The Death Catchers (3 page)

 

Conflict

If you have the gift (or, depending on your outlook, curse) of second sight, you see your first death-specter on your fourteenth Halloween. And after I saw mine, the real conflict began.

See, Mrs. Tweedy, this past Halloween, I learned that Halloween isn't just Halloween—it's also the start of the Celtic New Year. There used to be this big feast every Halloween, called Samhain, to celebrate the end of summer and beginning of winter. The feast supposedly also recognized the brief period each year when the mortal world and the spiritual world became united.

You probably remember this past Halloween, too, Mrs. Tweedy, because you promised to give anyone who dressed up in a literary-themed costume extra credit on that week's vocabulary quiz.

I'm sure you remember Opal Greenstone's costume, don't you?

Opal made a cardboard cube with fake tinfoil burners on top and knobs on the front, and cut a hole in the bottom for her head. She wore the cube around her head, drew dark circles around her eyes, and told everyone she was that young writer who committed suicide by putting her head in an oven, Sylvia Something-or-other. I heard the whole school was buzzing about it. Principal Gladroy sent Opal home before recess even started.

My costume wasn't half-bad, if I do say so myself. I wore a bright pink elephant trunk on my head that my mom made and stuffed with Styrofoam so it stuck straight out, a large bow tie from an old clown costume, army pants, a red tuxedo vest, sparkly silver gloves from my Madonna costume a few years back, and ballet shoes. For the finishing touch, I hung a sign around my neck that said
CRISIS OF IDENTITY
. Except I'm positive you don't remember my costume, Mrs. Tweedy.

I never made it to school that day.

It wasn't my fault. I was sitting at the breakfast table in all my Halloween finery, reading the paper as I ate my oatmeal with golden raisins. Mom and Dad were there, too, on each side of me. They were watching a story on
Good Morning America
about cooking with applesauce in place of vegetable oil. My grandma raised her eyebrows at me—we were both thinking of what kind of cooking crimes Mom would commit using this new cooking tip. I imagined Mom pouring a whole jar of applesauce into her already dreadfully runny mashed potatoes.

Bizzy was sitting on her walker-stool, Dixie, which put her almost a foot higher than the rest of us. Normally, Bizzy read one of her medical books at the breakfast table as she slurped some concoction of Konriko Creole Seasoning, raw eggs, coffee, and carrot juice. I always considered this reading habit very odd, especially when drinking something so revolting, but Bizzy loved reading about strange illnesses, odd injuries, and morose facts.

“Did you know that more than two thousand five hundred people die every year from gangrene in this country?” she'd ask. Or, “A few years ago, a man drivin' while suckin' on a lollipop kicked the bucket when his air bag inflated. Why, it was only a fender bender, but the force of the air bag caused the lollipop to lodge in his throat. Cause of death? Suffocation.”

Today, she wasn't reciting peculiar, morbid tidbits from one of her medical tomes. Instead, she was paying close attention to me. I was reading the Life & Style section, but I could feel the burn of Bizzy's eyes on my forehead. Instead of glancing up at her, I concentrated on the paper.

That's when it happened … everything went topsy-turvy.

I was looking at the paper, skimming the picture captions. All at once, every printed letter jumped off the ashen gray background, like a thousand tiny black crickets hopping up and down. The letters landed back on the page, all mixed up. I blinked furiously, worried that my contacts were melting in my eyes. I couldn't possibly be seeing what I was seeing. The letters swiggled on the page. Round and round
L
s,
K
s,
E
s,
O
s, and the other letters went in a circle, getting smaller and smaller like the water in a toilet that had been flushed. Finally they disappeared. The paper faded to a blank page and new letters bubbled to the surface, gradually. Soon I could make out the headline.

JODI SANCHEZ, 14, DIES IN TRAGIC ACCIDENT

I could hear my mom's voice in the distance.

“Are you all right, honey? You look like death!”

My fingers tingled as I tried to smooth out the paper, hoping that the alarming words would disappear. Instead, more appeared. A faded picture of Jodi, standing in front of the green awning of her mother's store, appeared next to the article about her death. She was smiling, revealing the small gap between her two front teeth. She was wearing a tight black T-shirt, her long hair in a ponytail slightly off-center.

