I look back at her dainty toes that are dripping puddles onto the wooden planks. They stink, my god, they stink. They smell like rot and death and decay. I hold my breath and kiss her second toe. This little piggy stayed home. Yes, yes that’s it exactly. This little piggy should have definitely stayed home.
“I’m…” I croak. “I’m sorry…” My voice leaves me entirely. I stop and clear my throat. “I’m sorry for trespassing. Excuse me.”
I bolt around her swaying body and make for Bentley’s truck.
A solid thump rattles the floorboards. I freeze.
“Run, Aria!” Bentley screams, but I can’t move. I have to turn. I have to look at her. I don’t have a choice. She turns to me with that vicious grin, her noose flicking with deathly seduction.
You so remind me of an old acquaintance.
She tilts her head at me, studying my face. Her lips haven’t moved, but I hear her talking. She’s in my head, twisting and turning like some disease, like some worm taking bites of my brain.
I wonder if you’re a descendent? Tell me child, what is your last name?
“G-g-grace.”
Her chin dips towards the floor, glancing at the kitten, then returns to me.
Such an unfitting name to such an evil clan.
Her noose snaps like a whip and curls around my throat. She pulls me close, her lips parting like a lover. Her tongue licks my face, from chin to brow. A choking sob escapes my throat. Her tongue is wet and cold and leaves a trail of slime like a snail.
Pity for you, I find such evil delicious.
The crank of an engine distracts the ghost. I hear his tires screeching across the asphalt.
I breathe a sigh of relief. He’s coming. He’s coming to rescue me. He’ll ram her and she’ll let go of me.
But the impact doesn’t come. The engine drifts further and further away. I burst into tears. He left me. I can’t believe he left me.
The ghost chuckles low in her throat.
Let me guess…he told you he loved you, didn’t he? She gets a faraway look. The ones that love you are the first to leave you exactly when you need them the most.
The grip from the noose tightens.
Now, where were we?
“No…please, no…”
The same tongue that licked my face is now tracing every bit of my features. It darts into my ears and up my nose. It crosses my eyelids, causing my eyelashes to stick to my cheeks. I grimace and clench my mouth shut.
Come, now! She cackles. Let’s give us a kiss…
The tongue, that awful tongue is now three times larger than it was before. It presses hard against my lips, bruising them. It forces itself against my teeth until it pries its way inside. It fills my mouth, this horrible thing, and shimmies down my throat.
Mhmm…she sighs in ecstasy.
I can’t breathe! I scream with my mind. Dear god, someone help me! I can’t breathe…
I teeter and sway on the edge of consciousness. The ghost loosens her grip and lets me fall to the floor. I gasp for air, croaking like a fish. I feel deprived of oxygen and energy. I’ve been violated in a way that can’t be explained. I have just enough energy to move my head to the side. Angelina picks up the bundle containing the cat. She opens the pillowcase and holds the limp creature in her palm. She puts her mouth over its nose. A logical mind would say that she blew air into its lungs, but I know what I saw. It was nothing more than a kiss.
Wakey, wakey, she says, stroking its fur.
As God as my witness, the creature stirred, licked her fingers, and ran away. She watches until it’s out of sight. Then she returns her gaze to me.
“No…no…” I plead.
I think she’s going to kiss me again, or choke me again, or whatever sick torture she delights herself in, but instead she lays beside me and looks at the ceiling as if we’re the best of friends.
Animals, she says sighing deeply. They really are the purest of creatures, don’t you think? Lucky for that little fellow, I’ve always been an animal lover.
She runs a hand through my hair and I shudder.
You see, my darling, I have this gift. I can suck the life out of people. It’s the most delicious thing. I’ve taken, oh, maybe forty years of your life with that kiss. You robbed that poor, defenseless kitten of his life, so I gave him twenty years of it back. But what of the remaining twenty? I’m sure you’re wondering.
She lowers her face mere inches from mine.
I ate it, little girl…I ate your life. I gave twenty years of it to the cat, and then swallowed the rest for myself.
She lets the words hang there, then rests beside me once more.
Each life has a different taste. The more wicked the soul, the sweeter the life. I’ve tasted better than you, that’s for certain, but I admit, you have an unusual flavor…
She turns and traces my jawbone with her finger.
You’re like a wine; savory and rich at first, but then…there’s an aftertaste. A bitter flicker of goodness at the back of my throat. Her face twists in disgust. It’s disappointing, really, how complex a human being can be.
She raises onto her elbow and twists my head to face her. My neck pops, causing pain to thunder down my shoulder blade.
Do you know what this means for you?
I shake my head a mere few inches.
It means you have a seed of goodness inside of you. If left to blossom, if nurtured and tended, you have the capacity of being decent. Not good, mind you, never good, but decent. It is that seed that gets caught in the back of my throat. It is that seed that makes me question whether I should let you live…
“Yes…yes…live…” I sob, unable to make a complete sentence.
Hmm…I’m undecided. You’ll have to let me think about it. In the meantime, how about another kiss?
16
Annie
I come home to find a note on the bed: Want your fucking cat? Talk to Angelina.
