Cauchemar Read online

  Hannah crossed her arms.

  James’s laugh was wooden. “It’s not that uncommon. Conjurers are a dime a dozen here, all claiming to work break-up spells or bring fortune, but that’s just voodoo. The orishas are something else. Those who believe say that most people have to be initiated. There’s a whole complicated process to follow, but some people are especially suited for it.” He looked away. “They said Mae was.”

  Orisha. The word was exotic but strangely familiar, as if she’d heard it echo from some corner of the house while half-asleep.

  Then the rest of James’s words hit her. “Really, James, is this Salem? Say what you will about Christobelle, but how dare you speak about Mae like that? A talented nurse can’t be just that, she has to be cavorting with spirits?”

  James shrugged his shoulders and played with a cat-shaped magnet on the fridge door. “I’m not saying Mae hurt anyone, or ever intended to. People are unnerved by what they don’t understand. She lived in your mother’s house; she raised you. Have you ever asked yourself why?”

  “I was a child,” Hannah said, hating how her voice broke. “The only mother I ever really knew raised me in a good house, where we kept to ourselves. We laughed, we cried, and never wanted for food or anything else. Why here? I don’t know. The woman who knew why is gone.”

  They both fell quiet as a gust of wind rattled the windowpanes.

  “I’m sorry. Interrogating people is a force of habit, I guess.” James cast her a sheepish look and held out a hand toward her belly. “May I?”

  Hannah shrugged. “Knock yourself out, but there’s nothing there yet to feel. I’m just your average chub.”

  “Leah was heartbroken when she heard about this,” James murmured to himself. He cleared his throat. “She’s liked him for what feels like a very long time.”

  Hannah pressed a nail into a soft patch of rot in the other half of the peach, smiling tightly. Jealousy filled her throat as though she’d swallowed the pit.

  After James left, Hannah hopped up onto the kitchen counter and surveyed the room. Callum’s pots were balanced in an unsteady tower in one corner, and a plastic bag filled with extra cutlery was in another.

  She could hear him walking upstairs, stomping and huffing from room to room with his suitcase of clothes. Comfort was stoking a cautious fire in her chest. She resisted it, knowing now how it felt to be without it.

  A clatter startled her and she looked down just in time to see Graydon jump away from the toppled pile of pots. “What’s wrong?” Hannah asked as she slid off the counter and bent down to scratch behind his fear-flattened ears. She followed his yellow gaze to a hole in the wall that tapered off into slivered cracks at either end.

  “It’s just a hole, little one.” As she crawled toward it, she heard Graydon hiss behind her. Gingerly, she touched her finger to the hole and instantly recoiled. The plaster was warm as a wound.

  “What are you doing down there?” Hannah looked over her shoulder to see Callum smiling at her.

  “What are you doing up there?”

  “Enjoying the view,” he said.

  Hannah shook her head. “Maybe you should find another home for these pots. Graydon’s nearly blind and senile, and sweet though he is, he won’t pass up the opportunity to knock things over.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Right away, ma’am.” Callum saluted her and filled his arms with pots. Smiling over his shoulder, he tossed them noisily into another black garbage bag.

  “Not what I meant,” she teased.

  As light drained from the house, Hannah prepared dinner.

  “What in hell is that?” Callum watched intently as she dropped chicken gizzards into a pot of broth.

  “Rice tossed in with livers, onions, and spice. Dirty rice, because it comes out colored.”

  “Racist,” Callum grumbled. She was aware of him fiddling with pantry doorknobs behind her. He paced restlessly, unscrewing the lids of jars, tapping the tops of cans, pestering Graydon with impatient pinches.

  “God, would you sit still already?”

  “I’m hungry,” he said from behind her. A smile entered his voice. “My woman’s taking too long with the food.”

  Hannah shook her head. Even the familiar motions of grinding black pepper and tapping out paprika over the meat couldn’t quite calm her racing mind. She felt most at ease in the kitchen but wasn’t used to being rushed. She wondered if the silence of the house was too much for him. It was an acquired taste. What would he be doing on a Thursday night in town? Any answer to that question would be very different from what she could offer. The smell of smoke pulled her out of her thoughts.

