Girl of Nightmares Read online

  “Turn off,” Thomas says. “I think that might be the road.”

  I crane my head over the seat as Carmel tries to navigate the Audi down something that isn’t so much a road as a mud-rutted four-by-four trail. The car has all-wheel drive, but this still poses a high risk of getting stuck. They must’ve had heavy rain here in the last day or so, and the tracks are covered over with puddles. I’m just about to tell Carmel to forget it, and to try to back out, when something black flashes up in the headlights.

  We skid to a stop. “Is that it?” Carmel asks. “It” is an enormous black barn, standing at the edge of a barren field with dead stalks of plants shooting up like stray hairs. The house that it must have belonged to, along with any other buildings, has long since been torn down. All that remains is the barn, dark and alone, waiting for us in front of a forest of silent trees.

  “Matches the description,” I say.

  “Description nothing,” Thomas says, rooting around in his messenger bag. “We got the sketch, remember?” He pulls it out and Carmel flips on the dome light. I wish she hadn’t. There’s an instant sensation of being watched, like the light just gave away all of our secrets. Carmel’s hand jerks to turn it off, but I put my hand on her shoulder.

  “Too late.”

  Thomas holds the sketch up to the window, comparing it to the shadowy figure of the barn. In my opinion, it isn’t much use. It’s rough, and done in charcoal so everything is just a different shade of black. It came in the mail along with the tip, and is the product of a psychic trance. Somebody drew out his vision while he was having it. He probably should have opened his eyes and looked down at the paper. The sketch has a definite dreamlike quality, a blurring of the edges and lots of harsh lines. It looks like it was done by a four-year-old. But as I compare them, the barn and the sketch start to look more and more similar, like it isn’t really the shape that matters so much as whatever is behind the shape.

  This is stupid. How many times did my father tell me that places can’t be bad? I reach into my backpack and grab the athame, then get out of the car. The puddles reach up to my shoelaces, and my feet are soaked by the time I get to the Audi’s trunk. Both Carmel’s and Thomas’s cars have been outfitted and stocked like survival outposts, with flares and blankets and enough first-aid supplies to satisfy the most paranoid hypochondriac. Thomas is beside me, stepping gingerly through the mud. Carmel pops the trunk, and we grab three flashlights and a camping lantern. We walk together in the dark, feeling our feet go numb and listening to our socks squelch inside our shoes. It’s wet and cold. Stubborn snow patches still cling to the bases of the trees and around the sides of the barn.

  I’m struck again by how ominous the barn looks. Worse even than Anna’s falling-down Victorian house. It crouches like a spider, waiting for us to get just close enough, pretending to be inanimate. But that’s stupid. It’s just the cold and the dark getting under my skin. Still, I wouldn’t necessarily give a thumbs-down if someone decided to come out here with gasoline and a match.

  “Here.” I hand Thomas and Carmel their fresh protection spells. Thomas puts his in his pants pocket. Carmel holds hers like a rosary. We turn on the lantern and flashlights just outside the door, which creaks back and forth like a come-hither finger. “Stay close,” I whisper, and they press in on either side.

  “I tell myself every time that we’re crazy for doing this,” Carmel mutters. “Every time, I think that I’ll just wait in the car.”

  “It’s not like you to stay on the sidelines,” Thomas whispers, and on my other side, I sense Carmel’s smile.

  “Get a room,” I mutter, and reach forward to pull open the door.

  Thomas has this annoying habit of going in hot, flashing his beam of light every which way at a million miles an hour, like he’s expecting to bust a ghost mid-haunt or something. But ghosts are shy. Or if not shy, at least cautious. Never in my life have I opened a door and found myself staring directly into a dead face. I have, however, stepped inside and instantly known I was being watched. Which is what happens now.

  It’s a strange sensation, that feeling of intense awareness from somewhere behind you. When you’re watched by the dead, the sensation is weirder, because you can’t pinpoint which direction it’s coming from. It’s just there. Annoying, but there’s nothing you can do about it. Sort of like Thomas’s strobe-flashlight.

