Anna Dressed in Blood

by Kendare Blake

  It’s always the same dream. A figure bending over my face. I’m scared, but I also know that the figure is linked to me. I don’t like it. I think it’s my father.

  But not really my father. My father has moved on. Mom and Gideon made sure of that; they hung around the house where he was murdered down in Baton Rouge for nights on end, casting runes and burning candles. But he was gone. I couldn’t tell whether my mom was happy or disappointed.

  I watch her now as she hurriedly snips and grinds different herbs, measuring them out, pouring them from the bowl of her mortar and pestle. Her hands are fast and clean. She’s had to wait until the last minute because the Five Finger Grass was hard to find and she had to go through an unfamiliar supplier.

  “What’s this stuff for, anyway?” I ask, picking up a piece of it. It’s dehydrated and greenish brown. It looks like a piece of hay.

  “It’ll protect from the damage of any five fingers,” she says distractedly, then looks up. “Anna does have five fingers, doesn’t she?”

  “On each hand,” I say lightly, and set the grass back down.

  “I cleaned the athame again,” she says as she adds shakes of slivered colic root, which she tells me is useful to keep enemies at bay. “You’ll need it. From what I read of this spell, it’ll take a lot out of her. You’ll be able to finish your job. Do what you came to do.”

  I notice she’s not smiling. Even though I haven’t been around much, my mom knows me. She knows when something’s off, and she usually has a pretty good idea of what it is. She says it’s a mom thing.

  “What’s wrong about this, Cassio?” she asks. “What’s different?”

  “Nothing. Nothing should be different. She’s more dangerous than any ghost I’ve seen. Maybe even more than any Dad saw. She’s killed more; she’s stronger.” I look down at the pile of Five Finger Grass. “But she’s more alive, too. She’s not confused. She’s not some shifting, half-existent thing who kills out of fear or rage. Something did this to her, and she knows.”

  “How much does she know?”

  “I think she knows everything, only she’s scared to tell me.”

  My mom pushes some hair out of her eyes. “After tonight, you’ll know for sure.”

  I shove myself off of the counter. “I think I already do,” I say angrily. “I think I know who killed her.” I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. I keep thinking about the man who terrorized her, this young girl, and I want to pound his face in. In a robotic voice, I tell my mother what Anna told me. When I look at her, she’s wearing big soft cow’s eyes.

  “It’s terrible,” she says.

  “Yeah.”

  “But you can’t rewrite history.”

  I wish that I could. I wish this knife was good for something besides death, that I could cut through time and walk into that house, into that kitchen where he trapped her, and get her out of there. I would make sure she had the future she should have had.

  “She doesn’t want to kill people, Cas.”

  “I know. So how can I—”

  “You can because you have to,” she says simply. “You can because she needs you to.”

  I look at my knife, resting in its jar of salt. Something that smells like black jellybeans permeates the air. My mom is chopping another herb.

  “What’s that?”

  “Star anise.”

  “What’s it for?”

  She smiles a little bit. “Smells pretty.”

  I breathe deep. In less than an hour everything will be ready, and Thomas will pick me up. I’ll take the small velvet bags secured with long strings and the four white pillar candles infused with essential oil, and he’ll have the scrying bowl and his bag of stones. And we’ll go to try to kill Anna Korlov.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The house is waiting. Everyone standing around me in the driveway is scared to death of what’s inside, but I’m more creeped out by the house itself. I know it’s dumb, but I can’t help but feel like it’s watching, and maybe smiling, grinning at our childish attempts to stop it, laughing off its foundation as we shake chicken feet in its direction.

  The air is cold. Carmel’s breath comes in hot little puffs. She’s got on a dark gray corduroy jacket and a red loose-knitted scarf; buried inside the scarf is my mother’s bag of herbs. Will showed up in a letterman jacket, of course, and Thomas looks as scruffy as ever in his beat-up Army fatigue coat. He and Will are huffing in the dirt, arranging the stones from Lake Superior around our feet in a four-foot circle.

  Carmel walks up to stand beside me while I stare at the house. My athame is hanging over my shoulder by its strap. I’ll put it in my pocket later. Carmel sniffs at her herb bag.

