As I Descended. Robin Talley

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      “Please continue, spirit,” Maria said out loud, ignoring Brandon’s muffled laughter. “Your name begins with M. What comes next?”

      The planchette didn’t move. But the cats did.

      They’d been watching the girls’ hands on the board, but now, in an identical movement, their heads rose, arcing, their eyes fixed on a single point in the air Maria couldn’t see. Neither cat made a sound, but their heads followed the same path over the table and across the room. Then they stopped, staring into the far corner of the ceiling.

      The hair on the back of Maria’s neck prickled. Lily and Brandon shivered. The air around them was frigid.

      Maria followed the cats’ gaze. The antique chandelier’s illumination didn’t reach that corner. The shadow on the ceiling wasn’t shaped the way you’d expect a shadow to be, with clean edges that followed the path of the light. Instead, it was jagged on one side. As if something were perched in that corner, clinging to the wall, hunched up on knees and elbows.

      Maria closed her eyes again and willed her heart to stop pounding. Showing fear was the surest way to anger a spirit.

      Maria knew how to do this part.

      She’d known ever since she first glanced into the old mirror that hung on her grandmother’s back porch when she was five. Maria always liked to play on the porch when they went to visit her grandparents, even though no one else used it and it wasn’t kept up anymore. The wind blew fiercely back there, even on calm days. The half-wild garden that ran along that side of the house had grown over, and vines crept up onto the rotting wood floor. It didn’t have much furniture anymore. Just an old swing that Maria’s nanny, Altagracia, warned her never to play on in case the rusted chains gave way.

      And the mirror. An old cracked glass hanging from a nail that jutted out of the brick. The mirror needed a good polishing, but it never seemed to swing on its perch, no matter how bad the wind got. Maria didn’t know why her grandmother kept the mirror out on the porch, but it was always there. Even in winter, when the glass frosted over.

      Whenever Maria played out back, sooner or later she’d glance toward the mirror. Every time, she felt it. It started on the back of her neck, then slid down her spine and along her arms and legs, giving her goose bumps regardless of the weather. Every time, she’d go over to the mirror and stare into it.

      She never saw anything except her own reflection, but it felt like something was tugging at her. Pulling her forward. Before she got old enough to know better, Maria used to think something was trying to pull her into the mirror itself.

      Once she looked into the mirror, she never moved. She only stood there, gazing at her own face until Altagracia called her to come inside.

      Maria drew in a deep breath and forced herself to shake the memory. The mirror on the porch was a long time ago.

      She couldn’t forget where she was right now. She couldn’t lose focus.

      She couldn’t risk getting lost in the mirror again.

      “If you’re here,” Maria said, her gaze locked on the planchette in front of her, “if you have anything you’d like to tell us, please do. We’d like to listen.”

      Above them, something knocked three times.

      Loudly. The sound thundered in their ears and lingered, echoing.

      “What the hell was that?” Brandon said.

      “Probably a sophomore playing some dumb game,” Lily said.

      “It didn’t sound like any sophomore,” Brandon said. “It sounded like somebody knocking at the gates of hell.”

      The planchette quivered.

      Lily and Brandon were both sitting forward. Brandon had his pad ready, a big M scrawled in the middle of it. The planchette moved faster than it had before, coming to a stop over the A.

      “M, A,” Brandon read. “Bet it’s the ghost of Marie Antoinette. Ask her if she can get me the answers for the history test next week.”

      No one laughed.

      Brandon kept talking anyway, his voice pitched higher than usual. “By the way, does anyone else smell something baking?”

      The planchette was still moving.

      The next three letters were R, I, A. Then the planchette stopped.

      “That’s not funny, Ree,” Lily said. “I thought we said we were going to take this seriously.”

      Maria took her hand off the planchette. She was sweating despite the chill.

      “I didn’t do that,” Maria said.

      Lily sat back in her chair, her wide-set blue eyes narrowed, her forehead creased. “Then is this something that happens sometimes? Is your ghost coming back from the future to mess with us or something?”

      “Couldn’t it be someone else named Maria?” Brandon interrupted. “Why don’t we ask its last name?”

      Lily rolled her eyes, but from the look on his face Maria knew Brandon wasn’t joking. She wondered if he’d seen the cats too.

      Maria wished she could be alone so she could do this right, but that was the thing about Acheron: solitude didn’t exist inside these old white walls.

      Maria didn’t want to touch the planchette again. Her desperate need to connect with the spirits had evaporated the moment the board finished spelling out her name.

      Plus, she could smell baking, too. It smelled like empanadas. The kind Altagracia used to make on Sunday afternoons.

      Maria used to like that smell. Tonight it made her nervous.

      But it was dangerous to leave a Ouija session unfinished. She remembered that much from the “games” she’d played as a kid. Once you’d opened a link to the spirit world, you had to close it. If you didn’t, the spirits would be free to roam as they pleased.

      Maria put a fingertip back on the planchette. Lily did the same. The dusty chandelier over their heads swayed gently and soundlessly.

      Except—even with all the windows wide-open, there was no breeze. Not tonight. The air in the room was heavy and still. Heavy, still, and cold.

      The old dining hall was on the first floor of their dorm, right next to Maria and Lily’s room, but it wasn’t used anymore. A massive cafeteria had been built in the new student life center on the other side of the hill years before any of them had come to Acheron. This room was much too small for actual dining anyway. It was the size of a small classroom, with just one long wooden table and a straight row of stiff-backed chairs on either side.

      Until tonight Maria had only ever been in this room for a minute at a time, cutting through it on her way to the staff kitchen to rinse her coffee mug or avoid one of her so-called friends. But for all the years Maria had lived in this dorm, every time she’d been in this room—and sometimes when she’d only passed by the door in the hall—she’d felt it. The tingly СКАЧАТЬ