COIMETROPHOBIA (FEAR OF CEMETERIES)

Tonya stood looking at Marta collapsed on the floor. The rest of the partygoers were crowding in to see what was wrong.

“Back up!” It was the loudest she’d ever shouted.

They obeyed, and Tonya dropped to her knees, positioning Marta on her back, lifting her neck to open her airway. She swept a finger through Marta’s mouth to check for obstructions. At the back of her throat she felt the hard edge of pizza crust and tweezered her fingers together and pulled, but it slipped through her fingers. Tonya tilted Marta’s neck higher, gave her a rescue breath and then joined her hands over her chest to give thirty chest compressions. By the time she completed the last one, a faint gurgling came from the girl’s mouth. This time when Tonya breathed into her, Marta’s chest rose a little. Encouraged, Tonya slipped her fingers back into Marta’s mouth. The pizza had shifted forward. Tonya reached in as far as her fingers would stretch. She pulled, extracting a wide piece of crust.

Marta coughed and started thrashing on the floor.

“Are you okay?” Tonya examined her face.

Marta’s complexion went from bluish to white to pink. When she stopped gasping, her first words were, “Out of my room!”

At first, Tonya thought Marta was joking, but the girl’s face was red, and her eyes stood out of her head, cartoon furious.

“But . . .”

“Don’t come near me!” She shot Priya a look. “Or near my boyfriend again!”

“You’re welcome!” Tonya stood up and marched to the door.

Priya tried to leave with her but Tonya put a hand up to stop her. “Stay and make sure that harpy doesn’t die. I’m going to wait for the ambulance before I strangle her.”

Outside was a lot colder than Tonya expected. The wind blew through her thin red top and made her wish she was wearing one of her roomy old sweaters. At least her discomfort was temporary. Marta was in real trouble.

Priya joined her. “They’re panicking, hiding the alcohol in case the cops come upstairs with the ambulance people. Marta wants you to turn them away.”

“The paramedics should see Marta. I think she needs help.”

“She’ll be delighted when she finds out you insisted,” said Priya.

“Too bad.” After seeing Marta vomiting in the change room and now gulping pizza like a starved wolf, Tonya was afraid for her.

The ambulance pulled up and she recognized the same paramedics who came for Professor Rudolph.

“Where is she?” asked the woman.

“Priya can lead you up,” said Tonya. “I gave her CPR and got the food out of her airway. She might try to tell you she’s okay, but will you take a look at her anyway? She’s been purging, and binging . . . I’m worried about her.”

As they waited for the elevator, the attendants stood on either side of a stretcher. Things were getting out of hand. Marta was from a Mod family but there were Mundanes on the diving team. One individual could suffer from bulimia but the way those divers were eating seemed unnatural. Could they be cursed?

Tonya turned to Priya. “Something’s wrong about the way Marta and the divers were eating.”

“Like what?”

“Pigging out on porridge doesn’t seem natural.” Would keeping Priya ignorant of magic put her in more danger than knowing?

“It was an eating contest.”

Tonya tried again. “What did Professor Rudolph and Marta have in common?”

“Passing out?”

“Eating like crazy. He stuffed his face full of fries in the middle of a lecture and then wandered off, blank-eyed.” All the way to the Three-Century Ash, but Tonya wasn’t going to explain to Priya that the ancient ash, the same species as the Old Norse World Tree, concentrated power. Until she had evidence to prove supernatural forces were involved, mentioning them would make Priya think she was crazy. Given recent events, Tonya feared she’d get proof soon enough.

The elevator arrived and Priya followed the attendants in. “Aren’t you coming?”

“You go with them. I want to check something.”

She could feel it coming. Tonya reached out with her mind and detected an extra current of energy in the earth beneath her feet. Pure power was moving and shifting but this was nothing like the little currents of life force that sometimes ran through the Herbal Healing Shop. In the summers when she worked there, life magic gave her a warm feeling or made colors look brighter for a while.

This underground energy felt cold and dark, like something bad was coming. It must all connect somehow: Marta, the professor, the porridge-eating divers . . .

