Graveyard Slot

by Michelle Schusterman

  After we cleaned up the rest of the glass, Dad turned on the TV and found a sitcom. He claimed he was too awake and felt like watching something, but I knew he was doing it because he thought I was scared. Two minutes into the show and he was snoring as loud as ever. I lay awake, listening to the laugh track and counting the bumps on the ceiling.

  In all honesty, I was scared. But not of the dark or of nightmares.

  I was afraid of myself.

  By the time I dragged myself out of bed, Dad was gone. I skipped showering—the memory of the scratches all over the tile was a little too fresh—and brushed my teeth and hair without looking in the mirror. When I got down to the lobby, Jamie was sitting on the sofa looking through a bunch of papers. He beamed when he saw me.

  “Hey!”

  “Hi!” I sat down, suddenly wishing I’d at least glanced at my reflection. “Where is everybody?”

  “The church.” Jamie held out a napkin-wrapped muffin. “Breakfast room closed a few minutes ago, so I grabbed this for you.”

  “Thanks.” I took the muffin gratefully. “Sorry I didn’t help edit last night.”

  “It’s okay! Your dad said you crashed pretty early.”

  I picked off a piece of muffin but didn’t eat it. “Yeah. I wasn’t feeling good.”

  Jamie was silent for a moment. I waited, wondering if he was going to ask what was wrong, or why I was acting so weird lately. I still wasn’t sure how much I wanted to share. Especially after last night.

  “Oscar and I have a theory,” he suddenly announced, and my stomach turned over.

  “About what?”

  “You.”

  “Um. Okay?”

  “So yesterday during Ouija, the message started out I want,” Jamie began. I nodded, trying not to shiver at the words. “Which could have been the same message you got from Ana back in Salvador, I want out. We were thinking it’s possible Ana came with you.”

  My face grew warm. “I’ve sort of wondered about that, too. Actually, I—I asked Sam and Roland about it because I kind of saw her at the waterfall.”

  Jamie’s eyes widened. “You did? Oscar didn’t mention that.”

  “I never told him,” I admitted. “Anyway, Sam said she’d have to have a pretty big reason to leave her mother’s grave and follow us, and I . . . I just have no idea why she’d do that.”

  “I do.” Jamie leaned forward. “This is going to seem kind of out there, though.”

  “Probably no weirder than what I’ve been thinking.” I tried to sound casual, but my stomach was knotting up tighter and tighter. Oscar and Jamie didn’t even know about the message on the cave walls or in the bathroom. If they thought I was possessed, too . . .

  “Okay.” Jamie took a deep breath. “We think you might be an exorcist.”

  I gaped at him. “A . . . what?”

  “You know, a person who performs exorcisms,” he explained eagerly. “After the Daems episode, everyone was freaking out about Emily. But some of the fans in the forums were more interested in what happened to Lidia. Especially after you blogged about Red Leer, how he’d been possessing her for, like, a week, how you’d gotten rid of him by using the flash on your camera. One person posted this theory: He thinks you basically performed an exorcism. Which is true, if you think about it,” Jamie added. “An exorcism is forcing a spirit out of another person’s body, right?”

  I blinked a few times. Bizarre as the idea was, it did make sense.

  “So last night, Oscar and I stayed up researching exorcisms,” Jamie went on, speaking faster now. “Exorcists can get rid of spirits possessing people—and animals and objects. Theoretically, they can even sometimes send the spirit from one thing into another, like, to trap it. So we think maybe when you guys contacted Ana, you somehow used your camera to exorcise her, just like you did with Red Leer.”

  “From who?” I interrupted. “She wasn’t possessing anyone!”

  “Right,” Jamie said. “But spirits can possess objects, too, remember? If her spirit was there—in her grave, her tombstone, or even her mother’s tombstone—you might have, like, pried her loose or something.” He paused, wrinkling his nose. “Okay, we don’t totally have that part of the theory worked out yet. But the rest makes sense.”

  I smiled despite myself. “Sure it does.”

