Shallow Graves

by Kali Wallace

  “Right,” I said. So now there were human-monster liaisons too. It would probably be weird to ask for her résumé.

  “And all she wants is information.”

  “That’s not all she wants.”

  Rain elbowed Zeke in the side without looking at him. “Yes, it is. But she has to keep things fair. She doesn’t want to owe anybody. So you tell her what you know about Willow and his people, and she’ll let you ask her something in return. That’s how it works.”

  “It’s bullshit,” Zeke said. “She just made that up and people are stupid enough to go along with it.”

  “Oh my god, shut up,” Rain said. “You’re too much of a pussy to even drive through the gate. Nobody cares what you think. Seriously.” She poked my shoulder and indicated the door. “Let’s go. Don’t worry about it.”

  “What kind of something do I get to ask?” I could think of two or three or five hundred questions I might have.

  “Something important. That’s what you have, so that’s what you get.”

  “That’s it?” It sounded suspiciously like the sort of arrangement a fairy-tale king would be tricked into agreeing to right before losing his entire kingdom to a conniving sorceress.

  “She won’t hurt you,” Rain said. “No matter what this idiot says. She’s not like that.”

  “She is with some people,” Zeke said.

  Rain made a frustrated sound. “Why are you being such an ass? She’s not— There she is.” She nudged me in the side again. “Go on, get out.”

  The woman who stepped onto the porch was dressed in jeans and a blue T-shirt, with wire-rimmed glasses perched on her nose and her long gray hair pulled into a braid over her shoulder. She lifted one hand in a wave and started walking toward us. Rain headed down the driveway to greet her. I moved to follow, but Zeke stopped me with touch on my arm.

  “Don’t give her anything that belongs to you.” His voice was low, too quiet for Rain to hear.

  “Like what? I don’t have anything.”

  “Whatever she asks for, don’t give her anything. Hair or skin or—or whatever.”

  “She’s going to ask for my hair?” I said, skeptical. “That’s not creepy or anything. Why?”

  “Because you’re”—he gestured at my face—“whatever you are, and she’s a magician.” The duh, obviously was implied by his tone. “She’ll ask for something. Don’t give it to her.”

  “Not even information?”

  “What? No, that’s fine. You can talk to her.”

  “Okay. No locks of hair. Only talking.”

  “And don’t accept anything she offers,” Zeke said. “Nothing. Even if it seems harmless. Even if she says she can’t help you otherwise. Do you understand?”

  Rain and the woman met on the driveway, and they embraced.

  “Yes,” I said, “but why?”

  “She can’t do anything to you if you’re just talking to her,” Zeke said, still speaking quietly and quickly. “It’s not . . .” He searched for the right word. “It’s not binding. She just lets people think it is because they’re too stupid to know better. But if you give her anything, or take something from her—”

  “What? What can she do?”

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. “But if I were you, I wouldn’t want to find out. Don’t trust her.”

  Ingrid hooked her arm through Rain’s and together they walked up the driveway. In spite of her gray hair, Ingrid’s skin was smooth, crinkling only in lines around her eyes.

  “Does your brother know you’re here?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Zeke said.

  “You’ll have to tell him I said hi.” Ingrid turned her steel-gray eyes to me. Her voice was rich and deep, and she spoke with a faint accent. German, maybe, but she had been in the United States for a long time. “What have you brought me, Rain?”

  “This is Breezy,” Rain said. “Breezy, this is Ingrid Schultz.”

  I nodded. “Nice to meet you.”

  Ingrid slipped her arm free of Rain’s. I tensed as she approached. She was a tall woman, a full head taller than me, and every instinct in my body was telling me to make myself small and unnoticeable. She didn’t do anything so obvious as sniff or walk around me in a circle, but there was something sharp and assessing in her gaze.

  Her friendly smile vanished. She stepped back. “You should come inside. This might take a while. Not you,” she said to Zeke. “You stay out here.”

