“My mom wasn’t smoking a cigarette, she was smo-king, like it was coming from inside her body.” He couldn’t believe he was actually saying this, but he was.
“I know. And I’m not sure how, exactly.” Vera took a sip. “But I think the gifts are left for it, the demon, or the inhuman spirit, or whatever you want to call it. And when it accepts the gift, when it grants a favor, then the gift manifests inside her body—the smell of lilies, the presence of smoke…”
Granting favors…his sister…the candy, the apple…
“What about Chloe?” Max spat, his brain clicking. “She left it crap, she said it did something, to a friend of hers—”
“I know.” Vera touched his hand. “We looked her over. We spoke to her. She seems okay.”
“I didn’t sense anything dark inside her.” Aunt Tilda agreed.
Oh, great! Aunt Tilda didn’t sense anything dark. I guess I don’t need to worry, then!
“What about my dad? I heard him.” Max’s eyes stretched.
“It’s a trick. Evil spirits have many voices,” said her aunt.
“No. It was him. He even told a bad joke. That was his thing. How could it know that?” His voice cracked. He didn’t even have it in him to be embarrassed.
“Your mom knew that.” Vera placed a palm on his arm.
“My mom wouldn’t do that to me.” His voice was small. It was the first time he heard his father’s voice, outside of an old video, in seven years. It was real. He heard his laugh. Max’s throat grew tight.
“That wasn’t your mother,” Vera said.
“Then what was it? How did it get there? Why is this happening to us?” He knew he sounded like a child, but that’s how he felt. This wasn’t fair. His family had been through enough; they didn’t need this too.
“To be possessed, a person needs to invite the demon in,” Aunt Tilda said matter-of-factly.
Max’s head turned her way. “What do you mean? You think my mom asked for this?”
“No, not exactly.” Vera shook her head. “You know all those horror movies about tarot cards and séances? Well, there’s some truth to that. To be possessed, you need to invite the demon, you need to open a door to the other side.”
“The shrine,” her aunt explained.
“You said lots of people have the shrine. Are they all smoking?”
“No. I don’t know. I’m not sure, actually.” Vera raised her palms. “And I doubt your mom knew what she was doing when she bought it. Kids who play with Ouija boards don’t think they’re actually summoning spirits, but sometimes…they are.” She shrugged. “The fact that she’s fighting it, that you can hear her, means that she’s regretting it. This is good. But the fact that there are so many people worshipping it…”
“You think they’re all possessed?” He pressed his fingers to his temples.
“Maybe.” Vera looked as confused as he felt. “I told you when you first came to see me, I’m not my parents. But I called them. I left a message. And they’ll know what to do. In the meantime, we need to keep you and your sister safe.”
“You’re going to stay here,” ordered Aunt Tilda. That wasn’t a question. “I’ll make beef stew.”
Then she opened the fridge and began rummaging around, like what they were having for dinner was somehow a major concern.
Max couldn’t stay here, in Vera Martinez’s home. This was the first time he’d stepped foot in the place. He just met her aunt. He had his sister to think about. And what about the rumors? Was this house any safer? His eyes flicked around, not landing on anything specific, but searching for something to confirm or deny what he’d heard for seventeen years.
“What are you thinking?” Vera watched his face. “Are you worried about where you’ll sleep? We thought Chloe could have the guest room, and you could sleep on the couch. It’s not great, but—”
She paused and read something in his eyes, then sank back in her chair. “You’re scared to stay here.”
Her eyes fell to the floor.
Now he felt like a jerk. Max didn’t know what he would do without Vera right now, and her aunt was like a real-life Mary Poppins with a spoonful of religion. He needed them, but they just said he shouldn’t invite any more trouble, and this place had a reputation.
“Okay, I’m just gonna ask, because I think we’re past the pleasantries.” Max exhaled. “Is your house haunted? Do you make witch’s brew? I realize my mom is currently possessed by a demon, so my options are limited, but if you have a strange collection of satanic objects hidden around here, now is the time to tell me.”
Vera’s eyes widened, then flicked to a nearby door. So did her aunt’s.
Max sat back. Wait, was it true?
His mouth fell open.
“Okay, it’s not what you think….” Vera’s voice was wary as she glared at an old barnwood door.
Are you kidding me? His sister was upstairs! And Vera was eying that door like even she was afraid of it. What was he supposed to think?
“I can see your mind spinning. Sip your tea,” Aunt Tilda instructed.
No, you sip your tea! he thought, but robotically, he took a drink.
“Obviously, you know my parents perform exorcisms.” Again, she sounded clinical. Your mother had…a colonoscopy. “Afterward, there are sometimes objects connected to these cases that aren’t safe to leave behind. What if the object holds residual power? What if another demon tries to access it? What if the demon they just expelled is still attached to it?”
“You’re serious about this? There’s shit like that in your house!” He must’ve looked like a cartoon character with a bunch of symbols and exclamation points floating above his head.
“Bacon! I found bacon!” Aunt Tilda cheered.
His face flung toward her as she yanked a plastic package from the fridge.
