Mrs. Franklin, one of the first to arrive on the scene behind the flashing lights of police cruisers, hadn’t been quiet in her implications. What she—and everyone—wanted to know was why my clothes were saturated with his blood and why I hadn’t called the police.
I didn’t know who called them. I couldn’t tell anyone I watched him die—watched him die, but hadn’t seen who’d killed him. No one would believe that. I just said I found him that way.
No one believed me, but there was no evidence to say otherwise. When my mother died at my touch two years later, the rumors began.
It had started innocently enough. When I was fifteen, Mom and I moved from Keota to Belle Meadow. Shortly after, Mrs. Franklin showed up in our lives, inviting Mom to her ‘church’ with a promise of a cure for her Bipolar Disorder.
Truth was, I’d lost my mother a couple years before the exorcism. I lost her when she stopped taking her Lithium—medicine was the witchcraft of man, Mrs. Franklin said. After that, life took a drastic turn for the worse. Dishes careening through the kitchen. Fists pounding the floor.
The exorcism was supposed to fix it all. But I’d had enough. I’d wanted my mom back—the woman she was before Mrs. Franklin showed up. I stormed into the church/basement and grabbed my mom’s arm, intending to pull her from her seat and drag her home. I wasn’t sure what I would do after that, but I never had the chance to figure it out. Mom died the instant I touched her.
Many nights after that, Mrs. Franklin and her congregation would gather outside my house, clasp each other’s hands, and try to pray the Wicca out of me. They believed it was my pagan faith that brought a plague of death to our town, though she never considered that Mr. Petrenko had died before my beliefs began.
Mand. Br. Shhh. -kened. Shhh.
I put a hand on my forehead and pushed my breakfast aside. The voices in my head demanded my attention. Before I did anything else, I needed to silence the overlapping whispers rattling through my brain. If they didn’t shut up, I would go certifiably insane.
If I wasn’t already.
***
THERE WAS ONLY ONE PERSON I could go to without turning to the doctors who had failed me before: Great Grandpa Parsons, my great-grandfather on my father’s side. A man I’d never met.
Only one problem: he was dead, leaving me with nothing more than records and mementos. He’d spent years researching the human mind to find answers about his mother, Abigail. The family called her schizophrenic, but Great Grandpa Parsons insisted her affliction was more complicated.
The thought propelled me from the couch to the fraying nylon cord hanging from the attic loft hatch in the hall. Inside, light spilled through the rusted blades of a stilled fan that blocked the porthole window, exposing unfinished beams and cardboard boxes.
Grandpa Parsons’ old chest rested between two dust-covered lamps near the window. I would have rummaged through these things sooner had the curse presented itself as a whispering from the onset. Instead, I’d spent years chalking the noise up to some kind of post-traumatic stress caused by my mother’s death. I’d wanted it gone, yes, but not nearly as badly as I needed to get rid of the voices that replaced it.
The voices in my head rushed by, one thought indistinguishable from the next. I tried a few deep breaths.
Please, GO AWAY.
My stomach churned as I struggled to find a quiet place. After several minutes, the overlapping voices finally faded.
I sat and traced my finger over one of the trunk’s tarnished metal buckles. Then, hands trembling, I unfastened the cracked leather straps and lifted the lid. Buried at the bottom of the chest, beneath old sepia pictures and plastic-sheathed Spiderman comics, awaited a promising book: Voices—Into the Minds of the Disturbed.
My fingertips scanned the words as I read, releasing the book’s essence into the air. Having studied old texts, I knew this scent—vanilla, anisole, and sweet almond—wafted from the pages because the paper was fabricated from ground wood. I inhaled with a smile. Books often made better company than people.
My smile faded as I pored over the words for nearly an hour, my posture wilting more with each page I turned. None of the afflictions outlined in the text sounded anything like what I was experiencing.
Big surprise.
I probably needed to look into something current. I snapped the book shut and placed the book back into the trunk. But before I closed the lid, I noticed the corner of a handwritten, yellowed slice of paper with quill pen calligraphy sticking out from between the pages of another book. I gently lifted the document and found a photocopy tucked behind the original.
This wasn’t how old documents should be stored. I slipped one of the old comics from a plastic sheath and eased the brittle paper inside. The plastic cover wouldn’t do for the long-term, either; I would find an acid-free folder to store it in later. I set the original document aside and rested back against the chest to read the photocopy.