Silent as the Grave

by Zoe Aarsen

  Father Fahey looked at Violet with an amused expression on his face. “An exorcism? This girl isn’t possessed!”

  It took me a moment to realize why he thought Violet was the one in need of an exorcism; when Trey and I had visited in the fall, the curse had still been on her.

  “It’s not her,” I clarified. My temper shortened by tiredness, I rudely snapped, “Do you really think someone in need of an exorcism would just walk onto church property?”

  Most likely to put me in my place, Father Fahey replied, “Well, it would depend on what said person was possessed by. Demons get a thrill out of parading around in churches and on hallowed ground.”

  Trey shot me a look, and I noticed that his eyes were watery. Although it didn’t seem wise to tell him as much, Father Fahey was our last hope. If he refused to either help us perform an exorcism or instruct us on how to do it ourselves, I was as good as dead. And there was no telling what Mischa would do to Trey and Violet, or anyone else who’d ever try to put a stop to the spirits’ killing.

  Knowing how critical this meeting was, Trey raised his voice at the priest. “This is serious, man. Do you get that?”

  Violet laced her fingers together and set her hand atop the table. “Listen. We know that you helped my grandmother cast a spell seventeen years ago.”

  “And that spell was corrupted,” Trey added. “Now people are dying. That’s your fault. Aren’t you afraid of going to hell?”

  Father Fahey shook his head regretfully. “All I did was offer advice.” He looked at Violet before continuing, “Your grandmother was desperate. Who knows what she might have tried if I hadn’t given her a little hope?” He paused before continuing. “I’m sure all of you believe that prayer is ineffective. Young people tend to think of it as a silly hobby of old people.”

  I didn’t dare break eye contact with him, but he was right. After Jennie had died, my mom had said lots of prayers. Hundreds. Thousands. None of them had made a difference; she’d still cried herself to sleep at night for years.

  “What none of you understand is that sending focused energy out into the universe, which is in many ways exactly what a prayer is, can be quite powerful. Can it cure cancer? Bring someone back from the dead? Most certainly not. But the Bible details many instances of desperate people making sacrifices to gain favor with God. And there are similar ways of making sacrifices to endear oneself to Lucifer and his legion of fallen angels.”

  A chill ran up my spine.

  “So, what? You counsel your parishioners on how to make bargains with God for profit?” I asked.

  “Not in the slightest.” Father Fahey finally sat down at the table with us and shook his head. “If someone comes to me in a state of despair, asking for help, I provide them with instructions for how they might request special consideration from the Lord, or at least reshape their thoughts about their predicament so they can more clearly see God’s intentions for them. There are no guarantees. I’m not a warlock.”

  “What about the money?” Violet asked with an arched eyebrow. “Does the Catholic church know that you’re running a little side business here at St. Monica’s?”

  “The money I accept for offering this type of advice goes directly toward the hospital bills of a little boy in Ortonville named Aaron Somer. He suffers from myelomonocytic leukemia. I donate it anonymously, and I don’t particularly care if the three of you believe me or not,” Father Fahey told us.

  My heart was steadily breaking. I had been so convinced that his guilt would be a slam dunk. I needed him submit to our demand that he help us, but with each word that left his mouth, it was becoming clearer that he considered himself to be some kind of Good Samaritan. He’d justified all of his actions long ago, and my hope was draining as our case against him fell apart.

  “And what about gaining Lucifer’s favor, for those times when God isn’t taking care of business?” Trey asked with an edge in his voice. “Because it seems to me that whatever kind of advice you gave to Violet’s grandmother, it wasn’t very heavenly.”

  Father Fahey folded his hands and set them atop the table before fixing his eyes on Trey. “My boy. I have a master’s degree in theology from Trinity College. Don’t you think that someone who yearns to know as much as possible about God would also want to learn as much as possible about God’s greatest enemy?”

  None of us had a response for that, and I, for one, was not eager to keep talking about the devil. Violet was the first to break the silence in the kitchen by asking, “What about me? Why do you think the spell you gave my grandmother actually worked?”

