Mary: Unleashed: Unleashed (Bloody Mary) Read online

  Copyright © 2015 by Hillary Monahan

  Cover photos © 2015 Shutterstock

  Cover design by Maria Elias

  Mary lettering by Tanya Ross-Hughes

  All rights reserved. Published by Hyperion, an imprint of Disney Book Group. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information address Hyperion, 125 West End Avenue, New York, New York 10023.

  ISBN 978-1-4847-1933-6

  Visit www.hyperionteens.com

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  June 24, 1864

  1

  October 30, 1864

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  November 21, 1864

  7

  8

  9

  April 9, 1865

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  November 23, 1864

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  January 12, 1865

  23

  24

  25

  26

  Acknowledgments

  May 15, 1869

  About the Author

  For Lauren, who’s been there through every step of this journey

  June 24, 1864

  Sister Mine,

  Below, I have listed my dastardly deeds since you abandoned me for Boston. “But Mary,” you say. “I did not abandon you so much as find a handsome gentleman to kiss me breathless for eternity.” The result is the same, Constance. I have brought a reign of terror to Solomon’s Folly. I will not be sated until I have tainted everything you love with my terribleness.

  1. I have claimed your room as my own. The pink sashes are gone because pink is an affront to all that is good in the world. I have replaced it with a shade of green you would abhor. I do this as both a declaration of war and because green is a far superior color.

  2. I have taken over your gardening duties. This is not to help Mother but to destroy your handiwork. Plants wither in fear at the sight of my boots. I am not blessed with your green thumb but, as Mother says, a black thumb, and I shall use it to wreak havoc upon your peonies.

  3. I have taken your place on the church choir. The psalms you hold so dear are now sung so off pitch, dogs bay thinking me their pack mistress. Our sweet mother has asked if perhaps I would like to do a Sunday reading in lieu of the hymnals, but I remain stalwart.

  (To her chagrin, I might add. When I expressed that I preferred the music, she looked much like your peonies—wilted and sad.)

  4. Despite your instruction that the shawl you knitted me last winter should not be worn with my shapeless blue frock, I have done just that. I disavow fashion! I want those who look upon me to know repulsion and fear. Your innocent lace is a weapon in my hands.

  5. I have taken over your duties with the Spencer girls, and I believe they find me the superior nanny. What better way to vex you than to fatten up the children you love with so much shortbread, they explode. Whilst Mrs. Spencer will undoubtedly take offense to my practices, the children will love me best, and that is all that matters.

  (I caught Agatha with two meaty fists in the shortbread pan. The child had eaten half the contents in the three minutes I took to attend her sister’s nappies. I would have been impressed if I was not so horribly afraid she’d get sick.)

  6. Mr. Biscuits is a traitor. Your poorly named dog has all but forgotten you. He sleeps at the foot of my bed every night making terrible sounds and equally as terrible smells. Every morning he looks upon me like I am the sun in his furry little world. This is likely because I am the one to feed him the scraps, but let’s pretend he is drawn to my shining disposition.

  7. Not only did I not go to the summer dance, I told Thomas Adderly that I would rather wash my hair than attend. I did not do this simply because Thomas is overly ardent and annoying. No, it was to defy your terrible sisterly advice! For shame, Constance! For shame!

  (Honestly, the boy is dull, and I’ve seen better teeth in horse mouths. There’s also the Elizabeth Hawthorne problem. Her preference for dull, horse-teethed gentlemen causes me far too much grief. While attending a dance may have been nice, the company was lacking and the repercussions weren’t worthwhile.)

  8. Last, but by no means least, I cancel my trek to Boston. Fie upon you and your fancy home! I shall remain in Solomon’s Folly until my skin is withered and my teeth fall out!

  (I am suffering a summer cold that has wetted my lungs, and Mother says I must wait to travel. While I do not like postponing, my sickness has kept me abed the last few days. I will write you when I am less apt to play the part of Pestilence. I hope to reschedule soon.)

  I hope this letter finds you miserable (blissfully happy) and that Joseph snores in his sleep. (That would be awful. Mr. Biscuits is bad enough. A full-grown man must be thrice as disruptive.)

  Write soon, my beloved harpy.

  Your sister,

  Mary

  The darkness has a face.

  Gray skin stretched over a craggy skull, black veins pulsing at the temples and cheeks. It has no nose, no lips—only voids crusted with liquid decay. Broken teeth jut up from the gums like yellow stalagmites. A white, wormlike tongue wags to taste the air. Tufts of hair top half-rotted ears, leaves and debris tangled in the elbow-length strands.

  The darkness has a voice. Sometimes it’s wet, like pipes choking through a clog. Other times it’s dry and slithery, like snake scales gliding over rock. It depends on whether she’s laughing. Mary likes to laugh, but only if she’s bled someone. That’s when the raspiest rattles echo from her throat.

  Nothing is normal after a haunting. School, friends, boys…who cares? How can you worry about the mundane when you’ve seen the extraordinary? When one of your best friends was killed by a ghost before your eyes?

