by Sara Shepard
“Maybe it’s haunted hummus,” Emma joked.
The girls had spent the afternoon running last-minute errands and setting the stage for the prank. They all wore long black robes embroidered with metallic stars that Charlotte had rented from a costume shop. Everyone except Nisha, that is, who wore black jeans and a black T-shirt, like a stage tech. Her job was to hide in the bushes and activate all the “special effects” they had devised for the prank, including a portable surround-sound system preloaded with Halloween noises like groans and rattling chains. But the best part was a group of helium balloons painted with scary, glow-in-the-dark faces that Nisha could drag around on a ribbon. The girls had tested them in Laurel’s bedroom earlier. In the dark, they gave a perfectly terrifying impression of floating disembodied heads.
I was proud of my friends for coming up with such a great prank—but I felt a little sad, too. They were about to conduct a fake séance in the same place I’d spent the last few hours of my life. If only there was a way I could really talk to Emma. If only Madame Darkling was a bona fide medium and I could use her to communicate with my friends. I’d tell Madeline and Charlotte how much I missed them. I’d remind Laurel that I was proud of her, and sorry we’d grown apart. I’d tell Emma that I love her, and thanks for everything she’s done for me. I’d even say hi to Nisha and the Twitter Twits. You don’t know how much your friends mean to you until you’re forced to watch them from the far side of the breach.
Emma’s skin hummed as if an electrical storm were brewing overhead, though the evening sky was clear and starting to fill with stars. She hadn’t been in the canyon since her first day here, when she’d waited for hours for Sutton to meet her. Her mind kept busily reconstructing what she knew about her sister’s last night—the date with Thayer and the runaway Volvo that had hit him, the argument with Mr. Mercer, and then … Becky. How could Becky have killed Sutton? Had she strangled her, or had she used a weapon? She’d had a knife when the cops took her to the hospital; maybe that had been the murder weapon.
And where had she hidden the body? It could be anywhere, even the underbrush just out of sight of the clearing. Emma took a few steps toward the woods, then stopped. Someone would have discovered it by now, if it were so easy to see. Here in the dark was not the time to hunt for clues.
“Almost showtime, ladies,” Madeline announced. Emma turned back to the circle, where the girls were gathering. Anticipation hung thick in the air. Charlotte held up her hands like a camera lens, surveying the area one last time. The Twins were doing some kind of theater warm-up exercise, saying “The lips, the teeth, the tip of the tongue” back and forth to each other. Madeline started handing out small cardboard boxes.
Emma lifted the top of hers. Inside was a papier-mâché mask in the form of a horned satyr, nestled in a bed of tissue paper.
“These are awesome,” Lili said. She and Gabby wore comedy and tragedy masks, one smiling and one frowning. Once they’d put them on, Emma couldn’t tell which girl was which. There was a whiskered black cat for Laurel and an eerie porcelain-doll face for Charlotte. In true diva form, Madeline had secured the only beautiful mask for herself—a red, feathered domino that covered her eyes and cheeks.
“Be careful with these. They have to make it back to the ballet closet by Monday morning, or I’m screwed,” Madeline warned.
A rhythmic chanting from behind the rocks made Emma jump. Nisha had started the music. Tendrils of “mist” from the smoke machine crept across the clearing. Even being in on the joke, Emma felt the short hairs on the back of her neck prickle. A few years earlier she’d had a job at the ticket counter for a Halloween haunted house. She remembered how silly the whole thing had looked when the lights were on—anyone could see how fake the foam monsters were, and even the professional-quality monster makeup seemed cakey and silly in the harsh light of day. But when the lights went down, when the smoke machine billowed and the music echoed creepily and the actors hid in the shadows waiting to jump out at their victims, the house became greater than the sum of its parts.
“Excuse me?” A girl’s voice broke in over the droning music. A figure emerged from the mist, looking around uncertainly. “Is this the Conference of the Dead?”
The girl’s face was hidden by a Venetian Carnevale mask in gold and white, but her hair was unmistakably Celeste’s, her braids jutting in every direction. Her robe was deep velvet and embroidered all over with esoteric symbols in gold thread.
