Silent as the Grave

by Zoe Aarsen

  I should have raised the gun and shot him right there and then. The space was so small that I couldn’t possibly have missed if I’d found the strength to just pull the trigger. But instead, I pulled my legs through the opening, slammed the hatch door, turned, and took a step forward.

  A cry of frustration escaped from my throat when I realized the mistake I’d made. I had stepped out onto a small widow’s walk, only about five feet square and surrounded by an ornate wrought-iron railing. I spun around in absolute fright, realizing that the rooftop of the mansion on all sides of the enclosed walk was a series of steep peaks. I’d known that, of course, before climbing out there. The house was a fake Tudor; its peaked rooftop poked out above the treetops encircling the property, visible from the street.

  Figuring it was more for my safety than for Mr. Simmons’s, I flung the gun into the trees with all of my strength. Before I could even watch it sink into the sea of pines below, the hinges of the hatch door squeaked behind me, and Mr. Simmons scrambled out to join me on the rooftop. Once standing, he raised his arms out toward me almost as if he was advancing forward to embrace me. “You know that this is the end,” he told me calmly. “You want to save your friends? This is how you do it.”

  Since Mr. Simmons was about to kill me in a way that would fulfill the spirits’ prediction for me even though they’d been banished, I became even more terrified about what had happened to Jennie when we’d been torn apart. Maybe we’d managed to get the spirits out of Mischa’s body, but it seemed as if my prediction was about to come true, anyway. Falling off a rooftop and plunging over fifty feet to the pavement below would definitely qualify as an air-related death.

  If I died the way in which they’d predicted, even if they were somewhere inside of either my body or conscious, struggling with Jennie, I had every reason to believe that the curse would continue. Maybe my death would even release the spirits back into this world. Nature likes cycles, Jennie had said. My death would complete one, and per the curse, a new one would begin. My death—and everything I’d done for the last few months—would have been for nothing.

  I dared to look over the low railing and down the shingled peak to the circular cement driveway and fountain below. A black Range Rover had been parked haphazardly near the fountain, a few feet away from Violet’s Mini Cooper. I raised one leg to step over the railing, highly aware that if I slid, there would be nothing to grab on to. About twenty feet down, there were two smaller peaks in the roof, built over decorative windows on the third floor. But if I lost my footing, there wouldn’t be any way to angle my trajectory toward either of them. Nothing would prevent me from falling over the edge.

  “That’s it.” Mr. Simmons encouraged me, taking another slow step forward. “Keep going.”

  Terrified that he’d spring at me and cause me to tumble backward, I lifted my other leg over the railing too. Through the sheer tights I was wearing, I could feel that the shingles on the roof were as rough as sandpaper, but treacherously slippery because of the silkiness of my stockings. Already sensing that my balance was waning, I took a tiny, prudent step down the peak.

  Encouraged that I was now in direct danger, Mr. Simmons crossed the widow’s walk to stand on the other side of the railing from me. If he wanted, he could reach over and shove me. Sensing that he might do exactly that at any moment, I extended my arms outward at the shoulders to try to keep my balance, and I inched down a little farther.

  “I was doing you a favor by insisting that the judge send you away,” he told me in a voice so calm that I understood he wasn’t the least bit anxious about killing me. The tiniest drop of cold rain fell onto my forehead, and then another hit my cheek. The thick clouds in the sky beyond Mr. Simmons’s head had darkened with the arrival of rain. “It was for your own good, since you were smart enough to piece together this whole puzzle even before I could.”

  “You don’t have to do this. We ended it,” I croaked, not wanting to face him but fearing I’d fall if I turned and looked down the slope. My throat was tight with tears. I couldn’t imagine how this might possibly end any other way than with me plunging to the ground and breaking my head open on the bright white cement. I would never see my mom or dad again. None of my hopes of getting older with Trey after all of this was over would ever come true. And poor Henry—Henry, who only ever wanted to make things right in his sister’s honor—was inside, possibly already dead. My life would end today. Here. “This is what they predicted would happen. You’re making it come true. You might make it start all over again if you do this!”

