I practically have to push Evan back up the path to the villa. When we get there, I see that my mother and Phillip are done eating: the table is abandoned, flies gathering thickly around a plate of fried plantains. I push Evan down on a lounger, where he sits limply, his head in his hands.
“I’ll be right back,” I tell him, though he barely seems to hear me.
I head inside through the double doors. I’m not sure what I’m thinking now—that if I beg my mother and Phillip, they’ll take us home on the next plane, cutting our vacation short? That they’ll take Evan to the hospital, anything to get him away, even if Damaris says it won’t make any difference?
Their bedroom door is shut; I stop in front of it, my hand up, about to knock. There are voices audible from the other side: Phillip shouting, my mother saying something, trying to calm him down, but it isn’t working. His voice rises even as hers spirals down into soft gasps. She’s crying. My hand is frozen in midmotion like a statue’s. My mother’s sobs roll softly under the door like the sound of the tide being sucked back out to sea, cut off suddenly by the sound of a slap, sudden as a gunshot. I hear her gasp, and suddenly everything is quiet.
“Carol…” Phillip says. I can’t tell if he sounds sorry or just tired. I am not sure I care. It will always be like this, I think, for the rest of my life, listening through a closed door as Phillip slowly destroys my mother, bleeding her soul dry as surely as Mrs. Palmer is bleeding Evan’s.
I step away from the door and the silence on the other side of it. In the living room Phillip’s golf clubs gleam in the leather bag that hangs from one of the hooks beside the front door. I grab a nine-iron and walk out onto the deck. Evan is lying on the lounger where I left him, his head on his crooked arm. He is so still I have to check the faint rise and fall of his chest to see that he’s still alive before I turn toward the path that leads down to the ocean.
The sea at night is black as ink. If I were a ghost flying over it, I wonder, could I see my face in its mirrored surface? It pounds onto the beach, sending up white froths of spray, as I slip through the gate of Mrs. Palmer’s house and into the garden.
Everywhere the shards of glass slice up out of the sand like shark fins slicing through water. The air here by the ocean is thick and hot to breathe. I raise the nine-iron in my hand; it feels heavy and solid. I bring it down hard against the nearest shard, half expecting the club to bounce off it. But the glass shatters, spiderwebbing out into a million cracks. A white puff of smoke rises from it, like an exhalation of cigarette smoke, and dissipates into the night air.
I stand there breathing hard, holding the club. And then I swing again, and again. The air is full of the lovely, silvery sound of shattering glass. A light goes on suddenly—the porch light of the house—stabbing into my eyes, but I keep swinging, bashing glass after glass after glass, until something seizes the other end of the nine-iron and it’s wrenched viciously out of my hand.
Mrs. Palmer is standing in front of me. She no longer looks perfectly put-together; her hair is damp and tangled, her eyes wide and wild. She’s wearing a long black dress, cap-sleeved, old-fashioned. She really does look like a witch. “What do you think you’re doing?” she half screams. “This is private property, my property—”
“These don’t belong to you,” I tell her. My voice is steady, but I can’t help backing up a step or two; my flip-flops crunch on the ground. “They’re souls.”
She gapes at me. “Souls?”
“Whatever you want to call them. The lives you’ve stolen. You put them in the mirrors. That’s where you keep them.”
Her voice is a snarl. “You’re crazy.”
“I saw you do it,” I tell her. “I saw what you did to Evan. I was looking through the window.”
Her mouth opens, and then I see her eyes go to the key in my left hand. “Damaris,” she says. “That woman is a meddler. She never knows when to stay out of other people’s business.”
“I want you to leave my stepbrother alone,” I tell her. “I want you to let Evan go.”
Despite her anger her red lips curl into a smile. “Damaris must have told you it’s not that easy.”
“If you don’t let him go, I’ll come back—I’ll smash the rest of these—I’ll tell everyone where you’re keeping the souls, and then everyone will know—”
“Your stepbrother,” she says. “He used to talk about you. He knew you had a crush on him. He said he found it amusing.” The anger is gone from her voice now; it has a lilt to it, the way she’d talked to Evan when she offered him the bottle of juice. “You were a joke to him, Violet. So why are you putting so much of your energy into saving him now?”