  “Smells like licorice,” she says, and sniffs at mine to make sure they’re the same.

  “That’s smart of your mom,” Thomas says from behind us. “It wasn’t in the spell, but it never hurts to add some luck.”

  Carmel smiles at him in the shiny dark. “Where’d you learn all this stuff?”

  “My grandpa,” he answers proudly, and hands her a candle. He hands another to Will, and then gives me mine. “Ready?” he asks.

  I look up at the moon. It’s bright, and cold, and still looks full to me. But the calendar says that it’s waning, and people get paid to make calendars, so I guess that we’re ready.

  The circle of stones is only about twenty feet from the house. I take my place in the west and everyone else moves to take theirs. Thomas is trying to balance the scrying bowl in one hand while holding the candle with the other. I can see a bottle of Dasani water sticking out of his pocket.

  “Why don’t you give the chicken feet to Carmel,” I suggest when he tries to hold them between his ring and pinky fingers. She holds her hand out gingerly, but not too gingerly. She’s not as girly as I thought she’d be when I first met her.

  “Do you feel it?” Thomas asks, his eyes bright.

  “Feel what?”

  “The energies are moving.”

  Will looks around skeptically. “All I feel is cold,” he snaps.

  “Light the candles, counterclockwise from the east.”

  Four small flames ignite and illuminate our faces and chests, revealing expressions that are part wonder, part fear, and part feeling stupid. Only Thomas is unperturbed. He’s barely with us anymore. His eyes are closed, and when he speaks, his voice is about an octave lower than usual. I can tell Carmel’s scared, but she doesn’t say anything.

  “Start chanting,” Thomas commands, and we do. I can’t believe it but none of us mess up. The chant is in Latin, four words repeated over and over. They sound stupid on our tongues, but the longer we do it the less stupid it feels. Even Will is chanting his heart out.

  “Don’t stop,” says Thomas, opening his eyes. “Move toward the house. Don’t break the circle.”

  When we move together I feel the power of the spell. I feel us all walking, all of our legs, all of our feet, joined together with invisible thread. The flames of the candles stand up strong without flickering, like solid fire. I can’t believe that it’s Thomas doing all this—short, awkward Thomas, hiding all of this power inside a fatigue jacket. We drift together up the steps, and before I can think, we’re at her door.

  The door opens. Anna looks out at us.

  “You’ve come to do it,” she says sadly. “And you should.” She looks at the others. “You know what happens, when they come inside,” she warns. “I can’t control it.”

  I want to tell her it’ll be all right. I want to ask her to try. But I can’t stop chanting.

  “He says it’ll be all right,” Thomas says from behind me, and my voice nearly falters. “He wants you to try. We need you inside the circle. Don’t worry about us. We’re protected.”

  For once I’m glad that Thomas reached into my head. Anna looks from him to me and back again, then slips silently away from the door. I cross the threshold first.

  I know when the others are inside, not only because our legs are movi
ng as one, but because Anna starts to change. Veins snake up her arms and neck, winding through her face. Her hair becomes slick and shimmering black. Oil covers her eyes. The white dress saturates through with bright red blood, and the moonlight bounces off it, making it shine like plastic. It runs down her legs to drip onto the floor.

  Behind me, the circle doesn’t hesitate. I’m proud of them; maybe they are ghostbusters after all.

  Anna’s hands are clenched in fists so tight that black blood begins to seep through her fingers. She’s doing as Thomas asked. She’s trying to control it, trying to control the urge to tear the skin from their throats, to pull the arms from their shoulders. I lead the circle forward and she squeezes her eyes shut. Our legs move faster. Carmel and I pivot so we’re facing each other. The circle is opening up, letting Anna pass through into the center. For a minute, Carmel is obstructed completely. All I see is Anna’s bleeding body. Then she’s inside, and the circle closes back up.

  We’re just in time. It was all she could do to hold herself in, and now her eyes and mouth open wide in a deafening scream. She slashes the air with hooked fingers and I feel Will’s foot slip back, but Carmel’s thinking fast and lays the chicken feet below where Anna hovers. The ghost quiets, no longer moving, but regarding each of us with hatred as she twists around slowly.

