Be Not Afraid (26 page)

“Marin!” Dominic’s face was white with horror. “Come on. We’ve got to go to her! Right now. We’ve got to do this, even if we have to sit on her hands to do it!”

Cassie lifted her head again, regarding us with hateful eyes. She growled and lunged, a chained tiger snapping at a piece of dangling meat. “Get away from me, you piece of shit! No one comes near me unless I say so! Get out!”

I stood frozen to the spot, too frightened to move, but Cassie’s words seemed to energize Dominic, and he grabbed my hand, dragging me toward her. I stood there panting, and then dropped to my knees, trying in vain to wedge the fragile flower inside her hand. But Cassie crushed it under her fingers, smashing it into the rug until there was nothing left but bits of stamen and yellow pollen. The petals lay to one side, bruised and broken, remnants of what they once had been. She threw her head back and arched her spine. Her toes were rigid; the veins along her arms stood out like cords. Somehow, the ropes around them held fast.

“Go to hell!” she screamed. “Both of you!” She raised her head, widened her voided eyes. Abruptly, the crucifix flew out of Dominic’s hand and smashed against the wall. I screamed and flinched, covering my face with both arms.

Cassie’s head jerked in my direction, and another low, cackling laugh emerged from her throat. “You. Who do you think
you
are?” She hissed her words, hate leaking from every syllable. “You think you can come into my presence with your so-called gift? Do you have any idea where your
pathetic ability comes from? That the only reason you can see me at all is because I recognize myself in you?”

“Don’t listen, Marin!” Dominic was yelling, but he sounded far away, as if he were deep underwater. “She’s just trying to scare you! Don’t listen!”

The low, terrible laugh rose again from inside the girl’s throat. “Do you want to see
your
pain?” she mocked. “LOOK!”

Once more, Cassie fell back flat against the mattress. For a moment, her body was completely still. Then, slowly, her head tilted back until the only thing visible was the ridge of her throat pressing like a gigantic cord against her skin. Her mouth opened mechanically, as if someone were pulling the top and bottom apart at the hinges. A faint gagging noise sounded from the back of it, and her tongue lolled to one side, limp as a piece of meat. And then, impossibly, the head of a snake appeared from inside the hole of her mouth. Its skin was the color of burnished coal, and it was as thick around as one of Cassie’s arms. It flicked its pink tongue as the rest of it emerged, liquid-like, from inside her throat, between her lips.

A hoarse shout came from Dominic as the reptile appeared. But he composed himself in the next moment, retrieving the crucifix again, standing with his feet apart as the snake slithered down the front of Cassie’s stomach. The ritual from the green book was forgotten; he was working only from instinct now. “Get back!” he said. “Go back to where you came from!”

The snake raised its head at Dominic’s words, almost as if it was listening, and then turned in my direction. Its pink tongue flicked in and out of its mouth, tasting something in the air, and its eyes were dark slits. It moved across the room fluidly, thick coils undulating, as if slipping through oil. Behind it, the terrible cackling laugh sounded again from Cassie’s mouth. “Look at me now!
Look
at me, and watch me destroy you!”

I was shaking so hard that it felt as though my entire body had been converted into a single vibrating nerve. Somewhere from very far away, I could hear Dominic’s voice. “Don’t listen, Marin! Don’t look!”

“Where do you think your precious mother is now?” Cassie’s cackling voice charged at me. “She’s where all hopeless souls go, where they are cast down after despairing and turning their back on the world!” The pink tongue flicked. The black tail slithered across the floor, moving the snake closer. “But she left you something behind to remember her by, didn’t she? A gift from me. A blessing from hell!”

NO!

It was the answer no one else had been able to give, the one that had been there all along, staring me in the face. My gift, my blessing, was no such thing at all. It was a malevolent force, something seared within me as a result of abandoning Mom, of leaving her to die, as malicious a thing as the snake still crawling toward me, hissing and spitting and moving closer with every second.

“Yes,” the voice hissed. “It’s the truth, isn’t it, Marin?
Isn’t
it?”

At the sound of my name, I started up from the corner as if someone had pulled me by the hair and raced toward the door. I clutched the icy doorknob and struggled to open it. It didn’t budge, didn’t even turn. A crushing sensation from the inside out enveloped me, and I struggled for air.

