Caught Dead

by Patricia Mason

  Mama began a chant, but Jessica pushed her against the sofa and grasped her throat, quickly cutting off her words. His mama groped at the hands strangling her while gurgling sounds leaked from her mouth. Jonah and Belinda pounded against the barrier around them, hurling threats and insults at Jessica but unable to help Derek's mother.

  Feeling frantic, Derek struggled to focus his energy on the bundle of sage still burning on the plate on top of the coffee table next to Jessica.

  Whoosh! The plate skidded to the coffee table’s edge, with the burning sage resting against Jessica's skirt. The fabric first smoked and then flamed.

  "Yes," Jonah shouted. "Good job, Derek."

  Glancing over her shoulder at the flame, Jessica screamed and jumped away as she automatically released Mama in order to bat out the fire. His mama fell to her knees, coughing and rubbing at her neck.

  "You'll regret that." Jessica turned on Derek and opened her mouth. An inhuman sound emerged and Derek felt his essence sucked toward her as if by some paranormal vacuum.

  "She's destroying Derek," Belinda cried.

  "She's killing his soul," Jonah screamed. "Do something."

  The cavernous oblivion of Jessica's mouth drew him in. Derek turned away from the horrifying sight in time to see his mother crawl to the flare she'd dropped. She removed the cap and struck the end, igniting a stream of smoke, flame and heat.

  Jessica broke off her attack on Derek, staring in horror at the flare. His mama rose, the flare held in front of her like a sword, and backed Jessica to the door as the room continued to fill with smoke.

  Chapter Ten

  The windows and doors of the cottage stood open allowing the smoke to dissipate, but the acrid metallic smell lingered. Jonah held a hand over his mouth, coughing as he put a fan in front of the door. Eliza sat on the sofa, holding her bleeding hand, and Derek hovered behind her.

  Jonah just stood there unable to process Jessica’s revelation. She killed his parents? But she’d been just a child at the time of their murder and their killer had been killed himself by Mayor Bundy, Jessica’s father. How was that possible? He didn’t know that answer. But he did know that Eliza had helped Jessica. Sure, Derek’s mom had a last minute change of heart, but that was no excuse.

  “That shit’s messed up, Mama,” Derek shouted. He’d been ranting pretty much continuously since Jessica left.

  Jonah pinned Eliza with a glare just as Belinda strode out of the kitchen with a first aid kit in hand. As she stepped closer to Eliza, Belinda gagged, made a quick right turn, and approached Jonah instead.

  “I can’t handle the sight of blood. You’ll have to bandage her hand.” Belinda held out the kit for him.

  Jonah nodded as Belinda headed in the direction of the bathroom.

  “Damn, Mama! How could you do that?” Derek burst out. “You always promised that you wouldn’t read Rayna’s diary, let alone perform any of the spells. Christ. You could turn dark so easily, Mama. I know I was murdered, but that ain’t no freakin’ excuse,” Derek continued as he began to pace behind her.

  Eliza looked up at Jonah with watery eyes, then her glance flittered away. “I’ll bandage myself.”

  He dropped the first aid kit into her lap and started to walk away. Eliza stopped him, placing a hand on his arm. He flinched at her touch.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I just…I…” Her betrayal still stung. But he knew she’d been crazed with grief over Derek. He could definitely understand what someone would do when a loved one died. Particularly when they’d been murdered in such a brutal way.

  Jonah nodded at her, accepting the apology, and then he walked away.

  “Sorry doesn’t cut it,” Derek shouted, moving in front of his mother. “You were working with Jessica.” Derek tore at his hair in exasperation. “That bitch killed me. Slit my throat. Do you remember that? Huh? I sure do… I mean I couldn’t remember for a while, but now I do. So how could you? Huh? How could you?”

  Jonah groaned. “She’s not gonna answer, buddy.”

  “Why not?”

  “’Cause she can’t hear you.”

  “Oh, right.” Derek stopped and plopped down next to his mother on the sofa.

  “Plus, she apologized. Just let it go. It’s over.”

  Eliza had used an antiseptic wipe and laid out a bandage, but she glanced up before applying it. “Derek is talking to me? What’s he saying?”

