A spell to wake the dead, p.2
A Spell to Wake the Dead, page 2
Elliot sits on a boulder outside the circle, and Nora and I begin. Together, we speak our sacred words to begin the ritual. We’ve been writing and honing these verses for years, borrowing pieces from spells and lore I’ve read and adding various elements that Nora has intuited on her own.
Nora and I have been practicing witchcraft for years, but the results have only ever been modest at best. I’ve got a notebook full of our spells and sigils and incantations, along with notes on whether they’ve been successful (protection charms, herb oils for banishing nightmares, a cord-cutting ritual after the first girl I ever had a serious crush on broke my heart) and unsuccessful (a glamour to hide acne, a spell to ace tests we didn’t study for, a numerology prediction to help my dad win the lottery).
Some of the spells have been inconclusive. In tenth grade, Nora cast a love spell—despite my warning her that it was a terrible idea—on Chloe Martins, and then Chloe invited her out for coffee the next day. They broke up after a few months, and I suspect Chloe already liked Nora long before she started messing with rose quartz and strands of people’s hair. Lots of people fall in love with Nora without the need for witchcraft. Most of the time, that doesn’t bother me.
“Focus,” she whispers, and I drag my concentration back to our ritual, to the circle on the sandbar, the sand dollar twin of the moon. As Nora speaks the words of her newfound spell, I let my eyes go blurry, let it all flood through me. The wind burning my cheeks and pulling tears from my eyes. The salt scent of the ocean. The gentle hush of the waves, the constant drag of the tide. And the moon, high overhead, illuminating some things with its beaming silver light and shrouding others in shadows. It’s impossible not to feel the magic building.
The wind gusts again, and the candle winks out. Nora sits back on her heels with a grunt.
“Do you want to start again?” I ask.
“No,” she says. “I think that’s a sign that it’s over.”
“Already?” I say. “That felt really short.” It might be my anxiety, not my intuition, but something about this whole ritual is just…off.
“Not everything needs to take a long time to work, you know.” Nora’s tone is slightly sour as she starts gathering up the shells.
I glance over at Elliot, who shrugs.
“Looked fine to me?” he says, but of course he’d say that, because spells all look the same to him. Nora’s the one who planned the ritual and collected the ingredients, so who am I to question her? But everything about this has been strange, and now it’s unfinished, and I don’t know how she’s okay with that. She drops the mason jar lid, and when I hand it to her, she won’t meet my eye.
“I’m going to put this back in the ocean,” she says, picking up the barnacle-covered rock.
“You could just put it in the tide pool where you found it,” I say, but already she’s hurrying off.
Elliot stands and stretches out his lanky frame. “What’s wrong with her?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “That was weird.”
He starts to speak, then pauses. He’s so close I can feel the electricity of him again. In the silvery moonlight, he looks like a silent film star, shadowed and striking with his gray eyes fixed on me.
He clears his throat. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.” My pulse is thundering. The wind roars, whipping my coat, throwing my long, black hair around my face, shoving me toward him.
“Is it—” Elliot stops short, his eyes cutting to something over my shoulder.
Down at the ocean’s edge, Nora screams.
CHAPTER 2
We race toward her, our boots pounding the wet sand. There’s another tide pool between us and the ocean, and Elliot charges through while I find a shallower place to cross. Nora is still screaming, and in the moonlight, I can see her backing away from a large object on the ground.
Elliot reaches her first, bends low to look at whatever that thing is, and then staggers backward. He wraps his arms around her, pulling her away from it, and I still can’t understand what’s happening, can’t make out what the thing is. Maybe a dead seal or dolphin, washed up by the tide? But we’ve seen those before, and they wouldn’t make Nora scream like that.
And then I’m closing in and I see it, and my brain starts to understand. Dark hair splayed out like seaweed on the sand. A long, gray dress tangled around thin legs. Skin so pale, it’s almost glowing.
