Whistling Past the Graveyard (Nicki Styx)

by Terri Garey

  “Amy?” he called. “Are you up there?”

  Groggy, I sat up, swinging my legs over the edge of the bed. “I’m here,” I called, strangely reluctant for him to come upstairs. “I’ll be down in a minute.”

  I had no idea how long I’d slept. Moments, hours, a lifetime.

  My gaze moved to the shelves beneath the window seat, and fell upon an album marked “Photos”. I could no more stop myself from picking it up and opening it then I could stop myself from breathing. The pages were old, and yellowed, crackling as I turned them, but there were the faces I’d expected to find. A man, dark-haired and somber, in full uniform. A little girl, sitting on the front steps of this very house, clutching the hand of a boy younger than herself.

  A woman, small and slender, her hair piled loosely upon her head in what I believe was called a “Gibson Girl” style. A black ribbon encircled her neck, from which a small cameo dangled. She sat straight, posing for the camera, angling her head just so, in a gown with ruffles at the shoulder, nipped tightly at the waist. Beneath the picture, written in a woman’s hand, the ink much-faded, were the words, “Mrs. Nancy Beaumont, 1910”.

  “Mrs. Beaumont,” I whispered. “You existed.”

  I felt her, then, like a cobweb gliding over my skin, leaving goose bumps in its wake. She was there, in the room with me, where she’d been since the day she died.

  Closing the photo album, I put it carefully back where I’d found it, then stood, putting my hands to the curtains. For an instant, I saw someone else’s hands, transparent and insubstantial, hovering over mine where they rested on the fabric. Anxiety rose in me, a frantic fluttering in my chest, but it was not my anxiety. It was Mrs. Beaumont’s, who didn’t want the curtains to be opened. I knew this, as certain of it as anything I’d ever been certain of.

  “It’s all right,” I said, as soothingly as I was able. With the words, I drew the lace sheer aside, and reached for the shades. “It’s time for you to go,” I told her, “time for you to move on, and leave this room behind.” The shades were brittle, almost crumbling in my hand.

  She was frightened now, so frightened. Fearful of the unknown outside of her safe little room. If she could’ve stopped me, she would’ve, but there was no strength in what was left of her spirit. “There’s no need to be afraid,” I said softly, managing to raise the old shades. The room was suddenly flooded with bright afternoon sun, dust motes dancing in the air. “You’re going on a grand adventure.” I unlatched the windows, struggling with the old hardware that hadn’t been touched in years. “Everything, and everyone, has its time.” The first window opened, letting in a gust of fresh air. “Now it’s time for you to go.” The second window was easier, and opened right away, setting the lace sheers fluttering.

  I could feel Mrs. Beaumont beside me, breathing in both the air and the view. Trees, under which she’d once picnicked. Wildflowers, which her daughter had once delighted in bringing her. Then, as the breeze came through the window and out again, she followed it, out into the garden, high above the trees and—I very much hoped—into the arms of the man she’d once loved, who waited for her in a place she’d yet to see.

  “Amy?” John’s steps sounded on the stairs.

  “In here,” I called, not moving from the window.

  He came in, saw me standing there, and moved behind me, winding his arms around my waist as he, too, looked out over the garden. “Some house, hm?” he murmured, resting his chin on my shoulder.

  “It is,” I agreed, feeling too peaceful and happy to move. “We’re going to be very happy here, I just know it.”

  THE EYES HAVE IT

  “Stop staring at me.”

  She didn’t listen, of course. So judgey-judgey with those big blue eyes, her silence speaking volumes.

  “It’s not like I meant to do it, but he hurt my feelings.”

  The house was quiet, so quiet you could hear the wind outside the window, moaning to get in. It was always cold in my room, but today it seemed colder than usual.

  “I warned him, really I did, but he just didn’t listen.” Just like you, I added mentally, but didn’t say it out loud.

  It was starting to rain now, the drops pattering against the window like pellets. Sharp fits and bursts, as if someone were throwing pebbles.

  “Look, I know you liked him, but he was a jerk to you, too, remember? What was I supposed to do, just take it? He rejected us both!”

