Chapter Annabelle #2
You bite the inside of your cheek, your breathing going shallow.
You were right, you know this story, but have never heard it told like this before, so that you can see the women’s faces ghoulish in the candlelight.
So that it makes you feel cold all over, your body still except for the constant roiling in your guts.
“Finally, the baby is born, and at first it looks like a normal child. The midwife places it in the arms of Mother Leeds while another woman wipes the sweat from her brow. But moments later, Mother Leeds has her head tipped back and her eyes closed in exhaustion. And the child begins to move from its swaddling blanket. The women are dumbstruck, think it is a trick of the light. But the baby morphs in front of their eyes and it isn’t a child after all, but a creature none of them had seen before.
The head of a goat, bat’s wings, horns and hooves.
And a devil’s forked tail. It screamed, a scream that made the women deaf to any sound that followed, and they clutched to one another as it began to fly around the small room.
Finally it found its way up the chimney, out into the woods.
The storm had gotten quiet by then, so they could hear the devil shrieking through the pines as it flew away.
“There have been dozens of sightings of the devil over the years. Including by Joseph Bonaparte, who settled nearby in Bordentown when his brother was defeated at Waterloo and exiled for a second time. He blamed the devil when his mansion burned to the ground. In 1909 the newspapers reported repeated sightings of the Jersey Devil and everyone was so fearful that they closed the schools and the mills. Mothers wouldn’t let their children play outside.
In the 1950s a group of boys playing in the woods swore they saw him.
But no one has ever been able to capture it on film.
So we’re left to wonder. Is it a myth? Is the Jersey Devil real? ”
“What happened to Mother Leeds?” Mindy Josephs asks from the back of the class. Miss Hamilton smiles, pleased by the question.
“Ah. That’s a good point. What happened to her after her curse came true?
Did she ever see the devil again? Some say she died not long after.
That she lost too much blood in the difficult birth.
Others say she went on with her life, relieved to be free of that thirteenth child, without another mouth to feed.
That she felt a new lightness every time she did the family’s laundry, with only twelve pairs of socks to match.
But the legend doesn’t tell us. We’re only left with stories of the devil and the ways he’s terrorized these woods. ”
You sit, still hunched, your arms digging into your stomach, clutching yourself tight.
Miss Hamilton is smiling from underneath the brim of her witch hat.
You bitch, you think, the words rising up in you before you have a chance to think about why, where they come from.
But when her eyes land on you something in her face changes, and you know she has felt it. Your anger. Your fear.
She changes topics. For the last twenty minutes of class you are back with the Mayans, talking about their stories, their mythology, but in your head you are seeing flashes of lightning. You are imagining a floor covered in blood.
The bell rings and she comes to stand near your desk, holds a finger up to you asking you to wait. She doesn’t speak until everyone has filtered out of the classroom.
“Annabelle. Did something about the story upset you? If so, I’m so—”
“No,” you blurt out, cutting her off.
She looks at you a moment longer than you’d like.
“Are you coming to the yearbook committee meeting today?”
You had been looking forward to it all morning, then forgotten about it after the events of homeroom.
“Yes,” you say, because you can’t think of anything else to do but to comply.
To feel yourself guided along by other people’s expectations and needs.
Because the part of your brain that so wants to be good knows you have to stay on the yearbook committee, to keep up your extracurriculars, if you want to be a competitive applicant for college. If you want to get out.
“Great, I’ve got something that I’m excited for you to see.”
There are six of you at the yearbook committee meeting, and as you gather around Miss Hamilton’s desk she seems lit with that same sense of mischief you saw in her face during class.
“I didn’t tell all of you about this because I didn’t know how it would work out, but last spring I applied for a grant from the state and we got funding for a new camera. We’re talking professional-grade equipment. Brand-new, state-of-the-art.”
She produces a black bag from her drawer. Unzips it and with tender, careful fingers, she holds up a camera, but it bears little resemblance to the bulky old Canon you’re used to using, with its frayed strap and scratched lens. The six of you gasp and Miss Hamilton laughs, delighted.
“Thirty-five-millimeter lens, titanium cover, crispest pictures on the market. I’ve had a chance to try it out and you will all be trained to use it.”
The other committee members ooh and ah, trade glances of disbelief.
“Annabelle, why don’t you take a walk with me and we can get some shots of the sports practices going on?”
You know why she’s chosen you. You were the one most interested in photos, took most of the pictures of extracurriculars—school plays and sports and mock trial—that ended up in the yearbook the year before.
You hate having your picture taken but you found that you like lifting the camera to your face, framing a shot, making the fleeting into something permanent.
You walk the school grounds and Miss Hamilton talks you through the intricacies of the dials on top of the camera, shutter speed and apertures, and when she hands it to you a tingle runs through you, of power, of possibility.
You take aim at the girls’ soccer team, and it doesn’t matter that the girl taking a shot on goal is Kristen Hanover, one of the ones who laughed when Sabrina called you fat.
You click the shutter, and you think gotcha.
You are in control. She’s as small as anyone else in the viewfinder. Captured.
“How does it feel?” Miss Hamilton asks, as you take photo after photo of the girls running their drills. “We have lots of film, so go to town.”
“I love it,” you say, a beat too late.
“I’m glad.” A pause, and you can hear the question forming before she asks it.
“Annabelle, are you okay?”
“Yeah, fine,” you say automatically.
“You just seem a little … distracted.” You turn to the boys’ soccer field, test out the zoom on the lens.
“I want you to know that if applying to all of those colleges is too much pressure, we can change the plan. Try for community college, and I’ll still help you in two years when you’re ready to transfer, get a Bachelor’s degree.
I believe in you wholeheartedly, but I don’t want you to feel overwhelmed. ”
“I’m not. I want to.”
She says something else but you don’t hear, because when you raise the camera’s viewfinder to your face you catch sight of Sabrina beyond the chain-link fence that hems in the sports fields.
Sabrina, getting into a black Camaro, a boy in the driver’s seat.
You zoom and zoom and before they pull away you can make out the texture of his buzzed head, a tattoo of a snake on his forearm, which is resting lazily out the window.
Billy Fauver. He graduated last year but you remember him in the halls, how he seemed too big for the small lockers, how with one lazy reach of his hand he could brush his fingers against the popcorn ceiling above your heads.
He used to get into fights all the time—once you saw him bash another boy’s face into the porcelain rim of the water fountain, his girlfriend pulling at his arm, crying, begging him to stop, blood on the floor, on the bulletin board, how it only made him angrier.
And there is Sabrina, getting into his car.
You lower the camera from your face, feeling revealed. The colors of the fields too bright, the whistles too loud, the motions of the players and the ball so fast they make you dizzy. And still. You find yourself promising to Miss Hamilton that everything is fine.
“Okay,” she says. “Why don’t you take that home? Mess around with it, bring it back next week.”
“Really?” you ask, flushing with pride.
“Of course. I trust you. Shoot anything you want, and I’ll develop the film for you so you can understand what you’ve done, how we might improve. You can use the rest of this roll and I’ll give you a second one. I know how much you like photography.”
“Thanks,” you say, knowing your cheeks must be going crimson. That phrase rings through your body, your secret shadowing every exchange with a double meaning.
So you can understand what you’ve done.