Enthralled: Paranormal Diversions (5 page)

“Sally!” she screams, loud and raw and filled with rage. The bearded one grabs her, lifting and twisting until her arm’s behind her back, his knife against her throat. She struggles, not caring at the bite of the blade into her skin.

“Margie,” Calvin says. It’s his voice that stops her. He’s still holding the gun. Her gun. She wants to close her eyes, but she doesn’t because she deserves this. To see what she’s brought down on her sister.

Her lips still vibrate from when Calvin kissed her, and she spits at him, hating the taste of him still in her mouth. He blanches and sidesteps her attempt at outrage, and his two brothers laugh, Slick Head reaching out and slapping his shoulder hard enough to make him stumble. Calvin’s cheeks flare a bright embarrassed pink, and his eyes leap to Margie’s and then away again, a shuttered mortification flashing through them.

“Tell her to drop the ladder,” Beard says into Margie’s ear.

She shakes her head. Already she can feel the sobs coming, and they taste like failure. She swallows and chokes trying to get the words out: “Don’t do it, Sally. You stay where you are!”

“Drop the ladder or I start carving your sister!” Beard shouts up toward the loft. He slides the blade along her collarbone and then digs it into Margie’s shoulder. Even though she bites her lips, she can’t stop the scream. The pain’s nothing like she’s ever known before, an explosion of fire as her body realizes how deeply the knife has sunk.

Margie’s knees give out, her legs limp and useless. As she slides toward the floor she looks to Calvin for help, but he just stands there, his hands tight around her gun and his eyes on the blood curling down from the gash in her shoulder.

He kissed that exact spot the night before. Traced his lips over that stretch of skin as she gasped and pulled him closer with a type of need he’d said he’d never been a part of before. Now the flesh is torn, the edges ragged from the unsharpened knife, and he looks like he can’t stop trying to figure out how something once so whole and perfect can become that broken so easily.

Margie braces her uninjured arm against the floor, fingers splayed to hold her weight before she collapses. She’s wheezing— loud and gagging from the pain. Beard grabs her hair and drags her out into the middle of the room to make sure Sally can see what he’s doing.

He pushes Margie to her knees, yanks her head back until her spine arches. Presses the knife against her throat, sweat glistening along the ridges of her tendons. “I don’t like asking twice,” he growls up at Sally, who huddles behind the banister, eyes wide and hands pressed over her mouth as her shoulders shake.

“Stop it!” Sally shouts. “Okay, I’m coming down. Just stop hurting her!”

She unfurls the ladder as Margie begs, “No, Sally, stay up there,” but Sally ignores her.

She’s halfway down, her bare toes wrapping over the wooden rungs, when Slick Head grabs her around the waist with a thick arm. Sally’s already anticipated the move because she pushes herself back, twisting the rope of the ladder around his neck and hauling his feet from the ground.

He kicks out, the rope tightening, and his mouth wrenches open—a black, choking maw ringed by yellowed teeth.

“Jeffrey!” Beard shouts as his brother starts to scratch wildly at his throat, his face flaring red.

“The knife!” Slick Head wheezes out, and Beard throws Margie to the ground. He jumps toward his brother, but Margie kicks at his feet, throwing him off balance so that he trips and falls, the knife skittering from his hand as his fists slam against the hardwood floor.

Sally’s there in the middle of it, swooping in for the knife as it slides past her. Everything stills as the pieces of the moment reorder and shift back together again: Margie struggling to her knees, Slick Head choking and pawing madly at the noose, Beard pushing himself up with his hands out in front of him as Sally crouches, knife held steady.

Calvin’s still in the corner by the door, shotgun clutched in his fingers.

“Shoot her,” Beard orders him, never taking his eyes off Sally or her knife.

Calvin jumps toward Margie, lowering the gun. She’s kneeling on the floor, one arm useless. She looks up at Calvin standing over her, the shotgun pressed against her temple in the same spot he kissed the night before. She doesn’t close her eyes. She won’t make it easy.

