Pretty Marys All in a Row Read online

  “The house faces east.”

  “Faded gingham,” I say. “Faded everything.”

  They beam as if they’ve been turned loose on the afterlife.

  “This will be enough,” they say. “We’ll find you something.”

  Tittering, they climb through the glass, and when they’re back in their bedroom, the mirror turns solid again, and their reflections vanish.

  I need to vanish too, back to the house for Gladys and David. But first, I kneel down and entwine my fingers with Red’s. She stares up at me from the floor, a pale sadness washed across her face. Our hands tethered together, I flash back to the house—our prison. I try to take her with me, to pull her out of the mirror, but when the darkness snakes away and I’m back in the dining room, I’m alone, no Red next to me.

  “Go, Rhee,” she says behind me. “Get them home.”

  I turn to the wall. Her visage is still in the reflection. She’s trapped. Red is trapped, and I can’t help her. The darkness won’t let me. He’s keeping her there, maybe even keeping her from me. And there’s no time to try again. With Gladys at my side, I’m gone, the two of us flashing back to her gaudy kitchen in Des Moines.

  “Thank you for the party,” Gladys says, waving goodbye with her cane. “And don’t worry, dear. You’re a capable young lady. You’ll find Mack in a jiffy.”

  I smile at her. If only she were right.

  My head stuffed with cotton, I focus again and return home. But this trip is worse than the ones before. It scorches through me, and when my feet feel something solid beneath them, I collapse to the splintered hardwood floor in the dining room. Everything about me is heavy and overstretched, my skin too tight and too flaccid at the same time like I’m wearing the flesh of someone else. All this travel in a single night has left me unbalanced, but that doesn’t matter. I have one more trip, and it’s the most important. I have to get David back before it’s too late.

  He waits for me in the hallway. Sometimes it seems that’s all he can do—wait patiently for me to return for him. The two of us huddle together, and in an instant, our bodies float backward into nothing, into the here and there. I inhale his scents of myrrh and cardamom.

  We return to the highway, as cold and empty and worthless as we left it. Here in the chill of the evening, nothing has changed. But back home, everything is different. Everything is wrong and ruined and all my fault. A profound ache deepens in my chest. I need to get back there. I need to help search for Mack, even though searching will do us no good.

  But I can’t leave David, not yet, not before I know.

  I look at him, my lips struggling to form the question. “Are you okay?”

  He shrugs and exhales a strained chuckle. “I’m fine.”

  But I just keep watching him—as if he’s not real, not anymore—and caught beneath my gaze, he understands that his word about feeling fine won’t be enough. With a sigh like a stone stuck in his throat, he stretches out one hand toward me.

  I don’t want to reach back. I don’t want to touch him and discover he’s not there, that the house did something to him, that I did something, even though I never meant to. I tell myself he can’t be like us. He can’t be a ghost like me.

  I hold my breath, and my fingers outstretch to meet his. I slip through him. He’s solid, and I’m not—the way it’s always been. But not the same. This is the first time I’ve ever been grateful for it.

  My heart still tight in my chest, I half-smile at him.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow,” I say and mean it. I’ll be back here on this highway as soon as the sun sets. Whether the darkness likes it or not.

  I close my eyes and return to the dining room. Red and I linger along the wall in silence as Mistress and Lew pat down the drapes and pull out the couch cushions and overturn all the chairs. Part of me wonders why they’re treating Mack the same as a lost handful of coins or a wayward wedding band, but I’m too exhausted and queasy to ask.

  On the floor, something flashes near my feet. A blue something. It’s David’s matchbook. He must have dropped it when he was here. I kneel next to it and try to pick it up, but my fingers slip through the paper. The matches are like him: spectral and not really here.

  I clasp my empty hands in front of me to keep from shaking, and I step back toward Red. She starts to ask if I’m okay, but from deep within the house, we hear something else. Something soft and sad and distant. A gentle sob like a lullaby.

  Mack’s sob.

  Lew wheezes out a wail of her own. “Where are you?” Her voice is thin and strangled. “Mack, where are you?”

