Be Not Afraid (17 page)

For a full minute, she stared at me without saying anything. Even from across the room, I could see the normal blue of her eyes again, and then a blur as they filled with tears.

“Marin,” Cassie whispered. It was her regular voice, verging on the edge of a sob. “Oh God, Marin, you’re here.”

Cassie wept with abandon, her face a picture of anguish. She tried to stretch an arm toward me, but the restraints made it impossible for her to move it more than a few inches. “Marin,” she whimpered. “Please, come here. Help me.”

But I didn’t move. What in God’s name had just happened? Were my eyes, my ears, all of my senses deceiving me? I searched Cassie’s face, straining to see something—anything at all—still lurking there inside her head, but there was nothing. Was the blackness really gone? Was whatever had just happened really over?

The veins along the outside of Cassie’s neck tightened as she tried to lift her head some more, but there was no sign of the softball-sized shapes that had been there, no trace of any distortion at all along the smooth slope of skin.
“Please,” she whispered, still stretching her fingers in my direction. “Marin.”

Was it really safe? Cassie looked like a baby, a toddler who had been punished and was pleading for forgiveness. But was it just a trick? Another ruse to get me closer so that she could hiss at me again, spit curses in my direction?

“It’s okay now, Marin.” Dominic was beckoning me forward with his hand. “She can’t move out of the restraints, and the Risperdal is starting to work. She’s calm. It’s all right.”

I got up, moving toward her on wooden legs, and then stopped a foot away from the bed. Cassie’s face, splattered with drops of saliva, was still pink from exertion. The figure eight on her cheek looked darker, as if the scabs had loosened and bled during her outburst, and the white bandages around her arms were unraveling.

I stretched out my hand until it came into contact with Cassie’s, but it was not until my fingers closed around the other girl’s that she began to cry. Her body heaved up and down as she wept, taking in air, breathing in oxygen. “Marin, don’t leave me. Please, don’t leave me.”

I struggled to wrap my head around everything that had just happened. First of all, what was the blackness I kept seeing inside Cassie? And secondly, where had it gone? Was it just hibernating again, the way it obviously had since I’d seen her in the hospital, waiting to emerge when it needed to? What made it come out? And then withdraw again?

“Cassie.” I pulled back a little and lowered my hand. “Is that really you?”

“It’s me.” Cassie’s voice was a whisper, but it broke on the word
me.
“Oh, Marin, please don’t leave. When you’re here, I can’t feel it anymore. It’s gone. She’s gone.” She was breathing hard again, but her eyes were still the same clear blue, the voice definitively hers. The muscles inside her face relaxed as her sobbing slowed. She smelled like sweat and body odor, and despite my terror, I reached out and touched her hair.

“Who is ‘she’?” I asked, just as I had in the hospital. “Who are you talking about, Cassie?”

“I don’t know.” The girl was starting to panic again. “But when I see you, she leaves. The pain leaves.” She talked quickly, as if running out of time. “You’re the only one who can take it away. Don’t go.” She clutched at my arm. “Please don’t go. Don’t leave me alone with her again. Please.”

She had to be wrong. Nothing I had just done—or didn’t do—could have had any effect on such a situation. The fact that I had been here was just a coincidence. A fluke. None of it had anything to do with me. “I won’t leave,” I whispered, sitting down on the bed next to her. “I’ll stay.”

Cassie’s head lolled to one side at my words. Her whole body trembled, and her breath emerged in raspy gasps. She shuddered once, something catching and then releasing deep inside her throat. For a full five minutes, she remained like that, silent, pressed up against me. Maybe the Risperdal was working after all. Or maybe she was just exhausted
from the events that had just transpired. Whatever it was, it did not take long before I recognized the sound of deep, measured breathing. I looked over at Miss Peale, who nodded. “She’s asleep,” she mouthed.

I got up as slowly as I dared, extricating Cassie’s hold on me with gentle hands, and lay her back down on the pillow. The skin on her face was a milky white, as if she had just come in from the cold, and her mouth was parted, the lips loose and slack. Ragged strands of her hair hung down against her chest, and the terrible carving on her cheek flickered beneath the bandage. I felt a tugging inside, a pain that made my eyes fill with tears, which made no sense at all after everything this girl had put me through, but there it was.

“Come on,” Dominic whispered. “Let’s let her sleep now.”

