by Cara Martin
“It’s not piety. It’s something else.” The woman’s voice drops like an elevator with its cables snipped. “She’s unnatural. My mother is frightened of her too.”
A third voice gusts through my body from directly behind me. I stagger forward, the presence lumbering along with me to stay close. Whirling to look at it, I struggle to hold my gaze. A teenage girl, her long brown hair tied back with ribbon, grins with unsettling saccharine sweetness. Her top and ankle-length skirt are simple and austere, bony shoulders jabbing up under the white fabric. Underneath her smile, the girl exudes a chilling dissatisfaction. Her pupils glint with deception and something else I can’t pinpoint. Something I want to turn away from.
“You can see me, can’t you?” I say. “What is this place?”
“Who is frightened?” the teenage girl asks, staring past me as though she doesn’t need me to move aside to do it.
The man frowns and tilts his head. “Why, no one’s frightened, Josephine. You must have misheard.”
“It’s only that I’m frightened for you,” the woman corrects, gathering her bravery in close like a shawl. “You’ve been feeling poorly for so long, Josephine, dear. We wouldn’t be doing right by you if we didn’t insist you see Doctor Stewart.”
Josephine bites her lip, her eyelids puffy and traced with vaulting purple veins. “I would never break the fifth commandment, Mother. I don’t want to displease you. But what a waste of time that would be for Doctor Stewart. I feel perfectly well.”
“Now, that’s not so.” The woman reluctantly pats her daughter’s hand. “All your spells.”
Josephine’s eyes begin to roll back in her head. She stops them dead, refocusing her gaze as her lips manufacture a second smile. “I’ve been chosen, Mother. I’m being tested. If you would pray with me, you’d understand. God would tell you the same way he’s told me. God can heal all afflictions.”
Josephine’s parents shrink under the weight of their deference, their exchanged glance sparking with trepidation. Her mother ventures, “Well, of course he can, but —”
“Worship the Lord your God, and his blessing will be on your food and water,” Josephine declares, her right fingers jerking at her side. “I will take away sickness from among you. Pay attention to what I say; turn your ear to my words. Do not let them out of your sight, keep them within your heart; for they are life to those who find them and health to one’s whole body.”
She bows her head reverently. “Don’t you see, Mother? Who are we to question the word of God? I am happy to be tested. Honored.”
Josephine’s eyes flick up to mine. They burn like battery acid. “You should be honored also.” Leaping forward, she knocks me to the floor.
She’s stronger than she looks, and I’m caught off guard. A bug on a windscreen taken out by a windshield wiper. I go down quick and clean. Falling and falling, never hitting ground. Sinking through black soup and blue skies. My head rolling over my feet, accelerating until I’ve forgotten how to breathe.
Dead maybe. Or something like it.
What’s like dead? That’s the question, isn’t it?
When I stop plunging, I’m standing deep in the woods, crowded by trees as tall as skyscrapers. They form ceilings and walls of shade, labyrinths within labyrinths. They camouflage secrets. Bury lies. Hide you away from the world, if that’s what you want.
But I don’t. Not now. I don’t want to see what happens next.
Josephine’s long hair dances in the wind, her dress billowing up around her knees. “I will pray for your soul, Mother,” she cries.
“I don’t understand.” The woman from the kitchen stares bewilderedly out from under a form-fitting hat. “Where’s the child you spoke of? The one you said you heard sobbing for her mother.”
“Am I not your child, Mother? Would you have come to soothe me had I been crying in the woods?” Josephine’s lips flatten into a treacherous line. “See that you do not despise one of these little ones. For I tell you that in heaven their angels always see the face of my Father who is in heaven.” She reaches behind the wide trunk of the nearest tree, her fingers snaking around the handle of a shovel.
“What are you doing?” The woman turns to run.