“I bet you she just happened to have that robe hanging around in her closet,” Laurel whispered. Emma grinned behind her mask.
The girls nodded slowly. Madeline, now transformed into some kind of glowing mystical creature, gestured to the empty space in the circle. Celeste stepped hesitantly down the path to join them, the whites of her eyes clearly visible behind her mask as her gaze darted around the clearing.
Despite Emma’s skepticism about Madame Darkling’s authenticity—when the curtain came up she was all pro. A theatrical intensity infused every gesture she made. She walked around behind them counterclockwise, sprinkling salt to mark out a circle. “Within this circle we invite all benevolent spirits who would communicate with us. All those who would do us ill are banished to the outer darkness.” Her voice seemed to have mysteriously acquired a strange, choppy accent. Emma locked eyes with Charlotte across the circle and had to bite her lip to keep from laughing out loud.
The medium rejoined the circle, waving her hands over a small cauldron that Emma recognized as a fancy potpourri diffuser. She reached into a little leather pouch around her neck and drew out a pinch of some kind of dried herb. When she sprinkled it into the fire the flame grew brighter. The smell that came off it was something like mint tea mixed with a locker room.
And then, suddenly, her eyes snapped up and locked right onto Emma.
“You,” she said, her voice throaty. “Someone is here for you, dear.”
Emma was glad that the mask on her face was covering her confusion. Had Madame Darkling forgotten who was who? Maybe this was just an opening act, her way of building up to the final reveal.
The music from the underbrush was low and ominous, a soft rumble of chanting monks. “I sense loneliness. Pain,” said the medium. The cauldron’s low flame played across her face. In that moment she looked like a witch, eyes alight with unearthly knowledge. “Someone who died too young.”
And then, somehow, I detached myself from Emma’s senses for the first time since I’d died.
I drifted away from her, around the circle toward Madame Darkling. I could smell the herbs, feel the heat of the fire and the coolness of the breeze, all on my own—not just through Emma. It wasn’t like having a body again so much as connecting with this place. The moonlight on the clearing, the wind, the soil, the quiet chorus of crickets, the mesquite branches gnarled against the sky like skeletal fingers—it was as if all of those things were connected and I was one of them.
Had this faux medium managed to inadvertently tap into something real? Or maybe my body was close, and being near it made me feel a little more alive again.
“Can you hear me?” I asked the medium. Her eyes flickered in answer. She didn’t seem to see me, but maybe she felt me.
“Tell her,” I said, speaking as clearly as I could. Madame Darkling’s pupils were wide in the darkness. “Tell her I wish I could have met her.”
“I wish I could have met you,” Madame Darkling said, her voice flat and distant. Emma gasped softly.
Emma closed her eyes. This couldn’t be real. She didn’t believe in ghosts. But more than ever, she wanted to believe. She tried to quiet her thoughts, to empty her mind and wait for another message to come. I’m listening, she thought desperately. Sutton, are you here? Is that you?
I could have hugged the woman, gold lamé and all. She could hear me. She could communicate with Emma for me, and we could work together to solve my murder.
“Tell her I’m worried for her,” I said. “She’s in danger. I only wish we’d
had a chance to meet. We would have been an unstoppable team. Tell her I’m grateful for everything she’s done. Tell her I love her.”
Madame Darkling’s sonorous voice came across the circle. “He’s a handsome young man—one you have loved in a distant past life, and lost. He stands at the edge of an abyss and reaches to you … reaches … but the chasm between life and death is too wide, and he turns away again.” Madame Darkling touched a hand to her brow. “He says … he says he will see you one day. On the other side.”
Next to Emma, Madeline snorted softly. “Sutton Mercer, breaking hearts on both sides of the grave,” she whispered.
I groaned with frustration. It had felt so real for a moment, but it was just part of the medium’s performance. No matter how strong I felt here, I was still stuck in this limbo, alone and powerless.
Emma’s shoulders slumped. It’d been so easy for her to believe her sister was still out there, watching over her. But that was how con artists worked, right? They figured out what you wanted to believe and served it up on a silver platter. She couldn’t afford that kind of denial. Sutton was dead and gone.
