by Zoe Aarsen
The scene playing out in the goggles switched angles to show me Violet’s reaction. I was startled by her appearance; it was definitely her, although she appeared to be much, much older. Perhaps as old as seventy or eighty, with fine wrinkles in her heavily powdered skin. She was still pretty, her eyes still framed with long lashes. Heavy pearl earrings stretched out her earlobes, and she was tastefully dressed in a stylish cashmere sweater. She always had favored sweaters. She seemed to be listening to the doctor attentively, and I was able to distinguish the word “cancer” as his mouth formed it.
“She’d been feeling ill for weeks, exhausted. Weak. No matter how much sleep she got, she felt unrested. The doctor confirmed her worst fear: that she had inoperable cancer. It had begun in her colon and had rapidly spread to her lymph nodes, significantly decreasing her chances for survival.”
The goggles continued, advancing a little further into the future. A group of middle-aged men and women had gathered in the parlor of a grand house—possibly but not definitely the Simmons mansion—and they all sat patiently on a sofa. Violet was breaking the news to these people, who I suspected were her children and their spouses.
“Violet was told she had less than a year to live. Because her husband had already passed away, she decided right there and then in the doctor’s office that she wouldn’t seek treatment. If her time had come, she wanted to face it, and not spend the last months of her life ill from chemotherapy. She knew that, because of terrible things she’d done as a girl, she would welcome the death meant for her with open arms. She gathered her sons and their wives, her daughter and her husband, and all of her grandchildren together—”
I choked, becoming overwhelmed by the sadness of it all despite my strong dislike for Violet. She remained completely still beneath my fingertips, not reacting to the story I was telling about her future death in any way.
“—and told them that it was her wish to enjoy her last few months spending as much time with her grandchildren as possible, and to die at home rather than in a sterile, impersonal hospital. So she grew thinner and frailer, passing each morning in the garden that reminded her of the one which had been planted by her grandmother in Willow.”
The scene being revealed to me in the goggles was so vivid that it was like watching a movie, and I wondered if Violet’s spirits had shown her my friends’ deaths in such precise detail. “Violet awakened in the middle of the night, and sensed that her visiting nurse was in the room, snoring gently in the nearby rocking chair. She knew that her time had come. She kept her eyes closed and focused on breathing until at last her lungs would not take in any more air. In the morning, the nurse found Violet’s lifeless body in her bed.”
Next, the goggles showed me a memorial service at Gundarsson’s, and I understood this to mean that Violet would live out the rest of her life in our hometown. “Two days later, Violet lay in her coffin.…” I took a deep breath, praying to heaven with all my might that what I was about to do would work and spare Mischa and Tracy from the same fate met by Olivia and Candace, if they were still alive.
“Light as a feather, cold as marble.”
I felt Violet’s body jerk beneath my hand, and looked up to see Henry, Trey, and Cheryl all looking as bewildered as I was. “Light as a feather, cold as marble,” I repeated.
They joined in my chant, “Light as a feather, cold as marble. Light as a feather, cold as marble.” We began to raise her off the ground slowly, and she was as weightless as I remembered Olivia and Candace’s bodies being when we’d first played the game.
Beneath the palm of my hand and through Violet’s thick dark hair, I felt the temperature of her head dropping. It became cold quickly. Inhumanly cold, like a block of ice, so much that the bones of my left hand ached as the chill seeped through the skin on my fingertips. I heard Henry gasp, and we observed the skin on Violet’s forehead and cheeks turning a pale shade of periwinkle blue, marbling over like stone. Her chest had ceased rising and falling, and a fuzzy white film of frost had accumulated on her lower lip. By all appearances, she was dead, frozen solid.
Cold as marble.
“She’s freezing!” Cheryl whispered hysterically.
“Don’t let go of her,” I commanded. “Light as a feather, cold as marble.”
“Holy shit,” Trey mumbled.
