Shallow Graves (16 page)

I didn't know the limits of my newfound sense. I didn't know if guilt mattered, if intent mattered, if accidental deaths were the same as cold-blooded murders. I didn't know anything. I certainly didn't know any convicted murderers. But I did know where Joya Allen lived.

I went to her house one night and lurked like a stalker in the hedge separating her yard from her neighbor's. I didn't know which
bedroom was hers, but it didn't matter. That close to the house, close enough I could have tossed a handful of pebbles up to the second story windows, I felt a dark mist of guilt flowing outward, as encompassing as fog from the lake, spreading from a single point in an upstairs bedroom.

My fingers itched. I clenched my hands into fists at my sides.

I pictured myself walking over to the door and finding a key under the mat.

Waiting until I was sure everybody was asleep. Slipping inside.

Creeping up the stairs, soft steps on soft carpet.

Standing over Joya as she muttered in her sleep. She would be dreaming of the man she had killed. Remembering how she felt in the moment she made the decision to hit the gas, anger and hatred and disgust and fear. The thump of car striking flesh, a crunch, remembering, and reliving.

I would place my hand on Joya's warm forehead.

I would feel for the shadow of her guilt, and I would
pull
.

I wondered if it would be easier to kill the second time. The possibility made me nervous in a way I didn't like. I didn't want to hurt Joya.

I left her house without looking back.

But I paid more attention after that. There were more killers around than I expected, but I kept my distance, and kept my hands to myself. I always returned to my house before dawn. I drew the curtains and hid from the sun, a silent ghost in my own home.

Silent, but not alone. The man I had killed was my constant companion. A real estate agent found his body a few days after I
woke up. I read about it in the news, but those bloodless articles felt distant and impersonal compared to what I had taken from him. His memories, snapped into my mind at the moment of his death, had faded from immediacy, but I still had them. I will always have them. When I lay in the dark and could not quiet my mind, he and I crept together through a small house in the drifting snow, peered through the windows, and thrilled when the woman walked into view.

I didn't want to understand. I wanted him out of my head and his disgusting memories gone. When he intruded and I caught myself yearning, planning,
wanting
, I flung myself out of bed and ran into the bathroom. I searched through the drawers until I found a pair of scissors, a package of disposable razors, a metal nail file. I hoped the pain might drive him away, but the sight of my own blood rising from the cuts on my legs only made the memories stronger. Children slumped over their dinners. The husband, the interloper, dead on the floor. And her, clutching at the stab wounds in her chest, dying.

After the blood stopped flowing and the cuts began to heal, I took my father's sleeping pills from his bedroom and swallowed them all.

It didn't work. Number one on my list of failures.

I went to the lake and tried to drown. I stole rat poison from a neighbor's garage. Failure, failure. I made a list to keep track. I took a kitchen knife from the wooden block on the counter and filled the bathtub, climbed in and trembled, blade in hand, until the water was pink and cold and my skin was pruned. Failure.

According to the calendar my family was due back from the cottage on Sunday.

I cleaned the shower and the bathroom, wiped everything dry and put the towels in the washer. I erased all the evidence I had been there. I looked for cash in my room, in Meadow's and Sunny's, but decided not to take it. I took only a pen and the space camp notebook from my desk. I balled up the dirty clothes I had been wearing when I died and stuffed them into a plastic bag. I didn't know what else to do with them.

I left before dawn. I swung the plastic bag over my shoulder, dropped the stolen skateboard to the asphalt, and I left.

I WAS STILL
on the lawn when Zeke came home. Watching the stars and tracking the satellites as they passed overhead, wondering which of them might be the ISS. Before, in my previous life, my normal life, I would have been imagining how I might describe that night later, in an interview, when somebody asked me, “When did you first know you wanted to go into space?” And I would say, “I always knew,” and I would talk about lying on the grass and watching the space station in orbit.

The truck pulled into the driveway; the front door opened and shut. I felt the grasping shadows that whispered
killer.
A minute or two later I heard voices through the open bedroom window. Jake
was angry about Zeke's field trip to Wyoming, angry about Rain, angry about the visit to Ingrid's, and probably angry about me too, but he didn't really get around to that before a door slammed and the argument ended.

The kitchen door squeaked open. “What are you doing out here?”

Trying not to eavesdrop. “Looking at the stars,” I said.

The southeastern sky was washed out by Denver's yellow glow, and the dark shoulders of the mountains loomed in the west, but there were still more stars than I ever saw at home.

I rolled my head to the side to look at Zeke. “Are you in trouble for helping us?”

Zeke let the door swing shut behind him and sat on the edge of the concrete patio. “Jake's just being an asshole.”

I thought maybe Jake had good reason to be upset, but I wasn't about to complain about being rescued from that red room.

“It's okay for him to do any stupid thing, but if I—” Zeke stopped abruptly, kicked idly at the crisp grass. “What are you even doing out here? It's the middle of the night.”

“I don't sleep.”

“Why not?”

“I mean, I can't sleep. I haven't slept since I woke up from being dead.”

“Huh. Weird.”

