Mary, Will I Die?

by Shawn Sarles

  Grace quickly turned the page, and there was one last illustration. But this one puzzled her the most.

  The maiden had disappeared completely from the scene, and now the serving girl stood with her back to the mirror, her clothes changed from rough burlap to colorful silk. Her hair done up beautifully. Her face glowing.

  But there was something off about the drawing. Grace couldn’t put her finger on it until … there, on the ground behind the serving girl. A trail of blood led right to the mirror. Were they footprints? Or droplets? And were they going to the mirror? Or coming out of it?

  Grace squinted and saw the flicker of something in the mirror’s reflection. It could have been the serving girl’s shadow. Or it could just as easily have been the demon waiting to claim her next prize.

  “Well?” Steph asked, jarring Grace out of her thoughts.

  “I—” Grace tried to think it out. “I think it’s something to do with vanity. Mirrors and being drawn in by your own reflection. But without the translation, I can’t know for sure. It’s definitely dark. But it wouldn’t be a German fairy tale without a little bloodshed.”

  “We can at least look up the title,” Steph suggested.

  Of course. That would help. Grace fumbled to get her phone out while also holding on to the book, then quickly typed in the German words. “Die Verflucht Frau.”

  “ ‘The Cursed Woman,’ ” she read aloud, her voice trembling slightly, the words knocking the room into an eerie silence.

  “So what now?” Calvin asked after a few moments, and Grace was surprised to see that he and Steph were looking to her.

  “Well …” Grace cast around for an idea. And her eyes fell on the shrouded piece of furniture across the room. “I guess we should start with the mirror. Did everyone see something that day? When we played Elena’s game? It was supposed to reveal our soulmates, right?”

  “I saw Henry,” Elena announced, perking up at the change in conversation. “Which makes total sense because we’ve been together for three years.”

  “You were together,” Steph corrected her.

  “Do you think that’s why he got hurt?” Grace gasped. “Because you broke up?”

  Elena’s expression soured, but before she could snap a retort, Grace had gone on.

  “No, that wouldn’t make sense because I’m not with—” And then she froze, realizing that she was thinking out loud.

  “You’re not with who?” Elena pressed, a gleeful smirk raising the corners of her mouth. “Who’d you see in the mirror that day?”

  “I saw—” Grace’s face flushed at the thought of confessing. But she couldn’t hide it. Not if they wanted to get to the bottom of this. “I saw Calvin.”

  Her ears burned. She couldn’t look at him. Couldn’t bear to see if he was surprised or—

  “And who did you see, Calvin?” Elena took the reins, enjoying herself now.

  “I—” Calvin struggled to get the words out, which only made Grace feel worse. He hadn’t seen her. They weren’t meant to be. She wasn’t his soulmate.

  “I didn’t see a person,” Calvin finally managed to get out. “I saw her.”

  It was like a lightning bolt had struck the center of the room, stunning them all with the revelation.

  He’d seen it. The demon. He’d seen death. Which meant …

  A lump formed in Grace’s throat.

  Was that why he had the visions? Why he saw danger everywhere he looked? He was seeing and drawing all these disasters, these accidents hurting the people around him. And eventually, he’d draw his own.

  She wanted to reach out and give him a hug. She wanted to assure him that they’d figure a way out of this. They’d stop this curse. They’d save him.

  But how could she guarantee that? Would her empty promises mean anything? Especially now that he knew she’d seen his face in the mirror. That she liked him. That she’d had a crush on him for the past five years.

  The lump in Grace’s throat swelled, and this time she couldn’t swallow it down. She could only stand in silence and worry.

  “Last but not least,” Elena chirped in a singsong voice. “Who did you see, Steph?”

  “I—” Steph faltered, and Grace worried she might have seen the demon, too. “I saw Cody Crosby.”

  “Didn’t his family move away last year?” Elena asked, clearly disappointed in Steph’s answer, though Grace didn’t know what else she would have expected.

  Steph nodded, her eyes downcast as she worried at her bottom lip.

