Pretty Marys All in a Row Read online

  And now I wonder if forgetting might have been better.

  “So,” David says, his voice shaking, “who were you?”

  I heave out a rueful laugh. Inside, I’m empty, so painfully empty I almost can’t speak.

  “I was no one,” I say, and it’s true, oh god, it’s true.

  The girl from David’s book was never me. She was the ghost who haunted me.

  The ghost I replaced.

  My fingertips graze the walls, nearly feeling the residue of my life there. “The previous Resurrection Mary came to me because we were alike.”

  And that’s it. That’s who the Marys are. We’re no one. The easy marks. The strange girls discarded by the world, the ones nobody would miss, our lives passed by and wasted. When the ghost who visited me was all used up like we are now, the darkness swapped me for her.

  Her eyelids heavy, Abby slips from David’s arms and climbs on the bed that used to be mine. The mattress is mildewed and stained, but she doesn’t mind. She just bounces and squeals and smiles up at us.

  A chill settles deep inside me. She can see me. She could see all of us, even once we were fading. That’s because she’s like us. She’s someone the darkness will choose. Maybe that’s his plan: to replace me with Abby, just like he’ll replace Red with the twins. I can hear his scratchy, hideous voice now when he comes for the twins: Two pretty Marys for the price of one.

  No. He won’t steal them. That, I’ll make sure of. He won’t have any of them. My sisters aren’t gone, not completely. Their weeping still haunts me. And even if their sobs are fading, they’re still here, still reachable.

  It’s not too late.

  Outside, the sun dips in the sky. The darkness is almost here.

  I kneel next to the bed, next to Abby. “You rest now,” I say. “But no matter what happens, you stay right here in this room. Do you understand?”

  She blinks up at me, her clear brown eyes the color of mine. “I understand, Aunt Rhee.”

  She curls up to sleep, and David closes the door behind us.

  Together, we linger in the moldering living room. This is my domain, just like the coffin was Mack’s and the porch was Lew’s and the mirror was Red’s. This is where he will come for me.

  But he won’t get the chance. I’ll go to him first. I’ll head into the darkness—through the shadows of these walls and out of this place into the space between. I’ll meet him there. No fear. No melancholy. Only me and him.

  I steady my breath and tell David my plan. “Wait until it’s nearly sunrise,” I say. “Then follow me in and come for them.”

  My sisters. They’ll be there, weeping in the dark. I know they will. And David will be able to reach them, now that our worlds are sliding together, and he’s stuck in between, the same as me.

  “And what about you?” he asks.

  “I’ll find my own way out.” It’s a lie, one that David sees through instantly. I won’t come back. The darkness will make sure of it. It spoke to me first and saved me for last. I’m integral to all of this, and that’s fine. So long as we can retrieve my sisters, then that’s something. That’s worth it.

  “And what now?” David asks, his eyes heavy and gray.

  I gaze at him. If this is the end, there’s one last thing I want to try. Part of David is like us now, trapped in between. Maybe once I’m gone and his last tether to the liminal space is severed, he’ll be okay again. Maybe it’s only because I’m in one place, and he’s in another, and the two realms are sliding together. But in this moment, our worlds aren’t so far apart.

  In the house, I could hold his matchbook in my hand. Now maybe I can hold him too.

  I stretch out my arms for his. David hesitates before reaching back. We don’t slip through each other, but we’re not entirely solid either. It’s like touching water, the way our skin ripples together. But after all these years, it’s not just something. It’s everything.

  Music from an ethereal Victrola rises through the air. “Moonlight Serenade.” My favorite Glenn Miller song.

  We sway together, side by side, our soft arms entangled. This is the closest to a first dance we’ll ever know, and that’s okay. It’s more than I ever thought we’d share.

  When the song is over and the sun slips from the sky, I turn away from him and move toward the shadows, toward the place I’ve always belonged.

  I look back once and smile at David. He smiles too.