  I walk to the center of the barn and set the camping lantern on the ground. The air smells heavy with dust and old hay, which is scattered across the dirt floor. When I turn a slow circle, my flashlight beam steady and careful, it whispers and crunches beneath my feet. Carmel and Thomas pay close attention and stay right beside me. I know that Thomas at least, witch that he is, can feel that we’re being watched too. His flashlight beam zips up and down the walls, seeking out the corners and the places to hide. He’s giving too much away, instead of using the light as a decoy and paying attention to the dark. The sounds of clothing are loud; Carmel’s hair rustling back and forth over her shoulder as she looks around is like a fricking waterfall.

  I put my hands out and step away, letting the light from the camping lantern break through our huddled mass. Our eyes have adjusted, and Carmel and I turn off our flashlights. The barn is empty except for what looks like the skeleton of an old plow in the south corner, and the camping lantern colors the room a muted yellow.

  “Is this the place?” Carmel asks.

  “Well, it’s good enough to stay in for the night,” I say. “In the morning we’ll try to walk somewhere with better reception and call a tow truck.”

  Carmel nods. She’s caught on. The stranded traveler act works more often than you’d think. Which is why it shows up in so many different horror movies.

  “It isn’t any warmer in here than it is outside,” Thomas comments. He shuts his flashlight off too, finally. There’s a rustle of commotion overhead, and he jumps a mile, does the quick-draw on his flashlight, and points the beam at the ceiling.

  “Sounds like pigeons,” I say. “Good thing. If we’re stuck out here too long we might have to do some yard-bird rotisserie.”

  “That’s … disgusting,” says Carmel.

  “It’s low-rent chicken. Let’s check it out.” There’s a rickety, rotting ladder that leads up to a trapdoor. I assume that all we’ll find is a hayloft and a bunch of roosting pigeons and sparrows. But I don’t need to tell Thomas and Carmel to be alert. They stay right behind, in constant contact. When Carmel’s toe strikes the tines of a pitchfork, half-buried in the hay, she makes a face. We look at each other and she shakes her head. It can’t be the same one, the same pitchfork that the farmer’s wife fell on. That’s what we say to ourselves, though I guess there’s no real reason it can’t be.

  I go up into the hayloft first. A sweep of my flashlight shows a large, flat expanse of hay-covered floor, and a few tall stacks of bales along the south wall. When I cast my light up toward the slanted roof, I see what has to be close to fifty pigeons, none of whom appear to mind the disturbance.

  “Come on up,” I say. Thomas climbs up next and we both help Carmel. “Watch it; this hay is loaded with bird shit.”

  “Nice,” she mutters.

  Once we’re all up, we look around, but there isn’t a whole lot to see. It’s just a vast, open space, lined with hay and bird turds. There’s a pulley system they must’ve used to move hay suspended from the ceiling, and thick ropes are looped over the rafters.

  “You know what I hate about flashlights?” Thomas asks, and I watch his beam move around the room, revealing sudden bird faces and shifting wings, then nothing but cobweb-covered boards. “They always make you think about the stuff that you’re not seeing. The stuff that’s still in the dark.”

  “It’s true,” says Carmel. “That’s the worst shot in a horror movie. When the flashlight finally finds whatever it was looking for, and you realize that you’d rather not know what it looks like.”

  They should both shut up. Now is not the time for them
to be trying to freak themselves out. I walk off a little way, to hopefully put an end to the conversation and also to test out the quality of the floor. Thomas walks a little in the other direction, staying close to the wall. My flashlight moves over the hay bales, paying close attention to places something might hide. I don’t notice anything except how gross they look speckled with brown and white. Behind me, there’s a long creaking sound, and when I turn a rush of wind hits my face. Thomas found one of the hay doors and opened it up.

  The feeling of being watched is gone. We’re just three kids, in an abandoned barn, pretending to be stranded for the benefit of no one. Maybe this wasn’t even the right place to begin with, and the feeling I got walking through the door was a fluke.