It hurts, what she says. I tell myself she’s lying, but it hurts anyway, a sharp sting, like getting lemon juice in a shallow cut. I take a breath. “I love him. Damaris said he could only be helped by someone who loves him—”
“But he doesn’t love you,” she says. “That is how men are. They take the love you give them and they twist it until it becomes a stick to beat you with.” She glances at the club in her hand; her look is vicious. “Tell me I have no right to even the score, Violet. Tell me you wouldn’t do the same in my place. Men are a curse on women’s lives and you know it.”
In my mind I see Phillip and my mother at his feet, picking fruit off the ground with bleeding fingers. “I don’t know what I think about men,” I say. “But Evan is only a boy. He isn’t good or evil or anything else yet. He shouldn’t be punished.”
“He will grow up to be like the rest of them,” says Mrs. Palmer, who murdered her husband in his own bed. In a distant sort of voice, she continues, “They all do. That is why I will not give him up.”
I think of Anne Palmer’s husband, the man with the stick. “Damaris said you wouldn’t give Evan up for nothing,” I say. “But he’s young and weak. What if I could find you something even better?”
Against the darkness, like the sudden, startling gleam of a firefly’s light, I see Anne Palmer’s smile. “Tell me,” she says.
I wake in the morning to bright sunlight and the sound of birds. I lie in my netted bed for a long series of moments. It would be easy to think that last night never happened, any of it, but when I turn my head, I see the plastic bottle sitting on my bedside table next to the alarm clock. The pale liquid inside it shines with a rainbow slipperiness, like an oil slick.
I throw on a batik beach dress and slide my feet back into my flip-flops. There are cuts speckled across my ankles where flying glass sliced my skin, but I am fairly sure that no one will think the red dots are anything but mosquito bites. I pick up the bottle on my way out. It feels heavy, heavier than if it were full of water. When I tilt it, the liquid inside makes a thick, sloshing sound.
Damaris is in the kitchen, frying bacon in a pan. She says nothing, but I can see her watching me out of the corner of her eye as I take a highball glass from the cupboard and fill it with ice. I unscrew the top of the plastic bottle Mrs. Palmer gave me last night and pour the liquid over the ice. It glops slowly out of the bottle neck, thick as lava. It smells vaguely medicinal, like herbs. As I stare at it, Damaris reaches around me and drops a slice of lemon into the glass. “There,” she says. “Tell him it is for his headache.”
I nod at her and take the glass out onto the deck. Evan is still lying in his lounger, but now his eyes are open and there is some color in his skin.
He won’t remember anything? I said to Mrs. Palmer last night in her glass garden, souls like bits of shining jagged teeth glittering all around us. You promise?
He won’t remember, she had promised. Only the vacation. The sun. The sand. And then the accident.
My mother is sitting in a chair next to Evan, fussing and trying to get him to hold a cold washcloth against his face; he pushes her hand away fretfully, but at least his voice is strong when he tells her no. She is wearing dark sunglasses again, but they don’t hide the discolored skin of her cheek. I take a long look at both of them before I cross the
deck to the shaded alcove where Phillip sits with the newspaper open on his lap.
“Hi,” I say.
He looks up, his narrow, cold face expressionless in the sunlight. There is no guilt in the way he looks at me, no inner admission that last night he did something that, even if my mother forgives, I do not. But I doubt Phillip is interested in my feelings, either way. He has never thought of me as a person at all, with the power to bestow forgiveness or withhold it.
It has to be fast, not slow, I’d said to Mrs. Palmer. I don’t want it drawn out. I want you to take it all at once.
She’d smiled with sharp, white teeth. All at once, she’d promised, and handed me something flat and shining and sharp. A bit of broken mirror.
Evan’s soul.
It’s yours, she said. To keep, or to break it open to return it to him entirely.