  Jamie grinned. “Just hear me out. Let’s say somehow you conjured Ana’s ghost out of her grave and transferred it to another object. Then you took that object along and carried it with you everywhere. A possessed object like that, with all that spirit’s emotions, would make you feel weird, right? Anxious. Maybe even paranoid. And every time you used that object, the spirit would tell you what she wants: to get out.”

  I sat up straight, the forgotten muffin rolling off my lap and onto the sofa. “Oh my God. You think Ana is in my camera?”

  “Pretty much,” Jamie said. “It would explain why you’ve been feeling sick; you’re picking up on Ana’s emotions. We all felt it yesterday when the camera was filming us. And it would explain why you’ve hated being around cameras in general.”

  That took a second to process. “How did you know about that?” I asked. It came out maybe a little more defensive than I intended.

  “Oscar told me.” Jamie looked a bit nervous. “I hope you don’t mind—I asked him if he knew why you’ve been acting so weird. He said you thought you were camera shy or something, and you don’t like being on TV. We just wanted to figure out what was going on so we could help.”

  “I don’t mind,” I said slowly. “I thought I had stage fright. But that kind of thing doesn’t usually make me nervous.”

  “Exactly—because it was Ana, not you!” Jamie exclaimed. Then his face fell. “Wait, but you saw Ana at the waterfall? That doesn’t make sense if she’s in your camera.”

  “Yes, it does.” I closed my eyes, remembering the scene. “I saw her through the viewfinder. When I lowered the camera, she was gone.” And the cave! I only saw the message in the pictures, not on the actual cave walls.

  “Then we’re right!” Jamie said excitedly. For a half second, my spirits lifted. Then I remembered the bathroom last night.

  No camera.

  Jamie was still watching me, so I did my best to look enthusiastic. “I think so, yeah! It makes a lot of sense.” Except at some point, Ana might have moved from the camera to me. “So . . . so what should we do? How do we get her out of . . . um, my camera?”

  “There’s a library a few blocks from here,” Jamie replied immediately. “Abril showed me. We can use their computers, since everyone took their laptops to the church; they’re setting up all the equipment to film tonight. Oscar asked us to look up some stuff about Brunilda and the catacombs, too.”

  “Okay.” As we headed across the lobby, I realized something. “Hey, where is my camera? I left it with you guys last night when you were uploading the video.”

  “Oscar has it,” Jamie told me, holding the door open. “He and Hailey are going to go through Guzmán’s stuff and see if they find any evidence that he’s planning any tricks during the séance. But Oscar thought he’d try using your camera and seeing if he got any more messages or weird vibes, like yesterday.”

  “Ah.” I wondered how I’d explain it when Oscar didn’t see or feel anything unusual. Funny thing, I don’t think Ana’s in there anymore . . .

  “Where is Oscar?” I asked suddenly. “He didn’t want to come?”

  Jamie gave me a sidelong glance as we crossed the street. “He did, but Hailey talked him into going with her and the cast so this would just be you and me.”

  “Why?”

  “Well . . .” He looked down at his shoes, face slightly red. “For some reason, a few months ago Hailey decided she was really good at matchmaking. She spent all semester trying to fix up her friends at school and some of mine, too. Most of them did not appreciate it.
”

  We turned the corner, walking past the east side of the church and the wrought-iron gates to a small cemetery. I could see the library a few blocks down, a small but stately gray building that looked more like a mansion.

  “Anyway,” Jamie continued, “the week before school let out, she kept leaving fake love notes from this girl, Tamara, in my friend Roger’s locker, and fake notes from Roger in Tamara’s locker, because she was convinced they liked each other.” His mouth quirked up. “They did not. It was awkward.”

  I stifled a giggle. “That’s kind of hilarious.” Then I realized what he was implying, and a blush crept up my neck. “Wait, so . . . are you saying she’s trying to set us up?”

  “Yeah. I told her to knock it off,” Jamie said quickly. “And that Oscar could come with us. But he said he didn’t mind. Although he also said going to the library maybe wasn’t the best place for a first date. Not that this is a date!” he added. “Unless, I mean . . . do you want it to be one?”

  My skin started to tingle and my heart sped up, kind of like a sugar rush.

  “Well,” I said, trying to sound casual. “Figuring out how to perform an exorcism actually sounds like a pretty ideal first date to me.”

