by Boris Bacic
Looks like your mom did some voodoo lol, the next one under said.
But then Jill saw a reply to the second comment from a user called poloniumpoisoning. It said, Yes, you are correct. OP, this the Vodou veve used to summon the loa.
Jill frowned at the sentence. It took her a moment to remember that ‘OP’ stands for ‘original poster’. She didn’t know any other words in the sentence the replier wrote. She responded to him with a question, what does all of that mean?
While waiting for the reply from poloniumpoisoning, Jill looked up the word vodou in the search engine. The first result she got said the following:
Haitian Vodou is an African diasporic religion that gradually developed in Haiti between the 16th and 19th centuries. It is a worldview encompassing philosophy, medicine, justice, and religion. Adherents of Vodou are called Vodouisants.
Jill opened the first link on the engine, and lo and behold, she saw a symbol on the right-hand side of the page. It wasn’t the one from her mom’s room, but it sure looked like the style of drawing was similar. As she scrolled down, she saw more and more of the symbols. And then she ran into the one from the office. Jill went back into her gallery to compare them, and sure enough, they were uncannily similar. Underneath the symbol, it said:
A vèvè pattern designed to invoke Papa Legba, one of the main loa spirits worshipped in Haitian Vodou.
Was her mom trying to summon some kind of Vodou spirit? Jill’s head started spinning. She read through the page about Vodou and expected to find things related to sticking needles into dolls, hexes, curses, and similar things. Quite the opposite was true, instead.
Vodou was apparently a peaceful religion that had been wrongfully portrayed by the American media and accompanied by the stigma from the Christian settlers who saw Vodou as Satanic worship. Jill further learned that there are many spirits in Vodou and that each of them has their own vèvè.
So that begged the question—was her mom trying to summon this Papa Legba? And why?
“Hey, what’s up?” Cheryl’s voice behind her caused her to jerk up.
Jill looked at her just as Cheryl sat on the steps next to her.
“I uh… I think I know what that symbol means,” Jill reluctantly said.
***
Cheryl listened raptly as Jill explained to her about Haitian Vodou, the loa, and the vèvè. At first, Cheryl didn’t buy it. Her mother practicing Vodou? But when Jill showed her the uncanny resemblance between the symbol in the office and the symbol on the webpage, she started to reconsider her beliefs.
“But, that doesn’t make any sense. Why would Mom be practicing Vodou?”
Jill shrugged.
“I still think it’s because she was crazy and just drew that in her confused state.”
“That didn’t look like a confused drawing to me. I mean, did you see that? It looked like it was drawn with precision. And whose vèvè is that again? Papa…?”
“Papa Legba. He’s the most prominent loa in Vodou.”
“What a stupid name,” Cheryl scoffed. “And what exactly do these loa do?”
Jill looked towards the trees across the road.
“I’m not sure, yet. They could be good, they could be evil. I don’t know anything about Vodou, to tell you the truth.”
“I thought it was called Voodoo, and it involved—”
“Sticking pins in dolls, yeah.”
Cheryl chuckled at that.
The sisters spent a moment in silence. They were probably thinking the same thing. What was Mom trying to do? What if Jill was right? What if she was just crazy and the symbol had no significance? They could be going on a wild goose chase for something that even Mom didn’t fully outline.
“We should search the house some more,” Cheryl suddenly said as she swiveled towards Jill.
Jill was on her phone, scrolling through a website with books containing symbols similar to the vèvè in the office.
“Good idea,” she nodded without looking up at her. “And I’ll buy some e-books about Vodou.”
Cheryl smiled.
“Look at us, collaborating to solve a mystery.”
Jill looked at up at her and returned the smile.
“If Mom and Dad saw us now, they wouldn’t recognize us.”
They shared another glance with each other for a prolonged moment. It was a special moment, a silent, wordless reconnecting of two souls who had drifted apart and now found their way back to each other.
“So, you wanna help me look through Mom’s office?”
Jill nodded.