  The livers were crisped to black in the pot. “Shit, it’s burned.” She took the pot off the element and considered the rice crusted at its bottom. “We could add some more broth, and maybe a bit of lemon. Try to make some soup?” she said, mostly to herself.

  “Oh no. Not our dirty rice,” Callum whined. “Here, let me scrape out the worst of it.”

  Graydon fretted in a corner of the kitchen, pawing at the hole in the wall then tensing. “Really, Gray, have you gotten into the catnip,” Hannah began, then squinted.

  The crack had grown.

  “Go ahead and take out whatever’s burned beyond repair,” she said, handing the pot to Callum.

  She knelt in front of the hole in the wall and tried to peer inside. The plaster was raised on either side, like the lips of a mouth. Beyond the edge, all she saw was darkness. She took a deep breath and hesitantly poked a finger into the hole. Feeling nothing there, she shimmied the rest of her hand inside.

  “Jesus, woman, that’s a slow way to escape.”

  “I only just noticed the hole this morning, and it looks like it’s already grown. It must’ve appeared while I was gone.” Hannah wormed her hand in deeper. She was almost wrist deep.

  “Nothing just appears,” Callum said. “Something must’ve thought the house was up for grabs. Out with it.”

  “Just a second.” Hannah felt something tickling against the tips of her fingers. She could imagine a fallen nest, a baby bird birthed in the dank tightness between walls, its voice lost behind layers of insulation. “I think there’s something in here.”

  “Out,” Callum barked. “I don’t want you getting rabies.”

  Her eyes widened as something writhed up her hand. She barely managed to pull it out before the biggest silverfish she’d ever seen, legs like a sunburst, squeezed through the hole and scurried under the counter.

  Hannah stood unsteadily and faced Callum, who slapped his knees as he laughed. “Good God, you raise them big out here.”

  The sensation of so many legs moving along her skin remained like an afterimage, and she rubbed her arms to dispel it.

  “There, now. I’ll seal it up tomorrow. Now, how do you feel about blackened chicken livers sprinkled over a frozen pizza? You’re in for a real treat. Trattoria a Callum.”

  Hannah laughed as Callum struggled to tie the apron strings around his waist.

  Later that night, their muscles sore from lifting and rearranging, they made slow love in Mae’s old bed. Callum’s touch was sleepy, exploratory, and she responded in kind. She saw the muscles of his neck tense above her and realized that this was the first of many such gentle nights. That in less than six months, there would be a child. She gripped his face tightly as he came.

  They lay tangled together afterward, and Hannah felt her body flinch as she slid into a half-dream. Callum stroked her hair, speaking words that she couldn’t quite understand. His hand seemed to tangle in her hair, pulling hard. She heard a child laugh from below Mae’s bed, and her heart jumped from a jumbled mix of panic and happiness.

  It was too soon, she thought, and then: it’s here.

  When she tried to sit up, she felt a great, pulsing weight over her belly. She glimpsed the child from the corner of he
r eyes as it ran out from under the bed, but no matter how she tried to draw its attention, it wouldn’t turn to show her its face. Instead, the child bent down to touch the head of the shadowed creature that lay with its belly low to the ground.

  The white tail curled around the child’s legs. The creature’s eyes were filmed as if blind, but when its tongue reached out, it found the child’s hand with the surety of sight.

  “Darling,” Hannah called in a quavering voice, “come to me.” The child ignored her, running its hand over the walls. Then, Hannah noticed the walls. Something moved in the shifting shadows.

  The child laughed again and moved closer to the wall. Hannah peered closer, and realized that they were silverfish, crawling atop each other. Hannah watched as the child pinched one of the flailing bodies and put it in its mouth.

  Hannah tried to scream but woke up with a moan.

