by Boris Bacic
That was so weird yesterday, to see her arm in a different position. Jill spaced out and thought about everything she had experienced since she arrived to the house.
The Vodou vèvè on the wall, the chicken leg and Barbara’s picture, the nightmare of the black figure staring at her, the glitchy call she had with Lee… she started to get a bad feeling about all of this, but the rational part of her refused to believe that something out of order was happening here.
You just spent too long in the house, and it’s starting to get to you. That’s all.
But it wasn’t just that. The longer Jill spent in the house, the more she started to imagine a figure standing in the corners of the house. She’d see it with her peripheral vision, but whenever she turned her head, it was gone.
She saw it just before Violet arrived, too.
Jill was sitting in the living room, reading a Vodou handbook, when she thought she heard something on her right. She didn’t respond to it immediately. This house was old, and it made noises from time to time. But then, when it abruptly came again a few minutes later, accompanied by just-barely visible movement, she froze.
She refused to look in that direction because if she did so, the figure would disappear. So instead, she tried to discern what it was by using just her peripheral vision. She pretended to read off her phone while focusing intently on the figure in the corner of her eye.
At first, she just saw an outline of… something. But then that outline started to get more and more defined. Jill saw something that looked like an arm hanging limply next to a body with a twitching hand.
A few times, Jill inadvertently moved her eyes slightly towards the figure, but the harder she tried to look at it, the more it seemed to retreat out of her line of sight. She decided to continue focusing on it with her peripheral vision instead.
After just a few minutes, the figure seemed to be much closer. It must have been moving so slowly and gradually that Jill didn’t even notice it until she was able to see the twitchy, rigid, and elongated fingers with sharp nails on the bony black hand.
She still refused to look. She wanted to let it get just a little closer, and then she would jerk her head towards it. But before she could do that, a noise startled her.
A low, raspy groan sounded, just barely loud enough to be heard over the silence hanging in the air. When Jill swiveled to look at the figure, it was gone. What stood there instead was just the tall lamp next to the wall, its shadow making an oddly humanoid shape. Jill pivoted around but found herself to be alone in the room.
She massaged her temples and convinced herself that she was just tired. But then another scary thought occurred to her; that she may have been losing her mind instead—just like her mother.
That terrified her more than any demonic shadow. She spent her entire life trying to be the exact opposite of her mother, and she would be damned if she’d start going crazy like her.
“You really don’t need to be here,” Violet’s voice pulled Jill back to reality. “If you’d like to assist, I don’t mind, but I can take care of everything without your help. You don’t need to bother yourselves.”
Jill was about to agree when Cheryl interjected.
“No, it’s fine. I think we should probably know how to do these things.”
Violet looked at Jill for confirmation.
What could Jill do then? Say that she won’t stay? Her relationship with Cheryl was wobbly at best, and she didn’t want to exacerbate it further by alienating her mother, no matter how indifferent she was to her.
She nodded with a fake smile and allowed Violet to start with her work. The nurse placed her handbag on the edge of the bed and began taking out various medical items, including syringes, vials, alcoholic swabs, etc.
The entire time, Cheryl stood next to Violet, basically invading her private space, while Jill stood at the back, allowing her little sister to take the lead—but still watching to show that she was at least somewhat interested in the process.
Violet was quick and efficient. Everything that needed to be done around Mom was done with finesse and calmness. Jill reckoned she would need triple the time that Violet needed in order to just prepare the syringe and injection.
Once the nurse finished moving Mom around for her daily exercise, she pulled the covers over her. She accidentally knocked the empty syringe and vial off the bed and onto the floor. The vial rolled under the bed.
“Oh, I’m such a klutz sometimes,” Violet complained.
“It’s okay, I’ll get it,” Cheryl knelt down.
She prudently grabbed the syringe, careful not to touch the needle, even though it still had the plastic cap on top. She reached under the bed, her arm and head disappearing out of view. She stayed like that for a solid ten or so seconds before pulling herself out.
“You got it?” Jill asked.
Instead of the vial, Cheryl was holding a piece of paper.
“What’s that?” Jill asked.
Cheryl held the paper with both hands and had already started reading the message that was written on it. Even from here, Jill could tell that the note was scrawled, rather than written. It looked like the handwriting of a child who just learned the alphabet.
Or an old person who forgot it, Jill thought to herself, wrinkling her nose.
Cheryl flipped the paper, revealing a wall of printed text. She darted her eyes across the lines of text, ignoring Jill.
“Cheryl!” Jill said, more sternly this time.
Cheryl stood up and turned to Jill, pale as a piece of paper.
“What is it?” Jill asked, awkwardly chuckling to suppress the knot that she felt in the pit of her stomach.
Cheryl handed the note to Jill with a blank look in her eyes. Jill took the note and glanced down at it, already certain that she wouldn’t like what she was going to read.
“It’s… it’s Mom’s will,” Cheryl said soft-spokenly.