  Mr. Simmons frowned at me, and I could see traces of Trey in his features. “I’m willing to take that chance and find out. You should have known how far I’d go to protect my family. But it’s your own fault that now you have to—”

  He lurched forward, chest first, as if he’d been struck by a powerful wind from behind. The railing only came up as high as his midshins, so he fell over it, arms flailing… headed directly for me.

  I only caught a glimpse of Trey standing on the widow’s walk—his eyes locked on mine, blazing with fear and regret. I could see the fury drifting off of him like steam rising off a lake on a cold morning. But before I could fully appreciate that Trey had followed us up to the roof and pushed Mr. Simmons from behind, Mr. Simmons’s shoulder knocked into mine and we both tumbled chaotically.

  I fell backward, knowing the instant my foot budged that I was doomed. I fell onto my back and slid, feeling the pull of gravity drawing me toward death at what seemed like hyperspeed. Mr. Simmons grabbed at the sleeve of my dress as we fell in unison, but the fabric slipped from his loose hold. He somersaulted down the peak in a way that made it look like his body had folded over at the neck, and we reached the edge of the roof at the same instant. He disappeared over it as if rolling like a log on his side, his head mere inches from mine.

  But my hands found the edge of the roof and—not even fully aware of what I was doing—I clamped on to it. A split second later, I felt my arms snap at the sockets, the full weight of my body coming to an abrupt, shocking halt. A nightmarish boom sounded from far below me a few seconds later, and I didn’t dare look, fearing that even a turn of my head would require more energy than I could spare. I already knew that was the sound of Mr. Simmons hitting the hood of the Range Rover.

  “Hold on!” Trey shouted hysterically from the widow’s walk. He was pacing and shaking his hands, and finally set his palms on the railing as if he intended to climb over it to descend the peak and save me.

  “Don’t!” I called up to him, but fell quiet in realization that any effort I exerted shouting was better spent hanging on. I squeezed my eyes shut, believing that each passing second was my last. The pain in my arms was so extreme that my fingers felt like they were slipping—even though they might not have been.

  I became keenly aware that I smelled smoke. Not house fire smoke, but sweeter smoke, the gentle smoke of birthday candles. Behind my closed eyes, I saw Mom, much younger—without a strand of gray in her hair and with no bags beneath her eyes—carrying a cake with two glowing candles in the shape of a “3” on top of it—toward me and setting it down in front of me in an otherwise dark room. I recognized the cake; Peppa Pig had been drawn on top in icing. I turned to my right and saw Jennie next to me, and heard distant voices singing “Happy Birthday.”

  A blur of smiling faces followed—schoolteachers, classmates, neighbors. And memories I’d long forgotten: trick-or-treating with Jennie around our neighborhood with Dad trailing behind us wearing a werewolf mask, shopping for school supplies, sitting in reading circles at Willow Elementary School, and slurping milk through straws from cartons in the lunchroom.

  I wasn’t going to be able to hold on to the edge of the roof much longer. Memories were running through my mind’s eye so fast that I could barely process them, but in a level of detail that reminded me comfortingly of things I hadn’t thought about in so very long. The smell of sticky white classroom paste. The floral patterns of th
e matching patchwork quilts that were once spread across Jennie’s and my beds. Powdered donuts—Dad’s favorite treat on Sunday mornings.

  Then I saw myself peering down at tree branches and grass from high above and heard childish laughter. I was at the top of the tree that used to be in the Emorys’ front yard. The summer that Jennie and I were six, we followed Trey in climbing all the way to the top, and we were too afraid to climb back down. Trey remained up there with us to comfort us, even though he’d climbed up and down that tree hundreds of times. Mom called the fire department to pull us down, and we went back up the very next day.

  In the distance—in my mind, I realized—I heard faint sirens. They grew louder as the whirlwind of memories continued. Bickering with Jennie over her butchering of a doll’s hair. The warmth of Moxie, our dog, sleeping in a ball on top of my feet in my bed at night. Playing Cat’s Cradle with Candace on a field trip bus ride—Candace had lost her teeth before everyone else and always knew the best games.

