“But she killed herself,” I said. “Do you mean you helped her kill herself?”
Maria tilted her head. “Not exactly. I told her that if she left, she could die and be free.”
I was only a foot away from Maria now, with the wall of salt between us. Anger and disbelief throbbed inside me as I stared down at her oozing skin, her thick-scarred eyelids. But behind the horror show of her face, something in her eyes was surprisingly intelligent and human.
“That’s impossible. How could you have told her? We can’t tell living people anything,” I said, a razor edge in my voice.
My intensity caused Maria to take a step back. Her eyes darted around the room, refusing to meet mine. “She was nice to me,” she said. “She knew I came in here. She called me her little friend. She had pretty pictures for me to look at. She would set them down on the floor in the morning, and I would sit and look at them. And at the end of every day, she would cut one out so I could take it with me. I still have them all. I’m very careful with them. They’re my favorite things. And she gave me a blanket, because it’s so cold here. I—I’m still cold, but I like the blanket very much.”
I pictured Aunt Cordelia leaving small offerings for this poor, destroyed creature, speaking to her kindly, as if she were a normal little girl and not a beast.
And then I remembered something I’d seen years earlier—a cut-out picture of a box of cat food.
Was it possible I’d been wrong about Maria? That we were all wrong about Maria?
I lowered my voice and crouched down to her eye level. “How did you tell her what to do?”
Maria didn’t answer. She looked like she was afraid she’d be in trouble.
“If you did help her, then … thank you,” I said. “She didn’t want to die here.”
“I know!” Maria’s rotting chin jutted up toward me, hurt and defiant. “No one should die here. If you die here, you can never go home.”
“Do you want to go home?” I asked.
Our eyes met. Hers were disconcertingly honest, like any child’s. She nodded.
“Then maybe you can help me. I’m looking for something—my aunt used to write me letters. I think she wrote one, but never mailed it. I think it’s here somewhere.”
Maria’s ruined hands wrung the front of her dress. “I found her one day, when she was sick. I was a little scared of her, because that was when she was very bad. The smoke had gotten her, so she yelled and chased me … but I knew that wasn’t really her. Later, I heard her crying, so I came back. She was very weak, and she fell on the floor. The salt was broken, so I stayed here to chase the bad ghosts away from her, and then I went up to her, and I …” She lowered her hand, as if placing it across an imaginary forehead. “I told her, Shhh, don’t cry, it’s Maria, I will help you. I told her she had to leave, and not come back. Otherwise it would get her—the black fire.”
“What’s the black fire?” I asked.
Maria’s uneven eyebrows rose in surprise. “It’s the bad thing,” she said. “It lives here, and it holds on to us. It won’t let us go. If you try to leave, it will send something after you.”
Like … smoke?
The room was totally quiet. “All right, Maria,” I said. “Thank you for helping Cordelia. I’ll bet she really thought you were a nice girl.”
“She did,” Maria said. “That’s why she gave me her most important letter to hide, even from herself. Because when she was a bad lady, she wanted to throw it away.”
I felt like the room was closing in on me. Words swam in and out of my mind’s grasp. “You have the letter?”
She nodded. “Do you want to see it?”
“Yes, I do,” I said, my heart beating so hard I could feel it in my chest. “In fact, I think she may have meant for you to give it to me.”
Maria’s rotting jaw pulled back, and her mouth formed a grotesque grimace.
It took me a minute to realize she was smiling.
“Come out,” she said, looking down at the salt.
I hesitated. Could this be a setup? Was she luring me to some dark, remote corner so she could attack me, out of the reach of my friends? Should I really believe her … ?
What choice did I have?
I knelt down and started to use the book to push the salt out of the way. To my amazement, Maria knelt, too, and began brushing it away with her fingers. A sickening smell, like burning flesh, faintly entered the air.
“No, stop,” I said, stopping myself just short of touching her charred-looking arm. “You’ll hurt yourself.”
She went on moving the salt around. “It doesn’t matter if I get hurt.”
“Most of the others can’t do that,” I said.
“Yes, they can,” she said. “Only they’re scared. I don’t get scared. I won’t cry. I never cried, not even when I was a baby. I only cry now because … I miss my mother sometimes.”
After we’d moved enough salt for me to pass through, Maria carefully filled in the line. The almost imperceptible searing sound made my chest ache.
“I need to keep them away from her nice things,” she said, by way of an explanation. “The bad ghosts, I mean.”
She stood up. And then she reached over and took my hand.
I cringed at the feeling of her paper-dry skin against my fingers, even as I braced myself for an attack. But she didn’t seem intent on hurting me. She led me out into the hallway.
It was deserted. The screaming woman, the straitjacketed girl—they had disappeared. All the ghosts had disappeared. I had an unpleasant thought of rats jumping off a sinking ship.
But before I had time to wonder where they’d gone, Maria led me through the wall, into a lavatory. It was a surprisingly spacious room, lit pale blue by sunshine that streamed through the high, mesh-encased window. A tiled shower area took up most of the floor space. There were restraints on the walls, and a splintered wood chair bolted to the floor with more restraints on it. The shower controls were on the wall near the door.
