What the Dead Want (16 page)

“T
HEY WERE KILLED IN FRONT OF EVERYONE.
T
HAT
first fire was used to burn down the rest of the church, to murder dozens of people. They were killed by Celia's own father.”

“Killed by the Klan,” Hawk said bitterly. “Same old.”

Gretchen could barely look at him. When she saw the pictures of those men, all she could think was, what if that happened to someone she loved? What if it was Simon, or her father? Or . . . Hawk?

Simon was speechless. He handed Gretchen her camera and then went to sit down. She looked at the digital display. In the photographs of the house she'd taken, fat
leering white men leaned against the porch, drinking and smiling while gray smoke drifted across the frame.

In one of the photographs of Esther she was actually holding a child on her lap. It was missing a leg. In the other pictures inside the house there were people in every frame—sitting in chairs, reading, talking to one another, lighting candles, drinking tea. Playing the piano. The entire house was filled with men and women, seemingly living alongside Esther. And in nearly every frame Rebecca and Celia stood whispering to one another. Trapped forever by an event captured on film for the pleasure of killers who believed what they were doing was good and right.

“We have some of their names,” Gretchen said. “And now we have their faces. These pictures I took—the lynching photographs. We can see who is responsible.”

Her mother would have been astounded. This was certainly the work she would have wanted to do if she were alive, capturing souls on film. But Gretchen could feel how wrong it was, how voyeuristic and strange to obsess over the pain and misdeeds of the dead, to hold them in this world, locked forever in a single moment; evidence, or trophy, the existence of these photographs remained part of the violation of the human spirit.

“All we know is how horrifying this history is,” Hawk said. “We don't know what to do about it.”

“We haven't developed all the pictures yet,” said Gretchen, feeling the now-unmistakable presence of Esther, her drive to solve this—to finish it once and for all. But she felt her own mind and feelings just as strongly. She didn't care about the house. She cared about freedom. Hers and Hawk's and Hope's. It was too late for the dead. Nothing would change the lives they'd lived. Nothing would erase the awful things her ancestors had done. But people needed to know who had committed these crimes and stop calling it the work of a barbaric history, or the WCP or the Klan, or an accident. The Klan is not one single entity, it is made up of individuals. Individuals hanged those men and women, captured them and killed them. Individuals struck those matches. They had names and faces and they never paid for their crimes. Gretchen was glad there was no more romance around the idea of the mansion. It was built with cotton money, by racists. Who murdered her great-great-great-great-grandmother, and the Greens' relatives too. She didn't want her family having one more moment in that house. Any illusion she'd had about her family or its place in history was shattered. All she wanted now was to get the mirror, and she could feel just as strongly that all Esther wanted her to do was use the darkroom. The combined force of their wills was almost too much.

“I'm going over to the house,” she said, standing,
crunching over the glass, a dark stain of blood spreading beneath her shirt where the lamp had hit her. “I've got to see the mirror again. I've got to use the darkroom. And quite frankly I could use a shot or two of gin.”

“You are
crazy
!” Simon said, looking genuinely terrified. “Do you know that?”

“Runs in the family, kid,” she said. “I didn't get outta Saigon when it all came down by being sane.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Simon said.

Hope gave his hand a squeeze. “I'll explain later.”

“I'm coming with you,” Hawk said. “Simon and Hope, you stay here—stay away from the windows and keep going through that archive. We need more names and faces. If Gretchen is right we need to know exactly who did this.”

As he was talking, Gretchen had walked into the kitchen and found the whetstone used to sharpen knives. She took out Fidelia's ivory hair clip and ran it back and forth over the surface, filing the tines of the clip until they were razor-sharp.

Hope stood behind her in the kitchen doorway. “What are you doing?” she asked.

“Giving myself a fighting chance,” Gretchen said. And for the first time she felt truly, deeply afraid that she might
not get out of Axton mansion alive. She put her hair back up and slid the clip in, being careful not to graze her scalp.

Hope came over and gave her a hug. “I'm doing this for our mothers,” Gretchen said, tears in her eyes. “Doing what they didn't have time to finish.”

Hope shook her head. “You're doing it for our daughters,” she said.

When they came out from the kitchen, Simon handed Gretchen the Nikon. It had never felt more like a weapon in her hands.

