by Boris Bacic
Instead, she found a picture.
It was an old picture of a middle-aged woman. The picture had a symbol across the face of the woman, painted in black. It wasn’t the same symbol as the vèvè on the wall. It was something simpler, with only three lines streaked across each other and some circles around.
“Is that… Barbara?” Cheryl squinted, mumbling to herself.
She turned the picture over in various angles as if she’d be able to get a better look through the paint, but the face was still half-covered. There was no mistaking it, though. Cheryl knew the woman in the picture.
***
“Find anything useful?” Jill asked from the office entrance, which accidentally startled Cheryl.
“Sorry,” she apologized a moment later.
She looked at the box Cheryl was holding and tilted her head slightly.
“Whatcha got there, Cherry?”
Cheryl looked down at the box with her mouth slightly ajar, but said nothing. She looked up at Jill and outstretched her arms to present the box to her. Jill put the phone in her pocket and approached Cheryl.
She didn’t even need to take the box from her to see the contents inside. Still, what she saw in there was so bizarre that she inadvertently squinted and stared at the photograph for a long moment.
“Is that Barbara?” she asked and looked at Cheryl, expecting a more sensical answer from her, but Cheryl was just as flummoxed as Jill was.
Her little sister stood with tense shoulders and lips tightly pressed into a thin line.
“Why the hell would Mom have a photograph of Dad’s second wife here?” Jill repeated the question, staring at the grotesque photo of the middle-aged woman with the black painted symbol across the face.
She already knew the answer, she just refused to admit it to herself.
“Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it?” Cheryl asked.
“Yeah, it is,” Jill nodded.
She returned the box to Cheryl, suddenly feeling disgusted by it. Cheryl promptly returned the box to the shelf on the left side of the room and stared at it for a moment with a wrinkled nose, while wiping her hands on one another.
“I cannot believe this. She must have really lost it,” Jill said.
“We don’t really know that,” Cheryl made a grimace. “I mean, maybe all of this has a rational explanation.”
“Oh, yeah, definitely. The rational explanation was that Mom tried to use black magic on Barbara because she couldn’t stand the thought of Dad remarrying.”
Jill became aware of how she raised the tone, but this newfound discovery of their mom was too much. It was one thing to be a narcissistic control freak and ruin your child’s life, but to be so petty as to ruin another person’s life just because they were happy and you weren’t? That was even lower than Jill thought her mother was capable of.
Cheryl didn’t object. She must have realized that Jill was right about whatever was going on here not being normal. Cheryl cleared her throat and crossed her arms, glancing at the box on the shelf once more.
“Let’s leave this room for now,” she suggested when she saw how visibly uncomfortable Cheryl was.
Once again, Cheryl didn’t object to that and turned to follow Jill.
“Did you find anything out from the books?” she asked as soon as the door of the office was closed.
“Oh, right,” Jill snapped a finger and pulled out her phone. “I finished reading one book about Vodou and started with the second one, and there’s some good info in there.”
“Wait, you finished reading an entire book?” Cheryl raised her eyebrows so high that her forehead wrinkled.
“Yeah,” Jill nodded.
“You downloaded it just two hours ago.”
“I’m a fast reader,” Jill shrugged.
Cheryl opened her mouth in shock and amazement.
“Doesn’t matter, listen,” she waved away Cheryl’s reaction dismissively. “I learned some good information about Vodou.”
“Okay, I’m listening.”
“Well, apparently, the loa, or the spirits of Vodou can be summoned when you need a favor. And I’m not talking about wash your dishes kind of favor.”
“I figured.”
“Apparently, you can do favors for the loa, and if you do them right, the loa have an obligation to serve you just as you served them.”
“That sounds like a commitment. I’m too lazy to even unsubscribe from promotional emails.”
Jill guffawed at that. Cheryl’s humor hasn’t changed much, it only got more advanced as she got older. Out of the two sisters, Jill was always the more serious one, while Cheryl was the type who broke the rules and didn’t take anything seriously.