  “I barely knew him,” she eventually said, shrugging. “So I never put much thought into it.”

  That left them at another dead end.

  “So if it wasn’t actually showing us our soulmates …” Grace wouldn’t let the mystery stump her yet. “What did it do?”

  She turned her attention to the mirror, still covered by its sheet, standing by itself in the corner of the room. She took a few steps toward it, feeling the air chill around her, an uncomfortable prickle crawling like a spider up her neck.

  But she also felt its pull—a pulse beckoning her to come closer.

  “What are you doing?” Elena sounded panicked all of a sudden.

  “Isn’t this what we’re here to see?” Grace asked. And before Elena could get out another word of protest, she’d grabbed the sheet and tugged.

  They all watched as the shroud unfurled in a rush of sliding linen. But when the mirror came into full view, a collective gasp ran through the room.

  “It’s cracked,” Grace murmured, turning to Elena. And for once, Elena didn’t have a snappy reply at the ready.

  “It wasn’t my fault—”

  Grace wasn’t listening, though. She’d turned back to inspect the mirror. But she could only see the gaping hole, the void right where her heart would be reflected.

  “It was an accident. I didn’t mean to—” Elena sputtered, losing steam.

  “When?” Grace asked, her voice surprisingly calm.

  “I don’t know. Maybe a week ago?”

  Grace nodded, absorbing the new detail, adding it to the mystery.

  Other than the crack, the mirror looked exactly as she remembered it. Ornate and old. Sturdy. A silver filigree swooped around the mirror’s face with pearls inset into the pattern. But as Grace got closer to the frame to really examine it, she saw that the silver wasn’t a decorative border at all.

  It was a script. Actual words, though not in any language or alphabet she recognized.

  She ran her fingers along the lines, feeling the bumps of the looping letters, how they curved and coiled around the mirror’s face like a snake. There was something familiar about them, but she couldn’t figure out what.

  “Let me take a picture of these,” Grace said as she stood up. She pulled out her phone and centered the camera on the mirror. Then she came in close, getting shots of the script, making sure she got all of it.

  When she stepped back, though, something wasn’t right. A strange aura had invaded every picture, wrapping the mirror and the words in dark shadows, an impenetrable fog.

  Grace scrolled back and forth through her photo gallery, sure that there was something wrong with her eyes or with the camera lens. She even took a test shot of her feet and then pointed the phone back up at the mirror. The white laces of her shoes came back crystal clear, but again, the picture of the mirror was completely blurred out.

  “Can I borrow some paper?” Grace asked. Calvin didn’t waste any time as he tore a page from the back of his notebook and handed it to her along with his pen.

  Grace startled at how heavy the writing utensil felt in her hand. Heavy and cold. A weapon. A knife with its pointed tip. And wasn’t it just as dangerous? At least in Calvin’s fingers?

  She shook the thought from her head and focused back on the mirror, plopping onto the floor and getting to work. She copied the symbols down as quickly as she could. Elena’s mom would call for them soon, and she wanted to make sure she got this right. She just knew that the w
ords held the key to figuring this whole thing out.

  And if she could decode them, then maybe—just maybe—she could save Calvin.

  A pile of papers lay scattered on the floor of Grace’s bedroom, like autumn leaves just dropped from their branches. They crackled as she picked through them, her tongue stuck out in concentration.

  “I’ve been doing a ton of research,” Grace explained as she shuffled through more of her notes. She looked so in her element, and it impressed Calvin that she’d pulled together so much in only a couple of days.

  “There are a ton of superstitions around mirrors,” Grace went on. “They can be used to summon spirits and to see the future. They’re doorways between our world and the next. They can steal souls. Suck them right out of our bodies. And they can even be used to foreshadow someone’s death.”

  She paused then, her face paling as her eyes darted up to meet Calvin’s.

  “It’s okay,” Calvin assured her.

  And it really was. He’d had this fate looming over his head for almost five years now. The visions and the drawings. He’d gotten used to it all. Grown tired of it. And had even, in a way, come to accept it.

