Shallow Graves Read online

  But I didn’t know that yet, during the last week of summer, and I was tired of not knowing how much to care.

  I put my feet up on my windowsill and dropped Diane’s invitation on the bed beside me.

  “Well, she did,” I said. “Are you going?”

  Melanie laughed again. “No way. Don’t you think we’re a little old for pizza and stupid horror movies now?”

  I did, but I went to Diane’s birthday party anyway, mostly because I was angry at Melanie for deciding who among our acquaintances would still want me around and who wouldn’t. I wrapped up a present in gold and white paper, rang the doorbell, smiled when Diane’s mother answered.

  Mrs. Fordham’s expression was distant and cool. “Diane and the others are upstairs. I’m so glad you could make it.”

  She didn’t greet me by my name; I wasn’t sure she even knew it. After the party the year before, as I had been rolling up my sleeping bag and shoving my clothes into my backpack, I had heard Mrs. Fordham saying to her daughter, “Why don’t you ask that nice Oriental girl to help you study? They’re very good at school, you know. It’s part of their culture.” I didn’t hear Diane’s answer, but she never did ask me to help her study.

  I hurried through the white living room, conscious of my shoes on the carpet, of Mrs. Fordham’s eyes on my back. I gave her a quick smile before running up the steps. Diane was there, of course, and her two best friends Courtney and Julie, but so were Maria and Tatiana. I was relieved to have at least two real friends for the night.

  Diane unfolded herself from her corner of the sofa and stood to take the present from me.

  “Thank you,” she said stiffly. “I didn’t want to invite you, you know.”

  I was surprised by her directness. I knew Diane didn’t like me very much and inviting me to her birthday party was more habit than anything else, but we usually pretended. We were pretty good at pretending.

  “But my mom would wonder where you were if I didn’t,” Diane went on. “She doesn’t know what a slut you are. I wasn’t going to tell her.”

  “Jeez, Diane,” Maria said. “You don’t have to be a bitch about it.”

  But she laughed, because Maria laughed at everything, and I had to laugh too. Melanie would love to know she had been right. I had managed to get dirt all over Diane’s pretty white house even without spilling a thing.

  Diane ignored me for the rest of the night. We watched a movie about college kids getting murdered by a professor possessed by the spirit of a serial killer, and when it was done Diane ordered pizza and dragged Courtney downstairs to fetch soda and chips. When they came back, Diane had a DVD case in her hands. It was plain on the outside, printed words and no pictures; she tucked it between the arm and cushion of the chair before we could see it. Tatiana asked her if she had any alcohol, just to see how she would react, and Diane informed us that nobody in her family would ever drink.

  The pizza arrived, we scattered paper plates and napkins all over the room, and Maria launched into a story about her cousin in Mexico who had decided to hitchhike through Central and South America, all the way down to the tip of the continent, and the trouble he was getting into, the people he was meeting, the mornings he woke up confused and disoriented after partying with strangers. It sounded equal parts fun and terrifying, and when Maria was finished, Julie said she would like to do something like that, something brave and adventurous, maybe after graduation. The rest of us agreed in the way of girls who had three long years before after graduation meant anything, a safe distance from which all wild ideas were possible.

  But not Diane. Diane only said, “That’s awful. He’s going to get himself killed.” Then she carried the DVD over to the player, put it in before any of us could get a look at it. “We’re watching this next.”

  “What is it?” Courtney asked.

  “My youth pastor gave it to me,” Diane said. Courtney groaned and rolled her eyes; Diane glared at her. “It’s not like that. It’s not a church thing. It’s better than a horror movie, because it’s real.”

  “It better not be a church thing,” Courtney said.

  Julie asked, “Is this the hot youth pastor you told us about?”

  Diane blushed. “He’s married,” she said, and we all laughed, almost like we were friends again.

