When they started the profession of the faith, she saw Mrs. Radcliffe with the collection basket. Mary Katherine remembered all of those years in CCD. Mrs. Radcliffe told her parents she was such a good student. Such a good little girl. She wanted to be that girl again. The girl in the white gown receiving her first Holy Communion. The girl who learned from Mrs. Radcliffe that the Communion wafer was the body of Christ and the wine was His blood. The little girl who told the boys to stop making fun of Mrs. Radcliffe after her big boobs brushed against the chalkboard in CCD and for the rest of the class, she had two perfect white chalky headlights on her blouse.
When Mrs. Radcliffe brought the collection basket to her row, Mary Katherine gave her all of the money she had.
“Thank you for teaching me about God, Mrs. Radcliffe,” she said.
Mary Katherine smiled.
Mrs. Radcliffe did not smile back.
She just scratched her arm.
The rite of Communion began. Father Tom led the congregation in the Lord’s Prayer. Mary Katherine stood up with her parents to receive Communion. She suddenly had a terrible feeling in the pit of her stomach. Mary Katherine reached the front of the line. She stood in front of Father Tom with her hands open.
“Body of Christ,” he said.
Mary Katherine brought the wafer to her mouth. She made the sign of the cross and chewed it as she had at least fifty-two times a year since she was seven years old. But this time, the wafer didn’t taste like bland Styrofoam.
It tasted like flesh.
Mary Katherine stopped chewing. She looked up and saw her parents staring at her. She wanted to spit the wafer out, but she didn’t dare. She went to Mrs. Radcliffe, who was holding the goblet of wine. Mary Katherine normally didn’t take the wine, but she had to wash this taste out of her mouth. Mrs. Radcliffe handed her the goblet. Mary Katherine made the sign of the cross and drank the wine. But it didn’t taste like wine.
It tasted like blood.
Mary Katherine forced a smile and a sign of the cross and ran to the bathroom. She went to the sink and spit out the flesh and blood. But when she looked into the sink, all she saw was a wafer and wine.
Mary Katherine suddenly felt her stomach come up. She rushed to the handicapped stall. It was always the cleanest. She got on her knees and threw up the eggs she had for dinner. She sat there for a moment, catching her breath. Then, she flushed the toilet and went to the sink.
She wiped away the thin layer of sweat that had broken out on her forehead with a coarse paper towel. Then, she fished in her purse for peppermint Tic Tacs to wash the wretched taste out of her mouth. She couldn’t find any mints, but she did find a stray tampon hidden on the bottom of her purse.
That’s when she realized her period was late.
Mary Katherine stopped. She thought about her aching body. Her tender breasts. The horrible nausea she felt all morning. The pit in her stomach. If she didn’t know any better, she would have thought she was pregnant. At first, the thought terrified her, but quickly, her mind calmed down. She couldn’t be pregnant. It was impossible.
After all, she was a virgin.
And virgins can’t get pregnant.
Everybody knows that.
Chapter 55
The wind howled outside. The lights began to turn off. And it was almost time for the old people to sleep. Ambrose had been reading his brother’s diary every minute since he’d found it. He wanted to stop several times, but he wouldn’t allow himself. His eyes could handle this much information, but he didn’t know about his heart. The feeling was more than guilt or regret. He had experienced plenty of each over the last fifty years. It was the diary itself. Everything about it reminded him of David. It smelled like him. It felt like him. And of course, it had that handwriting.
It looked like the walls of an insane asylum.
Most little kids have a chicken scratch scrawl, but when David’s mind turned, he took the prize. He wrote in the weirdest combination of capital letters, lowercase, cursive, and printing Ambrose had ever seen. Everything was a little off. Just like David was a little off. Ambrose had expected to finish the diary in a couple of hours. But somehow, one day stretched to two, and Ambrose wasn’t even halfway done. Every page was filled with so many sketches, drawings, and hieroglyphics that sentences couldn’t be read.
