Anna Dressed in Blood

CHAPTER SEVEN

We leave the falls and drive back toward Thunder Bay, coasting beneath amber streetlights and going too fast through blurred traffic signals. Chase and Mike are laughing with their windows rolled down, talking of Anna, making her legend grow larger. The blood in my ears sings so strongly that I’m forgetting to look for street signs, forgetting to map my way.

It took a bit of finesse for them to leave the party behind, to convince the others to keep on drinking and enjoying the edge of the world. Carmel actually had to pull a move that was essentially “Hey, what’s that over there?” on Natalie and Katie before diving into Will’s SUV. But now we’re just streaking through the summer air.

“Long drive,” Will says to me, and I remember that he was the designated driver last year at the Trowbridge Falls party too. He makes me curious; his DD status makes it seem like he’s hanging out with these knobs just to fit in, but he’s too smart, and something in his demeanor makes him seem like he’s the one moving the pieces without the others knowing. “She’s out a ways. To the north.”

“What’re we going to do when we get there?” I ask, and everyone laughs.

Will shrugs. “Drink some beers, throw some bottles at the house. I don’t know. Does it matter?”

It doesn’t. I won’t kill Anna tonight, not in front of all these people. I just want to be there. I want to feel her behind a window, watching, staring out at me, or maybe retreating deeper inside. If I’m honest with myself, I know that Anna Korlov has gotten into my mind like few ghosts have before her. I don’t know why. There is only one ghost aside from her that has occupied my thoughts like this, that has brought up such a stirring of feeling, and that is the ghost who killed my father.

We’re driving close to the lake now, and I can hear Superior whisper to me in waves about all of the dead things she hides beneath her surface, staring through the depths with murky eyes and fish-bitten cheeks. They can wait.

Will takes a right onto a dirt road and the tires of the SUV grumble and lurch us back and forth. As I look up, I can see the house, abandoned for years and beginning to tilt, just a crouching black shape in the dark. He stops at what used to be the end of the driveway and I get out. The headlights flash on the base of the house, illuminating peeling gray paint and flat, rotten boards, a porch overtaken by grasses and weeds. The old driveway was long; I’m at least a hundred feet from the front door.

“You sure this is it?” I hear Chase whisper, but I know that it is. I can tell by the way the breeze moves my hair and clothes but doesn’t disturb anything else. The house is tensely controlled, watching us. I take a step forward. After a few seconds, their hesitant footsteps crunch behind me.

On the drive up they told me that Anna kills anyone who enters her home. They told me about drifters who stumbled in looking for a place to sleep, only to be eviscerated when they lay down. They couldn’t have possibly known this, of course, though it’s probably true.

There’s a sharp sound behind me followed by fast footfalls.

“This is stupid,” Carmel snaps. The night has gotten colder and she’s put on a gray cardigan over her tank top. Her hands are stuffed into the pockets of her khaki skirt and she has her shoulders hunched. “We should have just stayed at the party.”

Nobody listens. They’re all just taking swills of beer and talking too loud to cover their nervousness. I creep toward the house with careful steps, my eyes moving from window to window, anxious for movement that shouldn’t be there. I duck as a beer can goes winging past my head to land in the driveway and bounce up toward the porch.

“Anna! Hey, Anna! Come out and play, you dead bitch!”

Mike is laughing, and Chase tosses him another beer. Even in the growing dark I can see that his cheeks are flushed with booze. He’s starting to waver on his feet.

I glance between them and the house. As much as I’d like to investigate further, I’m going to stop. This isn’t right. Now that they’re here and afraid, they’re laughing at her, trying to turn her into a joke. Crushing their full beer cans against their heads feels like a great idea, and yes, I feel the hypocrisy in my wanting to defend something that I’m trying to kill.

I look past them at Carmel fidgeting from foot to foot, hugging herself against the chill lake breeze. Her blond hair is wispy in the silver light, strands of spider web around her face.

