White Cat (Curse Workers 1)

“Only you can undo the curse,” she says, and I try to watch the movement of her mouth, the flash of her fangs, to see how she can speak without lips. “The clues are everywhere. We don’t have much time.”

This is a dream, I remind myself. A deeply messed-up dream, but a dream just the same. I’ve even dreamed about a cat before. “Did you bite out my tongue?”

“You seem to have it back,” the white cat says, her shadowed eyes unblinking.

I open my mouth to speak, but I feel claws on my back, nails sinking into my skin and I yelp instead.

Yelp and sit up. Wake up.

I hear the steady patter of rain against my window and realize that I’m soaked, blankets wet and clinging. I’m back in my room, in my old bed, and my hands are shaking so hard that I have to press them underneath my body to make them stop.

CHAPTER FIVE

WHEN I STAGGER DOWN to the kitchen in the morning, I find Grandad boiling coffee and frying eggs in bacon grease. I have on jeans and a faded Wallingford T-shirt. I don’t miss my itchy gloves or strangling tie; comfort’s the consolation prize for getting booted, I guess, but I don’t want to get too used to it.

I found a leaf stuck to my leg while I was getting dressed, and that was enough to make me remember waking, drenched with rain. I’ve been sleepwalking again, but the more I think about the dream, the more confused I get. Nothing lethal happened, which takes the Zacharov revenge scenario off the table. So maybe it’s just guilt that makes me dream of Lila. Guilt makes you crazy, right? It festers inside of you.

Like in Poe’s “The Tell-tale Heart,” which Ms. Noyes made us read out loud, where the narrator hears the heart of his victim beating beneath the floorboards, louder and louder until he confesses, “I admit the deed! Here, here! It is the beating of his hideous heart!”

“I need to talk to you,” I say, taking out a mug and pouring milk into it first, then adding the coffee. The milk billows up from the bottom, along with flecks of dust I should have probably checked for. “I had a weird dream.”

“Let me guess. You got tied up by lady ninjas. With big hooters.”

“Uh, no.” I take a sip of the coffee and wince. Grandad made it ridiculously strong.

My grandfather shoves a strip of bacon in his mouth with a grin. “Guess it would have been kind of weird if we’d had the same dream.”

I roll my eyes. “Well, you’d better not tell me anything else. Don’t ruin the surprise in case I have it tonight.”

Grandad chuckles, but it turns into a wheeze.

I look out the window. There are no cats on the grass. As I watch Grandad pour ketchup onto his eggs, the red liquid spreading, I think, There’s too much blood, and I don’t remember stabbing her, but a wet knife is in my hand and the blood is smeared over the floorboards like a thick glaze.

“So are you going to tell me about the dream you did have?” My grandfather sits down at the table, smacking his lips.

“Yeah,” I say, blinking as I remember where I am. Mom said those sudden, sickening flashes of the murder would get better over time, but they just got less frequent. Maybe some small decent part of me didn’t want to forget.

“You waiting for an engraved invitation?” Grandad asks.

“The dream started with me outside in the rain. I walked out to the barn, and then I woke up in my bed, with mud all over my feet. Sleepwalking again, I guess.”

“You guess?” he asks.

“Lila was in my dream.” I force the words out. We never talk about Lila or the way the whole family protected me, after. How my mother wept into the fur collar of her sweater and hugged me and told me that even if I had done it, then she was sure that little Zacharov bitch deserved it, and she didn’t care what anyone said, I was still her baby. How there was something dark under my fingernails and I couldn’t seem to get it out. I tried with my own nails and then with a butter knife, pressing until I started to bleed. Until my blood washed away the other darkness.

So my own conscience is finally doing me in. It’s about time.

Grandad raises an eyebrow. “Maybe it would help if you talk about her. Talk about killing her. Get it off your chest. I’ve done bad things, kid. I’m not going to judge you.”

Mom got arrested not long after Lila’s murder. Not because of me, not exactly, but she was off her game. She wanted a big score and she wanted it fast.

