What the Dead Want(53)

Gretchen muttered, “The mirror, the image, the picture. Bad picture, bad house . . . all these people with their souvenir lynching photos. We have to destroy the pictures. Destroy the image.” Then she yelled, “Stop the car!”

Hope hit the brakes and they all jerked forward, hanging suspended by their seat belts.

“We’ve got to go back,” she said, to a chorus of “No!”

“You better know what you’re doing,” Hope said.

“I don’t,” Gretchen said. “Not exactly. But we’re running out of time. I need to get into that mirror.”

“What?” Simon asked. “You have got to stop this right now. You are not making sense.”

“Celia and Rebecca gain their power from it. They’re trapped in it—like souls are trapped in a photograph. They were forced to watch their own death, inside that pretty oval Victorian frame. There are no pictures of them in the house—just the mirror. They use it like a portal.”

“Are you sure?”

“What the hell is wrong with this generation?” Gretchen said, clearly channeling Esther. “Of course I’m not sure, but do we got anything to lose at this point?”

“Yeah,” Hawk said. “Like all of our lives.”

“The mirror is only part of it,” Gretchen went on, as if he hadn’t spoken. “We need to get those pictures too. All the pictures of the girls suffering and the ones of them as ghosts—we need to find them all and destroy them.

“You drop me at the house and then the rest of you go destroy them. The fire we have tonight is going to free people, not trap them.

“Hope—the pictures with the murderers’ faces, those we keep. We are going to finish your mother’s research. We are going to clear this land of the lies of bigoted old murderers and we are going to free those little girls.”

They stared at her.

“You realize that is the exact opposite of what Esther and our mother had been trying to do for years,” Hope said. “The exact opposite. How can we destroy all these pictures?”

“And how do you suddenly know all that?” Simon asked incredulously.

“Ha!” she said. “Suddenly? It’s taken me a lifetime to figure it out. If I’d known this when I was alive I’d never have brought one gratuitous picture of suffering back from Vietnam for the gawking masses.”

Hope parked the car in front of the house—where a crowd of Shadow Grove acolytes had gathered.

Gretchen leaped from the car and ran up the stairs, into the house.

On the second floor the girls were playing jump rope. They skipped in delight at the sight of her and walked toward her with their dirty hands outstretched.

She pushed past them, straight for the mirror. She could see her mother’s face smiling, then faltering as she approached the glass. She shut her eyes and kept walking quickly, bracing for the moment when she would be sucked into the mirror, prepared for the shock of falling into another world.

Another blind step and her boot connected with the hard flat glass.

The girls shrieked in horror as it splintered and shattered; they knelt on the ground, trying to pick up shards of glass.

Gretchen opened her eyes and stepped back. It was just a mirror. She’d been wrong. She wasn’t in some other ghostly dimension with her mother. She was there in the hall. Nothing was behind or inside the mirror—it was just cracked and broken glass and ancient charred wood.

But still, the little girls lay on the floor sobbing, their skinny bodies shaking beneath their tattered, filthy white dresses. Whatever the mirror was—it held a power over them, the real power of a terrifying memory that had trapped them both.

“It’s done,” she said, patting them on the backs as if they were two sleepy children who refused to go to bed. “Time to rest now. We can all rest now.” Celia and Rebecca climbed into her lap and she held them, their small frail bodies racked with tears and wailing.





TWENTY-NINE


IN THE BASEMENT HOPE AND SIMON SHUFFLED THROUGH the pictures of the little girls’ murder and put them all in a box. They collected the lynching pictures, and the pictures of people in pain—all the photographs from Esther’s wall. The box was heavy by the end.

“I’ve never seen something so awful,” Simon said.

“Yeah,” Hope agreed. “Hard to believe.” The pictures were so sad, mostly because of the details. She thought of the clothes the people were wearing. The shoes on the feet of the hanged men. She imagined them tying their shoes that morning—walking through town, their feet solid on the earth. And she imagined the carefully prepared picnics of the people who came to watch the lynching. Women in their homes making sandwiches for their families so that they could eat them while watching another human being tortured and dying.

Hope and Simon took the box outside and carried it into the field.

“Where do we put it?” Simon asked.

“Damned if I know,” Hawk said. He watched the ghosts pass by, mingling with the people from Shadow Grove. “Can you see them?” he asked his sister and Simon.

They shook their heads. “Wait,” Simon said. “We’re really going to see them?”

“I never have,” Hope said.

“But Gretchen started seeing them her first day here. Maybe you will too. It takes a certain type.”