Vacations From Hell (16 page)

It has to be fast, not slow
, I’d said to Mrs. Palmer.
I don’t want it drawn out. I want you to take it all at once.

She’d smiled with sharp, white teeth.
All at once
, she’d promised, and handed me something flat and shining and sharp. A bit of broken mirror.

Evan’s soul.

It’s yours
, she said.
To keep, or to break it open to return it to him entirely.

I slid it under my bed last night, where it lay reflecting the moonlight.
I’ll break it open tonight
, I told myself.
Break it and give Evan back his soul
. I’ll do it tonight.

Or tomorrow.

I thrust the drink out toward Phillip. In the sunlight it looks like ordinary water, with a pale lemon wedge floating in it. Still, I can hear the hissing whisper of the thick liquid sliding over the ice. Or maybe I’m imagining that. “Here,” I say. “Damaris sent this out for you. She said it would be good for your headache.”

He frowns. “How did she know I had a headache?” I
say nothing, and after a moment he sets the newspaper down and takes the glass from my hand. “Thank you, Violet,” he says in that stiff, formal way of his.

And he takes a swallow. I watch his throat as the liquid goes down. I have never watched Phillip with such fascination before. At last he sets the glass down and says, “What kind of juice is that?”

“Aloe,” I tell him. “Damaris says it’s good for healing.”

“Folk nonsense.” He snorts and reaches for his paper again.

“There’s one more thing,” I say. “That woman, the one Evan was helping, well, her car’s still broken. She said Evan couldn’t figure out how to fix it.”

Phillip snorts. “I could have told her that. Evan doesn’t know anything about cars.”

“She was hoping you’d take a look at it for her,” I tell him. “Since you know. You probably know more about this stuff than Evan does.”

“That’s right. I do.” He picks up the glass again, drains it, and smacks his lips. “I guess I ought to go help the poor woman out.” He stands.

“That would be great.” I point down the path. “She lives there, in the pink house, the one that looks like a flower. She’s expecting you.”

And she is.
He’s my stepfather
, I had told Mrs. Palmer.
He’s strong, stronger than Evan. Older. And he hits my
mother. Just like your husband hit you.

Phillip pats my shoulder awkwardly. “You’re a good girl, Violet.”

No
, I think.
That is one thing I am not
. Because somewhere in the pink house, Anne Palmer is waiting, Anne Palmer with her red lips and her garden of glass, and her mirrors that take your soul. I watch as Phillip jogs down the path, a little stiff in his new flip-flops, the sunlight bouncing off his head where he’s starting to go bald. I watch, and I say nothing. I watch, because I know he is never coming back.

LIBBA BRAY

H
ello? We recording? I see a red light, so I’m hoping my battery lasts. Okay, pay attention, because I’ve got only one shot at this, and it’s gonna come at you on the fly. If you found this on YouTube, you are seriously lucky, because you need to know this.

Sorry about that banging in the background. It’s too hard to explain right now, and you don’t want to know what’s on the other side of that door. Trust me.

My name’s Poe, by the way. Poe Yamamoto. And that’s Poe as in Edgar Allan. Yeah, ’cause what guy doesn’t want to be saddled with that name? Crap, I’m all over the place. Okay. Focus, dude. Tell the story.

Let’s say you’ve just graduated high school and you’ve decided to celebrate the end of thirteen years of compulsory education with a little backpacking trip in
Europe with some friends. You do the do: Paris, Dublin, Venice—which, by the way, smells like pigeon shit fried in grease—London (cold, wet, expensive, but you knew that), maybe some beers in Germany. And just maybe one of you says, “Hey, let’s go off the grid, check out some of these mysterious towns in Eastern Europe, hunt for vampires and werewolves and things that go bump in the Slavic night.” Why the hell not, right? You’re only doing this once.