  Then I face the darkness and step into the wall.

  chapter nine

  The inside of the house unfolds into another world. A vast silver ballroom with a steel vaulted ceiling higher than the clouds and endless rows of fancy tables, shrouded in dark linens like corpses awaiting autopsy.

  This is for me. The darkness has crafted this ballroom just for me.

  Music plays somewhere far off, but that’s not what thrums within me. A murky wind rustles through the room, singing a requiem, so soft and lonely it makes me want to cry.

  “You may shed a tear,” someone says, “if you’d like.”

  The voice is clear and familiar and simmering in my ears, a melody that’s really here and not confined only to my mind. Something made concrete.

  “Hello,” I say, and the darkness appears in front of me, descending slowly, piece by piece, a gentleman climbing out of a carriage from the sky. He stands at full height, towering over me, and he looks real now. Real and handsome and wicked as heartache.

  I grimace away from him, and he laughs.

  “Don’t you like my new face?” He smiles. “Perhaps you’d prefer this one.”

  His body shifts, and his features soften. I blink, and I’m staring at David. Or rather, a hideous imitation of David.

  “Stop,” I say.

  “But I thought you liked him.” The darkness stands across from me yet whispers in my ear. “You’ve certainly gazed lovingly at him enough times.”

  My jaw clenches. “Return to what you were.”

  “As you like,” he says, and his visage reverts back to his own.

  I swallow hard. “Why are we here?” I ask, my voice splitting in two. “What do you want from me?”

  “Don’t you know?” The darkness eddies around me, over and over like a dance, and I intuit what he’s doing. He’s manipulating the hourglass. Each time he circles me, we lose another piece of the night. Time is slipping away quicker here. He’s stealing it from me, the same way he’s stolen everything else. He wants time to run out, so when morning comes, I’ll be here where he wants me, in the place where I’ll belong to him.

  “Where are they?” I say. “Where are my sisters?”

  “Don’t you see them, Rhee?” He ripples toward me. “Why, they’re right here.”

  The gloom shifts around me, and every fiber in my body goes numb. He’s disguised the room, and only now can I see through the fantasy, through the phony image of the ballroom. There are no tables and chairs and fancy linens. There are no accoutrements here at all. There are only girls. A thousand rows of girls, recumbent and still.

  Some are in coffins, sealed up tight. Some are shrouded in dead flowers and veiled in pink chiffon. Some are laid bare and lonely, nothing except their broken skulls or broken mirrors to protect them from the cold and the dark.

  The rustling sound whispers past me, and I realize it isn’t wind. It’s their weeping, hundreds upon hundreds of girls sobbing through heavy dreams, their cries muffled and ever-fading. All these Marys that came before.

  I pull away from the darkness and race through the maze of girls, desperate to discover my sisters, to rouse them before it’s too late. But these labyrinthine aisles stretch on forever, and the darkness is always faster than me.

  He skips across the ceiling and materializes at my side. “Where ever are you going, pretty Rhee?”

  “Give them back to me,” I say, and it’s a hopeless request, but I have to stall him, I have to find my sisters on my own. Then I can direct David to them when he comes at dawn. A dawn that is nearer now, so
near I can nearly taste its buttery sweetness. David will come, and he’ll salvage them. Somehow, he’ll get them out of here.

  I twist away and keep walking, down a long, dizzying row of girls, the darkness my constant companion. But then what of the other Marys? There are too many of them to rescue in one night. And how can we leave them here for the shadows to torment and possess?

  But I can’t think of the others now. I can’t think of anything except my four sisters.

  “I’ve watched you, Rhee,” the darkness whispers, soft and sweet as a lover. “For a lifetime, I’ve seen you. How you scare. Like haunting is a work of art.”

  “I’ve learned from the best.” I gaze hard at him. “From my sisters.”

  “They aren’t your sisters.” His voice bristles. “But of course, you’d call them that. The lot of you were always trouble.”

  Trouble. This pleases me. We were trouble because we were a family. Because we were stronger together. For all his vicious alchemy, the darkness couldn’t predict that. And he couldn’t stop it.