I slid it under my bed last night, where it lay reflecting the moonlight. I’ll break it open tonight, I told myself. Break it and give Evan back his soul. I’ll do it tonight.
Or tomorrow.
I thrust the drink out toward Phillip. In the sunlight it looks like ordinary water, with a pale lemon wedge floating in it. Still, I can hear the hissing whisper of the thick liquid sliding over the ice. Or maybe I’m imagining that. “Here,” I say. “Damaris sent this out for you. She said it would be good for your headache.”
He frowns. “How did she know I had a headache?” I say nothing, and after a moment he sets the newspaper down and takes the glass from my hand. “Thank you, Violet,” he says in that stiff, formal way of his.
And he takes a swallow. I watch his throat as the liquid goes down. I have never watched Phillip with such fascination before. At last he sets the glass down and says, “What kind of juice is that?”
“Aloe,” I tell him. “Damaris says it’s good for healing.”
“Folk nonsense.” He snorts and reaches for his paper again.
“There’s one more thing,” I say. “That woman, the one Evan was helping, well, her car’s still broken. She said Evan couldn’t figure out how to fix it.”
Phillip snorts. “I could have told her that. Evan doesn’t know anything about cars.”
“She was hoping you’d take a look at it for her,” I tell him. “Since you know. You probably know more about this stuff than Evan does.”
“That’s right. I do.” He picks up the glass again, drains it, and smacks his lips. “I guess I ought to go help the poor woman out.” He stands.
“That would be great.” I point down the path. “She lives there, in the pink house, the one that looks like a flower. She’s expecting you.”
And she is. He’s my stepfather, I had told Mrs. Palmer. He’s strong, stronger than Evan. Older. And he hits my mother. Just like your husband hit you.
Phillip pats my shoulder awkwardly. “You’re a good girl, Violet.”
No, I think. That is one thing I am not. Because somewhere in the pink house, Anne Palmer is waiting, Anne Palmer with her red lips and her garden of glass, and her mirrors that take your soul. I watch as Phillip jogs down the path, a little stiff in his new flip-flops, the sunlight bouncing off his head where he’s starting to go bald. I watch, and I say nothing. I watch, because I know he is never coming back.
Nowhere Is Safe
LIBBA BRAY
Hello? We recording? I see a red light, so I’m hoping my battery lasts. Okay, pay attention, because I’ve got only one shot at this, and it’s gonna come at you on the fly. If you found this on YouTube, you are seriously lucky, because you need to know this.
Sorry about that banging in the background. It’s too hard to explain right now, and you don’t want to know what’s on the other side of that door. Trust me.
My name’s Poe, by the way. Poe Yamamoto. And that’s Poe as in Edgar Allan. Yeah, ’cause what guy doesn’t want to be saddled with that name? Crap, I’m all over the place. Okay. Focus, dude. Tell the story.
Let’s say you’ve just graduated high school and you’ve decided to celebrate the end of thirteen years of compulsory education with a little backpacking trip in Europe with some friends. You do the do: Paris, Dublin, Venice—which, by the way, smells like pigeon shit fried in grease—London (cold, wet, expensive, but you knew that), maybe some beers in Germany. And just maybe one of you says, “Hey, let’s go off the grid, check out some of these mysterious towns in Eastern Europe, hunt for vampires and werewolves and things that go bump in the Slavic night.” Why the hell not, right? You’re only doing this once.
So you pack it up and head east. You take a train through the kind of forest that’s older than anything we have here, older than anything you can imagine. Like you can practically smell the old coming off that huge wall of forever trees, and it makes you feel completely small and untested.
Anyway.
You get to a village and you notice the big honkin’ evil-eye pendants the locals hang from their windows. Maybe you even laugh at their quaint superstitions. That, my friend, is the kind of arrogant crap that can get a guy killed. It’s not quaint and it’s not superstitious. There’s a reason those villagers are still alive.