  And then sirens were blaring, and the smell of smoke was growing more pungent. I knew the time had come for the worst memory of all: waking up in darkness, choking. Running my hand against the wall of the long hallway and feeling my way out of our old house on Martha Road. Stumbling out onto the lawn in my pajamas with Moxie running in circles and barking around me. And looking back over my shoulder to see Jennie’s silhouette in the living room window. She could see that I’d made it outside, but she’d inhaled too much smoke to do so herself.

  Just when I was expecting to see a continuation of memories that followed the night of the fire—and sensed my fingers releasing from pure exhaustion—I felt strong hands wrap around my wrists, and a voice told me, “I’ve got you.”

  I opened my eyes to find myself looking up into Trey’s face. He’d made his way down the peaked roof toward me on his belly. Hanging on to my full weight was making his arms tremble from muscle strain, and through gritted teeth, he calmly told me, “See if your feet can reach the wall.”

  “What?!” I asked in desperation, terrified that I was going to pull him over the edge.

  “The wall in front of you. Try to touch it with your feet.”

  Trying to swing or kick my legs in any direction after holding as still as possible took quite a bit of effort. It was also very cold outside, and moving around made me more aware of the temperature. But to my great shock, Trey was right: The roof’s overhang was only about six inches deep. My chest swelled with joy as I pressed the soles of my feet against the smooth wall.

  “Can you reach it?” Trey asked.

  I was concentrating too hard to reply while trying to get firm enough footing so that I could use the muscles in my legs to boost myself back onto the roof. Trey was in no way weak, but he wasn’t going to pull me up to safety on his own. The effort required to hoist myself up high enough so that Trey could pull me up a few inches farther made me grunt.

  But when he’d managed to raise me so that my rib cage was level with the edge of the roof, the sound of a bloodcurdling scream from four stories below made us both startle. The scream was unmistakably female, and I knew immediately that it had come from Violet. She must have stepped outside and seen her father’s dead body crumpled on the hood of his vehicle.

  “Don’t listen to her,” Trey commanded me. “You’re almost all the way up. One more big boost.”

  I repositioned my right foot higher on the wall and hoisted myself once more with all my might. This time, Trey had to inch backward to give me enough room to clamber over the edge and back onto the roof. Once I was finally able to set my knees down, I threw my body forward and pressed myself against the shingles, almost unable to believe that I’d made it.

  “Are you okay to climb up?” Trey asked me, nodding his head in the direction of the widow’s walk at the top of the peak.

  I could barely catch my breath, and dug my fingernails into the rough roof tile. Nothing felt or seemed real, and I wondered if my disorientation was a side effect of having cheated death. I had no sense of Jennie’s presence, and wondered exactly what had happened earlier in the parlor, and if she was safe. If I’d managed to survive the spirits’ death prediction for me, it would have been a bitter victory if something terrible had happened to Jennie to make that possible.

  But I didn’t think that the curse had been broken. I didn’t feel any different.

  “McKenna,” Trey said, his voice cutting through the fog of my terror about Jennie’s status. “You have to try to climb to the top.” Then, with a slight hesitation, as if he almost didn’t want to resort to mentioning this, he added, “We have to help Henry.”

  Henry. How much time had passed since he’d been shot? How much blood had he lost? Was it even still possible that he’d survived?

  Climbing higher seemed impossible, too risky. It wasn’t too late for me to fall over the edge, after all. It felt much safer to cling to my exact position, to that moment, to not take any more chances. But concern for Henry dragged me out of my fear and forced me to consider a few undeniable realities. With Mr. Simmons now dead and Henry either dead or dying, we probably had less than an hour to figure out what to do next. It occurred to me as strange that not only had Mr. Simmons come home early, unannounced, but Violet’s mother hadn’t been with him.

  I had to find the courage to climb to safety and get a sense of exactly where things stood.

  Trey urged me again. “Come on. You can do this.”