  She turned off the lights again, took the remote, and pressed play. The first minute or so was completely black, no title or credits or anything, then the film began. It was low quality, like it came from a cheap old camcorder, or a found-footage movie made to look like it did. There was a plain bedroom with a twin bed, nightstands on either side, a single lamp, and dull beige walls. The camera was at the foot of the bed.

  There was a girl sitting on the bed. She was maybe seven or eight years old. She was wearing blue flannel pajamas and playing with a stuffed rabbit, making it hop across the bed to one side and back again, narrating its progress in her little girl voice. She called him Mr. Rabbit. Her red hair was messy, her smile sweet. If she knew she was being filmed, she didn’t show it.

  “What is this?” Maria asked.

  “Shhh,” Diane hissed. She was staring at the screen, rapt.

  Footsteps sounded and a man passed in front of the camera, and another approached the bed from the side. The one on the left held a Bible and wore a priest’s collar. The one on the right said, “Hey, sweetie, you remember Father Matt?”

  The little girl smiled at the priest. She looked happy right up until her father took the rabbit out of her hands, then she began shaking her head and squirming. The men grabbed her arms and legs to hold her still, but she didn’t make a sound.

  “Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me,” Maria said. “Come on, Diane. This is dumb.”

  Diane ignored her and turned the volume louder.

  “I have like thirty Catholic aunts and uncles and cousins, and all of them know stuff like this is bullshit,” Maria said. “We should be watching The Exorcist instead. At least that’s not boring.”

  “If this is real, it’s child abuse,” Julie said. She looked sick to her stomach.

  “They’re helping her,” Diane said.

  A second later one of the men on the screen said, “We’re helping you.”

  “It’s not real,” Maria said. She didn’t sound like she doubted it, but she was still watching.

  The two men held the girl long enough to tie her down. They used cloth straps on her wrists and ankles. A woman’s voice was speaking off camera, saying over and over again, “Don’t hurt her, don’t hurt her, don’t hurt her,” stuck between a plea and a prayer. I wanted the camera to rotate. I wanted to see what kind of mother would let men do that to her daughter.

  Even if it was fake. Diane’s youth pastor had to be seriously messed up to give that to a fourteen-year-old girl and tell her it was real.

  Courtney said, “Definitely fake. It’s some kind of stupid viral marketing thing.”

  And Julie said, “Nobody even thinks movies like this are good anymore.”

  The man on the left picked up the Bible. He didn’t open it, just held one hand over the cover, and he began to speak. He had a weak voice, too quiet for the camera, and most of what he was saying was monotonous and dull. After he had been listing names of saints for a while, Maria and I began talking about something else, and when Diane shushed us, we settled for folding her discarded gift wrap into paper planes and chucking them at each other. On the recording, the girl struggled a little against the bindings, more annoyed than pained. A few times she looked beseechingly toward her father and the woman offscreen, but still she did not speak. Her lips were pressed together so tight they were a thin white line.

  The priest hesitated in a few places, watching the girl warily. He made it through addressing the unclean spirit, ancient serpent, impious one, et cetera, finally landed a firm amen and fell quiet. His face was red, as though the recitation had exhausted him. He touched his hand briefly to his chest and winced.

  The other man said, “Try aga
in.”

  So he did, from the beginning. But the girl had had enough. She began to whine and whimper, tugging at her bonds with restless impatience. The priest stuttered, and he reached out to touch her head. The girl jerked away and shrieked.

  It wasn’t an expelling-demons-from-her-soul shriek, more like a tantrum-in-the-grocery-store shriek, but the adults reacted like she had started screaming bloody murder. The girl’s father flung himself at her, clapped his hand over her mouth with an audible slap, and in the background the mother was saying, “Oh, no, no, honey, you know you have to be quiet!”

  The girl twisted away from her father’s hand and shrieked again. “I don’t want to!”

  The words were so much louder than they had any right to be. Each one landed like a stab in the ear, piercing and sharp. Julie grabbed the remote control from Diane and turned the volume down. Diane didn’t look away from the screen. The girl shrieked again. The girl’s father clasped his hands to his ears.

