Pretty Marys All in a Row Read online

  I position a pair of forks and a knife for myself, her rhyme ringing on repeat in my head.

  Mary Mack-Mack-Mack.

  All dressed in black-black-black,

  With silver buttons-buttons-buttons

  All down her back-back-back.

  Mourning garb. That’s the only outfit Mack wears. Appropriate enough in this house, I suppose. She hunches over the table, and the curled posture makes her look even smaller than she is. Though we have no way to know for sure, she looks like the youngest in the family, her cheeks flushed and dewy and still chubby with youth. If this is the way they put her in a coffin for real, she was no older than sixteen when she died. A child. A baby, even.

  I stalk around the table, arranging silverware, still humming her tune aloud. I don’t know who taught me the nursery rhyme—sometimes, I think these nothing songs are embedded in us from birth, the melodies stitched into our blood.

  As I sing, Mack doesn’t glance up. Maybe she doesn’t remember her own tune anymore. She shuffles to the sideboard and adjusts a row of hurricane lamps. We have no matches in the house, but that doesn’t matter. The oil never runs low, and we never have to light them. They burn all night for us.

  “Mistress is angry with you,” Mack whispers.

  I place a knife at the head of the table. “So?”

  “So you shouldn’t stay out so late.” She straightens each of the chairs, her nervous hands always searching for something to occupy them. “It’s not fair to the rest of us.”

  Not fair. As though any of this is fair.

  “Who cares if I’m ten minutes past curfew?” I stop and glare at her. “We have an eternity, don’t we?”

  Mack shrugs, her eyes downcast and gray. Instantly, my stomach clenches with shame. She’s only trying to keep the peace. In this house, we need somebody who tries. My lips part, ready to apologize, but the tendril at my feet has other plans. As if to chastise me, it coils around my ankles, and I trip across the antique rug.

  “Knock it off,” I say, and the vine hisses at me through green teeth before scurrying back toward the hall.

  I grip a butter knife between my fingers, clenched knuckle-white, and my body nearly leaves the floor as I imagine pouncing on that vine and using the blade to sever it in two. Afterward, I’d prod and play with the two verdant halves, watching them wriggle like a useless, dying worm in the afternoon sun. (The sun—I miss it almost as much as I miss being alive.)

  But the vine’s too quick for me. It slithers into the shadows and flips open the swinging double doors of the kitchen, returning safely to Mistress’s side. Sighing, I turn back to the table and console myself that butter knives are far too dull to bisect a vine anyhow.

  Besides, dinnertime is about to commence. In the hallway, the stairs lurch, and the rest of the family is here to join us.

  Mack smiles. “We’re in here, Lew,” she calls, in a childish sing-song.

  “Coming, darling!” With her long cape billowing behind her, Lew strides in through the doorway, her gait jaunty, hips swinging in time to the creaks of the house. Under one arm, she carries a horse skull. We don’t know where the cranium came from or if the horse died of natural causes, and since Lew certainly isn’t telling, we’ve decided it best not to ask.

  And that’s not the only thing Lew carries tonight. A burnished antique mirror the color of stardust dangles from her clenched hands. Inside the reflection, Bloody Mary drips crimson and waves at me.

  “Hey, Red,” I say, grinning.

  “Evening, Rhee.” A drop of blood trickles through the glass and plops on the carpet.

  “Don’t bother to greet me or anything.” Lew shoves Red into my arms. The mirror quivers in my grasp, and I try too late to smile at Lew, but she’s already sashayed off to the corner to sulk.

  “Don’t worry,” Red whispers. “It’s not your fault. She’s in a wicked mood tonight.”

  It’s easy to guess why. By the look of her wan face, Lew found no easy marks this evening. We’ve all been there. Haunting is no sure thing. Some evenings, in our travels, we come up roses and thorns and nightmares. Some evenings, we come up with nothing.

  But that won’t keep Lew down. To cheer herself up, she kneels at her secret-not-so-secret liquor cabinet and pulls out a bottle of Viking mead. Like her skull, we don’t know where the booze comes from, but on our worst days, none of us complains about the bottomless stockpile of liquor.