  Following his lead, I inched my way up the roof, clinging to it almost as if I were a snake slithering uphill. When I finally reached the flat landing at the top of the peak, and the railing surrounding the widow’s walk was within reach, I fought the urge to burst into tears. Trey stood on the landing and stepped over the railing first, and then turned to offer me a hand as I joined him. Even once safe, I didn’t dare look over my shoulder at the parking area below. Instead, from our vantage point, in the opposite direction, I could see the Simmonses’ vast gardens, which stretched all the way to the line of trees at the edge of the property. I could now see bald patches of grass where Violet’s gardeners had dug up the five rosebushes that had once grown back there, and I remembered that their roots were probably still beneath the surface of the ground, their evil still poisoning this land.

  We slipped back through the trapdoor and made our way down to the house’s first floor, and with each step I took, I grew more paranoid about what Violet was doing at that very moment. If she’d called an ambulance for either Henry or her father, then we’d be hearing real sirens within seconds. Sirens would lead to questions. Questions we couldn’t answer.

  And if Violet had summoned her father home early to thwart our plans for some reason, then we were in serious danger, because we had no idea what awaited us downstairs. Violet had seemed so vulnerable and sensitive when she’d come to me in January and shared her version of how the curse had manifested—and she’d been so seemingly helpful in paying for my travel back to Willow that weekend—but now I had to wonder if I’d been tragically naïve about her motivation.

  When we reached the last flight of stairs in the stairwell, which opened into the sunroom (as I had suspected it would), I whispered, “Trey,” at the top. He paused and seemed to understand that I was suggesting we wait for a moment. “We should be careful,” I whispered. “There could be more weapons in the house.”

  Trey nodded. We tiptoed the rest of the way down the stairs and slowly crossed the sunroom. Both of us lingered cautiously in the doorway of the kitchen, listening for signs of movement elsewhere in the house before daring to take a step into the parlor. But then we heard not one voice, but two. Violet was tending to Henry, and upon hearing him beg her for help, I dashed out from where Trey and I were lurking to see how badly he was hurt.

  “Just call an ambulance,” he told Violet.

  “I can’t yet,” Violet told him. She was kneeling on the floor beside where he sat upright, propped up against the sofa. The white towel she was pressing against his left shou
lder was crimson with blood, and his pallor was grayish. I was genuinely shocked that she was caring for him and trying to calm him down even after having seen her father’s body outside. She must have assumed that either Trey or I had pushed him off the roof. Her face was tearstained, and her voice kept cracking, but she remained focused on keeping Henry calm. “As soon as we call for help, there won’t be anything more we can do to save McKenna. Do you understand that?”

  “Save me?” I asked in surprise. “It’s over. Jennie took the spirits away.”

  Violet barely paid any attention to me as I approached and crouched alongside her. I’d never seen someone injured as badly as Henry appeared to be. Even though I didn’t know anything about gunshots other than that he’d already be dead if the bullet had gotten anywhere near his heart, he still looked very bad—bad enough to lead me to believe he was dying.

  “It’s cold in here,” Henry mumbled. “Why’s it so cold?”

  It was cold in there; the enormous house must be difficult to heat, with its high ceilings and tall windows. But I had a feeling Henry was cold for a reason other than the chilly draft in the living room, and Trey confirmed my fear.

  “He’s in shock.” Trey stood at a safe distance behind me. “He’s going to need medical assistance soon, or his organs will start to fail.”

  Mischa was sitting on the couch where we’d left her after opening the jar, staring at Henry with an expressionless face and blank eyes. I wondered if her soul had made its way back into her body, because she didn’t seem to be fully… there. But Henry’s situation seemed more urgent, so I switched my attention back to him.

  “Just call an ambulance,” I insisted. My pulse was still racing from the ordeal on the roof, scattering my thoughts, and without confirmation from Jennie, I could really only assume that the curse had been broken. But we were going to lose Henry if we didn’t get help for him. I still had nine days remaining before the new moon to save myself if the curse hadn’t been completely broken; Henry might have been down to minutes. “We have to do something,” I said.