Here Lies Olive, page 17
Jay raises one long, thin hand, his flesh rippling, pale bones flickering in and out of my eyesight.
“There.” He points into the darkness at a narrow space between the stone crypts where Maren’s ancestors rest. The corner of a leather book pokes out of the gap. “Next to those—”
His words cut off with a hiss. He drops his hand and balls his fists at his sides. His skin tightens until he’s just a skull with yawning, empty eye sockets staring into the mausoleum—staring at a dark figure crouched over the book.
My mouth falls open, trying to scream, but all that comes out is a strangled wheeze. The iron bars under my hands are frosted with delicate lace. My hands go numb from the cold that washes out of the mausoleum. Fear rolls off Jay in waves, creeping with stealthy fingers up my spine and wrapping me in a never-ending embrace. I feel like I’m watching a drop of ink spread through clear water, polluting it, and I’m helpless to stop it. The darkness spreads, and soon it’s going to pull me under.
The figure puts out one grasping hand and wraps fingers like creeping tendrils of pale smoke around the corner of the ledger. It makes a noise like dry leaves skittering across a dirt road as it disappears deeper into the gap. The cold wasteland that spread from it lifts just enough for me to jerk away from the gate, leaving my fingerprints seared in the cold metal. Jay stumbles back as well, his skin taut against his skull.
“It’s a shade,” I say. My voice wavers, and I swallow a lump the size of a peach pit in my throat. “In the mausoleum.”
Davis narrows his eyes and peers deeper into the darkness. “I don’t see anything. Are you sure?”
Damn right I’m sure. There’s no mistaking the bone-chilling cold or the feeling that I’m teetering on the edge of a bottomless pit. I grit my teeth and nod, rubbing my arms to try to bring back some of the day’s fading warmth. The sun is already dropping below the horizon, and the trees stand out, black and skeletal, against a blaze of color in the sky. The shadows cast by the other mausoleums are already long. In the maze of the dead, darkness has fallen.
“But what’s it doing here?” Davis asks. “Is it the same one that you saw at Seymour House?”
“No,” I say. “Shades are trapped here by an obsession with something from their life that wouldn’t let them pass through. The one we saw at the asylum probably died there . . . and this one . . .”
“Is my great-grandfather,” Maren says in a brittle voice. “He’s in there with the ledger. He didn’t move on because he didn’t want to leave his secrets unguarded.” She steps closer to the iron gate, jaw clenched as she looks deeper into the shadows where the shade lurks. If that dark entity really is William Seymour, then Maren is connected to it by blood. That must be why she can see it, when the one at Seymour House was veiled to her eyes.
“He’s still thinking about the asylum,” Jay says in a hoarse whisper. “Filling it with more bones and blood. It’s all he thinks about.” He shudders, folding in on himself. “I don’t want to go inside. If he sees me, he’ll make me go back.” His pleading eyes bounce between us. “If I go in there, I don’t think I’ll be able to come back out.”
My stomach twists. As terrifying as I find the shade, I know it must be even worse for Jay. He’s facing his greatest tormentor—his worst nightmare. Jay stepping into the mausoleum would be like me stepping into the Nothing.
And there’s a part of me that’s afraid of what will happen to Jay himself if he gets too close to the shade. The shadow in his eyes rose and twisted when we faced the one at Seymour House. Shades are like black holes: They suck away everything good, leaving you with only the worst parts of yourself, the parts that are like slimy creatures under a stone. And the worst part of Jay is the shadow spreading deep inside his mind. Every time he gets close to a shade, that shadow gets stronger. Confronting the shade of William Seymour might be enough to destroy Jay altogether.
“You don’t have to go in,” Vanessa says. “Just me and Maren. He’ll recognize her as a Seymour and won’t realize she’s a threat right away. I can’t see the shade, but I can manipulate the emotions tied up in the ledger long enough for her to take it.”
