Cold as Marble

by Zoe Aarsen

  Henry and Trey pulled me away from Violet by the arms, and Violet fell against Pete. It took a second before all of us on that snowy slope heard the deep, monstrous rumble growing around us. “What is that?” Trey asked. All of us looked around wildly, but I already knew what was coming our way.

  “Avalanche!” I shouted.

  The snow from above us on the slope seemed to slide directly down toward us as if someone had cut a slice of it off the mountainside. It descended upon us faster than I could even consider the best action to take to protect myself. Some kids facing the snow just stood there, paralyzed with fear. Others tried to get out of the way, but the snow was just too fast. It crashed toward us with a deafening roar, uprooting trees and carrying them down toward us. The last thing I saw before being knocked off my feet by snow was Trey, who extended his arms toward me, fingers outstretched, reaching.

  But he was just a second too late. The snow tore us apart, and in a flash of white, he was gone.

  Tumbling, crashing. For what felt like a lifetime I was thrown in every direction, upside down, skidding, and rolling on my side. I squeezed my eyes shut, but snow filled my mouth and ears, and my gloves came off. It occurred to me to try to curl my body into a ball to prevent my arms and legs from being pulled every which way, but I was moving so fast that I couldn’t even make my extremities accept commands from my brain.

  And then finally, it stopped. I couldn’t breathe; there was no air in my lungs at all, and they felt as if they were ablaze. Everything around me was dark, and I tried to move my arms as if I were swimming through the snow, doing everything I could to push them over my head. Back in the days when Olivia had first haunted my bedroom, I thought I’d known what terror was. But this was a different kind of terror, not even knowing if I was right side up or upside down, clawing my way through snow, unaware of whether I was making my way toward the surface or digging myself further toward my death.

  I knew I needed to calm down and think rationally, but fighting the nature of the human body as it shuts down is impossible. My thoughts slowed down and turned to Jennie. Had the final moments of her life been like this—dark and charged with panic? Had she suffocated on smoke the same way in which I was suffocating on snow? I wondered if she’d appear to me as my neurons stopped firing to accompany me into the spirit world… if what I was experiencing was physical death. And I was pretty sure it was.

  I found myself hoping that would be the case. I longed to see my sister again, and any thoughts I had about how my parents would grieve me after my body was found seemed unimportant and distant. All of the details of my life blurred together into a mist; Sheridan, Violet, even Trey. A blur of images without details. This must have been what people meant when they talked about your life flashing before your eyes. I thought of a thousand arbitrary things at once: elementary school pencil cases, the smell of freshly cut grass, the velvety texture of my favorite chenille blanket, Trey’s boyish laugh when we were kids and would climb trees together.

  Then, suddenly, I became aware that I could move my left foot, and that awareness blossomed into a realization that my left ski was still attached to my boot and it felt as if part of the ski was sticking out of the snow. Adrenaline flooded through me, reviving me with one last gust of energy to fight for my life. I wildly kicked my left leg, afraid that I might trigger the snow to begin siding again, but desperately needing oxygen. Contorting my body, I kicked my right leg and clawed with my hands until somehow, miraculously, I saw a speck of light.

  I broke through the snow and inhaled so deeply it sounded as if I were screaming. My breathing remained a howl as I gulped down oxygen, unable to even assess my whereabouts or the aftermath of the avalanche until the fire in my brain and lungs had been extinguished.

  And then I looked around and realized that I had no idea where I was. The helicopter that had been circling overhead when we’d confronted Violet was so far away that I could barely hear its blades chopping at the sky. My goggles had been knocked off, and I peered up the mountain, realizing that the snow must have carried me through trees. At first, I thought I was completely alone because all I heard around me was silence. And then—twenty, thirty feet above me on the slope—I saw skis sticking out of the snow.

  I couldn’t tell if they were still attached to anyone’s feet.

  Slowly, feeling as if every bone in my body had been bruised, I climbed out of the deep snow, crawling out onto the surface with extra caution to avoid triggering another slide.

