Break the Skin (2 page)

That’s what people could do, Delilah told me. Think so much of themselves that they could do something like that—just go away—no matter how much they knew it would end up hurting you. Her voice was a whisper in the dark, as if she could barely make a sound, but I could hear the misery in it, the heartache she still carried from her years of moving from foster home to foster home, the same sorrow that filled our trailer some nights when I heard her crying in her bedroom. “I never really had a mother,” she told me. “Never had any brothers and sisters, either, just the other foster kids, and you don’t want to know how they treated me.” She reached over and found my hand, and she twined her fingers around mine. “Everyone ought to have at least one person they can count on.” She squeezed so hard, I could barely stand it, but I let her. “I can always count on you, can’t I?” she asked, and because I wanted to be that person—the sort a woman like Delilah, older and more experienced, could value—I told her, yes, absolutely, yes, she could. “We’re like sisters,” I said, and she put her arms around my shoulders and hugged me.

All this seemed too private, too much a thing that only belonged to Delilah and me, sisters at heart, so instead I told the story of the day we shot the gun, which was almost a year after I’d moved in with her. By that time, I’d gone back home to live with Mother, thinking Delilah and I were done for good. But we made up, and one day we went down into the country to shoot her gun. I told the officers about that, and then I went backwards from there, working my way to where everything—though we didn’t know it—pointed us down a road toward trouble.

Delilah had a .38 Special, a five-shot pistol with a two-inch stainless-steel barrel and Pachmayr grips. Mama’s Little Helper, she called it, something to keep around,
just in case
.

One night, back in April, I cleaned and oiled it, and the next day she showed it to Lester. We were in the kitchen of the trailer. She let him heft that .38, let him pop out the cylinder and take a gander at the shiny heads of the copper XPB bullets I’d slipped in after the cleaning was done. He snugged the cylinder back into place, and with the tip of the barrel he pushed his derby hat off his forehead. He was wearing a gray T-shirt and a black vest, and it was easy for me to believe he’d stepped out of some old-time shoot-’em-up. He wrapped his left hand around his right wrist, extended his arm, and sighted down the barrel.

“It’s going to be loud,” he said. “You got a silencer?”

The trailer windows were cranked open, and there was a breeze and birds singing. The hyacinth bulbs Delilah had planted in the fall had sent up green shoots and now the pink and purple flowers were in bloom. First-year blooms were always the sweetest, but the hyacinths’ smell wasn’t enough to cover the stench from the poultry house down the street.

“Never needed a silencer before,” Delilah said.

It was that word,
silencer
, that put me on edge, made me understand that what we were doing was real. All along, I thought we were just talking big, but now I took in the sight of Lester holding that pistol, and I was scared.

Delilah drove us out of Mt. Gilead in her Malibu. She brought an empty plastic milk jug and a pillow to see if either one of them would help silence that .38.

We left Route 50 and drove through New Hope, that itty-bitty town where I lived with my mother. I’d gone home because of what had happened between Delilah and me and a woman named Rose MacAdow. She’s the other part of my story and the reason I was talking to the police.

In a snap, I told the officers, we were curving out into the country. We took a gravel road and then another until we were back in what Daddy always called “the trashlands”: run-down farmhouses, and front yards with junk cars up on blocks. Then there was nothing but the gravel road running past field after field where the wheat was still green. Every once in a while we passed a lane trailing back into the brush, most likely to a caved-in house or maybe only a set of cement steps where that house used to be.

“All right, all right,” I said. I was so on edge I felt like I might jump right out of my skin. “You don’t have to keep going all day.”

Delilah pulled down an oil lease road that carried us into the woods. She shut off the Malibu and the three of us sat there, no one moving, as if we were suddenly paralyzed with the thought of what we’d come to do. A breeze set the branches of a sassafras sapling to twitching. Somewhere farther back in the woods, a woodpecker drummed against a trunk, the
knock knock knock
echoing in the still air.

Finally, Lester said, “A man could get away with anything out here.”

Then the three of us got out of the car.

We tried the milk jug first. Lester stuck the barrel of the .38 down through the mouth and pulled the trigger. The noise made my ears hurt.