  “He’s yelling at you about your grandmother’s diary and working with Jessica.” Jonah glanced at Derek. “Specifics aren’t important. Some obscenities were involved, though.”

  “Derek,” Eliza admonished. “You don’t curse at your mama.”

  “I’m dead. What difference does it—I’m sorry,” Derek said.

  Before Jonah could relay the message, Belinda reentered the room still looking green.

  Her glance went to Eliza’s palm and then away as she gulped. “What did I miss?”

  Jonah shook his head and waved the question away.

  Belinda stepped forward and then linked her arm in his, leaning into his side. “Did you hear Jessica say she killed your parents?”

  “Yes, but I’m not sure how that’s possible,” Jonah said.

  Eliza pressed the bandaging in place on her palm. “Maybe possession?”

  “Jessica’s father supposedly shot the guy that murdered my parents eight years ago when the killer broke into Jessica’s room. Maybe she just got obsessed with murder after seeing that guy die,” Jonah suggested.

  “Ugh. Horrible.” A shiver passed through Belinda.

  “Or Jessica got possessed by the killer as he died,” Eliza said.

  “But if Jessica got possessed way back then, why wait ’til now to kill? If she was a homicidal maniac since childhood wouldn’t there have been a blood bath in this town for years?” Derek commented.

  “Jessica used the word ‘cycle’ when she came to me,” Eliza said in answer to the question even though she hadn’t heard Derek ask it. “We gotta know more ‘bout this cycle.”

  “This area’s got a nasty trend for serial and mass killers.” Jonah crossed the room to take a graph off his bulletin board. “But that trend’s lots longer than eight years.”

  “Didn’t you say you’ve been tracking murders in Ambrosia for the last 104 years?” Belinda asked.

  Nodding, Jonah approached Eliza and handed her the graph. “Could that be the cycle?”

  She examined it. “Nine murders in a two-week span roughly every eight years.”

  “Yeah, but the only connection I could find is a pretty flimsy astrological one,” Jonah said. “Every time the murders start, Orion’s belt is always in the exact same position.”

  Eliza examined the graph before eyeing him warily. “This’s got a lot of detail—names, dates, weather, zodiac—Why’d you do all this, boy?”

  Shrugging, Jonah looked away. “Don’t know. Just felt my parents’ deaths had to be more than just a crazy neighbor, I guess.”

  The answer seemed to satisfy Eliza, who nodded and looked down at the graph again. “No family connection? All the murderers, I mean.”

  Jonah shook his head. He grabbed a file folder off his desk and opened it before rifling through the clippings and internet print-outs. “Some of the murders were never solved. But for the ones that were, the killers had no connection I could find. Except they all lived around here so they probably knew each other. Mostly male murderers, except for the first one.” He drew a photocopy of a newspaper clipping out of the file. “Sarah Beth Walker, age thirty-two. Killed her family—nine people—before they caught her in October 1912. The family farmed some acreage about a mile out of town so they didn’t figure out what was going on for two weeks. She was hung, vigilante style, before trial.

  “No trial?” Belinda gripped his arm. “Maybe Sarah Beth was innocent.”

  “Doubtful.” Jonah grimaced. “They discovered her standing over her baby sister with a bloody knife.”

  “Ugh,” Derek groa
ned. “That’s cold. Killing a baby.”

  “Yeah,” Jonah said and then glanced back to the paper in his hand. “She reportedly had some sinister last words. ‘You’ll see me again and there will be blood.’”

  A gaunt, dark-haired woman with hard eyes, sharp features and a blank expression stared out from a grainy photo included with the article.

  Belinda shivered. “Creepy.”

  “We need more.” Eliza glanced around her.

  “There is no more,” Jonah said, shaking his head. “I’ve searched the internet, newspaper archives and library records. No other mentions of Sarah Beth Walker.”

  “Rayna was about fifteen in 1912.” Eliza retrieved her grandmother’s journal from where it had fallen, laid it on her lap and then, sitting back on the sofa, she opened it and began flipping through its pages. “You said October of 1912?”

  “No, Mama.” Derek tried to sweep away the journal, but his arm passed through it and made no effect. “That thing is evil.”