  “Are we ready?” Mistress glides in from the kitchen with a stack of plates, her vines and poisoned petals twisting and hissing and whispering at us. I shake my head. Mistress Mary, Quite Contrary. How does your garden grow? Not with silver bells and cockle shells, that’s for sure. More like barbs and venom and insults.

  We hustle to the table, and I set the mirror in the chair next to mine.

  “Thanks, Rhee,” Red says, smiling.

  Across from us, Lew sets her goblet aside and fills her skull with mead.

  Mistress taps her file-sharp fingers on her placemat. “What have I said, Lew? No skulls at the table.”

  The muscles across my back stiffen, and we all brace for what comes next.

  Lew leans forward, grinning. “If you dislike skulls so much,” she says, “then perhaps we should lob off your head and bury it in the garden. After all, we wouldn’t want it too close to the table.”

  Jaws set, they glare at each other across the baroque finery and wish the other one dead. They’re already decades too late to get what they want.

  I sigh. This is the same as it always goes. Mistress won’t be disobeyed, and Lew won’t conform. It’s a fight that never ends. It doesn’t help that, though she rarely says it, Lew resents us.

  “Everybody’s heard of the four of you,” she mutters anytime she’s imbibed one too many skull’s worth of ambrosia. “But how about me? Nobody knows some wassailing girl with a horse skull.”

  Sometimes we argue with her—“I’m nobody, the same as you,” Mack comforts her—but no matter what we say, we know it’s true: Mari Lwyd isn’t exactly a household name. The legend doesn’t even include her, per se. It claims she’s just a hobby horse with a skull fastened to the top. What an indignity. But then not every ghost gets to be a superstar. Better luck next time, Lew.

  When the glowering peaks in an inevitable stalemate, Mistress and Lew scoff and look away from one another. I shake my head because this is us, our complete family, as much as we’re a family at all. We’re a house brimming with Marys, the mortar bursting at the seams with urban legends and deranged nursery rhymes. We don’t know how we got here, and we don’t know how to leave.

  But for now, fleeing doesn’t preoccupy our thoughts. All that matters tonight is dinner. With a proud grin, Mistress regards the mirror. “Would you like to start, dear?”

  Red smiles. “Certainly.”

  She can’t reach through the reflection, but the fear has no trouble escaping. Red holds up her hands, and blood oozes out of her fingertips. It seeps through the mirror and out the bottom, drip-drip-dripping from the silver trim like a leaky faucet. We extend our goblets, and Lew guzzles the rest of her mead before holding up her horse skull. The fear pools in our glasses, and together, we sip the sweet nectar. The fear is honeyed and familiar like cotton candy melting in our mouths—cloying but oddly satisfying.

  “Divine,” Mistress says, her eyes half-closed.

  I lick a drop off the edge of my glass and sneak a glance at Red. “The twins again?”

  Her cheeks pinken. “Naturally.”

  She’s told me about them. They’re her regulars—a pair of high school sophomores from somewhere outside of Kalamazoo who can’t get enough scares.

  “They call to me nearly every night,” Red says, flashing me an impish grin anytime she talks about them. The daughters of traveling professors, the girls live alone among piles of their parents’ withered textbooks and their own wild imaginations. It was one of those books that taught them how to conjure Bloody Mary, how to do it in a way that she’ll a
lways appear. After midnight, they dim the lights and ignite enough candles to burn down the whole house. Then they dress up in their grandmothers’ antique weddings gowns (“Just to look extra creepy,” Red assures me), and after reciting some obscure verses peppered with Latin, they chant her name three times in their bathroom mirror, squealing with terror and delight each time she shows up.

  Red smiles. “Sometimes I think they do it because they’re as lonely as we are.”

  “I wish I could meet them,” I say. I wish I could meet anyone other than the lonely passengers on the same stretch of highway. But that’s not the way this works. There’s no mixing for us. When we hunt, Red’s in the mirror, and I’m on the road. Mistress wanders through gardens, and Mack’s confined to the dark of funeral homes, her half-finished coffin strapped to her back. Lew has the most mobility, roaming from door to door like a caroler, but even she tends toward the same rundown neighborhoods in the same forgotten cities. This is the way it’s always been, though we don’t know why.