  I sneaked a glance at him. His cheeks were still pink, but he was smiling. “Works for me, too.”

  Nerves twisted my stomach, but mostly in a nice way. And besides, I was tired of being frightened: of cameras, of trolls, of ghosts. Of all the things that could scare me, I wasn’t about to let boys be one of them.

  So after only a second’s hesitation, I reached out and took his hand, and neither of us let go.

  All right, Ana, I thought to the dead girl who was maybe-probably possessing me. No creepy messages for a few hours, okay? Be cool.

  The library wasn’t all that big, but there was a whole room dedicated to local history and genealogy. The librarian helped me and Jamie log in to one of the computers, and we started looking up everything we could find about exorcisms, using an online language translator when necessary. We found a lot of weird stuff, including a hilarious interview Grandma had done for Return to the Asylum that even I’d never read before. After an hour, we hadn’t found anything useful, but we were having too much fun to care.

  While I didn’t have the heart to tell Jamie, the more I thought about his theory, the more holes I found. How had I “exorcised” Ana in the first place? With Lidia, the camera flash caused her to have a seizure, which got rid of Red Leer. But nothing like that had happened at the graveyard. I’d been so nervous, not to mention mortified about the whole I wonder what it would be like to have a mom who cared about me thing I’d blurted out. I remembered sitting by Ana’s tombstone and seething; thinking Oscar was trying to move the planchette, thinking about my mom and her wedding, thinking about how much I hated being on camera . . . Jamie always said you had to really focus on a spirit during Ouija, and I hadn’t really been thinking about Ana at all.

  Then there were my panic attacks. I desperately wanted to believe that I could blame all that anxiety on my camera, but I couldn’t. The truth was, I’d been freaked out about being on TV since the moment Dad mentioned it on the plane. That was my anxiety, not Ana’s.

  What was it Roland had said? Your brain is occupied with your own situation, and it projected your issues onto the idea of her. But even that idea didn’t quite work anymore. Jamie, Oscar, and all the others had felt it at the park yesterday: the presence of something. They’d all been anxious, too. Whatever was happening, it wasn’t entirely inside my head.

  “Wait, scroll back up,” Jamie said, breaking me out of my thoughts. I scrolled up until he pointed. “That one. The Four Basic Stages of an Exorcism.”

  I clicked the link, and we read silently for a minute.

  The process of exorcizing a spirit can be broken down into four basic stages, as follows:

  Concealment. The spirit keeps its identity and presence a secret.

  Exposure. The spirit reveals its identity, either willingly or through force by the exorcist.

  Confrontation. The exorcist confronts the spirit and attempts to force it out of the victim.

  Banishment (or Reclamation). Either the exorcist is victorious, or the spirit reclaims the victim.

  “That’s how it was with Lidia,” I said slowly. “She started acting strange, but we didn’t know why. Next Red Leer ‘revealed his identity’ at Daems, when he made Lidia release the prisoners. Then I confronted him and banished him with the camera. All four stages.”

  “Right now, we’re stuck at stage two,” Jamie replied. “I mean, we know the spirit is Ana, but we haven’t exposed her yet. I guess we’ve got to do that somehow before we can confront her.”

  “Yeah.” I glanced at the clock in the corner of the screen. “We should probably start looking up Brunilda if we’re supposed to meet with Oscar and Hailey at one.” Opening the library catalog, I typed in Brunilda Cano and hit the search button.

  No results found.

  “Nothing?” I said, surprised. “The church did an exorcism on a nun and there’s no record, no newspaper article?”

  Jamie wrinkled his nose. “Huh. Maybe try the name of the church? The exorcism was in 1891, try that, too.”

  Nodding, I typed Catedral de Nuestra Señora de la Encarnación, convento, 1891. A few results popped up, including a link to a digitized microfilm photo, which I clicked immediately.

  “Well, there’s the photo,” Jamie said, leaning closer to the screen. “That’s her, right?”

  He pointed to the sharp-faced nun in the first row, and I squinted. “Yeah, she’s the one Guzmán circled. And there’s . . . wait, hang on.” I tapped the grainy, scanned caption clip next to the photo, where the nuns were listed in order from left to right. “Her name’s not on here.”