  I break into a sprint, cutting past two coffins and a pile of brush that was once a girl like Mistress. These are close imitations but still imitations. Everything here is strained illusion.

  The darkness meets me at the end of the corridor. I turn and try to run again, past a girl with mirror glass embedded in her skin—a previous Red, though not my Red—but the darkness cuts me off. He’s everywhere, and I can’t escape him.

  “The others weren’t like you.” He flashes me a smile that looks more like a sneer. “They grew weaker, but you became stronger. That’s because you’re like me. There’s always been darkness in you.”

  I stop in the center of the room, the still point of a hurricane. “That’s a lie.”

  He grins, a real grin this time. “No, it’s not,” he says, and he’s right. I hate it, but he’s right. I’ve always relished a good scare. It’s never bothered me, never haunted me like it should have. I’ve been better in death than I ever was in life.

  “And what will happen to all of them?” I motion to the girls, the disorienting rows repeating to infinity.

  The darkness leans in close, and I taste his breath, all jagged ice and coffin dirt and winters that never end. “They’re slumbering well enough,” he says. “You wouldn’t want to disturb them. That would be rude, don’t you think?”

  “Not as rude as stealing a girl’s afterlife.”

  He scoffs, and the dust in all the shadows shudders in refrain. “You had your chance at life, and you wasted it. I plucked you from nothing, from less than obscurity. And I transformed you into a legend.”

  “A fleeting legend,” I say. “You use us up until we’re no good. Until there’s nothing left of us.”

  “Not me.” He smiles. “The world is the one that uses you up. People forget the stories after a while. The new ghosts are bright and eager and make them remember again.”

  My fingers curl into talons. “And there’ll always be more girls, ripe and ready for the taking, isn’t that right?” I ask, and he shrugs. That’s how he sees it, as a daisy chain of ghosts. The twins and Abby and all those who could see us, who embraced us, will become just like us. We’ve condemned them without ever meaning to.

  “But you’re not like the others,” he says and grasps my hand in his. “I don’t want to put you away with them. I want you to stay with me.”

  I know what this means. I have to pick between two impossible existences: either he devours me tonight, the same as he devoured the others, or he spends an eternity devouring me in another way.

  And I have to choose. Right now.

  “I’ll stay,” I say and step to meet him. “On one condition.”

  He smirks. “What’s that?”

  “First, you dance with me.”

  He hesitates, convinced it’s a trick. But when he can divine no angle, he reaches forth and takes my other hand, and amidst ethereal music of my own making, we waltz. It’s not sweet, like with David, but coarse and regimented, every step aching in its precision. And he doesn’t try to hide what he’s doing. With one palm pressed into my back and the other shackled around my wrist, he’s drawing me in, closer to him, until there’s no way to tell where he ends and I begin. This is what he wants. I’m fading, the darkness siphoning me away, slowly, as though I won’t notice. He’s weakening me, making me pliable and translucent and nothing at all. Easier to control. Easier to call his own. And I let him. I let him because it’s almost time. It’s almost dawn.

  David sneaks in through the wall, through the path I left open for him, and with my focus razor-sharp, I shroud him and the entrance in darkness, blotting out the barrier between here and there. I still don’t know where my sisters are, but maybe David will find them in time.

  I twirl in a waltz, a Glenn Miller song surging over the weeps of the Marys, the music hiding David’s footsteps as he creeps down the rows.

  I hold the darkness closer to me, but even as I guide him away from David, he senses it. My trickery.

  The darkness whirls me around until I’m dazed and weak before he yanks me down an avenue of girls. For an instant, I see them—my sisters. And David next to them, desperately trying to awaken them.

  Without shifting from my side, the darkness lifts David from his feet, those long fingers wrapped around his throat, even at a distance. “And what shall we do about him?”

  “Don’t,” I whisper, though my voice is lost in the waning music and waning sobs.

  “We could always scare him into oblivion,” the darkness says as David squirms midair. “And of course, we could make his devilish little progeny one of our own.”