“Come on guys, let’s get out of here. Carmel’s getting nervous, and there’s nothing in there anyway besides spiders and mice.” I push my way past, but Mike and Chase grab me by each arm. I notice that Will has gone back to stand with Carmel and is talking to her quietly, leaning down and gesturing toward the waiting car. She shakes her head and takes a step toward us, but he holds her back.

“No way we’re leaving without looking inside,” Mike says. He and Chase turn me around and walk me up the driveway like prison guards escorting an inmate, one at each shoulder.

“Fine.” I don’t argue as much as I maybe should. Because I would like to get a closer view. I’d just rather they not be here when I did it. I wave to Carmel to tell her everything’s fine and shrug the guys off.

When my foot hits the first moldy board of the porch steps I can almost feel the house constrict, like it’s breathing in, awakening after being so long untouched. I walk up the last two stairs and stand, alone, before the dark gray of the door. I wish I had a flashlight or a candle. I can’t tell what color the house used to be. From a distance it seemed like it was once gray, that the paint peelings were slivers of gray falling to the ground, but now that I’m closer they seem rotted and black. Which is impossible. Nobody paints a house black.

The tall windows on either side of the door are caked over with dirt and dust. I walk to the left and rub my palm across the glass in a quick circle. Inside, the house is mostly empty, except for a few pieces of furniture scattered about. There is a sofa in the center of what must’ve been a living room, covered in a white sheet. The remains of a chandelier hang from the ceiling.

Despite the dark, I can see the interior easily. It’s lit with grays and blues that seem to come from nowhere. There is something strange about the light that I can’t process initially, until I realize that nothing is casting a shadow.

A whisper makes me remember that Mike and Chase are here. I start to turn to tell them it’s nothing I haven’t seen before, and could we please get back to the party, but in the reflection in the window I see that Mike is holding a piece of broken board, aiming at my skull with his arms raised above his head … and I get the feeling that I’m not going to be saying anything for quite some time.

I wake up to the smell of dust and the sensation that most of my head is lying in shards somewhere behind me. Then I blink. Each breath I take sends up a small puff of gray across aging and uneven floorboards. Rolling onto my back, I realize that my head is still intact, but my brain hurts so badly that I have to close my eyes again. I don’t know where I am. I don’t remember what I was doing before I got here. All I can think of is the fact that my brain feels like it’s sloshing around in there unattached. An image pops into my head: some Neanderthal oaf swinging a board. The pieces of the puzzle start falling into place. I blink again in the strange gray light.

The strange gray light. My eyes flash wide. I’m inside the house.

My brain shakes itself off like a dog ditching water and a million questions fly from its fur. How long have I been unconscious? What room am I in? How do I get out? And of course, the all important: Did those assholes leave me here?

My last question is answered quickly by Mike’s voice.

“See, I told you I didn’t kill him.” He taps his finger against the glass and I twist toward the window to stare up at his grinning idiot face. He says something stupid about how I’m a dead man and that this is what happens to guys who mess with his property. That’s when I hear Carmel shouting that she’s going to call the cops, asking in a panicked voice if I’ve at least woken up yet.

“Carmel!” I shout, struggling up onto my knee. “I’m okay.”

“Cas,” she shouts back. “These jerks— I didn’t know, I swear.”

I believe her. I rub the back of my head. My fingers come away with a little bit of blood. Actually, it’s a lot of blood, but I’m not worried, because head wounds leak like water from a faucet even when the injury is barely more than a paper cut. I put my hand back on the floor to push myself up and the blood mixes the dust into a gritty reddish paste.

It’s too soon to get up. My head is swimmy. I need to lie back down. The room is starting to move on its own.

“Jesus, look at him. He’s down again. We should probably get him out of there, man. He could have a concussion or something.”

“I hit him with a board; of course he’s got a concussion. Don’t be an idiot.”

Look who’s talking, I would like to say. All of this feels very surreal, very disconnected. It’s almost like a dream.

“Let’s just leave him. He’ll find his own way back.”

“Dude, we can’t. Look at his head; it’s bleeding all over the place.”

As Mike and Chase argue back and forth over whether to babysit me or let me die, I feel myself slipping back down into darkness. I think this might actually be it. I’ve actually been murdered by the living — pretty unthinkable.