Josephine swings, the shovel crunching into her mother’s shoulders from behind. She crumples to the deadfall with a groan. The girl doesn’t hesitate; she shows less mercy than a spider that wraps its prey in silk and then waits for it to die. Josephine’s weapon of choice isn’t sharp or clever, but it does the job. She belts her mother repeatedly, her forehead creasing in concentration with each blow. Within moments Josephine’s mother is a motionless, pulpy mass, one side of her face caved in, the breeze whistling morosely through the trees.
Too late, I realize I should’ve done something to stop the murder. My body doesn’t obey me anymore — I’m like a portrait in a frame — but my helplessness doesn’t entirely excuse my lack of intervention.
“Why?” I ask furiously. “Why do this?”
Josephine’s shovel digs resolutely into the brush and soil at her feet. “If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life crippled, than, having your two hands, to go into hell, into the unquenchable fire.” She whistles while she works, cheerfully digging her mother’s grave.
Once she’s rolled the remains into a shallow pit, Josephine hurriedly covers them with brush and dirt. Batting the filth from her twitching hands and the front of her dress, she sets out for home, and I lurch along with her. Repelled by her presence but unable to resist.
Before long we veer onto a dirt path wide enough for a horse and buggy. Ahead a sign sways gently in the breeze. SHANTALLOW.
Faint recognition ripples through me. No matter where you go, there you are.
“Where have you been?” demands the nine-year-old boy as Josephine trudges through her front door, disheveled and ashen. “Where’s Mother?”
“Gone. I tried to bring her back. She wouldn’t come.” Josephine’s hand grazes the boy’s cheek. “I’m sorry, Walter. But she isn’t righteous like we are. I’m afraid she’s run off with another man.”
“She wouldn’t,” the boy denies, face reddening. “She’s devoted to Father. You take it back.”
Josephine sighs tiredly. “You’re too young. I shouldn’t say such things. Forgive me.”
Black mist ascends slowly from the floor. Enveloping my feet first. Then cutting me off at the knees. Swallowing me whole and regurgitating my form in a hallway, near the top of a staircase where Josephine faces off against a small, white-haired woman. At the bottom of the stairs, a wheelchair that must be hers squats emptily in wait.
“You’ve been trying to turn Father against me,” Josephine hisses. “Don’t deny it.”
The old woman clutches skittishly at her robe, her pale, watery eyes pleading with the girl. “He only wants to search for your mother. There might have been an accident.”
“There was no accident. She abandoned us.” Josephine’s lips appear nearly blue in the dimly lit hallway, her pupils dilating wolfishly. “She was faithless and immoral. I pray for her. You should too, Grandmother.”
“You shouldn’t speak about your mother so.” The old woman’s voice splinters. “You’re a wicked girl. What other sort would utter such lies about the woman who gave birth to her? I don’t know why your father has let them go unchallenged, but I won’t. Not any longer. You may have bewitched him somehow, but your father needs to hear sense. Your unearthly stares and your ways of twisting the word of God have unnerved me for long enough.”
Josephine gurgles with laughter. “What makes you think Father would believe you over me? I’m his blood. You’re only a useless old woman.” She grasps her grandmother’s shoulders, propelling the woman stealthily backwards so that the two of them hover at the very top of the stairs.
“Stop!” the old woman cries, clawing
at her granddaughter’s arms, and then her hair. “You are my flesh and blood too. I beg you.” Her fingernails dig into Josephine’s skull, Josephine jerking under her touch but holding fast to her grandmother. “May the Lord judge between me and you, may the Lord avenge me against you, but my hand shall not be against you.”
“Don’t hurt her!” I warn. I can’t allow it to happen again.
But my feet are stupid. They move like bricks. Heavy and imprecise. Sliding my body between Josephine and her grandmother, I’m somehow as skinny as a paper clip. Like no shield whatsoever.
Josephine hesitates. A spindly branch of blood forms on her forehead as the old woman shrieks, “That’s the word of God. We must obey it. You shall not murder. If you love me, you will keep my commandments.”
The blood streams into one of Josephine’s eyebrows, staining it vivid red. “How dare you try to use his words against me when I love and worship him a thousand times more than you do?” Josephine scowls, shaking her grandmother into submission. “Do not yield to them or listen to them. Show them no pity. Do not spare them or shield them. You must certainly put them to death. Your hand must be the first in putting them to death.”
