The Haunting of Sunshine Girl (26 page)

“Why not?”

“Any child I had with my husband would be human. It takes two luiseach parents to have a luiseach baby.”

“Lucky me,” I whisper to myself.

“But finally I convinced him to take me back. The work we'd been doing was too important for him to hold a grudge.”

“Did your husband know what you were?”

Victoria shakes her head, almost smiling at the memory. “No. He thought I was something of a traveling salesman. I didn't lie, not exactly. I'd told him I traveled the world saving lives. He took it to mean I sold pharmaceutical products. I never corrected him. He wouldn't have believed me if I had. He was a chemistry teacher. He believed in science, not in spirits.”

I nod with understanding. I know what it's like to live with a nonbeliever.

“The winter my family was killed followed an autumn of record rains. Our street flooded; our neighbors' home was destroyed. It wasn't difficult for the demon to get inside—just follow the flow of the water and drift into our basement, then crawl up the rusty pipes and into our rooms.”

“The demon?” I echo. I know I shouldn't be surprised that a demon is involved in all of this, but it still sends a flutter of butterflies through my belly.

Victoria nods. “A water demon.”

“There are different kinds of demons?” I ask, but even as I say it I know it makes sense: the mildewy smell in our house, the wet fingerprints on my checkers, the damp carpet beneath my feet.

We must have a water demon too.

“They're not all that uncommon in this part of the world, though it's believed they originated in the South American rain forest. They thrive in moist climates. It must have been living here for months before it decided it would use my husband to take my daughter's life.”

Victoria pauses, taking a deep breath. I can tell she's trying to swallow a lump in her throat. I lean forward and put my hand on her knee. This part of the story, at least, I understand completely. I know about the ways mothers and daughters love each other.

“The demon drove my husband to drown our daughter.”

“Your husband drowned Anna?” My voice is no louder than a whisper. I'm suddenly very glad that I blacked out the Water Works box on my Monopoly board. I wish I'd done it sooner.

“No,” Victoria answers firmly. “The
demon
drowned Anna. It just used my husband's body to do it, as it is using your mother's body now.”

I shake my head. I mean, my mother hasn't exactly been herself lately—she's been angry and distant—but I've never actually been
scared
of her. Whatever is doing this to her, I can't believe it's strong enough to compel her to kill me.

But then I remember, according to Nolan, a luiseach is safe from dark spirits. So if it's a dark spirit that's controlling my mother, it's powerless to make her kill me.

“The police couldn't detect signs of a struggle—the scratches on the tile around the tub, the bruises on her arms and neck were invisible to them.”

I close my eyes, imagining Anna's neck ringed with a dark purple bruise.

I open them as Victoria says, “But that's not the worst part.”

I can't really imagine something worse than a demon forcing a loving parent to harm his own child. I'm not sure I want to hear what's next, but I guess I don't have a choice.

“When a human's life is taken by a demon, his or her spirit is trapped in a world of anguish.”

“That's why Anna can't move on?”

“She'll continue to be tormented until the demon is fully exorcised, ushered by a luiseach into the beyond. The demon follows her everywhere, always just a few steps behind.”

Wait, does that mean that the other spirit in my house is
this
demon, the creature who killed Anna and her father? I remember the sounds I heard coming from my mother's mouth last night. It's not just my
house
the demon is inhabiting.

“It's
inside
my mother?” I can barely get the words out.

Slowly Victoria nods.

“And it's my test to destroy it before it does to my mother what it did to your husband?” The words I don't say are stuck in my throat, choking me:
. . . before it kills her too.

Suddenly Victoria's role in all of this becomes clear.

“And you made a deal with my mentor to make Anna's demon my test? Because it needs to be fully exorcised before her spirit can move on?”

This time when Victoria nods, it looks like her head weighs a thousand pounds, like she can only move it with great effort. “It was hardly a coincidence that your mother was offered her dream job in a town with one of the wettest climates in the country.”

“My mentor got my mother her job?” I ask incredulously. “How long has this been going on?”

“He's been putting the pieces of your test in place for months. I've been helping as much as I could.”

“How?” I ask breathlessly.

“Luiseach can guide spirits, but they cannot move them, not without great strength. When I relinquished my powers, it gave off the energy he needed to set the test in motion—to put Anna in your house. Then I just had to wait until you revealed yourself to me.”

“Are you even an art teacher?”

“No,” she answers, smiling. “He arranged that job. All he told me was that one of my students would be the young luiseach living with my daughter.”

“That explains a lot,” I say softly.

“It does?” Victoria asks, weary but almost laughing. “Was I really that bad?”

“
Let's make some art, shall we?
You weren't exactly teacher of the year.” I force myself to smile in the midst of all this anguish, and Victoria does too.

I shouldn't be smiling at her. I should be
angry
at her—this test has put my mom's life in danger—but I can't. Even through her smile Victoria's pain is written clearly on her face. She's a mother trying to save her daughter.

“Why can't my mom hear Anna, perceive that we're living in a haunted house?”

“The demon has grown clever.” Victoria presses her lips into a straight line. “He must have blocked your mother's ability to perceive spirits in order to cause strife between you, to make it that much more difficult for you to protect her.”