“Dead,” I whispered sadly, “but not gone. I’m here, Emma.”
Tendrils of mist blew across the clearing, and the music shifted to a quiet murmur. Madame Darkling turned her turbaned head toward Celeste. The Venetian mask glittered in the ambient light.
“You, dear,” said the medium. “Someone’s arrived for you. An older lady. She only crossed over very recently. A woman of letters, perhaps?”
Through the holes in her mask, Celeste’s eyes became very round. “Grandmama?” she squeaked. “Is that you?”
Emma felt a pang of guilt. It was obvious Celeste had been close with her grandmother. Maybe that was where all her otherworldly nonsense had come from—the desperate desire to believe her grandmother was still there. It felt cruel to aim for such a vulnerable spot, especially since Emma had just found it so easy to believe that her dead sister was still with her.
“She’s trying to tell me something,” Madame Darkling intoned, touching her hands to her temples. She looked like she was straining to hear. “She says she does not approve of the boy you are seeing. Gareth, I believe?”
“G-g-g-garrett, Grandmama,” Celeste said, her voice so soft Emma could barely make it out. Madame Darkling nodded.
“She says … that he uses more hair product than you do.” Charlotte broke into a fit of coughing next to Emma. “And that he doesn’t truly care for you. She says that he’s using you to get revenge on his true love, a devastatingly beautiful girl who broke his heart.”
Emma couldn’t believe Charlotte had told Madame Darkling all this. Celeste’s lips pressed together tightly.
“I knew it,” she growled. “Don’t worry, Grandmama. We’re through. I won’t waste any more time on him.”
Madame Darkling clutched her head. “Silence!” she snapped. The girls went still. From the underbrush the music built, a violin’s tense tremolo joining the low drums. A gust of wind blasted through the clearing.
When it passed, the medium opened her eyes. “Something else is here,” she said, her tone afraid. A low moan came from somewhere to the left, then seemed to move around them as if they were being circled. Celeste’s head snapped up, her lips parted.
“Grandmama?” she whispered.
Multicolored lights began flashing from the underbrush, and the sound of footsteps reverberated all around the clearing. The fake cactus writhed as if it was possessed. For a moment Emma almost forgot that it was one of their props, controlled by Nisha in the darkness.
“No,” Madame Darkling said, her voice dropping low, a strange, half-mad grimace on her face. “Grandmama isn’t here anymore, Celeste. This is a malevolent being. Everyone, remain strong in your minds and intentions and we can banish it together. Forces of evil, leave us be. Forces of evil, leave us be …,” she began to chant.
A scream echoed from somewhere, and then another answered it on the other side of the clearing. Celeste gasped, one hand flying to her lips, the other pointing upward at the leering green faces swooping overhead. She whimpered and scrambled backward, scuffing the circle of salt with her sandals.
“You have broken the sacred circle!” Madame Darkling cried, raising a trembling finger to point at Celeste. Celeste opened and closed her mouth like a fish. She glanced wildly around, her face pale under her mask. Emma watched something move in the shadows behind her. It was Nisha, reaching out from behind a rock with a peacock feather in her outstretched hand. She tickled Celeste on the back of the neck and vanished before the other girl turned.
“Celeste …,” a strange voice crooned from the bushes. Nisha had cued up the best of their sound bites, a superdistorted recording of Charlotte calling Celeste’s name in a creepy singsong. Nisha had warped it and added reverb until it was scarcely recognizable. The same call came from the other side of the clearing, and then from a third angle. Soon they were surrounded on all sides by the voice.
Goose pimples sprang up along the back of Emma’s neck. Even I shuddered, and I knew perfectly well that I was the only ghost in the canyon tonight.
“The spirits have come to claim you!” Madame Darkling screamed.
Celeste was huddled over, her hands covering her head, trembling. The chorus of voices overlapped and grew to a fever pitch, an insane babble. But just when Emma didn’t think she could take any more, the sounds stopped at once.
“Gotcha!” the other girls screamed on cue, all except Emma.