“That’s no good,” Delilah said. “The whole town would hear that.”

So we tried the pillow, hoping it would muffle the shot, but all we ended up with was a pillow shot to hell and our ears still ringing.

“We’d never get away with it, anyway,” I finally said, and to my relief, Delilah agreed.

“It was a crazy idea,” she said.

We couldn’t get out of there fast enough. We drove back to Mt. Gilead, and then I got into Lester’s truck. We drove all the way back out to New Hope, neither of us saying a word.

Then, when we were parked in Mother’s driveway, I opened the truck door. Before I could get out, I turned to him and I said, “We shouldn’t talk about any of this.”

“You’re right.” The brim of his derby hat was slung low to his eyes now, as if he didn’t want anyone to get a good look at him. “We shouldn’t. If people got wind of what we were scheming, it could only be bad for us.”

Mother stepped out the front door and shook something from a towel. She had no idea what’d gone on down that oil lease road. To her, it was a regular Saturday, and everything was as ordinary as could be. That’s what I wanted more than anything—that feeling of everything being exactly what I’d expect. No surprises. Just the regular come and go.

“I got carried away,” I said to Lester. “We all did.”

“It’s all right, Laney.” He took my hand and squeezed it. “We just lost our heads. Now, forget it. I mean it. Let it go.”

But I couldn’t forget how a few nights before, we’d gathered at Delilah’s trailer. We sat around the kitchen table—Delilah and Lester and me. I took a paring knife, and along the length of a black candle I etched the name
Rose
.

Then I set the candle in the brass holder and put it in the middle of the table. I lit it, and as it burned, I reached out and took Delilah’s hand with my right and Lester’s with my left. I told them to close their eyes and to concentrate on calling forth the dark spirits. I closed my own eyes, and for a good while there was only the sound of our breathing and the candle wax dripping.

Then, for no apparent reason, the fluorescent light above the sink came on. I heard it crackle and hum, and when I opened my eyes, there it was, bright and with the slightest tinge of violet.

“Jesus, God,” said Lester.

“Has that ever happened before?” I asked Delilah.

“Never.” She squeezed my hand. “He’s here, isn’t he? The devil.”

I stared into the candle flame. “Can you see him?”

I knew that she wanted to, and that made me want it just as bad. I wanted to be able to say to her,
See what I brought you
. So I kept quiet, letting her look and look.

“I do,” she finally said in a whisper.

“Me, too,” said Lester.

Then it happened, the thing that scared me to death. I saw the wax dripping down the length of the candle, taking away the letters of Rose’s name, one at a time, and I started to cry a little, not making any noise, just letting the tears leak from my eyes and run down my cheeks.

I didn’t say anything.
You have to believe me
, I told the police officers. Not a word. I let Delilah and Lester do all the talking, and that’s what I’m guilty of—that silence.

“Look at her name,” Lester said in a whisper. “Look at it going away.”

I saw the last letter disappear, and I choked down a sob.

Delilah squeezed my hand. “Shh, Laney. Don’t cry. She’s hurt you long enough. She’s out to get all of us. We have to stop her. That’s what the devil’s telling us, isn’t he, Laney?”

I should have called an end to it. I should have said we were fools. I should have walked away. I should have called the police. I should have gotten out. I should have been the girl Mother wanted me to be, the girl with a singing voice so sweet and pure the angels had no hope of matching it. I should have been that girl with all her life ahead of her, a pretty life full of music and joy.

But I couldn’t stand to see the pain in Delilah’s broken heart, so I said, “Rose has hurt you, too.” I nodded my head toward the candle. “Take a good long look at that flame. Tell me what you see.”

I’ll admit I said that, and then I let the candle and what was already
inside Delilah do the rest. The way the flame waved and danced, it was easy to see whatever someone wanted to see.

“We have to put her away,” Delilah said, and still I thought we were only talking big. “She’s put a hex on us. A death hex. It won’t stop until she’s gone. We have to open the gates of hell and put her away forever.”

We swore we’d never tell anyone. Not a soul. Not to save our lives.