“What do you want me to say? I killed her? I know I did, even if I don’t remember it. I always wondered if Mom paid someone to make me forget the details. Maybe she thought if I didn’t remember how it felt, I wouldn’t do it again.” There’s got to be something dead inside me, because normal people don’t stand over the corpse of someone they love and feel nothing but a distant, horrible joy. “Lila was a dream worker, and so I guess the sleepwalking and the nightmares seem ironic. I’m not saying I don’t deserve them; I just want to understand why they’re happening.”

“Maybe you should come down to Carney. See your uncle Armen. He can still do some memory work. Maybe he can help you remember.”

“Uncle Armen has Alzheimer’s,” I say. He’s a friend of Grandad’s from when they were kids, and not really even my uncle.

Grandad snorts. “Nah. Blowback. But let’s see what that fancy doctor thinks first.”

I pour more coffee into my cup. A week after Lila died and Barron and Philip hid her body wherever bodies get hidden, I went to a pay phone and called Lila’s mother. I’d promised I wouldn’t, had listened to my grandfather explain that if anyone found out what I’d done, the whole family would pay. I knew that the Zacharovs were unlikely to forget who had dug the grave and mopped up the blood and failed to turn me in, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Lila’s mother alone in that house.

Alone and waiting for her daughter to come home.

The ringing seemed too harsh. I felt light-headed. When her mother answered, I hung up. Then I walked around to the back of the convenience store and puked my guts out.

Grandad stands up. “How about you start on the upstairs bathroom? I’m going out for supplies.”

“Don’t forget the milk,” I say.

“My memory’s fine,” he shoots back at me as he reaches for his jacket.

The floor tiles of the bathroom are cracked and torn in places, and there’s a cheap white cabinet shoved against one wall. Inside are dozens and dozens of mismatched towels, some full of holes, and amber-colored plastic bottles with a few pills in each. On the shelf beneath that there are jars crusted with dark liquids and tins of powder.

As I clean silken balls full of baby spiders from the corners of the shower and toss out sticky, mostly empty shampoo bottles, I can’t stop thinking about Lila.

We were nine when we met. Her parents’ marriage was coming apart and she and her mother went to live with her grandmother in the Pine Barrens. She had wooly blond hair, one brown eye and one green one, and all I knew about her was that Grandad said her father was someone important.

Lila was what anybody might expect from a girl who could give you nightmares with a bare-handed touch, from the head of the Zacharov family’s daughter. She was spoiled rotten.

At nine she beat me mercilessly at video games, raced up hills and trees so fast I was always three steps behind her long legs, and bit me when I tried to steal her dolls and hide them. I couldn’t tell if she hated me half the time, even when we spent weeks hiding under the branches of a willow tree, drawing civilizations in the dirt and then crushing them like callous gods. But I was used to brothers who were fast and cruel and I worshipped her.

Then her parents divorced. I didn’t see her again until we were both thirteen.

Grandad comes back with several shopping bags around the time it starts to rain again, most of them full of Windex, beer, or paper towels. He’s also brought back traps.

“For raccoons, but they’ll work,” he says. “And they’re humane—says so on the package—so don’t get your panties in a twist. There’s no guillotine attachment.”

“Nice,” I say, lifting them out of the trunk.

He leaves me alone to carry them to the barn. The cats are in there; I can see their eyes gleaming as I set up the first metal cage with its swinging door. I pop the tab on a can of wet food, sliding it inside the trap. Something thumps softly to the ground behind me and I turn.

The white cat stands not three feet from me, pink tongue licking her sharp teeth. In the afternoon light I can see that her ear’s torn. Crusts of garnet scabs—fresh—run along the back of her neck.

“Here, kitty kitty,” I say, nonsense words coming automatically from my mouth. I open another can. The cat jumps when the lid cracks open, and I realize how tense I’ve been. Like she’s going to speak. But the cat’s just a cat. Just an underfed stray living in a barn and about to be trapped.

I reach out a gloved hand, and she shies back. Smart animal.