Light flooded the clearing. The girls whipped off their masks, clutching their sides with laughter. Madeline had tears pouring down her cheeks. Laurel could barely breathe, crouched over her knees in hysterics. Nisha sauntered out of the bushes smirking.
Celeste blinked into the bright lights, a dazed and blank expression on her face. She didn’t remove her mask but stayed crouched in the leaves and dirt.
Charlotte tossed her hair to fluff it after having it crushed under the mask. “How’s Sutton’s aura looking now?” she sneered.
“Did you get it on tape, Nisha?” Madeline asked. Nisha held up her iPhone.
“It’s uploading to YouTube as we speak.”
“On it!” the twins exclaimed, whipping out their phones to retweet the link.
Celeste stood up slowly. Dirt and leaves stuck to her cloak. One of her braids had flopped over the top of her head and jutted outward.
“We really got you, didn’t we?” Madeline asked. “I mean, shouldn’t you have seen it coming, in the stars or the tea leaves or whatever?”
“Hilarious,” Celeste snapped. Her voice was substantially less dreamy than usual. “You’re hilarious.”
“We know,” said the Twitter Twins in perfect unison. They were dancing around each other in a taunting do-si-do.
Celeste walked slowly to the side of the clearing and picked up her hemp knapsack. It was covered in patches and buttons that said things like FREE TIBET and VEGANS TASTE BETTER. Then she turned on her heel to face them.
“You shouldn’t play with forces you don’t understand,” she spat. She locked eyes with Emma. “It can be dangerous. You can accidentally call all kinds of problems down on yourself.”
“I think it’s time you stop with the lame aura warnings,” Charlotte said. “You’re the one who called down all kinds of problems on yourself when you messed with us. Remember that the next time you try to get in Sutton’s head.”
“You’ve been warned,” Celeste insisted, shaking her head slowly. “The spirits will not be mocked.” She tossed her bag on her shoulder and started up the path away from them. A moment later they heard a car start and drive away.
“That was brilliant,” Madeline told Madame Darkling. The medium had already lit a cigarette and stood to the side, examining their props. Charlotte handed the woman an envelope bulging with cash, and she opened it and began counting the bills.
“I’m going to have to remember some of this stuff,” she said. “Glow paint an
d balloons. Nice touch.”
Emma stood back, mask still on, not joining in the celebration of the rest of the group. She watched as the woman shoved the envelope somewhere inside her robes, then took off down the same path Celeste had, toward the parking lot. Laurel wheeled a cooler out of the underbrush while Gabby and Lili built a teetering pyramid of kindling. Nisha cued up a Black Eyed Peas album on the surround sound. Soon they had a fire crackling, marshmallows speared on sticks and browning in the heat. The clearing, which just minutes before had been spookier than a graveyard, became bright and cheerful.
“That could not have gone better,” Madeline said, reclining in a camp chair. The Twitter Twins were reading aloud tweets hashtagged “séance.” They had gotten the prank trending locally within the past few minutes.
Emma pulled Sutton’s wool jacket closer around her torso. “You guys, I feel a little bad,” she said.
If there had been a DJ playing in the bushes, his record would have scratched and gone silent. The girls turned to gawk at her. Sutton rarely felt bad about anything, and she wasn’t big on regret. But Emma couldn’t help but think of how desperately she’d wanted to believe that her sister could still speak, and how lonely she’d felt in the split second after she’d realized the medium was a fraud. It had felt almost as awful as those moments after she’d found the murderer’s first note—almost as if she’d lost Sutton all over again.
“I just mean, you know … her grandma recently died. Maybe we shouldn’t have gone there,” she said softly.
Surprisingly, it was Nisha who spoke first, her voice tense.
“If she was stupid enough to think her grandma would talk to her through some cheesy lamé-wearing hack, she deserved to be punked,” Nisha said. “The dead don’t come back. No matter how much you want them to.”
Emma bit her lip. Of course solid, sensible Nisha would have no patience for the desperate, delusional hopes of the grieving. Her voice was harsh with bitterness. She sounded as if she was mocking her own grief as much as anyone else’s.