by Val Karlsson
Text copyright © 2010 by Lerner Publishing Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. International copyright secured. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the prior written permission of Lerner Publishing Group, Inc., except for the inclusion of brief quotations in an acknowledged review.
Darby Creek
A division of Lerner Publishing Group, Inc.
241 First Avenue North
Minneapolis, MN 55401 U.S.A.
Web site address: www.lernerbooks.com
Cover design: Emily Love
Cover photograph: Photo Words, Inc./iStockphoto
Karlsson, Val.
The protectors / by Val Karlsson.
p. cm. — (Night fall)
ISBN 978–0–7613–6144–2 (lib. bdg. : alk. paper)
[1. Horror stories.] I. Title.
PZ7.K14248Pr 2010
[Fic]—dc22 2010003317
Manufactured in the United States of America
1—BP—7/15/10
eISBN: 978-0-7613-6547-1 (pdf)
eISBN: 978-1-4677-2942-0 (ePub)
eISBN: 978-1-4677-2941-3 (mobi)
Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before
—Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven
1
I’ll never forget the day my stepfather locked me in a room full of caskets and left me there for twenty-four full hours. I had no food, nothing to do but lie in casket after casket. Some were cushioned and lined with satin, some lined with velvet, some just plain, hard wood. I lay in each one, imagining what it was like to be dead.
I was ten then. And what did I do to deserve being locked in that room overnight? I don’t really know. But then again, my stepfather often got mad at me for no reason at all.
My mom had left that morning for an overnight trip. She often went out to people’s homes to do spirit-contact sessions, cleansing ceremonies, things like that. She would hold weird rituals with candles and burning herbs. She would go into a sort of trance. My stepfather hated it.
This was the first time she was going to stay overnight, because of the distance.
“He was in my way, and he was causing trouble,” he told my mother after she returned and I had told her what had happened.
“But Sal, you can’t just lock a kid up! And with no food!” She hugged me tightly and stroked my hair.
The look he gave me at that moment—I’ll never forget it. It made me want to run away forever.
Up until that day, it had been life as usual in a family funeral home. Being in a room full of caskets was nothing new for me, actually. I grew up around coffins, cadavers, embalming tables, scalpels, the laboratory odor of formaldehyde. You see, I lived in a funeral home: Signorelli Funeral Home, my stepfather’s family business going back five generations.
I spent hours watching Sal in the mortuary prep room in the basement of our big, old, gray house. I learned the craft of preserving bodies for the funeral display. I observed him draining bodies of all their blood and filling their veins with chemicals. I watched him cut into abdomens and chests with the sharp-pointed trocar to suck out the fluids from their bodies. I watched him pump in a formaldehyde solution. When I was tall enough to reach the embalming table, Sal started to let me help him. “When you’re older, Luke, you’ll go to school for this and get certified,” he’d say. “But you will learn everything you need right here.”
I was just nine years old when Dr. Miller died. Sal had me put in the eye caps. That was to prop his eyelids up as his eyeballs started to sink back into their sockets. Then I helped again when our nosy neighbor Mrs. Chase had a heart attack. I held her jaw in place as Sal “shot” a wire in with an injector gun to keep her mouth shut. That was something she never did while she was alive. I didn’t dare joke about it, though. Sal was always very serious about his work. These were the first of my many hands-on experiences, which got more complex over the next few years.
I would watch Mom work too. She was the cosmetician. That is, she would dress and put makeup on the dead people and fix their hair. She loved doing it. She felt she was giving people a last bit of dignity before they were buried. It was amazing to watch her transform cold, lifeless flesh and make it look warm and living again. That’s how Mom was. She could bring life into any room, even an embalming room.
I guess things started getting really weird after I turned sixteen. That fall I was hanging out with Lincoln and my girlfriend, Aisha, a lot. Lincoln had been my best friend since elementary school. He had a pretty strange family too. Both of his parents were alcoholics. Lincoln’s grandfather had died a few years back. He had been a wealthy guy, and now Lincoln’s family lived off the money he’d left them. Lincoln lived in a huge house with a pool. But even Lincoln could see that, with his parents’ extravagant lifestyle, the money wasn’t going to last.
“My mother bought a crystal swan statue on the Internet last night,” Lincoln complained one day at lunch. He, Aisha, and I always sat together. Sometimes Lincoln would bring along one of his girlfriends, but today it was just the three of us.
“How much did that cost?” I asked, taking a bite of my ham sandwich.
“Twenty, thirty thousand . . .” Lincoln scowled.
Aisha sucked in her breath. “Geez, how big is it?”
“Huge,” Lincoln muttered. “I think she was drunk when she ordered it.”
“You’d have to be,” Aisha said, her dark eyes flashing. “How tacky.” Aisha would probably be the last person in the world to purchase a giant crystal swan. She wasn’t interested in wealth or material objects. Instead, she focused on the natural world. She knew more about different plants and animals than anyone I’d ever met.
As the three of us walked out of school that afternoon, Aisha tugged at my elbow. “Want to see that movie about whales I was telling you about tonight?” she asked with a smile. “It’s showing downtown at eight.”