“Here, kitty kitty,” I say.

The cat approaches me slowly. She sniffs my fingers, and as I hold my breath, she rubs her cheek against my hand; soft fur and twitching whiskers and the edge of her teeth digging into my skin.

I put down the can of cat food, watching as she laps at it. I reach out to stroke her again, but she hisses, back arching and fur lifting. She looks like a snake.

“That’s more like it,” I say, petting her anyway.

She follows me back to the house. Her shoulder blades jut out of her back, and her white coat’s streaked with mud. I let her into the kitchen anyway and give her water in a martini glass.

“You’re not bringing that dirty animal in here, are you?” my grandfather says.

“She’s a cat, Grandad, not a cockroach.”

He regards her skeptically. His T-shirt’s covered in dust and he’s pouring bourbon into one of those big plastic soft drink cups that come with their own straws. “What do you want with a cat?”

“Nothing. I don’t know. She looks hungry.”

“You going to let all of them in here?” Grandad asks. “I bet they’re all hungry.”

I grin. “I promise no more than one at a time.”

“This is not why I bought those traps.”

“I know,” I say. “You bought the traps so we can catch all the cats, drop them off in a field ten miles from here, and take bets on which one comes back first.”

He shakes his head. “You better get back to cleaning, smart-ass.”

“I have that doctor’s appointment with—,” I say.

“I remember. Let’s see how much you can get done before you have to leave.”

Shrugging, I go into the living room with a bunch of flat boxes and packing tape. I build the boxes and drag in the trash can from out back. Then I start going through the piles.

The cat watches me with shining eyes.

Circulars advertizing charms and an old fur muff that looks like it has mange go in the trash can. Paperbacks go back onto shelves unless they look like something I want to read or the pages look too crumbly. A basket of leather gloves, some of them stuck together from being too close to a heating vent, goes into the trash as well.

No matter how much I throw away, there’s always more. Piles slide into one another and confuse me about where I was clearing last. There are dozens of wadded-up plastic bags, one with a pair of earrings and the receipt still attached, others holding a random swatch of cloth or the crust of a sandwich.

There are screwdrivers, nuts and bolts, my fifth-grade report card, the caboose from a toy train, rolls of PAID stickers, magnets from Ohio, three vases with dried flowers in them and one vase overstuffed with plastic flowers, a cardboard box of broken ornaments, a sticky mess of something dark and melted covering an ancient radio.

As I pick up a dust-covered dehumidifier, a box full of photographs spills across the floor.

They’re black-and-white pinups. The woman in them is wearing wrist-length summer gloves, a vintage corset, and nylon panties. Her hair’s styled like Bettie Page’s and she’s kneeling on a couch, smiling at the person taking the pictures, a man whose fingers show up in one of the pictures wearing an expensive-looking wedding ring over his black gloves. I know the woman in the pictures.

Mom looks pretty good.

The first time I realized I had a talent for crime was after Mom took me out—just me—for a cherry slushy. It was a scorching summer day and the leather seat in her car was hot from the sun, burning the backs of my legs just slightly unpleasantly. My mouth had turned bright red when we pulled into a gas station and then around back, like Mom was going to put air in the tires.

“See that house?” she asked me. She was pointing to a ranch-style place with white aluminum siding and black shutters.

“I want you to go through that window in the back by the stairs. Just shimmy on in and grab the manila envelope off the desk.”

I must have stared at Mom like I didn’t understand her.

“It’s a game, Cassel. Do it as fast as you can and I’ll time you. Here, give me your drink.”

I guess I knew it wasn’t a game, but I ran anyway and I boosted myself up on the water spigot and poured through the window with the boneless grace of little kids. The manila envelope was right where Mom’d said it would be. Nearby, piles of paper rested under coffee cups stuffed with pens and rulers and spoons. There was a little glass cat on the desk with what looked like glittering gold inside it. The air-conditioning made the sweat dry on my arms and back as I held the sculpture up to the light. I tucked the cat into my pocket.

When I brought the envelope back to her, she was sucking on my slushy.