“Salem!” I look under the bed and in the closet. He’s not here, I feel it in my bones. No one would leave such a note unless they actually did something. But who? Who would…
“Aria…” I growl. “If you hurt him, I swear to god…”
I hop into Sticky Bun and fly down the mountainside. That psycho bitch better not have done anything to my cat.
I pull up to find a girl lying prone in the middle of the bridge. I run to her, scanning the area for signs of my cat. My pillow case lies empty a few feet away.
I sweep the hair from her face.
“Oh my god…”
It’s Aria. I can tell by her goth sneakers with the skulls drawn onto them. She’s…aged. Her face is covered in wrinkles. Charles Oates instantly pops into my head, the wrinkles are eerily identical. They could be siblings. A shock of white streaks through the pure jet black of her hair.
“Aria!” I shake her by the shoulders.
Her eyes roll back in her head and she coughs.
I heave a sigh of relief. “Thank God, you stupid bitch, at least you’re still alive.” She makes gagging sounds, so I roll her onto her stomach.
She throws up clots of blood.
I support her shoulders with one arm and rub her back until she’s finished. She recovers slightly, so I roll her back over.
“Aria, listen to me.” I take her firmly by the face. “Did you hurt my fucking cat?”
She nods and shakes her head simultaneously.
“You’re moving your head in a circle, I don’t know what that means!”
She points in the direction of home.
“Did he run away from you? Did he run home?”
She nods and starts sobbing.
“I’m calling an ambulance.”
As I’m talking to the dispatcher, Aria starts crawling towards the exit like a snake.
“For the love of Pete, Aria! Give me a second and I’ll help you.”
“Close your eyes, now!” A voice booms from behind me.
Startled, I turn to see Charles Oates stand
ing at the mouth of the bridge.
“Close. Your. Eyes!” he commands again.
I squeeze them shut.
“Hello? Hello? Annie, are you there?” The dispatcher calls from the other end of the line. I ignore him and let the phone fall to my side. The only thing I hear is the strangle of rope and the sensation of something solid swaying behind me.
“She’s here,” Charles whispers, his voice closer this time. “I’m going to take your hand and you’re going to follow me. You’re not opening your eyes until I say so.”
“What about Aria?”
“Leave her. You’re the only one here that’s worth eating.”
“Eating? What the hell does that mean?”
“You really don’t want to find out. Move!”
“But what about my truck?” I ask as he pushes me forward.
“I’ll bring it back to you, just get out of here!”
He guides me until the ground changes under my feet.
“Don’t look back,” I hear him say, and he pushes me forward by the shoulders. I do as I’m told and run from the bridge. I don’t look back, even though I desperately want to. I sweep my eyes from side to side, scanning the road in front of me for signs of my cat. I don’t see him anywhere. Ahead, on the eastern side of the mountain, the sun’s morning rays shine through. That doesn’t seem right. I couldn’t have been on the bridge but thirty minutes at most and dawn is already breaking. I roughly estimate when Copper left and how long it took me to get to the bridge. Time shouldn’t have moved this fast. Three hours have been lost and there’s no way of accounting for them.
The road to my house is on the backside of the mountain, away from Angelina’s bridge. I’ve barely rounded the curve when Charles drives up with Sticky Bun.
He hops out and hands me the keys.
“What the hell just happened back there? Why does Aria look like that?”
Charles looks at me sadly. “Remember when I warned you? Remember when I told you that if you didn’t stay away from the bridge, that Angelina would give you a face like mine? Well, that’s what that means. Aria went somewhere she wasn’t supposed to, and Angelina sucked the life out of her. Not enough to kill her, but enough to age her, enough to shorten her life.”
“Will Aria be okay?”
Charles shrugs. “As okay as anyone who has The Cough.”
“Rebecca at the diner doesn’t have wrinkles and she has The Cough.”
He shrugs his shoulders again. “There’s no rhyme or reason to it. Sometimes she takes more from some and less from others. All depends on how much she’s enjoying herself.”
I can’t wrap my head around this.
“When I arrived at the bridge, it couldn’t have been any later than two, now it’s daybreak. What the hell, Charles?”
“Nothing will ever make sense on the bridge,” he answers dryly. “Time races and stands still. Watches stop, people age. The bridge is her sanctuary and when you’re on it, you play by her rules. Now, go home. I have to make sure the ambulance picks up the girl.”
“What are you going to tell them?”
“I’m staying out of it,” he smirks. “Once you live here long enough, you’ll figure out that’s the best way to be. I will watch them without being seen. Go home, girl. I won’t tell you again.”
I make it home in record time. I get out of the truck and scream for my cat. I call for him down the mountain, towards the bridge, my voice carrying across the water. I’m sure the people in town can hear me.
There’s a meow behind me.
I spin to find him climbing out of the outhouse, stretching and flicking his tail. He squints at me as if I’ve interrupted the nap of his life.
I scoop him up and hold him close.
“Silly boy, where’ve you been?”
He meows again in reply.
“You were catnapped, weren’t you?” I whisper.
He meows again, but it comes out as a squeak.
“You’d tell me what happened if you could, wouldn’t you?”
I pet his head and he purrs. I hold him close and can’t help but notice that his fur is so much softer than normal. I lean away from him so I can study his face.