  The priest sighed deeply. “Your grandmother wanted your parents to successfully bring a child into the world at a time when it was not God’s plan to allow such a thing. I warned her. I don’t know if the spell I provided to her actually worked because I prayed on her behalf, or because her belief in it somehow physiologically influenced your mother, or if your mother would have delivered you even if your grandmother hadn’t sought my help.”

  My skin began tingling, and without even reaching into my pocket for my earbuds to ask Jennie for direction, I knew what she wanted me to ask. “What did you warn Violet’s grandmother about?” If he’d warned her, he’d predicted something like the curse was possible.

  Father Fahey looked at me with an expression so stern, it made me shrink in my seat. “That when you refuse to accept God’s design, even if your will manifests, the outcome will always be vulnerable.” He smiled with sad eyes at Violet. “Your grandmother came to see me not long after you were born, and told me about the… orders she’d been receiving. She was terrified, of course. Not only of what might happen to you if she didn’t comply, but of what might become of her soul if she did what was being asked of her. We both knew then that some… outside force had compromised the spell she’d cast.”

  I didn’t dare steal a peek at Trey even though the two of us knew exactly what that outside force had been. His mother had cast her own spell on Violet’s mother, and Kirsten had told us that was what had made the passage of the five evil entities into our plane possible. It was as if evil had piggybacked onto the spell originally cast by Grandmother Simmons.

  Which kind of made Trey’s mom the villain responsible for my upcoming death before the new moon.

  Father Fahey turned from Violet to face Trey and me. “I truly had no idea how to stop it. I hoped with all my heart that the evil that had attached itself to Ann had rid this world of itself when she passed away last year.”

  “Yeah… well, it didn’t.” A tear rolled down Violet’s cheek and she made no effort to wipe it away. “She passed it to me.”

  The priest continued, “When you came to me in the fall, I guessed that it had been transferred to someone else. But I couldn’t wager a guess as to who had interfered with your grandmother’s spell. For all I know, it was someone I’ve never met.”

  Although he seemed to pity our situation, it was obvious that he took no responsibility for the role he’d had in creating it. His righteousness was infuriating.

  I set the mason jar down on the table without explaining what it contained to Father Fahey. “Well, now it’s been transferred again. And it’s worse than ever before, because whatever it is—whatever these five things are—they pushed our friend Mischa’s soul out of her body.”

  He weakly smiled around the table at the three of us and shook his head as if wanting to console us, but shrugged to make it clear without saying as much that he wasn’t volunteering to involve himself. “Part of the spell that I provided to Ann Simmons involved planting a rosebush during a new moon in honor of each of the souls that had been lost. My best advice to the three of you would be to destroy those bushes—burn the roots, burn every petal. Put the ashes in a place where they can never contribute to the growth of another living organism. And,” he said, leaning back in his chair and resting his folded hands atop his belly, “be sure to do this during a full moon. The end of a cycle.”

  With panic in her ey
es, Violet looked across the table at me. “It’s too late for that. I already had our gardeners cut them down. The roots might still be there, but that all happened a few days after a new moon back in January. I don’t know what they did with the bushes or the flowers, but I’m pretty sure they didn’t burn them.”

  Trey shook his head and looked down at his lap. “Jesus Christ,” he muttered. “Everything we’ve done has been wrong.”

  Father Fahey appeared to be lost in thought for a moment and stroked his beard. “I truly hope you didn’t come here tonight intending to extort exorcism services from me by using that notebook for leverage. An exorcism isn’t what you need. If these incorporeal fiends have taken complete control of the host’s body, then they’re already too powerful to be withdrawn by prayer. Even if you found a way to draw them out, they’d need a place to go. In a typical exorcism, my job would be to make the host’s physical form too inhospitable for the demon to remain. Eventually, it would choose to return to hell. But these spirits…” He shook his head. “I fear they are something else, and they work together.”

