RoseBlood

by Howard, A. G.

  Due to the ominous sky, I earlier clipped an LED book light—the one Mom bought for us to use on the ten-hour flight here—onto my sweater lapel. After I pull up weeds and break up clods with the fork from the cafeteria, I’ll have to remove any roots left in the loosened soil. A little extra illumination will help me find them. Some weeds, like elder, bindweed, and couch grass, will regrow if any chopped roots remain. They’re regenerative, like salamander tails, earthworms . . .

  And phantoms.

  I veer my gaze to the roses far to my right, those left for dead at the touch of a man’s hand last Sunday. The way they sway on their stems, heavy and black, proves I didn’t imagine it at all. My chest tightens and my footsteps falter as I notice a piece of gray cloth, strung across a cluster of golden flowers right beneath the thorny bush. I move closer. Partly because the fabric looks familiar, but more because it’s so out of place in this untouched wilderness.

  Swallowing the knot in my throat, I crouch to tug the cloth free, recognizing it as one of the stockings Mom and I bought—part of my missing uniforms. The side seam gapes open, frayed but systematic, as if someone sliced it with scissors.

  A sense of violation rattles through me, jarring. I stand on weak legs, catching movement everywhere now—other articles fluttering like flags on various flowers and plants, all along the path.

  All this time, I’d assumed Kat and Roxie stole them, despite what they said to Tomlin. But when would they have had a chance to lay out a trail like this?

  My windpipe narrows until the damp air seems to burn. I venture into the overgrowth, because no matter who’s responsible, I’m not going to give them the benefit of chasing me away.

  Gathering up the damaged vests, stockings, and skirts, I place them in the tub I’d intended to use for gutted weeds and dead flowers.

  The trail of damaged articles is like a macabre Easter egg hunt. Around every winding turn of the path, I find another ragged or frayed piece, all of them torn but possibly salvageable for someone who knows how to use a needle and thread.

  Finally, I see the last article—a white ruffled shirt cuff hanging over an oddly shaped statue I can’t quite make out—on the other side of the footbridge where the garden ends and the cemetery begins.

  I make my way over the water, trying not to look down into the depths, careful not to slide off the curved, cobblestone surface. Several yards away, the chapel casts muted shadows across the graves. The jeweled glint of the broken stained-glass windows frames the darkness within—a disorienting contrast that spurs the feeling of being watched again.

  I step off the footbridge. Unlike the garden, the cemetery is easy to navigate. Ankle-high yellowing grass fringes a spongy, green carpet of moss between headstones. Stray, fallen leaves scatter across the ground on the wind. I stop at the tomb where my shirt cuff flaps, fighting the uneasy crimp in my stomach.

  It’s an antique statue of a baby’s cradle with a canopy—the stone molded and etched to look like wicker. This must be the unnamed infant’s grave Madame Fabre mentioned. There’s only a year carved into the surface: 1883. Not even a month or a day.

  Inside the stony cradle, my shirt covers the opening where a baby would be. The cloth puffs out, and red spots, resembling spatters of blood, tinge the white color. Ice-cold dread clenches my neck, makes my breath tight and whistling. After all the time I spent in Dad’s hospital room, observing him being poked and prodded with needles, watching his veins drained for test after test, blood is the one thing I’m squeamish about . . .

  I shake my head, willing myself not to lose it. This is fake blood. At an academy like this, everyone has access to theatrical makeup. Gusts of wind tug at the shirt’s ruffles, creating the illusion of something moving underneath.

  Goose bumps prickle my skin. I fist my free hand at my side, long enough to remind myself it’s all a prank. A cruel joke meant to scare me and send me running back to the states. Opening my fingers, I gingerly lift away the shirt. A bouquet of white roses waits underneath in place of the zombie baby my wild imagination had conjured.

  I choke out a laugh, but it’s short-lived once I realize how the red stains got onto my shirt. From within the spirals of petals seeps a running, dripping, liquid trail—as if the roses are bleeding from their hearts.

