Anna Dressed in Blood

CHAPTER TWELVE

I wake up covered in sweat. I had been dreaming, dreaming of something leaning over me. Something with crooked teeth and hooked fingers. Something with breath that smelled like it had been eating people for decades without brushing in between. My heart’s pounding in my chest. I reach under my pillow for my dad’s athame, and for a second I could swear my fingers close on a cross, a cross twisted round with a rough snake. Then my knife handle is there, safe and sound in its leather sheath. Fucking nightmares.

My heart starts to slow down. Glancing down at the floor, I see Tybalt, who is glaring at me with a puffed-up tail. I wonder if he had been sleeping on my chest and I catapulted him off when I woke. I don’t remember, but I wish that I did, because it would’ve been hilarious.

I think about lying back down, but don’t. There’s that annoying, tense feeling in all of my muscles, and, even though I’m tired, what I really want to do is some track and field — throw a shot put and run some hurdles. Outside, the wind must be blowing, because this old house creaks and groans on its foundation, floorboards moving like dominoes so they sound like fast footsteps.

The clock by my bed reads 3:47. For a second I blank on what day it is. But it’s Saturday. So at least I don’t have to be up for school tomorrow. Nights are starting to bleed together. I’ve had maybe three good nights of sleep since we got here.

I get out of bed without thinking and pull on my jeans and a t-shirt, then stuff my athame into my back pocket and make my way down the stairs. I pause only to put on my shoes and slide my mom’s car keys off the coffee table. Then I’m driving through dark streets under the light of a growing moon. I know where I’m going, even though I can’t remember deciding to do it.

I park at the end of Anna’s overgrown driveway and get out of the car, still feeling like I’m mostly sleepwalking. None of the nightmare tension is gone yet from my limbs. I don’t even hear the sound of my own feet on the rickety porch steps, or feel my fingers close around the doorknob. Then I step in, and fall.

The foyer is gone. Instead I drop about eight feet and face-plant in dusty, cold dirt. A few deep breaths get the wind back in my lungs and on reflex I pull my legs up, not thinking anything but what the fuck? When my brain switches on again I wait in a half-crouch and flex my quads. I’m lucky to have both of my legs still in working order, but where the hell am I? My body feels just about ready to run out of adrenaline. Wherever this is, it’s dark, and it smells. I try to keep my breathing shallow so I don’t panic, and also so I don’t breathe in too much. It reeks of damp and rot. Lots of things have either died down here or died elsewhere and been stuffed here.

That thought makes me reach back for my knife, my sharp, throat-cutting security blanket, as I look around. I recognize the ethereal gray light from the house; it’s leaking down through what I guess are floorboards. Now that my eyes are adjusted, I see that the walls and floor are part dirt and part rough-cut stone. My mind does a quick replay of me walking up the front porch steps and coming through the door. How did I end up in the basement?

“Anna?” I call softly, and the ground lurches beneath my feet. I steady myself against a wall, but the surface under my hand isn’t dirt. It’s squishy. And moist. And it’s breathing.

The corpse of Mike Andover is half-submerged in the wall. I was resting my hand against its stomach. Mike’s eyes are closed, like he’s sleeping. His skin looks darker and looser than it was before. He’s rotting, and from the way he’s situated in the rocks, I get the impression that the house is slowly taking him over. It’s digesting him.

I move away a few steps. I’d really rather he not tell me about it.

A soft shuffling sound gets my attention and I turn to see a figure hobbling toward me, like it’s drunk, wobbling and lurching. The shock of not being alone is momentarily eclipsed by the heaving of my stomach. It’s a man, and he reeks of piss and used-up booze. He’s dressed in dirty clothes, an old tattered trench coat and pants with holes in the knees. Before I can get out of the way, a look of fear crosses his face. His neck twists around on his shoulders like it’s a bottle cap. I hear the long crunch of his spinal cord and he crumples to the ground at my feet.

I’m starting to wonder if I ever woke up at all. Then, for some reason, my father’s voice bubbles up between my ears.

“Don’t be afraid of the dark, Cas. But don’t let them tell you that everything that’s there in the dark is also there in the light. It isn’t.”

Thanks, Dad. Just one of the many creepy pearls of wisdom you had to impart.

But he was right. Well, right about the last part at least. My blood is pounding and I can feel the jugular vein in my neck. Then I hear Anna speak.

“Do you see what I do?” she asks, but before I can answer, she surrounds me with corpses, more than I can count, strewn across the floor like trash, and piled up to the ceiling, arms and legs arranged together in a grotesque braid. The stench is horrible. In the corner of my eye, I see one move, but when I look closer I realize that it’s the movements of bugs feeding on the body, twisting beneath the skin and lifting it in impossible little flutters. Only one thing on the bodies moves of its own power: The eyes roll lazily back and forth in their heads, mucus-covered and milky, like they’re trying to see what’s happening to them but no longer have the energy.