“Nurse brought me in here once,” Maria said. “But the water was too cold. I told her I wanted a bath instead.”
And a toaster, I thought.
Then Maria pointed behind me, and I turned around, expecting to see a toilet and sink.
But the floor was completely covered with images cut from magazines and children’s books—hundreds, maybe thousands, of puppies, kittens, bouquets of flowers, letters of the alphabet, numbers, cheerful-looking houses, and babies and children and families … so many families. And tucked way back in the corner was a picture I recognized—the Christmas tree drawing I’d sent with my letter so long ago.
It looked like some surrealist art installation. If Aunt Cordelia had given her one picture every day, this must have been five years’ worth of pictures.
In the corner, tucked between a filthy, broken toilet and the wall, was a small flannel blanket, the kind tiny babies get in the hospital, with ducklings and baby rattles on it. It was soiled and limp with age.
Maria walked across the pictures without disturbing them at all. “These are my pictures, and this is my bed,” she said, carefully stretching the blanket out and sitting down on it. “Cordelia gave it to me.”
I pictured her huddled on a rag in the corner of a dark, creepy bathroom, waiting the way a lost child waits for her parents. Except Maria had been here for more than a century, and no one was ever coming back for her.
“I … like your pictures,” I said, reaching down to touch a picture of a collie.
“I love puppies. I had a dog once, named Buttons. He liked me. Nobody likes me now.” Her gravelly voice sank to weariness. “Not since Cordelia died. But I’m not angry that she left. I know why she had to do it.”
I was trying to figure out how to ask for the letter, but before I had a chance, she reached under her blanket and pulled out a stained, yellowing envelope. She handed it up to me.
The writing on the outside read DELIA.
“Look,” I said, showing Maria. “That
’s my name. You did great. That’s just what Cordelia wanted.”
She gave me a chilling grin. “I like helping. Are you going to read it? You can read it in here, if you want.”
I didn’t quite know what to say.
“I won’t snoop,” she said. “I can’t read, anyway.”
“Um … okay.” It seemed like as good a place as any. There was relative privacy and decent light.
“Here,” she said, spreading the edges of the blanket for me. I sat down next to her. “Can I help open the envelope?”
“How long have you had this letter?” I asked, handing it over.
“I don’t know … How long ago did she die?”
“Four years ago,” I said.
“Four years, then,” she answered, opening the seal and handing the sheets of folded paper to me.
“You’re a good girl, Maria,” I said.
I began to read.
My dear Namesake,
There is no easy way to say what I must now say, so I will simply begin, with the hope that you will give an old woman (who cares very much for you) credit for not being completely out of her mind.
My home is haunted. I will now do my best to explain.
What You Must Know:
Actual haunted houses (or institutes) are quite rare. Most hauntings are explained away by scientific means. Unfortunately, the Piven Institute is, as they say, “the real deal.”
I chose to share this with you, Delia, because I believe you are both young enough to believe me and strong enough to continue my mission, which I adopted as my life’s work: to destroy the evil that lives beneath my feet.
I pray you will never have to read this letter, that you will simply inherit an old piece of land that once held a house whose distressing history will never be known to you. But if you are reading it, then the house has found a way to get to me.
What Knowledge I Have Gathered of the Evil Spirit:
There is more than one kind of spirit. This building is home to quite a few paranormal residents, women who died during their stays here. Most of them are harmless (with one or two notable exceptions).
But why are there so many ghosts here to begin with? I believe that the underlying “cause” is a spirit or energy that is most definitely not harmless. Rather, it is a malicious force that has trapped the others here.
You have heard, I suppose, of cursed objects. I believe that, due to great tragedy or trauma that occurred here, the very land and structure were transformed and came to possess some spiritual power. I do not think that what drives that power is any single ghost but rather a sort of accumulation of malicious energy. The house hungers for loneliness and pain. I don’t know how else to explain it.
This force seems intent on controlling not only my ghostly cohabitants but myself as well. This is why I do not receive visitors, and why I live alone. I have groceries delivered from town once a week, but I never so much as invite the delivery boy inside.
In my research, I have come to believe that problem likely originated with the disappearance of the founder, our ancestor Maxwell Piven. He signed out in the logbook one day, but then was never seen again. My conviction is that he died on the property and was likely not given a proper burial. This would create within the house and property an immense sense of having been wronged. Perhaps on some level, Maxwell’s spirit seeks revenge. I don’t know. What I do know is that, after he died, women who had formerly been helped and healed within these walls began to die here. Up until that time, this had been a very progressive home with an excellent record. Something changed, drastically, in the mid-1880s. The staff did their best to cover up and explain away the deaths, but over time it became obvious that something was very wrong. Only in the 1940s, after a terrible tragedy involving the death of a county surveyor on the property, did the state do a proper investigation, which led the medical board to finally close it down for good.