I crash to a stop beside them, hands clasped over my mouth. “Oh God, oh God,” I keep muttering against my frozen fingers.
“I th-thought it was a dead animal,” Nora stammers. “Then I got closer and I thought it was a person sleeping. Like, maybe kids were drinking out here and somebody wandered off and passed out. Or maybe they ODed.”
It wouldn’t be the first time somebody overdosed around here. It happened to a girl from our school last year. She’d just graduated, and her friends were too messed up to call an ambulance to save her.
Through the wet fabric of her dress, the dead woman’s ribs stand out like the rungs of a ladder. I can’t tear my eyes away from her.
Nora’s teeth are audibly chattering. “I c-came over to try and wake her up before the tide came in. And when I touched her shoulder, she…she rolled over. And…oh God, she was so cold.” She buries her face in Elliot’s chest and he hugs her tighter, and underneath the shock and horror, for a tiny, selfish moment, I wish that was me.
The tide is slithering closer, tiny waves licking at the ends of the dead woman’s hair. It’s impossible to tell how old she is—or was. Her eyelids, just barely cracked open, reveal a glimpse of white inside. Her cheeks are sunken holes. But what keeps drawing my gaze is her mouth. It hangs open, revealing torn gums. Sour nausea floods my own mouth.
“Where are her teeth?” I say.
“Where are her fucking hands?” says Elliot.
I peer at the lace sleeve that’s draped across her stomach, and my throat closes up. He’s right. There’s no hand under there. I can’t see her other arm—it’s tucked under her back at an unsettling angle. This woman didn’t just overdose or pass out. Somebody killed her and took pieces of her. Eyes watering, I swallow hard.
“It seemed she was going to sit up, right before she rolled over.” Nora sobs. “I still keep thinking she’s going to wake up and say something.”
“God, I hope not.” I take a big step back and pull out my phone. “We need to call the police before the tide pulls her out.”
Maybe we should drag the body closer to the shore, but I can’t bring myself to touch it. Plus, every cop show I’ve ever watched has told me that’d be tampering with evidence. It takes me three tries to type 911 into my phone, and as I hold it up to my ear, the wind roars harder, blotting out all other sound. The dead woman’s flimsy sleeve flutters over the place where her hand should be.
“Hello?” I yell, only faintly able to hear the person on the other end of the line. “I’m on Mayflower Beach, and there’s a dead body here.”
* * *
~ ~ ~
Twenty minutes later we’re standing in the dry sand by the dunes, wrapped in crunchy silver blankets and blinded every few seconds by industrial-strength flashlights. I’m numb, with the wind swarming all around me. Nora is on the phone with her mom, who’s in the middle of her night shift at the nursing home.
“No, it’s fine. I’m fine.” A stray beam of light hits her face, making the tears on her cheeks shimmer, but her voice is steady. “Don’t leave work. I’m with Mazzy, and her mom’s on her way.”
“Do you want to sleep at my house?” I ask.
She repeats the invitation into her phone, and then nods and gulps. “Okay. Yeah. No, really, I’m fine.”
I put my arm around her shoulders. She’s shaking. We’re both shaking. Elliot and his dad are over by the path through the dunes, talking to a police officer. He hasn’t made eye contact with either one of us since we came back from the water’s edge, and I can’t blame him—he’s probably in shock—but I wish he’d come over here. It feels wrong for us all not to be together right now.
A figure in a flapping bathrobe comes stumble-running down the path, and then my mother’s arms wrap tight around me and Nora. She was baking earlier this afternoon, and the warm, cinnamon scent in her hair and clothes washes over me and, suddenly, finally, I’m sobbing. We stand there for a long while, all clinging to each other, until I can breathe again.
“Where’s Henry?” I ask, wondering if she left my four-year-old brother in the car, because my dad’s working until at least eleven tonight.
“He’s at home, asleep,” she says. “Jan from next door is keeping an eye on him.”