So you pack it up and head east. You take a train through the kind of forest that’s older than anything we have here, older than anything you can imagine. Like you can practically smell the old coming off that huge wall of forever trees, and it makes you feel completely small and untested.

Anyway.

You get to a village and you notice the big honkin’ evil-eye pendants the locals hang from their windows. Maybe you even laugh at their quaint superstitions. That, my friend, is the kind of arrogant crap that can get a guy killed. It’s not quaint and it’s not superstitious. There’s a reason those villagers are still alive.

You hang out, eat thick, spicy stew, try to make conversation with the locals, who keep telling you to move on—go see Moscow or Budapest or Prague. Like they want to get rid of you. Like you’re trouble. You ignore them, and one day you and your friends might find yourselves venturing into that unfamiliar forest, winding
through a thick mist that comes up out of nowhere. This is not the time to stop and take a piss on a tree or make a travelogue video for your family back home.

You know that prickly feeling you get on the back of your neck? The one that makes you scared to turn around? Pay attention to that, Holmes. That is a Me-No-Likee signal creeping up from the lizard part of your brain—some primal DEFCON center of your gray matter left over from the very first ancestors that hasn’t been destroyed by gated communities, all-night convenience stores lighting up the highways, and a half dozen fake Ghost Chaser shows on late-night cable. I’m just saying that lizard part exists for a reason. I know that now.

So if you’re walking down that unfamiliar path and the mist rises up out of nowhere and slips its hands over your body, turning you around until you don’t know where you are anymore, and the trees seem to be whispering to you? Or you think you see something in the dark that shouldn’t exist, that you tell yourself can’t possibly exist except in creepy campfire stories? Listen to the lizard, Holmes, and do yourself a favor.

Run. Run like Hell’s after you.

Because it just might be.

We still recording? Good. Let me tell you what happened, while I still can.

I don’t know who got the idea first—might have been me. Might’ve been Baz or Baz’s cousin, John. Could even
have been my BFF, Isabel. Just three guys and a girl with backpacks, Eurorail passes, and two full months before we had to report to college. Somehow we’d managed to blow through most of our money in a month. That’s when one of us—again, I can’t remember who—suggested we stretch our cash by packing it through Eastern Europe.

“It’s that or we go home early and spend the summer at the Taco Temple handing bags of grease bombs through the drive-thru window,” Baz said. He was on his fourth German beer and looked like a six-foot-four, sleep-deprived goat the way he staggered around. There was foam in his new chin scruff.

“Can’t we go to Amsterdam instead? I hear you can smoke pot right out in the open,” John pleaded.

Isabel shook her head. “Too expensive.”

“For you guys,” John mumbled.

“Don’t be that way,” Isabel gave him a kiss, and John softened. They’d been a thing since the second week in Europe, and I was trying to be cool with it. Izzie was worth ten of John, to be honest. “So where should we go? Not someplace everybody and their freaking aunt Fanny go. Let’s have a real adventure, you know?”

“Such as, my fine, travel-audacious princess?” said Baz, being all Bazlike, which is to say just one toe over the friend side of the Cheeky-Friend-or-Obnoxious-Jerk divide. He tried to pat Isabel’s faux hawk. She shook him off with a good-natured glare and a threatened punch
that had Baz on his knees in mock terror. “Mercy,” he cried in a high voice. Then he winked. “Or not. I like it either way.”

With a roll of her eyes Isabel opened our
Europe on the Cheap
travel guidebook and pointed to a section entitled “Haunted Europe” that gave bulleted info about off-the-beaten-path places that were supposedly cursed in some way: castles built out of human bones, villages that once hunted and burned witches, ancient burial grounds, and caves where vampires lurked. Werewolf or succubus hot spots—that sort of thing.

John tickled Isabel and grabbed the book away. “How about this one?” He read aloud, “‘Necuratul. Town of the Damned. In the Middle Ages Necuratul suffered from a series of misfortunes: a terrible drought, persecution from brutal enemies, and the Black Death. And then suddenly, in the fifteenth century, their troubles stopped. Necuratul prospered. It escaped all disease and repelled enemy attacks with ease. It was rumored that the people of Necuratul had made a pact with the devil in exchange for their good fortune and survival.