Jill read the document speedily. She then reread it once. And then twice. And then three times. No matter how many times she reread the document, it didn’t change. And still, Jill couldn’t believe it. She thought that this was probably a prank, a cruel joke played by her mother on her less favorite daughter as a final fuck you to her.
“It says in the will that she left the house to me,” Jill said timorously as she looked up at Cheryl and then at Violet for silent confirmation.
Chapter 16
Cheryl looked as perplexed as Jill, so she simply shook her head incredulously. Jill looked down at the document once more. She had to read it one more time, word by word, to make sure she didn’t miss anything important. It seemed legal enough, and it even had Annette’s name signed under, along with the signature of a witness and an attorney.
“I don’t understand,” Jill said as she flipped the paper.
On the backside was a scrawled sentence.
IM SORRY FOR TREATING YOU THE WAY I DID
Jill frowned. Is that what this was? Her mother felt guilty for mistreating Jill her whole life, so she wanted to make up for it by making her the sole heir of her property? Jill had mixed feelings about all of that.
On the one hand, she didn’t want the house—and she wanted it even less just for herself. Jill never thought about the inheritance she’d receive from her mother because she always assumed that Cheryl would be the one to get the house.
On the other hand, selling the house could get her a lofty amount of money for the family. Even if she gave half of it to Cheryl (which she would do without hesitation), she would have more than enough to pay off her own mortgage.
***
“Good for you, Jill. Looks like you were wrong about who Mom’s favorite daughter was after all,” Cheryl forced a smile.
She was aware of the hostility in her voice, but she couldn’t help it. Jill was to receive the house. The entire fucking house. Mom could have left half to her, the daughter in college who had student loans to pay off, but no, she decided to give it to the one who already had her o
wn apartment and was financially stable.
Fucking thanks, Mom.
She suddenly became furious. She imagined unplugging the goddamn machine keeping her mom alive, and hearing the beeping turn into a flatlined tone. She would never do it, of course, but fantasizing about it helped assuage her anger slightly.
Jill, Cheryl, and Violet stood in silence for a long time. Cheryl didn’t even hear the beeping of the machine in the background anymore.
“We need to figure out if this is even the real thing,” Jill said.
“Sure it is. Why would she have a fake will in the house?” Cheryl asked, doing her best to suppress the audible frustration in her voice.
Jill glowered at her for a prolonged moment, perhaps sensing that enmity.
“She has dementia, remember?” Jill asked with an impatient timbre.
“Yes, it was so sad to see your mother becoming more and more like that,” Violet forlornly said.
Both Cheryl and Jill looked at Violet.
“Wait, you knew our mom before the accident?” Cheryl asked.
Violet nodded with a facial expression that indicated that it was the most obvious answer in the world.
“Of course. I’ve been assisting your mother for the last few months now. When her mental health started to deteriorate rapidly, she decided to hire me because she couldn’t deal with everything on her own.”
Cheryl and Jill exchanged glares with each other.
“I don’t understand why she didn’t tell us anything,” Cheryl looked at her mom’s comatose body.
She suddenly had so many questions. What was going through Mom’s head in those last few months since Cheryl’s last visit? Was she trying not to be a burden on her daughters? What was it like for her in those last hours when her mind was already devastated by dementia? Was she scared? Confused?
“Unfortunately, I never had those conversations with your mother,” Violet said. “I came once a day to make sure everything was okay and give her her meds, and that was all.”
“Violet, did you see anything… strange happening with our mother?” Jill asked.
Violet squinted.
“I’m not sure I understand the question,” she said.
Jill scratched the back of her head.
“I don’t know. Did she do anything suspicious? Something not normal for patients with dementia?”
Violet looked down for a moment with a focused stare. When she looked up, she shook her head.
“Come to think of it, there may have been some things that your mother was doing, but I attributed those things to dementia.”
“What kind of things?” Cheryl asked.
Violet walked past the sisters and around the bed to the nightstand. She opened a drawer and bent down to grab something from it. When she turned around, she was holding a stack of papers.
Her head was down as she sauntered towards Cheryl. She handed the papers to her with a stoic expression. Cheryl hesitantly took them and glanced down. Jill moved to her side immediately to see what the big deal was.
The first paper on top had a pencil drawing. It was a vèvè, similar to the one they found in the office. The one on the paper was much cruder, with jagged lines jutting out and circles drawn unevenly.
“Is that the vèvè?” Jill asked.
Cheryl grabbed the paper on top and put it at the back of the stack. The next paper had some writings. It was scrawled so badly that Cheryl had to bring the paper closer to her face and read slowly. As soon as Cheryl read the first line, she realized that the rest of the lines on the paper were the same sentence.
Papa Legba, grant me protection against the evil in my house.
Papa Legba, grant me protection against the evil in my house.
Papa Legba, grant me protection against the evil in my house.
The lower the sentences went on paper, the more they seemed to have been scrawled in a hurry, and with more mistakes. Some of the sentences were missing punctuation or letters until the final two sentences at the bottom of the paper, which became entirely unintelligible lines of gibberish.