They had to be excavated.
But if there was a clue in here, he was going to find it. Ambrose rubbed his tired eyes and opened the diary again. The leather cracked. He continued to read.
April 1st
Ambrose said he was too busy to come to the woods today, but that’s okay. He is on the varsity baseball team and has important things to do. I just wish I could show him the inside of my tree house. It took me so long to build it by myself. But maybe that’s what makes it special. When you go in, you can walk around town. But it’s not really town. It’s a copy of town. People think they are alone, but they’re not. Imaginary people are with them all the time. Some people are very nice. Some are very bad. But none of them can see me, though, so it’s okay. In the daylight, I’m invisible like Wonder Woman’s jet. So, I am safe until night falls. That’s when the woman with burnt feet can find me. She always makes that terrible hissing noise. I just wish Ambrose would come and see it for himself.
April 13th
I am becoming a superhero. When I am on the imaginary side, I can jump really high if I think about it hard enough. But then, when I leave, I feel sick. I woke up today with a very bad headache. I thought the headaches were over. But they aren’t and now I have a fever. My mother is starting to get worried, but I can’t tell her what’s going on because I think the woman with the burnt feet is watching me. So, I pretended I was okay. But I don’t know if I’m okay. I’m starting to get scared.
April 23rd
I am having trouble sleeping because I’m so sick. And I’m afraid of the nightmares. I thought they were mine for a long time, but now I think I am having the whole town’s nightmares at the same time. The things people dream are terrifying. Everyone is so unhappy. The woman with the burnt feet keeps finding me. I am afraid to go to sleep tonight.
May 3rd
The deer are looking at me again. They are working for the woman with the burnt feet. I know it. I want to tell Ambrose the truth, so he can help me. But I know I sound crazy. And I know she is listening. I want to run away, but I can’t leave Ambrose.
May 9th
I don’t want to sleep anymore. The nightmares have been so bad that I see them when I’m awake. I don’t remember how many I’ve had by this point. Several a night because they keep waking me up. They are always different, but the ending is always the same. Somebody tries to kill me. Usually it’s the woman with the burnt feet. But sometimes, she has other people do it. Last night was the worst. I was on the street because she can’t walk on it without burning her feet. So, she pretended to be my mom to bring me over to the lawn. And when I wouldn’t come to the lawn for her, she sent Ambrose out to the street with a knife. I couldn’t get up. The hissing woman made Ambrose stab me. It was so real that when I woke up, I had to get the baseball glove Ambrose bought me for Christmas to remember that he still liked me. I slept with the glove all night, and this morning, I asked Ambrose if he wanted to play catch. He said yes! We played catch for 5 whole minutes! He said he was too busy with finals to play longer, but we’ll catch more in the summer. That would be so great. It’s important to have things to look forward to.
Ambrose closed the diary. He wanted to keep reading, but his cataracts couldn’t take another word. He closed his eyes to get the sting out and the moisture back. In the darkness, he could hear the world around him. The wind rustled the tree branches. The lady across the hallway coughed. The radiator hummed. Otherwise, Shady Pines was covered in an eerie silence. It reminded Ambrose of sitting in a foxhole. The quiet was never really quiet. It was just the coming attraction for the storm.
Ambrose opened his eyes and looked at David’s old baseball gl
ove resting on the nightstand. He suddenly felt very frightened and didn’t want to be alone. He stood up on his arthritic knees and left his bedroom with his brother’s diary in hand.
When he reached the parlor, Ambrose took his normal spot near the fireplace. He sat in the big easy chair and looked around the room at all the old faces. Mr. Wilcox and Mr. Russell played chess. Mrs. Haggerty knitted a new stocking for her granddaughter’s first Christmas. A few spinsters watched a trashy reality show.
Ambrose took out a magnifying glass and opened the diary. His eyes were burning, but he had to force another page into them. He squinted through his cataracts and focused to decipher his brother’s haunted handwriting.