  Another sob from right above us. Lew charges toward the wall, her gnarled fingernails clawing at the plaster. She makes it halfway to the ceiling before her body topples to the floor, but it doesn’t stop her. Back on her feet, she twists in wild circles, dizzy with desperation.

  “Tell us where you are,” Lew says, her eyes the color of weathered slate, “and we’ll find you.”

  The sound drops out around us, and we freeze. Then that voice—that wicked voice, always dripping with sweet malice—fills my ears.

  You can beg all you want, pretty Mary. But Mack can’t play hide-and-seek with you tonight.

  I’m not the only one he’s speaking to this time. All of us can hear him now.

  Lew gnashes her teeth and scans every crevice in the room. “Who are you? And what have you done with her?”

  The darkness laughs. Why don’t you ask Rhee? She knows all about me.

  Lew turns toward me, her lips curled back from her gums, the look of a feral animal ready to pounce.

  “You?” The question twists in my guts. “You know who did this to Mack?”

  If I wasn’t already dead, Lew would finish the job right now.

  “I don’t know him,” I say, the words sticking in my throat, thick and clotted as mud. “But I’ve . . . heard him.”

  Mistress steps toward me, and I back against the wall, cornered and small and scared.

  “For how long?” she asks.

  I gag on air and shrug, and without a word, they intuit the answer: long enough. I’ve known long enough to know better.

  Disgust blossoms in Mistress’s cheeks. “And you never told us?”

  I turn my face away—from the darkness, from Mistress and Lew, and most of all, from Red, because I can’t bear her disappointment too. But it doesn’t matter. I can still feel them watching me, saying nothing, their expressions colorless and wounded in ways for which I can never atone.

  The darkness laughs again, and the sound thrums through the house and deep into my bones. I close my eyes and will myself far from this place and this moment. The room is warmer now. Dawn is nearly here. I can wait this out. Tomorrow will be better. It has to be better. We’ll figure out how to retrieve Mack, and I won’t seem so terrible for not telling them about the voice in the shadows sooner.

  But for now, they won’t let me rest. Lew and Mistress draw closer, desperate to yank the answers out of me like intestines.

  “Who is he? What has he told you?” Mistress demands.

  “This isn’t my fault,” I say and wish I could believe it. “I wasn’t the one who dragged Mack into the shadows.”

  “But you knew,” Lew says, and her sour breath fills my nostrils. She tastes of death and desperation. “You knew, and you did nothing.”

  I start to speak, my breath shaky and not my own, but morning rescues me. Light pours into the house, and we’re enveloped in its embrace. The others melt away around me, and I could be like them. I could let the day overtake me like I always have. But instead, I open my eyes and focus on the horizon. This moment won’t slip away from me like the others before. I’ll hold onto this sunrise. For all I know, it might be my last.

  I see the sun, a glittering coin in the sky, and its warmth sinks into my skin like rose oil. Morning is here and so am I. The darkness can’t stop me from witnessing it this time. This moment is mine.

  Then it’s gone, and I’m back on t
he highway.

  Parked on the shoulder next to the cemetery, David is already here, and I’m grateful, so grateful, that I’m not alone. I’ll figure something out. Some way to rescue Mack. Some way to make this right.

  But there will be no right this evening. From across the lawn, I sense it on his face. Something’s happened. I seize up next to the car, a dozen paces from him, convinced if I move any closer, he’ll turn to ash before my eyes.

  “What is it?” I ask.

  He hesitates. “I’m not sure,” he says and reaches out for the rusted fence.

  His hand slips clean through it.

  My heart compresses in my chest, but before I say a word, he inhales and tries it again. This time, his fingers clench around the spire, and he’s whole.

  “I noticed it today when I was driving to work.” He grunts, and the sound catches halfway between a laugh and a sob. “Made for an interesting commute.”

  I stare at him, wanting so badly to scream that I have to bite down on my tongue until it bleeds to stop myself.

  “Can you control it?” I ask at last. “When it happens, I mean?”