“Okay, so, you think Mom summoned one of these loa to do her bidding?” Cheryl asked.
“I am almost one hundred percent sure.”
“Almost?”
“Yeah. Loas in Vodou each have their own vèvè, and depending on what you need, you summon the corresponding loa.”
“How do you know who the right loa is?”
“That’s the thing. You can summon any loa to help you, but you’d be better off asking an agricultural loa to help with your garden than a loa in charge of love. You need to really know Vodou by either being a houngan or a mambo to know who the best loa is to assist you.”
“A what now?”
Jill knew that the words would confuse Cheryl, but she just couldn’t help but throw around the Haitian terms that she just learned.
“Houngans and Mambos are Vodou priests and priestesses. They spend years and years studying Vodou and serving loa.”
***
Cheryl looked down for a moment with a frown before asking.
“So, if our investigation is on track, then we can assume that Mom was trying to summon a loa to serve her?”
“Exactly,” Jill complacently snapped her fingers.
“But why?”
“We already know why. You’ve seen the picture in the box.”
Cheryl shook her head. She refused to believe what Jill was telling her—what all the evidence was telling her.
“Mom wouldn’t want to hurt someone like that. I know her.”
“Do you really, Cheryl?” Jill lowered her chin slightly. “She was always really good to you. But you didn’t see some of the things I saw.”
Cheryl bit her lip uncomfortably.
“There’s no denying it,” Jill shrugged matter of factly. “Mom was trying to summon a loa to hurt Barbara.”
“No, that can’t be right.”
“Cheryl, think about it,” Cheryl sensed the frustration in Jill’s voice. “All the things we found in that room so far, all of them, they point to that and nothing else. I mean, what other explanation do you have? Casting a blessing on Barbara?”
She laughed at her own zinger. Cheryl swallowed since she had nothing to say, but she still shook her head defiantly.
“You think she managed to do it?” she asked.
“Do what?” Jill scowled.
“You know… summon a loa?”
Jill put her hands on her hips and looked up at the ceiling pensively with a frown. At the back of her mind, Cheryl hoped that Jill would say that Mom did manage to summon a loa. That way, she wouldn’t need to worry about telling Jill about her fears of the supernatural.
“No, I think it’s a load of bullshit,” Jill shook her head a moment later.
Cheryl suddenly felt like they were kids again and that she was the scaredy-cat who was afraid of the imaginary monsters in her closet.
“Yeah, you’re probably right,” she agreed with Jill.
“Okay. Maybe we’re overthinking this. We should probably just let it go. We’re not going to understand what happened to Mom by deciphering all this Vodou bullshit. I mean, Mom was—”
Her sentence trailed off.
“Mom was crazy, that’s what you want to say,” Cheryl scoffed, ready for another conflict with her sister.
Jill gave Cheryl a vagu
e smile and sighed.
“How about we get some lunch? We still have a lot of work to do, and it’s already Saturday afternoon.”
She didn’t wait for Cheryl’s answer and instead turned around and broke into a gait towards the stairs.
Cheryl cast one final glance at the door of the office before following Jill downstairs.
Chapter 14
“Stop it!” Cheryl shouted.
She was a child again. Tears welled up in her eyes as she spun in circles and repeatedly shouted at the kids to stop mocking her. There were five of them, and they were running in circles, singing ‘Cheryl the barrel’.
Cheryl didn’t even know how it came to that. One moment, they were all playing together in the woods, and the next thing she knew, one of the kids called her fat, and then another added that she looked like a barrel, and they started singing the mocking song.
She tried to break out of the circle and run, but the kids held hands and wouldn’t let her leave. She clasped her ears with her hands to block out the noise. And then one of the boys screamed in pain, which in turn, caused everyone to stop singing and spinning. When Cheryl looked at him, she realized that his lip was busted and bleeding.
