Chapter 2
In hindsight, googling ‘I see dead people’ had been a mistake.
But what was she supposed to do? She was a child of the information age. The default for anyone in her generation was to google the unknown. Darcy had learned to exercise some caution in the wake of looking up ‘blow job’ in the 5th grade after hearing some older boys say it at the movie theater, but the principle remained the same.
Once she had waded through the approximately 4,000 Sixth Sense memes, Darcy realized that the internet was going to fail her.
She had been keeping to her room since that night three days ago. The town had been abuzz all weekend, and the one time she had braved Facebook, she had nearly hyperventilated with the bombardment of grieving statuses and pictures of roaring flames. School had been cancelled today, but Darcy didn’t know how she was going to go back.
Was she just supposed to go take her chemistry test tomorrow? Focus on the laws of thermodynamics and work out the standard free energy of this equation or that? Go through the motions, face a cafeteria full of clamoring teenagers who would all only be talking about the carnival?
She couldn’t do that, couldn’t just go on like the world outside was the same one she had always walked through. It might look the same, but she knew better now. She could feel it when she closed her eyes as though she were a kid swimming underwater, unable to see, but still sensing something lurking in the deep.
Getting up from her desk, Darcy began to pace. Her skin felt too tight like it was moments from splitting along her bones. She’d been on edge for three days straight, and she recognized that she was about to hit her breaking point.
Letting her bedroom wall meet her back and sliding down because she was too exhausted to stay on her feet, she focused on breathing through her nose so the scream trying to claw up her throat wouldn’t make it passed her closed mouth.
That was the most exhausting thing.
She kept having to stop herself from screaming.
----------------------------------------------------
Her mother found her in the same spot hours later.
Diane had been cautiously letting Darcy get away with shutting herself off for the weekend. She told herself that was a normal reaction to trauma, and her daughter was merely processing a grievous but explainable tragedy.
The older woman consciously ignored the small voice in the back of her head, the one dripping in guilt, whispering about the last tragedy she and her daughter had shared.
The sight of Darcy huddled against the wall, clutching her head as she bit her lips together so forcefully that Diane expected blood to drip down at any moment, dispelled any hope that she had been harboring for the teenager to be alright.
‘It could still be just the shock of death,’ Diane thought to herself, ‘It doesn’t have to mean…’
Diane couldn’t finish the thought, wouldn’t finish it.
Shaking her head of things better left in the past, she moved across the room, coming to kneel at Darcy’s side.
“Sweetheart?” Diane tucked her daughter’s hair out of the way so she could see her face.
Darcy didn’t say anything, but she did crumble into her mother’s arms. Diane sagged with the unexpected weight, but just sat down and let the fully grown teenager curl up in her lap like she was still the little girl who liked to cuddle up to her mom on cold nights.
She rocked her girl soothingly and cooed into her hair until Darcy finally stopped trembling. She snuffled into her mom’s shoulder, and Diane rested against her head as she asked “Do you want to talk about it? You know I’m here to talk about whatever you want.”
Darcy didn’t say anything for the breadth of a heart beat before letting out a dry sigh.
“No, you aren’t.”
Diane pulled back, confused. “What do you mean?”
Darcy kept her eyes trained on the cross that hung around her mother’s neck. It had been her grandmother’s who had given it to her mother a few years before Darcy had been born when Diane had been having a rough time.
Diane had always been driven. Her father had died when she was young, and though her family had never wanted for money thanks to a slew of factories up the east coast, Diane had always admired her own mother for raising her on her own. Her mother hadn’t remarried which was a bit of a scandal at the time, but the Lewis’ had always marched to their own drum.
Diane came out of her childhood wanting to be as strong as her mother, but successful in her own right. She dedicated herself to her schooling and then to her job, worked her way up the corporate ladder, and basked in professional triumph. She didn’t mind that she had never found someone to share her life with because she had friends and had her mother, and was mostly happy. Her life was great with one gaping exception.
She had always wanted a child of her own.
Someone that she could raise like her mother had raised her; someone to teach how to be strong and how to love; someone to whom she could show this world.
Diane, a woman used to setting her mind to something and achieving it, was met with devastation when the doctors told her she was infertile. Her brains, her money, nothing that had helped her in the past could help her get the one thing out of her reach.
So Diane’s mother had given her the cross that had been a gift from her husband, Diane’s father, in the hope that it might bring comfort. Diane had always told Darcy that praying over the cross is what gave her Darcy. Darcy usually snarked back that science probably had more to do with it even though Diane had never been comfortable talking about whatever treatment she had used to conceive Darcy.
For which Darcy was exceedingly grateful because she always pictured a scenario with a turkey baster and freaked herself out.