  The priest stared at the girl in shock. “You’re not—”

  The girl screamed again, and that time her shout stretched out into a wail, rising louder and louder until it drowned out whatever the priest was saying. His face grew redder, his eyes wider. He touched his hand to his ear, stared at a spot of blood on his finger. He pressed his hand to his chest again.

  “What’s wrong with him?” Tatiana said. We were all watching the video now, our conversations and wrapping paper planes forgotten.

  The girl screamed one more time, and the priest collapsed.

  The woman shouted, “Father! Are you okay?” She and the man jostled around the bed and knelt beside the priest. The man said, “Go call 911,” and the woman sprang to her feet. She knocked the camera askew as she went by, so that it was pointed at an empty corner of the room, but we could hear the little girl saying, “Is Father Matt okay, Daddy? Is he okay?”

  The screen went dark, and white words appeared: Father Matthew was dead before the paramedics arrived. Officials refused to investigate.

  The video ended. There was no Coming Soon, no title, no studio name, no credits.

  “That’s it?” Courtney said. “I can’t believe you made us watch that, Di. This is so dumb. It’s not even scary.”

  “Did your pastor get that off YouTube?” Julie asked. “That was so stupid. Let’s watch a real movie now.”

  Diane clicked the DVD carefully into its case. “You shouldn’t joke about it. A man died.”

  “Not for real,” Maria said.

  “Put on whatever you want,” Diane said. “I don’t care.”

  She vanished downstairs for a long time. We were most of the way through Carrie, the original version with crazy Sissy Spacek, all the way to the start of the prom, before Diane came back to her own birthday party. None of us mentioned the video she had made us watch. We were afraid to find out just how seriously she took it.

  Tatiana found the video online a few days later. It had about a million hits. It was widely acknowledged to be a hoax, but there were still dozens of comments asking if anybody knew if the priest had really died, or if the little girl had ever gotten rid of her demons.

  I didn’t get an invitation to Diane’s birthday party the next year, and the last time it would have been possible I was dead and buried. I wondered if Diane even cared that I was gone, or if years of routine childhood friendship meant nothing in comparison to the triumph she must have felt given the general agreement that I had gotten what I deserved.

  TWELVE

  VIOLET SHOWED ME to a bathroom on the second floor. I took my time in the shower, lingering until the water was lukewarm. It had been far too long since I last felt clean. When I was done I toweled my hair dry and dressed in Violet’s clothes. The flower-print dress was too big, but the scratchy collar was high enough to hide the bruises around my neck.

  I sat down on the closed toilet seat and took my notebook from the backpack. I held the pen over the page for a minute or two, but I couldn’t decide if I needed to add demonic possession to the Real list yet. I didn’t know what I had seen on the video at Diane’s house. I was less willing to dismiss the possibility that it was real now, but I tucked my pen and notebook away without writing anything. I needed more information.

  When I emerged from the bathroom, Violet was nowhere to be seen. I poked my head into the only open room on the hallway. A middle-aged woman sat by the window, knitting a pink baby blanket.

  “Hi,” I said.

  The woman didn’t react. Her wooden needles flashed with astonishing speed. She wasn’t watching her hands as she worked; she was staring out the window with wide, unblinking eyes.

  “That’s really pretty,” I said. “I like the color.”

  The woman gave no sign she knew or cared that a stranger was standing outside her room. I watched her for a minute or two, waiting for her to notice me, but she never did.

  The stairs creaked as Violet returned. She smiled and said, “You look better.”

  “I feel better. Thanks.”

  I glanced at the knitting woman, looked to Violet for an introduction, but Violet only said, “It will be a little while before lunch is ready. Would you like me to show you around first?”

  “Sure. That would be great.”

  I didn’t care about the tour and I didn’t care about lunch, but I was curious about Violet. I wanted to know how the screaming little girl in Diane’s video had ended up at a church in Nebraska.