  He shakes his head. “It comes and goes,” he says. “Like I’m here and not here at the same time.”

  This is my fault. I’ve done this to him. And probably to the twins and Gladys, too. They’re trapped like us, but they don’t even get to be dead. They’re something else. Maybe something worse.

  I move toward David, but the tether that connects me to home and to my sisters tugs hard at my chest. I brace against it. It’s too soon. They shouldn’t be calling to me already. But maybe it’s not a bad thing. Maybe they found Mack.

  Or maybe the darkness found them.

  Everything around me spins, and I’m desperate to just stop, if only for a moment. But I don’t get that choice. Home yanks harder now, and I taste the sharp tang of sorrow. Red’s and Lew’s and Mistress’s grief. It’s copper in my mouth, pungent as blood.

  “I’m sorry,” I say to David. “I have to go. But I’ll come back. I promise.”

  If I can. If I even get a choice.

  David steps toward me. “Rhee,” he whispers, my name soft and honey-sweet on his lips, “what’s happening to us?”

  “I don’t know,” I say, and I’m pulled backward and home to my sisters.

  The three of them are already in the dining room, Red in her mirror and Mistress at the head of an empty table. In the corner, Lew kneels at her liquor cabinet and guzzles straight from the bottle, no horse skull for a goblet this time.

  I rush toward Red, and questions tumble out of me. “How were the twins? Were they okay? Did they say anything? Did we hurt them?”

  Meaning, did I hurt them?

  But Red shakes her head. “I don’t know.” She won’t look at me. “I couldn’t go to them, Rhee.”

  Lew scoffs. “None of us could leave tonight except you.”

  This has never happened before. They’ve never been trapped at night. I turn away from them, so they can’t see the fear in my eyes. “That’s not so terrible, right? It gave you more time to search for Mack.”

  “No, it didn’t.” Lew charges me and whirls me around to face her. “We can barely hear her anymore. Her cries are fading, Rhee. She’s fading, and we can’t find her.”

  But that doesn’t mean we’re alone. Red gazes through the curtains. “Someone’s outside,” she whispers.

  We hesitate, and a figure passes across the window.

  “Mack?” Lew starts out of the dining room first, and Mistress and I track her into the hallway. Together, the three of us open the front door.

  Something crouches on the porch behind the swing. It isn’t Mack. The shoulders are too broad, the body too tall. This is a man.

  Or something pretending to be a man.

  It turns toward us, and a scream lodges halfway up my throat. The figure has no face. It’s all shadows and confusion, and that forces Mistress and me back a step but not Lew. Lew’s always been a fool. She steps to meet the darkness.

  “Give her back,” she says, and the thing without a mouth laughs.

  I can do better than that. I can take you to her.

  The darkness drifts toward her, and Lew lets out a guttural screech and pitches her skull at the place where its face should be. It catches her trinket midair and wraps its fingers around the temples. At once, the skull shatters into a thousand pieces, and though Lew’s braver than Mack and raises her fist to the shadows, she can’t get ahold of it like it can hold her.

  One scream, and the shadows devour her.

  Now there’s another scream—my scream—as I fall to my knees and search the detritus for her. The shattered pieces of Lew’s skull embed in my palms, and I drip red on the porch floor. I scream again and keep screaming, and I won’t stop, my hands desperately trying to reassemble her. But she’s part of the darkness now, and collecting these fragments won’t put her back together.

  “Rhee.” Mistress’s voice behind me is distant and strange. “Come on.”

  “Wait,” I say, still fumbling with cracked bone, my fingers slick with my own blood. “Just let me try.”

  “You don’t have time.” Her hand is strong and cold on my shoulder, and that’s when I look up and see what she sees. The darkness is moving after me and over me and trying to get into me.

  This isn’t like the last time with Mack. The darkness isn’t satisfied with merely stealing Lew. He wants us too. Shadows drip toward us like tar, and we stumble back inside and shove the front door closed behind us. But that’s what he wants. He wants us in one place where there’s nowhere left to hide.

