Page 80 of That Ain’t Witchcraft

Maybe her human face was a pretty façade she put on for the sake of the living people she adored. Maybe this was what she looked like. But she was still Mary.

“Stay here,” I said, and stepped over the salt line, entering the circle.

Summoning circles are tricky things. People like to brag about using them to catch demons, but I’m not actually sure demons exist, and if they did, they’d be too big and too scary to catch with salt and candles. Mostly, summoning circles are used to call and contain ghosts. The people doing the calling have to know, for sure, that the ghost is out there: have to know the ghost’s name and as many details as possible about who they were when they were alive and who they’ve become since death. Get a few things wrong, get nothing. Or worse, get the wrong ghost.

Sam started to follow me. James motioned sharply for him to stop.

“It’s too late,” he said. “She’s over the line.”

Sam frowned but didn’t argue. I was quietly relieved. All Sam could have done was join me in the circle or tackle me out of it, and both those options had their serious downsides. If this was Mary, I didn’t need help. If it wasn’t Mary, I didn’t need him breaking the salt line and letting her out.

It only took a few steps to put me in front of the crouching spirit. I knelt, resting my hands on the floor so she could see I wasn’t armed, wasn’t holding salt or glass or anything else I could use to hurt her.

“Mary?” I whispered.

Slowly, she raised her head and looked at me.

I did not recoil. If I never do anything worth doing again, at least I’ll always know that I did not recoil: in that moment, when Mary needed me to be strong for her sake, I didn’t pull away from her. I wanted to. My muscles locked and the hair on my arms stood on end and every instinct I had screamed for me to get away as fast as I could, to put some distance between myself and the terrible thing now looking at me.

Her face belonged on a mummy dug out of a bog, some twisted, unspeakable horror that had been marinating in the muck and slime for a thousand years. Her skin was leather and slime at the same time, simultaneously drawn tight across her bones and sagging like it was going to slough off and puddle to the floor. She was a creature from a child’s worst nightmare, too twisted and terrible to exist outside the lands of the dead.

And her eyes were a hundred miles of open, empty road.

I didn’t hesitate. I leaned forward, wrapping my arms around her skeletal shoulders and pulling her close to me, bracing myself against the expected scent of the grave. It never came. She smelled, if she smelled of anything, of sunlight on green corn: sweet and dusty and alive.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered against the shriveled flesh of her shoulder.

Mary held herself stiff for a few more long, agonized moments before slowly, creakily raising her left hand and patting me on the back. The gesture started off awkward, like she was a puppet that hadn’t quite figured out how her strings worked, but loosened up quickly, until it was the familiar, comforting feeling of being soothed by my babysitter.

“… sorry … baby …” she said. Her voice was a distant hiss.

“What can we do?” I kept her close. Part of it was selfish: I never wanted to let her go again. Part of it was the desire not to see what the crossroads had done to her. Punching an ancient force of terrible magic in the face is rarely as good an idea as it seems.

“… don’t … know …”

I paused. What I was about to try seemed ridiculous, the real-world equivalent of one of those stupid kiddie shows where everything can be fixed with the power of love and friendship and wishing really hard. It was still the only idea I had. Whether this was what Mary looked like behind the friendly human façade she worked so hard to project or whether this was something the crossroads had done to her didn’t matter: she was in pain, she was being punished, and this needed to stop.

“You’re two kinds of ghost at once,” I said. “Whether you were supposed to be or not, you are. You’re a crossroads ghost, and I guess that’s how they have enough power over you to have done this to you. But you’re also my babysitter, and I need you. I need you to be ready to protect me. I need you to be ready and able to stand up on your own in case I try to, I don’t know, drink bleach or something else stupid as hell. I’m just a kid. I can’t do this without you.”

My voice broke on the last word. There was a low noise behind me, like someone stifling a gasp. I didn’t turn to see who it was. I didn’t do anything but stay where I was, and wait.

Finally, in a tone that was weary but amused—and more amused than weary—Mary said, “You’re not a kid, Annie. You’re old enough to drink, drive, and destroy other people’s property.”

“I’m still younger than you.” I finally pulled away enough to look at her.

My babysitter looked back.

She was dressed in the peasant blouse and jeans that were her default—and I wondered, for the first time, whether part of that “look” might not be her matching my mother’s subconscious expectation of what a babysitter was supposed to look like. When she took over watching the next generation, would her default shift to something more modern, seamlessly jumping over decades to settle on the nineties or the aughts? Still charmingly old-fashioned by the standards of the so-called modern world, but comforting enough to parental eyes to add an air of responsible respectability to someone who looked far too young to be trusted with an infant?

“What,” said Sam clearly, “the actual fuck.”

“Language, young man,” said Mary, not taking her eyes off me. “I’ll tell your grandmother on you.”

“She’d probably appreciate it,” he replied. “At least then she’d know I was alive.”

Mary ignored him, choosing instead to reach for my hands and stand, pulling me along with her. She was shorter than me. She had been for years, but in this moment she was radiating “responsible adult” fiercely enough that our heights suddenly seemed like a parsing error in the universe.

“That was not a safe or clever thing to do, but I am so proud of you,” she said, and pulled me into another hug. This time, she was warm and solid and safe, just like she’d been when I was a kid and couldn’t imagine ever wanting another babysitter to watch over me.