  I remembered that I was supposed to be stranded, so I added, “I do want to go online and check the bus schedule, if I can. I don’t even know where the nearest station is.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about that,” Violet said. “We’ll get you where you need to be.”

  Esme was no longer alone when we went back downstairs. Two men had come in while I was in the shower. One was young and dark-haired and unsmiling. Violet introduced him as Esme’s brother, Lyle. He had pulled a chair close to Esme’s side. He plucked the towel from her collar and smoothed the blanket, tucked it around her legs, his motions hesitant and awkward; he wasn’t used to taking care of her. He glanced up when Violet and I stopped in the doorway. Esme made a sound in her throat. Lyle answered with a soft shh-shh murmur.

  “And this is Pastor Edward Willow,” Violet said.

  Pastor Willow wasn’t what I expected. Part of me had expected him to be the exorcist in Diane’s video, and part of me was looking for somebody gawky and young, like the boy in the photo. But he was middle-aged and clean-cut, his blond hair lightly mussed, his smile warm and welcoming. He wasn’t as broad as his father in the picture, but he wasn’t skinny anymore either. There was a mist of rain on his hair and a shadow clinging to him that only I could feel. He was a killer.

  I smiled and shook Mr. Willow’s hand. I didn’t let myself grimace when I felt the darkness coiled and quivering inside him. His shadow was small, so feeble it seemed to vanish the moment I noticed it.

  “Welcome to our home, Katie,” said Mr. Willow. He clasped my hand with both of his and looked me in the eye. “I’m so glad you found your way to us.”

  “I really appreciate the help,” I said. “I feel stupid for getting stuck like this.”

  I gave him an abbreviated version of my made-up story: flaky roommate, missed ride, traveling parents. I had repeated versions of the story so many times it was taking on a life of its own. This time I told them my roommate had run off with a girlfriend, not a boyfriend, just to see how they would react. I was a little disappointed when Mr. Willow didn’t even bat an eye.

  “We’ll get you where you’re going,” Mr. Willow said, exactly as Violet had said only five minutes before. “How did you find us?”

  “Danny,” I said, “not Daniel. I met him in Omaha. He told me if I needed a place to crash, I could come here.”

  A quick glance passed between Violet and Lyle, but Mr. Willow wasn’t looking at them. He grinned and said, “You were lucky to run into him. Danny’s always felt very strongly about paying forward the kin
dness shown to him by sharing it with others. Is lunch ready yet, Violet?”

  “Not yet. Maybe half an hour, if that’s okay? I thought I’d show Katie around first.”

  “That’s just fine,” said Mr. Willow. He touched Violet’s shoulder and gave it a gentle squeeze. “You know how we appreciate everything you do for us.”

  Violet ducked her head and stepped back, her cheeks pink. I glanced away. I wasn’t the only one averting my eyes; Lyle was staring fixedly at the floor. He only looked up when Esme made a small, animal sound in her throat. She lifted her head and turned slowly, so very slowly, to look at me.

  Lyle took her hand and held it. To me he said, “You’re upsetting her.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “She doesn’t like strangers,” Lyle said.

  “Esme is closer to angels than most of us ever will be,” said Mr. Willow.

  It sounded like a non sequitur, but his voice glowed with so much fondness, so much pride, it was like a father praising his daughter for an unexpected accomplishment. If it weren’t for his shadow cowering and quivering, tucked away like a rodent in a burrow, I would have sunk into the warmth of it.

  Mr. Willow’s tone was familiar, almost conspiratorial, when he turned to me and said, “It is her gift and her curse, because it means she’s closer to demons as well.”

  I blinked.

  “We’re so glad you’ve found your way to us, Katie,” he went on. “Even if only for a little while. Go on with Violet and have a look around. The sun is coming out.”

  He knew.

  I didn’t know how. I had no idea what he saw when he looked at me.

  I had to look away first.

  He knew.

  It was impossible. Nobody knew what I was. I had hitchhiked halfway across the country without anybody noticing. I was being paranoid. Paranoid and stupid and irrational.