“Light as a feather, cold as marble,” Henry managed to chant.
Jennie wasn’t finished showing me details in the goggles. I saw Violet’s family gathered at the cemetery behind St. Monica’s church, a sight all too familiar to me from my many visits to Jennie’s grave. They all wore black, and a young priest I didn’t recognize led them in prayer as Violet’s coffin was lowered into the ground. It was a magnificent spring day, with not a cloud in the sky, and birds chirped high above in the tree branches. As the family began to disperse, wrapping arms around one another and blotting away tears with handkerchiefs, Jennie panned my view to show me a headstone a few feet away from the grave into which Violet’s coffin had been placed. On it was engraved the name TREY EMORY.
It was all I could do to not cry out in objection.
But there wasn’t time to dwell on whatever Jennie was trying to communicate about the importance of Trey being buried near Violet. The tip of Violet’s nose was turning blue, and the color was spreading across her face. Her head was so cold beneath the fingers of my left hand that it seemed like if someone were to tap her body with a hammer, she’d shatter like a ceramic vase. In the second that I turned my attention away from the goggles and dared to look at her, the scene I’d been watching unfold in the reflection vanished and was replaced with something terrifying.
I saw myself, my own reflection, right at that very moment, with the trees towering behind me. And then I saw three forms take shape to the left of me as if people were standing behind me, and two more appeared over my right shoulder. I shuddered, and the breath that I exhaled was frigid with horror. I squinted at the reflection in the goggles in an attempt to see more detail, but the five forms looked like faceless girls my age with long dark hair. They were Violet’s five sisters, I was sure of it, and I struggled to maintain my composure as it seemed in the reflection like they were leaning over my shoulders to get closer to Violet.
And then I saw in the gap between the first three forms and the last two that another shape had appeared. This one, it seemed, was Violet. The features of her face were blurred, but the contours of her head were recognizable.
She was there with them, in their realm. Their forms turned to acknowledge her.
We’d done what Jennie had advised us to do.
“McKenna! We have to stop! We’re killing her!” Henry said.
I would have thought that if Violet were still breathing, her breath would have poured out of her frozen nostrils and through her parted, frosty lips as steam. But she appeared to be as solid as a block of ice. Unbreathing.
We’d perhaps gone too far. If her body was truly frozen, her internal organs were frozen too, and her life functions had stopped. She had truly joined her sisters in their realm.
“Pendulum, are we done? Did we break the curse?” I asked in a hoarse whisper, afraid that we had murdered Violet.
It swung back and forth. Yes.
“Set her down and stop touching her!” I commanded my friends in a shrill voice, and they lowered her the few inches she’d been raised back down to the forest floor.
Color quickly returned to Violet’s cheeks. The frost on her lips melted into drops of liquid reminiscent of dew. None of us dared to move or speak until she finally wiggled her fingers and then mashed her lips together. Before even opening her eyes, she managed to croak, “It’s cold.”
Groaning in pain, she propped herself up on one elbow and then coughed into her fist. The four of us all eased back, in awe of what we’d done.
“Is it over for good?” Trey asked eagerly, nodding at the pendulum. “Ask it.”
I asked the makeshift pendulum, “Is it over for good?”
“Ask it if it’s over for evil,” Trey joked.
“Are they done with me?” she asked when she was finally able to get words out.
“I think so,” I informed her.
“What about the snow? How did I get here? Where’s Pete?” It seemed like perhaps either the game or the excruciating pain she was in had stunted her memory.
I calmly described the avalanche to her, and that everyone who had been standing with us at Stevens’ Pass had been carried farther down the mountain with the sliding snow. “I don’t know who, other than the five of us, survived,” I admitted. “When we get out of here, we have to be prepared for some very bad news.”
“That can’t be right,” she whimpered. “I didn’t tell a story for him. I wouldn’t do that.” Violet processed what it meant that we’d played the game and I’d predicted her death while she’d been frozen. “You have to let me call my mother,” she said, her huge blue eyes round with worry. “I need to know she’s okay.”