May 20th
I don’t know if I am asleep or awake right now. My head hurts so much. My family thinks I am eating cereal in the morning, but it’s really a bowl of aspirin that I’ve put in milk so they can’t tell the difference when I chew them. But it does no good. I am in constant pain. I am so ashamed. Yesterday, I got so sad that I wanted to die. So, I went into the tree house, walked out to the middle of the clearing, and waited for night to come. I knew the woman with the burnt feet would be able to see me at night, and she could kill me once and for all. But right before sunset, a man came out of hiding and saved me. He threw me back into my tree house right before the woman with the burnt feet attacked me. She ripped him apart instead.
May 21st
I went back into the tree house and looked for the man who saved me. I found him near the creek washing the cuts from his hands. He looked like he had been whipped a thousand times. I was so relieved to see someone who would talk to me. He said that he understood why I got sad yesterday, but that I had to be strong. He said he was a soldier, who promised his father to keep us all safe from her, and he would never give up. So, I couldn’t give up, either. I asked him what he knew about the woman with the burnt feet. He said she rules the imaginary world.
May 22nd
Her plan has started. No one on the real side can see it, but it’s there. I tried to help them see things the way they really were, but the kids think I’m crazy. I was walking home from school because I didn’t want them to make fun of me on the bus anymore. I went to the imaginary side through my tree house. I saw a woman yelling at her son on the porch. She hit her son really hard. She didn’t know that the hissing woman with the burnt feet was moving her arm and whispering in her ear.
June 1st
It’s spreading everywhere. The soldier and I have tried to keep people safe from inside the imaginary world, but it’s not working. The hissing woman is so much stronger than us. She gets stronger every day. It’s like the thing I heard in science class. The teacher told us that if you put a frog in boiling water, it knows to jump out. But if you put a frog in cold water and slowly turn up the heat, it can’t tell until it’s too late. So, it boils to death. Right now, the town thinks it’s a flu, but it’s something much worse. I would ask Ambrose to help me, but I know that deep down, even Ambrose thinks I’m crazy. And I really hope he’s right. I really hope I am just a psycho kid who goes into the woods and talks to himself. Because if this is real, the world is in a pan of cold water right now, and the heat is getting turned up. And I’m the only one on earth who can stop it.
“Nurse!” a voice called out.
Ambrose closed the book and looked up in the parlor. He saw Mrs. Haggerty stop knitting her granddaughter’s Christmas stocking to put her hand to her forehead to check her temperature. The nurse came rushing up.
“What is it, Mrs. Haggerty?”
“I have the flu.”
“Okay. Let’s get you to bed, love.”
Ambrose studied the parlor. Mr. Wilcox and Mr. Russell loosened their sweaters and asked someone to turn down the heat. Mrs. Webb scratched her neck, which was coated in a thin sweat like cooking spray on a skillet. Ambrose heard one of the spinsters cough as they watched the trashy reality show. The complaints and requests for water and Advil and cold washcloths spread throughout the room.
People were getting sick.
Except Mrs. Collins’ mother.
She stared right at Ambrose from her wheelchair. Ambrose felt the room go cold around him. A breeze tickled the hair of his neck. Like a whisper.
“That woman is standing right next to you, whispering in your ear,” she said. “Can you hear her?”
“What is she saying, Mrs. Keizer?”
Mrs. Keizer smiled like the Cheshire Cat and wheeled herself down the hallway with a squeak. Squeak. Squeak.
“Death is coming. Death is here. We’ll die on Christmas Day.”
Chapter 56
The Christmas Pageant was supposed to be great.