“Anna,” I say softly.

“These are not the worst,” she hisses. She’s got to be kidding. Some of these corpses have had horrible things done to them. They’re missing limbs or all of their teeth. They’re covered in dried blood from a hundred crusted-over cuts. And too many of them are young. Faces like mine or younger than mine, with the cheeks torn away and mold on their teeth. When I look back behind me and realize that Mike’s eyes have opened, I know I have to get out of here. Ghost-hunting be damned, to hell with the family legacy, I’m not staying one minute longer in a room filling up with bodies.

I’m not claustrophobic, but right now I seem to have to tell myself so very loudly. Then I see what I didn’t have time to before. There’s a staircase, leading up to the main level. I don’t know how she had me step directly into the basement, and I don’t care. I just want back up in the foyer. And once I’m up there, I want to forget what’s residing underneath my feet.

I make for the stairs, and that’s when she sends the water, gushing in and rising up from everywhere — cracks in the walls, seeping up right through the floor. It’s filthy, as much slime as it is liquid, and in seconds it’s creeping up to my waist. I start to panic as the corpse of the bum with the broken neck floats past. I do not want to be swimming with them. I don’t want to think about everything that’s under the water, and my mind’s eye makes up something really stupid, like corpses from the bottom of the stacks opening their jaws suddenly and scrambling out along the floor, hurrying to grab my legs like crocodiles. I push past the bum, bobbing like a wormy apple, and am surprised to hear a little moan escape my lips. I’m going to gag.

I make it to the stairs just as a pillar of corpses shifts and collapses with a sick splash.

“Anna, stop!” I cough, trying to keep the green water out of my mouth. I don’t think I’m going to make it. My clothes are as heavy as in a nightmare and I’m crawling up the steps in slow motion. Finally I slap my hand onto dry floor and jerk myself onto the ground level.

Relief lasts about half a second. Then I shriek like a chicken and throw myself away from the basement door, expecting water and dead hands coming to drag me back down. But the basement is dry. The gray light spills down and I can see down the steps and a few feet of floor. It’s all dry. There’s nothing there. It looks like any cellar that you might store canned goods in. To make me feel even stupider, my clothes aren’t wet either.

Damn Anna. I hate that time-space manipulation, hallucination, whatever. You never get used to it.

I stand up and brush my shirt off even though there’s nothing to brush off, looking around. I’m in what used to be the kitchen. There’s a dusty black stove and a table with three chairs. I’d really like to sit down on one, but the cupboards start opening and closing by themselves, drawers slamming shut and the walls starting to bleed. Slamming doors and smashing plates. Anna is acting like a common poltergeist. How embarrassing.

A sense of safety settles on my skin. Poltergeists I can take. I shrug my shoulders and walk out of the kitchen and into the sitting room, where the dust-sheeted sofa looks comfortingly familiar. I collapse down on it in what I hope looks like a pretty decent impression of bravado. Never mind that my hands are still shaky.

“Get out!” Anna shouts from directly over my shoulder. I peek over the back of the couch and there she is, my goddess of death, her hair snaking out in a great black cloud, her teeth grinding hard enough to make living gums bleed. The impulse to spring up with my athame at the ready makes my heart beat double time. But I take a deep breath. Anna didn’t kill me before. And my gut has a hunch that she doesn’t want to kill me now. Why else would she waste time on the corpse-filled light show downstairs? I give her my best cocky grin.

“What if I won’t?” I ask.

“You came to kill me,” she growls, obviously deciding to ignore my question. “But you can’t.”

“What part of that actually makes you angry?” Dark blood moves through her eyes and skin. She’s terrible, disgusting — a killer. And I suspect that I am completely safe with her. “I will find a way, Anna,” I promise. “There will be a way to kill you, to send you away.”

“I don’t want to be away,” she says. Her whole form clenches and the darkness melts back inside, and standing before me is Anna Korlov, the girl from the newspaper photo. “But I deserve to be killed.”

“You didn’t once,” I say, not exactly disagreeing. Because I don’t think those corpses downstairs were just creations of her imagination. I think that somewhere, Mike Andover probably is getting slowly eaten by the walls of this house, even if I can’t see it.

She’s shaking her arm, down near the wrist where there are lingering black veins. She shakes harder and closes her eyes, and they disappear. It strikes me that I’m not just looking at a ghost. I’m looking at a ghost, and at something that was done to that ghost. They are two different things.

“You have to fight that, don’t you?” I say softly.

Her eyes are surprised.

