Silent as the Grave

by Zoe Aarsen

  Violet shook her head. “We have to get the curse off you first.”

  “There isn’t time!” I exclaimed, fully aware of the outcome on which I was insisting. How we spent the next few minutes might determine whether Henry or I would die, and there wasn’t a chance that I was going to choose my life over his.

  “McKenna,” Trey said softly. “We have to at least try.”

  “Try what?” I snapped. “I don’t even know if the curse is still on me. Maybe I beat it by not dying on the roof.”

  But the more I thought about the fact that the prediction had been issued and not fulfilled, the more it seemed possible that I wasn’t in the clear yet. Violet confirmed my fear when she narrowed her eyes at me as if she was angry. In an emotionless voice, she said, “You didn’t beat it. It’s still on you.”

  “How do you know?” Trey challenged her.

  “There are still nine more days before the new moon,” she said in my direction. “Something changes about people who’ve gotten their prediction. I can’t explain it. It’s like normal people have this electrical charge around them, barely noticeable unless you’re trying to detect it. And people who are going to die soon don’t.”

  I remembered back to holiday break, when we’d met Kirsten at the bookstore in Chicago, and she’d been able to tell that Mischa was doomed because she didn’t have an aura. Maybe Violet had a touch of the same awareness Kirsten did, or even a version of the same abilities I had. Whatever the source of her sense may have been, I didn’t doubt that she was right.

  “If we don’t find a way to end this thing right now, before anyone finds out what happened to my dad, then we won’t. Not ever. You’ll die, and those things will find their way back to Mischa,” Violet said, sounding absolutely convinced. She had raised an arm to point at Mischa, who looked at her in confusion as if she had no idea what Violet was talking about.

  My phone was still on the living room floor on the other side of Henry, on top of a dark, black pool of blood, which had saturated the rug. When I picked it up, I noticed that the battery had less than 20 percent of power remaining; Before I even placed my earbud in my ear I knew I wouldn’t hear anything other than static, but I was hoping with all my heart that Jennie would reply and tell me what to do.

  Then we heard a car approaching outside. All of us raised our heads and our eyes shot toward the front windows, but the heavy brocade curtains were mostly drawn, and the sheer panels hanging underneath them made it difficult to see what kind of vehicle was pulling into the driveway.

  “Who is that?” Trey asked Violet. “Did you call someone?”

  With her brow wrinkled as if she was going to cry, Violet began, “It could only be—”

  The slamming of a car door and a bloodcurdling scream cut her short. Mrs. Simmons had arrived home, and would be calling for an ambulance as soon as her horror subsided enough for her to remember how to use her hands.

  “It’s my mom. She and my dad drove separately to the airport on Friday after work when they left on their trip,” Violet said as she stood. “We have to go upstairs.”

  I didn’t want to budge. My eyes passed from the window to Henry. There was no way he was going to be able to walk upstairs on his own, and we couldn’t move him.

  Desperate, I said into my phone, “Jennie, is it safe for us to move Henry?” But of course, all I heard in reply was static.

  “It’s better to leave him,” Trey said decisively. “Your mom will call an ambulance, and we need to get upstairs before she comes inside.” He squatted next to me to be eye level with Henry, who was having difficulty keeping his eyes open. “Help is on the way, man. You’re going to be okay.”

  We heard the voice of Mrs. Simmons, as clear as a bell, from outside as she shouted at a 911 operator on her phone. The sound of the automated front door lock being activated caused Violet to fold Henry’s right arm so that his right hand held the towel against his left shoulder. Then she rocketed upright. “Come on. Now.”

  I reached for Mischa’s arm and pulled her to her feet as Violet tore out of the living room in the direction of the grand staircase. To my great relief, Mischa was able to stand on her own and seemed to sense the urgency in our dash out of the room.

  The front door opened behind us as we ran across the foyer and up the stairs. I looked over my shoulder to see a bewildered Mrs. Simmons standing in the doorway. “Violet!” she shouted, as if she feared Violet was in danger based on the state in which she’d found her husband.

