Read Haunted Online

Authors: Joy Preble

Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Historical, #Europe, #Love & Romance, #Fantasy & Magic

Haunted (7 page)

BOOK: Haunted
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Thursday, 5:20
pm

Anne

So,” Tess says to me a few minutes later as she, Ethan, and I stand at the edge of the pool. The water laps lightly against the stairs in the shallow end. “See anything? Feel anything?”

I feel sort of silly. Kids sneak in here all the time. Ben is always bitching that in the mornings, when he opens up, he’ll find empty beer cans and cigarette butts and the odd roach clip or two left behind from some after-hours round of partying.

But sometimes whatever it is inside me just—well, needs to be used. It builds up, and if I don’t use it, I get sort of jumpy until I do. I haven’t told Tess this. Or Ethan. Mostly because it makes me sound like a supernatural junkie or something.

“No,” I say. “I don’t see or feel anything. If mermaid girl is here, she’s not showing herself.” I wince inwardly at how confident I sound—all joking and secure—which is definitely not how I feel.

We poke around the pool area some more. Tess plops down cross-legged at the edge of the deep end for a while, staring intently into the pool like she’s doing some kind of meditation. Ethan and I scope out the bathrooms. I peek up the slide at the kiddy pool. Nothing. Nada. Zip.

Figures. You want to see supernatural stuff, and it gets all shy. “Hey!” I say to the rusalka, who’s gone all invisible on us. “Come out, come out, wherever you are!” Still nothing.

We let ourselves out the front gate. I’ve trashed the padlock beyond locking, so we leave it hanging there. Carter will probably get yelled at for leaving it open, but that will be about it.

I pull my cell out of my skirt pocket. It’s been buzzing up a storm since we got to the pool, but I’ve been ignoring it—which, let me say, is not something I’m programmed to do—but if we’re headed back, I guess it’s time for a little damage control. Or at least for me to figure out how cranky Mrs. Benson really is that I’ve cut out on her like this. Tess’s story, that Miss Amy had taken ill and I was the only one who could help her with the beginning tap class, probably sounded as contrived to Mrs. Benson as it did to me when Tess relayed it as she’d climbed into the car. “You totally owe me,” she’d said. “Especially since I had to lie to Amy, too, about why I wasn’t going to be there to teach my class.”

I thumb through the missed calls, then press voice mail. Two messages in, it’s clear that I’m in big trouble. Mrs. Benson has chosen the passive-aggressive method of dealing with my unplanned exit from work. She’s called my mother, who has uncharacteristically surfaced from wherever she’s gone this afternoon.

My mother’s voice message consists of, “Where are you? Call me. Amelia is really pissed at you. I can’t believe you’re screwing up this job after she was nice enough to give it to you.” Actually, she used a more colorful phrase than
screwing up
. Once she decides to be a less-than-model citizen, her language is one of the first things to go. Especially when she’s angry.

My father has left two messages: one asking me where I am, and the other asking me if I’d heard from my mother.

There are also two texts from Ben, the last one confirming that we’re still meeting at eight. Both of them end with
xo
.

I text Ben back,
See you then
, adding my own
xo
. We walk toward the footbridge to the Birnam Woods subdivision that spans the little stream. I wonder, not for the first time, how many residents ever think it’s sort of odd to name a housing development after the forest in
Macbeth
. But it’s not like there’s a ton of
For Sale
signs or anything. Everyone seems just fine living on Inverness Lane and Dunsinane Street. Maybe if they kept getting visited in their dreams by a witch named Baba Yaga, they’d think twice about buying a house on a street named after a play in which just about everyone dies and the three witches mess with Macbeth’s head until he goes crazy. Or maybe not.

This is what I’m thinking about when I see her. I stop so suddenly that Tess, walking too close behind me, smacks into my back. Ethan, walking on my right, stops too. I feel this happen rather than see it because I can’t really focus on anything but the woman in front of me. My heart leaps into my throat.

“What?” Tess’s voice is shrill, I register that much. “What do you—? Oh. Hey! I see her! This time, I see her! This is totally amazing. I actually—”

“Careful.” Ethan takes my hand and holds it so tightly that I almost yelp—except that my throat’s so tight with fear that no sound comes out.

The rusalka stands with her back to us on the far end of the wooden footbridge. Tiny droplets of water fly in the air as she combs her pale fingers through her dark hair.

“Tell me what you want,” I ask her. “Why do you keep following me around?”

“Stories within stories, Anne.” The rusalka stays where she is and turns her head ever so slightly as she speaks. “You’re a smart girl. Not like me. You’ll figure it out.”

Right.


Kak vas zovut?
” Ethan’s still gripping my hand, but he moves us a few steps closer to the rusalka.

