CHAPTER FOUR PRESENT DAY
The next morning, the sound of a buzzing saw rouses me from a marathon night of terrible sleep.
A bleary glance from my window identifies the culprit: none other than Mister When-I-Wake-Up-We-All-Wake-Up Talbot.
I yank my robe over my pajamas and wait until I hear Baba’s car leaving the driveway to creep out of my room.
Strings of pain stretch inside my head, strumming between my temples.
The sun barely peeks through the blanket of clouds, but its presence means the threat of a Ward Wailer is gone.
My mother’s journal sits on my bedside table, open to one of its many blank pages.
I shove my feet into the yard Crocs, slapping the screen door open. A rickety wooden gate separates our backyard from the Talbots’. As I approach, I spot Jesse moving through the gaps in the boards. The morning frost seeps into my pajamas, wringing a shiver from me.
“Hey!” I shout through one of the gaps. “Quit it!”
Nothing. The sawing continues, yanking at the strings in my head.
The headache grows, my temper with it. I circle the yard for a way to stick my head over the gates, narrowing in on a cracked plastic chair by the fire pit.
I almost forgot we had a fire pit. Baba had big plans to grill corn, potatoes, and yams, but they had long since rusted along with most of his extracurricular plans.
Slamming the chair against the gates, I climb up, ignoring the warning squeak of the cracked plastic leg.
Jesse wears protective goggles and ear protectors as he brings the saw down against a hollowed-out tree log.
Containers of bleach, charcoal garden soil, and compost stack the bench behind him.
A blue tarp flutters beneath the containers.
Oookay, that’s not suspicious at all. What the hell is he doing?
Nothing I do succeeds in grabbing Jesse’s attention. I call, I wave, I whistle. Zilch. The guy is totally tuned to his own station.
Frustrated, I lower my arms. I would wonder how his dad sleeps through this racket if I didn’t already have an inkling. More likely than not, Mr. Talbot is locked away in their basement. His basement, which also happens to be the town mortuary.
I try to avoid the Ward gossip mill, I really do, but it’s impossible not to hear the rumors about the Talbot family.
Four years ago, Elias Talbot swept into Ward with a single black suitcase and his surly teenage son to replace Mr. Whitely as the town mortician.
The solemn Mr. Talbot was nothing like our previous mortician, who drove a bright green Jeep and hummed Top 50 pop songs in the grocery line.
No one could believe it when Jesse’s dad refused Mr. Whitley’s facilities and built his own mortuary, right in the basement of his house.
The motto on our street is mind your business, so nobody bugged Elias about pesky things like permits and zoning ordinances, although I had the pleasure of hearing Baba mutter about it under his breath for two weeks straight my freshman year.
As for Mrs. Talbot … not even our super sleuths can find any dirt on her.
Some people think Elias murdered her—that he invented a fake story for the police after he embalmed her and stored her in his basement mortuary.
Others think she’s in jail for committing an unspeakable crime and the Talbots had to flee town after her arrest.
In any case, not the sort of family you want to cross.
Unfortunately, I’m sleep-deprived and operating at the mercy of a single brain cell.
I find a pair of beaten dance shoes Baba was supposed to throw away behind the garbage bins and climb onto the chair again.
Strategy is of the essence here. Throwing the shoe too hard might startle Jesse into sawing himself in half.
Throwing it too gently won’t catch his eye, which means he’ll keep sawing, which means I’ll lose it and do something ill-advised like run into the Talbot house and cut the wires of all his power tools.
The first shoe sails wide, over the grill and straight through their open kitchen door.
Whoops.
I squint one eye shut, zeroing in like I’ve seen in the movies. Rearing my arm as far back as it’ll go, I keep a stabilizing hand on the gate. The chair squeaks.
A shadow passes over me, a wisp of darkness smaller than a bird in flight.
The shoe flies, and several things happen in rapid-fire sequence. The chair’s leg collapses, sending me flailing backward. Jesse’s head jerks up, and I fall into a shadow.
The world vanishes. Filth splashes around my ankles. I struggle to sit up, gagging against the odors battering my nose. Vomit, excrement. Blood and oozing decay.
I can’t see, but I could never forget this smell. The sewers carrying this putrid muck only break open in one street. A street thousands of miles away.
The nothingness at my feet wavers. From the void, a small body bubbles to the surface. Facedown and unnaturally still.
My heart freezes.
It’s not real. It’s not real. I screw my eyes shut and pinch my nose. Slow, shallow sips of air filter into my mouth. I left the Haikal villa three weeks ago.
The darkness presses close, and my hold on calm begins to rapidly unravel.
The darkness knows my name. It’s the darkness that pressed against me as I slept in El Agamy.
That throbs in the split second before my hand finds a light switch.
The most dangerous mistake is letting my gaze linger on these shadows.
Once they start to change, there’s no going back. They’ll follow me into the light.
“Mansour!” My head snaps back as someone shakes me. The fog of terror temporarily lifts, and I take a tentative sniff of the air. Wood shavings and jasmine. The sweet, moldy tang of the Ahmads’ tangerines squashed on the street.
I force my eyelids to lift. My knees are damp from kneeling on the grass. My palms lie open, facing the sky.
A position of submission. Of surrender.
A chill that has nothing to do with the temperature spreads down my spine.
At the sight of Jesse’s ear protectors dangling around his neck, I latch onto the remnants of my irritation. Irritation is safer than the fear surging through me, souring in my stomach.
“Who uses power tools at eight in the morning on a Saturday?” I demand. I hope he can’t hear the quiver in my voice.
“Power tools?” Jesse sits back on his haunches, work boots sinking into the grass. Dark eyes examine my features as though they might unveil the answers to the universe. “What the fuck just happened to you?”