  She returned to the house. Rain glanced at me, shrugged, and together we followed.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  “PLEASE TAKE A SEAT,” said Ingrid. She gestured to a sagging sofa. “Would you like something to drink?”

  “No, thank you,” I said.

  “Are you sure? Iced tea?”

  “I’m sure.” After the concoction Mr. Willow had made me drink, I wasn’t going to be accepting beverages from strangers any time soon.

  “I would love some iced tea,” Rain said. “I’ll help you get it.”

  They went into the kitchen, leaving me alone.

  Ingrid’s living room was small and cluttered, almost claustrophobic, with heavy curtains on the windows, busy patterns on folded quilts, a coat rack fat with winter parkas. A trunk served as a coffee table; it was stained with condensation rings and stacked with issues of The New Yorker and The Economist. There was a black woodstove at one end of the room, firewood piled beside it. In a corner leaned a bookshelf jammed with hardbacks and photo albums on all shelves except one, which was crowded with dusty jars and bowls of what looked like potpourri. I leaned in to smell an open bowl.

  I was only a few inches away before I realized the bowl wasn’t filled with dried flowers at all. They were beetle shells, shiny and black behind the curve of the glass.

  The floorboards creaked as Rain and Ingrid returned. Rain dropped into an armchair by the window, and Ingrid sat on the sofa.

  “Have a seat.” She patted the cushion beside her.

  I stepped around the wooden trunk and perched on the edge of the sofa, as far as I could be from her without making it obvious. I expected her to ask me about myself, where I had come from or where I was going, and I was piecing together another patchwork girl in my mind, a weak story I didn’t expect her to believe.

  But Ingrid didn’t care about any of that.

  “Now,” she said, “tell me what you are.”

  “Dead,” I said. “Sort of.”

  Rain coughed through her swallow of iced tea.

  “Fascinating. How long have you been dead?” Ingrid asked, a small smile playing on her lips.

  “What’s the date today?” I asked.

  “June twenty-seventh.”

  “A year and seventeen days. You can’t tell just by looking at me?”

  “Should I be seeing an aura? A magical pulse? No. There is nothing so obvious as that.”

  It had been obvious to Zeke, but at least she wasn’t telling me I smelled dead.

  “Have you been aware all this time?” Ingrid asked.

  “Not exactly.” I didn’t want to tell her about my stars.

  “Do you remember how you died?”

  “No.” The bruises around my neck were hidden under the scarf.

  She didn’t believe me. “Not at all?”

  According to the news reports, nobody had seen me leave the party. Nobody had seen anybody suspicious hanging around. No older guys, no drug dealers, no vagrants. Nobody who looked like they didn’t belong with a bunch of high school kids engaging in relatively harmless underage drinking. No strange cars or vans lurking on neighborhood streets. No calls on my phone. Nobody had seen anything. There were statistics about missing teenagers at the end of some of the articles. I hadn’t realized before how many people disappeared every year and never returned. No bodies, no tracks, nothing. They just vanished.

  I remembered slipping on the damp grass with Melanie as we walked toward Nate’s house. I remembered the loud music, the bass line heavy in my chest, and laughter as the front
door opened, the hot crowded living room and bright light from the kitchen, the blue margarita mix splattered on white tile thanks to somebody who had turned on the blender without its lid. I remembered the open glass doors to the yard, Christmas lights on the trees and hedges, and Melanie telling me that Jania had done that, obviously, not Nate, because Nate would never decorate for a party but he would let his girlfriend string up lights if she wanted to. I remembered the taste of beer, cold at first and lukewarm later, the smooth feel of the plastic cup, warm bodies jostling my bare shoulders. I remembered Melanie snort-laughing at something I said, and the way she tugged her hair over her shoulder and twisted it up, the small hairs at the back of her neck damp with sweat. I remembered the harsh light of the bathroom and my own reflection in the mirror, the red mark on my face and a sting I felt deeper than my skin, and the dizzy feeling of being just beyond tipsy, the muddle of disappointment and embarrassment, tears gathering in my eyes and—

  “No,” I said. I curled my fingers into fists. “I don’t. I imagine it was a pretty traumatic experience.”

