Pretty Marys All in a Row Read online

  “At least you’re not trapped in your own reflection,” she half-growls at us.

  The room shifts and contorts and turns inside out. The table levitates off the floor, and the silverware dances on our placemats like restless bones in the Paris catacombs. Everything is becoming unstable here, and we’re letting it. We’re letting the thing from the darkness control us.

  I press my hands to my face to hold in a furious laugh. My palms smell musky. David’s cologne. He can’t touch me, but in spite of himself, he’s left part of him behind with me. This has never happened before. I’ve never been able to carry him with me. I curl my fingers tight and clutch his scent to my chest.

  “What’s happening to us?” I whisper. “And what’s so hard about scaring? You’ve been doing it for years.”

  “Not anymore we can’t.” Mack’s eyes are as gray as dust, and she won’t look at me. “They can’t see us anymore.”

  The whole world holds still for a heavy, aching moment.

  I stare at her, digesting her words. “What do you mean?”

  Lew grunts. “She means, we’re dying.”

  “But you can’t die,” I say. “You’re already dead.”

  “We’re fading then.” Mack fumbles with a silver button that’s come undone from her jacket. “We’re disappearing.”

  I move toward her and grasp her hands in mine. “You’re here,” I say, pressing her skin into mine. “I can feel you.”

  “That’s great, Rhee.” She wrenches herself free. “But you’re the only one. Everybody out there can walk right through us and never notice.”

  “Like we’re not even there,” Mistress says, and the vine twitches limply at her feet.

  They say nothing else. There is, I suppose, nothing else to say. They just excuse themselves from the table and retire to their prisons.

  But I won’t depart so quietly. Upstairs in the master bedroom, I sit cross-legged on the floor in front of the mirror, my palms clasped together as if in prayer. But prayer would be hopeless. Even if I believed in something, I wouldn’t know who to pray to. And I don’t think anybody answers ghosts anyhow. If they did, we probably wouldn’t be ghosts in the first place.

  Red rests her forehead on the glass. “What are we going to do?” she asks. “You and I can’t bring enough to the table for all of us. They won’t last like that.”

  She’s right. Even if we wanted to, we can’t survive without dinner. We’ve tried. Twenty years ago now, back when David was young—and in a way, so were we—we went on a hunger strike. None of us scared a soul for a fortnight.

  This was the first choice we ever made, and we made it together.

  “Nobody owns us,” Lew had said, and we all agreed, the five of us gathered around the dinner table, hands clasped to hands and mirror. It should have been good. It should have been freeing.

  It was agony instead. Our bodies decayed around us, bones jutting out from every angle, skin melting in clumps on the dining room floor. Our eyes turned liquid in our skulls, and our hair shed in clumps. What an overwrought display we were, and I might have even laughed to myself if my skin hadn’t been so busy peeling from my bones in strips of tanned leather. Plus, it’s hard to speak, let alone giggle, when your tongue withers to cinders in your mouth.

  But no matter which of our parts disintegrated next, we never faded out like last spring’s daisies in December. We simply went on existing—the best we could. As it turns out, there are things in this world so much worse than death.

  When we finally returned to haunting, it didn’t take much for us to terrify people. Our bodies gaunt and gnarled, the grotesquerie was too much for even the strongest stomachs. David tried not to grimace when he saw me, and his expression is one I still can’t forget. And he wasn’t the only one. A regular of Lew’s—a little blue-haired lady on the outskirts of Des Moines—even suffered a seizure and was hospitalized for a week.

  We’ve never gone hungry again. It’s safer for everyone that way.

  “What if people are forgetting us?” Red asks. “What if that’s why they’re fading away? What if all of us will fade away?”

  “That won’t happen,” I say. “It can’t happen.”

  She stares at me, her gaze thistly velvet against my skin. “How do you know?”

  “I don’t,” I say. “But we’ll figure something out. We’ll get out of this.”

  * * *

  The dawn comes too soon, and once again, I’m on the highway. My entire body quivering, I bring my hands to my face. David’s scent is gone. I should expect nothing else, but the disappointment still bubbles up in my chest.