  With the twins’ fear buzzing in our bellies, Mistress sits back in her chair, contentment curling on her lips. “And Rhee? What do you have for us this evening?”

  I fidget in my chair. I know why she’s looking at me. Lew wasn’t the only one who struck out tonight. From their pallid complexions, it’s clear that Mistress and Mack have nothing to share with us either. If not for Red and me, the whole family would go hungry.

  I hesitate before holding out my hands. Smoke curls from my palms, and together, we inhale. I taste tonight all over again, the music and the forgotten summers and the peach cake with whipped cream, and I taste something else. Ragweed and vinegar and the pale underside of a shrunken orange peel.

  Lew recoils from me. “David, right? You saw David tonight?” Her nose curls up at his name, as if he’s sour milk in a teacup.

  There is a long, aching silence at the table, and though the rest of them aren’t as bold as Lew, they’re thinking the same thing: he’s a distraction. He’s trouble. Boys are always trouble. Anybody who isn’t one of us is trouble.

  At once, the evening is over. Spoiled by David. Spoiled by me. Without a word, Mistress folds her napkin into quarters and stands from the table, and we clear away the knick-knacks from dinner. The decorative silverware is shoved back into drawers. The plates and goblets and even Lew’s skull are rinsed and polished. The tablecloth is tossed aside, and a fresh one is smoothed into place. These are the same chores every night. We’ve performed them a thousand times before and will probably perform them a thousand times more.

  And now comes the waiting. Morning is almost here, so we return to our places in the house, the places only we belong.

  Mistress slips out the back door and wanders in her garden, plucking thorns from rose stems and sucking the blood that blossoms on her fingers.

  Lew lingers on the front porch, crooning strange carols that sometimes make me want to scream and sometimes make me want to weep.

  Mack creeps down the stairs to the basement and works on her coffin that will never be finished.

  Red can go nowhere on her own. She’s at others’ mercy, only venturing to where she’s called or carried. Tonight, I’m the one to oblige her. With a gentle hand, I pick up the mirror and tow it to the master bedroom.

  As we crest the stairs, she gazes out at me, her face close to mine but never touching, like two kids colluding at a slumber party.

  “I wish it wasn’t time already,” she says, her wispy voice more air than words.

  “I wish that too,” I whisper, and we tiptoe inside the bedroom. My hands trembling, I hang her on the wall next to the drooping four-poster bed. She looks at home there, the mirror handsome and secure in the shadows. I give her a half-smile, but my lips twitch at the corners. Things shouldn’t be this way. No one should be so alone, not even ghosts.

  “It could be worse, Rhee,” Red says. “We’re sort of together. All in the same house anyhow.”

  What she means is, At least we have each other.

  “Miss Bloody Mary,” I say and prop my hands on my hips in mock dismay, “don’t you go getting sentimental on me.”

  Her eyes blink twice, blink blood, and she smiles. “Never,” she says, a drop of red oozing out the bottom of the mirror and onto my hand.

  Smiling, I touch the reflection to say goodbye. I tell myself this farewell won’t last, but time moves differently for the dead. Sometimes I fear I’ll never see her again. And more than anyone, she’s my family. I’ve never had a sister, not one I remember anyhow, but Red is as good as a sibling. Probably better.

  “See you soon,” I say before moving for the door and closing it behind me. At last, it’s my turn to lock myself in a cage.

  On the third floor, my jail is the largest in the house. It even boasts a chandelier. Decadent, no? But I suppose a chandelier is practically required in a ballroom. And with its vaulted ceilings and marble archways, that’s what it is: a once-glittering ballroom, now past its prime. Grime lives on everything here—the chandelier, the stained-glass windows, the art deco wallpaper. But despite the sheen of gray, this place always ripples with a cold familiarity. Each night when I tiptoe through the double doors, I can feel the past budding up beneath my skin, and I stand quietly, hopeful that it will break through, that it will come to me. A memory of who I was.

