Anna Dressed in Blood

CHAPTER SIX

I let Thomas drive me home. After I was less defensive, he didn’t get on my nerves as much. On my way up the porch steps I hear him roll down his window and ask awkwardly if I’m going to be at the Edge of the World party. I don’t say anything. Seeing those deaths shook him up pretty good. More and more he seems to me just a lonely kid, and I don’t want to tell him again to stay away from me. Besides, if he’s so psychic then he shouldn’t have to ask.

When I get inside I set my bag down on the kitchen table. My mom is there, chopping herbs for what might be dinner or might be one of her wide variety of magic spells. I see strawberry leaves and cinnamon. That’s either a love spell or the beginnings of a tart. My stomach rolls over and taps my shoulder, so I head to the refrigerator to make a sandwich.

“Hey. Dinner’s going to be ready in an hour.”

“I know, but I’m hungry now. Growing boy.” I put out mayonnaise, Colby jack, and deli bologna. As my hands move for the bread I’m thinking of everything I need to do for tonight. The athame is clean, but that doesn’t really matter. I don’t anticipate seeing anything dead, no matter what the school rumors say. I’ve never heard of any ghost attacking a group of more than ten. That stuff only happens in slasher movies.

Tonight is about breaking in. I want to hear Anna’s story. I want to know the people who can lead me to her. For all that Daisy could tell me — her last name, her age — he couldn’t tell me where she haunted. All he knew was that it was her family home. I could, of course, go to the local library and trace the Korlovs’ residence. Something like Anna’s murder had to make the papers. But what fun would that be? This is my favorite part of the hunt. Getting to know them. Hearing their legends. I want them to be as large in my mind as they can possibly be, and when I see them I don’t want to be disappointed.

“How was your day, Mom?”

“Fine,” she says, bent over her chopping block. “I’ve got to call an exterminator. I was storing a box of Tupperware in the attic and saw a rat tail disappear behind one of the wall boards.” She shudders and makes yuck noises with her tongue.

“Why don’t you just let Tybalt up there? That’s what cats are for, you know. Catching mice and rats.”

Her face becomes a horrified squint. “Yish. I don’t want him to get worms chewing on some nasty rat. I’ll just call an exterminator. Or you can go up and set some traps.”

“Sure thing,” I say. “But not tonight. Tonight I’ve got a date.”

“A date? With who?”

“Carmel Jones.” I smile and shake my head. “It’s for the job. There’s a party at some kind of waterfall park tonight and I should be able to get some decent information.”

My mom sighs and goes back to chopping. “Is she a nice girl?”

As usual, she’s fixating on the wrong part of the news.

“I don’t like the idea of you using these girls all the time.”

I laugh and jump up on the countertop to sit beside her. I steal a strawberry. “You make it sound so dirty.”

“Using for a noble purpose is still using.”

“I’ve never broken any hearts, Mom.”

She clucks her tongue. “You’ve never been in love, either, Cas.”

A conversation about love with my mother is worse than the talk that involves birds and bees, so I mumble something around my sandwich and duck out of the kitchen. I don’t appreciate the implication that I’m going to hurt someone. Doesn’t she think I’m careful? Doesn’t she know the trouble I go to in order to keep people at arm’s length?

I chew harder and try not to get myself worked up. She’s just being a mom, after all. Still, all these years of me not bringing friends home should give her a clue.

But now’s not the time to be thinking of this. These are complications I don’t need. It’ll happen, sometime, I’m sure. Or maybe not. Because no one should get caught up in this, and I can’t imagine ever being finished. There will always be more dead, and the dead will always kill.

Carmel picks me up a little after nine. She looks great, in some kind of strappy pink top and a short khaki skirt. Her blond hair hangs loose between her shoulders. I should smile. I should say something nice, but I find myself holding back. My mother’s words are interfering with my job.