Way out on the sandbar, a floodlight illuminates the body, which is now lying on a stretcher, zipped inside a body bag. The water in the tide pools is getting deeper by the minute.
“Can I take the girls home?” my mom asks one of the many police officers hovering around.
He relays the question into a walkie-talkie, then nods. “The witness statements are all set. We’ll call you if we have any further questions.”
I don’t know what I expected, but it feels wrong to just walk away from this monstrous event. There should be more—we should all go down to the station to figure everything out now. But the officer just turns his back and stares out at the sandbar. Nobody knows what to do or say. This isn’t the kind of thing that regularly happens on Cape Cod, especially not at this time of year when the summer chaos has faded away.
We catch up with Elliot and his dad by the parking lot, and our parents exchange useless words like awful and tragedy and traumatic. Nora, Elliot, and I just stand there, waiting for them to come to some kind of closure, and then we all head silently to their cars, which are parked next to each other.
It’s funny, somehow, them parking so easily here. If this had happened on a sunny July day, they’d never have made it into the packed lot. I can’t stop imagining that handless, toothless body floating up to this beach, jam-packed with people in midsummer. One of its long, slack legs brushing up against a little kid swimming. Suddenly, my stomach heaves and I have to stop walking because I’m about to throw up on the gravel.
“Come on, hon. I’ll drive you to your car.” My mom holds the passenger door of her car open. Nora is already inside, and Elliot’s dad is backing out of his space. Elliot’s devastated face appears in the window as they pull away, and his mouth opens like he’s going to say something, but then they’re gone.
The wind gusts again, knocking me sideways, and inside the frigid blast of air, I almost think I hear a woman’s voice singing.
CHAPTER 3
A Christmas movie plays on the TV, even though it’s only November, and Nora and I are both scrolling on our phones. My mom keeps bustling back and forth between the kitchen and the living room, asking how we’re doing every time she brings us a new drink or snack. They’re starting to pile up on the coffee table: mugs and glasses and popcorn and chips and M&Ms and a plate of fresh-baked pumpkin bread that turns my stomach every time I look at it.
“Do you want to change the movie?” she asks, draping a crocheted blanket over Nora’s legs and then pressing her hand to my forehead, like I might have caught a fever from tonight’s trauma.
Nora and I exchange a glance. She shrugs.
“We’re fine,” I say. There’s no movie we’ll actually watch, but it’s nice to have something droning in the background.
“Okay.” She looks at the empty spot on the couch next to me, then at the clock. “Henry’s going to wake up in a few hours. Do you need me to stay up with you?”
“I think we’re good,” I say. “Are you working tomorrow?”
“Not until ten,” she says, “and I can call in if you need me to stay home.”
My mom manages a gift shop in Hyannis, so there’s no such thing as a real weekend for her. Or for my dad either, who is snoring in his recliner in the corner. He works as a line cook at one of the biggest restaurants in town, and it was eleven thirty by the time he finished his double shift and got a ride home. When we told him what happened, he blew out all of his breath and said, “Well, fuck.” He stayed with us for moral support, but as soon as my mom turned on the TV, his eyes started drooping shut. I’m not mad about it. His snoring is less stressful than my mom’s constant hovering and questioning.
“Okay, well…” She checks the popcorn bowl, which is still as full as ever, then picks up two empty mugs. “You know where to find me if you need anything. Good night, girls.”
“Night,” I mumble, swiping to the next video, but even the tiniest, fluffiest kittens aren’t calming my anxiety like they usually do. The sloths aren’t helping, and not even the red pandas, lifting up their stubby arms to intimidate potential attackers and looking like teddy bears who want a hug.
“The problem is,” Nora says, “nobody from the Cape has been reported missing for a long time. And she looked recently dead, didn’t she?”
I glance up from my screen. “Huh?”
“I’m looking at photos in missing persons databases,” she says. “Trying to figure out who the dead woman might be, but since nobody’s gone missing from around here recently, I’m searching for people from other places. Because, in theory, she could have come here on vacation from anywhere.”