I was always bored during those nature movies, but it would be fun to go with Aisha. We’d both been so busy with school that we hadn’t had a real date in a while.
“Sure,” I said. “As long as no one dies tonight.”
Aisha crossed her fingers for good luck as she turned to walk down her street. She knew by now that I usually had to help Sal out when a new body was brought in.
But when I got home that night and heard Sal yelling, I knew I wouldn’t be going to the movies.
2
I could hear the trouble before I even entered the house.
“Listen to me!” Sal was yelling. “You’re not even listening!”
A part of me wanted to turn around and head to Lincoln’s or Aisha’s. But I always worried about Mom when Sal was angry. I’d never seen him lay a hand on her. He got so angry, though. I was always worried things could turn violent.
“What about me?” I heard him shout upstairs as I walked into the kitchen. “You’re always going off to these people’s houses, Penny. What—you’re going to talk to Sofia Morelli’s dead husband?”
I’d already heard this argument a couple dozen times. It was always the same. Only the names changed. Mom believed she could communicate with the dead. People often contacted her to help them speak with their dead relatives. But Sal was never one to believe in ghosts.
“There’s a scientific explanation for everything, Penny,” he would say. “A body is a body—all skin, bones, and blood. And nothing more.” So every time my mother left for a séance, he got angry.
I actually agreed with Sal about science o
ver spirits. But at the same time, his coldness was depressing. I liked my mother’s wacky ideas and warm spirituality. I didn’t believe in the stuff, of course. But I have to admit, I preferred her approach to life and death.
“Sal, please,” my mother pleaded. “These people need me.”
“What about what I need? I need you here. You can’t stay here to talk to your own husband, who’s alive? Huh?”
“Sal, let me go!”
I heard a door slam and then my mother running down the stairs toward the front door. She saw me sitting in the kitchen. I could see her face fall as she realized that I had heard everything. She came over to me and hugged me. I heard a door open upstairs, then stomping.
“Oh, so you do have time for the boy, don’t you? For the boy, of course!” Sal growled as he thundered downstairs.
“Sal, you are being unreasonable. I would give you a hug too, if you’d let me. But I won’t come near you when you’re like this!” Mom turned and walked out the front door.
“Come with me!” Sal barked at me after the door shut behind my mother. “We have work to do.”
We had to embalm two bodies that night—a husband and wife killed in a car accident. Sal put me to work on the husband. I was so nervous from the fight that I spilled embalming chemicals all over the floor when I went to hook up the machine to the husband’s carotid artery.
“What have you done?” Sal roared. “Get out of here! You’re completely useless!” He grabbed me by the collar and shoved me toward the door.
I called Aisha to let her know that I wouldn’t make it to the movie that night. There was no way Sal would let me leave the house.
“That guy is such a jerk. It’s so weird, because he’s always so nice when I’m around,” Aisha said.
“Yeah,” I said. “He has a good game face.”
“I just don’t get why your mom married him.”
“That makes two of us,” I said.
I got off the phone with Aisha and locked myself in my room so I wouldn’t have to deal with Sal. The longer my mother was away, the more angry he seemed to get.
Sitting alone in my room, hoping Sal wouldn’t come barging in, I thought about my Protectors. My mom believed that the spirits of people who died stayed with the last person to handle their bodies. They became that person’s “Protectors,” she said, “with a capital P.” This was an old legend from a small, little-known American Indian tribe called the Mannahassa. It was significant to my mother because she was half Mannahassa. I always thought it was a crazy idea. But when I was afraid or really worried about something, I often found myself thinking about any Protectors I might have.
“You must have a thousand Protectors!” I told my mom one day, joking. She was usually the last one to handle the bodies, both before and after funeral services. She smiled.
“I know I have a few,” she replied.
“So, what about people who are murdered and whose bodies are never found? Do their spirits become the Protectors of the murderers?”
“No,” answered Mom, “of course not. When I talk about the last person to handle the body, I mean the last person to care for the body. To treat the body with respect and love. To prepare it for a proper burial. If the last person to handle a body has done so with disrespect, or worse, that doesn’t count. In fact, that could mean trouble for the person. The spirit will haunt that person.”
Later that night, Mom returned from the séance and came to check on me.
“Honey?” I heard her at my door. “Are you okay, Luke?”
“Yeah, Mom. You can come in.”
“Is it Sal, hon?”
I didn’t say anything, but the look on my face must have.
“You know, Luke, he’s had a very lonely life.” She stroked my hair. “I don’t think he ever learned how to show people he cares about them. When he was a boy, his father was very cruel to him.”
That I’d heard before. Sal had grown up in Bridgewater with his parents and one brother. The family ran the funeral business back then, too. Everyone in town still talked about Sal’s parents. His mother would do strange things all the time, like carry bags of sugar around with her like they were her babies. She had left the family when Sal was still quite young. Sal’s father, Charlie, had a reputation for being hot-tempered. They called him “Crazy Charlie.” Eventually, he climbed into an open coffin, lay back, and slit his own wrists.