I could hear my voice being shouted somewhere in the background—“Marin! Marin, wait!”—but the doorknob loosened, and I was out, pushing past the night nurse, racing down the hallway, stumbling down the stairs, hanging frantically to the railing even as my feet gave out beneath me, even as I swayed and clutched and then fell down the last three steps.

Another voice sounded, a man’s this time, calling my name, but it was so faint that I was sure I was imagining it. The front door was directly ahead.

Fifty feet.

Thirty.

Ten.

“Marin!” The male voice again. Dominic, maybe? Mr. Jackson? No matter. The knob turned in my hands, the heavy front door opening to the darkness outside. I cringed under the sudden brightness of the porch light and raced down the long, serpentine driveway, which would lead me to the street, which would lead me home. Which would lead me … where?

“Marin! Marin!”

I did not hear the car coming around the bend of the driveway, did not see the headlights carving a path directly opposite me; there was only the terrible sound of brakes screeching against pavement, the insidious crunch of metal as something collided into my right arm. And then I was airborne, suspended against the inky darkness as if caught in a photograph, pinned against the sky until my body crashed back down to the ground, a pile of bones and muscle, breath and blood.

For a split second, I caught sight of the moon, hanging like a faint thumbnail there in the sky, watching.

Waiting.

And then, nothing.

I woke to a searing pain in my right arm, a column of fire that traveled from my elbow all the way up to my shoulder. The snake! It had bitten me, crawled inside my mouth. Now it was writhing inside my belly, slithering up through my arm, its pink tongue flicking, spitting, engulfing me with its horrifying presence, strangling the life out of my bones, my lungs. I screamed, clutching at the strange white sheet covering me, and flailed at the silver railings on either side of the bed. “Get it out! Get it off me!”

Someone moved to the side of the bed and grabbed at my hands. “Marin.” It was Dominic. “Marin, listen to me. Nothing’s there.”

“No! It’s there! I can feel it! It’s right there! Get it out! Get it out, before it bites me! Before it kills me!”

“Marin, stop!” Dominic’s voice shook. “You’re not in
Cassie’s room anymore. You’re in the hospital. You had an accident.” He cleared his throat as his voice broke. “You got hit by our gardener.… He was just leaving for the night, and he didn’t see you in the dark. You’re in the hospital. We’re getting your father; he’ll be here any second, okay?”

But I was hysterical. “Get it off! Get it out!”

Dominic stepped back as another figure with short hair and long, white arms emerged from somewhere in the room.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “But you’re going to have to leave now. We have to calm her down.” The long hands pushed up the sleeve of my gown, tapped at a vein beneath my skin. A pricking sensation—the snake?—incited another scream, and I arched my back as it deepened, and then sank into oblivion once more.

I came to again, as if waking from a dream, and whimpered. My right arm was encased in plaster and my fingers poked out like sticks from one end, but the fiery pain had dulled. I moaned again, disoriented, and tried to open my eyes. They felt like leaden curtains, my eyeballs like orbs of fire.

Dad lunged from a chair in the corner, bending down over my face so that I could see him. “Here I am, Rinny. I’m right here. You’re in the same hospital as Nan, just a few floors down. You broke your arm, honey, but it’s all right. It’s going to be all right.”

I struggled to sit up, winced against a new pain that
shot through my collarbone, the length of my arm. My eyes were blurry; a crust around them pulled at my eyelashes. I rubbed them with my good hand, blinked a few times. Stared down at the strange blue shape shimmering beneath the bandages around my forearm.
My
pain. For the very first time, I was looking at pain inside my own body. Why had I thought it might look brighter inside me than it did in other people? Or larger, for some reason? It was neither, just another blue shape—this one thin and long, like a rectangle—hovering just below the surface of my skin. I moved my arm stiffly to the right to see what might happen, but the shape did not change. To the left. Nothing.

“Don’t move it right now,” Dad said. “Just rest.”

I looked up, tried to shuffle through the thoughts in my head, which were flung like so many playing cards on the floor. “What happened?”