I don’t know what’s said, but I know it’s a question by the inflection of his voice. I also know he’s speaking Russian, which makes sense if this really is a rusalka
,
and so far, I have no reason to believe otherwise. Possibly, I think, I should learn more than what I’ve taught myself from the
Lonely Planet
Russian phrase book I picked up a few months ago.

“What did you ask her?” I whisper.

“Her name. We need to know who she is.
Kak vas zovut?
” he calls to the rusalka another time. She still hasn’t turned around. “Your name. Please.”

“She’s the crazy woman who tried to kill Anne’s boyfriend.” Tess glares at Ethan. “Isn’t that everything we need to know?”

“No.” Ethan’s voice is a harsh whisper. “Names are crucial. Identity is crucial.”

I expect Tess to argue with him, but instead, she says, “Like in fairy tales? Like with that Rumpelstiltskin dude? Once the girl knew his name, he destroyed himself. You mean like that?”

“Well, yes.”

“You know,” Tess says, “you don’t need to sound so surprised, Ethan. It’s not like I don’t know
anything
.” She advances another step closer to the rusalka. “Hey! If you’ve got a problem, maybe we can help you. But not if you keep trying to drown people. And you need to tell us who you are, like Ethan just asked you. What’s your name?”

“It is what it is,” the rusalka says, “the name my mother gave me. Just as I gave my child her name. Just as all mothers do. Innocent names. Names to protect. Names to heal. Names of strength. This man you are with—he tells you correctly. And yet you choose not to listen, and he chooses not to see the truth. These are perilous faults, ones I understand all too well. What we love can be lost in an instant. What we name can still be taken from us. You must all listen carefully. You must see what there is to see.”

Tess starts to move closer still, but I grab her arm. Then we’re both shivering violently as the temperature of the air around us plummets. I’m freezing—as cold as I’d been in the pool. Colder. The only thought standing out in my head is this—I need to see the woman’s face. Why won’t she turn around? I’ve talked to her, and she’s followed me. I’ve seen her more than once. So why won’t she show me her face?

She doesn’t turn. She just flicks her head in a gesture that seems to say,
Follow me
. So we do. We cross the bridge and walk behind her along the far edge of the stream until it widens out into a pond. The air warms up some. The rusalka edges closer to the pond. Her dress trails behind her, the hem coated in mud, with tiny bits of twigs and brambles clinging to the wet sludge.

Fear and frustration morph inside me into what feels more like anger. “Just turn around!” I shout at her. “Let me see you, and then we’ll talk.”

“If that’s what you want,” the rusalka says. She walks to the pond’s edge and steps into the murky green water up to her ankles. Farther out, the pond is deeper—deep enough to canoe or swim. Or drown.

“Yes.” I edge my way down the grassy incline after her. But the black sandals I’m wearing have slick soles. I stumble, and only Ethan’s grabbing my arm keeps me falling. But it doesn’t keep me from gasping. Because when the woman in lilac finally swivels gracefully, I see that, impossibly, it’s not the rusalka
whose face smiles at me. It’s my mother.

The lilac gown is gone. My mother stands in the Birnam Wood pond, brackish water lapping over her feet. She’s wearing black, slim-cut jeans, a white tee, and a snug-fitting, short denim jacket. The tops of her black ankle boots—the ones she bought last weekend in Nordstrom’s—peer out from the water. Her hair is pulled back into a tight ponytail. The rusalka had eyes as gray as storm clouds, but my mother has brown eyes like mine. They study me as I force myself to stop screaming.
It’s not real,
I tell myself.
It’s not real. It can’t be real.
It’s stupid, crazy magic just like everything else. It is
absolutely
not real.

“You’re not my mother,” I tell the person in the water. “You aren’t fooling me.” I can barely get the words out because my voice is shaking. All of me is shaking.
It’s not real
, I tell myself again.

The woman with my mother’s face smiles sadly at me. Her thin shoulders sag just a little as she stands there, and I see her move to straighten her posture. The motion is familiar and intimate, something my mother does all the time, probably without thinking. It’s another habit she’s started again since last fall. Every time I see her do it, my heart twists a little.

The woman who looks like my mother but isn’t backs up a little deeper. The pond water begins to fill her ankle boots as they disappear from view.

“Don’t believe it,” Ethan says. His voice is steady, but still I can hear an edge of panic underneath. “It’s a trick.”

“Foolish man,” the thing with my mother’s face tells him.

Then she turns and wades into the deepest part of the pond so quickly that I barely see her slip under the water.

“No!” I scream. I know it’s not real, and I can hear Tess yelling at me to stop, but I’m wading in after my mother anyway—wading up to my waist in the sludgy pond water before Ethan can grab me and pull me back. All I can see is the image of my mother disappearing in the water. It blends in my head with the image of Ben at the bottom of the pool. It doesn’t look like swimming. It looks like drowning.