  I waited, expecting more questions, but Ingrid only looked at me, sipped her tea and looked. I grew more and more uncomfortable as the minutes ticked away. Beneath the fresh air flowing through the open windows and the spicy scent of the herbs growing in pots, there was an old, stale smell in the room, something dusty and faint. It reminded me of playing hide-and-seek with Meadow in our grandmother’s attic.

  I turned away from Ingrid’s steady gaze and glanced around the room, but I looked back after a moment. If this was meant to be a trade for information, I wanted to know what she was going to offer.

  I asked, “Do you know what I am?”

  “Do you?” she replied.

  In her chair by the window, Rain laughed. “She doesn’t know much.”

  “I ruled out zombie,” I said. “I’m not craving any brains and nothing has rotted off yet.”

  Ingrid was unamused. “This is not a game.”

  “I always thought that when people died they stayed dead,” I said. I didn’t know what she wanted me to say. “Except in comics. Nobody except Uncle Ben stays dead in comics.”

  She set her glass down. “They do, usually. Your situation is unusual, but not entirely unheard of. Normally one finds creatures like you in epidemics or war zones, where there is a great deal of death, and even then it is exceedingly rare. Did Rain explain to you how this works?”

  I glanced at Rain. “She said it’s a trade. Information for information.”

  “Do you have something to offer?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Something valuable?”

  I hesitated. Thought about the room painted in blood, the discarded belongings, the church on the prairie. “Something dangerous.”

  “Very well.” Ingrid stood to light two candles by the window. A heady, sweet scent filled the room. “I believe I can help you understand a little about what you are, with Rain’s help, if she’s willing?”

  “Sure,” said Rain.

  Ingrid sat again and said to me, “You’re here because you were murdered. That’s how unnatural things like you come to exist.”

  Now I was an unnatural thing. So much for Rain’s chimps-and-humans comparison. I wondered if unnatural thing was a step up or a step down from freaky bitch.

  Ingrid went on, “Nobody who dies a natural death, or a peaceful death, comes back as a revenant. Do you know what that means?”

  “Not really.”

  “Revenant is a word that has both quite a lot of meaning and very little. It only means that you’ve returned.”

  “Accurate,” I said. I refrained from telling her I had figured that out on my own. “What does that mean? Have you met somebody like me before?”

  “I haven’t, no,” she said. “Few people have. You are a very rare creature.”

  “But . . . why? Why did I come back?”

  “Is that really what you want to know?”

  “Uh, yes. That’s really what I want to know. Did I—” I wasn’t even sure what to ask. “Did I do something? Did somebody else do something?”

  Ingrid looked disappointed. “There are no good answers to those questions. Not that you would understand. It is no small feat of magic to bring the dead back to life.”

  “But somebody knows how to do it? Do you know how to do it? To make something like me—”

  “A monster,” Rain said.

  I glared at her. “People get killed all the time and don’t come back. Something must have happened.”

  “Indeed, something must have.” Ingrid leaned back in the sofa. “Can you bleed?”

  “Can I— What?”

  “Bleed,” Ingrid said. “If I cut you, will you bleed?”

  “Oh. Uh, yes.”

  “I would like some of your blood.”

  I started to ask her why, stopped and shook my head. “No.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “What did the ghoul tell you I was going to do with it?”

  Rain snickered. “I’m sure it was good, whatever he said.”

  I said nothing. The scent of the candles was stinging my eyes.

  “He’s a frightened child with a limited view of the world and, more important, he doesn’t know the first thing about how magic works. His kind rarely do. I only need a few drops,” Ingrid said. “Surely you can spare that much?”

  “No,” I said.

  “I can’t fully answer your question without it. That would be like asking a doctor to diagnose an illness without an X-ray.”

