Girl of Nightmares (3 page)

“Nice,” she mutters.

Once we’re all up, we look around, but there isn’t a whole lot to see. It’s just a vast, open space, lined with hay and bird turds. There’s a pulley system they must’ve used to move hay suspended from the ceiling, and thick ropes are looped over the rafters.

“You know what I hate about flashlights?” Thomas asks, and I watch his beam move around the room, revealing sudden bird faces and shifting wings, then nothing but cobweb-covered boards. “They always make you think about the stuff that you’re not seeing. The stuff that’s still in the dark.”

“It’s true,” says Carmel. “That’s the worst shot in a horror movie. When the flashlight finally finds whatever it was looking for, and you realize that you’d rather not know what it looks like.”

They should both shut up. Now is not the time for them to be trying to freak themselves out. I walk off a little way, to hopefully put an end to the conversation and also to test out the quality of the floor. Thomas walks a little in the other direction, staying close to the wall. My flashlight moves over the hay bales, paying close attention to places something might hide. I don’t notice anything except how gross they look speckled with brown and white. Behind me, there’s a long creaking sound, and when I turn a rush of wind hits my face. Thomas found one of the hay doors and opened it up.

The feeling of being watched is gone. We’re just three kids, in an abandoned barn, pretending to be stranded for the benefit of no one. Maybe this wasn’t even the right place to begin with, and the feeling I got walking through the door was a fluke.

“I don’t think that rune of yours is working too well,” I say. Thomas shrugs. His hand drifts absently to his pocket, where the runestone weighs on the fabric.

“It was never a sure thing. I don’t work with runes very often. And I’ve never carved one myself before.” He bends down and looks through the hay door, out into the night. It’s gotten colder; his breath is a foggy cloud. “Maybe it doesn’t matter anyway. I mean, if this is the place, how many people are really in danger? Who comes out here? The ghost of whoever it was probably got bored and went to fake accidental deaths somewhere else.”

Accidental deaths. The words scratch at the surface of my brain.

I’m an idiot.

A rope falls from the rafter. I turn to yell at Thomas but the words don’t come out fast enough. All I get out is his name, and I’m running, sprinting toward him because the rope is falling, and the ghost attached to the end of it becomes corporeal half a second before it shoves Thomas through the hay door, headfirst to a forty-foot drop to the cold, hard ground.

I dive. Hay needles into my jacket, slowing me down, but I’m not thinking of anything besides that glimpse of Thomas, and when I vault myself through the hay door I manage to catch hold of his foot. It takes every ounce of strength in my knuckles to hold on to him as he bangs into the side of the barn. In the next moment, Carmel’s there with me, hanging half out of the door too.

“Thomas!” she shouts. “Cas, pull him up!” With each of us holding a foot we jerk him back inside, first to the toes, then to the knees. Thomas is handling all this very well, not screaming or anything. We’ve almost got him back up when Carmel screams. I don’t need to look to know it’s the ghost. There’s an icy pressure against my back and all of a sudden the air smells like the inside of a meat locker.

I turn and he’s right in my face: a young guy in faded overalls and a short-sleeved chambray shirt. He’s fat, with a gut paunch and arms like pale, overstuffed sausages. There’s something wrong with the shape of his head.

I’ve got the knife out. It flashes from my back pocket, ready to go straight into his belly, when she laughs.

She laughs. That laugh that I know so well even though I heard it only a handful of times. It’s coming out of this fat hillbilly’s gaping mouth. The athame almost falls out of my hand. Then the laugh cuts out, abruptly, and the ghost backs off and roars, something that sounds like English played backward though a bullhorn. Overhead, the fifty or so pigeons erupt off of their roosts and flap down toward us.

In the middle of feathers and musty bird smell, I shout at Carmel to keep pulling, to not let Thomas fall, but I know she won’t, even though tiny beaks and claws are getting caught in her hair. As soon as we have Thomas back inside I shove them both toward the ladder.

Our feet tramp down in a panic of flapping wings. I have to remind myself to look back, to make sure the bastard isn’t going to try another push.

“Where are we going?” Carmel shouts, disoriented.