I'm finally beginning to understand. When we first moved to our new house Anna was happy—laughing, begging to play, whispering good night. The demon was a few steps behind—just like Victoria said—but he hadn't quite arrived yet. But then, that horrible night when the bathroom door was locked, when Mom and I heard Anna's voice pleading for mercy—that was when Anna's demon arrived. Nolan was right again: there was more than one spirit in the house. Even Victoria sensed its arrival; I remember the next morning she told us she'd had nightmares and barely slept.

Almost immediately after that night Mom went from denying that the noises I heard were paranormal—
There's no such thing as ghosts, Sunshine
—to being unable to hear the noises at all. She went from busy and tired to so distant that sometimes it felt like she wasn't there at all.

Somehow, even with the demon in our house—in
Mom
—Anna found the strength to reach out to me. She wanted to make sure
I knew she was still there, that I wasn't alone. No wonder the house was shaking when Nolan and I finally began to put the pieces together, no wonder the lightbulb burst above our heads. Nolan was right. Anna was
excited.
Maybe she understood this was my test all along. Maybe she was trying to help me, the only way she could.

And no wonder the demon tried to stop us when Mom came home and it saw what we were up to. Gosh, does the demon have access to Mom's thoughts and memories? Did it go through her brain, discover that I'm scared of spiders, and plant that daddy longlegs there just for me?

“I think it's obvious by now that I'm not cut out to pass this test, right?” I rub my hands together anxiously. If my mentor's been watching me like Victoria says he has, surely he can see that. “So can't you just tell my mentor to come out of the shadows or wherever he's hiding, do his best luiseach sorcery, and get rid of the demon and save my mom?”

“That's not how it works,” Victoria answers sadly.

“How does it work?”

“You have to exorcise the demon yourself.”

“What if I can't? I mean, my mentor will swoop in to save the day, right?” My palms are moist with sweat.

Victoria doesn't answer.

“What happens then?” My voice is so small that I don't know if she can hear me. “Will my mom's spirit be unsettled, the way Anna's is?” I can barely say the word
spirit.
Those two tiny syllables feel like saying that Mom will die.

“Anna wasn't possessed by the demon herself. Rather, she was a victim of its possession of my husband. Tormented though she is, her spirit survived. The same cannot be said for
the poor souls the demon actually inhabits. As it inhabited my husband.”

The warmth of Victoria's house shifts from cozy to oppressive. I yank at the neck of my sweater as though it's choking me and brush my hair from my forehead, the sweat on my palms making them sticky. My throat feels dry, so I reach for the tea Victoria poured for me and sip it, even though the cup threatens to slip through my sweating fingers. The liquid is so hot that it scalds me. I swear it wasn't that hot a few minutes ago.

“How did the demon make your husband's death look like a heart attack?” I ask hoarsely.

“When a water demon—or any demon, really—is finished possessing another person, that body becomes nothing more than dead weight to them. They want to rid themselves of it as quickly as possible.”

A lump rises in my throat, choking me as she continues. “Possession means that the demon is literally living inside another body, and within that body it can move freely. This demon had one goal in possessing my husband—use his body to drown my daughter.”

“Why?” I whisper, the tiny word struggling to fit around the lump in my throat.

“I told you that once a spirit turns wholly dark—once it becomes a demon—it will do whatever it takes to remain strong enough to stay on Earth. Releasing a spirit from a mortal body makes a demon stronger.”

Releasing a spirit.
“You mean killing someone?”

She nods. “If it had been a fire demon, it would have burned Anna to death. An earth demon often buries its victims alive. And a water demon drowns them.”

I shake my head, thinking about the little girl who's determined to beat me at Monopoly. How could someone hurt her?

“After Anna was dead the demon had no more use for my husband. So it reached its watery demon hand inside my husband's chest, squeezing his heart until it simply stopped beating.”

I close my eyes, trying not to imagine a cold, wet hand hovering near my mother's heart, just waiting to take hold. Tears start streaming down my face.

“And his spirit?” I manage to whisper. “What happens to the souls of the people the demon inhabits?”

Victoria looks away from a moment, taking a deep breath before she turns back and says, “Those spirits do not survive. The demon destroys them completely.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

The Long Way Home

“What does that mean?”

“It means they do not move on. They simply . . . cease to exist.”

“I don't understand.” The lump in my throat is so big, I'm surprised I can get any words out at all.

“Slowly, over time, every single person whose lives they touched will begin to forget them. Until no one can remember having known them at all.”

“But you still remember your husband.”

“I do. But it's only a matter of time.” Victoria shifts her weight uncomfortably, as though she's sitting on a hard wooden chair, not a plush one. “Already I cannot recall just how we met, how he asked me to marry him, the color of his eyes.”

“You have pictures of him,” I try.

“Yes, but someday I'll simply throw those pictures away, wondering why there are photographs of a stranger in my house.”

I think about my mother—the inside jokes and shared clothes,
the way she laughs, her perfectly straight auburn hair and freckled skin. I could never forget all that.

Could I?

I stand up and start for the door. “I should go.” I grab my coat from the twisted wooden rack by the door, trying to ignore the fact that beneath my own jacket there's a smaller one that must have belonged to Anna before she died. I wonder what other relics of her remain in this house. I wonder whether the turreted top floor was her favorite place to play. Did she play there with her father? Will Anna's ghost remember him even after Victoria's memories vanish? Maybe it would be better if Anna forgot him—forgot that his body drowned her, even if it was just carrying out the demon's will. Did he know what he was doing as it was happening? I close my eyes and press the heel of my hand to my forehead, overwhelmed.