  “I don’t think that rune of yours is working too well,” I say. Thomas shrugs. His hand drifts absently to his pocket, where the runestone weighs on the fabric.

  “It was never a sure thing. I don’t work with runes very often. And I’ve never carved one myself before.” He bends down and looks through the hay door, out into the night. It’s gotten colder; his breath is a foggy cloud. “Maybe it doesn’t matter anyway. I mean, if this is the place, how many people are really in danger? Who comes out here? The ghost of whoever it was probably got bored and went to fake accidental deaths somewhere else.”

  Accidental deaths. The words scratch at the surface of my brain.

  I’m an idiot.

  A rope falls from the rafter. I turn to yell at Thomas but the words don’t come out fast enough. All I get out is his name, and I’m running, sprinting toward him because the rope is falling, and the ghost attached to the end of it becomes corporeal half a second before it shoves Thomas through the hay door, headfirst to a forty-foot drop to the cold, hard ground.

  I dive. Hay needles into my jacket, slowing me down, but I’m not thinking of anything besides that glimpse of Thomas, and when I vault myself through the hay door I manage to catch hold of his foot. It takes every ounce of strength in my knuckles to hold on to him as he bangs into the side of the barn. In the next moment, Carmel’s there with me, hanging half out of the door too.

  “Thomas!” she shouts. “Cas, pull him up!” With each of us holding a foot we jerk him back inside, first to the toes, then to the knees. Thomas is handling all this very well, not screaming or anything. We’ve almost got him back up when Carmel screams. I don’t need to look to know it’s the ghost. There’s an icy pressure against my back and all of a sudden the air smells like the inside of a meat locker.

  I turn and he’s right in my face: a young guy in faded overalls and a short-sleeved chambray shirt. He’s fat, with a gut paunch and arms like pale, overstuffed sausages. There’s something wrong with the shape of his head.

  I’ve got the knife out. It flashes from my back pocket, ready to go straight into his belly, when she laughs.

  She laughs. That laugh that I know so well even though I heard it only a handful of times. It’s coming out of this fat hillbilly’s gaping mouth. The athame almost falls out of my hand. Then the laugh cuts out, abruptly, and the ghost backs off and roars, something that sounds like English played backward though a bullhorn. Overhead, the fifty or so pigeons erupt off of their roosts and flap down toward us.

  In the middle of feathers and musty bird smell, I shout at Carmel to keep pulling, to not let Thomas fall, but I know she won’t, even though tiny beaks and claws are getting caught in her hair. As soon as we have Thomas back inside I shove them both toward the ladder.

  Our feet tramp down in a panic of flapping wings. I have to remind myself to look back, to make sure the bastard isn’t going to try another push.

  “Where are we going?” Carmel shouts, disoriented.

  “Just get out the door,” Thomas and I shout back. By the time my feet hit the bottom rung of the ladder, Carmel and Thomas are way ahead, running. I sense the ghost materialize to our right, and turn. Now that I have a closer look, I can see that what’s wrong with the shape of his head is that the back of it is caved in. I can also see that he’s holding the pitchfork.

  Just before he throws it, I shout something at Carmel. It must be the right thing, because she whirls to see what it is and jerks her body to the left just before the tines of the pitchfork impale the wall. She finally starts screaming and the sound sharpens me; I draw my arm back and throw the athame in a snapping motion. It flies through the air and finds its home in the farmer’s gut. For an instant, he looks my way, at me and right through me, with eyes like tepid pools of water. I don’t feel anything this time. I don’t wonder where the knife is sending him. I don’t wonder whether the Obeahman can still feel it. When he wavers right out of existence like a ripple of heat, I’m just glad he’s gone. He almost killed my friends. Fuck that guy.

  The athame hits the ground with a soft thud and I run to pick it up before going to Carmel, who is still screaming.