“That's one word for it. Can I ask you something?”

“I guess,” Zeke said warily.

“Can you die?”

“Uh, yeah. We die. Not as easily as humans.”

“What does that mean? Extreme old age? Ghoul cancer?”

“No,” he said. “Somebody pretty much always kills us.”

The way he said it, so flat and accepting, it was worse than anger or fear would have been. Habit, Jake had said, when he compulsively checked through the front window.

“Who?” I asked. “People like that guy in Wyoming?”

“Yeah. Humans,” Zeke said, like it was obvious. Maybe it should have been.

“Is that what happened to your parents?”

A pause, then, “Yeah.”

“I'm sorry.”

“It was a few years ago.”

I didn't think a few years would make any difference when it came to losing your parents. “How old were you?”

“Twelve. Jake was seventeen. Eighteen. It happened right after his birthday.”

“My sister Sunny is twelve,” I said, mostly to myself. “Thirteen, now. I missed her birthday.”

“Is she your only sister?” Zeke asked.

“No. There are three of us. Meadow is in the middle. We—” The word caught in my throat. For a second it hurt to speak. “It's just the two of them now.”

A few years ago, when I started high school, Mom and Dad had called a family meeting. They had never done that before. My sisters and I joined them in the dining room. Mom and Dad assured us nothing bad had happened, but they wanted to talk to us about
the plans they were making in case something ever did. Our mother's older sister, Kathleen, had agreed to take us in. Meadow and I exchanged a skeptical glance across the table. Kathleen's second husband hated kids in general and us in particular. But that was what the adults had decided. Aunt Colleen was a photographer and always traveling, and Dad hadn't seen his family in China since he left for the United States at eighteen. Kathleen was the best option. Mom went over our college funds, their life insurance, their wills. Dad assured us they weren't sick or taking up skydiving. They just wanted to be prepared. We listened, but the words washed over us without impact, because who ever believes their parents are going to die? Even Sunny laughed when Dad said we would have to fight among ourselves over who got his best bathrobe, the soft gray one we all coveted on cold winter mornings. Meadow added that we would also fight over who got Grandma's china set because none of us wanted to be stuck with something so ugly. It was hideous, with big pink flowers and faded green leaves, smears of brown paint meant to be branches, and gold edging like fat worms. Mom shook her head and said she would ask the lawyer about arranging for the china to be mysteriously dropped off a moving truck during probate.

None of their plans had required me to take care of my sisters on my own. To become responsible, to get a job, to pay the bills and solve the problems, to be the adult. It had never even come up.

“Can I ask another question?” I said.

“Can I stop you?” Zeke replied.

“Unlikely. My third grade teacher, Mr. Schrader, told my
parents I wasn't allowed to raise my hand in class anymore because I was bothering the other students.”

“Were you?”

“Mr. Schrader was a jerk.” He was the same teacher who had called me a liar in front of the class when I couldn't share any Chinese words as part of Culture Day because my dad had never taught me any. “Ingrid said everybody knows stories about things—people like me.”

“Okay?”

“I don't know those stories.” I sat up, drew my knees to my chest, and hugged my arms around my legs. “I tried looking it up, but they don't cover this stuff on Wikipedia. All Google gave me was a bunch of Dungeons and Dragons character profiles and this random French TV show. Nothing helpful.”

“Humans don't know anything,” Zeke said.

“Yeah, we suck. I'm serious. Do you know something? Have you ever heard of anything like me?”

“There was this guy we used to know, this human. Jake and I sort of lived with him one winter.” Zeke leaned forward, rested his chin on his knees, mirroring my position. It made him look young and vulnerable. “He was in Vietnam, you know, back in the sixties or whenever. I guess they—attacked a village. Killed everybody who lived there.” He sounded honestly baffled when he added, “I don't understand human wars.”

“Neither do we,” I said.

“After they took out this village, people from their unit, what's it called?”

“Platoon.”

“Right. From their platoon. They started to die. They would go off into the jungle and something would get them. They couldn't stop it. They only saw it once.”

A faint shiver wormed down my spine. “It was one of the people from the village? Somebody they killed.”

“A kid, yeah. A little boy.”

“But only the one kid,” I said. “Millions of people died in Vietnam. Why did that one kid come back? Why was he special?”

Zeke only shrugged.

“Does anybody know?”

“I don't know. Magicians don't exactly share their secrets with people like us.”

“Ingrid thinks I'm going to be like that kid. Start killing a whole bunch of people.”

“Ingrid can't tell you what you're going to do. Magic can't do that.”

“You just said you don't know how magic works.”

“I know that much,” he said.

It could have been reassuring, but I wasn't in the mood to be reassured. I especially wasn't in the mood to be reassured by the vague and ill-defined rules of what magic could and couldn't do.

“One more question.” If Zeke really wanted me to stop, he would have gone inside already. “Why did you help Rain when she asked? I know you didn't want to,” I said, before he could deny it. “Whatever it was made your brother angry enough to threaten to cut me into little pieces if I was part of it.”

“Jake said that?” Zeke said, surprised.