  “The circle is cast,” Thomas says. “She is contained.”

  He kneels and we all kneel with him. It’s strange, the sensation that all of our legs are one leg. He places the silver scrying bowl down on the floor and uncaps his bottle of Dasani.

  “It works as well as anything else,” he assures us. “It’s clean and clear and conductive. Needing holy water, or water from an earthen spring … it’s just snobbery.” The water falls into the bowl with a crystalline, musical sound, and we wait until the surface is still.

  “Cas,” Thomas says, and I look at him. With a start I realize that he didn’t say anything out loud. “The circle binds us. We’re inside each other’s minds. Tell me what you need to know. Tell me what you need to see.”

  This is all far too weird. The spell is strong—I feel grounded and high as a kite at the same time. But I feel rooted. I feel safe.

  Show me what happened to Anna, I think carefully. Show me how she was killed, what gives her this power.

  Thomas closes his eyes again, and Anna starts to shiver in midair, like she has a fever. Thomas’s head falls. For a second I think he’s passed out and we’re in trouble, but then I realize that he’s just staring into the scrying bowl.

  “Oh,” I hear Carmel whisper.

  The air around us is changing. The house around us is changing. The strange, gray light slowly warms, and the dust sheets melt off of the furniture. I blink. I’m looking at Anna’s house, the way it must have been when she was alive.

  There’s a woven rug on the floor of the sitting room, which is lit up by hurricane lamps that make the air yellow. Behind us, we hear the door open and shut, but I’m still too busy looking at the changes, at the photos hanging on the walls and the rusty red embroidery on the sofa. If I look closer, I can see that it’s not really that fine; the chandelier is tarnished and missing crystals, and there’s a rip in the fabric of the rocking chair.

  A figure moves through the room, a girl in a dark brown skirt and plain gray blouse. She’s carrying schoolbooks. Her hair is tied up in a long, brown ponytail, secured with blue ribbon. When she turns at a sound on the staircase, I see her face. It’s Anna.

  Seeing her alive is indescribable. I thought once that there couldn’t be much left of the living girl inside of what Anna is now, but I was wrong. As she looks up at the man on the staircase, her eyes are familiar. They’re hard and knowing. They’re irritated. I know without looking that this is the man she told me about—the man who was going to marry her mother.

  “And what did we learn in school today, dear Anna?” His accent is so strong that I can barely make out the words. He walks down the stairs, and his steps are infuriating—lazy and confident and too full of their own power. There’s a slight limp to his stride, but he’s not really using the wooden cane he’s carrying. When he walks around her, I’m reminded of a shark circling. Anna’s jaw tightens.

  His hand comes up over her shoulder and he traces a finger across the cover of her book. “More things that you don’t need.”

  “Mama wishes for me to do well,” Anna replies. It’s the same voice I know, just with a stronger flavor of Finnish. She spins around. I can’t see, but I know she’s glaring at him.

  “And so you will.” He smiles. He has an angular face and good teeth. There’s a five o’clock shadow on his cheeks, and he’s starting to go bald. He wears what’s left of his sandy blond hair slicked back. “Smart girl,” he whispers, lifting a finger to her face. She jerks away and runs up the stairs, but it doesn’t look like fleeing. It looks like attitude.

  That’s my girl, I think, and then remember I’m in the circle. I wonder how much of my thoughts and feelings are running through Thomas’s mind. Inside the circle, I hear Anna’s dress dripping and sense her shudder as the scene progresses.

  I keep my eyes on the man: Anna’s would-be stepfather. He’s smirking to himself, and when her door closes on the second floor, he reaches into his shirt and pulls out a bundle of white cloth. I don’t know what it is until he puts it to his nose. It’s the dress she sewed for the dance. The dress she died in.

  Fucking pervert, Thomas thinks inside of our heads. I clench my fists. The urge to run at the man is overwhelming, even though I know I’m watching something that happened sixty years ago. I’m watching it like it’s playing on a projector. I can’t change any of it.

