crunched under the wheels of the car as she drove through the cemetery gates and up the hill that would lead her to her husband’s grave.
“Turn right.” Maureen tried to resist, but it was as if her arms, her hands, her fingers, no longer belonged to her. She was a marionette, and someone—the Ouija? Her dead husband?—was pulling the strings. She thought of the picture, the hair, the blood.
John teaches anthropology and folklore.
She remembered Tommy’s secret, mocking smile, and the way John had held her hand, like he was weighing it, while his eyes measured her up and down. A snatch of song rose into her head:
There’s … a … placefor us
. Only Tommy didn’t want a place for the two of them, did he? She thought not. Tommy wanted a place for himself, a roomy new home with no prostate problems.
“Proceed for two hundred yards, you murdering bitch.” She felt her foot press down on the gas, helpless to stop. “You have reached your destination. Now open up the glove compartment,” said the ghost in the machine. She did as she was told. The picture almost jumped into her hands, Maureen and Tommy on their wedding night … only now there was a strange black symbol inked over her face, a pentagram, the kind Tommy Junior used to scribble on his Trapper Keeper back in eighth grade, when he’d kept his hair long and worn his mother’s eyeliner. Maureen moaned. She finally had an idea of what was coming, of what her husband and John had been planning and plotting those long nights shut up in his den. She would take the defaced picture, marked with her hair and her blood. She would walk herself to his grave. And then? Things would happen; strange, unspeakable things. The Maureen who eventually came back down the hill, the new and improved Maureen, you could call her, would look exactly the way the old Maureen had … only she suspected that she would be a much more pinchy kind of grandmother.
But why stop at her? Tommy had never liked her body much, he’d made that clear a thousand times over. Maybe she was just a temporary home, one of those long-term apartments you rented while your house was being renovated or bug-bombed. Maybe Tommy had his eye on greener pastures.
“No!” she whispered as she pictured her five-year-old grandson. Ryden—a stupid name, Tommy had opined, and she’d secretly agreed—was a charming, sweet-natured boy who’d slip his grubby little paw into her hand whenever he had to cross a street, wholoved staying in her big bed for sleepovers, especially now that Grandpa Tom was gone. She pictured Tommy moving like a virus, infecting her first, and then infecting Ryden, changing him, turning him from a healthy and happy little boy into what Tommy had been when he’d lived and died. Turning him into a monster. “No!” she said again.
“Shut up,” said the GPS. “Shut up and do as I say.” And just like that, her hand was on the door handle, the door was swinging open, and she was walking, on legs that felt like wood, up to the gravestone with her husband’s name on it. She had spent thirty years doing his bidding, thirty years like a mouse caught on a glue trap, stuck, paralyzed, unable to escape, unable to do anything but hide her bruises and obey her master’s voice, even now that her master was … was …
“You’re dead,” she said. Her voice was a whisper, barely audible … but it was something. “You … you don’t get to tell me what to do anymore because you’re dead.”
Her husband answered her from the GPS. He quoted Monty Python. “I’m not dead, I’m just resting!” Then he laughed. Tommy had always thought Monty Python was funnier than she did. “You think you’re going to California?” the ghost in the machine taunted. “You think you’re going to Arcadia? Pedal your bike around Maine with those fat-ass sisters of yours? You aren’t going anywhere. It ends for you tonight.”
Maureen staggered up a small hill toward the grave, the picture