“‘Over the past century Necuratul’s fortunes have dwindled. Isolated by dense forest and forgotten by industrialization, most of its young people leave for the excitement of the cities and universities as soon as they can. But they return for the village’s festival day, August 13, in which Necuratul honors its past through various rituals, culminating in a Mardi Gras–like party
complete with delicious food and strong drink. (Necuratul is famed for its excellent wines as well as its supposed disreputable history.)

“‘Sadly, this may be the last year for the festival—and Necuratul itself—as there are plans to relocate the town and build a power plant in its location.’”

“Wow. There’s a happy travelogue,” Baz cracked. “Come to our town! Drink our wine! Ogle our women! Feast on our feast days! And all it will cost you is…
your soul
!”

“They’ve got great wine and a hellacious party? I’m there,” John said. He still had his expensive sunglasses perched on his head. His nose was sunburned.

Baz drained his stein and wiped his mouth on his arm. “I’m in.”

“Me too. Poe?” Isabel held out her hand to me and grinned. It was always hard to resist Izzie when she was being adventurous. We’d been best friends since seventh grade when she’d immigrated from Haiti and I’d arrived from the big city, and we’d held on to each other like buoys lost on a dark, uncertain sea. I laced my fingers through hers.

“Town of the Damned it is,” I said, and we all shook on it.

The next morning we left the hostel before dawn and caught a train headed east from Munich. The train chugged around mountains with steep drop-offs that
made the still-hungover John and Baz sick to their stomachs. After a few more twists and turns we disappeared into a deep, dark forest—a towering guard of ancient power.

“I wouldn’t last a day in there,” I muttered.

“Dude, no one would,” John said. He pulled his hat over his face to block the light and went to sleep against Isabel’s shoulder.

At Budapest there was an influx of travelers, and our cozy cabin was invaded by an old lady with a smell like garlic and an accent dense as brown bread. “I am sitting here, yes? You will make room.”

Isabel and John were still asleep on the bench opposite us, so Baz and I scooted over, and the old lady sat down and spread out next to us. “Where are you going? No, wait! Don’t tell me. I guess. You’re going to—”

“Necuratul. Town of the Damned,” Baz interrupted. He wiggled his eyebrows for effect.

The lady grunted. “I said I would guess. I am a fortune-teller. When stupid American boys don’t beat me to the fist.”

“You mean ‘to the punch’?” Baz asked.

“Whatever. You are?”

We introduced ourselves and she nodded like she had mulled it over and decided it was okay for us to have our particular names. “You may call me Mrs. Smith.”

Somehow Mrs. Smith didn’t seem like the name of an Eastern European fortune-teller who smelled of garlic
and got on at Budapest. I guess our faces gave it away, because she gave us a little shrug. “It was easy to paint on my truck. Besides, everybody knows someone named Smith. Come. I will tell your fortunes.”

“We don’t have any money,” I said quickly.

“Who said anything about money?” Mrs. Smith snapped. “I forgot my book and I’m bored. Don’t be such an asshole.”

“Isn’t this what happens in the movies a lot? There’s some old dude or woman who tells your fortune and is all, ‘Oh, you’re gonna die or make a boatload of money or meet a girl. Now give me all your cash’?” Baz yammered.

Mrs. Smith bristled. “I can tell your fortune right now without even consulting your palm.”

“You can?”

“Yes. You are an idiot. You will always be an idiot.”

Baz’s smirk disappeared. “’kay. In the movies it’s usually more complicated. And less abusive.”

Mrs. Smith was staring at my face, and I automatically felt my armor coming on. Like it was the first day of seventh grade all over again:
Yo, slant eyes. Gook. Sushi roll. Hey, you’re Asian—can you help me with my math homework?