Then it hit her. The cemetery. The diving team kids cross-trained by running through it. Professor Rudolph visited his wife’s grave there, and the ash was just inside the cemetery, near her aunt’s property. Lynette took her boyfriend on romantic walks through the cemetery’s winding paths. Marta didn’t have an eating disorder. She had caught some kind of supernatural disease in the cemetery. Was that even possible?

Aunt Helen would know. Tonya sighed.

With a clattering sound, attendants emerged from the elevator pushing an empty gurney. Priya was with them, as was Marta, shoulders squared, face neutral. Her mask only slipped when she caught sight of Tonya and wrinkled her nose.

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“I hope you feel better . . .”

“Shut up!” Marta strode past to join the ambulance attendants at the side of the road. She told them something Tonya couldn’t hear, but which cracked them up. Still laughing, they loaded the gurney into the ambulance.

Marta waved them off as they drove away.

“C’mon,” Priya said, “let’s take the stairs.”

On the way up to Priya’s room, Tonya tried to compose a rational argument to convince her friend to stay out of the cemetery. Priya was so excited about her art installation, but if she went ahead with the plan to set it up in the graveyard, the whole campus could wind up like Marta. Supernatural curse or airborne disease, everybody who spent time in the cemetery had been struck with compulsive eating. Her need to eat had gotten so extreme, Marta would have choked to death if Tonya hadn’t intervened.

They went into the room and Priya gave her a hug. “What you did was brave. That ungrateful witch should be thanking you.” Priya’s hug made warning her friend away from the cemetery that much harder but it had to be done.

Tonya sat on the edge of Priya’s bed and gestured for her friend to take the desk chair. “I have to tell you something important. I think I know what’s happening, to Marta, to Lynette, and Professor Rudolph.”

“Lynette your roommate?”

“They’re all eating uncontrollably. Something takes over their minds and, well, you saw the diving team.”

“Peer pressure at its worst, right?” Priya shook her head. “If Marta told those kids to jump off a bridge . . .”

“It’s not peer pressure. It’s a curse that spreads like a disease.”

“A what?”

“This town hides a lot of secrets. The ground beneath us is full of magical energy. You don’t notice them, but the Old Families in this town are constantly negotiating and fighting with each other to control that power.”

Priya crossed her arms. “You must be joking.”

“Magic is real.”

“Very funny. Nice Halloween prank.”

“I’m not kidding. This eating problem is coming from the cemetery.”

“Don’t be stupid. Aren’t you learning anything in first year Psych? People in groups do nutty things. That doesn’t mean they have a magic virus.”

“So how do you explain Professor Rudolph stuffing his face with fries and bumping into things all the way to the graveyard?”

“Narcolepsy?”

“I’m telling you, a magical force drew him to that cemetery.”

“You don’t really believe that.” Priya stared at Tonya, her eyes a little too wide. She hadn’t told her she was crazy yet, but Tonya figured it was coming.

“You saw my roommate Lynette. She doesn’t seem the imaginative type to you, does she? Well, she ate four boxes of Halloween candy, for no apparent reason. People are binging compulsively because they caught something in the graveyard.”

“That’s insane,” said Priya.

“What if I told you it wasn’t magic? What if I said the cemetery was spreading a contagious disease and the only way to save them was to shut down the cemetery.”

“I’d say shut down the bakery too. Every time I walk by that place I smell cookies and I want to buy some.” Priya pretended to sniff heavenly baked goods.

“I’m not kidding.”

“You’re overreacting.”

“Can nothing convince you to stay out of the cemetery?”

“I’ve been building my animatronics for months and you’re telling me to scrap everything? Halloween night is my debut, my one shot. Local TV is going to cover it. I won’t get a chance like this again.”

“Marta almost died tonight.”

“She has a problem. The rest is your imagination.”

“You saw the professor’s face yourself. And I told you about Lynette. She’s binging too.”

“How do you know the Professor is still sick?” asked Priya. “Maybe he signed himself out of hospital.”

“Look, I know, okay? People in my family have kind of a connection to . . .