Outside the crickets were chirping. The wind was blowing hard as they walked along the road instead of cutting through the field. After seeing the lynching photographs, reading Fidelia's journal, and the enormous branch crashing through the window, neither of them wanted to walk past the tree.

Hawk slipped his hand into hers. They walked in unison, her Doc Martens and his sneakers crunching along the dirt road.

Gretchen tried to make small talk as they walked, to keep her mind off what would be waiting for them at the house.

“Hope says you're going to music school in the fall,” she said.

“I am,” he said. “I'm going to Tisch.”

“Tisch?! In the city? Why didn't you say something
before
?”

“Uh . . . well, we were, you know, figuring out you weren't a ghost and then getting your aunt's body out of the house and then solving the accident epidemic and, well, I'm not entirely sure whether you are really you or Esther right now. . . .”

“Ha!” Gretchen said, slapping him on the back.

“See what I mean?” he said.

Gretchen certainly did.

“But yeah,” Hawk said. “I'm going to be in the city. We'll be neighbors.”

“Like Valerie and Fidelia,” Gretchen said.

“I hope luckier than them,” he said.

From where they stood on the road they could see the house. The attic windows were brightly lit, but everything else was dark. In the moonlight they could make out the dark swarm of insects hovering above the weather vane.

“When we go in there,” he said, “no matter what happens, we stick together this time.”

“I
SERIOUSLY WISH WE
'
D BROUGHT A FLASH
LIGHT
,” Gretchen said as they stepped onto the porch. The only light downstairs was provided by the bright three-quarter moon. She tried not to think about the images of ghostly men lurking outside the place. She didn't see them, and if Hawk saw anyone, he didn't tell her.

“Don't worry,” Hawk said, reaching the door first. “The electricity is still on.” He flicked a switch next to the door frame and the porch and the front hallway were flooded with light.

The house looked like it had aged a century while they were gone. Thick dust covered everything, parts of the
wall and ceiling were crumbling, furniture was missing, rags and books were lying around the floor.

The floors seemed to slope sharply down in some places and in others there were holes that went straight into the basement. The staircase was a gauntlet of fallen objects and smashed portraits.

There was no humming or buzzing of insects. No sound at all.

The smell of mold and earth and smoke and metal still permeated the place. They turned on the lights in every room they went through. Gretchen wondered if they were surrounded by specters. If ghosts were there now, reading the newspaper. Going through the pantry, sitting at the piano. But so far no spirit made itself clear to them.

“How long is it going to take?” Hawk asked.

“Shouldn't be that long,” Gretchen said. “I'm just going to process the film and make a contact sheet. But first . . .” She went into the parlor and opened the liquor cabinet, got out the gin, and took a long gulp directly from the bottle.

Hawk watched her, shaking his head.

“You want some?” She offered it to him.

“No thanks, Esther.”

“It'll put hair on your chest,” she said, and winked at him.

Hawk smiled. “I'm all right.”

The drink didn't make Gretchen feel sick like it had the first night she was there; it relaxed her. And she was grateful for it as they headed up the stairs, because the idea of seeing the mirror—seeing the little girls now after having found the horrible photograph of their last moments—was overwhelming.

The house was silent; the uneven floors didn't creak as they walked. But the portraits of her ancestors now seemed to give them smoldering hateful looks as they passed them on the stairs.

And then there they were. Rebecca and Celia, in front of the mirror holding hands, laughing maniacally at their reflections. Their mouths were covered in blood and they were mewling like cats. The gingham dress they had stuffed the cat into lay at their feet torn to pieces.

When Hawk and Gretchen tried to cross onto the attic stairs, the girls turned their heads in unison and stared at them with piercing dark eyes—then ran toward them.

“Help,” Celia shrieked. “Help us! Help!”

Hawk knelt and put out his arms to catch her—she ran to him frightened and trembling, then bit him fiercely on the chest, reached out and scratched his face. Rebecca started laughing.

He tried to hold her back at arm's length but her tiny body was stronger than a grown man's.

Gretchen crouched down too so she could look Celia in the eye.

“We know,” she said. “We know what happened.”

Rebecca shrieked and ran forward, trying to grab Celia and pull her away.

“Shhh,” Gretchen said. “We know.”

“We started the fire,” Rebecca said.

“You did not,” Hawk said, trying to hold both girls as they scratched and bit him.

“Let go, let go,” they chanted.