  “Carmel! Are you hurt? Did it get you?” Thomas asks. He inspects her as she whips her head back and forth in a panic. The pitchfork came just that close. So close that one of the tines stabbed through the shoulder of her coat and pinned her to the wall. I reach up and yank the pitchfork loose, and she jumps away, brushing at her coat like it’s dirty. She’s equal parts scared and pissed off, and when she screams, “You stupid asshole!” I can’t help but feel like she’s screaming at me.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The athame is resting in its jar of salt, buried up to the hilt in white crystals. The morning sun coming through the window hits the glass of the jar and refracts in every direction, bright gold, almost like a halo. My dad and I used to sit and stare at it, stuffed into this same jar, having been purified by moonlight. He called it Excalibur. I don’t call it anything.

  Behind me, my mom is frying eggs. A set of her freshest spell candles are stacked on the countertop. There are three different colors, each with a different smell. Green for prosperity, red for passion, white for clarity. Next to them are three small stacks of parchment bearing three different incantations, to be wrapped around the candles and tied with string.

  “Toast or no toast?” she asks.

  “Toast,” I reply. “Do we have any more saskatoon jam?”

  She gets it out and I pop four pieces of bread into the toaster. When they’re done, I layer them with butter and jam and take them to the table, where my mom has already set our plates with eggs.

  “Get the juice, would you?” she says, and as I’m half-buried in the refrigerator, “So, are you going to tell me how things went Saturday night?”

  I stand up and pour two glasses of orange juice. “I was on the fence about it.” The ride back from Grand Marais was near silent. By the time we got home, it was Sunday morning, and I immediately passed out, only regaining consciousness to watch one of the Matrix movies on cable before passing back out and sleeping through the night. It was the best avoidance plan I’d ever come up with.

  “Well,” my mom says chirpily, “get off the fence and dive in. You have to be to school in half an hour.”

  I sit down at the table and set down the juice. My eyes stay trained on the eggs, which stare back at me with yellow yolk pupils. I jab them with my fork. What am I supposed to say? How am I supposed to make sense of it for her, when I haven’t made sense of it myself? That was Anna’s laugh. It was clear as a bell, unmistakable, falling out of the farmer’s black throat. But that’s impossible. Anna is gone. Only I can’t let her go. So my mind has started making things up. That’s what the daylight tells me. That’s what any sane person would tell me.

  “I messed up,” I say into my plate. “I wasn’t sharp enough.”

  “But you got him, didn’t you?”

  “Not before he pushed Thomas out a window and almost turned Carmel into shish kebab.” My appetite is suddenly gone. Not even the saskatoon jam looks tempting. “They shouldn’t come with me anymore. I never should have let them.”

  My mom sighs. “It wasn’t so much an issue of ‘letting them,’ Cas. I don’t think you c
ould have stopped them.” Her voice is affectionate, completely lacking in objectivity. She cares about them. Of course she does. But she’s also pretty glad I’m not out there by myself anymore.

  “They were sucked in by the novelty,” I say. Anger flies to the surface out of nowhere; my teeth clench down on it. “But it’s real, and it can get them killed, and when they figure that out, what do you think is going to happen?”

  My mother’s face is calm, no more emotion there than a slight furrow of her eyebrows. She forks a piece of egg and chews it, quietly. Then she says, “I don’t think you give them enough credit.”

  Maybe I don’t. But I wouldn’t blame them for running for the hills after what happened on Saturday. I wouldn’t have blamed them for running after Mike, Will, and Chase got murdered. Sometimes I wish I could have.

  “I’ve got to get to school,” I say, and push my chair away from the table, leaving the food untouched. The athame has been purified and is ready to come out of the salt, but I walk right past. For maybe the first time in my life, I don’t want it.

  * * *

  The first sight I catch after rounding the corner toward my locker is Thomas yawning. He’s leaning against it with his books under his arm, wearing a plain gray t-shirt that is ready to rip through in a few places. His hair points in completely contradictory directions. It makes me smile. So much power contained in a body that looks like it was born in a dirty clothes basket. When he sees me coming, he waves, and this big, open grin spreads across his face. Then he yawns again.

  “Sorry,” he says. “I’m having trouble recovering from Saturday.”