“You said you understood what it takes to survive,” Calvin says to Margie. “How hard it is to find somewhere safe.” He’s sweating, his lips pale. “You’ve got Sally to take care of like I have my brothers.”

Margie just stares at him. He knows what she’s done for her sister. What she would do if their situations were reversed. Behind them, Slick Head’s chokes become high-pitched wheezes.

Margie winces, and Calvin’s finger jumps on the trigger before slipping away. “Cut him down,” Calvin orders Sally without taking his eyes off Margie.

“You have to understand this.” He speaks like he needs Margie’s absolution.

She feels the perfect roundness of the barrel of the shotgun pressed hard enough against her skin to leave an indentation. One flick of his finger and she’s done worrying. Done planning and patrolling and constantly fighting against the incessant fear.

She’s failed Sally. She always knew that she would. In the same way her father failed her and she failed her mother. In the world with the dead, her failure was always inevitable.

Slick Head’s gags become desperate—wet, smacking sounds that fill the cabin as streaks of blood tear along his neck from his nails scratching for air.

Sally’s breathing hard and fast as she steps toward Slick Head, his face puffy, with busted blood vessels in his eyes turning them red. She draws the hand holding the knife over her shoulder as if preparing to hack at the rope. He claws at her, trying to get his fingers around the blade, but she just swings her arm hard, knuckles cracking against his jaw but the hilt of the knife keeping her fist solid like a brick.

Blood dribbles from his mouth and she pulls back to strike again as the hanging man chokes on broken teeth.

Beard roars and leaps for her, but he’s too late. She’s already sliced the knife across Slick Hair’s throat, a ragged gurgling gash of frothing blood that drips from his neck as his mouth gapes open and closed, open and closed.

Sally spins toward Beard, holding the bloody blade between them, but that doesn’t stop him. He crashes into her, dragging her to the ground. His fingers rake at her, claw at her face, and pummel her throat.

She tries to hold him off but she’s a young girl and he’s a massive man—it’s like a fawn beating back a bear, and Beard howls and spits with his rage as blood from his brother’s neck twines down his arms and drips to the floor.

Margie’s eyes flare and she drags her broken body across the room to her sister’s defense, not caring that the barrel of the shotgun traces her movement. “Stop it!” she screams, reaching for her sister’s tiny hands, trying to drag her away from the mauling monster.

Beard roars up, rising tall on his knees as he swipes at Margie, hand slapping at her busted shoulder, which causes a surge of pain bright and intense to shatter across her mind, shutting her down.

Sally pulls into a ball, pressing her face against Margie’s side, trying to protect them both. Beard huffs, his mouth foaming as he stares at them huddled under his brother’s mangled body.

He holds out his hand. “Give me the gun,” he demands of Calvin, but Calvin doesn’t move. He stares at the two girls. Two broken bodies that moments before had been whole.

He did this. He helped break the world.

Beard spins toward him, his fingers clawed in a fervent fury. “Shoot them, Calvin. Stop acting like any of this means something and just do it!”

Margie’s senses clear bit by bit and she watches as something clicks in Calvin’s eyes. He aims the shotgun at her, and she takes a deep breath, waiting for him to pull the trigger. She always thought she’d be relieved in that moment but instead she feels the most intense regret.

She’s spent too much time scared. She should have gone to West Virginia with Sally. She shouldn’t have locked them in a cabin she knew would one day fail to protect them.

She thinks of all the notebooks filled with her sister’s handwriting. The trips had always been a lie.

Calvin stares at Margie. “You care about me?”

She doesn’t answer, just clenches her jaw as her cheeks burn with her own stupidity for trusting a stranger.

He steps closer to her, urgent. “Would you kill me for her?” He says it like they’re the only two people in the room. As if one brother isn’t dead and the other asking for her and her sister’s murder.

Margie doesn’t have to think before answering. “Yes.”

Calvin pulls the trigger. Outside a few birds scream and scatter into the trees.

“They wouldn’t have,” Calvin finally chokes out. “I’ve never meant enough to them. Ever.” Smoke twines around him, pungent and sweet. “Jeremy was wrong. It should mean something. Killing someone—I need it to still mean something. Or else everything in the world falls apart.”