“In the beginning, I couldn’t fight it at all. It wasn’t me. I was insane, trapped inside, and this was just a terror, doing horrible things while I watched, curled up in a corner of our mind.” She cocks her head and hair falls softly down her shoulder. I can’t think of them as the same person. The goddess and this girl. I can picture her peering out of her own eyes like they’re nothing but windows, quiet and afraid in her white dress.

“Now our skins have grown together,” she goes on. “I am her. I am it.”

“No,” I say, and the minute I do, I know it’s true. “You wear her like a mask. You can take it off. You did it to spare me.” I stand and walk around the sofa. She looks so fragile, compared to what she was, but she doesn’t back away, and she doesn’t break eye contact. She’s not afraid. She’s sad, and curious, like the girl in the photograph. I wonder what she was when she was alive, if she laughed easily, if she was clever. It’s impossible to think that much of that girl remains now, sixty years and god knows how many murders later.

Then I remember that I’m really pissed. I wave my hand back toward the kitchen and basement door. “What the hell was that about?”

“I thought you should know what you’re dealing with.”

“What? Some bratty girl throwing a hissy fit in the kitchen?” I narrow my eyes. “You were trying to scare me off. That sad little display was supposed to send me running for the hills.”

“Sad little display?” she mocks me. “I bet you almost wet yourself.”

I open my mouth and quickly shut it. She almost made me laugh, and I’d still like to be pissed. Only not literally. Oh crap. I’m laughing.

Anna blinks and smiles, fleetingly. She’s trying not to laugh herself.

“I was…” She pauses. “I was angry with you.”

“For what?” I ask.

“For trying to kill me,” she says, and then we both do laugh.

“And after you tried so hard to not kill me.” I smile. “I guess it must’ve seemed pretty rude.” I’m laughing with her. We’re having a conversation. What is this, some kind of twisted Stockholm syndrome?

“Why are you here? Did you come to try to kill me again?”

“Oddly enough, no. I–I had a bad dream. I needed to talk to someone.” I ruffle my hand through my hair. It’s been ages since I’ve felt so awkward. Maybe I’ve never felt this awkward. “And I guess I just figured, well, Anna must be up. So here I am.”

She snorts a little. Then her brow furrows. “What could I say to you? What could we talk about? I’ve been out of the world for so long.”

I shrug. The next words leave my mouth before I know what’s happening. “Well, I was never really in the world in the first place, so.” I clench my jaw and look down at the floor. I can’t believe I’m being so emo. I’m complaining to a girl who was brutally murdered at sixteen. She’s trapped in this house of corpses and I get to go to school and be a Trojan; I get to eat my mom’s grilled peanut butter and Cheez Whiz sandwiches and—

“You walk with the dead,” she says gently. Her eyes are luminous and — I can’t believe it — sympathetic. “You’ve walked with us since…”

“Since my father died,” I say. “And before that he walked with you and I followed. Death is my world. Everything else, school and friends, they’re just things that get in the way of my next ghost.” I’ve never said this before. I’ve never allowed myself to think it for more than a second. I’ve kept myself focused, and in doing so have managed to not think too much about life either, about living, no matter how hard my mom pushed me to have fun, to go out, to apply to colleges.

“Were you never sad?” she asks.

“Not a lot. I had this higher power, you know? I had this purpose.” I reach into my back pocket and pull out my athame, drawing it from its leather. The blade shines in the gray light. Something in my blood, the blood of my father and his before him, makes it more than just a knife. “I’m the only one in the world who can do this. Doesn’t that mean it’s what I’m supposed to do?” As the words leave my mouth I resent them. They take away all of my choices. Anna crosses her pale arms. The tilt of her head sweeps her hair over her shoulder and it’s strange to see it lying there, just regular, dark strands. I’m waiting for it to twitch, to move into the air on that invisible current.

“Having no choice doesn’t seem fair,” she says, seeming to read my mind. “But having all of them isn’t really easier. When I was alive, I could never decide what I wanted to do, what I wanted to become. I loved to take pictures; I wanted to take pictures for a newspaper. I loved to cook; I wanted to move to Vancouver and open a restaurant. I had a million different dreams but none of them was stronger than the rest. In the end they probably would have paralyzed me. I would have ended up here, running the boarding house.”

“I don’t believe that.” She seems like such a force, this reasonable girl who kills with a turn of her fingers. She would have left all this behind, if she’d had the chance.

“I honestly don’t remember,” she sighs. “I don’t think I was strong in life. Now it seems like I loved every moment, that every breath was charmed and crisp.” She clasps her hands comically to her chest and breathes in deep through her nose, then blows it out in a huff. “I probably didn’t. For all my dreams and fancies, I don’t recall being … what would you call it? Perky.”