“Just get out the door,” Thomas and I shout back. By the time my feet hit the bottom rung of the ladder, Carmel and Thomas are way ahead, running. I sense the ghost materialize to our right, and turn. Now that I have a closer look, I can see that what’s wrong with the shape of his head is that the back of it is caved in. I can also see that he’s holding the pitchfork.

Just before he throws it, I shout something at Carmel. It must be the right thing, because she whirls to see what it is and jerks her body to the left just before the tines of the pitchfork impale the wall. She finally starts screaming and the sound sharpens me; I draw my arm back and throw the athame in a snapping motion. It flies through the air and finds its home in the farmer’s gut. For an instant, he looks my way, at me and right through me, with eyes like tepid pools of water. I don’t feel anything this time. I don’t wonder where the knife is sending him. I don’t wonder whether the Obeahman can still feel it. When he wavers right out of existence like a ripple of heat, I’m just glad he’s gone. He almost killed my friends. Fuck that guy.

The athame hits the ground with a soft thud and I run to pick it up before going to Carmel, who is still screaming.

“Carmel! Are you hurt? Did it get you?” Thomas asks. He inspects her as she whips her head back and forth in a panic. The pitchfork came just that close. So close that one of the tines stabbed through the shoulder of her coat and pinned her to the wall. I reach up and yank the pitchfork loose, and she jumps away, brushing at her coat like it’s dirty. She’s equal parts scared and pissed off, and when she screams, “You stupid asshole!” I can’t help but feel like she’s screaming at me.

C
HAPTER
T
WO

The athame is resting in its jar of salt, buried up to the hilt in white crystals. The morning sun coming through the window hits the glass of the jar and refracts in every direction, bright gold, almost like a halo. My dad and I used to sit and stare at it, stuffed into this same jar, having been purified by moonlight. He called it Excalibur. I don’t call it anything.

Behind me, my mom is frying eggs. A set of her freshest spell candles are stacked on the countertop. There are three different colors, each with a different smell. Green for prosperity, red for passion, white for clarity. Next to them are three small stacks of parchment bearing three different incantations, to be wrapped around the candles and tied with string.

“Toast or no toast?” she asks.

“Toast,” I reply. “Do we have any more saskatoon jam?”

She gets it out and I pop four pieces of bread into the toaster. When they’re done, I layer them with butter and jam and take them to the table, where my mom has already set our plates with eggs.

“Get the juice, would you?” she says, and as I’m half-buried in the refrigerator, “So, are you going to tell me how things went Saturday night?”

I stand up and pour two glasses of orange juice. “I was on the fence about it.” The ride back from Grand Marais was near silent. By the time we got home, it was Sunday morning, and I immediately passed out, only regaining consciousness to watch one of the Matrix movies on cable before passing back out and sleeping through the night. It was the best avoidance plan I’d ever come up with.

“Well,” my mom says chirpily, “get off the fence and dive in. You have to be to school in half an hour.”

I sit down at the table and set down the juice. My eyes stay trained on the eggs, which stare back at me with yellow yolk pupils. I jab them with my fork. What am I supposed to say? How am I supposed to make sense of it for her, when I haven’t made sense of it myself? That was Anna’s laugh. It was clear as a bell, unmistakable, falling out of the farmer’s black throat. But that’s impossible. Anna is gone. Only I can’t let her go. So my mind has started making things up. That’s what the daylight tells me. That’s what any sane person would tell me.

“I messed up,” I say into my plate. “I wasn’t sharp enough.”

“But you got him, didn’t you?”

“Not before he pushed Thomas out a window and almost turned Carmel into shish kebab.” My appetite is suddenly gone. Not even the saskatoon jam looks tempting. “They shouldn’t come with me anymore. I never should have let them.”

My mom sighs. “It wasn’t so much an issue of ‘letting them,’ Cas. I don’t think you could have stopped them.” Her voice is affectionate, completely lacking in objectivity. She cares about them. Of course she does. But she’s also pretty glad I’m not out there by myself anymore.

“They were sucked in by the novelty,” I say. Anger flies to the surface out of nowhere; my teeth clench down on it. “But it’s real, and it can get them killed, and when they figure that out, what do you think is going to happen?”

My mother’s face is calm, no more emotion there than a slight furrow of her eyebrows. She forks a piece of egg and chews it, quietly. Then she says, “I don’t think you give them enough credit.”