But now as Darcy stared at the cross, she felt nothing more than a spreading numbness.
“I mean that you aren’t really here to talk about whatever I want.”
Diane reached out to lift Darcy’s chin, but Darcy just tucked her head further into her chest.
“Of course I’m here to talk with you! I’m your mother, I love you, and I’m here.”
“Then why do we never talk about the night that Grandma died?”
Diane stiffened, fear and shame trying their best to drown each other out in her chest.
Darcy continued on, oblivious to her mother’s turmoil. “I mean, that’s a pretty weird thing, right? Your kid wakes you up crying and tells you not only that your mom’s dead, but how she died? And we what? Never talked about it except for you telling me to keep quiet about it? What am I supposed to do with that?”
Diane tried to back away, but Darcy’s weight kept her pinned to the ground. She cleared her throat and said “Sweetheart, you… don’t understand.”
“You think I don’t know that?” Darcy’s voice shrilled against Diane’s ears, “I am so aware of that it’s not even funny!”
Diane raised her hands to the side of her head to block out Darcy’s screaming, but it was no use. Darcy’s voice reverberated regardless.
“I keep seeing them! Them being, you know, dead people! Not only seeing them, but feeling them, feeling their, I don’t even know, their energy? Soul? But more than that, I feel their death, Mom. I know it. I know their deaths in a way I can’t even explain. So no, I do not understand…”
As Darcy kept yelling, Diane felt the oddest sense of vertigo. She knew she was still sitting with her hysterical girl in her lap, but she could no longer feel the floor beneath her. There was no more of the late afternoon sunlight shining on them from the window, just blue darkness unendingly spread around them.
Diane could do nothing in her shock, but pull a still screaming Darcy protectively into her chest.
Suddenly, a shaft of light appeared in the darkness like a tunnel. At the end of the tunnel, Diane saw window crystallizing out of nothing. “Darcy, shh, Darcy!” Diane put her hand over Darcy’s shrieking mouth. Darcy startled out of her tirade; her eyes widening as she took in the now familiar tableau.
Diane had hoped that her hallucination, it had to be a hallucination, would fade when Darcy stopped yelling, but the twilight held up in the silence.
“Mom?” Darcy whispered from behind her hand, but Diane just clamped down tighter. There was a picture forming in the window in the tunnel.
Darcy turned her head to where her mother’s gaze was arrested just in time for the light in the window to forge the silhouette of two figures. As they watched, the image sharpened to show the figures to be a horned man, red as blood, and Diane herself.
The horned man edged closer to Diane, who they could now see was in her bedroom. The man, so large his horns scraped the vaulted ceiling, laid a hand on Diane’s shoulder and hissed “It’s time,” into her ear, his voice sounding like lightning cracking through a boulder.
It wasn’t the Diane in the picture that spoke next, but the Diane that held Darcy.
“Mephisto…”
Diane and Darcy watched as the Diane in the frame withered and grayed, starting from where Mephisto’s hand clamped her shoulder and radiating out through her body, leaving only a brittle husk. With a low chuckle, Mephisto disappeared from the room as quietly as he had entered.
Darcy stared at the corpse of her mother in that little window, and closed her eyes against the tears she didn’t think she had left.
When she opened her eyes, it was to her own room, bathed in light.
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Diane had one hand around Darcy and the other around the cross at her neck.
For a woman who had just witnessed her own death, she felt calm.
Or maybe she was confusing resignation for calm, but she didn’t think that mattered. She had spent years in doubt and paranoia, so there was something almost relieving about knowing exactly what would come out of the choice she had made 17 years before. If that choice had been worth it.
As she gazed down at her beautiful daughter, she thought it had been.
Darcy blinked at the fresh round of tears rolling down her face and reached out a hand to the hardwood beneath them, testing if they were really home.
She pressed her hand into the floor and turned to face Diane.
“Mom?”
Diane gave her a watery but encouraging smile.
Darcy blinked at that and spoke in a deadpan that made Diane proud. “You don’t seem confused. And you knew that… that thing that looked very much like a certain religious character that I am definitely not going to say out loud because it is too crazy. Way, way too crazy.”
Diane laughed at that. ‘Very worth it,’ Diane thought, ‘Anything is worth Darcy.’
“I’m not confused. Rather, I’m not as confused as you. It’s all a little too fantastic to not be somewhat confused, I guess.”
Diane stood up from the ground, her knees creaking and back protesting. Darcy got to her feet with no problems, but that was the way with the young.
Diane led Darcy out of the room with the intention of making them some tea. Warm drinks were always a welcome distraction in the face of serious conversations.
And Diane thought this would be a serious conversation.
Deals with the devil were a fairly serious matter, after all.