I stand in the center of the bathroom, unsure which parent to focus on. None of us can stop crying. I need them both to hear what I have to say but I don’t want to tell it to either of them. How am I supposed to explain something I barely understand? How sure am I my memories are even real? How long have we been in this fucking bathroom? It’s impossible to separate facts from fictions. Maybe Amy never existed. Maybe the black magic rituals were invented inside a brain rotting with slow, impending death.
No.
It happened.
I know it was real. Otherwise, nothing else is real, either. This bathroom. My family. These thoughts. I might as well be throwing a temper tantrum in some mental asylum, confined by a straitjacket drenched in my own slobber.
“This is all my fault,” I finally whisper to the room.
Slowly, both my parents lift their heads. Eyes black from sleep deprivation. Skin loose around their faces. They just stare at me for a moment, as if they’re not sure I even spoke.
“What?” Mom says.
“I said this is all my fault.”
“What’s all your fault, honey?”
I pause, unsure how to answer such a complex question, then point at the bathroom door, followed by the bathtub.
“What are you talking about?” she says.
“This all happened because of me.”
“No it didn’t, honey. C’mon. Don’t think like that. It’s nobody’s fault.”
“No. Listen. You aren’t listening. You never listen.”
“Okay.”
“Last night.” I shake my head. “No. Not last night. Not anymore. The night it started. When was that? That night… that night… Amy and I… we did something bad. We did something real bad.”
No one responds. I have their attention now.
“There’s a website we go to sometimes.”
“What kind of website?” Dad asks. He’s still chewing those alcohol wipes. The sound’s sickening and I can’t stand to hear it.
“Please don’t get mad,” I tell them.
“Mel, what the hell are you talking about?”
“It was like a subreddit thing. Like, for the occult. People all around sharing… I don’t know, books they’ve found.”
“Books?”
“Like, old books. PDFs, blogs, Google docs. Everything.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m saying, this subreddit, what they had. I guess… spells, basically. Like, I don’t know, rituals.”
“What the fuck is a subreddit?” Dad asks, but I ignore him. Despite our current predicament of being trapped in a bathroom, there is still not enough time to thoroughly explain Reddit to my father in a way that he will understand.
“I don’t understand, honey,” Mom says.
“Amy was sick, okay? Like… really, truly sick.”
“What do you mean? What was wrong with her? Was it cancer? Did she have cancer?”
Shit, how the hell am I supposed to explain this? Especially after everything that’s happened. It’ll sound like I’m speaking in a foreign language (speaking in tongues). I inhale and exhale deep breaths several times before continuing. “We thought, maybe, there was something inside her. Something… bad, like… like a spirit. Or… or a demon.” I hate how silly it sounds coming out of my mouth. It makes me feel like a little kid.
Dad lets out a loud laugh. “Mel, what the fuck are you babbling about?”
“It was ruining her life.” I try sounding more serious by deepening my voice and waving my hands to punctuate certain words. “The thing inside her. It used to be dead, but then it came to life, and it wanted to destroy her, wanted to take over her body and do bad things.”
“Just be quiet, okay?” Dad says. “You’re delirious. Close your eyes. Go back to sleep.”
“Bad things like what?” Mom asks, voice cracking.
“Like… like… you remember that boy from my school, the one who died?”
“What?” Dad says.
Mom nods. “They sent an email out about it.”
“What email?” Dad says. “I didn’t get no fuckin’ email.”
“They probably don’t have yours listed.”
“And why the hell not?”
“Probably because you never gave it to them.”
“Well, why didn’t you?”
“Why didn’t I what, Robert?”
“Give them my fuckin’ email.”
“Because I already gave them mine.”
“Will you guys please stop fighting?” I ask them, nearly yelling. “Jesus Christ. Please. Just… just let me say what I have to say.” What I don’t point out is they’re arguing about a goddamn email address less than five feet from their dead son. His body rapidly decomposing and still they have to bicker about things that don’t matter. What I don’t tell them is they should have never gotten married, that they could have easily spared us all future horrors by simply dissolving their relationship long before having children. Our existence has been a burden on not only them but also ourselves since day one in the womb.
“Okay,” Mom says. “I’m sorry.”
“The boy who died… it was because of us. Amy and I, we performed a spell, something to make him stop spreading rumors, to stop making up lies. He wasn’t supposed to die. That was never part of the plan. But… something went wrong. The spirit inside Amy, somehow it twisted the spell, made everything worse, and… and… and… he died. We did a tongue spell on him and that same night he choked on his tongue while sleeping.”
“It’s impossible to choke on your own tongue,” Dad says, uncertain.
“Well, it happened. And who knows what would have kept happening if we didn’t put an end to it?”
“What do you mean?” Mom says. “Put an end to—”
“—put an end to the thing possessing Amy.”
“A demon,” Dad says, no longer sounding so amused.
“We didn’t know what it was, just that it was bad news.”
“What did you do?”
I lick my lips and it takes me a moment to realize it’s the same way Dad licks his own lips. I want to vomit but there’s nothing left inside me to regurgitate besides hazy memories. “Amy found a PDF of this old grimoire, this—”
“An old what?” Dad says.
“Grimoire. Like… a textbook of magic. Old, super dark magic. It was called the Black Pullet.”
“The Black Bullet?”
“Pullet.”
“Oh.”
“It was really old,” I tell them. “Like, from the seventeen-hundreds. Someone uploaded a PDF of it on the occult subreddit. I don’t know how they had a copy, but they did. All those old books are on the internet, if you know where to search for them.”
“And how did you know where to search for them?” he asks.
“I didn’t. Amy did.”
“Of course she did.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I ask, fists tightening at my sides. What am I going to do? Punch him? Shit, maybe.
He rolls his eyes. “Nothing.”
I consider challenging him, but what’s the point? This isn’t about him. It never was. “We found this one spell in the book that looked promising. It said it had the power to destroy everything while also protecting your friends. We thought maybe we could direct it into the thing eating Amy from the inside. Channel all the magic into the evil force and destroy it once and for all. And, since it was also meant to protect friends, we thought Amy would be able to withstand it, that it would only harm the bad stuff inside her. At the time it was the only thing that made sense. We were so afraid something else would happen. We… we didn’t know what else to do. Joe was dead and it was our fault and what if something like that happened again? We needed to get rid of the bad thing. We needed to kill it.”