“
We're
going to fix the house,” Gretchen said. “It's okay.”

Celia's voice changed. “Hey, sweets,” she said. Gretchen stepped back, shocked, and then fell to her knees weeping at the sound of it. It was her mother's voice. It was Mona.

“Sweets,” Celia said with Mona's voice. “It's time for you to go home.” She watched Celia smile at her pain in hearing her mother, and the girls started laughing again.
They're crazy
, Gretchen thought.
And cruel
. And suddenly it made perfect sense. They're crazy from what happened. Enraged. They are trapped and they want everyone to feel pain.

“They have never ever been this strong,” Hawk said to her, still struggling to hold them off.

“I'll bite you; I'll kill you,” Celia hissed at him in her
own voice. He grabbed Rebecca and held her, but Celia wrenched her from his hands and they ran back to the mirror and stood again transfixed, whispering their strange rhyme
.

Sufferus Sufferus to taste of thee in our life's last agony.

And it was then that Gretchen recognized the words from the prayer card she had seen the first hours in the house. It was a Communion prayer. They were praying, chanting the last words they had said before being set on fire. They were repeating it like an incantation.

“Why do they stand there like that?” he asked. “What's holding them there?”

“C'mon,” Gretchen said. “There's no time.” They bounded up to the attic, past the studio and into the darkroom, then slammed the door. The last time Gretchen had been in there—just last night—she had watched her aunt dying, writhing in pain at the very end. She quickly got out the jugs of chemicals, rewound the film in the Nikon, and popped it out of the camera. “I have to turn off all the lights for this,” she said. “Even the safelight.”

In the pitch-darkness she opened the roll and wound the film onto the spool, then put it in the black canister and poured in the first chemical, shaking the canister. Once the film was safely inside she turned on the safelight.

Hawk's face was stricken in terror. The thing was
in the room with them. The thing with the hooves. It was standing in the corner. Even bigger than before, and breathing heavily.

The thing's horrible eyes squinted around the room as if it couldn't see them but could smell them. How it could smell anything over its own terrible stench was a mystery.

They remained as quiet as possible while she processed the rest of the film. Hawk was staring at the thing now, examining it. Gretchen could see his disgust, see him trying to calm himself down. She carefully took the film out of the canister and unrolled it from the spool. There was little time to dry it so she pressed it to her leggings, hoping not to damage it.

Then she took a pair of scissors off the enlarger table and cut it into five neat rows, placed them on the contact sheet and then turned the enlarger on, giving it seven seconds.

The click and light of the enlarger startled the hooved thing and it grunted and shrieked, squealed like an animal about to be slaughtered. It began to stomp and puff itself up, its body changing. It reared up and came closer to Hawk, spinning, trying to stomp on him. Hawk slammed the thing back against the wall, but it came at him again, clawing at his neck.

Gretchen lunged at the thing with the scissors but it
knocked them from her hand, grazing her side. Hawk was trying to grab hold of it now, his hand on the dingy and tattered white sheet, pulling—the thing squealed as Hawk grabbed its face and pushed it into the last tray of chemicals, holding it down as it thrashed and stomped. Gretchen managed to toss the contact sheet into the first tray of the sink and watched the rows of images appear. She rubbed it around in the developer and then tossed it into the fix and counted the eternity of thirty seconds while the creature flailed beneath Hawk's grip. Hawk was punching it now to subdue it. And the thing seemed to be getting weaker.

Gretchen grabbed Hawk's hand, holding the contact sheet in the other and pulled him away from the creature, and they ran from the room, slamming the door. Outside the room was the man dragging the sack. Waiting.

He reached out a bony hand and grabbed Hawk, pulling him toward the sack. Gretchen pulled the ivory hair clip from her head, leaped forward, and stabbed him in the stomach until a thick viscous liquid poured from the man, spilling onto the floor. She held the contact sheet away from him and tried to run, but slid in the dark oily blood and began to fall.

Hawk grabbed her and helped her up. They ran for the stairs and took them two at a time. When they reached the bottom Gretchen was weeping with frustration at having
to leave the mirror again. She turned as if to head back, but Hawk pulled her hand hard, trying to shake some sense into her, and then they heard Celia and Rebecca shrieking behind them, asking for help, then laughing and calling, “Here, kitty kitty kitty, here, kitty kitty kitty. Come play with us. . . .”