>

“Only you can undo the curse,” she says, and I try to watch the movement of her mouth, the flash of her fangs, to see how she can speak without lips. “The clues are everywhere. We don’t have much time.”

This is a dream, I remind myself. A deeply messed-up dream, but a dream just the same. I’ve even dreamed about a cat before. “Did you bite out my tongue?”

“You seem to have it back,” the white cat says, her shadowed eyes unblinking.

I open my mouth to speak, but I feel claws on my back, nails sinking into my skin and I yelp instead.

Yelp and sit up. Wake up.

I hear the steady patter of rain against my window and realize that I’m soaked, blankets wet and clinging. I’m back in my room, in my old bed, and my hands are shaking so hard that I have to press them underneath my body to make them stop.

CHAPTER FIVE

WHEN I STAGGER DOWN to the kitchen in the morning, I find Grandad boiling coffee and frying eggs in bacon grease. I have on jeans and a faded Wallingford T-shirt. I don’t miss my itchy gloves or strangling tie; comfort’s the consolation prize for getting booted, I guess, but I don’t want to get too used to it.

I found a leaf stuck to my leg while I was getting dressed, and that was enough to make me remember waking, drenched with rain. I’ve been sleepwalking again, but the more I think about the dream, the more confused I get. Nothing lethal happened, which takes the Zacharov revenge scenario off the table. So maybe it’s just guilt that makes me dream of Lila. Guilt makes you crazy, right? It festers inside of you.

Like in Poe’s “The Tell-tale Heart,” which Ms. Noyes made us read out loud, where the narrator hears the heart of his victim beating beneath the floorboards, louder and louder until he confesses, “I admit the deed! Here, here! It is the beating of his hideous heart!”

“I need to talk to you,” I say, taking out a mug and pouring milk into it first, then adding the coffee. The milk billows up from the bottom, along with flecks of dust I should have probably checked for. “I had a weird dream.”

“Let me guess. You got tied up by lady ninjas. With big hooters.”

“Uh, no.” I take a sip of the coffee and wince. Grandad made it ridiculously strong.

My grandfather shoves a strip of bacon in his mouth with a grin. “Guess it would have been kind of weird if we’d had the same dream.”

I roll my eyes. “Well, you’d better not tell me anything else. Don’t ruin the surprise in case I have it tonight.”

Grandad chuckles, but it turns into a wheeze.

I look out the window. There are no cats on the grass. As I watch Grandad pour ketchup onto his eggs, the red liquid spreading, I think, There’s too much blood, and I don’t remember stabbing her, but a wet knife is in my hand and the blood is smeared over the floorboards like a thick glaze.

“So are you going to tell me about the dream you did have?” My grandfather sits down at the table, smacking his lips.

“Yeah,” I say, blinking as I remember where I am. Mom said those sudden, sickening flashes of the murder would get better over time, but they just got less frequent. Maybe some small decent part of me didn’t want to forget.

“You waiting for an engraved invitation?” Grandad asks.

“The dream started with me outside in the rain. I walked out to the barn, and then I woke up in my bed, with mud all over my feet. Sleepwalking again, I guess.”

“You guess?” he asks.

“Lila was in my dream.” I force the words out. We never talk about Lila or the way the whole family protected me, after. How my mother wept into the fur collar of her sweater and hugged me and told me that even if I had done it, then she was sure that little Zacharov bitch deserved it, and she didn’t care what anyone said, I was still her baby. How there was something dark under my fingernails and I couldn’t seem to get it out. I tried with my own nails and then with a butter knife, pressing until I started to bleed. Until my blood washed away the other darkness.

So my own conscience is finally doing me in. It’s about time.

Grandad raises an eyebrow. “Maybe it would help if you talk about her. Talk about killing her. Get it off your chest. I’ve done bad things, kid. I’m not going to judge you.”

Mom got arrested not long after Lila’s murder. Not because of me, not exactly, but she was off her game. She wanted a big score and she wanted it fast.