Carmel drives a silver Audi that’s a couple of years old, and it hugs the curves as we flash past strange street signs that look like Charlie Brown’s t-shirt, and others proclaiming that apparently a moose is going to attack the car. It’s getting close to dusk and the light is turning orange; the humidity in the air is breaking and the wind is strong as a hand against my face. I want to hang my entire head out of the window like a dog. As we leave the city behind my ears prick backward, listening for her — for Anna — wondering if she can feel me moving away.

I can feel her there, mingled into the mud of a hundred other ghosts, some shuffling and harmless, others full of rage. I can’t imagine what it is to be dead; it’s a strange idea to me, having known so many ghosts. It’s still a mystery. I don’t quite understand why some people stay and others don’t. I wonder where those who leave have gone. I wonder if the ones that I kill go to the same place.

Carmel’s asking me about my classes and about my old school. I flop out some vague answers. The scenery has become instantly rural, and we pass through a town where half of the buildings are molded out and falling down. There are vehicles parked in yards, caked with years of rust. It reminds me of places that I’ve been before and it occurs to me that I’ve been through too many places; that there might be nothing new anymore.

“You drink, right?” Carmel asks me.

“Yeah, sure.” I don’t, not really. I’ve never had the opportunity to get into the habit.

“Cool. There’s always bottles, but somebody usually manages to get a keg set up in the back of their truck.” She hits her turn signal and pulls off the road into a park. I can hear the ominous rush of the falls from somewhere behind the trees. The drive went fast; I didn’t pay attention to much of it. I was too busy thinking about the dead, and about one dead girl in particular, wearing a beautiful dress, stained red with her own blood.

The party goes as parties go. I’m introduced to a multitude of faces that I’ll try to connect to names later and fail. The girls are all giggly and eager to impress the others in attendance. The guys have grouped together and left the majority of their cerebrums in their cars. I’ve made it through two beers; this third one I’ve been holding for the better part of an hour. It’s pretty boring.

The Edge of the World doesn’t feel like the edge of anything, unless you take it literally. We’re all gathered along the sides of the falls, strings of people standing witness to the passing of brown water over black rocks. There isn’t really that much water to speak of. I heard someone say that it was a dry summer. Still, the gorge that the water has cut over time is awesome, a sheer drop on both sides, and in the center of the falls there is a towering rock formation that I would like to climb, if only I had better shoes.

I want to get Carmel alone, but since we got here, Mike Andover has been interrupting her at every opportunity and trying to stare me down so forcefully that it’s like being hypnotized. And every time we get him to go away, Carmel’s friends Natalie and Katie appear, looking at me expectantly. I’m not even sure which is which — they’re both brunettes and they have extremely similar features, right down to matching hair clip things. I feel myself smiling a lot, and I have this odd urge to be witty and clever. The pressure is pulsing at my temples. Every time I say something they giggle, look at each other for permission to laugh, and look back at me again, waiting for my next zinger. God, living people are irritating.

Finally, some girl named Wendy starts throwing up over the side of the railing, and the distraction is enough for me to take Carmel by the arm and walk with her alone along the wooden walkway. I wanted to make it all the way to the other side, but when we get to the center, staring down over the drop of the falls, she stops.

“Are you having fun?” she asks, and I nod. “Everybody likes you.”

I can’t imagine why. I haven’t said a single interesting thing. I don’t think that there’s anything interesting about me, except for the thing that I don’t tell anyone about.

“Maybe everybody likes me because everybody likes you,” I say pointedly, and I expect her to scoff, or to make some remark about flattery, but she doesn’t. Instead she just nods quietly like I’m probably right. She’s smart, and aware of herself. I wonder what she was doing dating someone like Mike. Someone from the Trojan Army.

Thinking of the Army makes me think of Thomas Sabin. I thought he’d be here, skulking around in the trees, dogging my every move like a lovesick … well, like a lovesick schoolboy, but I haven’t seen him. After some of the hollow conversations I’ve had tonight, I kind of regret that.

“You were going to tell me about ghosts,” I say. Carmel blinks at me and then starts to smile.