“How can you tell from a photo?” I ask. “I have no sense of what she looked like before she died.”
Nora’s eyebrows lift as she continues to swipe at her screen. “I can picture her perfectly.”
“How, though?” I say. “She was just so blank and pale and…I don’t know…dead. And we couldn’t see her eyes. How old do you even think she was?”
Nora sits up straight, folds her legs under her, and shuts her eyes. “She was twenty-seven or twenty-eight. Long, wavy dark hair. Like yours. She looked a bit like you, actually.”
“Her hair was shorter than mine,” I say. Mine is so long I can sit on it, which makes it longer than everyone else’s. Plus, I don’t want to look like a dead woman.
“She was willowy and graceful.” Nora stretches her arms out like a dancer. “She loved music and art. And reading. She may have been a teacher. I think her name started with an M.”
I shrug. There’s no point in arguing with Nora when she gets like this. “We could ask my tarot cards about her. Not that they’ll specifically tell us her name, but maybe we’ll find out some more general details?”
Nora’s eyes snap open. “Yes.”
* * *
~ ~ ~
Two minutes later, she’s sitting cross-legged on my quilt, the one my grandmother made for me just before she died three years ago. I take a wooden box from my bedside table, slide the lid open, and hold the blue-and-silver deck out to Nora.
“You’re the one who feels the strong connection to her,” I say. “You shuffle.”
She shakes her head. “You’re better at this than I am.”
That’s true, even if it’s vain to admit it. I’ve been reading cards since I was thirteen. I put in the time and work to learn all the symbols and meanings of each card, all the subtleties and differences between each deck I own. My mom says tarot cards are purposely vague, so people are just seeing what they want to see, but mine have been uncannily accurate about a lot of things. Like the time I kept pulling the Tower, the card of sudden and total destruction, every day for a week, and then on Saturday night, my dad drank too many beers with his friends after work, crashed his car into a cranberry bog, and ended up losing his license.
Nora always reminds me that the Tower isn’t necessarily a terrible thing, that there’s no such thing as a bad tarot card. And I agree, to a point. After everything blows up, you have no choice but to start again from scratch, to fix whatever caused the disaster in the first place. My dad quit drinking after the accident and started going to AA meetings. It’s been hard for all of us, and it sucks that we have to drive him places or he has to ride his bike for the next year, but I think the outcome was ultimately positive. In that case, Nora was right that sometimes you have to blow things up to fix them.
But it terrifies me that there’s nothing stopping our lives from blowing up over and over, endlessly and forever. Yes, I stopped pulling the Tower after my dad’s car crash, but I know it’s lurking in there, waiting for the next big explosion. And sometimes you don’t have any control over what caused it or what happens next. There’s no way of knowing or preparing, and I hate not being prepared for everything.
“Let’s do it together,” I say, shuffling the cards a few more times, and then handing them to Nora. “Speak what you want to know.”
“Who is the woman we found?” Nora shuffles once more.
“And what happened to her?” Using my left hand, I cut the deck into three piles, and Nora stacks them back up with the middle section on top. With a deep breath, I begin to lay them out.
The Moon. Secrets and shadows and hidden forces at work.
The Queen of Swords. A strong-willed woman, intelligent and decisive.
“That’s her,” whispers Nora. “Keep going.”
The Three of Swords. Betrayal, sorrow, grief.
The Ten of Swords. Disaster, misfortune, deep wounds.
The Devil. Addiction, unhealthy relationships, entrapment.
“I guess that makes sense for a murdered woman,” Nora mutters, but my skin is crawling. There might technically be no such thing as a bad tarot card, but together, these cards are unmistakably ominous. I might pull one or two of them in a reading, but never all at once. I flip over another card.
The Fool, reversed. Ignorance, unmindful choices, thoughtlessly leaping into situations.
A shudder slithers up the back of my neck.
“This is a warning,” I say.