Maren blanches. The shade at Seymour House didn’t seem to affect her, but that was a different shade—different circumstances. This is her great-grandfather, the part of her past that brought so much suffering to the poor of White Haven, the man who is responsible for everything Maren hates about herself. What if the pain and shame that runs through her veins turns out to be too much, and she wades into the darkness to find the ledger and can’t find her way back out?
The only thing that saved me at Seymour House was taking Maren’s hand—that spark of light that leapt between us.
“And me,” I blurt out. “I’ll go in with you. I don’t think it can hurt us if we’re together—holding hands.”
“Are you sure?” Maren asks, pulling a strand of hair from her ponytail and wrapping it around her wrist.
“No,” I admit. “But that’s the only thing that helped me at Seymour House.”
“Maybe I should go instead.” Davis shifts his feet. “I saw the book when Jay pointed. I can just go in and grab it—”
Vanessa shakes her head. “That won’t work. You can’t take the book, only Maren can. It’s her legacy. And Olive is right. If we hold hands, we’ll be fine. She’s sensitive to spirits and shades. That can be scary, but it keeps her safe because she knows what to watch out for. You’d be helpless in there. Unable to see to what’s happening.”
Davis tenses his jaw and nods, stepping back beside Jay.
“Maren, you go in first,” Vanessa decides. “A Seymour should be the first one through the gate.” She puts her hand on Maren’s arm, her lips curved in an earnest smile. “It’ll be okay. Olive and I will be right behind you.”
My hands, empty and shaking, twist around each other. I’ll be right behind her.
Maren lets the hair around her wrist fall away. She’s wearing the key on a long silver chain around her neck, and she fishes it out of her sweater and hands it to Vanessa. It’s old-fashioned, a skeleton key with the same fancy swirls as the mausoleum gate.
Vanessa puts the key into the lock and turns it.
The gate opens soundlessly. I was expecting it to creak or groan or clang or make some other ghostly noise, but the silence is even worse. It’s the way a gate would open in a nightmare.
A breeze from inside the mausoleum lifts Maren’s hair off her neck as she steps through the gate. For a split second I’m sure Vanessa is going to slam the gate closed behind her, turn the key, and throw it into the shadows. I’m about to leap forward, heart in my throat, but Vanessa just slips the key into her pocket and reaches for my hand. I give it to her without meeting her eyes, and together we slip through the gate into the damp mausoleum.
A candle flares to life. Vanessa drops my hand and leans over another, left behind from a previous mourner. A flame dances from its wick as well. She picks it up and touches it to the other candles in the mausoleum: set into niches, lining the floors between the crypts, grouped together in the corners. Their flickering light illuminates Maren from below, casting her face into shadow.
Vanessa stands with her back to us, fingers spread and palms placed flat against one of the crypts. She hums, low in her throat, muttering words under her breath every now and then. Secrets, I hear, and whispers and vespers and charms. Scarlet and violet and crystal and dreams. Maren stands in the middle of the narrow aisle, shoulders hunched and shaking. I reach for her, and she jumps when I touch her on the back.
She turns, clasping my reaching hand between both of hers. I wrap my fingers around her palm, anchoring her to me. The air seems to ripple, the hairs on my arms standing up suddenly before settling back down. A wild shriek of laughter builds in my throat and I swallow it, choking on it as I force it down into my chest. Anger flashes through my veins, then despair and fear and grasping—always below everything else—grasping, seeking, searching.
“Maren,” Vanessa says in a low, guttural voice. “This is your legacy. Take it.”
The shade uncoils itself from the tight space between the crypts. Cold, the kind of cold that makes you gasp for breath and sticks your eyelashes together, sweeps out over us as it straightens up. Its face is a whirlpool of black that seems to suck every bit of light into the swirling vacuum.
The shade crooks one finger at Maren, beckoning. She inches forward, clinging to me with one hand while searching with the other hand for the book. The shade plucks the book from the mists of darkness it wears like a shroud. The book is just like Jay’s memory: handsome and bound in leather, the initials WS embossed on the cover.