Maybe I don’t. But I wouldn’t blame them for running for the hills after what happened on Saturday. I wouldn’t have blamed them for running after Mike, Will, and Chase got murdered. Sometimes I wish I could have.

“I’ve got to get to school,” I say, and push my chair away from the table, leaving the food untouched. The athame has been purified and is ready to come out of the salt, but I walk right past. For maybe the first time in my life, I don’t want it.

*   *   *

The first sight I catch after rounding the corner toward my locker is Thomas yawning. He’s leaning against it with his books under his arm, wearing a plain gray t-shirt that is ready to rip through in a few places. His hair points in completely contradictory directions. It makes me smile. So much power contained in a body that looks like it was born in a dirty clothes basket. When he sees me coming, he waves, and this big, open grin spreads across his face. Then he yawns again.

“Sorry,” he says. “I’m having trouble recovering from Saturday.”

“Epic party, right, Thomas?” snickers a sarcastic voice behind us, and I turn to see a group of people, most of whom I don’t know. The comment came from Christy something or other, and I think, who cares, except that Thomas’s mouth has pinched together and he’s looking at the row of lockers like he wants to melt into it.

I look at Christy casually. “Keep talking like that and I’ll have you killed.” She blinks, trying to decide whether or not I’m serious, which makes me smirk. These rumors are ridiculous. They walk on, silent.

“Forget them. If they’d been there they’d have pissed themselves.”

“Right,” he says, and stands up straighter. “Listen, I’m sorry about Saturday. I’m such a dope, leaning out the door like that. Thanks for saving my skin.”

For a second, there’s this lump in my throat that tastes like gratitude and surprise. Then I swallow it. “Don’t thank me.” Remember who put you there in the first place. “It was no big deal.”

“Sure.” He shrugs. Thomas and I have first period physics together this semester. With his help, I’m pulling an A-minus. All of that shit about fulcrums and mass times velocity might as well be Greek to me, but Thomas drinks it up. It must be the witch in him; he has a definite understanding of forces and how they work. On the way to class, we pass by Cait Hecht, who makes a point of looking as far away from me as she can. I wonder if she’ll start to gossip about me now too. I guess I’d understand if she did.

I don’t catch anything more than a glimpse of Carmel until our shared fifth period study hall. Despite being the third leg in our strange, ghost-hunting trio, her queen bee status has remained intact. Her social calendar is as full as ever. She’s on the student council and a bunch of boring fundraising committees. Watching her straddle both worlds is interesting. She slides into one as easily as the other.

When I get to study hall, I take my usual seat across from Carmel. Thomas isn’t here yet. I can tell immediately that she isn’t as forgiving as he is. Her eyes barely flicker up from her notebook when I sit down.

“You really need to get a haircut.”

“I like it a little long.”

“But I think it gets into your eyes,” she says, looking right at me. “Keeps you from seeing things properly.”

There’s a brief stare down, during which I decide that almost getting pinned like a butterfly in a glass case deserves at least an apology. “I’m sorry about Saturday. I was stupid and off. I know that. It’s dangerous—”

“Cut the crap,” Carmel says, snapping her gum. “What’s bothering you? You hesitated in that barn. You could have ended it all, up in the loft. It was a foot away, its guts bared like it was serving them up on a platter.”

I swallow. Of course she would notice. Carmel never misses anything. My mouth opens, but nothing comes out. She slides her hand out and touches my arm.

“The knife isn’t bad anymore,” she says softly. “Morfran said so. Your friend Gideon said so. But if you have doubts, then maybe you should take a break. Someone’s going to get hurt.”

Thomas slides in next to Carmel and looks from one of us to the other.

“What’s the what?” he asks. “You guys look like someone died.” God, Thomas, that’s such a risky expression.

“Nothing,” I say. “Carmel’s just concerned about why I hesitated on Saturday.”

“What?”

“He hesitated,” Carmel replies. “He could have killed it, in the hayloft.” She stops talking as two kids walk by. “But he didn’t, and I wound up staring down the wrong end of a pitchfork.”

“But we’re all okay.” Thomas smiles. “The job got done.”

“He’s not over it,” Carmel says. “He still wonders if the knife is evil.”