  I start walking, start scaring, start the cycle all over again. And like the best nights, the moon dips, and David’s station wagon coasts to the shoulder. I smile to myself. This is what I need. To see him and to read the books he promised to bring me. I’ll find a way out. We’ll find a way together.

  I move toward the passenger’s side, but I don’t get in. That’s because tonight he’s brought someone else with him.

  “Hi,” a tiny voice chirps.

  His daughter sits in a gray booster seat, wearing pigtails and a smile.

  “My name’s Abby,” she says brightly. “And I already know who you are.”

  I edge away from the car. “I’m fine,” I say. “I don’t need a ride tonight.”

  I whirl around—away from David, away from the car, away from that little cherub in the backseat. She can’t be real. Other than that picture on the dashboard, she can’t really exist. And I can’t be close to her, not with the darkness courting me. I shouldn’t even be close to David, but he doesn’t care. He throws the car into park and flicks open the driver’s door.

  “Rhee, please.” He chases after me. “Don’t go.”

  I turn back and gape at him. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m visiting you,” he says, his face drawn, “like I always do.”

  “This is not like always.” I point back at the car. “Why is she with you?”

  She. I won’t even say her name. It’s like a curse of sorts, a magic spell that will undo me if the word crosses my lips.

  David shrugs as if he too is genuinely confused about it. “I just thought you should meet,” he says. “She’s been asking about you.”

  About me. About a ghost. I almost laugh aloud. He’s told his daughter ghost stories. I’m a ghost story.

  If my fists wouldn’t go clean through him, I’d strike him in the chest.

  “Why would you tell your daughter about me?”

  He swallows hard. “She wanted to know where I go at night. It seemed wrong to lie to her.”

  I glare at him. “And what do you tell your wife?”

  “She never asks.”

  I hesitate in the chilled night air, staring at him and at the car. I should keep walking. I should run. But I want to see those books. I need those books. If I’m going to help my sisters, I have to figure out who I am, who we all are.

  My head down, I trudge back to the car with David behind me. On the floor of the passenger’s side, a book on folklore is already flipped open to the pages about Resurrection Mary. I slip inside and gaze down at another picture of a girl who’s supposed to be me. It’s a different girl, this one a few years older than the last, but she still doesn’t look like me.

  The engine roars, and I focus on the text. I need to memorize this. I need to figure out who we are. Besides, I tell myself this is a normal night. Just ignore the pint-sized beast in the backseat, and everything will be fine.

  But apparently, pint-sized beasts aren’t eager to be ignored.

  “When I grow up,” Abby says, her legs bobbing up and down in the booster seat, “I want to be just like you, Aunt Rhee.”

  I dry-heave and bring up a mouthful of smoke. “No, sweetie,” I say and twist around to look at her. “You don’t want that. I promise.”

  “Sure, I do.” She smiles at me with her crooked milk teeth. “Daddy says there’s nobody as incredible as yo
u.”

  David chokes on air, his fingers bone-white around the wheel. “I never said . . . that.”

  “Yes, you did, Daddy.” Abby beams as if this is a delightful game, and only she remembers the rules. “You said, ‘Aunt Rhee is an incredible person. I hope you can meet her someday.’ You said that, Daddy.”

  I double-over in my seat, and remember the girl from the last book David brought. I close my eyes and see her face somewhere dark and lonesome, and I see something else. A flash of faded gingham like a quilted comforter or maybe a curtain. And a broken picture window, the crack in a shape of a spider web.

  “What’s wrong, Aunt Rhee?” Abby asks.

  Everything, I want to say. This is all wrong. If I’m not this girl in the picture, who am I? Am I anyone at all?

  Yes, I’m someone who wishes she wasn’t here. I wish I was out of this car and away from this little girl and the flashes of memories I’d rather not have. I should slip through the door and return to the highway. I should keep my eyes closed and just go home.

  Or I could make a choice. I could go somewhere else. I could prove to the shadows that we don’t belong to them.