“What do you want me to say? I killed her? I know I did, even if I don’t remember it. I always wondered if Mom paid someone to make me forget the details. Maybe she thought if I didn’t remember how it felt, I wouldn’t do it again.” There’s got to be something dead inside me, because normal people don’t stand over the corpse of someone they love and feel nothing but a distant, horrible joy. “Lila was a dream worker, and so I guess the sleepwalking and the nightmares seem ironic. I’m not saying I don’t deserve them; I just want to understand why they’re happening.”

“Maybe you should come down to Carney. See your uncle Armen. He can still do some memory work. Maybe he can help you remember.”

“Uncle Armen has Alzheimer’s,” I say. He’s a friend of Grandad’s from when they were kids, and not really even my uncle.

Grandad snorts. “Nah. Blowback. But let’s see what that fancy doctor thinks first.”

I pour more coffee into my cup. A week after Lila died and Barron and Philip hid her body wherever bodies get hidden, I went to a pay phone and called Lila’s mother. I’d promised I wouldn’t, had listened to my grandfather explain that if anyone found out what I’d done, the whole family would pay. I knew that the Zacharovs were unlikely to forget who had dug the grave and mopped up the blood and failed to turn me in, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Lila’s mother alone in that house.

Alone and waiting for her daughter to come home.

The ringing seemed too harsh. I felt light-headed. When her mother answered, I hung up. Then I walked around to the back of the convenience store and puked my guts out.

Grandad stands up. “How about you start on the upstairs bathroom? I’m going out for supplies.”

“Don’t forget the milk,” I say.

“My memory’s fine,” he shoots back at me as he reaches for his jacket.

The floor tiles of the bathroom are cracked and torn in places, and there’s a cheap white cabinet shoved against one wall. Inside are dozens and dozens of mismatched towels, some full of holes, and amber-colored plastic bottles with a few pills in each. On the shelf beneath that there are jars crusted with dark liquids and tins of powder.

As I clean silken balls full of baby spiders from the corners of the shower and toss out sticky, mostly empty shampoo bottles, I can’t stop thinking about Lila.

We were nine when we met. Her parents’ marriage was coming apart and she and her mother went to live with her grandmother in the Pine Barrens. She had wooly blond hair, one brown eye and one green one, and all I knew about her was that Grandad said her father was someone important.

Lila was what anybody might expect from a girl who could give you nightmares with a bare-handed touch, from the head of the Zacharov family’s daughter. She was spoiled rotten.

At nine she beat me mercilessly at video games, raced up hills and trees so fast I was always three steps behind her long legs, and bit me when I tried to steal her dolls and hide them. I couldn’t tell if she hated me half the time, even when we spent weeks hiding under the branches of a willow tree, drawing civilizations in the dirt and then crushing them like callous gods. But I was used to brothers who were fast and cruel and I worshipped her.

Then her parents divorced. I didn’t see her again until we were both thirteen.

Grandad comes back with several shopping bags around the time it starts to rain again, most of them full of Windex, beer, or paper towels. He’s also brought back traps.

“For raccoons, but they’ll work,” he says. “And they’re humane—says so on the package—so don’t get your panties in a twist. There’s no guillotine attachment.”

“Nice,” I say, lifting them out of the trunk.

He leaves me alone to carry them to the barn. The cats are in there; I can see their eyes gleaming as I set up the first metal cage with its swinging door. I pop the tab on a can of wet food, sliding it inside the trap. Something thumps softly to the ground behind me and I turn.

The white cat stands not three feet from me, pink tongue licking her sharp teeth. In the afternoon light I can see that her ear’s torn. Crusts of garnet scabs—fresh—run along the back of her neck.

“Here, kitty kitty,” I say, nonsense words coming automatically from my mouth. I open another can. The cat jumps when the lid cracks open, and I realize how tense I’ve been. Like she’s going to speak. But the cat’s just a cat. Just an underfed stray living in a barn and about to be trapped.

I reach out a gloved hand, and she shies back. Smart animal.

“Here, kitty kitty,” I say.