  I steel my body against the shadows. “Leave them alone,” I say.

  The darkness smiles. “Or what?”

  I gaze into his face, into that terrible face, and something ignites inside me. A tiny flicker that burns so bright I can hardly bear it. My own gloom. It’s what’s always been there. It’s what made the darkness want me, and though he’s drained so much of it away, I’m still me. With every shred of power left in me, I reach out, my own hands invisible, and release the shroud that hides the barrier between here and there. On the other side, back in the shack that was once my home, morning has broken, and the light pours in through the cracked picture window. In an instant, it breaches this faux ballroom and sears through us.

  In my arms, the darkness screams—a darkness that can’t be joined with fire or light—and I feel it. The fear in him. Until this moment, I wasn’t sure, but now I know: even the wickedest things can feel fear. It unfurls from deep within him, and his body burns up until all that remains of him is smoke and dread.

  Smiling, I inhale and devour him whole.

  Panting, David falls to the floor at my feet, and I linger here among these rows of sleeping girls.

  Maybe this is over. Maybe we won.

  But then something new shifts within me. My skins boils on my flesh, and I know I’m wrong. This isn’t what I wanted. The darkness, all cold and candy-sweet, is within me now, a part of me like I was once part of him. He crawls inside me, a spider up a sleeve, and with my body fading away after what he’s done to me, there’s almost nothing left. I’m more shadow now than I am me. And with him coursing inside my veins and merging with my own darkness, I can guess what comes next. I’ll become the new emissary, the one to gather together the girls. The captor, boundless and cruel. Everything is a cycle, and I’ll be the newest part of it.

  No. I’d rather become nothing at all. I’d rather fade away right here.

  My gloom dwindling into his, I part my lips and wail. This is enough to reach my sisters. Without him to chain them down, my pain awakens them from their cruel dreams.

  With a steady hand, Mack lifts open her coffin, and Lew cobbles together her skull before rising to her feet. Never one to be outdone, Mistress shifts from the ash that used to be her garden, and she drifts toward me, more fearsome than before. They gather together around me, my family united one l
ast time.

  David is here too. He kneels over me, searching the air helplessly. “I can’t see her.” His words are strangled and wet. “Rhee? Where is she? I can’t see her.”

  “She’s here,” Mack says, but the quiver in her voice belies the truth: the other Marys can barely see me themselves. I’m fading before their eyes. They huddle together, frantic to find me and anchor me here. Lew leans against Mack, and Mack grips the hand of someone else. Someone I hardly recognize outside of the obscure gray of the mirror.

  Red. Here she is, out in the open, whole and real and unconfined. It’s like I’m seeing her for the first time.

  “You’re beautiful.” I reach for her hand, but I slip right through her. She smiles at what’s left of me and bites back her tears.

  “We need to do something,” Mistress says, proper and resolute as always. At her feet, something sinuous and determined whips through me. The vine. It’s smaller now, down to the nub where the darkness tore it in two, but it flicks at me, trying to coax me back. They’re all trying to coax me back, my four sisters and David too. But even together, they’re not enough to ground me here. I’m slipping away.

  Perhaps this is for the best. The darkness will end with me. I close my eyes and wait for my body to dim beneath the shadows. But my rest is not to be.

  “Why are all these pretty ghosts sleeping?” A tiny voice like a cathedral bell at midnight rings through the ballroom. “And where’s Aunt Rhee? I heard her crying.”

  Abby. I told her to stay out of here, but she didn’t listen to me. Of course, she didn’t. A chance to meet the beyond? I wouldn’t have listened to me either.

  A shadow passes across my face, and I open my eyes. Abby looms over me and grins.

  “It’s okay, Daddy,” she says. “I’ve found her.”

  “You can see her?” David waves his hands uselessly in the air as if I’m deliberately hiding there. “Baby, you see her?”

  “Sure, she’s right here.” Abby wraps her chubby fingers around mine, and in this moment, I’m not a ghost at all. I’m only a girl, real and whole.