But then I hear Chase’s voice go up about five or so octaves. “Jesus! Jesus!”

“What?” Mike shouts, his voice irritated and panicky at the same time.

“The stairs! Look at the fucking stairs!”

I force my eyes open and will my head to lift up an inch or two. At first I don’t see anything extraordinary about the stairs. They’re a bit narrow, and the banister has been broken in no less than three places. But then I look up farther.

It’s her. She’s flickering in and out like an image on a computer screen, some dark specter trying to fight her way out of the video and into reality. When her hand grips the rail she becomes corporeal, and it whines and creaks beneath the pressure.

I shake my head softly, still disoriented. I know who she is, I know her name, but I can’t think of why I’m here. It occurs to me suddenly that I’m trapped. I don’t know what to do. I can hear the repeated panicked prayers of Chase and Mike as they argue about whether or not to run or try to get me out of the house somehow.

Anna is descending upon me, coming down the stairs without taking any strides. Her feet drag horribly along like she can’t use them at all. Dark, purplish veins cut through her pale white skin. Her hair is shadow-less black, and it moves through the air as though suspended in water, snaking out behind and drifting like reeds. It’s the only thing about her that looks alive.

She doesn’t wear her death wounds like other ghosts do. They say her throat was cut, and this girl’s throat is long and white. But there is the dress. It’s wet, and red, and constantly moving. It drips onto the ground.

I don’t realize that I’ve scooted back against the wall until I feel the cold pressure against my back and shoulder. I can’t take my eyes off her eyes. They’re like oil drops. It’s impossible to tell where she’s looking, but I’m not foolish enough to hope that she can’t or hasn’t seen me. She is terrible. Not grotesque, but otherworldly.

My heart is pounding in my chest, and the ache in my head is unbearable. It tells me to lie down. It tells me that I can’t get out. I don’t have the strength to fight. Anna is going to kill me, and I’m surprised to find that I would rather it be one like her, in her dress made of blood. I would rather succumb to whatever hell she has in mind for me than give up quietly in a hospital somewhere because someone hit me in the head with a piece of plank board.

She’s coming closer. My eyes are drifting shut, but I can hear her movements whisper through the air. I can hear each fat drop of blood strike the floor.

I open my eyes. She’s standing above me, the goddess of death, black lips and cold hands.

“Anna.” My mouth curls into a weak smile.

She looks down at me, a pathetic thing shoved up against her wall. Her brow creases as she floats. And then she jerks her gaze away toward the window above my head. Before I can move, her arms shoot forward and break through the glass. I hear Mike or Chase or both of them screaming almost in my ear. Farther away, I hear Carmel.

Anna has pulled Mike through the window and into the house. He’s screaming and bawling like a caught animal, twisting in her grip and trying to keep from looking at her face. His struggles don’t seem to bother her. Her arms are as immobile as marble.

“Let me go,” he stammers. “Let me go, man, it was just a joke! It was just a joke!”

She sets him on his feet. He’s bleeding from cuts on his face and hands. He takes one step backward. Anna bares her teeth. I hear my voice coming from somewhere else, telling her to stop or just screaming, and Mike doesn’t have any time to scream before she thrusts her hands into his chest, tearing through skin and muscle. She pushes her arms out to the sides, like she’s forcing her way through a closing door, and Mike Andover is torn in half. Both halves fall to their knees, jerking and skittering like insect parts.

Chase’s screams are coming from farther away. A car starts up. I’m scrambling away from the mess that used to be Mike, trying not to look at the half of his body that is still connected to his head. I don’t want to know if he’s still alive. I don’t want to know that he’s watching the other half of him twitch.

Anna is looking down at the corpse calmly. She looks at me for a long moment before turning her attention back to Mike. When the door bursts open she doesn’t seem to notice, and then I’m being dragged by my shoulders from behind, pulled out of the house and away from the blood, my legs thumping down the front porch steps. When whoever it is lets go of me, they drop me too suddenly on my head, and I don’t see anything anymore.