“She stress-cooks. Just go with it,” muttered Vera.
Max rubbed his temples again, then glared at the wooden door, boards crisscrossing like Xs on the upper and lower panels. An X usually meant stay away. “If it were just me here, fine. But my sister is upstairs.”
“She’s perfectly safe,” said Aunt Tilda, plopping carrots onto a cutting board. She grabbed a chef’s knife.
“She is.” Vera agreed. “I wouldn’t let you stay here if she weren’t.”
“How can you say that? You just told me that you have to invite a demon in. Well, how many demons have you invited in here?”
“It’s not the same thing.”
“How?” He knew he was frustrating them, but he didn’t exactly have a lifetime of demonic background information.
“The objects in our basement—it could be a toy from a house that was haunted by the ghost of a child, or a mirror that was once owned by a warlock—my parents take them so we can watch over them. We have them blessed every week. We make sure their evil never spreads.”
“But what if you’re wrong? What if it doesn’t work that way?” His eyes narrowed. He couldn’t believe she’d grown up like this, with evil artifacts steps from the breakfast table. A rush of pity swept over him. How was she not more messed up?
“My parents know what they’re doing,” Vera replied.
“Why? Because they have, like, superpowers?”
Vera’s aunt chuckled. But he wasn’t joking. What else would you call it?
“Yeah, something like that.” Vera reached for his hand. “You’re safe here. I promise.”
No one could promise that.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The Storm
In a small coastal community, a hurricane rages. The eye is cutting an unrelenting path up the jagged coast, from Washington, D.C., to Atlantic City, from Lower Manhattan to Roaring Creek. The storm surge is expected to crest beyond the Great Flood of 1955—a historic squall still tattooed on buildings
with fading lines that mark the day canoes rowed down Main Street.
A ten-year-old girl is huddled in a dining room, the most interior space in the house. Her only protection is her aunt and the packing tape crisscrossing the whistling windows.
“Pray, Vera, just keep praying,” her aunt tells her, squeezing the girl to her chest, her long salt-and-pepper hair forming a shield to cover them both.
Outside, the wind howls like a mother who’s lost her child, branches flinging violently into the air as if every spot must be searched, all debris upended. The roof groans from the blasts.
“Our Father, who art in Heaven…,” her aunt chants, rocking the girl who is nearly taller than she is as they cuddle together on the hardwood floor. The girl’s parents are stranded overseas, unable to return.
They are alone.
“Thy kingdom come, thy will be done…”
For days, the governor pleaded for evacuations, but they didn’t pack. There are items in the basement that cannot be moved, cannot be left unattended, and cannot be taken in a fire. The girl knows this. She knows what her parents do.
“Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those…”
The girl turns to the swaying lace curtains and catches a blur of movement in the deluge outside. Slowly, the figure takes the shape of a man. A man in a hat.
His evergreen poncho flaps like the frantic wings of a bird under attack, while his matching wide-brim fisherman’s hat forms a bloated gutter above his gray beard. The aluminum awning above him offers no protection as the rain gusts horizontally, vertically, and circularly, mixed with bits of earth. A white puff of a dog is clutched beneath his armpit. He places it down, the puny animal determined to answer nature’s call.
“Oh my God. Mr. Zanger is outside,” the ten-year-old says, pointing toward the yard.
“Don’t use the Lord’s name in vain,” her aunt scolds, then she follows her gaze. “What is he thinking?”
The man clutches a pole, struggling to stay upright as sheets of water crash on his face. The dog is barely visible through the murky haze, his yaps inaudible over the freight train rumbling across their ceiling. The old man releases the pole, stretching for the animal, as the posts of his awning suddenly lift from the ground like pegs from their slots, and the green-and-white metal sheet soars with the wind. The man crashes to the mud back-first. His head hits.
“Oh my God!” The girl leaps to her feet.
The wind shoves the small canine against the siding of the colonial, and the man lies motionless, faceup in the downpour.
The girl runs through the house, her eyes on the shuddering back door. She’s aware of the danger, but she doesn’t stop. She and fear are old friends. Best friends. The storm is no match for what’s inside her house.
“Vera! No! Get back!” her aunt yells.
The girl reaches the door, Category Two gales fighting her push, thrusting her inside like even the storm doesn’t want her stepping into its wrath. She barrels through.
There are no shoes on her feet as she stumbles blindly, toes squelching on the sodden earth and a skinny elbow bent in front of her face for protection. Three steps forward, she slides back one, three steps forward, she wobbles back again. The dog yelps, guiding her way.
She trips over the man before she sees him, dropping to her knees into clumps of clotted leaves.
“Mr. Zanger! Are you okay? Can you get up?” She shakes his shoulders, and his head lifts briefly.
“Vera! Vera! Come back!” her aunt cries in the distance.
The girl tugs at the heavy body, his consciousness slowly returning.
“Mr. Zanger, can you hear me?” She wipes the rain from his eyes, using her back as an umbrella to shield his face. He attempts to roll onto an elbow, but the hurricane throws him back like a wrestler who’s won his match: stay down! “Mr. Zanger!”