She releases her grandmother with a violent shove. The old woman’s head cracks against the wooden steps, her body thumping after it. Sliding freefall down the staircase in a jumble of lifeless limbs. The wheelchair squeaks in agony as her kneecap collides with one of the spoked wheels.
“Father!” Josephine wails, contorting her face into a mask of grief. “Come quick! There’s been an accident.”
Darkness descends without warning. Falling fast and furious, but weightless as snow. I stumble along the corridor, trying to escape it. In this place where I can’t run, the void breathes cold on my heels and the back of my neck. It trips me to the ground, ingesting me in a single gulp.
For a moment the entire world burns black with absence. If you’re drawn to light, does that make you a moth? I need help. Intervention.
Fluttering toward something that might be a candle or an electric spark, my mind recovers lost words and chants them like a prayer:
Moon and stars, forever shine,
Moon and stars, friends of mine,
I close my eyes and trust your light,
I close my eyes and say goodnight,
Watch over me while I am gone,
Watch over me until the dawn.
Suddenly I blink down at a large wooden table. It’s littered with fabric swatches, colorful spools of thread, and tools I don’t recognize. I’m dizzy and confused, adrift. Then I see the man from the kitchen. Josephine’s father. He’s perched on a stool, bent over a woman’s hat, fussing with the faux flower affixed to its side. His hands shake turbulently as he glares at them in frustration.
Josephine appears in the doorway, her face mottled gray and thin. “Can’t I help? It’s been days since I’ve spent any time working alongside you.”
The man’s eyes brim with unspilled tears. “I’ve been struck down, Josephine. I can’t still my hands, nor my thoughts. My mouth stings with the point of a hundred needles. Why has God cursed us?”
He’s as sick as she is. The two of them suffering from something I don’t understand. The worst kind of sickness. One that folds back in on itself like a collapsible map, stealing sense and obscuring truth.
Josephine scurries to her father’s side. “Father, no. You mustn’t say that. He’s only testing us. Pray with me now.” She kneels on the floor beside him, clasping her hands together as her father struggles for breath.
“You pray for me, child,” he gasps, slumping in his seat.
Oxygen stutters in his esophagus, eyes closing and his body rapidly resigning itself to failure.
“No!” Josephine surges to her feet, embracing her father as he leaves the world of the living. Her cheek on his shoulder, her eyes shut against the new realities of her existence. Orphaned, alone in the world except for her brother.
Darkness hovers above me, lapping the ceiling like storm waves. I brace myself against its descent. But this time darkness doesn’t fall. I remain steadily in place, watching with dread.
Josephine lets go of her father, leaving him sagging on his stool like someone who’s only fallen asleep on the job. Staring up at the ceiling, her hands scrunch into quaking fists. She howls in protest. Rage and heartache splice into an inhuman scream. Her fists strike the table with a vehemence that makes it leap.
Those same hands, pale and freckled, pummel air as she rasps, “You, shadowy spirit, I command you, leave this place. You don’t belong here.”
She means to hurt me, if only she could. But her hands can’t reach me anymore. I’m miles beyond, while standing right next to her.
Josephine’s eyes glow with outrage. Narrowing her gaze, she backs out of the room, her back hunched like an angry cat. “You presence mocks me, serpent. You are not welcome here.” She stomps upstairs, her gait uneven and her right hand making the sign of the cross.
I look on as Josephine and her brother drag their father’s body up to her parents’ bedroom, pulling a sheet solemnly over their father’s head. “We need to tell someone he’s passed,” Walter says, his eyes pink-lined from sobbing as he and Josephine sit cross-legged on the floor beside the bed. “We should ride into town and fetch Father Carey.”
“Shhh,” Josephine intones, her eyes tender the way I’ve only ever seen them with her brother or father. “We mustn’t tell anyone. We only need to pray. God can bring him back for us. He will. I know he will. It’s another test. Everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die.” Blanching, she suddenly clutches her stomach.
