Mary (Bloody Mary) Read online

  I glanced at my friends. For all that we didn’t like admitting it, Jess was right. Bloody Mary was something the world should know about. She was something we should be able to talk about and warn people away from, but we couldn’t. No one would believe us.

  “I’ll wait,” I said, dropping my head down into one of my pillows. “If I need a doctor later, we’ll go, but for now let’s see how I do.” Everyone nodded, all of us wearing matching frowns. Earlier, I’d feared my friends would be torn apart by what happened at Anna’s house, but I realized then it wouldn’t happen for one reason. We shared a ghostly burden.

  Jess flung the red notebook onto the floor with a frustrated sigh. She’d been leafing through it in hopes of finding something that’d help with Bloody Mary, but she’d come up empty. It wasn’t surprising; most of what she had in there was for making Mary appear, not disappear.

  Kitty also tried to help by scouring the Web on my laptop. Searching for Bloody Mary yielded a bunch of Halloween sites, so she switched to a general ghost search. I was prone in bed with Anna wedged onto the mattress at my side while we looked for clues on her phone.

  Sadly, the Internet failed us.

  A lot of what we found involved sites charging exorbitant fees to purify a house against negative spiritual activity. Many claimed to be professionals, but it was hard to take them seriously when their Web sites had horror movie sound tracks and blinking cartoon ghost banners. Also, their “real ghost” photography sections were typically floating orbs or mysterious shadows. Nothing we found was Bloody Mary–caliber.

  “I think I’ll head home for a bit. Call Aunt Dell and maybe try to talk to Cordelia Jackson again,” Jess said. “I don’t have any leads, but they might.”

  “Why not call them from here?” Anna asked, her tone sharp. “If we’re suffering, it’s only fair you suffer with us.”

  I could tell Jess wanted to yell by the way her molars ground together, her cheek twitching like she had a nervous tic. Her eyes swept to me for a moment before she took a deep breath, her nostrils pinching together. “Because, smart-ass, I don’t have Aunt Dell’s number on my cell.”

  “Who’s Cordelia Jackson?” Kitty asked, cutting Anna off before she could provoke Jess again.

  Jess whipped her head around to eyeball her, her expression not altogether friendly. “She’s a girl from Solomon’s Folly who summoned Bloody Mary a while ago. She hung up on me last time I called, but maybe if I explained what happened to Shauna...” Jess’s voice trailed as she swiped her stuff off the floor. “You cool if I go, Shauna? I’ll call you tonight.”

  I nodded and glanced at the girls. I was afraid both of them would ask for a ride home and leave me alone to suffer horrible Mary paranoia and an aching back, but neither Kitty nor Anna looked inclined to follow. Maybe it was a safety in numbers thing. Maybe they were too mad at Jess.

  “Drive safe,” I said. Jess nodded, heading for my front door.

  “Later,” Kitty called after her.

  Anna said nothing.

  The front door clicked, and Anna shot up from the bed next to me with a shriek. She went to my doorway and peered down the hall, staring at the closed door like it had grown fangs and a tail. “Thank God. I want to smack her for being so stupid. I get it, we agreed to do it, but if we knew what we were in for? Yeah, no. No, never.”

  “I’m not sure Jess knew what we were in for, either,” I said, slowly pushing myself up from the bed. “I guess we should have asked better questions.” My wounds felt tight and sore, but I ignored the pain and forced myself onto my feet. Kitty reached out to steady me, and I cast her a grateful smile when her hand cupped my elbow. “Thanks.”

  “I have the right to be mad,” Anna insisted. “You can’t tell me I don’t.”

  “You do. I’m mad, too,” I said. “I will be for a while, but I’m not going to say this is all on Jess. Mostly, yeah, but not all.” I felt sticky and gross from my bath in Mary’s mirror, and all I wanted to do was shower in steamy hot, fresh water until I was clean again, but there was no way I was doing that in a bathroom in an empty house. “Do you guys mind sticking around while I take a shower? I’ll borrow Mom’s car later to drive you home. I just…you know. In case I need help.”

  Anna nodded before going into my living room and throwing herself on the couch. I heard the TV turn on a moment later. “That’s fine. But I swear, Shauna, I don’t know if I want to hang out with Jess again,” Anna called down the hall.