  Exactly what Zeke had said she would say.

  “No.”

  Rain said, “Told you she would be like this.”

  Ingrid sighed. “Very well. We’ll try this a different way. Rain?”

  “Sure,” Rain said.

  Ingrid set her glass down and reached for my hand. I started to pull away, but she caught my fingers and held them. Her grip was firm. She held my hand, examining my fingers and probing the phalanges beneath the skin. A chill crept over me, raising goose bumps all along my arms.

  “You will remember, eventually,” she said. “You will remember how you came to be this way. You will remember the moment you died and did not die.”

  “You will remember,” Rain said. Her low seductive voice was back, slow as a hot summer’s night, deep as a well. “You’ll remember eventually.”

  The slick cool grass, Melanie’s laugh, hot stinging skin. One by one the sensations returned.

  “You may think the memories are gone,” Ingrid went on, after what seemed an impossible length of time. “And you may take comfort in that. You may tell yourself you have not changed. But it is a mistake to think of yourself as the same person you were before.”

  “I’m not—”

  Ingrid squeezed my fingers and I stopped, sealed my lips together.

  I waited, waited, trying not to meet her eyes, trying to count my breaths. I lost focus every time I made it to nine or ten. The slick cool grass, Melanie’s laugh, hot stinging skin. The whole of that night was spooling out before me, bright, loud with details I had forgotten, whirling through my mind with frantic energy.

  “You’ll do well pretending to be human, for a while,” Ingrid said.

  “You’re pretending to be human,” Rain echoed quietly, no more than a murmur.

  I am human, I thought. I couldn’t say it.

  “But it won’t last. In time you will choose to be more monster than human. You will shed the pretense of care, the charade of empathy. When you make that choice, there is no way back.”

  “There is no way back,” Rain said.

  “What do you crave?” Ingrid asked.

  I was dizzy, unstable, and disoriented. Rain was still speaking, but I couldn’t understand her anymore, the words were flowing and falling and meaningless. Ingrid must have given me something after all, even though I had heeded Zeke’s warning. There was something in the air, in those pungent candles, in her touch and in
Rain’s voice, some earthy rich drug like Mr. Willow’s herbs and insects. I closed my eyes. I tasted blood. Blood and iron and grit, and I tasted peanut butter too, and Sunday roast and potatoes. I saw a knife penetrating my abdomen and the muzzle flare of a gun. I saw the baseball bat that had been my birthday present swinging down at my face and felt the rough scrape of solid rock beneath my fingers as I scrambled through an absolute darkness and no, no, no, these were the wrong memories, the wrong echoes, these belonged to people who had been dead and gone for years, buried and rotted away long before I had become what I was. I had no right to these memories. The killers, the killers were mine, but the victims belonged only to themselves.

  “What do you crave?” Ingrid asked, and Rain said, “You know what you want to do.”

  The impossible memories evaporated like mist in the morning sun, and I was alone. I was alone in the backyard of an empty house, alone on a dark roadside, alone in the red room, but every time I lifted my hand, every time I reached out, another person appeared, and they flinched, and they fell. First the ones I knew, the men I had already killed, then more, people I had never seen before, men and women with black shadows clinging to the insides of their skin, anchored to the blunt teeth at the backs of their mouths, every single one of them a murderer, every single one irresistible. I touched them one by one, featherlight and intimate, and one by one they died, falling in lifeless heaps as I walked across cities, across mountains and plains, across neighborhoods of houses lit from within with cowering yellow light. There was blood on my hands, blood in my mouth, blood running in rivulets around my feet, and every time it dried and flaked away, I found another murderer. I walked until I became a plague of vengeance in a human mask and the city began to look like my city, the neighborhoods like those I had always known, and I was walking down a street I knew, approaching a house I had seen before. A single light shone in an upstairs window. A shadow moved behind the glass. Furtive, scared. A dead boy.

  I opened my eyes.