“I was.” She clears her throat and does her best to start, laying out the technical specs of last year’s party: who was there; what they were doing; why they came with this or that person. I guess she wants me to have a full and realistic picture. Some people need that, I suppose. Personally, I’m the type who likes to fill in the blanks and make it my own. It’s probably better that way than it really was.

She finally gets to the dark, a dark filled with intoxicated and unreliable kids, and I hear a thirdhand recounting of ghost stories that were told that night. About swimmers and hikers who died at Trowbridge Falls, where the party was that year. About how they liked to try to make you have the same accident that they did, and more than one person had been victim to an invisible push at the cliff edge, or an invisible hand dragging them down into the river current. That part makes me prick up my ears. From what I know of ghosts, it sounds probable. In general, they like to pass around the badness that happened to them. Take the hitchhiker for example.

“Then Tony Gibney and Susanna Norman come screaming down off of one of the trails, shouting about how they were assaulted by something while they were making out.” Carmel shakes her head. “It was getting pretty late, and a lot of us really were kind of freaked, so we got into our cars and took off. I was riding with Mike and Chase, Will was driving, and as we left the park, something jumped down in front of us. I still don’t know where it came from, if it was running down the hill, or if it had been perched in a tree. It looked like a big, shaggy cougar or something. Well, Will hit the brakes and the thing just stood there for a second. I thought it was going to jump on the hood and I swear, I would have screamed. But instead, it bared its teeth and hissed, and then—”

“And then?” I prod, because I know that I’m supposed to.

“And then it moved out of our headlights, stood up on two legs, and walked away into the woods.”

I start laughing and she hits me on the arm. “I’m not good at telling this,” she says, but she’s trying not to laugh too. “Mike does it better.”

“Yeah, he probably uses more swear words and crazy hand gestures.”

“Carmel.”

I turn around and there’s Mike again, with Chase and Will on either hip, spitting Carmel’s name out of his mouth like a shot of sticky web. It’s strange how just the sound of someone’s name can be made to act like a branding.

“What’s so funny?” Chase asks. He puts his cigarette out on the railing and places the old butt back into his pack. I’m sort of grossed out, but impressed with his eco-consciousness.

“Nothing,” I reply. “Carmel just spent the last twenty minutes telling me how you guys all met Sasquatch last year.”

Mike smiles. There’s something different. Something’s off, and I don’t think it’s just the fact that they’ve all been drinking. “That story is true as shit,” he says, and I realize that what’s different is he’s being friendly to me. He’s looking at me instead of at Carmel. Not for one second do I take this to be genuine. He’s just trying something new. He wants something, or worse, he’s going to try to get one over on me.

I listen as Mike tells me the same story that Carmel just finished, only with lots more swear words and hand gestures. The versions are surprisingly similar, but I don’t know if that means they’re probably accurate, or just that they’ve both told the story a lot. When he’s done, he sort of wavers where he’s standing, looking lost.

“So you’re into ghost stories?” Will Rosenberg asks, filling the space.

“Love them,” I say, standing up a little straighter. There’s a damp breeze coming off the water in all directions and my black t-shirt is starting to cling to me, giving me a chill. “At least when they don’t end with a cat-type Yeti crossing the road but not bothering to attack anybody.”

Will laughs. “I know. That’s the kind of story that should end with the punch line, ‘a little pussy never hurt anybody.’ I tell them to add it, but nobody listens.”

I laugh too, even though I hear Carmel mutter toward my shoulder about how disgusting that is. Oh well. I like Will Rosenberg. He’s actually got a brain. Of course, that makes him the most dangerous of the three. From the way that Mike is standing, I know he’s waiting for Will to set something up, to get something going. Out of sheer curiosity I decide to make it easy for him.

“Know any better ones?” I ask.

“I know a few,” he says.

“I heard from Natalie that your mom’s some kind of a witch,” Chase interrupts. “No shit?”

“No shit.” I shrug my shoulders. “She tells fortunes,” I say to Carmel. “She sells candles and stuff online. You wouldn’t believe how much money there is in it.”

“Cool,” Carmel says, and smiles. “Maybe she can read mine sometime.”