  I had no answer for her, so I tottered my way to the bathroom, Kitty at my side to keep me steady. I was about to go in, but the moment my foot crossed the threshold, my body tensed. I didn’t want to take another step. That stupid brass mirror over the sink. It was nearly as big as Anna’s, and all I could picture was Mary lurking inside its depths, ready to pull me back into her world.

  “Guys? Can you come in with me when I…not when I shower, but when I go into the bathroom? I’m afraid,” I admitted.

  They understood. Anna got up from the couch to grab the salt shaker from the kitchen. She shook the salt at me when she trotted down the hall. Kitty stayed at my back as the three of us shuffled into the bathroom as a collective, terrified unit. My heart was in my throat when I glanced at the mirror, but it quickly sank when I saw a normal reflection. Behind me, Kitty and Anna let out their own relieved sighs.

  “Here, let me,” Anna said as she brushed by me to place a thin salt line beneath the mirror. She was meticulous, shaking out the grains once, twice, three times.

  “Thanks, Anna. I appreciate it,” I said as they headed back to the living room.

  Even though we’d checked the glass, even though Anna had salted, I kept my attention fixed on the tile floor as I undressed. It felt better to avoid reflective surfaces—less chance of seeing something I didn’t want to see.

  I stepped over a basket of Mom’s bubble bath stuff to get into the tub, sliding the shower door along its golden runners. The panels had textured, wavy glass, so I could see colored shapes through them but not details. I was fine with that—the door acted as a great, blurry barrier between me and the mirror. I turned the shower on full-throttle, anxious to burn Bloody Mary’s taint from my skin. As soon as the water hit my bandages, I yelped; that much heat on my cuts was more than a little unpleasant. I bore it, though, focusing on the water swirling down the drain rather than the discomfort.

  The bathroom slowly filled with pale gray steam. My face tilted toward the showerhead and I sighed, relieved, but then a mystery glob hit my forehead and slithered down my face. My eyes flew open. I reached up to touch my cheek, dismayed to find mud smearing my fingertips. The showerhead sputtered and coughed, water gurgling and struggling inside the pipes. The spout twisted in its base like a furious metallic serpent.

  There was another burp from the pipes. A rank, rotten odor spilled out into the bathroom. I recoiled, my hands covering my nose and mouth, the hairs on the back of my neck bristling. I recognized this stench. It was decay. It was sour and sweet and meaty and wrong.

  It was her. I smelled her.

  “No. No,” I moaned, whipping my head back and forth. She couldn’t be here. This had to be some horrible cosmic joke, a terrible coincidence that the building’s pipes backed up exactly the same day we’d summoned a ghost. Another wad of sludge spewed from the shower to splash my shoulder and front. I reached for the faucet to turn the water off.

  That was when I saw her.

  Mary stood on the other side of the shower door. Her image was distorted—a blur of black hair, white dress, and gray and yellow skin. How? How had she come out of the mirror past Anna’s salt line? Was it because we had no handhold or candle? I could reason out how she’d gotten through the mirror earlier, how we’d failed. But how was it she was here now with no summoning, no candle, no hand-holding?

  She didn’t move toward me. She didn’t make a sound. But I screamed at the top of my lungs, backing into the corner of the tub, banging on the wall for my friends. Panic bubbled up insid
e of me, a geyser of confusion that left me feeling light-headed. I heard Kitty and Anna scrambling down the hall. They were coming to help, and had I not been so terrified, I’d have appreciated exactly how brave that was.

  “Open the door,” Anna yelled. I could hear the doorknob twisting and rattling as they fussed with it, but it wouldn’t budge.

  I hadn’t locked it.

  They hadn’t locked it.

  Mary had locked it.

  Kitty and Anna shoved at the door with all their weight, but the hinges wouldn’t give. They squealed and bent, but the screws held tight. “It won’t…it can’t,” shouted Kitty. “SHAUNA! ARE YOU OKAY?”

  No, I wasn’t okay. The pipes of the shower groaned in agony as the showerhead vomited thick mud. I wanted to turn the faucet off, but I was too scared to move. I whimpered and huddled down in the tub, my hands covering my face, but I kept peeking over them. I was too scared of dying not to peek.