I suck in a breath and hold it tight in my lungs. The ledger. Maren just has to take it from the shade that used to be her great-grandfather, ease the book out of its hands before it realizes—
But as Maren reaches for it, the shade cocks its head at an unnatural angle and draws back. Cold billows out from it, dark clouds that are almost solid. My fingers immediately cramp, and I almost let go of her hand. Gritting my teeth, I squeeze harder, and the darkness recedes just a bit, just enough for me to make out the flickering light of the candles on the stone walls and the human-shaped void that is bearing down on Maren. Her hair whips through the air, a tangled frenzy in snarling wind.
“Take it,” Vanessa commands. She’s standing in the middle of the cold, dark fury, but her clothes hang still and untouched. The bracelets on her wrists, the bow looped around her neck . . . all motionless, unruffled by the howling wind.
“Take your legacy, Maren. He won’t give it freely, but it’s yours just the same. Take it. Take it from his hands and his blood.”
Maren shrinks back, folding in on herself, her fingers slipping away from mine. And suddenly I know that if she lets go, she’ll be devoured by this darkness.
I do it without thinking—tighten my grip on her hand and stiffen my arm to force her back, then step in front of her. A rhythmic beating fills the air, pounding in my veins and rattling the bones in their marble beds. It’s a liquid sound: the hot, wet blood of the Seymours coursing through the thinly veined marble of the stone house.
It’s a heart, I think. The Seymours keep their secrets close to their heart. The walls of the mausoleum bellow in and out as the heart pumps. Blood seeps out of the veins that crisscross the floor and the crypts.
The shade tucks the ledger into its dark shroud and disappears into a crack at the back wall. Blood runs down the walls of the crypts, pooling in the timeworn grooves and names carved into the stone: William Seymour. Edward Seymour. Maren Seymour.
I spin on my heel when I see her name, my breath frozen in my lungs. The metallic scent of blood fills the room, cloying and bitter, and the flickering light of the candles turns Maren’s hair to blood, streaming down her back, blooming like red flowers on the white lace of her blouse.
Pain cleaves my head and rattles my bones. The darkness invades my mind, shock jolting through my entire frame, grating, gnawing, needling.
There’s a voice in my head, and it sounds like Mrs. H. Only this voice is bitter and mocking instead of afraid.
It is Nothing—you’re right, Olive. Look at them and see. So much blood and shame and pain and secrets and love carried around for such a short time. And for what? You see how it ends, don’t you?
Darkness blooms across my vision, black spots that meet and grow until I can’t see anything. Until I see Nothing.
It’s dark and cold. I’m alone. There is no stone floor below me, no stone walls around me. My heart thuds erratically and then stops. It grows cold in my chest, like a dead knot of wood. My lungs stop drawing breath; my blood stops flowing. Everything is still. I try to move, but my arms are held in place. By the shade’s power over darkness or by my mind or by some betrayal of my body, I’m not sure. All I know is, when I try to reach out for Maren, I find Nothing. I can’t touch her, but I also can’t feel her. There is no sense of the girl I’m falling in love with.
If my heart were still beating, this thought would have stopped it. Falling in love isn’t something I do. I’m physically incapable of the kind of vulnerability that love requires.
But I stepped toward the shade for her.
It dawns on me slowly, the way the sun sinks toward the horizon on an autumn evening. Then the night rushes in, and I know that I love her. My body recognized it before my heart did. My feet stepped between Maren and the shade.
My heart flares, one solid thump that sends blood coursing through my veins. It’s not much, but it’s enough for the darkness to fade just enough for me to lift my hand and see my fingers still twisted around Maren’s. I stretch, trying to step toward her, and this time I can sense her, just on the other side of the darkness. Her hold on me is like an anchor as she reaches for something hidden between the crypts and the wall.
The ledger. She clutches it to her chest and yanks on me, reeling me out of the darkness, away from the shade’s power. I can feel my heart gaining strength, even as the darkness threatens to close over me again. The charged air ripples as the shade lets out a noiseless shriek that rattles my bones. The sound is in the air all around me, in the motes of dust that swirl off the crypts, in my clenched teeth and pounding head. The shade rears back, wispy arms clutching at the empty air, the fog that makes it up swirling tighter and tighter until it shrinks down into a squall of fury. Its sound, the one that makes me want to claw out my eyes and bash my head on the wall, grows to a fever pitch.