Priya frowned. She held up her hand, ready to cover Tonya’s mouth.

How to make her listen? “Something weird is going on in that graveyard. I can sense it.”

“Good. That makes it even spookier.”

“I’m serious.”

“An eating contest is not a virus, and bulimia isn’t a contagious disease. Do you know how crazy you sound?”

“People here know I’m sane. Loon Lake isn’t like other places.”

“Right. Your auntie sells herbs and calls it medicine. People in your family believe a bunch of superstitious garbage.”

“Her cures work!”

“Sorry. No offense to your sick aunt, but before I believe in magic, you have to show me some.”

“Magic isn’t like card tricks. There will be consequences.”

“And lame excuses.”

There it was. Initiating Priya into the magic world was dangerous, but there was no choice. “C’mon, we have to take this outside.”

Tonya led a reluctant Priya outside and along the path toward the edge of campus. She stopped under a pine tree. “I hoped I wouldn’t have to do this.”

“Let’s go back, I’m cold.” It was the first thing Priya had said since Tonya hustled her into the elevator.

“Stand back. I’m untrained so things might get out of control.”

Priya didn’t move. Tonya walked to the far side of the tree and pulled down a bough by the tip. She closed her eyes and concentrated on the life inside, her mind lighting up with green traceries of sap running through fractal channels like veins. She took a deep breath and willed that life force out through the pine bough, along her arm, and down through her body into the ground.

“Nothing’s happening.”

Tonya lost her concentration and had to start again. This time she ignored Priya’s questions and tried to become one with the ground and feel its thirst for life.

“All things die and return their energy to the earth. I’m just speeding up the process . . .”

There, the pine needles went crispy dry in her hands. Tonya opened her eyes.

Priya took the branch from her, turning it over to examine the dead needles. “How did you do that?”

“I drew out some life force and returned it to the ground.”

“You killed a branch with your touch.”

“Now, do you believe me?”

“Maybe. What did you say? Magic can speed up the natural process of death and decay. But if magic is real and dangerous, that gives me a whole new reason to spread my message. My art scares people. People think art is pretty but pointless. When they walk through that cemetery, I want them to feel primal vulnerability, like their ancestors, surrounded by wild beasts and scared of the dark.”

“The forest south of campus is creepy too. Why not move it there, just to be safe?”

“Are you joking? It took me a whole day to install the mounts. Besides, we’ve already handed out the flyers and announced a bonfire in the field just outside Loon Lake Cemetery.”

“On my aunt’s property!”

“She won’t mind if we use her empty field. Didn’t you say she was in the hospital? Besides, the swimmers are already bringing wood for the bonfire. If I don’t light it, they will.”

“Tell Shin to make them move it.”

“Too late. People are going to show up whether we like it or not.”

“Make an announcement. Rope off the area and put up signs or something. We can’t lead a hundred people through the cemetery tomorrow night. They’ll get infected.”

“You can’t prove that.”

“Isn’t the risk enough to convince you?”

“Building my creatures has taken years, and preparing them for installation took weeks. I’ve already installed most of the pieces. You can’t tell me to dismantle my masterpiece. I could never move it in time.”

“There are powerful forces you are messing with, extra-powerful on All Hallows’ Eve.”

“These forces are all over Loon Lake. You said so yourself.”

“Something’s changed.” Tonya put her hand on the grass. An extra energy thrummed beneath the earth. “Feel it?” She took Priya’s hand by the wrist and placed it where it vibrated most. “There’s something wrong with this magic.”

“I don’t feel anything.” Priya snatched her hand away. “You’re tired. It’s late. You’re getting emotional. Go to bed.”

“Tell me you’ll call it off.”

“Sure, don’t worry. Now go to bed before you fall over.”

“So, you’ll do it?”

“First promise you’ll get your ass into bed.”

Priya’s half-smile gave Tonya a nagging doubt, but how could she argue with yes? Besides, draining the branch had worn her out, as though some of her energy had flowed into the ground with the tree’s.

Tonya couldn’t help it. She leaned on Priya’s shoulder as they walked back into the dorm.