  But then she saw the four of us running up the stairs. Violet weakly called out, “It’s okay, Mom!” Although, obviously, nothing was okay.

  Mrs. Simmons threw the bag she carried over one shoulder onto the floor, balled her hands into fists, and screamed from the very bottom of her core, “What is happening?”

  “Everything’s fine!” Violet shouted.

  We reached the top of the stairs, and followed Violet to her bedroom. She slammed the door behind us and twisted the delicate lock above the knob. That lock might have kept Mrs. Simmons out, at least as long as she was in a wild state of confusion and trauma, but it wouldn’t take long for someone—likely the police—to make their way into the room.

  We had only minutes remaining to solve a mystery that had baffled us for months.

  CHAPTER 20

  TREY WHEEZED, HIS CHEST RISING and falling as he caught his breath. He snapped at Violet, “What the hell?! You said your parents would be gone until tomorrow!”

  Violet scowled. “What, do you think I arranged for my dad to—”

  From behind us, a small voice said, “I don’t feel normal.”

  All of our heads turned toward Mischa, who was touching her throat as if she was as surprised that she’d spoken as we were. Suddenly concerned, Trey asked, “How do we know this is really Mischa and the spirits haven’t found their way back into her head?”

  With a confused expression on her face, Mischa insisted, “It’s me. I feel like I’ve been asleep for a long time.”

  We heard another high-pitched scream from the house’s first floor, which suggested that Violet’s mom had just noticed Henry. Her outburst put all of us back on task.

  Violet waved her hand at the phone I held in my hand. “Can you hear your sister at all?” she asked with tears in her eyes.

  I shook my head. I heard nothing but the baritone voice of a radio announcer on another AM frequency creeping through the static in bursts. But I did feel the slightest sense of tingling across my head. I hoped Jennie was the cause of it, and not the pure terror that we were all about to be held accountable for breaking into the Simmons house, holding Violet hostage, shooting Henry, and killing Mr. Simmons. And that I’d then go on to die in a horrible plane crash or in some other way, alone, on my return to Florida.

  “Just try to reach her,” Trey encouraged me in a hoarse voice. “Ask her to help you.”

  My pulse was bounding, and my heart felt like it was thundering in my chest. “I can’t concentrate,” I admitted. I had to be in a certain mind-set to be able to hear Jennie, and at that moment, I was way too frazzled to tune in to her energy. Somewhere, far away, I heard a chorus of voices chanting something that sounded like history, history, which reminded me of how sometimes words would get stuck in my head over the winter, before I’d been able to connect with Jennie over radio waves.

  But “history” didn’t make sense. The entire curse was rooted in history. I couldn’t pore over every detail of the last eighteen years to figure out how to unravel everything in the seconds remaining. Where to begin? With the moment Trey’s mom stepped into Violet’s father’s lecture hall eighteen years ago? Or the moment when Grandmother Simmons visited Father Fahey for help?

  Never before had I tried to communicate with Jennie under quite this much duress. My ears pricked at the distant sound of sirens, and it took me a second to realize that I wasn’t simply remembering the night of our house fire again. These sirens were real, and they were growing stronger.

&
nbsp; “Just relax,” Trey commanded me as he reached for my upper arms and gently squeezed them. “Here, let’s sit.”

  The four of us sat down in a circle on Violet’s carpeted floor.

  “What are we doing?” Mischa asked innocently. She clearly had limited awareness of what had happened since she’d been evicted from her body the day before, but there was no time to fill her in.

  “Trying to break the curse,” I mumbled. As much as I wanted to feel calmer, instead I felt even more wary of the seconds passing by. But with the pleading eyes of Violet, Trey, and Mischa weighing on me, it was all I could do to mutter hopelessly into my phone, “Jennie, can you hear me?”