  Crouched as I was, I caught sight of my mom’s bath supplies, including a slim tube of bath salts leaning against the basket. Scented Epsom salts. The crystals were purple, but hopefully their color and purpose didn’t matter.

  Kitty and Anna were still pounding on the door, and I could hear something hard slamming against the wood like they were trying to knock it down, but it wasn’t going anywhere. I was alone in this, and that meant I had to stop shrinking. I let out another sob and stood, steeling myself to open the shower door with shaking fingers.

  As I touched the handle, Bloody Mary let out an earsplitting cry.

  I screamed and thudded down into the tub as she pressed one of her hands to the door, smearing the pads of her fingers against the panes. I got a close-up look at the black gouge across her palm. The skin near the cut bubbled with moving lumps. My stomach churned as a beetle wormed its way out of her flesh.

  I had to get to the salt before things worsened. I wrenched the door aside and dove for the basket. My chin was tucked to my chest so she couldn’t slash my throat if she swiped at me. I left my back exposed despite my injuries. It was better than giving her access to my front. My fingers wrapped around the lavender-colored tube of salts. I ripped off the top, frantically flinging the crystals around the bathroom.

  But Mary wasn’t in the bathroom. I heard a hiss. I craned my neck toward the sound. Mary was gazing at me from inside the shower door. She’d never been freely standing in the room. The hand, the beetle, all of her was trapped inside the glass.

  I fumbled my way over the edge of the tub, tossing salts at the glass door so she couldn’t follow. She writhed as the salts struck the textured glass, but she never tried to poke through the door. Behind me, clumps of mud continued to sputter and spew over the tub.

  The moment my bare feet touched the linoleum floor, Mary moved. She left the shower door and reappeared in the mirror above the sink. Before she’d been a blur of shapes and color in the textured glass; now she was as sharply defined as my own reflection. She glared at me, the sliver of her upper lip twitching, the flesh cracked open, oozing a trail of yellow slime down the corner of her mouth.

  “Go away,” I shouted, tossing another handful of bath salts at the mirror. “Go away!”

  Mary smiled, the thin skin of her cheeks stretching tight over her skull. The veins at her temples pulsed black, as if a twisted, distorted life still fueled her body. Her dry, reptilian laughter grew louder and louder. My misery amused her. I couldn’t take it anymore. I couldn’t stand her being there. I couldn’t stand her finding my fear so very entertaining.

  I whipped around to grab the freestanding toilet paper holder from the floor. The heavy iron hit the mirror like a baseball bat, and shards of glass rained down around me.

  As soon as the glass stopped falling, the door unlocked. Mary was appearing without a summoning, manipulating objects, haunting glass, and skipping from surface to surface. None of this were we prepared to handle. I could explain none of it.

  Anna and Kitty barged in but stopped short when they saw me standing muddy and naked in the middle of the floor. I yanked a towel off of the towel bar and wrapped it around myself, shivering when it brushed against my bandages.

  “Is she in here?” Anna asked, waving the shaker of table salt back and forth from the doorway. I shook my head and motioned them back into the hall so I could leap over the shattered glass to join them.

  Kitty stuck her head inside to peer around the bathroom before moving. She looked from the tub to the shards on the floor. I followed her gaze, frowning at the sharp, spiky pieces of glass. One mirror down, but there were so many others. Would I have to shatter them all? My vanity? The tall, standing mirror in my mother’s bedroom? What was stopping Mary from climbing out of them right this instant?

  “Kitty, move,” Anna said from the hall. I leapt over the remnants of the mirror and onto the hallway carpet. Anna pressed past me with her salt to stand in the doorway, like she expected something else to go wrong. I expected something to go wrong, too. My eyes drifted down the hall. She could be anywhere. Here now.

  Good God.

  “Why is this happening?” Kitty asked, her voice sounding strangled.

  “I don’t know.” I sank down onto the floor, my body smeared with mud and gunk, my stomach so tense it cramped. I dropped my head into my hands and stared through my splayed fingers, my attention fixed on the broken shards of mirror. I wished Jess had known what could happen so she could have prepared us, so we would have known to run long and run far to get away from Bloody Mary.