He pushed through the door first and then stood there for a moment, his back to me, and lowered his head. For a full moment, his shoulders rose and fell as he pressed his thumb and forefinger along the inner corners of his eyes, and I wanted to go to him, I did, but then I remembered how I hadn’t wanted anyone around me after Mom died, not even the people I loved the most. Their presence hurt physically, as if the part of her she had taken away from me was still with them. I couldn’t bear it.

He turned back around after another moment, wiping his face with the back of his wrist. Without moving, he met my eyes. Held them for a moment. “Sorry,” he said.

“Please don’t say that. There’s nothing to be sorry for.”

He nodded. “You okay?”

“I think so.”

“Did you see those …?” He winced, bringing his fingers to his neck.

I nodded.

“What
were
they?”

“I don’t know. But they went away after she calmed down.”

He nodded again, his eyes sweeping the rug beneath his feet. “And that laugh …” He looked up. “You heard it, right?”

“Yeah.”

“I
told
you. That’s what I heard that night. In the kitchen. The same exact thing.” He tilted his head to one side. “It’s not just me, is it? I mean, I wasn’t imagining it. That wasn’t her voice, was it?”

“It didn’t sound like her.”

He ran a hand through his hair and rolled his shoulders back as if shaking off some last vestige of fear. “Well, at least she’ll sleep now. She’ll be out for a while too. That stuff they give her could flatten a horse.”

“Good.”

He hesitated as I looked at my watch. “You need to go, probably.”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll take you home.”

But I lingered as he moved past me, something still tugging inside.

“Marin?” He turned around.

“What do you think it is?” I didn’t want to know, and yet a part of me already did. Still, I needed to hear someone else say it. I needed to hear him say it.

Dominic pushed his hands inside his pockets. He took a deep breath and then let it out, a loud whooshing sound. “I think when she said those weird words in the closet that day, when she was holding your hand and trying to get our grandmother to talk to her …” He paused, wincing. “I think it worked. I mean, I think my grandmother’s spirit came into that room. And then it must’ve moved into her.” He lifted his head. He looked drained, as though he hadn’t slept in days; the hollows beneath his eyes were shrouded with faint circles. “You heard her just now, right? When she was describing it. She used the word
she.
It can’t be anything else. That’s gotta be what happened.”

“You … I mean, you really think it’s your grandmother’s spirit in there …?” I could barely bring myself to finish the sentence. “I mean, in
her
?”

“Yeah.” Dominic’s face was anguished. “I do. And we’ve got to find a way to get it back out because for some reason, it’s torturing my sister. Maybe it’s upset at being trapped inside Cassie’s body. Maybe it doesn’t know how to get back out. I don’t know.” He ran his hands through his hair. “Oh my God, I don’t know how any of this shit works.”

I could hear the tremor in his voice, a shaking that I knew my own voice would assume if I said anything else, and so I took his hand instead, holding it between both of mine. The gesture was as natural as his had been, maybe even more so, and I cupped his big fingers inside my palm and pressed them against mine.

“I’m scared,” I whispered.

“I know.” Dominic made no movement to adjust his hand, except to squeeze mine more tightly. “So am I.”

We went out to a sun porch on the side of the house, an enormous room with a white floor and three ceiling fans spinning overhead, so we could sit and talk. I followed Dominic’s lead, collapsing next to him on a white wicker couch with lemon-colored cushions. Palm plants rose up from stone pots in each corner, and crisp eyelet curtains hung over the windows. The air smelled like oranges and fabric softener, and I wished that I could lay my head down and go to sleep. I wondered if I would ever be able to fall asleep again after everything I’d just seen. Would Cassie?

“Maybe there’s an undoing ritual in the book.” Dominic was riffling through the pages of the little green book. “You know, that’ll tell us how to get the spirit out.”

“What do you mean,
us
?” I already missed the feel of his hand in mine. And right now, I wanted it more than
ever, if only to help ease my own fear, which was starting to encompass a lot more than just the facts of Cassie’s situation. Things were happening too fast, charging ahead at full speed before we had a chance to come to any real conclusions about anything. What if we were wrong, and it didn’t involve Cassie’s grandmother at all? What if it was some kind of evil demon or crazed spirit? Then what? “Dominic. There’s nothing
we
can do about this. We have to get a—”

“Wait, look!” His eyebrows shot up as he pointed to a page. Across the top of it, the heading read
EXORCISM OF CONJOINED SPIRITS
. He slapped the back of his hand against the book. “I
knew
it! We can undo the conjoining ritual with this. We can totally help her!”