  “It’s just a nightmare,” Callum whispered. Below the susurrations he breathed into her ear, she heard pattering across the walls. Hannah opened her eyes and saw them, black bodies carried like offerings atop their thousands of legs. She strained her neck trying to see past the edge of the bed, to see whether the creature was waiting, yellowed teeth ready for her tender skin. “Callum. Turn on the light.”

  “Hannah, honestly,” he began as he flicked on the light, “there’s nothing there. We’re safe.”

  Hannah looked from his questioning eyes to the bare walls. There were no smears, no trace of a single silverfish. She sat up carefully, still sensing the phantom weight on her chest, but the floor was empty. “Just a dream,” she muttered.

  Callum drew a deep breath and lifted his arm, waiting until she was planted with her back against his chest.

  Callum had filled the hole in the kitchen, but she’d noticed others. Smaller and shallower, but she could swear that they were all fresh, if only from the warmth that emanated from the split plaster. Callum sealed each, but by the fifth or sixth, he began to patrol the hallways, testing the wall with the heel of his boot. “House osteoporosis,” he told her, frowning. “You know these walls. Have you seen holes like these before?”

  Hannah shrugged. “I don’t think so, but it’s a century-old house, at least. Isn’t this par for the course?”

  Callum grunted and knocked on the wall. Hannah half-expected it to give way.

  After Callum left for work, Hannah read, feeling unworthy of the luxury of time she’d been given. She had to admit that the earthy fragrance of moss and wet soil that wafted through the house’s open windows relaxed her in a way the town’s exhaust fumes never could, but her childhood home didn’t feel as familiar as it once had.

  Graydon slept all day, a furred tangle of twitching limbs. Hannah watched him as she lay on the couch and felt almost like she was imitating him. Too often, afternoons sped by as she sat cross-legged on the floor, sorting through the plastic bags of photos she’d found wedged behind old coats and sour-smelling blankets in Mae’s closet.

  She didn’t recognize some of the people—five black women, faces crosschecked by veils from their Sunday hats, arms around each other in front of a fountain. Young Mae beaming from a wedding photo, then in overalls, hoisted over the shoulder of the man from her wedding photo. Hannah struggled to think of him as her husband, just as she couldn’t imagine this bird-boned girl inside the hardy, wise body of her Mae.

  Finding a rare photograph of Christobelle was a shock, her profile against a blurred background of trees, a curtain of red-tinged blonde hair trailing behind her. The slanted light hid her face, mostly masking her features, but Hannah thought she could make out a smile. She wondered how well Mae and Christobelle had come to know each other, and then, with a shock, whether it was Hannah herself that had driven them apart.

  There were dozens of photos of Hannah. In so many of them, she frowned at the camera, as if suspicious that anyone would want to commemorate such a plain face.

  There was a photo of her riding a horse during her only trip to Texas, baby-fat face sunburned and peeling, as the beaten beast huffed around the ring. She’d hated it, the knotted muscles and cramped cartilage clicking between her legs, the coarse horsehair in her fist. And Mae stalking her around the wooden pen, the black Konica affixed to her face like an eyepatch.

  The white border of a Polaroid caught her eye, and she pulled it out. Three over-exposed faces grinned up at her. Sarah Anne, Hannah, and the blank eyes of Sarah Anne’s older brother. She ran her hand over Jacob’s face, and felt static shock gathering in a fingertip. She tried to steady herself by lowering her head to the cool floorboards. Her body followed, and guilt weighted her like another body atop hers. Jacob’s long-dead body.

  She didn’t get up until she heard Callum’s feet on the stairs.

  “What are those?” Callum asked, leaning over to kiss her forehead by way of hello. The photos fell from her hands and fanned out over the hardwood. “Any of you when you were little?”

  “Trust me, you don’t want to see those. I look like a brat, and not a pretty one. You’re home early.”

  “I have a show tonight, and I wanted to check in with the old lady beforehand. I trust that’s acceptable?”

  “Sure is,” she said, and took his hand.

  He groaned as he pulled her up. “You’re getting big. That son of ours is going to be a linebacker.”