Suddenly, since having seen Violet’s future death, I didn’t view the girl in front of me as such an evil threat anymore. I’d spent months despising her, fearing her, and wishing I’d never crossed paths with her, but now she sat before us, defenseless. She was more worried about her mother’s life than about her own broken leg. If everything she’d previously told us about how the curse functioned was true, I couldn’t feel anything but pity for her. I knew in my heart that if I’d been in her position, I would have done anything to save my own mother, such was my fierce love for her. Maybe Violet wasn’t such a heartless monster, after all. It had probably been pretty awful for her, having to do such terrible things and not being able to confide in anyone about it.
“We should call for help first,” I told her. Truthfully, I didn’t trust her. There was no telling what kind of lies she might tell her mother about what we’d done to her on the mountain that day if I let her use the phone before I reached out for help. I wouldn’t put it past her to tell her mother that we were holding her hostage. I dialed 911, and emergency operator told me that she would pinpoint our location from the cell phone’s position and send a rescue team on snowmobiles. “One of the people with us is injured,” I told her. “She has a broken leg.”
Once help was on the way, I decided it might be best to use the remaining time we had with Violet to our advantage. “You should tell us everything you know about how and why you predicted deaths. We deserve the truth, Violet. Especially Henry. Olivia didn’t do anything to hurt anyone.”
She looked around at all of us with saucer eyes that no longer danced with sarcasm and contempt. “They told me,” she sputtered, “that if I didn’t go out and get who they wanted, they’d kill my mom.” Every time I said no, they threatened me. They showed me how they’d do it. They told me that my life was a gift to her, and that if I didn’t serve them, they’d take her life away as a punishment.”
“Who, Violet?” I asked. “Who said they’d punish your mom?”
“I don’t know what they are. Ghosts, maybe? There are five of them. My mom had three stillborn daughters before I was born, and then another and a miscarriage when I was little. I don’t know if they’re the spirits of my real sisters, or something else just pretending to be my sisters. They died so that I could live, or at least that’s what… they say. It doesn’t make any sense to me, but that’s the reason they always give me for why they make me do things.”
She nodded in Trey’s direction and told us all, “He knows. They told me he knows too.”
Trey shrugged innocently. “I’ve seen them in dreams, but they’ve never asked me to do anything to another person.”
Violet’s magnificent blue eyes filled with tears. “Every time I’ve told them that I won’t do what they want, they make my mom get sick, and then they get greedy. They usually only want me to get them one person every month, but when they’re angry, they want more.”
“I think we ended it,” I told her. “I really and truly do. I don’t think they’re ever going to ask you to do anything for them again.”
Violet disagreed vehemently. “There’s no way to break it without my mom dying. Believe me. I’ve read books. I’ve Googled. Maybe you don’t care about me. That’s fine. I guess I couldn’t expect anything more. But my mom didn’t do anything wrong. She doesn’t deserve what they’ll do to her.”
“Olivia didn’t deserve to die,” I reminded her. “Neither did Candace, or Rebecca, or any of the people you killed in Lake Forest before you moved to our town.”
She squeezed her eyes shut, refusing to look at me. “I didn’t ask for this to happen to me, okay? I never wanted to kill anyone, and I don’t care if you believe me. You don’t know what it’s been like,” she shouted at me.
There was no consoling Violet at that point, so I did what any normal person would do now that help was on the way, and I gave her Henry’s phone. Tapping the shattered glass of the screen, she entered in the numbers of her family’s landline and waited. When her mother answered at the other end of the line, she burst into tears and yelped, “Mom?”
Violet’s mother was alive. She’d heard about the tragedy on Mt. Farthington, and she and her husband had been on pins and needles waiting for authorities in Traverse City to contact them about Violet’s status. The sun was starting to get low in the sky, and we were alone on a cold mountainside. The temperature was rapidly dropping, and I wished our rescuers would hurry up and arrive even if salvation meant we had to face the death toll of the avalanche.
