Girl of Nightmares

by Kendare Blake

“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.”

  All the talking about me as if I’m not here is getting on my nerves. They go back and forth for a minute or so, Thomas defending me feebly and Carmel asserting that I need at least six sessions of paranormal counseling before I return to the job.

  “Do you guys mind catching a little detention?” I ask suddenly. When I jerk my head toward the door and stand, they both get up too. The study hall monitor shouts some question about where we think we’re going, or what we think we’re doing, but we don’t stop. Carmel just calls out, “Uh, I forgot my note cards!” as we go through the door.

  * * *

  We’re parked in the lot of a rest stop off 61, sitting in Carmel’s silver Audi. I’m in the back, and both of them have twisted in their seats to look at me. They wait, patiently, which makes it worse. A little prodding wouldn’t hurt.

  “You’re right about me hesitating,” I say finally. “And you’re right that I still have questions about the knife. But that’s not what happened on Saturday. Questions don’t keep me from doing my job.”

  “So what was it?” Carmel asks.

  What was it. I don’t even know. In the instant that I heard her laugh, Anna bloomed red behind my eyes, and I saw everything she had ever been: the clever, pale girl in white, and the black-veined goddess dressed in blood. She was close enough to touch. But the adrenaline is gone now, and there’s daylight all around. So maybe it was nothing. Just a wishful hallucination. But I brought them all the way out here to tell them, so I might as well tell them something.

  “If I told you that I couldn’t let go of Anna,” I say, looking down at the Audi’s black floor-mats, “that I need to know she’s at peace, would you understand that?”

  “Yeah, absolutely,” Thomas says. Carmel looks away.

  “I’m not ready to give up, Carmel.”

  She tucks her blond hair behind her ear and looks down guiltily. “I know. But you’ve been looking for answers for months. We all have.”

  I smile ruefully. “And what? You’re tired of it?”

  “Of course not,” she snaps. “I liked Anna. And even if I didn’t, she saved our lives. But what she did, sacrificing herself—that was for you, Cas. And she did it so that you could live. Not so you could walk around half dead, pining for her.”

  I have nothing to say. The words bring me down, far and fast. Not knowing what happened to Anna has driven me close to insane these past months. I’ve imagined every imaginable hell, the worst possible fates. It would be easy to say that’s why letting her go is difficult. It would be true. But it’s not all. The fact is, Anna is gone. She was dead when I met her, and I was going to put her back in the dirt, but I didn’t want her to go. Maybe the way that she left was supposed to wrap things up. She’s deader than dead and I should be glad; instead I’m so pissed off that I can’t see straight. It doesn’t feel like she left. It feels like she was taken away.

  After a minute, I shake my head and words fall out of my mouth, practiced and calm. “I know. Listen, maybe we should just cool it for a while. I mean, you’re right. It isn’t safe, and I’m sorry as hell for what happened on Saturday. I really am.”

  They tell me not to worry about it. Thomas says it was nothing and Carmel makes a joke about getting harpooned. They react like best friends should, and all of a sudden I feel like a total dick. I need to get my head straight. I need to get used to the fact that I’m never going to see Anna again, before someone really does get hurt.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The sound of that laugh. It plays back in my head for about the hundredth time. It was her voice; Anna’s voice, but it sounded mad, and shrill. Almost desperate. Or maybe that’s just because I heard it coming out of a dead man’s mouth. Or maybe I never really heard it at all.

  A sharp crack makes me blink and look down. One of my mom’s white clarity candles lies in two pieces at my feet, rolled up against my toe. I’d been packing them into a box to take to Morfran’s shop.

  “What’s the matter, son of mine?” She’s got this halfway smile on and a cocked eyebrow. “What’s got you so distracted that you’re breaking our livelihood?”

  I bend down and pick up the two halves of candle, awkwardly shoving the broken ends together like they’ll magically merge. Why can’t magic work like th
at?

  “Sorry,” I say. She gets up from the table where she was tying on incantations, takes the candle from me, and sniffs it.

  “It’s okay. We’ll just keep this one. They work just as well broken as not.” She walks over and sets it on the windowsill over the sink. “Now answer the question, kiddo. What is it? School? Or maybe that date of yours went better than you let on.” The look on her face is half-teasing, but there’s hope there too.