“Oh, it’s what you need to say to invoke Papa Legba,” Jill said.
Cheryl flipped the paper to the back and looked at the next one. More writings.
“Is that French?” Cheryl asked.
“Haitian Creole,” Jill said.
Cheryl glanced at her momentarily, amazed by the profound knowledge of Vodou Jill learned in just a few hours of reading. Cheryl looked at the writing, and although she couldn’t discern what it said, she assumed that it was the same as the first page because she recognized the words ‘Papa Legba’. She was about to flip the page to the bottom of the stack when she saw something written on the backside.
HES AFTER ME
“Who is? Papa Legba?” Cheryl asked.
“That doesn’t make sense,” Jill shook her head. “Papa Legba is not an evil loa. Unless Mom did something to piss him off.”
For a moment, Cheryl wondered if Jill talked about all of this hypothetically or if she truly believed that there was a Vodou loa in the house. She chose not to share her own thoughts, mostly because she was still angry about the will. She instead flipped to the fourth and final page.
A pencil drawing covered the paper.
There was a wide circle covering a big portion of the paper, as if whoever drew it did so dozens of times over, making it thicker, denser, like a swirling void. Lines jutted out at the edges of both the interior and exterior, like a child’s drawing.
In the center of the circle was a figure—a tall, faceless, featureless figure with elongated arms and legs, a thin head, and a hunched back. Sharp fingers protruded from the bony hands, and where the eyes should have been, instead, there were two black orbs from how the pencil was pressed harder against the paper.
Cheryl felt her breath catch in her throat.
“I don’t know what exactly plagued your mother’s mind,” Violet broke the silence. “But whatever it was, it drove her farther into insanity.”
Cheryl looked at Jill, who retained a studious glower at the paper.
“What do you think?” Cheryl asked, hoping against hope that Jill would give her an answer that would confirm the presence of something metaphysical and that Cheryl wasn’t losing her mind.
Jill shook her head, and for the first time today, Cheryl thought she detected confusion on her older sister.
“I don’t know. Dementia must have really gotten to her badly,” she said at last.
Cheryl turned to Violet.
“Violet? What do you think?”
Violet slightly cocked her head.
“I think what happened to your mother was unfortunate. If you’re asking me if there’s something… supernatural happening here, I really cannot say.”
“But do you think it’s possible?” Cheryl insisted.
She avoided looking at Jill in case she stared at her judgmentally. Violet inhaled deeply through her nose and slightly raised her chin. She clasped her hands together in front of herself and gave a once-over to Cheryl, as if testing to see if she was screwing with the nurse.
“You have to understand, Cheryl, I am a nurse. Whenever something unusual happens—and there are a lot of bizarre things happening in my line of work from time to time—my first assumption is never that it’s something out of this world.”
Cheryl's cheek twitched at the disappointment of Violet’s sentence.
“But this house,” the nurse continued. “It’s unlike anything I have ever experienced before.”
“What do you mean by that?” Jill asked.
***
Violet looked at Annette’s motionless body in bed before facing Jill again. The nurse looked like something was on her mind, and she weighed her options if she should talk about what troubled her or not.
“It’s an old house, and I can see how someone could go crazy in it.”
“How so?” Cheryl interjected.
Violet shrugged.
“I don’t know
. I’m not a religious person, and I definitely do not believe in ghosts, or anything of the like. But lately, whenever I step inside this house, something doesn’t feel quite right. Now, I honestly think that this is just my own paranoia because I’ve listened to your mother raving on about it for a while, so it must have gotten to me.”
“But what if it wasn’t just the ravings of a person with dementia?” Cheryl asked.
Violet retained the focused stare for a moment, and then grimaced at Cheryl.
“As I said, this house is old. There are sounds coming from the walls, especially at night. Objects take up strange shadows under the dim light. And your mother used to read and watch things related to it. I think it only exacerbated her condition.”
“Mom’s in a coma, and somehow her dementia got to us so much that we’re discussing spiritual and otherworldly things,” Jill scoffed.
Violet laughed uneasily at that.
“Well, it’s easy to be influenced by this,” she said. “Especially if you spend more time than necessary surrounded by it. There was even similar research done which explained that spending too much time listening to radical radios or watching radical TV can cause us to become like that.”
Jill thought about that for a moment. Violet was right. Carried by what happened to their mother, Cheryl and Jill had started to succumb to a form of mass hysteria that there was something going on in the house.
“You’re right, Violet,” Jill said. “Whatever did happen here was logical. Our mother had dementia, that much we know for sure. She started going crazy living alone in the house, and eventually began concocting rituals that she thought would protect her from whatever she thought wanted to harm her. And then one night, she got scared by something she thought was there so much that she literally fell into a coma. Case closed.”
Silence fell on the room.
Cheryl didn’t look like she bought that theory, and it was impossible to tell what Violet thought.
“What happened doesn’t matter anymore,” Jill added. “What matters is that we need to decide what to do next.”
“I’ll leave you two to take care of your matters. I will be here Monday around the same time,” Violet nodded.