Small Town Monsters by Diana Rodriguez Wallach

Author:Diana Rodriguez Wallach [Rodriguez Wallach, Diana]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2021-09-07T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Vera

Telling a guy that your basement holds five or six dozen objects that at one time were possessed by inhuman, murderous spirits is not exactly the way to endear him to you. Not that Vera wanted to endear him. Or maybe she did. It was complicated.

She needed her parents.

They texted that they were in the throes of an exorcism and would call her later. How exactly could Vera tell them to ditch the possessed girl in Barcelona and come back to help the possessed woman here? Surely that girl deserved saving, but it was hard to feel sorry for her across an ocean when someone down the street was literally smoking. Vera dug her hands into her hair and groaned into her no-longer-warm tea. Maxwell Oliver was upstairs with his sister watching Brave. (A poignant title given the circumstances.)

“You know what I’m going to say.” Vera peered at her aunt, who busied herself with chopped vegetables and hunks of meat.

“I know no such thing.” Aunt Tilda swept her long silver hair behind her ear and poured chicken stock into a Crock-Pot.

“The hurricane.”

Vera let the words hang.

She and her aunt rarely talked about it, as if giving what happened that day mental energy was giving it power. But there was nothing to give power to, right? They’d stopped it.

When Vera was ten years old, when she heard that object shatter behind the old barnwood door, she thought her life shattered with it. She had been told repeatedly to never touch that door, enter that room, or brush against a single object. Vera and her aunt gave those same instructions to Maxwell and his sister today. But they didn’t tell them that years ago, something broke.

After the crash sounded, Aunt Tilda tucked her ten-year-old niece under the dining room table, the lace cloth Vera’s only protection, and opened the basement door. She was gone for five minutes, exactly three hundred seconds. Vera counted. When Aunt Tilda returned, she said she’d recited the “prayers of protection.” Everything was fine now. But when her parents got home, and Aunt Tilda informed them of the prayers she’d said, they realized she’d only completed two parts of a four-part ritual. That wasn’t enough.

So they completed the rest themselves—seven days after the hurricane had wreaked its havoc.

Of course, they worried that something had been unleashed, but there were no reports of possession, no increased calls to the church. Seven years passed. They believed they’d contained it.

They could have been wrong. What if all the eerie coincidences, all the accidents, all the deaths, even the gas explosion, traced back to that one horrible moment?

“The hurricane has nothing to do with it.” Aunt Tilda stirred the contents of her pot, her wooden spoon sloshing.

“You can’t know that,” Vera countered.

“I do. I said the prayers. I was there when your parents said them. It worked.”

“But what if it didn’t?” Vera shook her head. “Aunt Tilda, the town changed after the gas explosion.”

“Yes, because the explosion was horrific, but that had nothing to do with the hurricane.

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