Finally, at long last, we heard snowmobiles in the distance.
Henry and Trey stood and began shouting to catch their attention, but I remained kneeling next to Violet until two EMTs located us and examined her leg. Even though one of the rescuers insisted that I ride down to the base of the mountain to be examined by doctors, I waited until Violet was stabilized to be transported before I agreed to leave. Although I wouldn’t say that I felt any sympathy for her, I felt an odd connection to her that I hadn’t sensed before playing the game. Perhaps watching her future death had bound me to her. I wondered as I watched the EMTs position her on the back of one of the snowmobiles if she’d felt a similar tie to her victims before they’d died.
It was starting to get dark by the time I rode on the back of a snowmobile out from underneath the branches of the pine trees that had hidden us from helicopters while we played the game that ended the curse. That night there would be no moonlight in the sky. It was the start of a new lunar cycle, and the start of a new beginning for all of us. Despite the questions I knew that I’d be asked by police, school officials, and my parents, and despite the fact that I had no idea what kind of punishment Trey and I would be facing for running away from our respective boarding schools, my heart felt light and bouncy. Tiny flurries flitted around me as I cruised down the mountain over snowdrifts, almost as if celebrating our victory.
We’d done it. We’d ended the curse.
CHAPTER 21
TO OUR SURPRISE, OUR RESCUERS told us when we reached the base of the mountain that they’d been searching for us for over an hour. They’d been just about to bring in dogs to aid in the search before nightfall when I’d called for help.
Trey, Henry, and I were lucky that the rescuers had been told to prioritize our health and safety over enforcing criminal justice. Just like Violet and Cheryl, we were seen immediately by physicians from local hospitals who’d been brought to Mt. Farthington after the avalanche.
The scene around us was chaotic; there were police cars and news vans and news crews shooting live footage of us sitting in the backs of ambulances having our vitals taken. Even though at that point I didn’t want to be poked and prodded by doctors—I just wanted to go home to Willow and see my mom—the doctors on the scene
explained that we would all need to be examined in the emergency room. Everyone else who’d been rescued that afternoon had also been taken to the hospital, so we didn’t have much of a choice.
The EMTs split us up to transport us in three different ambulances. Trey and I insisted on riding together. We sat together on the gurney in the back of the ambulance and politely ignored the redheaded EMT who rode back there with us. Trey put his arm around my shoulders, and I eased into his embrace. Although the ride to the hospital was hardly private or romantic, I wondered if we would have another moment like that together before we were shipped back to Northern Reserve and Sheridan.
“You are amazing, do you know that?” he whispered into my ear, his breath tickling my skin. “I always thought you were special, but I just didn’t know how special.”
I thought he was referring to the way in which I had handled the pendulum and been able to watch what Jennie had shown me in the goggles. “It’s a gift. It doesn’t make me amazing, really. It just means that half of my soul is in the spirit world, you know? The connection between me and Jennie was never really broken when she died. But it took eight years for us to get back in touch.”
Trey pulled me closer so that he could kiss the top of my head. “Sure. All that may be true. But you’re still the most fearless, badass person I’ve ever met. I don’t know anyone else who would have found a way to get all of us here and still have the presence of mind after being involved in an avalanche to do what you did today.”
“I couldn’t have done it without you,” I reminded him. And Henry, too, but I didn’t want to say Henry’s name during such a tender moment.
“I think you could have,” Trey argued. “I think you’re capable of a lot more than you know.”
I smiled weakly at the EMT who sat facing us, wishing he weren’t there. Even though he could still hear me because he was only about two feet away from us in the cramped space, I dropped my voice to a whisper. “I can’t stand being away from you anymore,” I told Trey. “We have to find a way to be together after you’re released from Northern Reserve.”