What the Dead Want (11 page)

H
OPE HAD THAT SAME GRIM AND DETER
MINED LOOK ON
her face Gretchen had seen in the car. She tried to calculate a way out the window, but the drop was steep and the rosebush so thick with thorns it seemed impossible. The car was sitting there beneath them, trunk open waiting for whatever part of the archive they could manage, and the sound of the swarm still filled the hallway outside, but only a few wasps remained in the room—batting themselves against the windows and walls before flying out into the open air.

Gretchen couldn't shake the memory of them crawling all over her, trying to get into her mouth. The sharp pain
of the stings was subsiding and a tight numbness was taking its place.

Hawk was stacking piles of papers and boxes in the middle of the room, stoically ignoring the raised bumps on his arms.

“I think we can get out this window,” Hope said.

“Yeah, it'll be a real pleasure climbing down the thorn hedge carrying dusty boxes full of fragile papers,” Gretchen said, and was shocked at how sarcastic and harsh her own words sounded. Hope and Hawk looked up at her. Seconds before, her heart had been beating in her throat and she had been filled with so many different emotions—now she just felt annoyed and impatient, overcome with the feeling of being in someone else's skin, the way she'd felt at the church; she scratched at her swollen eyebrow in annoyance and then looked away.

She wanted to apologize, but when the siblings gave each other an uneasy look it only made her laugh.

“You know,” Hope said, “you sound like Esther.”

Gretchen shrugged. She didn't just sound like Esther, she felt like Esther. She began to feel light-headed and a little nauseated as though her own thoughts were being pushed to the back of her mind and something else was taking over. Could it be the stings? She wanted a gin fizz and a cigarette and to get all this solved immediately. She
paced back and forth; she went to the closet and looked for anything that could be used to climb out of the windows, but there was no rope. Maybe the swarm would make its way outside or downstairs. It would have to—it wouldn't stay right there outside the door, would it?

She knelt down and stared through the keyhole. The black cloud of insects was swarming near the ceiling while the little girls played happily beneath it, looking in the mirror. Their dark sunken eyes were reflected in the mottled glass. For a moment they looked translucent, but not the way a double exposure does—translucent like she could see the solid fact of their skeletons, gray beneath their pale dirty skin. She shuddered but couldn't look away. Wasps flew in random arcs in front of the mirror, plunking into the glass and bouncing off, and then in the space above the girls' heads she saw her own haggard face reflected in it again. This was impossible, she was behind a solid door, not standing behind Celia and Rebecca, but there it was, her face, tired and drawn.

Hawk came over and put his hand on her shoulder.

“How's it look out there?” She didn't know what to say. She hadn't seen her mother's face in six years, but it was undeniable. The figure looking out from behind the cold mottled glass was not hers at all. It was Mona.

Her chest felt tight and she couldn't speak. She squinted, then looked again.

“I don't know if this is an illusion,” she whispered to herself.

The girls still played merrily in front of the mirror, their fading and frail bodies possessed of a power that sent a sick chill through her bones. The swarm had dwindled. She watched as Celia and Rebecca captured the old gray cat and tried to put their doll's clothes on it. The animal was yowling and trembling in fear, its ears back, and they were laughing and singing to it, petting it roughly with their dirty, sooty hands.

“Gretchen,” Hawk said again, putting a hand on her shoulder. “What is it?” She turned away from the keyhole and looked up at him.

“That mirror,” she said.

“You guys,” Hope interrupted, “I've got it figured out!” She was quickly rolling up the old Persian rug that had lain at the foot of the bed and was carrying it over to the window, then flopped it out so that it covered a length of the wild thorny roses. It stuck firmly in place—but the thorns did not go all the way through. The weight of the rug toppled part of the rose hedge so that it was nearly pressed to the ground.

Hope put a box of books onto the carpet and it slid down, landing in the lawn just a few yards from the car. Then she did it with another and another.

“C'mon,” she said to Gretchen and Hawk. “We're next.”

Then she stepped out onto the ledge and stood on the carpeted rosebush, which wavered under her weight. She balanced as though she was on the back of some great animal.

“We've got to bring the mirror,” Gretchen said.

Hawk stared at her. Hope was already on her way down, scooting along the carpet, which moved precariously but still supported her.

“We can't leave it here!” Gretchen said.

“C'mon!” Hope was shouting from beneath the window. “What are you waiting for?”

“We'll come back for it,” Hawk said.