  She didn’t bother to answer, so I looked away, uncomfortable.

  “I don’t like the way he treated me,” I insisted. “He deserved what he got.”

  When had it gotten so dark outside? It had been daylight just a few moments ago, hadn’t it?

  “He thought he was so hot, with that perfect hair and those perfect clothes… and that car!” I laughed, more of a sneer, really. “What a stuck-up creep… who does he think he is?” I laughed again, louder this time. “Or more accurately, who did he think he was?”

  She didn’t find my little joke amusing, but I’d expected no less. The weight of her stare bore down on me, claustrophobic and condemning.

  “Oh, you’re no better than me; admit it! You can’t stand it when someone prettier, or thinner, or better dressed than you comes along! I’ve seen the looks you give them, even when you say nothing!”

  She was saying nothing now, of course. Just staring, accusing me soundlessly with those stupid blue eyes. All that eyeliner and mascara; it was ridiculous.

  “Not everyone has big boobs and blond hair like you,” I snarled, fed up. “Cute guys aren’t that easy for me to come by.” I didn’t like the way she lounged in her chair, feeling so free to give me the silent treatment just because we were friends.

  “Stop it!” The rain pattered, and the night, with all its silence and guilt and coldness, closed in. I drew my sweater close, and faced her, head on. “Stop staring at me, I said! I’m warning you, just like I warned him—stop staring!”

  She wouldn’t, so I reached out and grabbed her, giving her a good shake. Her expression, so judgmental, so superior, didn’t change.

  Desperate to see some emotion, some understanding, some forgiveness in her eyes—anything, really, to make the staring stop, I did the only thing I could do. One vicious twist of my wrist, and her head came off in my hand. I threw it in the corner, as hard as I could, where it rolled to a stop beside that of her stupid boyfriend.

  “Fine, Barbie, if that’s the way you want it.” I tossed her body down, too, right in the middle of her pretty pink playhouse. “I hope you and Ken are both happy now!”

  TABULA RASA

  “I don’t know how I let you talk me into this, Grace.”

  The pungent smell of burning sage was stinging my nose and making my eyes water. I doubted my sister could hear me above the chanting, but she did.

  “Shhh,” Grace mouthed, raising a finger to her lips.

  The woman doing the chanting ignored us, waving the bundle of burning herbs in extravagant gestures over my living room furniture—designed, no doubt, to asphyxiate any evil spirits, or at least encourage them to seek a non-smoking environment. I suppressed a giggle at the thought.

  Grace glared at me across the coffee table, where a single white candle burned.

  I tried to compose my features into a serious expression, but it was hard.

  Grace’s friend Sherry brought the smoldering smudge-stick closer, and passed it over our heads one final time before dropping it into an ornately carved brass bowl. She picked up a long, crystalline rode and rapped the bowl sharply, causing a piercing note to break the silence.

  “I invoke the light within,” Sherry intoned. “I am a clear and perfect channel. The light is my guide.”

  I kept my eyes down, certain I was about to burst into undignified laughter.

  Sherry owned a metaphysical bookstore. She apparently offered psychic readings in a back room, and sold things like crystals and incense along with books on mysticism and witchcraft.

  “Not witch
craft, Jody.” Grace had corrected me, when I’d voiced my objections to a “cleansing ceremony’ for my new house. “Wicca. Sherry is a Wiccan. It’s an ancient religion, based on nature. Besides, what could it hurt? Afraid she’ll turn you into a frog?”

  And so here we were, sitting in my darkened living room, choking on the pot-like smell of burning sage while the candle flickered, causing eerie shadows to dance on the walls. I gave a sigh of relief when Sherry threw the front door wide, letting in a gust of fresh air. The candle sputtered, about to go out, but Grace shielded the flame quickly with her hand, and it flared to life again.

  Sherry moved through the living room, chanting under her breath and now waving what looked like an ostrich plume. She disappeared into the kitchen, and I heard the window over the sink open. The smoke began to clear, drifting in waves out the front door.

  “Is this a private party, or can anyone join?”

  My heart sank. I sprang to my feet, hating the heat that flooded my cheeks.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I live here, remember?”