The cat approaches me slowly. She sniffs my fingers, and as I hold my breath, she rubs her cheek against my hand; soft fur and twitching whiskers and the edge of her teeth digging into my skin.

I put down the can of cat food, watching as she laps at it. I reach out to stroke her again, but she hisses, back arching and fur lifting. She looks like a snake.

“That’s more like it,” I say, petting her anyway.

She follows me back to the house. Her shoulder blades jut out of her back, and her white coat’s streaked with mud. I let her into the kitchen anyway and give her water in a martini glass.

“You’re not bringing that dirty animal in here, are you?” my grandfather says.

“She’s a cat, Grandad, not a cockroach.”

He regards her skeptically. His T-shirt’s covered in dust and he’s pouring bourbon into one of those big plastic soft drink cups that come with their own straws. “What do you want with a cat?”

“Nothing. I don’t know. She looks hungry.”

“You going to let all of them in here?” Grandad asks. “I bet they’re all hungry.”

I grin. “I promise no more than one at a time.”

“This is not why I bought those traps.”

“I know,” I say. “You bought the traps so we can catch all the cats, drop them off in a field ten miles from here, and take bets on which one comes back first.”

He shakes his head. “You better get back to cleaning, smart-ass.”

“I have that doctor’s appointment with—,” I say.

“I remember. Let’s see how much you can get done before you have to leave.”

Shrugging, I go into the living room with a bunch of flat boxes and packing tape. I build the boxes and drag in the trash can from out back. Then I start going through the piles.

The cat watches me with shining eyes.

Circulars advertizing charms and an old fur muff that looks like it has mange go in the trash can. Paperbacks go back onto shelves unless they look like something I want to read or the pages look too crumbly. A basket of leather gloves, some of them stuck together from being too close to a heating vent, goes into the trash as well.

No matter how much I throw away, there’s always more. Piles slide into one another and confuse me about where I was clearing last. There are dozens of wadded-up plastic bags, one with a pair of earrings and the receipt still attached, others holding a random swatch of cloth or the crust of a sandwich.

There are screwdrivers, nuts and bolts, my fifth-grade report card, the caboose from a toy train, rolls of PAID stickers, magnets from Ohio, three vases with dried flowers in them and one vase overstuffed with plastic flowers, a cardboard box of broken ornaments, a sticky mess of something dark and melted covering an ancient radio.

As I pick up a dust-covered dehumidifier, a box full of photographs spills across the floor.

They’re black-and-white pinups. The woman in them is wearing wrist-length summer gloves, a vintage corset, and nylon panties. Her hair’s styled like Bettie Page’s and she’s kneeling on a couch, smiling at the person taking the pictures, a man whose fingers show up in one of the pictures wearing an expensive-looking wedding ring over his black gloves. I know the woman in the pictures.

Mom looks pretty good.

The first time I realized I had a talent for crime was after Mom took me out—just me—for a cherry slushy. It was a scorching summer day and the leather seat in her car was hot from the sun, burning the backs of my legs just slightly unpleasantly. My mouth had turned bright red when we pulled into a gas station and then around back, like Mom was going to put air in the tires.

“See that house?” she asked me. She was pointing to a ranch-style place with white aluminum siding and black shutters.

“I want you to go through that window in the back by the stairs. Just shimmy on in and grab the manila envelope off the desk.”

I must have stared at Mom like I didn’t understand her.

“It’s a game, Cassel. Do it as fast as you can and I’ll time you. Here, give me your drink.”

I guess I knew it wasn’t a game, but I ran anyway and I boosted myself up on the water spigot and poured through the window with the boneless grace of little kids. The manila envelope was right where Mom’d said it would be. Nearby, piles of paper rested under coffee cups stuffed with pens and rulers and spoons. There was a little glass cat on the desk with what looked like glittering gold inside it. The air-conditioning made the sweat dry on my arms and back as I held the sculpture up to the light. I tucked the cat into my pocket.

When I brought the envelope back to her, she was sucking on my slushy.