Next to Margie, Sally rolls to her hands and knees and beats at Beard’s shot-shredded chest, blood splattering her fists and arms, caking her hair. It’s not enough she’s given up the world because of the dead, but to have been asked to give up this place, and the dreams it held, because of the living is too much.

Margie stares at Calvin. He pushes the gun into her hands, guiding the barrel until it’s wedged into the hollow of his collarbone. She doesn’t understand how everything’s changed again. How one minute she was death and then she was life and now she holds death in her hands again.

“I understand,” he says. “I know you’ll never trust me now. I understand that, and maybe that’s the way it goes. My death can mean something too.”

He pushes her finger onto the trigger. Behind her Sally finally sags against the wall, sobbing as her fingers curl on themselves, slick and bright.

Margie climbs to her feet, shoulder screaming as torn muscle protests the movement. Clutching the gun, she walks to the table where the maps are spread out, blood now spattered along the mountains and towns. She tries to wipe it away, but only ends up smearing them red.

She’d wanted to keep her sister safe. She’d wanted to keep a part of the world the way it was, before the change time, for Sally.

But she knows, now, there’s no escape from the monsters. They’ll always be there; you just choose to live with them or not. Sometimes you have to plan for another day—sometimes that’s all you have. “You said you’ve been to West Virginia,” she says. “You’ll show it to us?”

Red Run
by Kami Garcia

o one drove on Red Run at night. People went fifteen miles out of their way to avoid the narrow stretch of dirt that passed for a road, between the single stoplight towns of Black Grove and Julette. Red Run was buried in the Louisiana backwoods, under the gnarled arms of oaks tall enough to scrape the sky. When Edie’s granddaddy was young, bootleggers used it to run moonshine down to New Orleans. It was easy to hide in the shadows of the trees, so dense they blocked out even the stars. But there was still a risk. If they were caught, the sheriff would hang them from those oaks, leaving their bodies for the gators, which is how the road earned its name.

The days of bootlegging were long gone, but folks had other reasons for steering clear of Red Run after dark. The road was haunted. A ghost had claimed eight lives in the last twenty years—Edie’s brother’s just over a year ago. No one wanted to risk a run-in with the blue-eyed boy. No one except Edie.

She was looking for him.

Tonight she was going to kill a ghost.

Edie didn’t realize how long she had been driving until her favorite Jane’s Addiction song looped for the third time. Edie was beginning to wonder if she was going to find him at all, as she passed the rotted twin pines that marked the halfway point between the two nothing little towns—when she saw him. He was standing in the middle of the road, on the wavering yellow carpet of her headlights. His eyes reflected the light like a frightened animal, but he looked as real as any boy she’d ever seen. Even if he was dead.

She slammed on the brakes instinctively, and dust flew up around the Jeep and into the open windows. When it skidded to a stop, he was standing in front of the bumper, tiny particles of dirt floating in the air around him.

For a second, neither one of them moved. Edie was holding her breath, staring out beyond the headlights at the tall boy whose skin was too pale and eyes too blue.

“I’m okay, if you’re worried,” he called out, squinting into the light.

Edie clutched the vinyl steering wheel, her hands sweaty and hot. She knew she should back up—throw the car into reverse until he was out of sight—but even with her heart thudding in her ears, she couldn’t do it.

He half-smiled awkwardly, brushing the dirt off his jeans. He had the broad shoulders of a swimmer, and curly dark hair that was too long in places and too short in others, like he had cut it himself. “I’m not from around here.”

She already knew that.

He walked toward her dented red Jeep, tentatively. “You aren’t hurt, are you?”

It was a question no one ever asked her. In elementary school, Edie was the kid with the tangled blond braids. The one whose overalls were too big and too worn at the knees. Her parents never paid much attention to her. They were busy working double shifts at the refinery. Her brother was the one who wove her hair into those braids, tangled or not.