  Then it hit me. Maybe Jess had known. The pictures on the wall. She’d taken the pictures down. Why would she suspect Mary could be anywhere other than a proper mirror? She’d said safety, but that was a bizarre leap to make.

  “Oh, no. Come on,” I whispered. “No.”

  I propelled myself off the floor and jogged to my room, frantically searching for my phone, never once turning my back on my covered mirror. My cell was still in my backpack, and I tugged it out and dialed. Kitty and Anna ran in after me, but I ignored them, pacing until I heard Jess’s voice over a loud rap sound track from her car stereo.

  “She’s here, Jess. Mary was in my bathroom taunting me. How’d you know to move the pictures off Anna’s wall?” I demanded.

  Jess turned the radio down. I could see her expression in my head—the knitted brow, the pinch at the corners of her mouth. “Oh, my God, are you okay?”

  “Why did you move the pictures, Jess?” I repeated.

  She sighed. “Okay, so I…Cordelia,” she blurted.

  “Cordelia what?” I eased down onto my bed. Kitty came to sit beside me. Anna hovered in the bedroom doorway, glancing over her shoulder every once in a while, convinced Mary would come lurching after us from the bathroom. She gripped the salt container in her hand, her thumb skimming back and forth over its top.

  “She was haunted by Mary for a long time,” Jess answered. “Like, I didn’t want that to happen. That wasn’t what I was trying to do.”

  “I thought Cordelia hung up on you when you called,” I said.

  “She did after I told her I wanted to summon Mary, but…Look, Shauna. I didn’t want anyone to get hurt, I swear. It was supposed to be a cool thing, but it went weird. Cordelia said Mary was after her. That she could see Mary in glass and shiny stuff. So that’s why I took the pictures down.”

  “Why was she haunted for a long time?”

  The silence on Jess’s end grew uncomfortable. “I don’t know. She just said Mary never left her alone. She followed her in mirrors and glass. For years. Mary was still following her the last time I called.”

  I went silent. Mary was following me in mirrors and glass, too. If Cordelia was stuck with her for years, was I? In a terrible, selfish way I hoped Mary was stuck on Kitty or Anna. But they’d gone into the living room while I’d showered. I was the one Mary had come after.

  Me.

  Mary was on me.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Shut up, Jess.”

  I sucke
d in a deep breath and counted to ten. I felt tears welling; I didn’t want to cry. Not anymore. I’d cried enough already. Instead I clung to my anger, feeling it swell hot and bright behind my eyes. Jess had put our lives at risk because she wanted to play a stupid game. “Here’s what you’re going to do, Jess. Text me Cordelia Jackson’s phone number. Then find out everything you can about Bloody Mary. Origins. Everything. And Jess, if you screw me over again…”

  I didn’t finish the sentence. I didn’t know how to finish it. I’d what? Not talk to the person with the most information about Mary? I needed all the help I could get.

  “Yeah, of course. I’m going to help, Shauna. I’ll figure it out. I’ll help you with anything you need,” Jess said.

  “Right now I need to not talk to you. If you find anything out, text me,” I barked before ending the call. Anna and Kitty peered at me, questions all over their faces. My phone buzzed with a text message—Cordelia’s number. I glanced at the numbers. Cordelia had information that I wasn’t sure I was ready to hear.

  “This woman, she was haunted by Bloody Mary for a long time. That’s why Jess knew to take the pictures down. Cordelia saw Mary in glass and other shiny stuff,” I explained before dialing the number. Anna and Kitty shared a look, but they stayed quiet as I waited for Cordelia to pick up. I waited. And waited. It rang six or seven times, and I was about to hang up when a deep female voice rasped a hello at me.

  “Cordelia? Cordelia Jackson?”

  “What?” was the flat response.

  She wasn’t a kind-sounding woman. Her voice was gravelly, like she’d smoked for too long or talked too little.

  “H-hi,” I stammered. “My name is Shauna O’Brien. I’m friends with Jess McAllister, who called you about summoning Bloody Mary.”

  The line went dead in my hand. Kitty reached out to pat my shoulder, and while I appreciated the sentiment, I brushed her aside. I didn’t want comfort right now. I wanted answers, and this woman in Solomon’s Folly was the only one who could give me any. I redialed. It didn’t take Cordelia long to pick up a second time.