The rusalka resurfaces as suddenly as she went under, floating on her back, arms stretched out. Still as death. It’s really her again, the lilac gown sagging beneath her, wild black curls dipping this way and that in the current. For one brief second, she raises her head, opens her eyes, and looks at me. “Please,” she says. “Oh, please help me.” And then she’s gone.

Ethan drags me up onto the grass. “It wasn’t real,” he says to me over and over.

Tess just strokes my hair and tells me it will be okay.

“I don’t know what she wants from me. I don’t know how to help her.” I realize I’m not sure which woman I really mean.

So I do what I’ve wanted to do since I first saw Ethan this afternoon. I sit down in the grass, my wet denim skirt heavy against my legs, and cry.

Thursday, 6:12
pm

Ethan

I know. I know.” Anne has repeated this over and over as we walk back to the car. “It wasn’t really her. It’s fake. It’s magic. I get it. But why would she do that?”

Anne settles herself in the front seat as Tess climbs into the back of the sedan. None of us has a towel, so Anne and I are both still soaked from the waist down. Pond water drips from us onto the seats and runs onto the carpet.

“If she wants me to help her with something—whatever it is—why scare the crap out of me? Why show me my mother’s face? What sense does that make, Ethan? No sense at all.” She shivers.

She isn’t crying anymore, but she wipes her nose with the back of her hand, dabs at her red eyes, then pulls down the visor and peers into the tiny mirror. “Wonderful. Now I can add looking like hell to my list of problems.”

“You look fine.” Tess leans forward between us and pats Anne on the shoulder. “But this is totally creepy. I mean, if it can make itself look like anyone, why pick your mother? No offense to her or anything, but if the rusalka wanted you to follow her into the water, why not make herself look like Ben? What’s the deal? Only you would get a mermaid with some mother complex. If I’m going to be haunted, I want to be haunted by someone hot. And male.”

“Thanks for the perspective.” Anne squeezes some more water out of her skirt. “Sorry,” she says to me. “Your car is going to smell like pond for a while.”

I ignore the obvious. The state of my car is the least of our worries right now. “We just need to sort this all out, Anne. We need to slow this all down, go somewhere, and talk. I need to know everything that’s been going on.” I hesitate for a second and then add, “And so do you.”

The words settle on all three of us as I jam the Mercedes into gear and pull out onto the street.

“Crap.” Anne digs her phone out from the pocket of her soaked skirt. Pond water dribbles out as she flips it open. “Even more wonderful.” She inspects the phone. “Yup. Dead.
God
, I hate my life right now. Seriously.”

She pokes me in the arm with her forefinger. “Maybe I don’t want to go talk this all out. You
do
realize that you’re back for—what? An hour? And already my life is crazy again. And don’t you dare say it’s my destiny or whatever. Getting haunted by some Russian mermaid is not my choice of destiny. And neither is destroying yet another cell phone.”

I smile at the last part. I remember how she’d used her phone as a makeshift weapon to help us escape from Viktor on the speeding, out-of-control El train.

“Oh, yeah,” Anne says. She jabs my arm again, harder. “This is really funny, right? I have to use my minimum wage salary to replace my phone. Hysterical.” She tosses her cell phone to Tess. “Dump that in my purse, would you? It’s back there on the floor. Hopefully not wet. I’ll see what I can do once it’s dried out.”

“Sure thing, boss. Maybe it’s fixable. My brother dropped his into the toilet two months ago at some frat party, and he’s still using it. But that’s Zach for you. Speaking of which, I’m meeting him at seven. We’re going to grab a burger somewhere and then go to the movies. You and Ben should come with.” She pauses for one beat too many for the next part to be sincere. “You too, Ethan. More the merrier. You could get to know Ben. Because Anne and Ben—”

“Tess,” Anne says. “Enough.”

“Just saying.” Tess edges up so her face is closer to mine. Her tone shifts from cheery to something a bit darker. “And here’s what else I’m saying. Whatever’s going on, Ethan, you need to figure it out. Isn’t that what you told me at the pool? That you were here to help? Well, so far, you’re not helping.”

“I said, enough,” Anne tells Tess once again. “This isn’t solving anything. Go to the movies with your brother. I’ll call you later.” She turns to me. “And you need to drive me home. We can talk on the way.”

“All right.” Tess scowls. “But don’t let Russian Magic Boy talk you into anything. Because the way I see it, you’ve got a dead phone, a boyfriend who got lured into the deep end, and a mermaid who wants you to think she’s your mother. Telling you to be careful is like the understatement of the year.”

“Do you remember the way to my house?” Anne asks after we’ve dropped Tess off at her car and I’ve taken her back to her Jetta, checking first to make sure that Mrs. Benson isn’t watching out the back door of the shop.

“Think I can find it.”

“Magic?”

“GPS.”

Water still dripping from both of us, we leave it at that.

BOOK: Haunted
10.01Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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