“I do, but, we gotta do one thing, first.”
“And what’s that?”
“Call Charlie so he can see Auntie Cherry.”
Chapter 12
They were inside the living room and sitting on the couch next to each other. Jill pressed the video call button and shoved her hair behind her shoulder. The phone started ringing, and Cheryl felt her heart skip a beat. She wasn’t in the frame of the camera yet, and she didn’t want to lean closer to Jill to jump into the video call.
After just two rings, Lee answered the phone with a reticent ‘hello?’ and started talking to Jill. Jill spoke briskly and after making some small talk, told Lee that she was with Cheryl and that she wanted to speak to Charlie.
“Alright, one moment,” Lee said with a hint of surprise in his tone.
Cheryl saw Lee disappearing out of view and getting replaced by pixels of something that looked like a wall. She heard voices in the background as if from a barrel, and then the phone moved again.
A little boy jumped into the frame, exposing one missing incisor with a wide grin. Immediately, Cheryl pasted on a rictus.
“Hi, Mommy,” Charlie said, waving a tiny hand with fervent motions that made his fingers look blurred.
“Hey, baby! How was baseball practice?” Jill asked.
Cheryl noticed an ear-to-ear smile on her sister’s face. She rarely saw Jill expressing such genuine happiness.
“It was good. Our team won,” Charlie said. “Jacob got hit in the head with the ball.”
He hysterically laughed at that while Jill widened her eyes and fake-gasped. Cheryl let out a quiet peal of laughter, too.
“Charlie, I have someone who I’d like you to meet, okay?” Jill said.
“Okay,” Charlie immediately got serious.
Jill leaned closer to Cheryl, so that both of them were in the frame. Now that she saw herself next to Jill, Cheryl realized how much they resembled each other. She smiled at the camera and waved, but Charlie didn’t react, much to her disappointment. He continued staring at one spot confusedly as if he were trying to solve a difficult mathematical problem. He must have forgotten who she was. Of course he did, it’s been ye—
“Aunt Cherry!” Charlie’s voice boomed and his mouth opened into another smile.
Cheryl felt a warm feeling washing all over her, unlike anything she had felt in a long time. The closest feeling to it she had was when she found a stray kitten in front of the dorm one night and decided to take care of her for the night until someone adopted her.
“Hi, Charlie!” Cheryl shouted back, waving more fervently now.
Jill nudged the phone into Cheryl’s hand and disappeared out of the frame, giving the two of them a moment of privacy. Cheryl instinctively took the phone, even though she was taken aback by this. By the time she looked at Jill, she was already on the other side of the couch. Cheryl looked back at Charlie and smiled widely.
It was strange to see this child, who she knew as a toddler, now as a much older boy. In her mind, Charlie always stayed a toddler who could barely utter a few words, called Cheryl Cherry, and played with toy trucks.
For a moment, it felt awkward, and Cheryl didn’t know what to say, but then Charlie took the initiative and said, “Where have you been all this time, Aunt Cheryl?”
His voice was like a melody to her ears. She again had that warm feeling that had her melting inside.
“I’m sorry,
Charlie! I’ve… I’ve been busy,” she shrugged.
He incredulously shook his head.
“You shouldn’t work too hard. Ms. Wilson says working hard can cause burnout.”
Both Cheryl and Jill laughed.
“Well, you know what? You tell Ms. Wilson that if I don’t study, I’ll fail the year, and then I’ll be jobless.”
As soon as the words left her mouth, she wondered if she used too many big words—she wasn’t used to speaking with five-year-olds. To her surprise, Charlie gave her an insouciant remark about having more free time.
Cheryl spent some time talking to him about pre-school and teased him with questions related to girls he might have a crush on. It took Cheryl some time to get used to speaking to him in a more adult tone than the last time she saw him. He was indeed clever, just like Jill said.
The conversation with her nephew was exactly what Cheryl needed to help her forget all about Tom and the ugly vèvè in Mom’s office. Those things still gnawed at her, like rats slowly nibbling through a concrete wall, but right now, she didn’t care.
