Chapelwood (The Borden Dispatches #2)(10)

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But I had myself a little spell, and that’s a good way to talk about it, I think.

A spell is a magical thing, and not always a good thing . . . that’s what I learned from the library books I used to sneak home, before Daddy caught me one time too many. My little spells are magical, and they are bad. Like I’ve pricked my finger on a spindle (and I don’t even know what a spindle is, but apparently it’s something sharp) and gone to sleep for a thousand years . . . or that’s what it feels like I’m trying to do.

These spells . . . it’s like there’s a dark fog creeping in, coming at me from all sides, making it hard to see. It sneaks up and wraps itself around my eyes. It feels like the lights have all gone out—I couldn’t see the light on the stove, or the gaslights we had just lit up, even though I could hear them hissing. I knew they were on, but I couldn’t see them.

After a few seconds, I couldn’t really see much of anything. I staggered around, holding on to the chairs to keep myself from falling, and I closed my eyes—because when you can’t see anything, at least it ain’t weird if your eyes are closed, and maybe that’s dumb, but that’s what I thought. So that’s what I did.

Usually, when I have a spell, this is the part where I start hearing voices. Most of the time, it’s nobody I know, but sometimes it’s Grandma or our neighbor Mr. Miller, who died when I was thirteen. I never knew him well when he was alive, so I don’t know why he’s so chatty now that he’s in the ground.

But I didn’t hear any voices. I was all alone with other noise.

I closed my eyes and I saw that sparkling black light—you know, the kind when you’ve held your breath too long, or stood up too fast after being half asleep. Some people say it’s like seeing stars, but it isn’t. The stars don’t move, not in those darting, fizzling patterns. Stars don’t wink on and off, and go out altogether when you shake your head, trying to fling that spell away.

In the big bedroom, I heard it louder and louder: that thump, slide, and drag . . .

I thought I was taking myself away from it, but I must’ve got turned around. I found a doorknob and I turned it, thinking it’d let me outside—and I don’t know why I wanted to get outside, blind like I was from the spell, and from closing my eyes. But I turned the knob and shoved the door and I knew, even without being able to see, that I’d just opened up the bigger bedroom where Momma and Daddy slept.

I opened my eyes, for all the good it did me. I saw only the shadows of their furniture, the bed, the two chifferobes next to each other up against the wall, and a little bedside table where my momma used to keep a Bible—but I bet she doesn’t anymore.

And I saw something else, too. Another shadow, one that shouldn’t have been there. Something about as big and long as an oak root, coming right out of the wall, swaying back and forth along the floor.

I rubbed my eyes and didn’t see anything no clearer, and maybe that was for the best. I didn’t really want to look at it, anyway.

I tried to move away from the thing, to get myself back out of that room, because it was the last place on earth I wanted to be. I found the doorknob behind me, grabbed it, and ran—slamming the door behind me—but then the damnedest thing happened, and it don’t make no sense, but this is what it was: I wasn’t in the parlor, like I oughta’ve been. I was back in the bedroom, or still in the bedroom—I couldn’t say. I was so confused, so scared. All I know is I went through the door and I didn’t go anyplace, and I was just about to stop breathing, I was so afraid.

Then the thing on the floor, the tree root, or snake tail, or whatever it was . . . it came for me.

It took me by the ankle and it wound itself up tight, and I started screaming—but it only squeezed harder until I thought it was going to take my foot off. It slipped up my leg, up to my knee. And the more of me it touched, the more I could see again . . . but what I saw . . . it couldn’t have been real.

I saw stars, when it held me. Real stars, not the fuzzy kind your brain makes. I saw heaven, so far away and so strange . . . it was heaven—it must’ve been. Somewhere out past the clouds, past the stars—they went by me so quick it was like they’d turned into streaks, into long white lines. I was moving through the universe and it was all so bright and so dark, too, that I didn’t even notice I wasn’t breathing anymore. I couldn’t breathe. There wasn’t any air. There was only the feeling of being squeezed all over my whole body, and watching the stars stretch and explode and fade away.

I could hear my daddy’s voice somewhere, even though he wasn’t with me. I heard him and the reverend talking. I heard my momma talking, too, but not to the dog in the yard and not to me. I heard a thousand voices, all up inside my ears, and I was all alone in my parents’ bedroom except for the thing on the floor that I couldn’t see—but I could feel it, and it was trying to tell me something, but I didn’t know what.

That’s true, I think. It was trying to talk to me, using the words of all the people I ever met, ever talked to . . . It took the words from one person, and mixed them up with the words from another person . . . mixing and matching, lining up letters and voices that were so scrambled it was like listening to a thousand preachers all telling different sermons at the same time, as loud as they could.

No, wait. It wasn’t quite so personal as that. It was more like standing in a hall with a thousand Victrolas, each one playing a different record. The words I heard in my head didn’t come from real people, living and speaking. They were just recordings cut up into pieces.