Chapter Eight #2
“So is who?” Susie says.
The glass—or whatever is controlling it, since I don’t think it’s us, not anymore—slides to three more letters, bouncing from one to the other in quick succession.
D
E
A
The glass then lurches all the way across the table to the N. As it moves, Julianne emits a strange, strangled squeak.
“Do you know someone named Dean?” Heather says.
Julianne nods. “My first husband.”
“Did he die?” Susie asks, sounding viscerally scared.
“Yes,” Julianne says, a catch in her throat. “Decades ago.”
By then, the glass is on the move again, sliding to the letter on my immediate right.
F
It continues to hopscotch across the table, to the R.
Then the A.
As the glass pauses right in front of her, Violet swallows hard and stares it down, as if daring it to continue. It does, sliding to the N and then the K.
“Does anyone know a Frank?” Heather says.
“I–I do.” It’s Violet, no longer staring. Her eyes are now clenched shut as a grimace stretches across her face. “That was my father’s name.”
She keeps her eyes closed even as her fingers remain on the glass, her arms stretching over the table as it continues without pause to the other side of the table, ready to spell out yet another name.
M
My heart skips as the glass skids to a stop in front of the letter. It happens again a second later when the glass moves to another.
O
No, I think. This isn’t happening. It can’t be happening.
The glass continues on, pausing at the L before looping back around to meet it again.
In that moment, I understand why Violet closed her eyes. She didn’t want to see the glass make its inevitable slide to the final letter, confirming the name she already knew it was going to complete.
I do.
Just to make sure I’m correct.
I am, of course, the glass settling at the letter just to the right of Violet.
Y
Molly.
There’s no way any of them could know her name, even if they all saw my audition tape.
Not once did I say it out loud. I only referred to her as “my sister,” never “Molly.” Yet seeing the name spelled out like that sends a wave of exhaustion crashing over me.
The whole room seems to tilt, when it’s me doing the tilting, like I’m a mere second from passing out.
Somehow I remain upright. Still at the table, still touching the glass as it continues its devious spelling jag, zigging to even more letters.
“E,” Susie says, sounding it out. “L.”
Heather joins her on the next letter. “I.”
“S,” says Julianne, chiming in.
Together, all three finish spelling a name that, this time, is blessedly unfamiliar to me. “E.”
“Elise,” I say. “Who’s Elise?”
“That’s fucking enough!”
The outburst comes not from someone at the table but Ronan, surging from the darkness. At the table, he swats the glass out from under our hands. They remain hovering in midair a moment, touching nothing, as the glass itself smashes against the piano and shatters.
“Which one of you is behind this?”
“Behind what?” Violet says, hand on her chest, looking as breathless and unnerved as I feel.
“That name!” Ronan stalks around the table, eyeing us with rabid suspicion. “One of you told the others to spell it.”
“No,” I say.
“We didn’t,” Julianne adds. “It was Azra.”
This only makes Ronan angrier. He continues to circle the table, so mad his teeth are bared. “Goddammit, there is no Azra! None of this is real!”
Just then, the table jumps.
As ridiculous as that sounds, it’s the only way to describe it. A sudden, inch-high rise that sets the letters atop the table sliding.
It jumps again. Slightly harder this time, returning to the floor with an audible thunk. A few of the letters fall off the table. Others careen together in its center.
“Who’s doing that?” Heather says, flinging her gaze to the rest of us, trying to catch one of us in the act.
“No one,” Violet says right before the table jumps again.
“Someone has to be doing it, and it sure as fuck isn’t—”
She’s cut off by the sound of the table, no longer jumping intermittently but literally hopping. Thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk.
“Stop it!” Susie shrieks, either to us or the table or both. “For God’s sake, stop!”
The table hits the floor with one last thunk and settles there. As it does, the candles on the sideboard go out.
Every single one.
At the same time.
They’re extinguished in an instant, as if a giant hand has snuffed them out, plunging the room into darkness so thick I can’t see anything. Not the table. Not the others. Not even my hand, which, yes, I hold in front of my face. In that sudden and total blackness, I hear a voice.
Speaking right into my ear.
No, not speaking.
Whispering.
An insidious rasp of four words.
“You will be last.”
I pivot, groping in the darkness, seeking the source of the voice. But no one is there. Just empty space that I continue to claw.
“Who said that?”
For a slash of a second, I think I’ve spoken without realizing it, the plaintive question flying from my lips, unbidden.
I certainly thought it. Certainly intended to ask that very thing.
Which is why I assume my voice said it without consulting my brain.
But then I hear it again, not from me but from someone on the other side of the pitch-black room.
Susie.
“Who said that?”
“Said what?” someone—I think Heather—asks.
“You didn’t hear that?” Susie says, returning to that scared, childlike whine.
“I didn’t hear a thing,” Violet adds.
Standing in the darkness, I think of Daisy’s diary. How she’d described the exact same thing happening to her.
There’s no time to let that sink in, because within seconds Brad is flicking on a flashlight, flooding the room in white, incandescent light. His face looks pale in the blinding glow, his cheeks and forehead slick with sweat.
“Are you okay?” Ronan says.
“No, I’m—”
Brad suddenly drops the flashlight, its beam spinning around the parlor like we’re at a disco. He then lurches out of the room, moaning. In the dizzying whirl of the flashlight, I lock eyes with Violet. We both know something is very, very wrong.
“Brad?” I say, feeling my way out of the parlor and down the hall. In the darkness, I hear him stumbling to the front door, which he throws open. Light appears behind me. Ronan, flashlight in hand, leading the others.
“Where’d he go?”
“Outside,” I say.
We all tromp to the door in a concerned herd, finding Brad doubled over in the grass. When he flops onto his back, Ronan and I are by his side in an instant.
“What’s wrong?” Ronan asks.
Brad’s in such agony that he can barely speak. The two words he does manage—“My stomach”—are forced out in pain-racked huffs. Heather pushes between us and drops to her knees by Brad’s side. “Let me take a look.”
“You’re not a doctor,” Ronan says.