“No,” Gretchen said. “I saw my mother. My mother, she's trapped in there. I can't leave her.”

For a moment she thought of how she was sure she'd seen her mother when she was a child. How she'd followed that woman, taken her picture.

Of all the frightening things that had happened in the last two days, what terrified Gretchen the most was the idea that she was imagining all of it—that there were no
little girls, no swarm of wasps, no ghosts, just an abandoned house. The way she seemed to be about to faint and then slipping into some kind of behavior and thinking like Esther's was unlike anything she'd ever felt before. Even Hawk seemed too beautiful, too sweet and familiar, to be real. From her aunt's first phone call, the whole thing seemed impossible. Maybe she'd been hit by a car crossing Delancey Street and was in a coma and this was all just a dream.

Hope was still calling to them from the front of the house, the cat was still yowling behind the door.

Like a breeze passing though the room, a feeling of annoyed confidence swept over her again. She wasn't a child anymore and Esther didn't bring her here for no reason.

“I'm sure,” she said. “I'm sure I saw my mother.”

1860

Lincoln has won the election. Not a single Southern state voted for him. And now there is even more talk of war.

Our work is just as dangerous. And fights with my parents seem to have no reprieve. My mother asked if it is my intention to become a spinster. The only good thing about it is she encourages me to spend time with George. Bakes pies for him and asks me to take them over. On the way I stop by the church and talk and plan with James. He is torn by the need to preach and the desire to go and fight. When he talks like this it knocks the wind out of me. I don't know if I'm afraid to lose him, or if I am jealous that I have no options myself, no option to stay and make a real life, no option to leave and fight, no money for school, total and complete dependence. My every last decision determined by men and the laws they've made against my freedom.

Yesterday evening when I returned from seeing him and our talk about his decisions, it all came to a head. My mother asked me why it took me so long to return.

I wanted to give her a simple answer and then go to bed but I found myself shouting, How dare you ask me? I am not your chattel. I am not your property!

She said that as long as I live under their roof they have a right to know and that she is terrified that I am still involving myself with aiding fugitives. That I could get us all killed. I
could not contain my rage any longer.

You mean fugitives like my grandmother? I shouted. Like your mother? Like Valerie's family? How dare you question my actions while you are living like cowards.

She said, You don't know how it was, Fidelia. You never saw the things we've seen.

Oh, but I have, I said. I have seen girls my age, hobbled and scarred and covered with burns, traveling here pregnant with their white rapists' babies.

She looked shocked but I went on.

Don't pretend, Mother, don't pretend that's not why we look the way we do too.

She began crying. Then my father came in holding the tin where I hide my money and I felt like a puppet whose strings had been cut.

You will not use your money to help fugitives, he said. And he took all seventy dollars, years' worth of my working and saving, and put it in his pocket.

Both of you, I said, are as good as murderers. Your silence and your cowardice cost LIVES. You're no better than those killers with their torches.

At this my mother struck me.

I'm trying to keep you alive, she said.

You can't! I shouted. You can't!

H
AWK OPENED THE DOOR, THEN TOOK A
QUICK STEP
directly onto the cat, who was wearing the blue gingham doll dress. It screeched and ran off, disappearing into a room at the end of the long hallway. Celia and Rebecca were now nowhere to be seen and there was no swarm of wasps, nor a broken vase. He and Gretchen looked at one another, dumbfounded.

“Not good,” Hawk said.

“Better than a house full of ghosts and stinging insects,” she said, confused that her first instinct was not to grab the mirror and go but instead an overwhelming desire to run up to the studio and preserve Esther's photographs. She
was also dying for a cigarette again, though she'd never smoked one in her life.

She tamped down her desire to head to the attic and knelt in front of the mirror, trying to look past her own reflection. Searching somewhere in the deep well of murky glass for her mother's form. It was an illusion, she thought, or maybe proof that her mother was dead. She wanted more than ever to get the mirror out of the house—so she could get to the bottom of these horrible mysteries.

“What could have scared off a house full of ghosts and stinging insects?” Hawk asked.

“Us?” Gretchen said, only half listening to him.

“Not a chance.”

The house was desolate, and a breeze moved the curtains just slightly. They could hear the car idling in the driveway, waiting for them.

The mirror was big—but not so big that two people couldn't carry it down the stairs. It would have to stick partway out of the trunk, but they could get it out of there.

They each grabbed a side of the ornate blackened frame and began to lift it. It did not move an inch, as if it were anchored to the floor.