  They say I died walking home after a dance. This floor must be fashioned after that ballroom, the final place I visited before my long ride into eternity. It’s certainly expansive enough to host a barrage of horny young people whose feet itch for a good two-step. If you ask me, people don’t dance enough anymore. So many of the world’s problems could be solved with a good waltz or salsa.

  The lights dim overhead, and I sway in the soft embrace of shadows. The air heaves with the lonely scents all old houses share: dust and mold and misbegotten dreams. Our home is more misbegotten than most.

  But I won’t think about that now. I’ll just listen to the music that doesn’t exist. “Moonlight Serenade.” Glenn Miller seems to be the order of the day. Glenn Miller should always be the order of the day.

  Somewhere, I hear it playing, distant but unmistakable, the static of the speakers crackling and the gentle purr of the phonograph turning on. My throat buzzes with the melody as I hum it out of tune, my tired body twisting in lopsided circles, my pirouettes ghastly enough to convince me that I wasn’t a prima ballerina in my past life. One occupation struck from an endless list of possibilities.

  The last scraps of the evening dwindle away as I dance, but morning might as well be a myth in this place. We know only night. I haven’t seen the sun since I came here. Sometimes I wonder if I’ve ever seen it. But I must have because otherwise I wouldn’t know what it was. I wouldn’t remember the butter-yellow rays spilling across the horizon, or the sweet warmth sinking into me, past the bone and right down to my soul. That means even if it’s lost to me now, there was a before, there was a version of me who wasn’t this exiled beast, feasting on pain. This gives me hope. Out there somewhere, could there be something better than this?

  My eyes flutter. Tomorrow is gathering closer. Something else is closer too. That discordant voice returns, scraping against my skin like claws.

  Why don’t you dance with me, pretty Mary?

  My breath catches like a stone in my chest, and I seize up. Nestled elsewhere in their gilded cages, can the others hear these words too? Or is this voice for me alone?

  “Who are you?” I ask, but once again, the sound fades away like a faraway echo. Only this time, it’s replaced with something else.

  A distant weeping like a choir of a thousand girls mourning as one.

  At first, I think it’s coming from within the house, but these aren’t my sisters. The five of us don’t cry, maybe can’t cry. These are the sobs of strangers.

  I want to stay awake. I want to keep listening to the shadows. But I’m no match for the dawn. The moment the sun rises, my eyes close, and a shroud of darkness embraces me, as in
timate and cruel as a lover.

  Then I too fade away.

  chapter three

  I open my eyes, and it’s night again. Sweet stars the color of sugar crystals are strung overhead, and I’m on the highway, my satin gown pressed and my pearl necklace polished. There is no hint of last night on me. No trace of our shared meal or stain from Red’s blood or sheen of dust and regret from the ballroom. Tonight, I’m fresh and new. And worst of all, I’m hungry.

  But maybe the hunger is a good thing. If the last few dinners have been any indication, Mistress, Mack, and Lew will be returning home empty-handed and wan as ever.

  Fortunately, the highway is generous tonight. The moon has barely risen before I’m offered a ride. And it’s a charming one. A whole Volkswagen van of wannabe hippies, ten of them total, each arrayed in tie dyes and buckskin, their gaunt bodies stuffed between and behind and under the seats, filling every available space. And as it usually goes with hippies—those original to the 1960s or these modern-day ones—all of them are way too trusting. They smile and pull over and squeeze me in, though it doesn’t take long for them to realize their mistake.

  I do my best vanishing trick, blinking in and out, the veins under my skin turning phosphorescent, and I must be a fierce sight because soon there isn’t a calm soul in sight. Their eyes bulge before closing up tight with tears, and their fingers are stuffed inside their gaping mouths. But even that doesn’t stop their screams.

  Their fear isn’t sweet like Glenn Miller. These hippies holler and sob in time to Bob Dylan, his early stuff from his Greenwich Village days. Not my usual style, but they’re plenty satisfying. In the crammed backseat between the dangling bead curtains, the biggest challenge is telling the difference between the plumes of their fear and the residual pot smoke. I quaff more than my share of both.