“Well, no. He didn't say anything, but he was holding a scalpel when he didn't say it.”

“He wouldn't do that.”

“So what was it? I get the impression she's not a friend of yours and, to be honest, she creeps me out.”

“She's a nightmare,” Zeke said.

I started to answer, hesitated, turned the word over in my mind. “You don't mean a bad dream, or, like, a really unpleasant person.”

“No. I mean she's a nightmare.”

“I don't know what that means,” I said.

“I don't know how to explain it. That's what she is. She can do things to people's minds just by talking to them. Make them think they're in danger or lost or whatever. Give them real nightmares.”

My skin crawled with an uncomfortable realization. “Do they have to be asleep?”

“No. She can do waking nightmares too.”

Rain, in the red room, speaking in that sultry low voice, and the images that rose unbidden in my mind. The screaming woman—a mother separated from her children—the blank-faced men dragging her away. Telling Brian Kerr to come into the room, and how quickly I had wanted to agree. They had her mouth taped shut before I woke up. They knew what she could do.

And again, at Ingrid's house, repeating what Ingrid was saying, and how clearly and how vividly I had seen what she wanted me to see.

I hadn't questioned it at the time. I hadn't wondered where the
thoughts were coming from, or why Ingrid wanted Rain there at all. I had been so focused on figuring out what I could do to other people I hadn't suspected what she was doing to me.

“She can make you think anything? Anything at all?” I said.

“I don't think so,” Zeke said. “I think she can only use something you're already scared of. Like, if you've never been scared of spiders, she can't make you think giant spiders are going to eat you. But if you're scared of heights she can make you think you're going to die falling off the bed.”

What was I scared of? If they had asked, I wouldn't have had a good answer. But Rain didn't need to ask. She had plucked it from my mind and turned it back on me, she and Ingrid together.

I took a breath—reflexive, unnecessary—to steady my voice. “Okay, that makes every conversation I've had with her a hundred times more disturbing, but it doesn't exactly answer my question. Are you avoiding answering? If you don't want to tell me why you helped her, it's fine. I'm just curious.”

“It's not that. It's just . . . We haven't been here very long. When we first got here, we . . . we didn't really know anybody. We didn't know who to trust. We met Ingrid and her son.”

“The pervert.”

“He and Rain have a thing—”

“I so don't want to know the details.”

“You really don't. Anyway, they helped us, I guess.” Zeke didn't sound like he had appreciated the help. “Found a place to live, told us who we could trust, who we couldn't, you know. It was, um, more than we expected.”

“Why?”

“Nobody likes ghouls.”

“Is that it? Rain and her creepy boyfriend helped you, and you owed her?”

“A little, yeah. A couple months later she came by one day and said she was calling in a favor. Family emergency. It didn't sound like a big deal, so Jake went with her. They were gone all night, and when he came back he had—”

A long pause.

“Food,” Zeke said.

It took me a second to understand he didn't mean takeout from the local Thai place.

“Rain's never killed anybody,” I said.

He said nothing.

“Neither has Jake. He definitely hasn't.”

Zeke was relieved, but he tried to hide it. It wasn't hard to guess what kind of secrets he had been imagining Jake was keeping from him.

“But if Rain can do what you say she can, she wouldn't have to do it herself, would she?” I said. “She could, you know, scare somebody else into doing it. On purpose or on accident.”

“I guess.”

“Does it work on you? What she can do?”

Zeke was quiet for a moment before answering. “We can tell when she's trying to do it.”

That sounded like a qualified yes, but it also sounded like he didn't want to talk about it. I let it drop. I said, “Oh, by the way, I met Steve.”

“I told you not to go into the basement.”

“When has that ever worked? I'm a girl in a horror movie. I have to go into the basement.”

“Is that what you think this is?” Zeke asked.

“I woke up buried in somebody's backyard. I'm dead, but I can't die. I'm a
monster.
What else am I supposed to think?”

“I don't know.”

“That's super helpful.”

“I don't know how else things can be.” Zeke's voice was quiet.

All at once I wanted the conversation to be over. I didn't understand why he was talking to me anyway. Maybe he was bored or lonely, but it didn't matter. It was just another day, another stupid monster for him, but I didn't want to hear that this was normal, this was ordinary, this was how people lived, people who had been there all along, never mind that I had never been smart enough or sharp enough to see them. I wanted him to go away and leave me alone.

“You don't have to stay up to entertain me,” I said.

Zeke gave me a quick look. “Yeah, okay.” He stood up and offered a quiet “Good night” as he went inside.

I missed him as soon as he was gone. Alone was worse. I hadn't noticed, when I had been running away across the country, because I hadn't wanted to notice. But now that there were people who knew what I was and didn't seem to care, the thought of endless empty days and nights of solitude stretching into the future was too painful to consider.

I was going to need a hobby. Learn to knit. Get a library card.
Join a Warcraft guild. Take up vigilantism. There are so many more hours in a day when you don't spend a third of them sleeping.

I was going to have to learn how to pass the time, if I was going to stay like this forever.