  “Derek doesn’t want you to look at the journal. He says it’s evil,” Belinda said.

  “We have to look at it.” Eliza continued to flip pages. “She coulda known about Sara Beth.”

  A sepia-toned photo fell from inside the journal. Jonah picked it up. The image showed five young women standing in a line in front of the Devoe house and dressed in their Sunday best. On the right end of the line stood a smiling black teenager in a patterned dress that fell to her mid-calf. Taller than the other four, the slender girl was obviously the youngest of the group.

  Eliza had stopped paging through the journal to observe Jonah examining the photo. “That’s my grandmother.” Eliza pointed to the girl on the end that had drawn his attention.

  Belinda moved to look over their shoulders. Jonah handed her the photo for a closer look. Handling it gingerly, Belinda smiled. “She’s gorgeous.”

  “That was taken before she descended into the darker magics.” Eliza took back the photo and then laid it on the arm of the sofa before she turned back to the journal.

  “Here’s the beginning of October 1912.” As she silently read through a few pages, they waited. Finally, she spoke again. “There’s just one passage about the murders and the lynching: ‘They say the youngest Walker girl killed her family. She always seemed a weird one. I never felt no sort of magic in her, though, so would think she probably just went crazy. But my friend Jimmy was there when they strung her up on a tree at her daddy’s farm. I never heard of lynching a girl, but Jimmy said the murders were something vicious and evil. He said she spoke at the end and the sheriff got convinced she was a witch. Jimmy said the deputy, Tom Carver, collapsed after the hanging and the guys didn’t even tease him about womanly vapors like they shoulda done.”

  “Weird,” Derek said.

  Jonah agreed. “Still not a lot of help. There’s nothing else?”

  Eliza skimmed a couple of journal pages. “It says that she noticed Tom Carver acting strangely, but no one else thought anything of it. Then it looks like there are some pages torn out. After that there’s a truth revelation spell.”

  “No,” Derek said firmly. “Don’t read that spell.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t read that,” Belinda said.

  “I’m not gonna just read I’m gonna perform it.” Eliza stood and walked to her knapsack. “This spell promises the answers we need.”

  “Are you crazy?” Derek shouted and then turned to Jonah. “Stop her. She can’t do this.”

  Jonah rose from the sofa and followed after Eliza. He touched her arm, bringing her to a halt just as she reached into the bag.

  “Derek wants you to stop. He doesn’t want you to do this spell,” Jonah said.

  His friend nodded his ghostly head.

  “But,” Jonah added, turning his attention back to Eliza. “I agree with you. We should do it.”

  Derek rounded on Jonah in outrage. “Douche canoe,” he yelled. “I mighta known you’d go for the creepy-ass option. You don’t give a shit what happens to my Mama. You’re such a raging ahole.”

  Belinda stepped between them glaring at Derek. “Don’t call him names.”

  “You agree with him, Belinda?” Derek asked, eyebrows arched. “I thought you were half normal. But you’re a hundred percent wacked since you’re hooking up with Weirdo-Bob here.”

  “Hey,” Jonah barked. “That’s enough. I’m not letting you insult her.”

  “Derek,” Belinda interjected. “I don’t agree with Jonah or your mother. In my opinion this is a bad idea. We don’t know what kind of evil that spell will unleash. So I say don’t do it.”

  “Thank freakin’ God somebody is finally listening to me,” Derek said before stalking in a huff to the corner of the room. “It’s two for and two against. A tie. So that’s a stalemate. That means no action.”

  Eliza broke in. “If I know my boy, he’s saying something about a tie vote. He used to talk such nonsense as a kid when he wanted to have his way. But I’ll tell him now what I told him then. This here ain’t no democracy. It’s a dictatorship and I’m Mussolini.”

  After that, Eliza sent Jonah for an ingredient she needed. Once he returned from outside, he found that, for the second time that day, the area rug at the center of the room was pulled back and a chalk circle drawn on the wood beneath. Eliza knelt at the center, having placed two candles—one white and one red—in front of her. Derek sulked in the corner, and Belinda was rifling through the contents of the files on his desk. He turned back to Eliza.