I smile and she does too, then tucks her hair behind her ear in a gesture that is so alive and human that it makes me forget what I was going to say.

“What are we doing?” I ask. “You’re trying to get me to not kill you, aren’t you?”

Anna crosses her arms. “Considering that you can’t kill me, I think that would be a wasted effort.”

I laugh. “You’re too confident.”

“Am I? I know that what you’ve shown me aren’t your best moves, Cas. I can feel the tension in your blade from holding back. How many times have you done this? How many times have you fought and won?”

“Twenty-two in the last three years.” I say it with pride. It’s more than my father ever did in the same amount of time. I’m what you might call an overachiever. I wanted to be better than he was. Faster. Sharper. Because I didn’t want to end up like he ended up.

Without my knife I’m nothing special, just a regular seventeen-year-old with an average build, maybe a bit on the skinny side. But with the athame in my hand you’d think I was a triple black belt or something. My moves are sure, strong, and quick. She’s right when she says she hasn’t seen my best, and I don’t know why that is.

“I don’t want to hurt you, Anna. You know that, don’t you? It’s nothing personal.”

“Just like I didn’t want to kill all of those people rotting in my basement.” She smiles ruefully.

So they were real. “What happened to you?” I ask. “What makes you do this?”

“None of your business,” she replies.

“If you tell me…” I start but don’t finish. If she tells me, I can figure her out. And once I figure her out, I can kill her.

Everything is becoming more complicated. This questioning girl and that wordless black monster are one and the same. It isn’t fair. When I slide my knife through her, will I cut them apart? Will Anna go to one place and it to another? Or will Anna get sucked away to whatever void the rest go to?

I thought I’d put these thoughts out of my mind a long time ago. My father always told me that it wasn’t our place to judge, that we were only the instrument. Our task was to send them away from the living. His eyes had been so certain when he’d said it. Why don’t I have that kind of certainty?

I lift my hand slowly to touch that cold face, to graze my fingers along her cheek, and am surprised to find it soft, not made of marble. She stands paralyzed, then hesitantly lifts her hand to rest on mine.

The spell is so strong that when the door opens and Carmel comes through it, neither of us moves until she says my name.

“Cas? What are you doing?”

“Carmel,” I blurt, and there she is, her figure framed in the open door. She’s got her hand on the knob and it looks like she’s shaking. She takes another tentative step into the house.

“Carmel, don’t move,” I say, but she’s staring at Anna, who backs away from me, grimacing and grabbing hold of her head.

“Is that her? Is that what killed Mike?”

Stupid girl, she’s coming farther into the house. Anna is retreating as fast as she can on unsteady feet, but I see that her eyes have gone black.

“Anna, don’t, she doesn’t know,” I say too late. Whatever it is that allows Anna to spare me is obviously a one-time deal. She’s gone in a twist of black hair and red blood, pale skin and teeth. There’s a moment of silence and we listen to the drip, drip, drip of her dress.

And then she lunges, ready to thrust her hands into Carmel’s guts.

I jump and tackle her, thinking the minute I collide with that granite force that I am an idiot. But I do manage to alter her course, and Carmel jumps to the side. It’s the wrong way. She’s farther away from the door now. It occurs to me that some people only have book smarts. Carmel is a tame house cat and Anna will make lunch of her if I don’t do something. As Anna crouches on the ground, the red of her dress flowing sickly onto the floor, her hair and eyes wild, I hurtle myself toward Carmel and put myself between them.

“Cas, what were you doing?” Carmel asks, terrified.

“Shut up and get to the door,” I yell. I hold my athame out in front of us even though Anna isn’t afraid. When she springs, it’s for me this time, and I grab on to her wrist with my free hand, using the other to try to keep her at bay with my knife.

“Anna, stop this!” I hiss, and the white comes back into her eyes. Her teeth are grinding as she spits her words through them.

“Get her out of here!” she moans. I shove her hard to knock her back one more time. Then I grab Carmel and we dive through the door. We don’t turn until we’re down the porch steps and back on dirt and grass. The door has shut and I hear Anna raging inside, breaking things and tearing things up.

“My god, she’s awful,” Carmel whispers, burying her head in my shoulder. I squeeze her softly for a moment before pulling free and walking back up the porch steps.

“Cas! Get away from there,” Carmel shouts. I know what she thinks she saw, but what I saw was Anna trying to stop. When my foot hits the porch, Anna’s face appears at the window, her teeth bared and veins standing out against white skin. She slams her hand against the glass, making it rattle. There is dark water standing in her eyes.

“Anna,” I whisper. I go to the window, but before I can put my hand up she floats away and turns, glides up the stairs, and disappears.