  “No such luck, Mom.” It’d be easy enough to say it was school. Easy enough to say I was daydreaming. And I probably should. My mother is happy here. After we found out that my father’s murderer had been renting out the attic of the house and ate her cat, I figured she’d move us. Or burn the house down. But she didn’t. Instead she settled and made the place ours, more than any of the rentals we’ve lived in since my dad died. The whole thing seemed like something she’d almost been waiting for.

  I suppose it was something we were both waiting for. Because it’s over now. Closed.

  “Cas? Are you okay? Did something happen?”

  I give her my most reassuring smile. “It’s nothing. Just leftover crap.”

  “Mm,” she says. She pulls a box of matches out of the junk drawer. “Maybe you should light this clarity candle. Get rid of the cobwebs.”

  “Sure.” I chuckle, and take the match. “Shouldn’t I say the incantation first?”

  She waves her hand. “The words aren’t always necessary. You just have to know what you want.” She pokes me in the chest, and I strike the match.

  * * *

  “You are playing horribly,” Thomas says to me from one couch cushion over.

  “So what, it’s just Pac-Man,” I reply as my last guy runs smack into a ghost and dies.

  “If you’re going to look at it that way, you’re never going to beat my top score.”

  I snort. I’d never be able to beat it anyway. The kid has creepily accurate hand-eye coordination. I can hold my own in a first-person shooter, but he beats me at the old arcade games every time. He takes the controller and the theme music starts over. I watch as Pac-Man eats cherries and dots and sends ghosts back to the start box.

  “You’ve memorized the boards.”

  “Maybe.” He grins, then hits pause when his phone starts buzzing. The cell phone is new for Thomas. A gift from Carmel, which she uses to repeatedly text him to try to get us to meet her at the mall. But the mall is a thing that should not be suffered. Except maybe for Cinnabon.

  Thomas sighs. “Want to meet Carmel and Katie at Cinnabon?”

  I take a deep breath. He’d come over to give me a book he’d found that had theories about the afterlife. It’s sitting next to the Xbox, unopened. I’m tired of reading and coming up with more questions and no answers. I’m tired of chasing down my dad’s old associates and getting nothing but best guesses. It’s become an exhausting dead end, and even if it makes me feel guilty to think so, that’s the truth.

  “Let’s go,” I say.

  * * *

  The mall is bright and smells like lotion. Every store we pass by must sell the stuff. Carmel met us at the entrance, alone. Katie bugged out the minute she heard we were coming.

  “Does it bother you that your best friend dislikes me so much?” Thomas asks, his mouth stuffed so full of Cinnabon that he’s barely understandable.

  “She doesn’t dislike you. You just never take the chance to get to know her. You both make her feel unwelcome.”

  “That’s not true,” Thomas objects.

  “It’s sort of true,” I mutter from just behind them. And it is. When it’s just me and Carmel and her friends, it’s fine. I can mingle if I have to. But when the three of us are together, it feels like a closed club. I sort of like that, and I don’t even feel guilty about it. The three of us together is safe.

  “See?” Carmel says. She slows down a step or two so I can catch up and walk beside them. Thomas says something else about Katie and I hear Nat’s name come up too, but I’m not really listening. Their couples stuff is none of my business. I drop back to my regular spot just behind. The mall is too crowded to walk three-across without bobbing and weaving through people.

  A multitude of voices call Carmel’s name, and I look up from my cinnamon roll to see Amanda Schneider, Heidi Trico, and a different Katie something-or-other waving their arms. Derek Pimms and Nate Bergstrom are with them too; guys that Thomas would call the next wave of the Trojan Army. I can almost hear him thinking it now, hear him gritting his teeth as we walk over.

  “Hey, Carmel,” Heidi says. “What’s up?”

  Carmel shrugs. “Cinnabon. And wandering around. Dropping hints for birthday gifts that some people are too dense to pick up on.” She nudges Thomas affectionately. I wish she wouldn’t have. At least not in present company, because it makes Thomas turn red as a beet, which makes Derek and Nate grin like jackasses. The other girls just glance first his way, then mine, smiling without showing their teeth. Thomas shuffles his feet. He never looks Derek or Nate in the eye, so I compensate by staring them down. I feel like an idiot, but I do it. Carmel just talks and laughs, at ease and seemingly oblivious to the whole thing.