“I’m fine.” Edie shook her head, black bobbed hair swinging back and forth against her jaw.

He put his hand on the hood and bent down next to her open window. “Is there any way I could get a ride into town?”

Edie knew the right answer. Just like she knew she shouldn’t be driving on Red Run in the middle of the night. But she hadn’t cared about what was right, or anything at all, for a long time. A year and six days exactly—since the night her brother died. People had called it an accident, as if somehow that made it easier to live with. But everyone knew there were no accidents on Red Run.

That was the night Edie cut her hair with her mother’s craft scissors, the ones with the orange plastic handles. It was also the night she hung out with Wes and Trip behind the Gas & Go for the first time, drinking Easy Jesus and warm Bud Light until her brother’s death felt like a dream she would forget in the morning. The three of them had been in class together since kindergarten, but they didn’t run in the same crowd. When Wes and Trip weren’t smoking behind the school or hanging out in the cemetery, they were holed up in Wes’ garage, building weird junk they never let anyone see. Edie’s mom thought they were building pipe bombs.

But they were building something else.

The blue-eyed boy was still leaning into the window. “So can I get a ride?” He was watching her from under his long, straight lashes. They almost touched his cheeks when he blinked.

She leaned back into the sticky seat, trying to create some space between them. “What are you doing out here, anyway?”

Would he admit he was out here to kill her?

“My parents kicked me out, and I’m headed for Baton Rouge. I’ve got family down there.” He watched her, waiting for a reaction.

Was this part of the game?

“Get in,” she said, before she could change her mind.

The boy walked around the car and opened the door. The rusty hinges creaked, and it reminded Edie of the first time Wes opened the garage door and invited her inside.

The garage was humid and dark, palmetto bugs scurrying across the concrete floor for the corners. Two crooked pine tables were outfitted with vises and tools Edie didn’t recognize. Wire and scrap metal littered the floor, attached to homemade-looking machines that resembled leaky car batteries. There were other salvaged and tricked-out contraptions—dials that looked like speedometers, a portable sonar from a boat, and a long needle resting on a spool of paper that reminded her of those lie detectors you saw on television.

“What is all this stuff?”

Wes and Trip glanced at each other before Wes answered, “Promise you won’t tell anyone?”

Edie took another swig of Easy Jesus, the liquid burning its way down her throat. She liked the way it felt going down, knowing it would burn through her memories just as fast.

“Cross my heart and hope I die,” she slurred.

“It’s hope
to
die,” Trip said, kicking an empty beer can out of his way. “You said it wrong.”

Edie stared back at him, her dark eyes glassy. “No, I didn’t.” She tossed the empty bottle at a green plastic trash can in the corner, but she missed and it hit the concrete, shattering. “So are you gonna tell me what you’re doing with all this crap?”

Wes picked up a hunk of metal with long yellow wires dangling from the sides like the legs of a mechanical spider. “You won’t believe us.”

He was right. The only thing she believed in now was Easy Jesus. Remembering every day to forget. “Try me.”

Wes looked her straight in the eye, sober and serious. He flicked a switch on the machine and it whirred to life. “We’re hunting ghosts.”

Edie didn’t have time to think about hanging out with Wes and Trip in the garage. She needed to focus on the things they had taught her.

She was driving slower than usual, her hands glued to the wheel so the blue-eyed boy wouldn’t notice how badly they were shaking. “Where are you from?”

“You know, you really shouldn’t pick up strangers.” His voice was light and teasing, but Edie noticed he didn’t answer the question.

“You shouldn’t get in the car with strangers either,” she countered. “Especially not around here.”

He shifted his body toward her, his white ribbed tank sliding over his skin instead of sticking to it the way Edie’s clung to hers. The cracked leather seat didn’t make a sound. “What do you mean?”

She felt a wave of satisfaction. “You’ve never heard the stories about Red Run? You must live pretty far away.”

“What kind of stories?”

Edie stared out at the wall of trees closing in around them. It wasn’t an easy story to tell, especially if you were sitting a foot from the boy who died at the end of it. “About twenty years ago, someone died out here. He was about your age—”

“How do you know how old I am?” His voice was thick and sweet, all honey and molasses.