WE WERE SCARED
. You have to understand what happens to people who start to believe they have no choice—people like us. We had so little—or in my case, I’d thrown too much away—and we were fierce to protect what was ours. Enough things had gone wrong that we’d begun to believe that evil was stalking us, and it was up to us to find a way to stop Rose MacAdow.

That’s who we were the night I lit that black candle. By then I felt like I was in a current of time that I couldn’t stop even if I wanted to, a current that began when Delilah called to say someone had broken into her trailer and left a mess. “Come over here, quick, Laney, I’m scared to death.”

When I walked into the trailer—it would be a few more days before I lit that black candle—my heart started pounding. Whoever had come to do this had been out of control: kitchen drawers yanked out, their contents dumped onto the floor; broken dishes; slashes in the couch upholstery so the stuffing stuck out; glass picture frames cracked; clothes cut to rags; the toilet stopped up and flushed so it overflowed; a symbol drawn on the bathroom mirror in lipstick: a circle with a pentagram inside it. I’d seen that symbol before, and it always put me in mind of the star I’d learned to draw in grade school from one continuous line, only this star was turned so two of its points touched the top arc of the circle that contained it.

An inverted pentagram, I told Delilah when the two of us walked
through the trailer, overwhelmed with the destruction. We stood before the mirror, the pentagram seeming to fall across my face. It was meant to conjure evil spirits, to call them into the trailer where they’d feast off whoever lived there.

“It was Rose, wasn’t it?” Delilah said.

I nodded. “Who else?”

We set about cleaning up the mess, talking as we worked, wondering what might be about to happen next and what we could do to stop it.

THE NEXT DAY
, Lester came home from work and found that someone had been out to his place. They’d spray-painted those same inverted pentagrams on the front of his house.

“Rose shouldn’t get away with this,” he said, and I told him we wouldn’t let her.

That night, when I was driving to work, a car came up behind me, so close its headlights filled my Corolla. Whoever was in that car had the high beams on. I looked in my rearview mirror, but the lights were so blinding I couldn’t make out anything about the car that was following me and I couldn’t see anyone inside it. I hunched over the steering wheel, trying to get out of the glare.

Finally, the car fell back. I took another glance at the mirror, but I still couldn’t make out a thing about that car.

“It could have been nothing,” I said when I told the story to Delilah. “Maybe it was a drunk, or some kids out joyriding.”

“You know exactly who it was. It’s a wonder you weren’t killed.”

When she said that, I felt my knees go weak. I put my arms around her and pressed her to me. “What in the world have we got ourselves into?”

She let me hold on to her like that. Then, finally, she pulled away. She said, “We better get out of it quick.” She used the back of her hand to caress my cheek. “Right, Laney? We better get out before someone gets hurt.”

I nodded. I’d figure out something, I told her. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I will.”

IT WAS UP TO ME
, I told the police officers, on account of Rose had taught me how to cast spells. “I’ve been doing them a long time now,” she told me, “and I swear, Laney, they really work. Just put the right energy out there, and, trust me, you’ll get what you want.”

At one time, she and I and Delilah lived together at the trailer park. It was there, one March morning toward dawn, more than a year before we’d test-fire that .38, when Rose cast the first spell, a spell for love. Now that what we started is done, I can own up to the fact that, yes, I stood as witness, and yes, Delilah was there. She was there, and she said, “It’s just for fun, right, Rose?”

Rose wouldn’t answer. She just went on with what she was doing, her small hands—pretty little hands for a woman her size—busy with the candle and the match. She set the taper—red, to represent the heart, she told us—on Delilah’s night table and lit it. Rose had the blackest hair, cut in a bob and parted in the middle. When she leaned over the candle, the ends of her hair came close to the flame. Her face was so pretty in the light: pale skin, button nose, dainty mouth, red lips. Her mouth looked like it should have belonged to a smaller woman. Not that she was sloppy fat. Fleshy, I guess you’d say. Hips a little too wide, bottom a little too round. Sometimes she tried to make herself feel better about her weight by saying there was more to her to love than a skinny thing like me could put in front of a man. I never took offense. I understood she wanted to be thin. Maybe not as thin as me, but still.