And then the shade bursts into a kaleidoscope of darkness, a supernova of rage that throws us to the ground.
Chapter 19
worm food
A pair of hands yanks me to my feet none too gently. Davis crushes me against his chest before releasing me so fast that I almost fall back to the ground.
Jay is on his hands and knees, scrabbling under the stone bench for the book. It must have flown out of Maren’s hands when the shade knocked us to the ground. Everything spins. I squeeze my eyes closed, willing my muscles to relax. My arms are tight against my sides, and my jaw aches from holding back a scream.
Vanessa stands by the gate, locking it with the skeleton key, her eyes wide and swimming in shock. She reaches out to brush a cobweb from my hair. Her touch is like ice, the cold from the mausoleum and the shade still clinging to her skin.
“Are you okay?” Maren asks, running a finger down my arm; I shiver and loosen at her touch, letting my head loll forward on my neck.
My pulse thrums in my wrist where Maren touched me, reassuring me that we broke free with the ledger that we came for. All the tension in my body leaks away, and I press a hand to the space between my eye and my temple.
I let out a shaky laugh. “Can we please go? I don’t want to be here any longer than I have to.”
“Where?” Vanessa asks.
I need lots of people, bright lights, music, chocolate—
“Poppy’s,” I say. “I want a Mexican chocolate malt.”
Davis’s jaw tightens in a brief grimace, but he glances at me and adds, “And green chile cheese fries.”
“Won’t people see?” Jay says, running his fingers over the embossed initials on the cover of the ledger. The gold flake is rubbing off.
I shrug. “See what? Friends looking at an old book? If anyone asks, we can tell them it’s something for Junior Reapers that Maren and I are working on.”
“A history of the town’s cemetery bylaws,” Maren says immediately. “How long decorations can be left up after holidays, and the appropriate space left between graves, and—”
“Oh my.” Jay holds up his hands in surrender. “You’re right. That’s terribly dull. Anyone who asks will lose interest in us immediately.”
I laugh. I’m still rattled—it feels like the little discs of jelly that pad the joints between my bones are gone, everything grating together when I move—but laughing helps. And I have a feeling that a chocolate shake will, too.
The neon lights are already on when we get to Poppy’s, and the parking lot is full. Dinner rush. Poppy’s face lights up when Davis walks through the door, and to his credit, he reluctantly smiles back. But even with the owner’s son, we still have to wait for a booth, and I can tell Jay is anxious. He keeps fidgeting, patting the ledger to be sure it’s still tucked under his arm, his face flickering to bones and back again. Poppy finally points us to a corner booth in the back by the jukebox. Jay lays the book in the center of the table as soon as she takes our order and walks away.
I glance at Maren; her eyes are fixed on her great-
grandfather’s initials in the bottom corner of the cover.
“Open it,” she says. “Just open it. I need to know how deep this goes.”
Davis reaches over Jay and flips the cover open. The pages are yellowed, the handwriting old-fashioned and slanting, but each page has a name at the top, followed by a column of numbers and dates and a few short addendums.
Davis turns the pages slowly, looking for Jay’s name. He’s two-thirds of the way through the book when he stops.
“Jay Francis Henderson,” he reads.
Jay sucks in a sharp breath. “Does it—”
Just then, Poppy comes back with a tray loaded with food. Davis leans over the book to take his burger and green chile cheese fries, and Vanessa passes around the rest of the food. I can’t even wait—I’m plucking fries from the greasy paper cone while she’s still reaching across the table, dipping them in my Mexican chocolate malt before it’s even set in front of me. The fries are crispy on the outside and mealy on the inside, and my tongue burns from the bite of ancho chile pepper in the malt.
“God, Olive, don’t forget to breathe,” Davis says. I cross my eyes at him and grab another handful of fries. He’s not the one who faced a shade earlier tonight.