My father passed away soon after, when I was quite young, and he left the property to me. For most of my life, I lived here by myself. I was never happy. When I began receiving your letters, it was as though a veil lifted, and I looked back on those wasted years and began to wonder what had compelled me to stay here. Upon reflection, I reached the conclusion that it was not simply out of my own personal lack of ambition—which is what all the town gossips would say about me, that I was too lazy and selfish to have a family!—but due to the intervention of something very powerful in the house.
How did I know this? I don’t know. But have you ever had someone believe something about you that you know to be untrue? And your sense of inner justice won’t let you simply surrender to the opinions of others? It was that way for me. I knew that I had not been lazy or selfish. In spite of my many unhappy years, I have always managed a decent amount of self-respect. So I gave myself credit that others did not extend. In the end, we must always be the judges of our own consciences.
I closed my eyes, resting them for a moment. Yes, I knew that feeling.
I began to investigate, to look for a way to cleanse the house. The older such a force gets, the more powerful it becomes. I considered, at one point, simply burning down the building, but I believe that demolishing the house will not rob it of its power—rather, it would simply cease to confine the spirits that dwell here any longer. The damage a force so wicked could do as a “free agent” is a terrifying thought to me. Not to mention that the unfortunate souls who call this place their home would be displaced and left to wander. A ghost needs a home or it becomes a wraith, a hopeless, pathetic creature living in eternal misery.
This is why you must find whatever is the center of the house’s power. And you must destroy it. I have never been able to find it, though I have devoted the past several years of my life to looking. Now, the house is fighting back. It is hoping to catch me off guard. I imagine that one day it will succeed, and that will be the end of me—on this plane, at least.
The task I’ve given you is unfair. I understand that. I’m expecting you to succeed where I have failed. But trust me when I say that if I didn’t believe you would be able to do this, I wouldn’t ask you to. We Pivens are made of stern stuff.
Our ancestor, by creating such a place, has caused much death and destruction. And so I believe that, as Pivens, it is our duty to clear the evil from the earthly realm.
So you see, Little Namesake, this is why I have decided that you must have the house. I rely on you, in the event of my failure, to see this mission through. Once the evil is removed, and the poor spirits who are trapped here have been freed to move on as well, then you may do whatever you like with the property.
You can probably sell it for quite a bit of money, enough to make you comfortable and reward you for a noble task well carried out. Your only stipulation in selling it should be that the building will be destroyed. A building with a history such as this one has does not deserve to stand. It has committed its own crimes, and it must pay its own price.
I think that before I mail this letter, I will send you a bit of history about the house, which I have yet to write. I am sorry for going out of order, but I feared my bouts of forgetfulness would grow worse before I had a chance to put this down clearly for you.
In spite of the years and distance, I remain,
Your fond aunt,
Cordelia Jane Piven
PS—If you ever need assistance, go to the third floor. Bring some nice pictures cut from a magazine. I have a little visitor of whom I am very fond. Be clear in asking her for help and I am confident that she will do her best for you.
I set the letter down.
“Was it a nice letter?” Maria asked.
“No,” I said. “But she said something very nice about you.”
Her eyes lit up. I was growing used to looking at her. My mind played along, reconstructing how she once might have looked, molding the distortedness of her features into the face of a little girl.
“So why did you try to attack me that day?” I asked. “Right afte
r I died?”
She blinked and stared up in surprise. “Attack you?”
“When you had the sheet on. You were coming closer.”
“I only wanted to see you,” she said. “I wanted to meet you.”
“You weren’t going to hurt me?”
“Oh no.” She shook her head. “I had the sheet on because I didn’t want you to be afraid of me.”
Was everything I’d heard about Maria a lie? I recalled what Florence had told me—that the little girl had tried to kill her own father.
“Did you ever hurt someone?” I asked. “A man?”
Her shoulders slumped and her chin sank to meet her chest.
“Maria, it’s okay. You can tell me. I almost killed a person once.”
She glanced up at me. “You did? Were you naughty?”
“Very.” I nodded. “I lost my temper.”
“I was naughty,” she said. Then she raised her head and looked at me, a burning intensity in her gaze and a hint of rebellion in her voice. “I used to imagine hurting him. He wasn’t nice. He was very, very unkind to all the ladies. He told me he would take me away from my mother. And then … one day … he did. Up to the third floor.”
“Who was the bad man?” I asked. “Was it Maxwell?”
She buried her face in her hands and didn’t answer.
“Did you hurt him, Maria?”
“No!” She shrank away, as if I might roughly grab her and demand an answer. “It wasn’t me. I’m not the one who hurt him. But I’m glad he got hurt.”
“Who did it?” I asked. “Please tell me.”
She pressed her lips together. A tear glistened at the corner of her eye.
“Okay, it’s okay,” I said. “You don’t have to tell me who it was. But do you know what she did to him?”
“Of course I do,” she said. “She made a cake. But it wasn’t her fault—the other part.”
“What other part?”
“We found it,” Maria said. “Nurse Carlson and me. We were good friends. We liked cake, and we liked to explore sometimes when no one was watching. We found it in the kitchen one night, and it already had a piece cut out of it, so we thought we could have some, too. Only … it wasn’t a good cake. It was a very bad cake.”