Jodi Sanchez, beloved daughter of Mora Sanchez and freshman at Crabapple High, died yesterday at County General Memorial Hospital after sustaining fatal injuries from a car accident.

I could hear Mom chattering in the background, echoed by mounting concern on the part of Dad. But I couldn't stop reading.

A reckless morning commuter hit the girl while she was crossing the street at the corner of Ocean Avenue and Delores Avenue. Though emergency medical technicians tried to revive her at the scene, she died two hours later during surgery.

Jodi stared at me from the paper and I could've sworn her brown eyes blinked at me. “Oh. My. Good—”

Bizzy bounced off Dixie and, with one step, was at my side, clawing at my shoulder. I could feel her knee dig into my hip as she shoved me off my chair. I thought of Jodi and almost vomited.

“Ow!” I yelped in pain.

“Oh my word, chi-ull!” Bizzy howled, even louder. “You're lookin' mighty green around the gills! You must have gone a little spotty and fallen right over!” Her clear eyes peered into mine intently. She swept her index finger to her lips and signaled for me to
shhhh
. With a surprising amount of force for a septuagenarian, Bizzy pulled on my arm, yanked me up by my elephant trunk, and dragged me toward the living room.

“We're gonna get you horizontal right away, Lizzy-Loo! Off to the couch we go!” Bizzy yelled for my parents' benefit more than mine.

I glimpsed Mom with my left eye. She scrunched her eyebrows together, completely befuddled by all the commotion.

“Is she all right?” I heard her say. Bizzy kept pulling me forward. I staggered and lurched along with her as she pushed through the swinging kitchen door.

I'd heard that sometimes older people get a little loopy as they age. But as far as I could tell, Bizzy had gone suddenly senile. She was acting like a complete maniac. I looked at her as she pushed me onto the living room couch, my hip still throbbing from the crush of her bony knee, my elephant trunk lopsided and my clown bow tie up around my chin.

I was afraid of my own grandmother. What in the world had come over her? Why was she trying to isolate me from Mom and Dad?

“Sit here, and hush up until I return.
Please
.” The
please
was more of a command than a polite request. She hobbled back into the kitchen and pushed the door wide open.

“ 'Fraid it's the sudden inset of the flu,” I could hear Bizzy explain in a voice louder than necessary to my parents in the kitchen. For a moment, I thought maybe it
was
the flu. After all, out of nowhere, I'd seen my best friend appear in the paper and imagined a headline describing her death. Maybe the delusional fever I'd had at the cemetery was back in full force.

During one of her breakfast medical information sessions, Bizzy had told us that hallucinations were sometimes an early sign of a brain tumor. I considered the possibility. I put my hand on my forehead. It felt normal. I wondered if I was the one who was going suddenly senile.

Though I hadn't heard her return to the living room, Bizzy was now standing over me. She was leaning on Dixie.

“You need to listen to me, Sweet Pea, like you've never listened to me before.”

“What's going on?” was all I could manage to mutter.

“What did you see?”

“What did I
see
?”

Bizzy's eyes were clear.

“In the paper. Did somethin' appear?”

“How do you know I saw something in the paper?” I began to push back against the couch, away from Bizzy, scared.

“Now ain't the time for questions,” Bizzy said urgently. I was confused. If there was
any
time for questions, I was sure
this
was it.

Though my trust in her was shaken, I wanted an explanation and she seemed to have one. So I told Bizzy about the spooky picture of Jodi, the headline to match, and what the paper said about her dying in a car accident on the corner of Dolores Avenue and Ocean Avenue.

“When?”

“Just now, at the table.”

Bizzy skootched Dixie closer to the couch so her whole head was floating above mine.

“
When
did the article say she passed on? Was there a date?” Her voice turned hard, as if her throat was made of steel.

“I don't know.”

“You don't know because it didn't say? Or because you didn't notice?”

“I don't know.”