  Thunder growls in the sky and a stray droplet of rain hits my face. I shiver, though it’s not the impending storm that chills me to the bone; it’s how the flow of blood creeps into the stone’s cracks and crevices beside the thorny stems, forming letters, as if Death himself is penning the scraggy, cursive words before my very eyes:

  B-e-l-o-v-e-d R-u-n-e.

  10

  ALONG CAME A SPIDER

  “A spider spins its web strand by strand.”

  Author Unknown

  My name, written in blood, chains me in place.

  The wind picks up—cold and brutal. It slaps my face with dampening locks of hair and tugs at the shirt in my hands like the insistent ploys of a ghostly toddler. When the downpour of cold rain hits—drenching all the way to my scalp and through my clothes—I still can’t move. Not until I see the white rose petals cleansed, the red script smearing into streams, the words erasing, yet leaving me nauseous in their absence . . . violated and confused.

  Lightning breaks—dangerous veins of electricity ripping the sky. In the forest, a tree sparks with glowing embers, its branches shorted-out circuits falling to the ground. Three seconds later, thunder shakes all around me.

  The storm is too close. I need to find cover, and the academy is all the way across the footbridge and on the other side of the garden.

  My only option is the chapel. I scoop up my bloody shirt and the white roses, because I’m convinced they’re a stage prop with a mechanism in their stems that pumps out red ink through the petals, like we once used in a play during my sophomore year. As I lift them, I realize that each petal’s edge is fringed with deep red to form a duotone bouquet. Even when I scrape the edges, the contrast remains. It’s the natural color scheme. I once saw roses like this at a plant nursery in Texas. They’re called Fire and Ice. I must have been too panicked earlier to notice their uniqueness.

  After placing them atop my uniforms in the tub, I slosh through shallow puddles and mud-slicked moss toward the ominous building.

  The sky darkens to a bruise that resembles evening more than noon. Intermittent bursts of lightning shift the landscape around me—fractured images of decaying gravestones, a sagging garden, and blowing leaves. I clamber up the crumbled steps to the chapel. My gloved fingers reach for the door, then jerk back as the serpent-shaped latch seems to slither and writhe away from my hand. I struggle to catch my breath.

  It’s made of tarnished brass . . . it just appeared to move because of the crawling shadows generated by the lightning.

  My attempts at logic are the only thing keeping my courage afloat. I can’t let myself consider that underneath the howling wind and scraping leaves, I heard a hiss when the sky lit and the latch moved; or that even with a mechanism inside their stems, how could the roses manage to bleed a legible rendering of my name?

  My heart pounds in my chest, competing with the thunder, as I study the latch. Having spent time with my dad outdoors, I have no phobia of rodents, reptiles, or insects. What’s freaking me out is the fact that metal shouldn’t move like a living thing. Gnawing on my lower lip, I grip the brass serpent to open the door. The rusty, wet hinges give slowly, like old bones, creaking and grinding as I force them open. I thrust the stainless-steel tub inside. It hits the floor with a metallic clang, prompting another hiss like the one I heard earlier.

  A dangerous scatter of lighting forces my feet forward. The wind shuts the door behind me. I inhale, acutely aware of the stifling darkness.

  Shoulder blades pressed to the wooden frame, I stand in place—the black surroundings heavy as a blanket on my head. The sounds outside dull to near silence: muted raindrops and muffled wind. My clothes drip onto the stone floor in a disturbing r
hythm.

  The scent of dank stone, wet roses, and dust permeates my nostrils. Lightning blinks through the jagged stained-glass windows, painting prisms of color along the walls. Something shuffles in the shadows, and a jingle follows—like the tiniest bell.

  Gooseflesh spreads over me again. I scoot away from the door-frame, flush to the wall, until the sensation of vines weaving in and out of the stone juts through my sweater between my shoulder blades.

  “Hello?” I attempt, my voice a shrill echo.

  The jingling erupts again, then stops just as fast, as if it’s driven by movement.

  “Who’s there?” I shout this time.

  I regain enough presence of mind to search for the book light clipped to my sweater. The gloves make my fingers stiff, so I peel them off to flip on the dime-size bulb. I rotate the long, skinny neck so it casts a spindle of light twelve inches in front of me. My eyes begin to adjust. The room takes on a dusky haze, everything blurred to indiscernible outlines beneath the beam at my lapel.