  Hannah buttoned up his shirt. “You look vulgar,” she said, and laughed as he stared openly at her growing breasts. “Can we go for a walk or something? I’ve been cooped up all day.”

  He squeezed her shoulder. “I know just the thing.”

  “You’re quiet,” Callum said, walking through the long grass a few steps behind her.

  “You’re quiet, too.” Mosquitoes settled against Hannah’s bare legs, piercing the skin. “Goddammit.” She slapped at her calves.

  “So this sullen silence is tit for tat?” Callum fit himself against her back. He followed her like a shadow. “I thought you’d be happier, being back in the house.”

  “The mosquitoes have been driving me crazy. I’ve never had it this bad before. I woke up this morning and there were a dozen at least, sleeping on my legs like satisfied leeches.” The humming had been constant for days. She shook her head, trying to dislodge it.

  He pinched her back and brought up a still-seizing mosquito, his fingers red with a smear of her blood. “Stay close, then. You’re my own private citronella candle.”

  “Happy to help.”

  “Should I try to guess what’s on your mind?” he asked, his voice laced slightly with impatience.

  Hannah sighed. “I’m a little bit mired in memories. Have you ever heard of the orishas?”

  “Bits here and there,” he said. “Superstition and stories from some of the older guys. This one drummer I knew a while back lost his leg by an alligator but got a souvenir. The damn thing left a tooth wedged in his bone. After that, he got involved with a strange crowd. He claimed that he started having these out-of-body experiences, and that he needed sex at the strangest times, but I saw him have one and it just looked like a bad bit of acid to me. He swore that he was being—what’d he call it? ridden, I think—by one of those orishas, but others who knew more about orishas and the traditions around them claimed it was disrespectful to say so. They got upset, said it was something else affecting him.”

  The open field seemed to fall quiet as he spoke. “What did it look like?” she asked.

  Callum cleared his throat. “Nasty. I remember thinking he might’ve snapped, the way his eyes rolled back and his voice turned hard. He recited every damn ailment his body had, from a bum wrist to, and this is gold, a shrunken testicle. It took a few big men to subdue him, and even then, he just watched us with this strange smile. Some whispers followed us for a while, about devils and the like, but I never put much stock in it.” He shrugged. “Why do you ask?”

  “Have you ever fel
t like you know less about yourself than other people do?” Hannah brushed back her hair, and tried to smile. “I guess I’ve been thinking a lot about this friend I had when I was younger.”

  Callum growled in the back of his throat. “A boyfriend?”

  “A girlfriend, actually.” Hannah let the word hang in the air, realizing after she spoke it aloud that it was true. “Her name was Sarah Anne.”

  Callum scrunched up his eyes. “I’m picturing a curvy little blonde. Correct me if I’m wrong.”

  Hannah was silent.

  “Now I’m picturing the two of you and a room full of pillows.”

  “Nicely done. She was blonde and very beautiful, a textbook cheerleader in the making. Her older brother, too, except he was a bit off. Had been his whole life, but moving here changed him. I’ve been running it over and over in my head, and I think there was something else wrong with him. Maybe he was possessed.”

  “I thought you didn’t believe in that stuff,” Callum teased her.

  The last day Hannah had seen Sarah Anne and Jacob was branded imperfectly in her mind, full of holes and confusion. She stroked her belly, struggling to center herself. There was no greater comfort than being fully known and accepted by another, but would Callum judge her as she judged herself?

  “There was a fire at their house. A terrible fire.” Hannah found it hard to say the words. “Jacob died. Sarah Anne and I were downstairs, and we managed to squeeze out through a window, but he was upstairs.” She frowned at the field. The verdant patches stood out in contrast to the thirsty brown grass. “It moved so quickly that we barely got out.”

  “Jesus.” Hannah could see the questions hiding in Callum’s eyes. “How old were you?”

  “Barely a teenager,” Hannah whispered.

  Callum whistled. “You must’ve been terrified.” He pulled her into his arms. “But that was a long time ago. Why are you worrying about it now?”