Most people got along with Sal. He was cheerful in town, but grumpy at home. But I’d heard some people say that, even as a child, Sal had taken after his father. Once, when I was only about seven, I was walking home from school and our old neighbor Mrs. Henning stopped me on the sidewalk.
“I know your daddy,” she said. I knew she was talking about my stepfather, because my real father had died before I was born and had never lived in Bridgewater.
“Did you know that when Sal Signorelli was your age I saw him throw a whole litter of kittens into a bonfire?!” She shook her head, tears forming in her eyes. “And he did it with a smile on his face.”
I ran home crying that day. When I asked my mother about this rumor, she told me it couldn’t be true. Sal loved cats, and Mrs. Henning was a very old woman.
“No one really cared about him until I came along,” my mom explained to me now. “If it weren’t for us, who knows where he’d be?”
Probably in a county jail or mental institution, I thought.
“We help him so much,” she said.
“Well, you would think he’d appreciate having a son,” I said bitterly. “I mean, if he was lonely before, you know?”
“Oh, Luke, I’m sure he does. I’m sure he does.” I noticed when she said this that she had a worried look on her face, as though she wasn’t quite convinced herself.
Then, a few weeks later, everything changed for me.
3
Mom had a cleansing session scheduled for that afternoon out at the McKenzie farm, about an hour’s drive away. In a cleansing, Mom believed she was getting rid of evil spirits that were haunting a place.
As she was leaving, she looked worried. I thought maybe she had fought with Sal again.
“What’s wrong, Mom?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she answered. She seemed distracted. “I’m feeling almost like I shouldn’t go. Just now, when I was getting my jacket, I thought I felt a hand on my shoulder holding me back.”
“Come on, Mom,” I said. “A hand? You’re probably just worried that Sal will be mad at you again for going.”
“Maybe you’re right,” she said. “Anyway, the McKenzies have been waiting for weeks for me. Mrs. McKenzie is at her wit’s end . . . so many strange things happening in their house.” She still looked pale, but she tried to smile at me. She kissed my forehead and went out the door.
Later that night, I sat outside, rocking on the old porch swing. A crisp breeze blew the leaves off the many trees that hid our old house from the road. Dark clouds drifted across the full moon. I was worried because it was almost midnight and Mom still hadn’t come home from the farm. Sal, too, had not yet come back from picking up a body from a family’s house over in Rockdale. He had been called around ten. Something seemed wrong.
I thought about calling Aisha, but I didn’t want to worry her. Eventually, through the trees, I saw the hearse pull up and turn into the long, curved driveway that led to the funeral parlor on the side of the house. Sal got out and opened the back. He stopped when he noticed me sitting on the porch. He started walking toward me, looking at the ground. When he reached the porch, he looked right at me with a blank stare. I thought he was going to say something. But then he just turned around and started walking back to the hearse.
“Sal!” I followed after him. “What is it? What’s going on?”
He glanced over his shoulder at me. “Listen,” he mumbled, “There’s been an accident. . . . Your mother’s been killed.”
My heart stopped for a moment. I felt cold, like my blood was draining out of me. Like so
meone was cutting into my stomach. I glanced at the open hearse. Had Sal brought her dead body home? I started toward it. Sal stopped me with his hand.
“That’s not her,” Sal quickly explained, “in the hearse, I mean. That’s Mrs. Antonino. I went to pick up her body earlier, before the police reached me on my cell.” He hung his head. I waited in disbelief and horror.
“Your mother’s body . . .” he began. “I’m afraid there wasn’t much left. . . . You see, there was a really bad fire. Your mother lost control of the car and crashed into a stone wall on a back road. No one saw the accident, but the car went up in flames. Everything was burned . . . but a few bone fragments.” Sal had a strange, blank expression. “After I get Mrs. Antonino downstairs and prepped, I’ll go collect the remains.”
I stared at him, unable to speak. Hot tears burned lines down my face. I covered my cheeks with my hands. I couldn’t believe I was crying in front of Sal. He was a monster. Did he even care that she was dead?
“I hate you! She hated you too! You never deserved her.” I couldn’t believe the words that were coming out of my mouth. I’d never dared to speak this way to Sal. But now I couldn’t stop. “You’re a worthless excuse for a human being. You made her life hell!”
I flinched a little, expecting Sal to come at me. But he didn’t even scream. He just stared. For a second, I swear I saw a flicker of a smile pass over his face.
“I’m sorry, boy,” Sal said quietly. He shook his head. “You’d best go to bed and get some rest. This is a big shock for you.”
And that was it.
He turned and shuffled back down the path to the hearse. He hoisted Mrs. Antonio’s black body bag over his shoulder. Then he disappeared through the side door that led down to the mortuary prep room.
That night I couldn’t sleep, thinking about what my mother had said before she’d left that day. Could it be that she was right about the Protectors legend? Had her Protectors tried to warn her about the accident? Was one of them responsible for the hand that had tried to stop her from going?