  Not surprisingly, even when I strained my hearing and tried to steady my heart rate despite the sound of vehicles screeching to a halt, I still didn’t hear any sign of her. The distraction of the voices coming from the front of the house outside only added to my anxiety. Mrs. Simmons had seen Trey with us. If she’d recognized him from the courtroom and had already called the cops, then we could expect them to show up with guns raised, ready to apprehend him. Police in our town would also recognize Mischa as the girl who’d gone missing over the holidays and then reappeared with no memory of where she’d been. With Mr. Simmons dead in a grisly mess outside, and Willow’s three most problematic teenagers holed up in a bedroom with its wealthiest, there was no telling what would happen when authorities made their way upstairs.

  My mind kept whirling with thoughts of that nature, making it even harder to listen for Jennie. History, history. Tell history, the voices urged.

  “Keep trying,” Trey urged.

  I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to reach Jennie with my mind instead of my voice. Please, please. If you’re there, if you can hear me…

  My heart sank. I couldn’t sense her presence at all.

  It was pointless to keep trying. I was going to have to accept that we’d failed, and that the spirits had done something terrible and irreversible to my sister.

  Just as they would do to me within the next nine days.

  I opened my eyes as I admitted, “I just can’t…”

  But when I saw the expressions on the others’ faces, I fell quiet. They were looking at something behind me. I turned to see what they were marveling at, and I couldn’t believe my eyes. The wooden chest at the foot of Violet’s bed had opened, its lid tilted backward on its brass hinges. And from within it, two stuffed animals had floated up into the air. They hovered over the chest, at least two feet above our heads where we sat on the floor.

  “What… the hell… is happening?” Trey asked.

  One of the stuffed animals was a beige dog with floppy ears and a brown nose. It was levitating on its back, just as Olivia, Candace, and Mischa had when we’d played Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board at Olivia’s party. The second plush animal was a white teddy bear, and it floated below the dog, positioned in the air as if it were standing.

  Now, I felt the tingling under my hair more strongly. This was undoubtedly Jennie, reaching out in what must have been the only way she could.

  “It’s Jennie,” I whispered.

  The voices weren’t encouraging me to think about history. They were saying, Your story. Your story. They wanted me to tell the story of my death, the death that should have just occurred.

  Violet flinched at the sound of heavy footsteps coming up the staircase, accompanied by loud male voices. The police had probably arrived, and they were now inside the house, on their way to find us. “Is she saying we need to play the game again?”

  “Yes, sort of,” I said, trying to understand what Jennie was demonstrating. The white bear floated higher as the beige dog was lowered, and then the white bear was angled on its side as if lying down, taking the position that the dog had held. Then both stuffed animals fell back into the chest. “I think she’s suggesting that I—”

  Fists pounded on the other side of Violet’s bedroom door. “Open this door!”

  Trey’s alarmed eyes shifted from the door to me. “Whatever she wants you to do, just do it!”

  “Open up!”

  “Okay,” I said, trying to ignore the barrage on the door. “We should hold hands or something. Just like when we played the game the first time. I think the game always requires everyone’s participation.”

  Without any resistance, Violet, Mischa, and Trey linked hands. Mischa and Trey, on either side of me, each reached for one of mine. I closed my eyes and tried to remember exactly how it had felt to be on the Simmonses’ roof, when I’d been certain that I was about to die. I tried to imagine what it was like having all of those scenes from my life play inside my eyelids.

  Then I took a deep breath, knowing this would be my last chance to save my life. “It was a cold day in April, and McKenna Brady had just attended the funeral of her friend Mischa’s parents with Violet Simmons, Henry Richmond, and Trey Emory. McKenna had arrived at the funeral with the intention of bringing Mischa back to Violet’s house later that afternoon to make her play a game. The purpose of the game was to trick evil spirits that had overtaken Mischa’s body into abandoning it by making them believe that McKenna was about to die. To do this, Violet was going to aim a gun at McKenna and shoot her, if necessary.”