  I’m about to brave walking around when something attacks my feet. Yelping, I snag my fingers in some ivy on the wall to stay upright. A vine slices the inner bend of a knuckle, prompting a sting tantamount to a paper cut. I pop my finger in my mouth to ease the throb, tasting blood, but I’m unable to think beyond whatever is still wrapped around my ankles. Every muscle tensed, I jerk my left leg and nudge it loose.

  A bundle of nappy, grayish fur shoots out from the tangle of my boots and skirt, and into the splay of LED light.

  “Diable?” I ask tentatively, almost breathless. The cat jingles as he backs up and snarls. His ears—disproportionately large, like a bat’s—spread low on his head.

  I lean forward, elbows pressed to my knees, and laugh, relieved to find the cat’s as real as me, and not a ghost at all.

  Diable responds with a deep, throaty yowl, his yellow-green eyes locked on me. He’s obviously not as impressed to be sharing the space. His tail twitches. It’s a strange, hooked shape—as if it was broken at one time and never healed right—so thin it resembles a coat hanger wrapped in fraying felt.

  “Wow. You really do look like an SOS pad,” I tease and hold out my hand for a peace offering.

  He sniffs a breath across me, and sneezes on my palm, as if to assure me he might look like a soured dish sponge, but I smell like one.

  I grin. He’s probably right. I’ve been overwarm ever since stressing in the cemetery, and being in here makes it worse. The air is too close—claustrophobic. Moving the book light to the bodice of my dress, I peel out of my soggy sweater and drape it across the roses in the tub to distance myself from what happened at the grave—at least for the moment. Next, I tug off my headband and use it to bind my wet hair into a ponytail, leaving only a few ringlets plastered to my temples and the nape of my neck.

  Diable loses interest and trots out of my beam’s radius.

  I kneel and move the book light’s neck to search for what the cat was playing with at my feet when he tripped me. A clear plastic wristband, like people wear in a hospital, scrapes beneath the toe of my boot. I shift, and something else rolls beneath my heel: a flexible, transparent plastic cord, about six inches long. Droplets of red liquid cling to the inside. It reminds me of IV tubing, fresh off a patient. My stomach turns.

  These items are so intimate . . . reminders of Ben and Dad. It’s too timely, after having thought of them both today. Maybe I’m losing my mind to guilt.

  I prod the tubing with a fingertip, proving to myself it’s real, and another theory takes shape. Maybe whoever pulled the prank on me used this chapel for preparations. This could be from the roses that were bleeding—part of the mechanism within their stems. Determined to make my case, I retrieve both items and drop them into the tub alongside everything else.

  I’m itching to leave and hole up in my dorm room where I can piece together the events in the garden and cemetery, but the lightning continues to torch the surroundings in intervals. I have to wait out the storm.

  Diable’s confident jingling in the shadows gives me comfort. He’s not the least bit unsettled, so there can’t be anything dangerous here. Resituating the light on my bodice, I move the neck around to scope out any more clues.

  There aren’t any hiding places. No benches . . . no prayer altar and no pulpit. Nothing one would expect to find in a traditional house of worship—just a spacious, empty room with an air of gloom and loneliness drifting with the dust particles from the cathedral roof. Along the left half—the back of the chapel—the floor has caved in over time, sloping downward. A thick ground cover coats it like carpet.

  Following Diable’s jingles, I inch closer to the right side—the front—where nature’s progression has been slower. Weeds have pushed their way up from cracks in the foundation, just like the vines across the walls, but in sporadic intervals. I take small steps as my slick boots skate atop a gritty film of dirt on the stony surface.

  The cat’s silhouette leaps up to perch on what was once a baptismal. I join him at the oval basin. The brick edge hits me mid-thigh. A pool of murky water glitters inside—some nine feet in diameter—reminding me of a well. It seems unusually wide and deep. The scar on my knee throbs, and I’m reliving the dreaded memory . . . kicking my way out of a wooden crate that held me underwater.

  I shake off the uneasiness; let it run down my spine like droplets of melting ice.