  Requiring every ounce of willpower I could summon, I stood up and assessed the damage to my body. My nose was bleeding, probably from when the goggles had been knocked off. I’d lost my right ski and my helmet, too. The skin on my hands was bright red and raw from being exposed to snow for so long.

  I was alive, and as far as I could tell, I wasn’t seriously injured. Once I realized that, I felt as if I’d been stabbed in the gut. Because as I looked around, I had no idea where Henry, Trey, or Cheryl were.

  Violet’s prediction had come true. But this time she might have been one of her own victims.

  CHAPTER 20

  THE LOGICAL COURSE OF ACTION would have been to use Henry’s phone to call the police and alert them to my location. But I couldn’t make that call and attempt to express coherent thoughts until I knew where Henry and Trey were. So instead of reaching into my jacket for the phone, I wandered around, stunned, through the trees. There had to have been around thirty people on the landing at Stevens’ Pass when I’d arrived with my friends to confront Violet, but when I dug around the skis I saw poking out of the snow a little higher up on the mountain from where I’d landed, I was relieved but still distressed because they weren’t attached to any boots. The force of the sliding snow must have torn them off of the feet of whoever had been wearing them.

  Ahead of me, I thought I saw a flash of lime green in between two trees, and I took a few more steps in that direction until I was sure that my eyes weren’t deceiving me. It was Cheryl. She was sitting upright, and she was stunned—but alive.

  “Cheryl!” I cried and broke into a run. She stood up, and we threw our arms around each other, collapsing into sobs.

  “I thought I was dead!” she sobbed into my hair.

  “You’re not dead. We’re here. We’re okay,” I assured her.

  I wiped tears from my eyes and looked around, wondering just how massive the avalanche had been to have thrown us so far apart from each other. “We have to find Henry and Trey,” I told her.

  “They could be anywhere,” she replied, sounding overwhelmed. Looking upward in the direction of the top of the mountain, it was impossible to distinguish natural debris from anything that might have been part of a human body. Overhead, we heard the helicopter growing closer, but I hoped that it would keep its distance so as to not loosen any more shelves of snow.

  I unfastened my one remaining ski and ditched it to be more nimble. We wandered around on wobbly legs until I saw what looked like a hole in the snow that someone had crawled out of. “It looks like someone pulled themselves out of there!” I exclaimed. There were footsteps in the snow leading out of that hole and up the mountain farther, into a thicker wooded area, and we hurried along to see where they led.

  This area of the mountainside was so dense with trees that there wasn’t even much snow on the ground; it had instead collected on the branches of the pine trees around us. It was odd, after having been surrounded by snow from every angle all afternoon, to suddenly find ourselves walking on dry pine needles in a stretch of terrain that felt completely disconnected from the activity of the bustling resort.

  Then I saw something that made me cry out in joy. Both Trey and Henry were kneeling on the ground, fully focused on arranging something. “Trey!” I called. My voice broke, and I started crying uncontrollably, pretty sure I’d never been happier in my whole life than right then. When he turned and saw me, he got up on his feet and ran toward me.

  “Oh my God. You’re alive!” he exclaimed,
smothering me with kisses. He lifted me off the ground and spun me around.

  “And you’re alive!” I cradled his face in my hands and stared into his eyes, never wanting to look away.

  But Cheryl cleared her throat to catch my attention. “Ahem,” she said, and nodded to where, thirty feet away, Henry was positioning an unmoving body on the ground.

  The body wore a shiny lavender ski jacket and matching pants.

  My jaw dropped. “Is she…,” I asked Trey.

  “She has a pulse,” Trey informed us. “Henry and I were looking for you when we found her.”

  I reached inside my coat for Henry’s phone to check the time, and discovered that the screen had cracked. It was 3:47 p.m. I estimated that Cheryl and I hadn’t walked around looking for others for more than ten minutes. But I couldn’t guess how long Violet had gone without oxygen. The responsible course of action would have been to call 911 immediately to request medical attention for her.…

  And yet, this was all her fault.