  I was cutting corners, but I could hear a metallic clanging noise on the other side of the door, making me think that whoever was out there was trying to break the lock.

  “But when Violet raised the gun, Henry jumped in front of McKenna and blocked the bullet. Moments later, Violet’s father arrived home unexpectedly after a vacation, and was shocked by what he saw occurring in his living room. He chased McKenna up to the house’s rooftop, and she climbed over a railing and descended a dangerously steep peak to try and escape him.”

  I hesitated, knowing that if I told the story accurately from this point onward, Violet would know that Trey was responsible for her father’s death. But I had only seconds remaining, and couldn’t risk this game not working out of fear of offending her. So I continued, “Trey had followed Mr. Simmons and McKenna up there, and he surprised Mr. Simmons by shoving him from behind. Violet’s father fell forward, over a railing, and when he reached the place where McKenna was clinging to the shingles, he knocked into her. Together, they fell off the edge of the roof.”

  This was the critical moment, the point at which Jennie’s instructions would either work… or fail. Whoever was on the other side of the door had successfully removed the doorknob, and was peering at us through the hole left in the door. I blocked that out, and focused on trying to tell the rest of the story—the story of how I would have died if Trey hadn’t saved me—as calmly as possible. When Violet had been the storyteller on the night of Olivia’s party, she’d gone all out on the gory details, so I did my best to imagine my death as it would have realistically occurred.

  “McKenna tumbled through the air, falling over three stories to the pavement below. Her skull cracked when she hit the ground, and her neck snapped. She died instantly, spraying the cement and nearby fountain with blood and brain matter.”

  From outside the door, I heard a male voice say, “They’re having some kind of séance or something!”

  I looked around the circle at Mischa, Violet, and Trey and said, “Two days later, her family and friends gathered at Gundarsson’s funeral home, where her twin sister was waked eight years earlier. Her body lay in a closed coffin. Light as a feather, stiff as a board.”

  Already knowing what was expected of them, Mischa and Violet chanted, “Light as a feather, stiff as a board.” Trey joined in, and the four of us continued to repeat the phrase. Our voices faded as if someone were turning down the volume on the audio around me. Within seconds, it was as if everything happening in Violet’s bedroom was on mute, or like my brain had been enclosed in something soundproof. I saw the lips of the others continue to move as they chanted, and in my peripheral vision, I saw men in navy-blue uniforms burst into the room after throwing the door open.

  Then everything wen
t dark.

  * * *

  When I opened my eyes, I was in a hospital bed.

  I held very still as I gained awareness of my surroundings, at first wondering if somehow I’d reversed time and was eight years old again, back at St. Matthew’s Hospital, where I’d been taken after the house fire that had killed Jennie. Or maybe this was part of the dying process, revisiting one of my strongest memories. I recognized the location by its antiseptic smell before even noticing the TV on the wall across from my bed or the IV in my arm.

  As soon as I made sense of the fact that it was daylight—and sunny outside my window—I realized that the women on the television show on my room’s TV were discussing the current president. I hadn’t traveled back in time. Then I felt a jab of pain in my heart.

  Henry.

  The last thing I could remember about being in Violet’s bedroom was the door opening. I had no idea if Henry had been taken away in an ambulance, or if he’d even lived long enough to be treated by the paramedics when they’d arrived at the Simmons mansion.

  And I definitely didn’t remember being injured, so I wondered how I’d ended up there.

  Just as I was leaning forward in bed, wondering if I could drag the stand on which the bag of saline solution attached to my IV was hung, I noticed Violet, of all unexpected people, sitting in the corner with a cup of coffee.

  “You’re awake,” Violet said, sounding pleased. “Your mom just stepped out for a few minutes to check on your stepdad.”

  “He’s not my stepdad,” I croaked, surprised by how crusty my voice sounded and how sore my throat was.

  “You were intubated,” Violet said, gesturing at her own throat. “They just removed your breathing tube about two hours ago, if you’re wondering why your throat hurts.”