  And then something shifts. The athame. It’s secure, in its sheath, fastened with two straps around my ankle. But I just felt it move, the way it does sometimes when I’m hunting. And this was no small movement; it was an unmistakable twist.

  I pivot in the direction it moved, feeling more than half-crazy. There is no dead thing haunting the mall. It’s too busy, too bright, and too lotion-y. But the knife doesn’t lie, so I search through the passing faces, faces that stare blankly on their way to American Eagle or laugh and smile with friends. All clearly alive in varying degrees. I pivot again and the knife jerks.

  “What?” I mutter, and look ahead, at the window display of the store across from us.

  It’s Anna’s dress.

  I blink my eyes hard twice. But it’s her dress. White and simple. Beautiful. I walk toward it, and the mall has gone quiet. What am I seeing? Not just a dress that’s similar to hers. It’s her dress. I know it even before the leg of the mannequin steps down off of the pedestal.

  She moves jerkily on plastic legs. Her hair is hanging down her shoulders, limp and loose like a synthetic wig. I don’t look at her face. Not even when my fingers are against the glass of the display and her mannequin-legs bend, rustling the white fabric.

  “Cas!”

  I jerk, and the noise of the mall hits my eardrums like a slamming door. Thomas and Carmel are on either side of me, concerned looks on their faces. My whole head is cloudy, like I just woke up. As I blink up at the glass, the mannequin stands like it always stood, posed and dressed in a white dress that doesn’t really look anything like Anna’s at all.

  I glance back at Amanda, Derek, and the others. They look as shell-shocked as Thomas and Carmel right now. But by tomorrow they’ll be laughing hysterically as they tell everyone else they know. I pull my fingers away from the window awkwardly. After what they just saw, I can’t say that I blame them.

  “Are you okay?” Carmel asks. “What happened?”

  “Nothing,” I say. “I thought I saw something, but it was nothing.”

  She drops her eyes and looks quickly right and left. “You were shouting.”

  I look at Thomas, who nods.

  “I guess I got a little loud. The acoustics in here suck; you can’t really hear yourself.”

  I see the look they give each other, and don’t try to convince them. How could I? They see the white dress in the window and they know what it means. They know what it was that I thought I saw.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The day after my epic nervous breakdown at the mall I spend my free period outside on the edge of the quad, sitting under a tree and talking to Gideon. There are other students out too, occupying the ground that’s not shady, sacked out on the new spring grass with their heads on their backpacks or their friends’ laps. Occasionally they look my way, say somethi
ng, and everybody laughs. It occurs to me that I used to do a better job of blending. Maybe I shouldn’t come back next year.

  “Theseus, is everything all right? You sound distracted.”

  I laugh. “You sound like my mom.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Sorry.” I hesitate, which is stupid. It’s the reason I called him in the first place. I wanted to talk about it. I need to hear that Anna is gone. That she can’t come back. And I need to hear it in an authoritative British voice.

  “Have you ever heard of anyone coming back, after they’ve crossed over?” I say finally.

  Gideon’s pause is appropriately thoughtful. “Never,” he says. “It simply isn’t possible. At least not within the realm of sane probability.”

  I squint. Since when do we live in the realm of sane probability? “But if I can propel them from one plane to another using the athame, couldn’t there be some other thing that could get them back?” The pause this time is longer, but he’s not really taking it seriously. If he were, I’d hear the jostling of a ladder or the rustle of turning book pages. “I mean, come on, it’s not that far-fetched a thought. A to B to G maybe, but—”

  “I’m afraid it’s more like A to B to pi.” He takes a breath. “I know who you’re thinking of, Theseus, but it just isn’t possible. We can’t bring her back.”

  My eyes clench shut. “What if she already is back?”

  There’s wariness in his voice when he asks, “What do you mean?”

  I hope a laugh will put him at ease, so I twist my mouth into a smile. “I don’t know what I mean. I didn’t call to freak you out. I just—I guess I just think about her a lot.”

  He sighs. “I know you must. She was—she was extraordinary. But now she’s where she belongs. Listen to me, Theseus,” he says, and I can almost feel his wizened fingers on my shoulders. “You have to let this go.”

  “I know.” And I do. Part of me wants to tell him about the way the athame moved, and about the things I’ve thought I’ve seen and heard. But he’s right, and I’d only sound nuts.