Everyone looked in one direction, and Cheryl followed their gazes. Jill stood there, with two more rocks in her hands, ready to hurl them at the bullies.
“Ow! You hit me!” the boy said.
“And I’ll do it again!” Jill raised her hand with the rock.
“No, no, wait!” the boy pleaded.
“Get out of here before I throw this rock at your teeth!”
“Okay, okay!” the boy said and immediately, the bullies ran off.
With the threat gone, Jill dropped the rocks and approached Cheryl. She wiped the tears off her face and hugged her.
“It’s okay, Cherry. The bad kids are gone. I’ll always protect you,” she said.
The forest dispersed along with Jill, leaving a black, swirling mist that surrounded Cheryl. It was so thick that she couldn’t see anything except it. She turned in circles, but all she could see was the fog. She moved in one random direction, listening to the soft thudding of her shoes on the carpet. She also became vaguely aware that she was no longer a child, but back to her adult self
She had no idea where she was, so she decided to just go in one direction until she stumbled into something. But what if she didn’t stumble into anything, and just kept walking on and on forever?
That thought caused her to panic, so she broke from a trot into a jog. Her panting was muffled in the air, the sound barely leaving her mouth before getting drowned out by the oppressive silence.
And then, just as she stopped, the mist started clearing up. At first, she thought it was just her imagination, but as she spun around, she saw the gigantic wisps of fog retreating all around her, like snake-like coils.
Cheryl saw the pink carpet on the floor, and then more and more objects began revealing themselves around her. A bed, a closet, walls, a door, a window…
It was Cheryl’s room.
The mist was still present, but now it was in the form of a transparent smoke that caused the entire room to slowly dance along with the wisps, almost like staring through the smoke above a fire.
Cheryl spun around and saw herself sleeping in her old bed. She was on her back; her head lolled to the side, one arm above, the other at her side, the cellphone clutched in her hand. The bed was barely long enough for Cheryl, and her feet dangled off the end of it.
It was surreal, staring at herself sleeping, and for some reason, Cheryl knew that this was a dream, and yet, something more. She remembered that she decided to take a break after lunch. She remembered slumping into bed and being on her phone scrolling through social media. She remembered—
Movement under the bed caused her to jerk her head towards it.
There was a shadow obscured by the darkness under the bed, but undeniable movement was there. Cheryl froze and stared at the spot without blinking. Nothing happened. For a moment, she convinced herself that she just imagined it, but then it happened again.
Ever so slowly, something slithered and crawled towards the bottom of the bed where Cheryl’s feet dangled. Cheryl felt her heart beginning to race. Simultaneously, the Cheryl in bed began stirring. Her head turned from one side to the other, and her face contorted into a painful grimace.
Wake up! Wake up! Cheryl tried to shout to her asleep body, but for some reason, she couldn’t even open her mouth.
The black mass seeped into the light and slowly climbed towards Cheryl’s foot. Cheryl saw pointy fingers protruding at the end of the arm-like mass, but they looked anything but human. They were elongated and tendril-like.
The fingers clutched the edge of the mattress, causing a low scratching sound. Cheryl wanted to scream at herself to wake up, but her figure on the bed just slightly tossed and turned, as if having a bad nightmare.
“We had a deal,” a raspy, croaky voice said from under the bed, almost in a whisper.
Cheryl widened her eyes, feeling like she was going to lose her mind from the fear that enveloped her. All the hair on her body stood straight up and she felt shivers running down her spine.
“We had a deal, Annette,” the voice said once more.
Cheryl saw another clawed hand appearing in the light at the foot of the bed, and then the top of a black, shapeless head. And then another limb—a foot maybe?—and for a moment, Cheryl thought that there were multiple figures under the bed. That, or there was one, but it was extremely elastic.
The hand that gripped the mattress grabbed Cheryl’s ankle.
