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
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,