“Jesus,” Mike says. “Just what this town needs: another goddamn weirdo. If your mom’s a witch, what does that make you? Harry Potter?”

“Mike,” Carmel says. “Don’t be a jerk.”

“I think that’s a lot to ask,” I say softly, but Mike ignores me and asks Carmel why she’s bothering to hang around such a freak. It’s very flattering. Carmel’s starting to look nervous, like she thinks that Mike might lose it and try to punch me over the wooden rail and down into the shallow water. I glance over the edge. In the dark I can’t really make out how deep it might be, but I don’t think it would be deep enough to cushion a fall, and I’d probably break my neck on a rock or something. I’m trying to stay cool and collected, keeping my hands in my pockets. Just the same, I hope my look of indifference is driving him nuts, because the comments he made about my mom, and about me being some kind of wimpy boy wizard, pissed me off. If he took me over the edge of the falls right now, I’d probably wind up stalking the wet rocks, dead and looking for him, unable to rest until I’d eaten his heart.

“Mike, chill,” Will says. “If he wants a ghost story, let’s give him the good one. Let’s give him the one that keeps the junior high kids up at night.”

“What’s that?” I ask. The hair is prickling up on the back of my neck.

“Anna Korlov. Anna Dressed in Blood.”

Her name moves through the dark like a dancer. Hearing it in someone else’s voice, outside of my own head, makes me shiver.

“Anna dressed in blood? Like Cinderella dressed in yellow?” I make light, because it will frustrate them. They’ll try harder to make her horrible, to make her terrifying, which is exactly what I want. But Will looks at me funny, like he’s wondering why I know that nursery rhyme.

“Anna Korlov died when she was sixteen,” he says after a moment. “Her throat was cut from ear to ear. She was on her way to a school dance when it happened. They found her body the next day, already covered with flies, and her white dress stained with blood.”

“They said it was her boyfriend, didn’t they?” Chase supplies like the perfect audience plant.

“They thought maybe.” Will shrugs. “Because he left town a few months after it happened. But everyone saw him at the dance that night. Asking about Anna, and figuring that she’d just stood him up.

“But it doesn’t matter how she died. Or who killed her. What matters is that she didn’t stay dead. About a year after they found her, she showed up back in her old house. See, they sold it after Anna’s mom kicked off from a heart attack six months earlier. This fisherman and his family bought it and moved in. Anna killed everyone. Tore them limb from limb. She left their heads and arms in piles at the foot of the stairs and hung their bodies in the basement.”

I look around at the pale faces of the small crowd that has gathered. Some of them look uncomfortable, including Carmel. Most of them just look curious, waiting for my reaction.

I’m breathing faster, but I make sure to sound skeptical when I ask, “How do you know it wasn’t just some drifter? Some psychopath who happened to break into the house while the fisherman was out?”

“Because of how the cops covered it up. They never made any arrests. They barely even investigated. They just sealed off the house and pretended nothing had happened. It was easier than they thought. People are actually pretty willing to forget a thing like that.”

I nod. That’s true.

“That and there were words, written in blood all over the walls. Anna taloni. Anna’s house.”

Mike grins. “Plus, there’s no way somebody could have torn a body up like that. The fisherman was a two-hundred-fifty-pound dude. She tore his arms and head off. You’d have to be built like The Rock, be high on meth, and take a shot of adrenaline to the heart to be able to twist a two-hundred-fifty-pound dude’s head clean off.”

I snort through my nose, and the Trojan Army laughs.

“He doesn’t believe us,” Chase moans.

“He’s just scared,” Mike says.

“Shut up,” Carmel snaps, and takes me by the arm. “Don’t pay any attention to them. They’ve wanted to mess with you from the minute they saw we might be friends. It’s ridiculous. This is grade-school bullshit, like saying ‘Bloody Mary’ in front of a mirror at slumber parties.”

I’d like to tell her that this is nothing at all like that, but I don’t. Instead I squeeze her hand reassuringly and turn back to them.

“So where’s the house?”

And of course, they glance at each other like that was exactly what they wanted to hear.