  My husband Adam walked in the open front door, a frown on his too-handsome face. I say “too-handsome” because his good looks didn’t match his all-too-often bad behavior.

  “I thought you were working tonight.” The bruises on my upper arm throbbed, a reminder to keep my tone pleasant.

  “I left early,” he said stonily, his gaze flicking over Grace and Sherry before returning to me. “What the hell is going on in here?”

  “Just a… a cleansing ceremony,” I muttered.

  “A what?” A skeptical look marred his face.

  “A cleansing ceremony,” Grace repeated, as though Adam were an idiot. She and Adam had never gotten along; unlike me, she didn’t have to get along with him, merely tolerate him during the occasional family function, of which there were fewer and fewer every year.

  The look Adam sent my sister made me cringe. “Learn something new every day, Gracie,” he said with a sneer. “I didn’t realize that you were a witch as well as a bitch.”

  There was a moment of dead silence, and then Sherry stepped forward.

  “She isn’t a witch,” she told Adam mildly, “but I am.”

  I bit my lip, a little unnerved by the nasty turn things had taken.

  Adam looked Sherry up and down. “You’re certainly ugly enough,” he answered rudely. “How about you jump back on your broomstick and get the hell out?”

  Sherry shook her head, gypsy earrings tinkling. “I’m here to do a cleansing,” she stated calmly. “And I can certainly see why this house needs one.”

  “I agree.” Adam glanced around at my spotlessly clean living room. “And as soon as you two haul your ugly asses out of here, my wife can get her lazy ass busy cleaning it.”

  “I said ‘cleansing’, not ‘cleaning’”, Sherry corrected. She put down her ostrich feather and picked up the rod she’d used to strike the bronze bowl. It glittered and gleamed in her hand, reflecting the light from the candle, an effect I hadn’t noticed before.

  “Bad luck, disappointments, all things not of Light; remove yourself from my sight.” Sherry waved the rod in a tight circle, pointing the tip directly at Adam. “Violence, ugliness, all things cruel; make kindness and love the only rule.”

  Adam laughed the worst kind of laugh, the one with no real amusement behind it.

  “I know how you treat my sister,” Grace hissed, stepping up to stand beside Sherry. To my surprise, she held a gleaming little crystal rod of her own in her hand. “I know how you cheat on her with other women, and what you do to her when she stands up for herself.”

  Adam’s eyebrows shot sky high. “You been telling stories behind my back, Jody?”

  I shook my head, too petrified to answer.

  “Chains that enshackle, let now be unbound; bring all that is heartless down to the ground.” Sherry and Grace recited the rest together, while I watched, frozen in place. “From earth did you spring, and to earth you go; run if you will, but there’s nowhere to go.”

  I blinked, and Adam was gone.

  Sherry made a noise of satisfaction as she and Grace looked down at the floor. There, in the middle of my gleaming hardwood floors, an ugly brown cockroach twitched its antennae.

  It bolted, heading for the shadow of the couch, but Grace was too quick for it, crushing it beneath her shoe. “Gotcha,” she crowed, over the crunch.

  For a moment, I was speechless. “What the hell just happened? Where’s Adam?” I glanced wildly around the living room, feeling like I’d missed something very important.

  “Don’t worry, Jody,” my sister said, with a grin. “It’s all over now.”

  “Not quite,” said Sherry gently, giving my sister a meaningful look.

  “Oh!” Grace said. “The tabula rasa spell. I almost forgot.”

  “The tabula what?”

  “It means ‘blank slate’, my dear.” Sherry gave me a kind smile as the two women advanced on me with their wands. “A wiping away of all bad memories, to make way for the good ones to come.”

  “Don’t worry, sis, this won’t hurt a bit.”

  The next thing I knew, we were sitting on the couch, shadows flickering on the wall from the candle on the coffee table.

  “I don’t know how I let you talk me into this, Grace.”

  The pungent smell of burning sage was stinging my nose and making my eyes water.

  “Shhh,” Grace mouthed, raising a finger to her lips.