“Oh, my god,” I say as we look into each other’s eyes.
One of Salem’s eyes are blue. They’re supposed to be green. This is definitely something I would have noticed before. “What the hell happened to you on that bridge?” I ask, knowing full well that he can’t answer me. “You feel okay though, right?” He purrs and jumps out of my embrace, tired of my interrogation.
He prances to the back door. I bring him inside and fill his dish with food.
It’s six in the morning and Mom will be up soon. I might as well not bother trying to sneak back into bed. I’ll put on a pot of coffee and make her some breakfast. I have to play this off as being sweet instead of just now making it home from being out all night.
I hear shuffling going on upstairs. She’s awake. As I fry up the bacon, she takes a shower. Perfect timing. The food will be ready when she is.
“My goodness,” she says, coming down the steps. “You’re industrious this morning!”
I smile. “It was my turn to cook for you. Good morning.” I kiss her cheek.
She returns the kiss and sits down to her meal. I sit down across from her.
“So, me and Copper explored the old homestead the other day.”
“You be careful, the place is probably rotten and falling in,” she says while buttering her toast. “You know how you teased me about the hanging girl on the bridge?”
“Yeah,” she snorts humorously.
“Is the hanging girl Angelina? You know, as in, our relative Angelina?”
She sets the toast down and gives me a hard look.
“No, that’s an urban legend. There’s no such thing as ghosts, and even if there were, our relatives wouldn’t be one of them.”
“How are you so sure?”
She raises her brows at me. “Is there something I should know about?”
I shrink in my chair. “No, I just want to know more about Angelina since she seems to be so popular.”
Mom runs a hand down her face and sighs.
“I don’t know much about Angelina; she was gone before I was born. The family didn’t talk about her much, and I never asked. It felt taboo just to say her name. She disappeared when she was sixteen. She was breathtakingly gorgeous, so there was no lack in interested suitors. I never heard rumors of her being promiscuous, although people claimed that she ran off with a beau. There was also talk of how Angelina worshipped her mother and would never leave her without at least saying goodbye, so that’s why the family suspected foul play, even though there was never a body and no evidence to support their suspicions. Some claimed that she ran off to join the army. It was World War Two, after all. Anyway, it wasn’t long after her disappearance that the town drunk claimed to see her hanging by a noose from the rafters of the bridge. He claimed that Angelina turned into some demon from hell that cursed him with a bloody cough. No loving family member wants to be told that their relative has turned into some sort of paranormal monster, so of course our family was livid at the accusation. The teenagers in town ran wild with it, and then it became an urban legend.”
“Did you ever do what the teenagers did? Did you ever try to see her?”
“I’d like to say I took the high road and didn’t partake in the shenanigans, but I did. It was disrespectful to the family, and I regret that now.”
Mom looks sadly into her coffee cup. “I remember the affect Angelina had on my great grandmother Diana. I always called her Grandma Dee. Grandma Dee was Angelina’s mother, and she’d be your great-great grandmother. I remember coming here for visits when I was little, I couldn’t have been more than five or six. Grandma Dee would have been in her eighties. She was soft-spoken and gentle, and even though I was a little kid, I could tell there was something off about her. Sometimes she’d wear her nightgown in the middle of the
day, and when my mother tried to convince her to get dressed, she’d pitch a fit like a toddler. On other days, she’d be awake and dressed before anyone else and cooking breakfast with a smile on her face. Kind of like you,” she winks.
“Then, there were times she’d insist on putting empty pots on the stove even though no one was cooking at the time. She kept four dolls on the sofa in the living room, and woe be to the person that moved them. They were her babies, and it delighted me when she cooed, and rocked, and talked to them. She and I would tend to those dolls for hours. In my mind, she was the master of make-believe. No other adult treated dolls with such tenderness. I was too young to understand that Grandma Dee actually thought the dolls were alive. One night, Grandma Dee woke me up. She was standing stark naked at the foot of my bed.
‘Let’s go swimming, Angel. And after we’re done swimming, we’ll go fishing. The fish are as big as you are, and will gobble you up in their bellies if we’re not careful. Take off your clothes and let’s go!’
“I did as she told me to. The part about the fish gobbling me up scared me a little, but I felt oddly safe in my grandma’s presence. I knew she wouldn’t let anything happen to me. She was strange, but she was gentle, and I was completely enraptured with her.
“We played in the river under the light of the full moon. She was an old woman and her body was proof of it. She was saggy and wrinkly and not beautiful by common standards, but as she flung her arms out and twirled beneath the stars, I was certain she was a water goddess.
“It felt like time stood still. We played until our skin wrinkled. I was getting a little cold, standing there naked in the night. I don’t know what triggered it, but grandma stopped splashing and stood in the middle of the river staring at the covered bridge. She was standing in a place that was too deep for me and the current was too strong, so I stood in the shallows and called to her.
“Grandma Dee! What’s wrong?”
“She just kept standing and staring and wouldn’t answer me. I waded a little closer to her. The water was up to my chin and I contemplated swimming to her, but then I thought of the big fish that gobbles up little girls, and I didn’t venture any closer.
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