“What is this thing made of?” Gretchen asked.

They tried again, bending at the knees and pulling up with all their might, but it was no use. Gretchen hunched
over to take a breath, and as she did, a hand appeared, pressed flat on the glass—as if they were lifting not a mirror but a darkened glass cage.

She jumped back, then sat before the mirror on her knees and put her palm over the one pressing out.

“I'm here,” she whispered to Mona, then she tugged on Hawk's sleeve. “Look, look,” she said, pulling him down beside her. “It's her.”

Hawk knelt and peered into the mirror. The woman had put both her hands now on the glass.

Gretchen was smiling, overwhelmed with the vision of her mother's ghostly face.

“She's right here,” she said. “Do you see her?” The idea that she could communicate with her mother, that she could be in the same space with her, was overwhelming. She had so much to ask her.

Hawk was silent.

“Do you see her?” she asked again.

He said, “I don't, Gretchen.”

“Well, she's there!” she said, and she could hear the wail building in her own voice. “I can see her. You've got to help me move this.”

“We're not getting it out of here today,” Hawk said.

“We've got to!”

“Not with just the two of us. Best we can do now is get
ourselves out of here and get some help.”

Gretchen pressed her hands hard against the glass—hoping against hope she could somehow slip through it and stand beside her mother. Put her arms around her. Smell that tea tree oil and chai tea scent. Tears sprang to her eyes. Just because Hawk couldn't see her mother didn't mean she wasn't there.

“We need to help her.”

“And we will,” Hawk said. “But not now.”

Something crashed downstairs and they could smell smoke.

“We've got to get out of here,” he said, taking her hand.

Gretchen wiped her face and stood resolutely. She was reluctant to leave the mirror behind but had a strong need to go to the attic. Something was telling her to get Esther's photographs, the ones she'd pinned around the room.

“I've got to go up to my . . . to Esther's studio,” she told Hawk.

“Not by yourself.”

“You actually think you can protect me from an accident or from spirits?” She laughed at him. She was about to say she'd lived through worse, but realized it wasn't true at all.

He was looking at her strangely. “You're back,” he said to her.

“Of course I'm back,” she said, not knowing what she meant. “This is my house. You get going and help Hope, I'll meet you at the car in a few minutes.”

They ran down the hall together, parting at the long banister. Hawk stepped down nimbly, keeping an eye out for ankle-high ropes, and she bounded up the attic stairs two at a time.

In the studio her old Leica was right where she had left it when she'd taken Esther's camera. And the walls of Esther's studio, where all her photographs were hung, were covered in blood.

Sickened and terrified, Gretchen grabbed the Leica and slid it around her neck along with the Nikon. It was as if every photograph Esther had taken was dripping with deep red paint, but it had that smell, a thick metallic stench. She covered her mouth and nose and forced herself to stand there, blinking tears from her stinging eyes. Outside the window, the sky was bright and she could hear the sound of the weather vane turning in the breeze. The walls seemed to be breathing, dripping red.

An icy breeze moved through the room and the door slammed behind her. That's when she saw Celia and Rebecca. They were holding paintbrushes and their faces were sooty. They looked more rabid than ever.

Gretchen clutched her camera in front of herself. Her
first instinct was to run, but instead she knelt down so she would be closer to their height. As soon as she did, the girls stepped back, crouching, like cornered animals, their eyes darting from side to side.

“Did you paint the walls?” Gretchen asked them, trying to talk steadily and calmly, trying to have the friendly tone you would take with living children up to some mischief and not dead children who were trying to kill you with a swarm of wasps.

Rebecca nodded.

“We fixed the pictures,” Celia said. “There's so much paint.” She sounded hoarse, like a child who has been crying for a long time, and she was wheezing slightly, a strange musical intake of air between breaths.

“Now we can fix up the house!” Rebecca said, jumping up to her feet, then balancing on her toes, smiling.

“The way we fixed the church,” Celia said.

“You fixed the church?” Gretchen asked.

Rebecca and Celia nodded.

“Why?”

“Because of how we play. Because of who we are.”

Gretchen was stunned by what they'd said, but tried to remain focused.

“Do you know Mona?” Gretchen asked. “Do you play with Mona in the mirror?”

“No Mona,” Rebecca said. “Mona wants us to leave; she can't fix anything anymore.”

“Why does the house need fixing?” Gretchen asked.