  At last, he’d come around to issuing advice on the topic we were there to discuss, but he was telling us exactly what I didn’t want to hear: that there was no way for me to save myself. An exorcism wouldn’t work. Game over.

  “There has to be something we can do,” I pleaded, my voice barely more than a whisper. We’d botched Mrs. Robinson’s best advice. Father Fahey was our last resort.

  “Then your best bet would be to destroy the physical form of the possessed person. Quickly and suddenly, before the spirits have a chance to suspect what’s coming. And while doing everything you possibly can to protect yourselves with the Lord’s grace until they find a new life-form to attach themselves to.”

  My mind raced as I tried to process the priest’s instruction. Destroy a physical form? I suddenly felt overheated and realized I was sweating beneath my winter coat.

  “What are you saying?” Trey demanded angrily, voicing my thoughts.

  “Are you recommending that we kill Mischa?” I shouted. I was on the razor’s edge between life and death, and now I found myself in the same awful predicament that Mischa had been in since January: kill or end up dead. The whole point of everything I’d done since the fall was to try to prevent more people from dying, and now my only chance at saving myself was to murder Mischa.

  “I’m recommending that you render her body incapable of supporting life.” Father Fahey nodded at the mason jar on the table. “I’m afraid Mischa may not ever be able to return to her body, anyway.”

  CHAPTER 15

  I CANNOT BELIEVE A PRIEST is telling us to murder someone!”

  Trey couldn’t contain his outrage on our drive back to Violet’s house. I was just as upset as he was by Father Fahey’s advice, but I was too distraught to express it. In fact, I was so distracted by fear of my imminent death that I could barely form complete thoughts. Whether Mischa’s body was inhabited by five forms of pure evil or not, there was no possible way I could bring myself to hurt her. I was willing to do a lot to save Mischa’s life, but not to end it forever.

  I’d known Mischa since we were in Mrs. Martindale’s preschool class together. She’d been headstrong and outspoken even at the age of five, insisting on turning cartwheels when the rest of us put down mats for naptime. I couldn’t imagine life without her. How could I move forward in life with any hope of ever being happy if the memory of dooming her in order to save myself was in my heart? “You have to talk to your sister and ask her if there’s another way,” Violet told me in a shaky voice. She was so keyed up that I was glad there weren’t more cars on the road at that hour; she was driving erratically.

  I was texting a reply to Henry, whose messages I’d been ignoring all evening. Kirsten, the clerk at the occult bookstore in Chicago we’d met back in January, had texted him out of the blue and said that her sister had taken her to London for her birthday as a surprise. That explained why she’d been so out of touch for the last few days. When she arrived home that evening from the airport, the soybean plant she had potted as part of a protection spell she’d cast for my benefit was dying, and she assumed that something was very wrong. I hadn’t previously known and didn’t especially like that Kirsten had cast a protection spell on me, but it was a relief to know that she hadn’t been in touch because she was traveling and not because she was sick of us.

  Apparently, Henry had driven over to my house after dinner to check on me, and completely freaked out that my house had burned down. Now that I was finally texting him back, I felt awful for not having replied sooner. He’d assumed the worst, and the fire department wouldn’t release any information. I couldn’t bring myself to dump any more bad news on him, so I didn’t mention that we’d struck out with Father Fahey.

  “Right now, I have to take a shower and get some sleep,” I said after tapping to send my message assuring Henry that I was fine. “I’m not even thinking clearly anymore.”

  “But we’ve only got tomorrow!” Violet argued. “If we don’t figure this out before the funeral, we probably won’t have a chance to even see Mischa again before you’re scheduled to leave. I mean, who knows where she’ll go after tomorrow? Either she could leave town with her uncle or just… vanish.”

  From the back seat, Trey said, “McKenna’s right. We’re not going to come up with any good ideas right now.”

  “Okay,” Violet said as we pulled up to the security gate on the outskirts of her property. “Your call. But we’re getting up early.”