Mrs. Tweedy, I don't want to admit this—it's embarrassing and I'm not sure why it happened—but I began to cry. The tears welled up silently, but when they gushed out, it was a pathetic display of general wussiness.

Now that I think about it, I know exactly why I started crying. Bizzy had never spoken like that to me. All the customary kindness in her voice had drained away. She was behaving like I had done something awful. Though she called me Sweet Pea, she was grilling me like I was a rotten pea who had given her a bad case of food poisoning. It didn't help that I began to think that Jodi was actually dead.

Bizzy saw the tears pool in my eyes and her face softened immediately. She took her crinkled thumb and slowly wiped my eyes. The tears spilled out and collected on her thumbnail.

“I promise it'll be okay, Lizzy-Loo. Jodi's gonna be all right.”

“The paper changed, Bizzy,” I said, wiping away more tears. “The article on Jodi appeared out of nowhere on the page I was reading.”

“I know it did, Sweet Pea.”

“You do?”

“Been expectin' this day for a long time now,” Bizzy said. She wasn't happy when she said it.

“What day?”

“The day you saw your first death-specter.” She looked at me, her mossy eyes filled with resignation.

“My first
what
?” I asked.

“Death-specter. It's a fancy way of sayin' you had a vision of what's to come.”

“
What's to come?
You mean the future?” My mind reeled. Did that mean Jodi was set to die?

“Yes, child,” Bizzy said.

“How do you know that?” My voice was filled with doubt and mistrust because I didn't want to believe it. “Maybe I just imagined the whole thing … because I have a fever. Or a tumor.”

I began wishing it
was
a tumor. A tumor was something a doctor could explain. “Visions” of the future, however, were not something that could be explained by any doctor I knew, unless he or she was of the witch variety. Better still, a tumor would mean that the headline I'd seen about Jodi wasn't true.

“What about Jodi? Is she okay? If what you say is right, we need to go warn her before it happens!”

“We can't do that, Sweet Pea,” Bizzy said. “You have to trust me when I say that if we warn her, it'll only cause what you saw in the paper to happen sooner.”

“How do you know all this?”

“I have death-specters, too,” Bizzy said. “Since I was your age. You inherited this from me, Lizzy-Loo.”

“But … how do I know that you're not just making all of this up … that …”

“Look at your left hand,” Bizzy said, motioning with her head toward my arm, which rested limp at my side. I held my hand in front of my face, almost expecting to see another vision.

“The other side,” Bizzy said.

I flipped my left hand over so that my palm was facing me. As I started to gasp, Bizzy grabbed a pillow from the couch and placed it across my mouth to stifle my startled cry.

Right above where my wrist joined my hand were the words JODI SANCHEZ. The name was as red as my own blood and as small as if it'd been written with a typewriter. But there was sloppiness to it. The letters were hot and raised, like a stinging nettle had scratched me in the exact formation of each letter, inflaming my skin.

I lay there, transfixed by the sight of Jodi's name at the bottom of my hand.

“When you have a death-specter, the person's name appears on your left hand.” Bizzy placed her own hand next to mine. She twisted her wrist and jangled the dozens of pearls covering it. “Why do you think I wear so many pearls on my left hand, Sweet Pea?”

I looked at Bizzy blankly.

“It certainly ain't because it makes eatin' any easier,” she said, laughing.

“I don't understand. I mean,
how
is this even possible? Dad and Mom don't have death-specters, do they?”

“It's passed on through generations of the womenfolk on your father's side of the family. Somethin' about the ability to make a life's connected to the ability to see when it'll end. The trait skipped right past your father because he's a man.”

“But why? Why you? Why me?”

“That's like askin' why you're as tall as you are or why your feet ain't smaller. It's somethin' you inherited and there ain't no reason why other than fate.”

Stunned doesn't even begin to cover it, Mrs. Tweedy. You know that vocab word you're so fond of—
ineffable
—that describes what there aren't words for? That moment taught me the limits of the English language, because they haven't invented the word yet that explains how I was feeling right then. The feeling was kind of like jittery-painful-nausea-headache-dread. The whole situation was ineffable. And it was about to get a lot worse.