Celia reached out and scratched Gretchen's face savagely with her tiny nails, and Gretchen gasped in pain, held her hand to her cheek, and felt the wet trickle of blood.

“Bad pictures,” she said, “bad house.” Rebecca laughed at what Celia had said, and three oily-looking gray moths flew out of her mouth, fluttering about the room. Celia made a game of skipping around her friend trying to catch them; she plucked one out of the air and tore its wings off, making Rebecca laugh louder. Her voice was now lovely and musical and full of joy, like a child at play, not some kind of demon bent on causing pain.

Suddenly they turned their heads in unison, as if called by something Gretchen couldn't hear. Their faces contorted with confusion or rage or fear, she couldn't tell which, and they ran out of the room whispering their awful chant.
Sufferus sufferus . . .

When Gretchen turned back around, the walls were as they'd been before, covered with nothing more than Esther's photographs: pictures of fires, wars, children. But the stench remained.

“Bad pictures,” Gretchen whispered to herself, touching
the stinging scratch on her face, two cameras now hanging around her neck. “And now they're all mine.”

Esther's collection of the dead, of the terrible things men did, was like the precursor to Mona's ghost photographs. Both of them were missing the living, the here and now. They were letting the past devour the future.

She found an empty box beneath the light table and began tearing down the pictures, sweeping them off the wall with her arm onto the floor or into the box.

The car horn beeped again outside, but she was too far away and deep in the house to simply yell out the window. She hurried, trying to get as many pictures into the box as she could.

Then her blood went cold in her veins. Something was dragging, slithering along the hall. Then the sound of hooves—not tiny hooves like the night before, but clomping like a policeman's horse on the street. She hurriedly filled the box and then stood before the door, her heart pounding; she threw the door open in time to see a grizzled naked old man with a beard and a tattered hat, his eyes yellowed and bloodshot, the irises burning orange. He had a lecherous smile and was pulling a sack of something behind him down the hall. In front of the stairs, a large beast paced back and forth, licking its teeth. It had the legs of a horse and a pointed head and black hollow
eyes, but underneath its body was covered with white tattered feathers, and beneath those it seemed to be made of mud. Its face was hideous, human and terrifying. Its mouth a long thin purple line. She stood perfectly still, hoping whatever world this thing came from, it was incapable of sensing her. The car horn blared again and then she heard the sound of a door opening and closing.

Hands trembling, she picked up the Nikon and shot picture after picture, getting closer to it. When she put her camera to her eye all she could think about was composing the shot. Not what it was or what it was going to do, but how to capture its image. The camera was like a weapon, something that she could destroy the creature with, something to prove to herself that it wasn't real, that it couldn't hurt anyone, that it was only a shadow of the lingering evil in the world.

It sniffed at the air and looked around, not concerned with her. It seemed to be listening to something far away, then it headed down the hall toward the darkroom.

Clutching her box of photos, Gretchen ran downstairs as fast as she could. As she got to the second-floor landing she saw Hawk headed back up, looking worried. She ran into his arms, breathing hard.

“Are you all right?” Hawk asked. “Are you . . . I'm sorry I didn't come with you. I'm so . . .”

“I'm fine,” she said. “I'm fine, got some good shots.” She was still shaken, but suddenly exhilarated, thrilled to have seen even a small glimpse of her mother, ready to shoot more pictures. Escaping danger felt like it was in her blood.

“C'mon,” Hawk said, grabbing the box from her, and they raced down the stairs, skidding across the porch and tumbling onto the lawn.

1860

James has made his decision to go fight. And I understand. But it fills me with desperation. I told him I would come with him, asked him to help me cut my hair and dress as a man and go with him, and he looked so sad.

He said, Fidelia, when you were younger it would have been possible, but you have turned into such a woman. There is no way anyone would mistake you. Maybe there is some way for you to stay here and take over the parish until I get home.

This shocked me. I had never heard of a woman pastor.

Think of it, he said. It's you who has encouraged me, it's you who
is so passionate about these issues. If you must remain here it should be in a place that's fitting, a place away from your family where you can continue our work. And when I come home we can be together.

It was a better idea than living at home. But we both knew it was an impossibility, the church and our families would never allow it. We sat in silence.

I remembered that moment when I first came along with him, to help lead people from the woods. How we were hunkered down, terrified. Any noise could mean our capture—and our friends who had worked so hard for their freedom being sent back to a life of slavery and abuse. He had taken my hand there in the complete darkness—and with his finger had written on my skin, drawing invisible letter after invisible letter.