  “Away,” I say. “Far away.”

  I open my eyes, and the air shimmers black around us. But this isn’t the darkness seeping into me. This is something I’m conjuring all my own.

  “Rhee?” David’s voice trembles. “What’s happening?”

  He stares at me, and he’s gone, vanished before me.

  But no, I’m the one who’s gone, siphoned from the car and sent somewhere else. Somewhere small and cramped and strange.

  A space with a window. On the other side of it, two girls in wilted wedding dresses gape at me.

  “Who are you?” they ask in tandem, and I step back from them into a puddle of liquid. Of blood.

  “Rhee,” a familiar voice, sweeter than the darkness, says. “How?”

  My breath heaves in my chest as I see her. Bright and clear and near me for the first time.

  Red. I’m standing right next to her.

  And I’m inside the mirror.

  chapter four

  “Red.” The twins creep closer to the mirror. “Why didn’t you tell us there were two of you?”

  “Because there aren’t two.” Red stares at me, and I can’t tell if she’s shocked I’m here or indignant I’m encroaching on her space. “Rhee isn’t the same as me.”

  “This is her? This is Rhee?” The twins’ faces brighten, and their thin fingers graze the opposite side of the mirror in disbelief. “You’re Resurrection Mary?”

  “I guess,” I say, fidgeting and aware of how inadequate my knowledge is about everything, even myself. With the mountains of books behind them, the twins probably know more about me than I do.

  They watch me, their eyes eager, and Red inches closer, as though she isn’t sure I’m real.

  “How?” she asks.

  I shrug. “I don’t know.”

  But that’s a lie. I’m here because I asked for this. I wanted to escape David and Abby, to flee that moment in the car. I wanted to make a choice. And that’s what I did. But now that I got what I asked for, I’m not sure what to do next.

  But Red knows. Her fingers quivering, she takes my hand. For the first time, I’m holding my sister’s hand.

  Then it’s gone. I lose the focus that brought me here, and my fingers slip through her palm. She screams my name, but I can’t scream back, the words clogged like glue in my throat. Red reaches for me, her hands grazing my wrist, my shoulder, my throat. She grasps at my necklace, and for a moment, it’s the only thing that tethers us together. But it’s too weak to bind us for long. The clasp snaps against the nape of my neck, and one by one, the pearls cascade to the floor. Red falls away from me, the twins fall away, and I’m tipped backward in darkness.

  Alone in the darkness.

  I blot out the world with both hands, my body tumbling through nothing. I expect the voice to find me here, but it’s entirely, unnervingly quiet. Everything is quiet. The thing that lives in the shadows must not have expected this. I didn’t expect it either.

  When I open my eyes, the world still swirling, I’m back in the station wagon. It’s parked in front of the cemetery. This is ordinary, so painfully ordinary, that I wonder for a moment if I never left, my trip to the mirror no more than a wishful fever dream. Then I reach up, my fingers quaking, and touch my collarbone. The pearl necklace is gone. I left it behind with Red.

  This is real. I escaped this place. I finally made a choice of my own.

  Slumped over the steering wheel, David gapes at me, his face gray and laced with sweat. His lips mouth something—a prayer maybe, or a question—but the words dissolve before breaching the air.

  Abby, however, isn’t like her father. She’s not afraid of the ghost that blinks in and out of existence. In the backseat, she giggles and claps her hands.

  “Neat trick, Aunt Rhee. Can you do it again?” She leans forward in her booster seat, eyes wide and flashing. “And can you take me with you?”

  * * *

  I return home early. Tonight, the highway was no place for me to linger. David wanted to know what happened, and while I couldn’t blame him, I couldn’t explain it to him either. I can’t even explain it to myself.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said, though we both knew it could be a week, a month, or a lifetime until we meet again.

  “Bye, Aunt Rhee!” Abby waved brightly. “See you soon!”