  “I had them in my bag,” Eliza explained seeing him eyeing the candles. “The colors are different than Rayna used, but I adjusted the spell a bit.”

  Jonah was still thinking about the wisdom of making changes to the spell when Eliza added, “Do you have what I asked for?”

  He stepped forward and handed her a half-full baggie. “Yes. Dirt from Jessica’s grave.”

  “Aha,” Belinda crowed, lifting a newspaper clipping. “This one has a photo of Jessica.”

  Belinda gave it to Eliza.

  “Careful,” Eliza warned. “Don’t step inside. Stay close to me, but outside the circle.” After emptying the baggie’s contents a couple of inches to the right of the candles, Eliza placed the newspaper photo to their left. “We’re ready.”

  Eliza closed her eyes and took in a deep breath before blowing out. As she continued to breathe, an eerily still silence fell over the cottage. Finally, she opened her eyes and took up a match. After striking it to flame, she held it to the wicks and spoke.

  “Lighting candle red, lighting candle white, the darkness hiding much takes flight.”

  She placed a hand on the newspaper clipping. “No longer concealed, let all be revealed.”

  Taking a handful of the dirt, Eliza tossed some forward then back, right then left. “From west and east, south and north, let Jessica’s truth come forth.”

  After the echo of the last word faded into silence, that silence continued until it stretched into seconds, and seconds then turned into a minute or more.

  Jonah hadn’t expected an explosion, but he expected…something. The still lifted and the normal sounds of the house and the surroundings—refrigerator hum, insect buzz, faraway traffic—began again. Eliza rose, her brows converged in a frown and her lips pressed tight.

  “Ha-ha,” Derek said gleefully springing from his corner. “Nothing happened.”

  “You don’t have to sound so happy about it,” Jonah said.

  “Yeah,” Belinda added. “We still don’t know anything that’ll help us stop Jessica.”

  Eliza stepped out of the chalk circle and sank down onto the sofa. “I don’t know why the spell didn’t work. Maybe the candle color’s more important than I thought. But I had the white one. That’s the purity candle, the truth candle. That’s the important one. The other one shoulda been black. I guess I could go and get one from my house and try again.”

  “No need for that,” an unfamiliar feminine voice said.

  Jonah st
arted. His eyes darted around searching the room for the source of the voice. He noticed Belinda, Derek and Eliza all doing the same. The voice wasn’t Jessica. He knew her voice. So who was it?

  “You did just fine, Eliza honey,” the voice said. “You’re my grandbaby after all. You got the power.”

  “Grandma Rayna?” Derek’s mother glanced around her. “Where are you?”

  “Here,” the voice answered. “The photo you took from my journal.”

  “Don’t let my mama touch that,” Derek said to Jonah. “She could turn.”

  Jonah grabbed up the photo before Eliza could reach it. For a few moments the photo appeared the same as when he’d last looked at it, several girls standing in a line. But then the teenager on the end, Rayna, moved, stepping away from the line of her sisters and appearing to walk toward the long ago camera holder until only her face filled snapshot.

  Eliza looked over from his right. Belinda and Derek crowded in on his left.

  “What are you doing here?” Eliza asked.

  “You called me here with your—well, my—spell. Duh. Maybe you’re not as smart as I thought you were,” Rayna’s image answered. “Maybe my great-grandson is smarter.” Her head turned Derek’s way. “Hi there, honey.”

  Eliza stiffened, apparently at knowing Rayna could see her son.

  Rayna’s image laughed. “So I’m here to answer your questions about Jessica.”

  “Yes, but why you in particular?” Eliza questioned.

  “Why not me?” The image smiled more broadly. “I know the ‘truth’ you’re seeking. I found out all those years ago when Jessica—or should I say Sarah Beth—was Tom Carver. Before she went by Jessica Bundy and a host of other names.”

  “Is Jessica demon possessed?” Jonah asked.

  “Good question,” Rayna’s image said. “You could call her that, but she has an ordinary human soul.”

  Eliza groaned as if demon possession would have been a desirable answer. “But then, how is she going from body to body?”

  “She made a bargain with someone powerful, that’s how.”

  “What bargain? Powerful who? Why? And how do we kill her?” Belinda burst out with a flurry of questions.