“Track Three:” Bloody Mary, Kate and Ashley
It's only a game, I hadn’t thought about it in years. It doesn’t matter how many days tick off the calendar, the echo of how the words sounded when they caught in my throat when I repeated her name still echo in my brain.
Three times into the mirror, just like they told me to say.
Then the candles went out, and you started to laugh. Well, I heard a sound in the attic, and you kept laughing. But you don't believe in all of that.
Didn’t.
She ‘didn’t believe in all that…’
Sometimes, even now, I forget she’s not here anymore.
It was a childish dare, a challenge made in the dark of the dusty attic at the top of Rachel’s old house. The old stained glass window, piped with black lines, faced the cemetery on the corner. The blur of torched glass, the highlights of the colors; it obscured what was below, but never enough to ignore it.
That night I drew the short straw.
Ashley handed me her mirrored compact, then I said her name three times.
… We waited.
…But nothing happened…
…
Tucked away in Rachel’s bedroom, the sleepover turned from talks of dares to prank calls, and boys. And long after the fits of giggles and gossip had faded, I swore I could hear- something.
A slap of wood shutters.
A clunk of feet lacking grace.
And far too many creaks to be a house suddenly inclined to start settling.
I said it was coming from above us, but Rachel and Ashley just laughed.
They didn’t believe in all of that.
It’s been years, but Ashley and I still meet for coffee. Though I’m not sure why we still do; by the time we both leave I feel ashamed and Ashley can’t be bothered to conceal her annoyance.
“Kate, if Rachel had said it. Then like, maybe I’d believe it.” Ashley always popped the pink gum in her mouth between thoughts. “But it was you, not her. If there was a curse, it’d have come after you.”
Regardless of what Ashley believes, I can’t stop replaying that night in my mind. I’ve never been able to shake the guilt that it was me who unleashed whatever it was that went after Rachel that night.
And I don’t think I ever will.
‘Went after.’ That actually makes it seem like Rachel had a chance; a way out. What killed Rachel was fast and it was deadly. And Rachel never saw it coming.
I still visit Rachel’s grave every week. Her final resting place, forced to remain in clear view of that rotted attic window.
Her own family doesn’t even live there anymore. Its remained vacant ever since, but I still feel like something’s up there; with eyes that follow me through that wavy, colored glass.
Like a dry eye that never blinks.
When I visit Rachel I’m careful to keep my back turned toward the attic. If something is watching me, I don’t want to know it.
I come here every Saturday afternoon. But in the winter when the light fades fast I don’t like to linger past the dusk. And today, I was late. I stay just past the light to fulfill the superstition I haven’t been able to shake since it happened.
One hour. For one hour, I sit beside her and tell her about my week, the world, and what little information I’ve gathered on her family. When I finish, I leave red carnations on her grave. The only flower Rachel ever liked.
“Look,” she used to say, “if people are going to give me something that’s already dead or dying as a gift- then it better be cheap.” Rachel was nothing if not practical.
I bent down to set the food colored flowers on the wispy grass next to her headstone when a chorus of giggles and shrieks rose out of the darkness-
The hammering of my own heart beating shocked me and I stumbled over the off set edge of the marble marking someone else’s plot. My head, now ground level with the dirt and the moss, was in between the rocks and the tombs.
I pushed my way back up to my feet, someone else’s dirt jammed under my nails. I rushed to the tree line searching for the source of the voices, but I should have known where they were coming from.
After it happened, it didn’t take long for Rachel’s story to fade from a real tragedy into town folklore. It was fodder for every girl hosting a sleepover from the age of ten to sixteen. I know they were just playing the same games we had… but it’s different now. Now it’s her name they call out from Rachel’s abandoned porch.
Tonight there were three girls, who by the looks of their clothes looked better suited to be invoking their eighteenth birthday’s, than a spirit.
They couldn’t have been more than thirteen.
I wish I could tell them to pause. To pile on more layers. To make time and injury and heartbreak work harder to steal from you. But there they were, offering themselves up on decaying wood like it was a silver platter.
From where I stood I couldn’t tell what they were holding, maybe the mirrored backs of one of their phones. I could only hear them squeal in anticipation. It didn’t matter anyway, I didn’t need to hear the name of the girl they were calling out to know what they were doing.
Darkness had fallen all around me. I gripped Rachel’s blood red carnations, willing these children to stop. No one believed me then, but every teen in town has gone on to try and recreate it.
To disprove it? To taunt it? To tarnish me?
I want to tell them to pause again.
To go home.
But who am I to tell anyone else to go home when I’m still buried here in the darkness.
They giggled and screeched and ran from Rachel’s old porch arm in arm, both relieved and disappointed that nothing had happened. Whatever they came to do was already done.
I felt the air I’d been guarding in my lungs slip out of my mouth. Temporary relief washed over me.
I turned, ready to go back and place the now broken stemmed flowers in my clutches on Rachel’s grave, but I couldn’t.
I was frozen.
I blinked. Again and again, and somehow my eyelids continued to be the only thing on my body able to move. Everything else was cement. My brain was failing me. No part of me could believe what I was seeing.
Rachel.
Dirty.
Rotted.
Her throat baring the scare of the slash that took her.
And still, there she was, staring back at me.
Who let you outta that grave?
I felt was Rachel’s icy gray hands reach out for her carnations, flecks of fingertips caked with decay and dirt.
I wanted to scream for those kids, “Can anyone see this, or am I just tripping?” but it was too late.
It was the last thing I felt.
A cold washed over me…
And then, nothing.
An amends made. Placing me at home in the darkness right beside her.