Dusk or Dark or Dawn or Day

Some of the fear comes back into Teresa’s eyes. “She’s not here.”

“She was in the theater with me when you took me. You a corn witch like she is? I know your daddy was, so I guess if those things run in families, it would make sense for you to carry the same seeds in your soul. Corn witches big on prisoning ghosts in glass? I thought your people would have raised you better.”

She takes a step toward me, hand raised to the level of her shoulder, and the world shifts around us. She’s a corn witch like her parents: I can hear the rustle of leaves in the distance as the field responds to her anger. Corn can break concrete, if it grows fast enough. I’m not sure corn can hurt me, but if anyone can teach me otherwise, it’s probably her.

“Don’t you talk about my people, dead girl,” she spits. “You think you have some sort of rights here? You just killed a man. Dead things shouldn’t be killers. That’s not how the world works.”

“I died because the world isn’t always nice; doesn’t make me any less of a person,” I say, and my words are as true today as they were forty years ago, when I ran out into a storm and the sky fell down on my head. “You locked me up. I let me out. What were you thinking?”

“That nothing happens by mistake,” she says. We’re both stalling. She’s trying to call the corn; I’m trying to figure out what comes next. As long as we’re in this holding pattern, I can wait to see what happens. “Ghosts can grant life. You think God did that by accident? You’re tools for the living, and you’re selfish. You don’t let go. You don’t give what you’ve got.”

“We’re not tools,” I say. “We’re as human as you are. Witches can do things too, but I don’t see many of you standing up and offering to serve the whole of humanity.”

“They’d use us.”

“You’d use me.”

Silence falls, uncomfortable and tight, heavy with the weight of everything that hasn’t yet been said.

Then the corn bursts through the ground.

It’s growing faster than summer kudzu, grabbing for my ankles like rustling hands. Teresa’s eyes are filled with fury, her hand spread wide as she beckons the spreading field onward. I don’t think, don’t pause, just move: I leap for the nearest wall, letting go of solidity in the moment before impact. I pass through the brick, and the alley falls away, leaving me temporarily alone, with no idea what’s coming next.





13: Mama, Mama, Make My Bed


I need to find Brenda. She must know by now that it’s her daughter we’re up against: two corn witches can’t possibly be this close together without noticing each other. I know she said witches don’t feel each other the way that ghosts do, but they’re using the same thing as a focus for their magic. Surely the corn will tell them, if nothing else does.

Ghosts always know when there’s another ghost around. We change the way the air feels. It’s the change I notice first, before Danny reaches through the wall on the other side of me, grabs my hair, and drags me into the dark of the auditorium beyond.

He’s insubstantial, but so am I; there are no barriers to his hands finding what little substance I have, no rules that forbid his fingers to close around my throat. He can’t strangle me—I don’t need air under the best of circumstances, and certainly not when I’m essentially air myself—but old habits die hard, and so he squeezes and I flail, until I manage to break his grip and shove myself away.

He glares at me, and when he opens his mouth, there is no sound, but I understand him all the same. Ghosts can always speak to ghosts, even when the rest of the world would dismiss us as nothing but wind and shadows.

Why couldn’t you stay in New York? he demands. Why couldn’t you stay away, and let me have this?

You’re hurting people, I reply. You’re helping a witch against your own kind.

Danny says nothing, because there’s nothing for Danny to say. He sold us out for the promise of peace and being left alone. I wish I could say I don’t understand. There have been times when I’d have given anything if it meant I could keep up my little masquerade of life, keep haunting my own routines and not bothering anyone who didn’t need to know what I really am. But I never hurt anyone. Not like this.

Where is she keeping the mirrors, Danny?

He doesn’t answer me. I drift to where he hangs in the air, reaching out and resting the memory of my hand against the memory of his shoulder. Contact is funny when you have no skin to touch.

She’s done. Brenda’s not going to let her walk away from this. I hope. I pray. Can Brenda really side with the dead over her own daughter? The living are a mystery to me. I didn’t spend enough time as one of them. Show me where the mirrors are, and maybe I won’t tell Brenda where to find you.

He turns his face away. I wait.