“An exorcism?” I repeated. “You’re not serious.”

“It’s right here.” He pointed to the page again. “Look, it’s right here.”

“You’re out of your mind.” I made a point not to look at the book. “Have you ever seen
The Exorcist
? Do you know what happens during those things?”

“That’s just a movie, Marin.” Dominic was studying the page, his eyebrows furrowed into a knot. “You know, like
The Exorcism of Emily Rose
and
The Haunting
and all those other ones. They amp up all the special effects to make more money. None of that shit really happens.”

“Oh yeah? You know that for sure?”

“Marin.” Dominic looked up from the page. “This is real life, okay? Just listen for a minute.”

I swallowed hard, a slow dread already beginning to
move through my veins. “Dominic, I really don’t think that—”

“It doesn’t say anything here about the red room or candles or anything.” He began to read aloud, his excitement mounting: “ ‘Before a conjoined exorcism can begin, the afflicted person must be lying supine on the floor.’ ” He looked at me. “Supine?”

“I think that means flat on her back. But, Dominic, I don’t—”

“ ‘After the afflicted has been settled comfortably,’ ” he pressed on, “ ‘he or she must be in the presence of a single being that possesses a buried heart’ ”—his forehead wrinkled and his voice slowed—“ ‘and a hidden trinity. BE FOREWARNED! This ritual cannot be completed without specific said objects, and should not even be attempted unless both are present.’ ” He looked up at me. “What the hell is ‘a buried heart’ and ‘a hidden trinity’?”

“No idea.” I paused, and then unable to help myself: “They’re not talking about a real heart, are they? Like in a dead person?”

“I don’t know.” Dominic’s eyes were as wide as nickels. “What do you think?”

“It doesn’t matter what I think.” I shook my head. “But getting a real heart is totally impossible, unless you’re some kind of crazy person who goes and digs up corpses. And the hidden trinity must be some kind of code that, like, only your grandmother understood. Neither of those things makes any sense.”

“I agree.” He reached up to pull on his earlobe. “Help me figure it out. Just keep talking.”

“I don’t want to keep talking.” I got up and paced the length of the room. Sunlight filtered through the big windows, illuminating a pocket of dust motes; they hung suspended in the air like tiny stars and then vanished again. “The only reason I’m even here is because I wanted to find out more about what happened that day in the room behind the closet.”

“All right.” He interlaced his fingers and locked them behind his head. “Fine. Then I’ll just talk to myself.”

I gazed out at the beautiful scenery through the glass pane: a white, kidney-shaped pool surrounded by deck chairs and tables looked out over a sweeping vista of manicured lawns and cypress trees. A man in jeans and a red baseball cap was riding a mower over the grass, and farther out beyond the pool, another man was washing a black car in the driveway of a four-car garage.

“A buried heart,” Dominic murmured behind me. “Buried as in what? Literally buried? Like in a graveyard, maybe? Or maybe it’s just underneath something. Closed off, in some way. Shit, I don’t know. How about just a heart? Heart as in …” He exhaled again, a loud, painful sound. “As in love? As in … what?”

He’d said his father was in the local office today, that he lived more or less in the tall building downtown. So who was the guy on the lawnmower? And who was the man washing one of their four cars? Did they have a staff?
People who just took care of the grounds? I’d never known anyone like that.

“Maybe it doesn’t have to be a real heart,” Dominic continued. “Maybe it can be fake or plastic. You know, like something the Tin Man gets. In
The Wizard of Oz.
A symbol, you know?”

“The Tin Man gets a plastic heart with a stopwatch on it,” I said without turning around. The man on the lawnmower was creating wide, even swaths in the grass, neat as a ruler. “I doubt that’s what the people who wrote that book had in mind for an exorcism ritual.”

“Yeah.” He cleared his throat. “I just … I mean, I can’t imagine my grandmother ever doing anything with a real heart. She used to freak out if she saw a
worm
on the sidewalk. Besides, the only thing I ever heard about her was that she was just a medium. She wasn’t into black magic or anything. As far as I know, she didn’t go around visiting graveyards or sacrificing dead animals for exorcisms.”