  The woman doing the chanting ignored us, waving the bundle of burning herbs in extravagant gestures over my living room furniture—designed, no doubt, to asphyxiate any evil spirits, or at least encourage them to seek a non-smoking environment. I suppressed a giggle at the thought, for there were no evil spirits here.

  ZOMBIE LOVE

  “Is that a femur in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?” Donna snuggled in closer to Derek, brushing the dark hair from his eyes with one hand. Unfortunately, a clump of it remained in her fingers, and she knew this particular boy toy’s time was limited. That was the problem with zombies—their shelf life was much too short, the pesky problem of decomposition being one she hadn’t solved yet.

  Even embalming didn’t help, and she didn’t care for waxy buildup on her fingers any more than she did her floors.

  “Brought you a present,” Derek murmured, with a lopsided grin, “for our two-week anniversary.” His breath reeked of blood and sausages, which made sense considering his job at the local meat packing plant. With a flourish, he whipped a hand from behind his back, and offered her his prize.

  “How sweet,” Donna squealed. “It’s a heart!”

  “Yeah, baby,” he answered smugly, blood dripping between his fingers. “A fresh one. Nothing but the best for my girl.”

  “Awww,” Donna said, “I got you a present, too.” She let go of him long enough snatch her purse up from the bed. Digging inside, she brought up an object about three inches long. Picking off a piece of lint before handing it to him, she announced, “I usually wait at least a month before giving my boyfriend the finger!”

  Derek and Donna both died laughing, which was long overdue, considering Donna had been dead for two centuries, and Derek for two weeks.

  She eyed him with regret as she giggled, knowing his laughter would soon be a thing of the past, much like Horatio’s, the guy who’d gotten her into this fix. It had been Horatio’s idea to visit the cemetery in Edinburgh that night two hundred years ago. Bodysnatching had been a good way to earn some quick cash back then, unless your body happened to be the one that got snatched, of course.

  Poor Horatio, she’d known him well, until that shovel had come out of nowhere, and smashed his head in. The doctor who’d done it hadn’t hit her hard enough, though, and she’d woken up in his laboratory to find him on top of her. After that, what was a ghoul to do except defend herself? It was only after she’d killed the doc with his own dirt-encrusted shovel that she’d found the secret
book lying on his desk, in plain sight, and learned the ancient grimoire’s secrets of how to reanimate the dead.

  “Hey, baby,” Derek said, interrupting her musings. “I got a perfectly good boner going to waste here.” He grabbed her hips and pulled her close again. “What say we get naked and put it to good use, hm?”

  Donna smiled. She’d learned a few secrets about herself that night, too, including how her brush with death and her newfound ability to reanimate dead flesh left her with a taste for more of it. Immortality had cost her soul, but she was pretty sure she didn’t need it where she was going.

  “Absolutely,” she answered, with a smile that revealed her own teeth, pearly white and perfect. Her eyes glowed red as she began to tug his shirt from his pants. “No use letting a good piece of meat go to waste.”

  OUIJA WANNA HAVE FUN

  “Don’t do it, Katie.”

  “C’mon, Megan, it’ll be fun,” I urged. “Nick says he’s been out there lots of times, and nothing bad has ever happened.”

  “I’m not going out to that spooky old house after dark,” my best friend said. “Everybody knows the old Hoffman place is haunted.”

  “Fine,” I snapped, impatient with her. “We’ll go by ourselves.”

  “I thought your Dad told you to stay away from Nick. Does he know you two are out together?”

  “No, and if you tell anyone, I’ll never speak to you again,” I warned. “I’ll call you later, ok?”

  I hung up and turned back to Nick, my new boyfriend, who was examining a Ouija board cushioned on black velvet beneath the glass of Blessed Be Botanical’s display counter.

  “I just keep it for display,” the woman behind the counter said, “The Ouija isn’t a toy. I really don’t recommend it.”

  The shop smelled like incense, filled with the tranquil sounds of new age music and trickling water from the fountains displayed in a corner. Both intrigued and repelled, I eyed the Ouija board. “How does it work?” It looked quaint and old-fashioned, just a flat brown board imprinted with letters and numbers in a fancy typeset.