  “I’ve also been looking into Elena’s grandmother’s story,” Grace picked back up, choosing her words more carefully now. “Trying to find its origin and a translation. Obviously, Germany was my first thought, but I couldn’t find anything. Not when I searched for ‘Die Verflucht Frau.’ And not with anything else I tried.”

  “Maybe it’s original,” Calvin suggested. He’d thought a lot about that book, the hand-painted illustrations and the fact that it didn’t have a title. About how old it looked. “It could be part of a family collection. Something passed down from generation to generation.”

  “I was thinking that, too,” Grace agreed. “I just need to see it again so I can translate it. But who knows if Elena will even hand it over. You heard her. She thinks this is all a joke.”

  Elena had seemed pretty dismissive when they’d left her house the other night. She thought Calvin had made it all up. Or that he had something wrong with his brain. But he knew he wasn’t crazy. Finding this connection had proven that. It had given him hope. If they could only piece it all together.

  “Have you made any progress on that mirror language?” Calvin asked as he picked up the page that had come out of his own notebook. He studied the script that Grace had copied down. She had a steady hand. She could probably make a good artist on her own. He traced his finger along the smooth loops as if that could somehow let him understand it.

  “Another dead end,” Grace sighed. “But I got some solid leads. It looks kind of like something I found in this old grimoire online.”

  Calvin cocked an eyebrow.

  “It’s like a textbook,” Grace explained. “But for magic. It has incantations and summonings and spells and rituals. I ordered one online that seemed promising, but I won’t know until it gets here.”

  Grace fell silent then, her shoulders sagging as she exhausted her research. Calvin didn’t like how defeated she looked. She’d already done so much. None of them could have gotten half as far.

  “Maybe Elena will come around.” Calvin tried to sound optimistic. “Or she’ll remember something her grandmother said.”

  Grace huffed out a stream of air. “I doubt it.”

  “Didn’t you used to be friends?” Calvin asked, curiosity getting the better of him. “I just—I remember you two were always whispering when we used to carpool together.”

  “We were close,” Grace replied, her hand sneaking up to her chest, pulling at the locket around her neck, which Calvin had come to recognize as a nervous tic.

  “What happened?”

  “I’m not really sure.” Grace’s eyes lost their focus suddenly, turned distant.

  “You don’t have to—”

  “It’s fine,” she went on, even though she looked anything but fine. “Elena and I were friends. Best friends. But then after my mom—after she was gone—Elena just disappeared. She abandoned me, too, right when I needed her the most.”

  Calvin felt the wind knocked out of him. He hadn’t realized that the two losses were connected. He hadn’t even known for certain that Grace’s mom had died in that car accident until Grace had mentioned it a couple of weeks ago. But to lose her best friend right after going through that—it was criminal.

  “I don’t know if I wasn’t cool enough,” Grace continued, “or if my sadness was too much for her to handle. It doesn’t really matter. I stopped hearing from her and that was that.”

  “I wish I had known,” Calvin replied.

  But Grace only shrugged. “You probably wouldn’t have liked me back then. I was sad all the time.”

  Grace sighed, her shoulders dipping again. She still didn’t look happy, but at least the tears had cleared from her eyes.

  “But now I know not to put too much faith in anyone. Because you never know when they’ll decide to leave you.”

  It sounded bleak, but Calvin couldn’t blame her.

  “You can count on me,” he assured her. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  But even this, Calvin realized too late, was a lie. He had no idea how much longer he had left. Each day could be his last. And it looked like Grace knew that, too.

  “Here, I want to show you something.” Calvin held out his hands for Grace to stay put while he got to his feet and grabbed his bag. He quickly fished out his notebook and flipped to the back of it.

  “Trying to cheer me up with your death drawings?”

  “No. These aren’t those drawings. They’re mine.”

  And Calvin opened the notebook to show her, turning the pages slowly so she could see.

  “These,” Grace stammered as she fingered the corners of the pages. “These are amazing.”