  Her spirits must have told her to predict this avalanche and issue deaths for Jason, Chitra, Cheryl, and who knew how many others. However, Cheryl was standing next to me, perfectly fine except for a limp and probably a future case of PTSD.

  So far.

  Violet had predicted a death for Cheryl, and there was just less than an hour remaining before the new moon occurred. The curse was not yet broken.

  “Is she okay?” I asked, walking toward Henry. Trey and Cheryl followed me, and when we got closer I saw that Violet’s enormous blue eyes were open.

  “Don’t try to move,” Henry was instructing her. But he wasn’t telling her to hold still because he wanted to keep her immobile until we had a chance to play the game. Her right leg was bent below the knee at a gnarly angle, surely broken. He looked up at us, concerned. “She’s hurt pretty bad.”

  Upon noticing us, Violet began crying. “You’re going to kill me, aren’t you?”

  I was surprised—and offended—that she really believed Trey and I were capable of murder. Then it dawned on me that she must have concluded that the way I intended to break the curse was to actually end her life. “We’re not going to kill you, Violet,” I assured her, trying to sound comforting. “We just have to play the game with you. That’s it. No one has to die.” However, even as I explained this to her, panic was building in my chest that she might go into shock at any moment. The game might not work if she was incapacitated. And it was unimaginable what would happen to Trey, Henry, and me if she were to die out there on the side of the mountain while we watched.

  I noticed on Henry’s phone that Kirsten had left a voice mail twenty-two minutes earlier, which must have been when I’d felt the vibration of the phone ringing. With a flash of pain in my gut, I hoped that Kirsten hadn’t been calling with bad news about Mischa.

  “She really needs medical attention,” Cheryl murmured.

  It was sickeningly callous and inhumane of me, but we wouldn’t get another chance to play the game before we ran out of time. I glanced at the phone again to check the time. It was 3:49 p.m. We had fifty-five minutes, and it probably wouldn’t take rescuers that long to find us. So I knelt down alongside Violet and informed her, “All we have to do is play a game like Light as a Feather, and I’ll tell a story for you. Then the curse will be broken, and you won’t have to protect your mom anymore. Do you think you can hang on just for, like, five minutes?”

  With glazed eyes, she struggled to prop herself up on her elbows. “It really hurts,” she sputtered.

  “I know. I’m sorry,” I said, feeling truly awful that I hadn’t already called for help. “But just five minutes, Violet. That’s all it’ll take.”

  She looked around at all of our faces. I couldn’t wager a guess what she was thinking, but I was sure that her physical pain was probably outweighing her inclination to make the logical choice, which was to break the curse once and for all while we were all assembled before the new moon. Finally, with a trembling lower lip, she said, “Just make it fast.” She set her head back down on the ground, ready for me to initiate the game.

  Since I was the only one among us who had played the game before, I directed my friends to take positions kneeling on the ground around Violet’s body as she blinked up at the sky. Cheryl and Trey placed outstretched fingers beneath Violet’s hips on both sides, and Henry placed them under her feet. We debated whether or not to remove her ski boots, but decided against it for fear of messing up her broken leg even more. I explained to my friends how, after I predicted Violet’s death, they would have to chant, light as a feather, cold as marble, and attempt to raise Violet’s body off the ground.

  I placed my fingers on her temples, remembering that Jennie had told me she’d show me Violet’s death. “It’s not going to work for you,” Violet mumbled. “Not the way it works for me. They’re going to be so… angry.”

  Suddenly afraid of what it might mean for my own conscience if ending the curse actually resulted in Violet’s mom dying, I unzipped my coat pocket and was very happy to find that my makeshift pendulum and the cigarette lighter were still in there. “Hand me some of those pine needles, Cheryl,” I instructed her. She twisted around to grab a handful of golden needles off the ground and passed them to me. At that point in the winter, there were no leaves to be found on trees, and I believed it would be better to burn what was available than to burn nothing at all.