“Eighteen?”

He lifted an eyebrow. “Good guess. So what happened to him?”

Edie knew the story by heart. “It was graduation night. There was a party in Black Grove and everyone went, even Tommy Hansen. He was quiet and always kept to himself. My mom says he was good-looking, but none of the girls were interested in him because his family was dirt-poor. His dad ran off and his mother worked at the funeral home, dressing the bodies for viewings.”

Edie saw him cringe in the seat beside her, but she kept going. “Tommy worked at the gas station to help out and spent the rest of his time alone, playing a beat-up guitar. He wanted to be a songwriter, and was planning to leave for Nashville that weekend. If the party had been a few days later, he might have made it.”

And her brother would still be alive.

Edie remembered the night her brother died, his body stretched out in the middle of the road. She had stepped too close, and a pool of blood had gathered around the toes of her sneakers. She had stared down at the thick liquid, wondering why they called the road Red Run. The blood was as black as ink.

“Are you going to tell me how that kid Tommy died?” The boy was watching her from under those long eyelashes.

Edie’s heart started racing. “They had a keg in the woods, and everyone was wasted. Especially Katherine Day, the prettiest girl in school. People who remember say that Katherine drank her weight in cheap beer and wandered into the trees to puke. Tommy saw her stumbling around and followed her. This is the part where folks disagree; in one version of the story, Tommy sat with Katherine while she threw up all over her fancy white sundress. In the other version, Katherine forgot about how poor Tommy was—or noticed how good-looking he was—and kissed him. Either way, the end is the same.” Edie paused, measuring his reaction. At this point in the story, people were usually on pins and needles.

But the blue-eyed boy was staring back at her evenly from the passenger seat, as if he already knew the way it ended.

“Don’t you want to know what happened next?”

He smiled, but there was something wrong about it. His eyes were vacant and far away. Was he remembering? He sensed Edie watching him, and the faraway look was gone. “Yeah. How did he go from making out with the prettiest girl in school to getting killed?”

“I didn’t say he was killed.” Edie tried to hide the fear in her voice. She didn’t want him to know she was afraid.

“You said he died, right?”

She didn’t point out that dying and being killed weren’t the same thing. If Edie hadn’t known she was in over her head the minute he got in the car, she knew now. But it was too late. “Katherine was dating a guy on the wrestling team, or maybe it was the football team, I can’t remember. But he caught them together—kissing or talking or whatever they were doing— and dragged Tommy out of the woods with a bunch of his friends.”

The boy’s blue eyes were fixed on her now. “Then what happened?” His voice was so quiet she had trouble hearing him over the crickets calling out in the darkness.

“They beat him to death. Right here on Red Run. Some guy who lived out in the woods saw the whole thing.”

The boy nodded, staring out the window as the white bark of the pines blurred alongside the car. “So that’s why no one drives on this road at night?”

Edie laughed, but the sound was bitter and cold. About as far away from happy as it could be. “This is the Bayou. If you avoided every road where someone died, there wouldn’t be any roads left. Folks don’t drive on Red Run at night because Tommy Hansen’s ghost has killed six people about our age. They say he kills the boys because they remind him of the guys who beat him to death, and the girls because they remind him of Katherine.”

Edie pictured her brother lying in the glow of the police cruiser’s spotlight, bathed in red. She had knelt down in the sticky dirt, pressing her face against his chest. Will’s heart was beating, the rhythm uneven and faint.

“Edie?” She felt his chest rise as he whispered her name.

She cradled his face in her hands, but he was staring blankly beyond her. “I’m here, Will,” she choked. “What happened?”

Will strained to focus on Edie’s tear-stained face. “Don’t worry. I’m gonna be okay.” But his eyes told a different story.

“I should have listened . . .”

Will never finished. But she didn’t need to hear the rest.

Edie could feel the blue-eyed boy watching her. She bit the inside of her cheek to keep from crying. She had to hold it together a little while longer.