  Time shifts ahead; the light changes. The lamps seem to get brighter and figures flash by in dark blurry clumps. I can hear things, muffled conversations and arguments. My senses struggle to keep up.

  There’s a woman at the foot of the stairs. She’s wearing a severe black dress that looks like it must be scratchy as hell, and her hair is pulled back in a tight bun. She’s looking up at the second floor, so I can’t see her face. But I can see that she’s holding Anna’s white dress in one hand and shaking it up and down. In the other, she’s clutching a string of rosary beads.

  I feel more than hear Thomas sniff. His cheeks twitch—he’s caught wind of something.

  Power, he thinks. Power from the black.

  I don’t know what he means. I don’t have time to wonder.

  “Anna!” the woman shouts, and Anna appears, coming out from the hall at the top of the stairs.

  “Yes, Mama?”

  Her mother holds up the dress in her fist. “What is this?”

  Anna seems stricken. Her hand flies to the rail. “Where did you get that? How did you find that?”

  “It was in her room.” It’s him again, walking out of the kitchen. “I heard her say she was working on it. I found it for her own good.”

  “Is it true?” her mother demands. “What is the meaning of it?”

  “It’s for a dance, Mama,” Anna says angrily. “A dance at school.”

  “This?” Her mother holds the dress up and spreads it out with both hands. “This is for dancing?” She shakes it in the air. “Whore! You will not go dancing! Spoiled girl. You will not leave this house!”

  At the top of the stairs, I hear a softer, sweeter voice. An olive-skinned woman with long black hair in a braid takes Anna by the shoulders. This must be Maria, the seamstress who was Anna’s friend, who left her own daughter behind in Spain.

  “Do not be angry, Mrs. Korlov,” Maria says quickly. “I help her. It was my idea. Something pretty.”

  “You,” Mrs. Korlov spits. “You’ve made it worse. Whispering your Spanish filth into my daughter’s ears. She has become willful since you came. Proud. I won’t have you whispering to her anymore. I want you out of this house!”

  “No!” Anna shouts.

  The man takes a step closer to his fiancée. “Malvina,” he says. “We do not need t
o lose boarders.”

  “Hush, Elias,” Malvina snaps. I’m beginning to understand why Anna couldn’t just tell her mother what Elias was after.

  The scene speeds up. I can feel more than see what’s happening. Malvina throws the dress at Anna and orders her to burn it. She slaps her across the face when she tries to convince her to let Maria stay. Anna is crying, but only the Anna in the memory. The real Anna is hissing as she watches, black blood boiling. I feel like doing a mixture of the two.

  Time moves ahead, and my eyes and ears strain to follow Maria as she goes, leaving with only one suitcase. I hear Anna ask what she’s going to do, begging her to stay close by. And then all but one of the lamps goes out, and the windows outside are dark.

  Malvina and Elias are in the sitting room. Malvina is knitting something out of dark blue yarn and Elias is reading the newspaper, smoking a pipe. They look miserable, even in their evening routines of pleasure. Their faces are slack and bored, mouths drawn in thin, grim lines. I have no idea how this courtship went, but it had to be about as interesting as watching bowling on TV. My mind moves to Anna—all of our minds move to Anna—and as if we summoned her, she comes down the stairs.

  I have the strange sensation of wanting to squeeze my eyes shut while not being able to take them off something. She’s wearing the white dress. It’s the dress that she’ll die in, but it doesn’t look the same on her now as it did then.

  This girl, standing at the foot of the staircase, holding a cloth bag and watching the surprised and increasingly furious expressions of Malvina and Elias, is incredibly alive. Her shoulders are square and strong, and her dark hair hangs in still waves down her back. She lifts her chin. I wish I could see her eyes, because I know that they’re sad and triumphant.

  “What do you think you are doing?” Malvina demands. She’s looking at her daughter in horror, like she doesn’t know who she is. The air around her seems to ripple, and I get a whiff of the power Thomas was talking about.

  “I’m going to the dance,” Anna replies calmly. “And I am not coming home.”