When it was about time to end the call, Charlie asked her when she was going to visit, which almost brought her to tears. Cheryl did her best not to show any emotions, mostly because of Jill. The two of them were together now, but after everything was done with their mom, they would probably go their own separate ways. This was just a brief moment of bonding they had.
Still, Cheryl foolishly allowed herself to believe that she would be welcome into Jill’s life as her sister and Charlie’s Aunt.
***
“Say goodbye to Aunt Cherry, Charlie,” Jill said when Cheryl gave her the phone back.
“Bye-bye, Aunt Cherry!” Charlie waved frenetically, stretching out each word.
Cheryl waved back. For the first time since they arrived at the house, Cheryl seemed genuinely happy.
Jill walked towards the kitchen, still speaking on the phone, “Charlie, let me talk to Da—”
But Charlie ended the call.
“He hung up on me,” Jill groused aloud.
Cheryl laughed at that remark. Jill called back and waited for the video call to connect. She walked into the kitchen and, with her free hand, poured a glass of water for herself from the tap. She glanced at the tap, and when the glass was almost full, she pulled it away from the stream and turned off the tap.
She brought the glass to her mouth and looked at the phone, and almost dropped the glass on the floor.
The call was already connected.
The screen was glitchy, green pixels shuffling from corner to corner, and Jill saw Lee in the frame. He was standing horizontally, indicating that the phone was splayed on its side. Lee’s entire figure was in the frame, hunched over something, facing away from the camera, but it was dark from the sunlight that peered directly at the phone’s camera.
“Lee?” Jill called out.
She took a sip of water and placed the glass on the kitchen counter. The phone made glitchy noises, something akin to short electrical bursts with the sound perpetually cutting out. Jill saw Lee swaying left, and then right, frame by frame.
“Lee, can you hear me?” Jill asked, now suddenly feeling a little uneasy.
Lee turned his head sideways and froze like that, along with the entire phone. His face was pixelated and dark, and Jill saw one white square for an eye. She tried pressing the ‘end call’ button, but the phone wouldn’t respond. She tried holding the power button to restart it, but still nothing.
“Come on, you piece of shit,” she said as she smacked the phone against her palm out of frustration.
She repeatedly pressed the end call button, forced to stare at Lee’s frozen figure. And then she just stopped pressing anything at all and continued staring. But then she started to notice more and more details on Lee’s frozen figure. The more she stared, the less the figure actually looked like Lee.
The arms that hung to the side were too long, too thin, and too incongruous compared to the rest of the body. The legs were just as slim, and the shape of them was strange. There weren’t any wrinkles or bagginess notable for clothes—especially the kind of oversized clothes that Lee often wore.
The figure in the frame moved its head slightly more to the side, revealing a noseless (and lipless?) black face and pearly white teeth. From the pixelated image, it looked as if the person was baring its teeth like a dog.
The video suddenly went entirely black. The call was still on because the big red button to end it was there, but the screen on Lee’s end was pitch black. A soft, raspy growl escaped from the phone’s speakers.
Jill jumped, dropping the phone on the floor in the process. It thudded against the kitchen tiles with a dull sound, thanks to the rubber case.
“You okay?” Cheryl called from the living room.
Jill glared at the phone. The call had ended. She looked towards the door leading to the living room and was about to shout to Cheryl not to worry when a vibration caused her to nearly jump out of her skin again. When she looked down, the phone was ringing. Lee’s name was on the screen.
“Jill?” Cheryl shouted with a more solicitous timbre this time.
“Yeah, I’m fine. Just dropped my phone,” Jill shouted back.
The phone continued vibrating intermittently, each vibration giving Jill a foreboding feeling. Nevertheless, she bent down and picked it up, reprimanding herself for being so silly. She pressed the green button to accept the video call and waited.
The screen was glitchy again, little squares of various colors flying across the video. The pixels started decreasing, and a shape appeared in the middle of the screen. It said something indiscernible in a robotic tone.