  My scalp was tingling and I sensed that Jennie very badly wanted to tell me something, but I didn’t take my phone out of my pocket, and I did my best to block her out. If she thought we should find a way to kill Mischa, I didn’t want to know.

  Violet led me up to her bedroom and set out a clean towel for me. I’d been there before, the first time she’d invited me over to bake cupcakes, but I’d forgotten how oddly sophisticated it was in decoration for a teen resident. Her bed had a natural, rustic oak headboard and footboard, and it was covered by a white pin-tucked comforter. Neatly framed concert posters of 1980s bands like the Cure and New Order hung on the walls, and plush gray carpeting covered the floor. A wide desk with an enormous iMac screen atop it was arranged so that Violet could gaze out at the gardens through her windows whenever she sat there doing homework. Bookshelves lined the opposite wall, and at the foot of Violet’s bed was a beautiful wooden chest that perfectly matched her bed frame.

  As she opened the door to the adjoining bathroom, she said, “I’ll leave a change of clothes out for you. You smell kind of smoky. I can wash your clothes tonight if you want.”

  “Thanks,” I mumbled, closing the door behind me. I wearily undressed and thought to myself how odd it was that Violet was turning out to be so surprisingly… likable. For the last six months of my life, I’d put so much energy into hating her that I didn’t even want to admit to myself that I’d never really had a chance to get to know her before terrible things began happening. As I stepped beneath the piping-hot water, it crossed my mind that she really wanted to make amends.

  But I was too exhausted to contemplate whether or not Violet had ulterior motives. It seemed obvious that she might, especially if her own long-term health was in danger. Instead, my thoughts drifted toward the idea that I was washing the smoke and ash of all of my most beloved possessions out of my hair and off my skin. It was odd to think of the detritus of my childhood circling a drain at Violet’s house, but in many ways, it was practically metaphoric for the impending end of my life.

  After I toweled off in the bathroom, I stepped into Violet’s bedroom and found that she’d set out a pair of pajamas and underwear for me, as neatly folded as if I were staying at a luxury hotel. Almost delirious with tiredness, I pulled them on and realized with amusement that Violet’s wealth had done nothing to shelter her from terror. There had been times when I’d been jealous of people at school for their nice clothes or cars, but now I
realized that those things were meaningless. They didn’t protect you from anything—or make death any less terrifying.

  With a towel wrapped around my head because the Simmons house was drafty, I decided to carry the mason jar down to the first floor even though I knew it was ridiculous to take it with me everywhere. As I descended the stairs, I heard Henry’s voice coming from the kitchen, and I instantly blushed. I wasn’t prepared to be in the same room as both him and Trey, and I’d said good night when I’d ended our call to discourage him from even thinking about driving over to Violet’s house.

  He shot up from where he sat at the kitchen table with Violet and Trey the moment I entered the room. When his eyes met mine, and I saw the relief in them, I felt as if I were on a roller coaster speeding down a 250-foot drop. I’d suspected it before, but really didn’t know until then: Henry was completely in love with me.

  Perhaps I shouldn’t have even noticed or cared, especially with Trey sitting less than three feet away from him. But my chest felt constricted, and I could barely breathe. I wasn’t in love with him in return, at least not the way I was in love with Trey. However, the realization of the depths of his emotions had me completely flustered. And that had to mean something.

  “You didn’t have to drive over here,” I told Henry as I sat down. My cheeks were still pink, and I kept my eyes on the mug of tea that Violet slid toward me to avoid looking over at Trey. Since I was hyperaware of Henry’s feelings, I was paranoid that Trey was too. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that Trey had changed into a pair of sweatpants and a sweater, presumably belonging to Violet’s father.

  Henry shook his head as he sat down again. “Of course I did. I didn’t even know if you were alive all afternoon. Your house burned down.”

  Violet had heated up the pizza she’d taken out of the freezer hours earlier and a second one, and she sat at the table across from the guys as the two of them devoured both. “We saved you some,” Trey told me as he motioned for me to sit down at the table next to Violet.