“Your pains again?” Walter coils his arms around his knees. “If you leave me, I’ll have no one. You can’t leave me here, Josephine. Promise me.”
“I would never leave you.”
Walter frowns, the dark pouches under his eyes aging him by years. “You would if God wanted you to. You do everything he wants.”
“Yes, but he wouldn’t want me to leave you,” his sister assures him, a deliberate gentleness smoothing any edges from her voice.
“How do you know?” the boy asks.
Persistent banging from downstairs commands their attention. Overhead a black cloud begins to bubble, preparing to boil. “What are you waiting for?” I roar up at it. “Take me away.” No one in their right mind would choose to be here. Witnessing horror after horror, helpless to intervene.
“There’s someone at the door,” Walter cries.
He clambers to his feet, Josephine shrieking after him, “Wait! Don’t answer it.”
I shout along with her, warning whoever’s on the other side of the door. “Get away! It’s not safe here.”
Josephine glares defiantly into the hall, as if she can see me. “You will not stop any of this,” she declares. “The deeds are already done.”
Gathering her skirt, she stands carefully. Fighting to keep her balance as she shambles down the steps that reunite her with her brother while she conceals something within the folds of her skirt.
A lanky young man in a flat cap stands uncertainly next to Walter in the corridor. “I’m sorry to bother you, miss,” he says. “My name is Henry Adler. I’m looking for the Farwell house.” He bends his head, his cheeks flushing. “I arrived by train. Hopped on the railway traveling west and I’m afraid I may have jumped off too late.”
“The railroad tracks are miles and miles from here,” Josephine declares, eyes landing on Henry’s patched knapsack and then the beads of sweat dotting his forehead.
Henry nods. “I’ve been walking since morning. I’d be real grateful if you could spare some water.”
Josephine ignores the request. “The Farwell house is all the way over on the east side of Middlesbrough, I’m afraid. We’ve never met before, so I don’t suppose you’re part of the Farwell family?”
&
nbsp; “No, miss. Charlie Farwell and I were in the war together. I’ve only come to pay him a visit.”
“Charlie lost his left leg in the Battle of Vimy Ridge,” Walter chimes in.
“Yes, he did.” Henry frowns, biting the inside of his cheek. “Although victory was ours, we lost thousands of men in the battle.”
He doesn’t see the hammer reeling toward his head, catching him an inch above one eyebrow. Hobbling backwards, Henry collapses against the front door. Josephine charges again. Her reflexes are sluggish, her balance poor. The hammer bashes into Henry’s ear. Blood oozes onto his neck, dripping onto the floor and fanning out under him in a semicircle of crimson, his eyes slapping shut as his body slides to the ground.
“You didn’t have to kill him!” Walter screams. “He just wanted water. We could have given him all the water a person could drink.”
“He’s not dead.” Josephine extends a crooked finger, aiming it at Henry’s chest. “You see, he’s still breathing.”
Walter scrambles closer, bending over Henry’s prone body. “There’s so much blood. We have to fetch Doctor Stewart quick.”
“We can’t do that. Think of Father. If anyone sees him, they’ll want to bury him. We must wait for God’s miracle.” Josephine’s right leg quivers, her eyes lost in thought. “Fetch me some rope from Father’s workshop. Quickly now.”
Her brother dashes into the room behind the kitchen, emerging with a thick length of rope. Josephine ties Henry’s hands taut behind his back. Then binds his feet. His bleeding slows, but he doesn’t regain consciousness.
“You shouldn’t have hurt him,” Walter laments in a small voice. “He was in the war. He fought for our country.”
“I did what I had to do,” Josephine snaps. “Don’t you understand that he would have asked for Father? He would have wanted him to bring him into town or the Farwell house. He would have ruined everything. We need time. Days. A miracle can’t be rushed.”
“But what do we do now?” Walter’s posture deflates, shoulders rounding and knees buckling.
“We wait.” She reaches out to ruffle her brother’s hair. “Have faith.”