“Jill, can you hear me?” the screen suddenly cleared up and presented Lee’s head and shoulders in the frame.
Jill sighed in relief—a little too deeply, she noticed. She wasn’t even aware of the breath she’d been holding up until now.
“Jesus, Lee, where have you been?” Jill asked.
“Sorry, hon. I didn’t hear the phone. Everything okay over there? You look like you’ve just run a marathon.”
Jill laughed that off.
“I’m fine.”
“Are you sure? Maybe Charlie and I should come help you there.”
“No, no. It’s fine, really,” Jill replied quickly.
She didn’t want Charlie to be anywhere near this house. It was bad enough that his grandmother was comatose in the house, but to see the crazy stuff like they found in the office would probably raise a lot of questions with a kid his age.
“It’s really no problem, Jill. We could be there in just a few hours.”
“No. Really, Lee. It’s fine. Besides, I wanna do this on my own.”
Lee glowered at Jill.
“Okay, fine,” he conceded a moment later.
“I’ll be back before you know it,” Jill smiled. “Honey, listen. I got a lot of work to do here, so I’ll talk to you later, alright?”
“Sure, sure,” Lee nodded.
“Don’t forget to—”
“Pick up the clothes at the dry cleaner’s, I know,” Lee rolled his eyes.
“Love you,” Jill sent Lee a kiss.
“Love you, too, babe. Have fun with your sis.”
The call ended and Jill put the phone back in her pocket.
She walked out of the kitchen in a stupor, the image of the glitchy black figure still etched in her mind.
Chapter 13
Cheryl really didn’t want to go back to the room with the vèvè, but she had to get some answers. Mom was doing something, and she was determined to find out what. Maybe she was crazy just like Jill said, but Cheryl couldn’t let it go. There was a missing piece of the puzzle here, she was sure of it.
As she entered the office, she suddenly became aware of just how cold the room was. Or maybe it was just her overreacting. She always had an overactive imagination, even from an early age.
Before she got her own room, she and Jill shar
ed a room. Whenever Cheryl would get scared of the monsters hiding under her bed and in the closet, Jill would tell her that there are no such things as monsters. Sometimes, she’d encourage her with some words of comfort, and by allowing her to keep her flashlight on through the night. But as they got older, Jill would get frustrated and tell her to quit being a crybaby. Eventually, Cheryl ignored any sounds she thought she heard from the closet because she didn’t want Jill to think of her as a coward.
At the age of six, Cheryl got her own room, but her imagination was still active. The monsters under her bed seemed even scarier and bolder now, so she often had to call her parents to check the room. Dad checked the closet and under the bed while she was there, but she was usually too upset to continue sleeping on her own. Mom would then get soft and tell her that it’s okay for her to sleep with them that night.
Now that Cheryl entered the office, the same sense of unease crept up inside her, making her feel small as she was as a child.
No, that’s stupid. There are no such things as monsters and ghosts, Cheryl, come on.
With that thought, Cheryl broke into a more confident amble, ignoring the gnawing feeling of fear at the back of her mind. Once she was deep inside the room, the feeling of dread was gone, and she instead felt brave.
“Now, where do I start?” she muttered to herself.
She looked around the office for anything that could harbor any secrets. There was a dusty, cobweb-covered bookshelf on the left side of the room. Cheryl hoped there would be no spiders. She hated spiders.
There were tattered books messily thrown on the shelves, most of whose spines had no titles. Cheryl saw a small cardboard box on the top shelf next to the pile of books. It was small enough for jewelry, so that’s what Cheryl thought she’d find in there—not that she would wear or keep anything from this horrid room.
A sudden thought of finding a cursed earring ran through her mind. She’d put the earring on and have really bad luck financially and in relationships. She suppressed hysterical laughter at the thought that she might already be cursed when it came to love. When Cheryl grabbed the small box, opened the lid, and peered inside, she didn’t find any jewelry.