You hang out, eat thick, spicy stew, try to make conversation with the locals, who keep telling you to move on—go see Moscow or Budapest or Prague. Like they want to get rid of you. Like you’re trouble. You ignore them, and one day you and your friends might find yourselves venturing into that unfamiliar forest, winding through a thick mist that comes up out of nowhere. This is not the time to stop and take a piss on a tree or make a travelogue video for your family back home.
You know that prickly feeling you get on the back of your neck? The one that makes you scared to turn around? Pay attention to that, Holmes. That is a Me-No-Likee signal creeping up from the lizard part of your brain—some primal DEFCON center of your gray matter left over from the very first ancestors that hasn’t been destroyed by gated communities, all-night convenience stores lighting up the highways, and a half dozen fake Ghost Chaser shows on late-night cable. I’m just saying that lizard part exists for a reason. I know that now.
So if you’re walking down that unfamiliar path and the mist rises up out of nowhere and slips its hands over your body, turning you around until you don’t know where you are anymore, and the trees seem to be whispering to you? Or you think you see something in the dark that shouldn’t exist, that you tell yourself can’t possibly exist except in creepy campfire stories? Listen to the lizard, Holmes, and do yourself a favor.
Run. Run like Hell’s after you.
Because it just might be.
We still recording? Good. Let me tell you what happened, while I still can.
I don’t know who got the idea first—might have been me. Might’ve been Baz or Baz’s cousin, John. Could even have been my BFF, Isabel. Just three guys and a girl with backpacks, Eurorail passes, and two full months before we had to report to college. Somehow we’d managed to blow through most of our money in a month. That’s when one of us—again, I can’t remember who—suggested we stretch our cash by packing it through Eastern Europe.
“It’s that or we go home early and spend the summer at the Taco Temple handing bags of grease bombs through the drive-thru window,” Baz said. He was on his fourth German beer and looked like a six-foot-four, sleep-deprived goat the way he staggered around. There was foam in his new chin scruff.
“Can’t we go to Amsterdam instead? I hear you can smoke pot right out in the open,” John pleaded.
Isabel shook her head. “Too expensive.”
“For you guys,” John mumbled.
“Don’t be that way,” Isabel gave him a kiss, and John softened. They’d been a thing since the second week in Europe, and I was trying to be cool with it. Izzie was worth ten of John, to be honest. “So where should we go? Not someplace everybody and their freaking aunt Fanny go. Let’s have a real adventure, you know?”
“Such as, my fine, travel-audacious princess?” said Baz, being all Bazlike, which is to say just one toe over th
e friend side of the Cheeky-Friend-or-Obnoxious-Jerk divide. He tried to pat Isabel’s faux hawk. She shook him off with a good-natured glare and a threatened punch that had Baz on his knees in mock terror. “Mercy,” he cried in a high voice. Then he winked. “Or not. I like it either way.”
With a roll of her eyes Isabel opened our Europe on the Cheap travel guidebook and pointed to a section entitled “Haunted Europe” that gave bulleted info about off-the-beaten-path places that were supposedly cursed in some way: castles built out of human bones, villages that once hunted and burned witches, ancient burial grounds, and caves where vampires lurked. Werewolf or succubus hot spots—that sort of thing.
John tickled Isabel and grabbed the book away. “How about this one?” He read aloud, “‘Necuratul. Town of the Damned. In the Middle Ages Necuratul suffered from a series of misfortunes: a terrible drought, persecution from brutal enemies, and the Black Death. And then suddenly, in the fifteenth century, their troubles stopped. Necuratul prospered. It escaped all disease and repelled enemy attacks with ease. It was rumored that the people of Necuratul had made a pact with the devil in exchange for their good fortune and survival.
“‘Over the past century Necuratul’s fortunes have dwindled. Isolated by dense forest and forgotten by industrialization, most of its young people leave for the excitement of the cities and universities as soon as they can. But they return for the village’s festival day, August 13, in which Necuratul honors its past through various rituals, culminating in a Mardi Gras–like party complete with delicious food and strong drink. (Necuratul is famed for its excellent wines as well as its supposed disreputable history.)