That’s what everyone told Christopher’s mother. The Christmas Pageant was a proud tradition between Shady Pines and Mill Grove Elementary School going back all the way before they had to start calling it the “Winter Pageant” for legal reasons. On the last Friday before Christmas, Mill Grove Elementary would send kids to sing “winter” (aka holiday) songs and make cookies for the old folks. Then, the old folks would give the kids different prizes for Balloon Derby. The rule was whoever’s balloon flew the farthest by the pageant would get the best prize, but all the kids would get a little something. Everyone knew the prizes were actually Christmas and Hanukkah presents, but the Balloon Derby excuse was a great way around the separation of church and state.
“That’s like keeping God out of God dammit!” the nurses liked to joke.
No matter on which side of the aisle one stood, the old people loved the pageant because it was a distraction from checkers and daytime TV. The kids loved it because they got out of school. But nobody loved it more than the staff because it meant that for a few blissful hours, the old people would stop complaining.
There aren’t a lot of win-win-win situations in life.
This was one of Mill Grove’s finest.
“Did you hear news, Mrs. Reese?” one of the nurses asked in her broken English.
“What?”
“Mrs. Collins…she call in sick with flu. She won’t be in all day. Christmas miracle!”
For the rest of the morning, the folks of Shady Pines were excited about the pageant the way children are the night before Christmas. Christopher’s mother tried her best to join in their festive mood. Since it was her son’s last day of school before “winter” break, she was planning to whisk him away after the pageant and take him to whatever movie he wanted—her good taste be damned. Then, they would spend the whole weekend decorating their very own home for Christmas.
But she couldn’t shake it.
That uneasy feeling.
“Hi, Mrs. Reese.”
Christopher’s mother turned and saw Mary Katherine walking through the door. The girl looked scared. This was nothing new, of course. Poor Mary Katherine was so skittish, so guilty, so unbelievably Catholic that sometimes, she said the Lord’s Prayer before her dessert, thinking somehow her “these, Thy gifts” prayer before dinner didn’t last long enough. But this look was different. The girl was downright ashen.
“You okay, honey?” Christopher’s mother asked.
“Oh, yes. I’m fine,” the girl said.
But she wasn’t fine. The poor thing looked like she might burst into tears.
“You sure? You can talk to me.”
“I’m sure. Just a little sick to my stomach. That’s all.”
“Then go home. You already got your certificate. You don’t need to keep volunteering. No one will judge you, you know?”
“Yes, they will,” she said.
With that, Mary Katherine nodded a quick goodbye and slipped into Mrs. Keizer’s room to begin her volunteer shift. Christopher’s mother would have followed, but she was distracted by the noise from the parlor.
“They’re here! The children are here!” the voices yelled.
The excitement worked its way through the room as the school buses pulled into the parking lot. Within seconds, the doors opened, and the
teachers did their best to shepherd the kids into single-file lines. Christopher’s mother instinctively looked for the kids she knew, but she couldn’t find them in the sea of wool knit caps and Steelers beanies.
The first person through the door was Ms. Lasko. Christopher’s mother had just seen her in the principal’s office when Christopher got into the fight with Brady Collins. It was only a few days ago, but she remembered that Ms. Lasko had looked healthy and vibrant and pink-faced.
The difference was shocking.
Ms. Lasko was pale and drawn. The bags under her eyes were so black that she looked like she’d been punched. She was so exhausted that Christopher’s mother didn’t think she had slept since the principal’s office. She looked as tired as…
As Christopher.
“Are you okay, Ms. Lasko?” Christopher’s mother asked.
“Oh. I’m fine. Thank you, Mrs. Reese. Just a little headache.”
That’s when Christopher’s mother noticed it. Ms. Lasko smelled like a fifth of vodka covered up with a gallon of peppermint mouthwash. Christopher’s mother knew that smell. She had grown up with it. That smell used to read her bedtime stories. And beat the shit out of her when she spilled things.
Christopher’s mother was ready to tell the other teachers that her son’s homeroom teacher was drunk as a skunk.
Except that Ms. Lasko wasn’t drunk.
She wasn’t even buzzed.
She looked like someone who was going through withdrawal.
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