  Mack is already in the basement, toiling away at her coffin. The pounding of the hammer trembles through the house like an irregular heartbeat, and I shudder at the sound. Lew and Mistress aren’t back yet, so I creep upstairs. In the master bedroom, the mirror is on the wall where I left it last night. And Red is already inside, home early just like me.

  “We need to tell them,” she says. “About what happened.”

  She’s right. And it’s not the only thing I need to share. I still haven’t confessed to anyone about what I’ve seen and heard in the shadows. I nearly laugh aloud to myself. And what will I say? I don’t even know what the voice is. And what if it’s not there at all? What if I’m just crazy?

  I steady my hands in front of me and wish that I was merely crazy. That would make this all so much better.

  We’re halfway through dinner—Red’s offering from the twins as our appetizer, main course, and dessert—before I can gather the courage to speak.

  “Something happened tonight,” I say, and the words are so silly and inadequate that I want to scream.

  But it’s enough to get my sisters’ attention. Their eyes flick up at me, and my entire body goes numb. They won’t believe what I say, and I don’t blame them. But I have to tell them. I take a deep breath for courage, and I hold it in until my chest aches. Then I blurt out, “I went into the mirror.”

  “With Red?” Lew’s face scrunches up. “You went into Red’s mirror?”

  I nod, and the world shrinks in from all sides like a corset yanked tight around my waist.

  “That’s ridiculous.” Mistress tidies up her place setting, posture straight as a steel rod. “That’s not how this works, Rhee, and you know it.”

  “But it’s true.” Red holds up my necklace as proof. I smile. In the time since I visited her tonight, she’s gathered up all my stray pearls and restrung them on the wire, good and gleaming as the day I bought them. A day I can’t even remember.

  “A trick.” Lew rolls her skull beneath her open palm. “We’re fading out of existence, and the two of you are playing tricks.”

  “It’s no trick,” I say.

  “But it must be,” Mack says, her arms folded across her belly, cradling her hunger like a swaddled infant. “You know we can’t reach each other. That’s against the rules.”

  “Whose rules?” I say. “And even if there are rules, maybe they’re changing. Maybe what happened to us is somehow tied to what’s happening to you.”

  Lew wheezes out a shrill laugh. “So y
ou two get to socialize while we slowly starve to death.” The skull quivers beneath her fingers. “Sure, that seems fair.”

  “Maybe this can help us,” Red says, a drop of blood like a teardrop in the corner of her eye. “All of us.”

  “I don’t see why we’re talking madness.” Mistress shoves back her chair and glares at me. “If you want to talk about magic tricks, Rhee, then prove it. Walk into the mirror right now.”

  My throat closes up, and I hesitate, all gazes on me.

  “I don’t think it works that way,” I say.

  But to be fair, I’m not sure. I have no idea how it works.

  “It’s like I thought.” Mistress circles the table toward me. “You can’t do it.”

  Looming over me, she reaches for my hand—to slap my wrist like I’m a wayward child or maybe just to tether herself to me, her kin—but whatever she wants, it doesn’t matter. She can’t hold on. Her entire arm becomes translucent as water. Tonight’s meal was far from enough to keep her with us. As though in retaliation, as if it’s my fault, the vine swats at me, but it slips right through my ankle.

  None of us moves. As quickly as it happened, Mistress is solid again. She hasn’t left us for good, not yet, but she will soon. All three of them will. We’re almost out of time.

  “I won’t listen to this tonight,” Mistress says. “I won’t listen to any of it.”

  She rushes outside to her garden without another word, and at once, dinner is over.

  “Way to perk up a meal, Rhee,” Lew says with a scoff before heading for the front porch, somewhere far from me.

  Mack is the last to leave the table. Still clutching her gnawing hunger, she sighs and trudges toward the basement.

  At the door, she turns back. “I wish it were true,” she says and disappears down the steps.

  My heart heavy, I embrace Red, the only one who believes me. Outside, Lew passes by the window and reclines on the porch swing. I listen for a moment as she creaks softly back and forth, but no elegiac melodies curl sweetly from her lips. Everything in the house is quiet and haunted.