  There’s nothing to fear here. It’s a baptismal. People stood in it. The water can’t be very deep. It’s an illusion created by the darkness. The beam attached to my dress shimmers along the glassy surface. Its bright reflection moves in ripples as something stirs inside.

  Diable notices the ripples, too. He seems intrigued. His long, pointed ears tilt forward and he balances on the basin’s lip, tapping the water with a paw and emitting a long, low mewl that starts deep in his throat and ends with a sharp-toothed snarl.

  The water bulges as though something is surfacing. My skin goes cold and clammy.

  It’s got to be a fish . . . or a frog.

  I back up a step, because I’m lying to myself. Whatever is causing the water to churn is too big to be either. I read once that rats are good swimmers. With their aquatic ability and flexible bodies, they can make their way up from city sewers into toilets. I ease back another two steps, my pride the only anchor keeping me from bounding away in fear.

  “Hey kitty . . .” I gulp. “Did you trap a rat in there?” Diable’s eyes stay pinned on the eddying currents, leaving my words to hang in midair, taunting my raging imagination.

  I’m not a skittish girl. Last summer, I was the one who took the biology class pet home. No one else volunteered to take care of our Mexican red-knee tarantula for three months. But Sister Scarlett and I got along famously. Especially at feeding time. For some reason, I was intrigued by the way she trapped her prey against the wall of the terrarium, by the way she danced around the hopping cricket until it was so entranced with terror and fascination, it froze in place and practically begged for her to eat it.

  That was before Ben.

  Nausea sweeps through me at the thought. After our encounter, I realized why I was enchanted by the spider’s feeding rituals, that there was something in my gypsy blood—something tainted and wrong . . . just like Grandma said.

  The water in the baptismal surges again. If it is a rat, it’s the biggest one I’ve ever seen. The bulge pressing up from underneath is now the size of a basketball.

  I try to adjust my light, but my trembling fingers knock the neck off-kilter so the beam shifts to my toes. Before I can fix it, a wave rises, sloshing water across me, the cat, and the floor.

  Feathers and wings emerge in sync with a cavalcade of lightning. A long, graceful neck unfurls into the most beautiful swan I’ve ever seen—as red, bright, and vivid as the blood seeping from the roses earlier.

  Thunder rolls, and Diable lunges at the bird. He loses balance, plopping into the water belly first.

  The swan releases a trum
peting croak then flaps its wings. I dodge its webbed feet as it swoops over my head on a gust before landing safely in the shadows at the back of the chapel, out of sight. The bird grows silent, to the point I wonder if it’s still there.

  Yowling and sputtering, Diable snatches my attention. His battle against the water has propelled him into the middle of the baptismal. I try to reach him, but even when my thighs hit the basin’s edge, my arms aren’t long enough.

  My throat lumps. I hesitate, telling myself this isn’t like the time when I was little and my Les Enfants Perdus fairy tale book fell into the river . . . the water isn’t deep enough to cover my head. My grandma’s not seated on the dock beside me, waiting to push me over the edge and trap me under a crate when I try to retrieve the one thing left of Daddy.

  In my book light’s beam, I watch the cat’s head disappear.

  Fingers digging into the bricks, I pull up onto the edge and balance my right hip there. I lean sideways, anchoring myself with my legs bent over the outside lip, and dunk my arm in. After stirring the cold water around, I snag the flailing ball of fur by his collar.

  “You know, a dishrag would have the decency to lie still,” I scold him as he fights against me until chilly water coats both my arms. My book light falls off during our wrestling match, submerging in a shimmery trail.

  Our surroundings grow dim again, broken by sporadic slashes of lightning. I tug the cat close enough to the edge so he can climb out. Startled by a clap of thunder, his front paws latch onto my knee with razor-sharp barbs. Yelping, I writhe to free myself. We break apart, him tumbling to safety and me teetering headfirst into the water, swallowed up by frigid, liquid shadows.

  I capsize, unable to right my body, clawing my ponytail loose in the struggle. The book light descends below in slow motion—like a hazy yellow star orbiting farther and farther off in the distance—illuminating the bubbles and swirling currents caused by my violent entry. The depths seem to be unending.