  I still can’t look in a mirror, because I see her. Mary. She’s tattooed on my brain. Vines swathing her thin frame, clinging to a ragged dress with a copper-splattered bodice. Talons tipping the spindly fingers, the edges as sharp as razors. One leg swollen with water and ready to burst, the other nothing but bone. Beetles everywhere, living inside a walking corpse, scurrying beneath the skin until they gnaw their way out.

  The thought of her is enough to send me fleeing to my mother’s side. Last week, I caught a glimpse of my reflection in a picture frame and hit the floor as if I were in an air raid. Mom doesn’t understand my twitchiness. Worse, I can’t explain it. She would never believe me. I hadn’t believed Jess when she’d first told me about it, either.

  Jess. She got us into this mess. Bloody Mary Worth was her obsession and we were stupid enough to follow. When Jess positioned us in that bathroom, when she checked her compass points and placed the candle and salt line, we didn’t think anything would happen. It was just a game. Then a ghostly hand pressed against the glass. We should have ended it there, but one more summon, Jess said. Just one. I relented. No, I encouraged my friends to go along with it because I was curious.

  Now I’m scarred, Jess is haunted, and Anna’s dead. Regret weighs on me from the moment I wake in the morning until I drift into my dreams. I want to walk away, to let Mary be Jess’s problem, but I have a debt to repay. To Anna. To other girls who’d play the game. Jess will pawn the ghost onto someone sooner or later. Mary w
ill continue torturing girls from the mirror.

  I have to do something about it.

  The question is…what?

  The letter from Mary to Constance Worth Simpson should have made me laugh. It should have warmed me to the authoress from a century and a half ago. I’d have thought her clever and charming. I’d have said something like, “I’d be her friend.”

  But this letter had been stuffed inside of Jess McAllister’s notebook, wedged between two pages of handwritten notes about Bloody Mary. Despite the tone, it was no joke, as proven by the three other letters present. They cataloged Mary’s plight from start to end—a smart, funny teenager deteriorating along with her circumstances. A cruel pastor robbing her of her mother, and in turn her humor. Anger filled the gaps, but eventually that was taken, too, when she was murdered at seventeen years old.

  The ghost of the legend wasn’t born evil. She was made that way. Two cups tragedy, one tablespoon cruelty, a splash of neglect. It was a recipe for pain.

  We tried to stop Mary. Jess even staged another summoning with Kitty, Laurie Carmichael, and Becca Miller, “To save you, Shauna,” she said to me. “To get you unhaunted.” She succeeded, albeit not how she anticipated. Jess planned for Kitty to take on the curse during that last summoning, but I intervened and Jess was grabbed in Kitty’s stead.

  We sent Mary back into the mirror, but not before Mary spilled Jess’s blood. We all knew what that meant; Mary wouldn’t let Jess go until Jess died or another girl took the mark from her. It was how it had always been with Bloody Mary. It was how it would be until someone put the ghost to rest. More girls would die.

  Like Anna Sasaki died.

  It was hard to believe she was gone. Some days, the pain of her loss was raw, like someone branding me with a hot poker. Other days, it was a dull throb, like a bone-deep bruise. I missed Anna’s intelligence. I missed her snark. I missed scribbling notes to her during math class to pass the time.

  I missed her.

  School resumed a few days after her disappearance. AMBER Alert: Anna Sasaki. The police hadn’t a trace, nor would they find one: Mary dragged Anna through the mirror and into her swampy, black world.

  The fog rising on the other side of the mirror. Crimson blood spraying across the glass. Too much to be nonfatal. Too much to grant any hope that Anna survived. Terror and loss and futility dropping on my head like an anvil. Grief crushing me beneath its weight.

  The Sasakis would never get the closure they so deserved.

  The days after the murder were a fixed reel in a movie, the same twelve-hour clip playing, rewinding, and repeating the next morning. I got up, ate breakfast with my mother, and went to school early. I didn’t like being alone in the house. Every sound in the building sent me scurrying for the only weapon I knew that worked against Mary—salt. It burned her. I had boxes of it squirreled away in my closet in case she returned. There was no reason to expect her, but Jess’s tie to Mary made me uneasy. Would Jess’s haunting be different because she and Mary were related? What would happen if Jess somehow allied with Mary? I put nothing past Jess. She’d sacrificed one friend to the mirror and nearly succeeded in sacrificing a second.

  Jess could justify anything when she put her mind to it. Even murder.

  At the end of the school day, I would go to Kitty’s house until Mom got out of work. After Anna died, Mom cut her hours at her second job. It was the only good thing to come from the haunting. I loved my mom. I also loved knowing that Mary left me alone whenever Mom was near. We never quite figured out why that was, but I had my suspicions. Mary Worth loved her mother. Other mothers were safe by association.

  I spent the last hour of every day alone in my room, lying in bed and gazing at the wall. My thoughts drifted to Anna, to Kitty’s boyfriend, Bronx. He was a star football player before Mary pulled him through a glass window and dropped him three stories. His legs had snapped like twigs. Double casts, metal bolts, surgeries—he was lucky he’d ever walk again, never mind play sports.