“Something wrong?” I said with a lot of edge.

“You have one blue eye and one brown,” she said.

I folded my arms over my chest like I was daring her to get into it. “Yeah. Genetic fluke. My dad’s Japanese.
My mom’s American.”

“And totally hot,” Baz interrupted. “I mean your mom, not your dad. I mean your dad’s a good-looking dude and all, but your mom—”

“Baz. Stop.”

“’kay.”

“There is a legend about the man with eyes that see the earth and the sky. One brown, one blue,” Mrs. Smith said. Her voice had changed, gotten softer, a little wary.

“What legend is that?”

“He is cursed to walk in two worlds, the living and the dead. May I?” She took my hand and stared at it a long time, frowning. “It is as I thought. You move hand-in-hand with the unseen forces, the dark spirits, the unquiet and vengeful. It is your fate to bump asses with evil, Poe Yamamoto, and very soon you will be tested.”

“Dude,” Baz whispered in my ear, his white-boy dreads tickling the side of my face. “Did the creepy old lady just say ‘bump asses with evil’?”

She slapped his arm. “I am not deaf, you know.”

“Ow! Was that necessary?”

“You were being fresh,” Mrs. Smith said emphatically.

Baz shut up then. Anybody who could shut Baz up was a force to be reckoned with, as far as I was concerned.

“Beware the easy answer, Poe Yamamoto. Look beyond the surface to what lies underneath. There is
always more. Another explanation. A deeper, more frightening truth. But without truth there is no resolution. And without that the dead do not rest.”

“Okaaaay. Anything else I should know?” I asked.

“Yes. Don’t eat the pastry in the café car. That’s not fortune-telling. That’s experience—it’s always three days past stale and hard as brick.” She handed me her card. It read:
MRS. SMITH. FORTUNE-TELLER.
There was a phone number in raised print. “In case.”

“In case what?”

“You make it back.” She gathered her things and shoved them into her handbag. “Okay. Now I move to another cabin. To be honest, you give me the willies. Good luck, Poe Yamamoto.”

The door closed with a bang behind Mrs. Smith. Isabel woke up and stretched. She looked pretty all sleepy, the sunlight dappled across her ebony cheekbones. “What did I miss?”

“Forest. Mountains. More forest. Oh, and some bizarro fortune-teller lady just told Poe he’s got a destiny with evil.”

Isabel blew into her hand, made a face. “Yeah, well, I think it may be my breath. I’m going to the café car for gum.”

It was well after dinnertime the next day when we reached the station closest to Necuratul, and everyone was suffering from tight muscles and hungry bellies. We
showed the station agent our guidebook, and he pointed us toward a driver in a festive hat with a feather stuck into the band. He was sitting beside a horse-drawn wagon and eating a sandwich. Isabel pointed to the word
Necuratul
in the book, and the guy stopped chewing and gave us all funny looks.

“You should go to Bucharest or Prague. Very beautiful,” he said.

“We really want to see the festival,” Isabel said. She smiled her I-will-make-you-like-me smile, but it didn’t work on this guy. He didn’t crack so much as a grimace.

The driver picked at his sandwich. “They say they used to worship the devil. Some say they still do.”

Baz made a vampire face, hooking his teeth over his bottom lip and opening his eyes wide. Isabel slapped his arm.

“Next year,” the man continued, “they will build a power plant on the mountain. Good-bye, Necuratul. That is progress, they say. Anyhow. You have money?”

“A lot of money,” Baz said at the same time John said, “Not much.”

“Young people,” the driver grumbled as he wiped his hands. “I will take you. But first I will tell you: do not go into the forest. Stay inside the stones and do not cross them or you will be sorry.”

“Why will we be sorry?” Isabel asked.

“Restless spirits, waiting to be set free. Stay out of the forest,” he warned, and offered the rest of his
sandwich to his horse.