  Calvin had to hide his own smile at her glee. “It’s your Wolf Man.”

  Grace tapped the picture excitedly. He’d known she’d like that one.

  “And that’s not all.”

  Calvin held his breath as he flipped the page. He’d finished it late the night before.

  “You—” Grace gasped, her eyes darting from the page to Calvin. “You drew this for me?”

  “Unless you know of another Elvira fan.”

  Calvin couldn’t contain his grin this time. He’d had to look up the horror hostess because he had no idea who she was. But he’d seen her on enough of Grace’s T-shirts to know she was one of her idols. Once he had a few references, it’d been pretty easy to draw Grace in the woman’s likeness.

  “So I take it you’re a fan?”

  “I love it!” Grace screeched. She flung her arms around Calvin’s neck. “Can I have it?”

  And Calvin nodded, carefully tearing the picture out of his notebook.

  “You have to sign it first,” Grace insisted, which threw Calvin off.

  He’d never had to do that before. Did he sign his whole name or just his initials? He’d seen artists do it both ways. Unsure, he quickly decided on a combination and squiggled a C and then his last name in the bottom corner. He handed it off to Grace and she leapt to her feet, padding across the room to her desk where she pinned it proudly on her bulletin board.

  “My very own Calvin Lee original.” She beamed back at him. “Hopefully the first of many.”

  And then, before either of them could get caught up in what she’d just said, Grace bounded back and sat down next to him.

  “You know, you should do this at the carnival. Set up an easel and everything. I bet a lot of people would pay to have their own monster caricature.”

  “But we’re going to the carnival together,” Calvin replied. He didn’t want to abandon her on opening night. And he wasn’t sure that he was ready for so many people to see his work. He couldn’t control his visions. He never had any idea when they’d hit. The last thing he wanted was to hand someone a picture of a roller coaster crash or a finger lost on the Tilt-A-Whirl or a corn dog stick to the eye or a fun-house
fire.

  “Promise you’ll think about it,” Grace insisted. “I know it’s scary. Maybe you can do a bunch of random monsters before and sell them during the carnival. That way you won’t have to draw on the spot.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Calvin replied.

  “People need to see what you can do. You’re so talented.”

  And Calvin had to take a moment to collect himself. To breathe. No one had ever believed in him like this. No one had ever cared so much about him. He’d shared the scariest parts of himself and Grace hadn’t run away. She’d embraced him. She was doing everything she could to save him.

  “There’s something else you should see,” Calvin said slowly, deciding that he could trust her. He flipped back in his notebook, fingering the pages, thinking carefully before he pulled out three sheets of paper and laid them out in front of Grace.

  “What are these?” Grace asked as she bent close. And then she gasped.

  “It’s us,” Calvin said, pointing to each picture in succession. “Elena, Steph, and you.”

  “But when did you draw these?” Grace hadn’t looked up from the pages.

  “At the beginning of the month,” Calvin replied. “But I didn’t want to show anyone. I wasn’t sure what they meant.”

  “Is this Henry’s accident?”

  Grace pointed to the picture of Elena, a close-up of her face, her eyes wide with horror, her mouth open in a scream that Calvin could hear ripping off the page. Flecks of blood dotted her cheeks, and Calvin suddenly realized that Grace was right. It was from the accident, Henry’s blood speckled across Elena’s face. A premonition drawn weeks before it had happened.

  “Have the others come true yet?”

  Grace’s question brought Calvin out of his thoughts. His eyes darted to the other drawings—Steph with what looked like fireworks shooting off around her head, her eyes clenched shut in terror, and Grace surrounded by hundreds of shards of broken glass, blood dripping from her palm down to her elbow.

  “I don’t think so.” Calvin’s voice wobbled. Why did he have to be the bearer of bad news? This demon’s harbinger of doom?

  “Don’t worry,” Grace said, reaching out, stilling his trembling hands with her own. “We’ll figure this out before anything else happens. Before anyone else gets hurt.”