  Mary took so much from both of them. Thinking about my part in bringing her into this world almost always made me weep into my pillow. It would have been easy to lay it all on Jess, but I wouldn’t fool myself. I’d made bad decisions, too.

  Jess liked to remind me of that sometimes. She refused to fade into obscurity. Rapid-fire texts—sometimes apologies, sometimes accusations. I ignored every message. The assault died down after the first few weeks, but I’d still get the occasional plea for help. When she saw me in the halls at school—her eyes sunken in like she hadn’t slept in forever, a fresh cut or scratch marring her skin—I looked away. Sometimes she followed me, calling my name. I ducked into classrooms to avoid her. I left the cafeteria if she tried to eat near me.

  It wasn’t just because of what she did. The cuts and bruises told me she hadn’t lost Mary yet. No one near Jess McAllister was safe.

  “Shauna, wait up!”

  Kitty’s voice sliced through the hall din. The last bell had rung, and kids were eager to exit the school. We were only a week away from summer vacation, and you could feel the anticipation in the air. The chatter was louder and more animated. The attitudes in class were more laissez-faire. I resented it. Anna’s death plagued me every day, while my classmates talked about beach parties. It was too soon. I wasn’t ready for life to go on.

  Kitty trotted up to my locker, her book bag slung over her shoulder. Her face was flushed from gym, her heavyset body hugged by a tank top and shorts. She hadn’t changed clothes from class, but then, neither of us could go into the girls’ locker room. That’s where Anna went missing. Kitty usually opted to change in her car. I snuck off to change in the bathrooms near the science labs, my trusty box of salt perched on the toilet tank.

  Kitty swept a lock of caramel-brown hair away from her ear. “Let’s get out of here. Tennis in ninety-degree heat is not fun. I’ll roll the windows down in case I stink. Sorry.”

  “No problem.” We shouldered our way through the hallway and out the back doors. My backpack weighed fifteen thousand pounds. Finals were upon us, and though I tried to study for the tests, I couldn’t focus. It was like all my textbooks had spontaneously rewritten themselves in a language I didn’t understand.

  “I’m avoiding the principal’s office now,” Kitty said as we approached her red SUV. “There’s a memorial for Anna in one of the display cases. Every time I see it, I cry.”

  Saying Anna’s name was enough to make Kitty’s voice hitch. I squeezed her shoulder, doing my best to ignore the sweat slicking her skin. Kitty and Anna had been best friends since grade school. Losing Anna on top of Bronx’s accident—if you can call it an accident when a ghost flings your boyfriend out a window—had ruined her. Looking at Anna’s picture every day would be a special kind of torture.

  “I’m sorry. At least we’re almost done with school. You’ll get a few months off to recoup.”

  Kitty tossed her stuff into the back of the car before climbing into the driver’s side. “Not exactly. We’re still doing that thing with Cody in Solomon’s Folly.”

  I wasn’t the only one feeling obligated to end Mary Worth. I told Kitty time and time again that I could handle it without her, that Cody Jackson had volunteered to help so Kitty could stay safe, but Kitty always threw my own words back at me: we’d walked away with our lives, but others might not be so lucky.

  We had to do something.

  “We started it together, we’ll finish it together. For Anna,” she’d say.

  It was always we. It was always for Anna.

  I couldn’t quite look at Kitty’s profile. If I’d told Jess no all those weeks ago, if I’d been less of a pushover…

  “It’s okay, Shauna.”

  She brushed the back of my hand, her fingers tan next to my pasty, befreckled skin. It wasn’t absolution, but it was enough. Kitty put the key in the ignition, opening the windows and sunroof of the truck. A breeze swept in, pushing the oppressive heat away.

  As soon as Kitty inched fro
m the parking spot, a green Ford Focus sailed around the line of cars and stopped in front of us. Kitty slammed on the brakes. My hand gripped the dash as I peered down the expanse of the SUV’s hood only to find myself staring at Jess McAllister. So blond. So perfect with that narrow nose and big blue eyes. So injured. A ragged cut bisected her right cheek and top lip. I’d passed her in the hall just yesterday and the cut hadn’t been there.

  How’d she explain that to her family? A fight? A bear encounter? She tripped and fell on a shovel?

  My pulse pounded in my ears.

  She shouted something that the end-of-school-day chaos drowned. I shook my head and looked away, but she shouted again. And again. It wasn’t until Kitty threw the truck into reverse that Jess’s voice finally penetrated.

  Read it, Shauna.

  Read what? My phone had no messages. She hadn’t given me anything in school. But Jess did know my locker combination. She used to help herself to my stuff all the time. As Kitty peeled from the parking lot to get away from our once-upon-a-time friend, I started digging through my bag. Jess was bad at things like boundaries and personal space. Why would that change now that we weren’t friends?

  It only took a minute for me to find the photocopied pages held together by a red paper clip. They were wedged into my English textbook between the cover and the first page. She’d written a note across the back in her familiar hen scratch:

  Her last letter was dated the day before her death certificate. This was written the next day. How did Mary die?