  Jamie’s brow furrowed. “Second from the left, first row . . . María Carmen Romero. Did they skip Brunilda?”

  “Nope.” I touched each face with my finger. “Seven nuns, seven names.” I sat back, frowning. “Why does Guzmán think that’s her?”

  Neither of us spoke for a few seconds. Then Jamie jumped up and grabbed my hand, pulling me out of my chair. “I have an idea.”

  We hurried out of the library and back up the street toward the church. But Jamie veered off into the cemetery, leading me to the first row of headstones behind the church.

  “Is there a reason we’re here?” I asked. “Not that cemeteries aren’t excellent first-date venues, too . . .”

  He laughed. “I’m looking for Brunilda’s grave. She was a nun at this church, so she’d be buried here, right?”

  “I guess, yeah.” We wandered up and down the rows, still holding hands. The tombstones were old and weather-beaten, but the names and dates were still pretty legible. “Look, Sor María Carmen Romero . . . died November 28, 1891. The same day Brunilda Cano died, according to Guzmán.”

  Jamie gazed at the tombstone thoughtfully. “Did she change her name or something? Don’t nuns sometimes do that?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But if she was born Brunilda Cano, her name would’ve come up when we searched the library catalog. It would’ve been somewhere in the genealogy section.”

  “Good point.”

  We continued down the row, checking each grave. After a few minutes, Jamie pulled out his phone and checked the time. “Twenty to one,” he said, making a face. “If we’re going to check every tombstone, we should probably split up.”

  “I’ll do the last two rows,” I replied. “Meet you at the gate?”

  “Okay.”

  I hurried down the path to the graves farthest from the church. As I slowed my pace to check each tombstone, I thought about that last exorcism article we’d found. I still had no idea how to actually conduct an exorcism. Half the stuff we found online was either obviously fake or obviously joking, and the rest suggested stuff
like holy water and prayers, depending on the religion. The only thing they really had in common was the idea that the exorcist basically convinced the spirit to leave. Sometimes the fight turned physical, but usually words were enough.

  But what was I supposed to say? And was it even possible for me to exorcise myself?

  Five minutes later, I headed back to the cemetery entrance. Jamie stood waiting at the gate, hands behind his back. “Any luck?” he asked.

  “Nope. You didn’t find her, either?” When he shook his head, I frowned. “So the only records of Brunilda Cano even existing are just the stuff Guzmán found in his grandmother’s attic? And in his photo, that’s not even Brunilda . . . This is getting weird.”

  “Yeah, very.” Jamie cleared his throat and held out a long brown stem. Several dried-up petals drooped from the end, yellowing and crinkly, like skinny, shriveled fingers. “For you.”

  “A dead flower?” I asked, confused. “Did you take that from someone’s grave?”

  His eyes widened. “No! I found it on the path—it must’ve fallen out of a bouquet or something. I thought, you know . . . first date. Flowers.”

  “Oh!” I exclaimed, flustered. “Thanks.” I took the flower, trying not to smile too hard and failing pretty miserably. “Ooh, I think it’s got a few strands of cobweb on it. How romantic.”

  “Gah, really?” Jamie wiped his hands on his shirt frantically, and I snickered. “Hey, I draw the line at spiders.”

  I inspected the lily, then held it out. “Spider-free, see?”

  He leaned away, shaking his head. “I’ll take your word for it.”

  We left the cemetery and headed inside the church, joking about spiders and other phobias. By the time we entered the courtyard, Jamie was telling me about how Hailey was deathly afraid of squirrels.

  “Squirrels?” I repeated in disbelief. “I thought she wasn’t afraid of anything!”

  “That’s what she wants everyone to think,” Jamie said. “But yeah. She used to act kind of weird when we’d go to Central Park, but she wouldn’t say why. Then this one time a squirrel ran across our picnic blanket, and Hailey actually tried to kick it. She missed, and the squirrel took off in one direction and Hailey ran the other way, screaming her head off.” He paused, smiling sort of guiltily. “I got her a stuffed squirrel for Christmas last year.”