  Mistress and I edge backward into the dining room as the hurricane lamps flicker before extinguishing altogether. Though it’s almost too dark to see, there’s enough light for us to glimpse what happens next. The ceiling sags overhead, and bits of pale tile fall on us. The smaller fragments are like snow on our eyelashes, but the larger, jagged pieces gouge our shoulders and neck. We yelp and pluck them out and press ourselves into the corners, but the whole room quivers and turns against us. The wallpaper peels off the plaster like stiff flesh in a taxidermist’s hands. Everything in the house is alive and determined. Red screams my name as the mirror shakes and shifts on its nail, and she falls. I dive after her and catch her before she hits the floor, before she shatters into nothing. Undeterred, the wallpaper curls toward us, nipping at my feet and ankles and thighs. I crawl away on my back, kicking and flailing and pulling the mirror with me. In the doorway, Mistress yanks me up, and we run toward the hall. I cradle Red against me, my palms leaving red handprints on the glass.

  Outside, darkness drapes over the house, our own burial shroud. I gaze through all the windows and the cracks in the door, but there’s no world left out there. No front porch. No garden. Nothing beyond these walls and this moment. He’s sealed us inside the house.

  And this time, we’re not leaving until he’s finished with us.

  chapter seven

  Mistress grabs my hand, and we clamber for the stairs. But the darkness is there before us, dripping down each step, and that figure from the porch forms again in front of our eyes, stronger and more defined than before.

  Now it has a face with two dark eyes smiling at me. I turn away to keep myself from screaming.

  “Come on.” Mistress yanks me toward the basement.

  I bite down on air and brace against her. There couldn’t be a worse place for us to hide. One way in—down the splintered steps with no backs—and no other way out. It’s the only room in the house I’ve avoided for years. It was Mack’s domain, and that gave me an excuse to eschew it, but that wasn’t the real reason I avoided it. I couldn’t stand it because I felt trapped there. Mack didn’t need to build a coffin down there—the whole place was a sepulcher already.

  But now, we have no choice. With the darkness pouring into all the cracks and filling up the rooms, we’ve got nowhere else.

  We dash for the basement and lock the door behind us.
r />   After a long moment, something knocks on the other side.

  I stuff my fingers in my mouth and press myself against the door, but it thrusts its weight against me. Mistress sprints down the stairs and tosses Mack’s leftover boards up to me. I barricade the door, shoving the lumber beneath the knob to keep it from turning. A fool’s move, but one that holds for the moment. And all we have are these moments, fleeting and cruel as they are.

  I creep down the stairs to Mistress, both of us breathless in the dark.

  “Can you get us out?” she whispers.

  I hold the mirror tighter. “Maybe.”

  I close my eyes and try to focus, try to see anything except this place, but the shadows are everywhere. They’re all around me and in me, too, pulsing through my body like poison. They want us here.

  I try again. I strain through the darkness and the rank tastes of fear and blood and oblivion to see past this moment. To see David and the highway and those crumbling potholes that I memorized a lifetime ago. But in my mind, it’s all empty spaces where my memories should be. I choke back a sob. Once upon a time, the darkness stole my life from me. Now it’s stealing my hereafter too.

  I shake my head. “I’m sorry,” I say, every muscle in my body limp and paralyzed.

  A single bulb dangles overhead, turning our skin a jaundiced yellow.

  This is it. This is where we go to die.

  No, that’s not right. Mistress, Red, and I have died once already. We’re practically pros at that. This will be worse. We’ll be less than nothing, no better than white noise buried behind the woodwork. How can anything be less than what we already are?

  I lean back against the wall, desperate to catch my breath. The basement is filled with the light sweetness of carnations. Mack’s scent. She should be here. This is where she belongs.

  Now only an echo of her remains. Down here in the damp and the cold, you can still hear her, those soft weeps, the cries of an abandoned child.

  And there’s someone else here too. Another weeping girl in the walls. But these sobs are different. They brim with rage the color of late autumn when all the trees have blistered to orange ruins and blackened bark. A fury that wanes more with every passing moment because the darkness pulls her farther from us.