  Carefully holding the pine needles off to the side so that embers wouldn’t fall on Violet’s face, I lit a few of them and waved them around so that wisps of smoke swirled around all four of us and across Violet’s body. Then I dangled the lanyard from my index finger and asked, “Pendulum. If we play Light as a Feather, Cold as Marble with Violet, will we be putting her mother’s life in jeopardy?”

  Side to side. No. Violet’s mother would survive if we broke the curse.

  Cheryl looked utterly horrified. “What the hell are you doing?” she asked.

  “Just… trust her,” Henry said.

  “I’ll explain later,” I promised Cheryl. “Pendulum, is Jennie here with us?” The pendulum slowed to a stop, dangled motionlessly, and then reversed its direction to move back and forth. Yes.

  “Is she listening?” I asked. The pendulum swung back and forth. “Jennie, if we play Light as a Feather, Cold as Marble, will you show me Violet’s death?”

  Yes.

  I still wasn’t sure how she was going to actually do that, though. When we’d cast a spell with Kirsten at the bookstore, she’d used mirrors as a method of allowing spirits to visually show us things. But we were on the side of the mountain in the aftermath of a natural disaster. There was no chance we had a cosmetic mirror among us. “I need something reflective,” I announced.

  Trey hopped up and dashed over to a nearby tree. He returned to us carrying the ski goggles that Henry had bought for him earlier that afternoon. They had a hot orange tint to them but were, indeed, reflective. “Will that work?”

  The image of my face was slightly distorted in the goggles, but they were the best option I had. “It’ll work,” I told him. “Could you hold it, just like that?”

  He slipped the index finger of his right hand beneath Violet’s hip again and held the goggles toward me with his left hand.

  I knelt behind Violet’s head, my knees just barely touching the top of her hair. She closed her eyes, knowing what her role was in this routine.

  I pressed the tips of the fingers on my left hand to Violet’s temple and continued to hold the lanyard in my right hand. “Pendulum,” I asked, my voice anxiously fluttering as I looked at my reflection in the goggles. I placed my left hand firmly on top of Violet’s head, tightly gripping her skull. “Can you show me Violet’s future death?”

  Violet flinched beneath my fingertips. She winced but did not open her eyes. The pendulum began moving in a clockwise circular pattern and swung faster as the diameter of the circle in which it spun widened.

  “What… is… happening?” Tr
ey asked.

  I kept my eyes focused on the goggles, ignoring Cheryl’s comment of “Oh my God,” but all I saw were my own expectant dark eyes with pine trees behind me in the distance and snow clouds overhead.

  “Can you see anything?” Henry asked.

  “I don’t know,” I admitted, confused and a little disappointed. “I really thought this would work.” Panic rose in my throat. If we’d come this far—escaped from our respective schools, lied to our parents and destroyed their trust in us, thrown away our plans for college, managed to get Violet away from everyone else to play the game—and I couldn’t visualize her death, I didn’t know what else I could do. It would be a failure of epic proportions.

  And just then, I realized that I wasn’t looking at my own reflection in the goggles. I was looking at Jennie as if she were my age—sixteen—and not eight, as she was when I’d last seen her alive. She blinked when I didn’t, and she mouthed, Watch. “Wait, wait, something’s happening,” I mumbled distractedly just to ensure that Trey wouldn’t move the goggles.

  The goggles clouded over, and a scene slowly took shape. It appeared to be a doctor’s office. It was the middle of the afternoon, with sunlight streaming in through horizontal blinds, casting stripes of sunlight on the far wall, bouncing off of yellowed medical school diplomas framed behind glass. A male doctor with a white beard was seated at the desk, and he folded his hands on the desktop, fighting the urge to open the file before him. He was speaking with a woman who was seated across from him on the other side of the desk, a woman with short gray hair who was listening attentively. Although I couldn’t hear anything with my ears related to what I saw happening, I sensed pulses of energy in my head similar to the voices I often heard that explained to me well enough what was going on. I began narrating out of fear that I’d not describe the story being shown to me well enough for the game to work if I waited too long and forgot details.

  “It was the middle of the afternoon in a doctor’s office. A doctor with a white beard was informing Violet about some test results that had come back.”