“You? You!” He groans, squinting.
Then his dark pupils swell, fear taking hold.
Only, he isn’t afraid of the storm.
“Get away! Get away from me!” He pushes the girl, tossing her into a puddle so deep it covers her hips. He crawls back on the seat of his poncho, giant galoshes kicking muck onto her cheeks.
Black hair sticks to her face as the rain blurs the look of disdain in his eyes. The old man reaches for his dog, who is cowering in a barren shrub, then scrambles up the two concrete steps to his home, the door slamming behind him.
“Vera! Vera! Come inside!” her aunt shouts over the wind.
The girl turns toward the sound, embarrassment surging within her. He fears her. Even now. Even in this. She spies her aunt’s panicked face peeking through the door, and for the first time, she notices the wind—its odd dance, its strange pattern. Severed branches, plastic bags, autumn leaves, and trash can lids swirl around her property, twisting in a spiral, curling away from her home. It’s as if her white Victorian were the center of the storm, everything whipping around it, not at it.
Even Mother Nature won’t get too close.
The girl crawls on scratched knees, heavy drops pelting her back and mulch fumes filling her nostrils. Finally, her fingers graze concrete, the steps. Her aunt yanks her inside by a single arm.
“You could have been killed!” she hollers, shaking the girl’s shoulders, water spraying onto the pine boards of the country kitchen.
The girl doesn’t respond, her head flopping limply, as her aunt continues to grip her body.
“What if something hit you? What if you were hurt? What would I do?”
The words form a dull buzz in the girl’s head as she shivers.
The chill deepens, but the source is no longer her sopping clothes. Her body stiffens. The aunt stops speaking. They both feel it.
Their eyes turn in unison toward the basement door, an unseen force tugging their chests and swelling their pupils. The dust in the room grows hefty as the silence builds.
Then the crash sounds. A cascading clink of shattered glass rings in the girl’s ears, in her soul.
Something has broken.
No, it’s broken loose.
She doesn’t blink until an audible gasp rips from her aunt. Hairs rise on the girl’s arms as the aunt begins to pray. The names of saints, God, Mary, and Jesus tumble from her aunt’s lips.
But the girl knows it is too late.
They both do.
The unthinkable has happened.
Evil has been set free.
And God can’t help them now.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Vera
Telling a guy that your basement holds five or six dozen objects that at one time were possessed by inhuman, murderous spirits is not exactly the way to endear him to you. Not that Vera wanted to endear him. Or maybe she did. It was complicated.
She needed her parents.
They texted that they were in the throes of an exorcism and would call her later. How exactly could Vera tell them to ditch the possessed girl in Barcelona and come back to help the possessed woman here? Surely that girl deserved saving, but it was hard to feel sorry for her across an ocean when someone down the street was literally smoking. Vera dug her hands into her hair and groaned into her no-longer-warm tea. Maxwell Oliver was upstairs with his sister watching Brave. (A poignant title given the circumstances.)
“You know what I’m going to say.” Vera peered at her aunt, who busied herself with chopped vegetables and hunks of meat.
“I know no such thing.” Aunt Tilda swept her long silver hair behind her ear and poured chicken stock into a Crock-Pot.
“The hurricane.”
Vera let the words hang.
She and her aunt rarely talked about it, as if giving what happened that day mental energy was giving it power. But there was nothing to give power to, right? They’d stopped it.
When Vera was t
en years old, when she heard that object shatter behind the old barnwood door, she thought her life shattered with it. She had been told repeatedly to never touch that door, enter that room, or brush against a single object. Vera and her aunt gave those same instructions to Maxwell and his sister today. But they didn’t tell them that years ago, something broke.
After the crash sounded, Aunt Tilda tucked her ten-year-old niece under the dining room table, the lace cloth Vera’s only protection, and opened the basement door. She was gone for five minutes, exactly three hundred seconds. Vera counted. When Aunt Tilda returned, she said she’d recited the “prayers of protection.” Everything was fine now. But when her parents got home, and Aunt Tilda informed them of the prayers she’d said, they realized she’d only completed two parts of a four-part ritual. That wasn’t enough.
So they completed the rest themselves—seven days after the hurricane had wreaked its havoc.
Of course, they worried that something had been unleashed, but there were no reports of possession, no increased calls to the church. Seven years passed. They believed they’d contained it.
They could have been wrong. What if all the eerie coincidences, all the accidents, all the deaths, even the gas explosion, traced back to that one horrible moment?
“The hurricane has nothing to do with it.” Aunt Tilda stirred the contents of her pot, her wooden spoon sloshing.
“You can’t know that,” Vera countered.
“I do. I said the prayers. I was there when your parents said them. It worked.”
“But what if it didn’t?” Vera shook her head. “Aunt Tilda, the town changed after the gas explosion.”
“Yes, because the explosion was horrific, but that had nothing to do with the hurricane.”
“I’m not so sure. I think there’s a connection.” Vera stared at her hands twisting on the kitchen table. “I’m having dreams.”
Her aunt stopped stirring. “What kind of dreams?” Her voice betrayed a touch of fear.
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