Two slats from the gate lie in pieces beside me. Sawed off, it seems. I’d worry about explaining to Baba why the neighbor’s son hacked his way onto our property, if Baba ventured out here more than once every fifty years.
“I have a headache,” I say. It emerges more pitifully than I intended. A headache making me hallucinate foul smells and faraway streets and floating children.
Down the road, a door slams shut, and the rest of my fog clears. I’m alone with Jesse. Sure, his eyes are still brown, and I think Mr. Olson’s smoking on his porch next door, but still. The thing could take him at any moment. Getting sawed into chunks isn’t on my list of top ten ways to get killed.
I skirt around Jesse and throw open the screen door. “Sleep in for once, would you?” I call over my shoulder. The screen slams shut behind me.
By late afternoon, I’ve successfully repressed my memories of the morning, prepared and packaged dinner, organized my closet, and cleaned every corner of the house.
I purse my lips at the pile of books on my desk. I’ve descended into levels of boredom where even stats homework would hit the spot.
A sharp tap rings from the roof. I flinch, whipping my head toward the ceiling.
Another tap, this one directly over my bed. Rain trickles from the clear panes of the window, pooling at the sill.
No hail. So what’s on my roof?
A dozen taps slam overhead.
I reach for the handle of a side door that leads to the roof and hesitate. I haven’t gone up to the roof in years.
The metal side door in the corner of my room opens to a set of four steps in a claustrophobic passageway.
The previous owners constructed it after a series of terrible storms brought down the power lines.
According to the real estate agent who sold Baba the house, the owners would go to my room whenever it thundered and keep watch over the door.
In case the power went out, they wanted quick access to the roof, where they would be easily visible to a passing Medivac.
I jump as the door rattles, tearing me from the memory. Every instinct cautions me against opening it.
The taps keep coming. The twinkle lights around my ceiling vibrate, and one corner comes loose from its thumbtack.
And then—nothing.
I swallow, massaging my chest with the heel of my hand. “Hail,” I say aloud. My voice rings in the newfound silence. “It must have been hail.”
Someone knocks on the other side of the metal door.
I go perfectly still. Water drips from the rusted lip of the door, soaking the towel I’d shoved under it this morning.
Hail doesn’t knock.
“Who’s there?” Without taking my eyes off the door, I grope around for the heaviest item on my dresser. My fingers close around the long, gold aluminum perfume bottle Baba bought at the swap meet for my birthday.
Armed with my signature scent, I approach the door.
“Don’t be mad,” comes the voice on the other side of the door, and I nearly drop the perfume.
“Jesse?”
“Ding ding ding, she’s done it again, folks,” Jesse drawls. “Do you mind letting me in? These steps aren’t exactly comfortable.”
I hope the rain soaked him through. “Were you throwing rocks at my roof?”
A pause. “Maybe.”
I make an aggravated noise. At least his confirmation eases my lurking paranoia that the thing has found a way to possess the weather.
To climb down here, Jesse would have had to scale our roof, push aside the thin copper sheet covering the steps, and maneuver himself into the opening. Extraordinarily dangerous in the best of weather, let alone in the rain.
I press my shaking fingers to my forehead. “This is a mean prank, even for you.”
“Even for me?” Jesse’s chuckle is sardonic. “Whatever could you mean?”
I flounder for a response that isn’t Everyone in town thinks you hate us and come up blank.
The door hinges creak. “Let me in, Mansour. If I’m going to have my character assassinated, I’d rather be face-to-face.”
Against my better judgment, I press my cheek to the door. This is the longest conversation I’ve had with anyone in nearly a month, and I hang on to every word. “I can’t.”
“Listen …” His tone shifts, almost gentling. It sets me on guard instantly. “I know. Okay? I know why you’re afraid to open the door. I know what happened to Miss Diaz.” A long pause, where I am viscerally aware of each beat of my heart. “I saw her eyes.”
I gasp.
Tears blur my vision. I haven’t told anyone about my visit to Masr since the aborted attempt with Alex, too afraid of finding myself yanked out of school and thrust somewhere I don’t want to go.
Of seeing Baba remove his glasses and wipe them on his shirt to hide his obvious apprehension, his flash of bone-deep sorrow.
How could Jesse know?
“If you know what I’m afraid of, then you should know why I can’t open this door,” I whisper.
“I’m saying it won’t happen. Not with me.”
I frown. He sounds so sure, so certain. I’ve been dealing with this for weeks, and he thinks he’s cracked it in twenty-four hours? “It happens with everyone. Despite the best efforts of your superiority complex, you still count as everyone.”
“Ouch,” Jesse says cheerfully. “How about we test it? I won’t move from the stairwell when you open the door. If it possesses me, just slam the door shut again.”
“No.”
I took a risk with Miss Diaz yesterday, and it ended with a pair of scissors in my arm.
“Mansour—Mina. I can help you.” A short rap against the door startles me, and I pull back an inch. “Let me help you.”
In the corner of my room, a single brown leaf drops from my calathea onto the carpet.
The leaf has been dead for weeks, but I’d hoped it would recover the way my monstera usually did.
It didn’t make any sense to me how the rest of the calathea was thriving while an entire leaf had browned inches away; as if they weren’t connected by the same roots, housed in the same blue ceramic pot.
It might not have even felt the dead leaf finally fall.
I gaze at the corpse on the carpet and make a decision.
“Pull your jacket halfway down your arms,” I order. If it possesses him and throws his giant body against the door, I need to give myself the advantage. “And tie your shoelaces together.”
To his credit, Jesse doesn’t argue, although I’m sure there’s a sarcastic retort knocking on the back of his teeth. “Done.”
Please don’t let this be another mistake.
Bracing myself, I close my hand around the curved handle and pull the door open.