She felt icy cold on the spot where she had been grabbed, but at the same time, it was as if the touch burned her. The Cheryl in bed now tossed more violently and moaned, but still refused to wake up.
“WE HAD A DEAL!” the voice came through again, guttural and deep this time.
Cheryl shot up in bed so explosively while scooting backward that she hit her back against the wall. She was covered in a cold sweat, trembling like a leaf in the wind from head to toe.
She didn’t even register the knocking on the door until it came again more loudly.
“Cheryl?” It was Jill and she sounded concerned.
“Yeah, I’m awake,” Cheryl said, aware of how brittle her voice sounded.
“Alright. Violet is here for her daily checkup on Mom. Do you wanna join us?”
“Yeah. I’ll be there in a minute,” Cheryl said absent-mindedly.
Her eyes were fixated on the foot of the bed. There were no black hands reaching for her there, even though Cheryl expected them to. For a while, she couldn’t move. What if that black figure was still under the bed and just waiting for her to step off so it could grab her?
Even after a full minute, she still trembled violently, as if suffering from hypothermia. After some time though, she managed to compose herself enough to start moving.
Cheryl got on all fours and crawled towards the foot of the bed, hand by hand, foot by foot. When she got close to it, she veered over the edge towards the floor, inch by inch.
There was nothing there.
She got a little bolder and leaned further forward. There was noth—
No, there was something there.
Scratches on the carpet. Four parallel, two-inch long white scratches, contrasting against the pink floor, as if someone clawed at it with their nails. Cheryl felt her heart rate quickening once again. She took a few deep breaths, and without thinking, plunged her head down to glance under the bed.
A pair of eyes floating in the darkness stared back at her.
No, just her imagination. There was nothing there. No black figures. No monsters. As she raised her head, she sighed in a mixture of exasperation and relief. She hopped off the bed, much calmer now.
And that’s when she became aware of it.
The steady pulsating of her right ankle. Cheryl looked down, but the sweatpants she wore covered her ankle. She prayed that it was her imaginat
ion as she bent down to pull the pant leg up. She hesitated. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to see what was causing that pain. Blocking out those thoughts, Cheryl yanked the cloth up.
There was nothing there.
Cheryl rotated her foot to scrutinize the ankle from various angles, but there was nothing there. No finger-shaped bruises, no scratches, no markings. At the same time, the pulsating she felt began subsiding. Did she even feel the pulsating in the first place, or was it just her imagination?
Another knock on the door caused her to jerk her head back up.
“Cheryl? Are you asleep again?” Jill’s muffled voice came from the other side.
“Sorry! I’m coming,” Cheryl pulled her pant leg back down.
The pulsating in her ankle was gone, even though a faint coldness remained present around the area that she imagined was grabbed in her dream. She shook her head, scolding herself for letting herself get scared so easily.
The scratches on the floor? They were there before, they must have been.
And the black figure? That was just a stupid nightmare, that’s all.
Despite telling herself that over and over, Cheryl couldn’t get the horrid voice that she heard in the dream out of her head, and with that, she wondered about one thing.
What kind of deal did that thing have with my mom?
Chapter 15
“Everything okay?” Jill asked Cheryl as soon as she opened the door.
Her little sister looked distressed. She took a nap, that much was evident from her bedraggled hair, but her eyes portrayed anything except drowsiness. They were wide and alert, and they confusedly darted in various directions.
“Yeah, why wouldn’t it be?” Cheryl asked with a grin before turning to Violet. “Hi, Violet. Sorry for making you wait.”
Violet nodded aloofly, “Not a problem, Cheryl. Shall we?”
The sisters followed Violet into their mom’s bedroom. The room had rays of orange gleaming in from the setting sun through the window and falling on Annette’s pallid face. Jill was overcome by the familiar sense of sickness as soon as she heard the machine’s beeping and the medicinal, old people smell. The first thing Jill did when she entered was to observe her mother and make sure she hadn’t changed positions again.