“I need to ask you the same question.” His voice was soft, but I could hear the restraint behind it. “Dominic Jackson met me here after the hospital called and said the two of you were at his place. He said you got spooked and ran out of the house, and that’s when a car hit you. You broke your arm in two different places.”

It was starting to come back, but slowly, a fishing line reeled in through murky water. Running down the steps. Someone calling my name. The room. The snake.

The snake!

I sat up with a start, ignoring the shooting pain in my
arm. As if by reflex, my breath reverted again to a series of shallow pants. My eyes swept the room, scanning the floor, the corners, under the meal table, the television. I yanked at my sheets, tore back the blanket covering my legs, and then curled my feet up under me. But there was no sign of it.

“Marin?” Dad looked bewildered. “Honey, what is it? What are you doing? What’s wrong?”

“The snake!”

His eyes skittered across the floor as he took a step back. “There’s no snake, Marin. Is that …” He looked stricken. “Is that what you saw? They had a snake? At their house?”

I nodded, sobbing, reaching for him. “It came out of her. Out from inside Cassie. I saw it! It was right there, moving toward me, getting closer and closer. She … it … told me that that was what my pain looked like, that that was what I had inside me.” I sobbed, helpless, overcome again with the horrifying memory. “I have evil inside me, Dad. That’s why I can see the things I see. It’s evil. It’s from hell.”

He grabbed me around the shoulders, leaned in an inch from my face. His eyes were as wide as quarters, his voice tight and clipped. “You listen to me, Marin. I don’t care what you saw or heard in that room, but there is nothing evil about you. There is nothing evil
inside
you.
Nothing,
do you hear me?” His voice shook, but it was as strong as I had ever heard it.

I pushed against his shirt with my good arm, refusing to hear him. “But that’s what it
said
! And it’s the only thing that makes sense anymore! In the room that day, when she
invited me over. Oh, Dad, she tricked me. She was doing something awful, some kind of ritual that involved contacting dead spirits. I never told anyone, because I didn’t think anyone would believe me. But it … she … must have recognized the evil inside me. She told me! She saw it! And then she showed me!”

His face paled at my words, his fingers releasing themselves slowly around my wrist.
“Spirits?”
he repeated. “You were contacting spirits?”

“
I
wasn’t! She was! I was just trying to get out of there! But she left me, she locked the door.…” My voice crumpled into sobs again.

“Oh, Marin.” He pulled me to him, let me sob against his shirt. “Oh my God.”

“I’m evil, Dad.” My chest heaved and shook.

“You are not evil.” He sat back, cupped my face in his hands. “Listen to me.
Listen
to me! I know”—he paused, his voice shaking—“I know in my
soul
that the ability you were given is not evil.”

“You can’t say that!” I turned my head, trying to dislodge his grasp. “You don’t know!”

“I
do
know.”

“How?”
I stared at him, desperate in a way that I had never been before. He had to give me an answer this time. He had to.

“You want to know how I know?” He let go of me and paced the room, raking a hand through his hair. “For an entire year now, Marin, I’ve watched you walk around with
your eyes down, hidden behind your sunglasses, refusing to look people in the eye. I’ve tried to put myself in your shoes, tried to imagine what it must be like to have to do such a thing just to preserve your sanity. But the other night in the hospital, while we were sitting there with Nan, I watched you take off your sunglasses and look at her.” He tried to smile, but it came out as a grimace. “For a minute, I thought maybe some kind of laser beam was going to shoot from your eyes. Your gaze was so intense, so full of everything you feel for her.” His eyes rimmed with tears. “I may not have had much of a reaction the next day, when the doctor told us about her recovery, but that’s only because I wasn’t that surprised. Even if you hadn’t had this ability, Marin, the love you felt for your grandmother that night would have worked a miracle. It would have changed her forever.”

My breathing sounded far away, and for a moment, I could not be sure it even belonged to me. “You really think I healed Nan?” I whispered.

“I think God healed Nan,” Dad said. “Through you.”

It was as if something inside just shattered, and then somehow restored itself, all in one moment. I sank into the pillows and closed my eyes.

It was too much.

It was still too much.

And even if it was true, I had no idea how to bring myself to believe it.