Midnight Cathy

The farmhouse on County Road 9 had sat empty for six years before Luna Reyes and her mom moved in, and some nights it made it pretty clear it hadn’t missed the company.

It groaned when the wind came off Lake Tilda. It ticked inside the walls when the furnace kicked on. And no matter how much lemon cleaner Mom used, it smelled like wet wool and old pennies, with something sweet underneath, like a butterscotch somebody had dropped behind the radiator in 1974 and never found. The attic was still full of the last family’s boxes. Mom kept saying she’d haul them to the dump. Mom kept saying a lot of things.

Luna didn’t mind the house. She turned eight that morning, and when you’re eight, a house that makes noises is mostly just interesting.

She woke to rain needling the window and the smell of cinnamon. In the kitchen, a paper banner sagged across the cupboards, HAPPY BIRTHDAY in Mom’s careful marker letters, the second P already curling loose in the damp.

“There she is,” Mom said from the stove. She was already in her diner uniform, the pink one with the coffee stain on the hip that never came out. “Eight years old. You look about forty.”

“I do not.”

“You’ve got the bags under your eyes. Forty-one, maybe.” Mom slid a plate of cinnamon toast across the table, then pulled a box from behind her back. “Okay. Don’t get excited. It’s not new.”

The box wasn’t wrapped. They didn’t own wrapping paper anymore. They’d left a lot behind in the apartment in Minneapolis when they drove north in the spring with everything they had in a borrowed truck, and Luna had learned not to ask which things.

Inside, on a nest of yellowed tissue, lay a doll.

She was old; you could tell right away. Her red dress had faded at the folds to the pink of a healing scrape, and her blond hair had the stiff, hopeful curl of something brushed by a lot of different hands. Her eyes were blue glass. Between her shoulder blades, a small white ring hung on a string.

“She’s a Chatty Cathy,” Mom said. “From the sixties. You pull the ring and she talks. There’s a tiny record inside her, like a little record player.”

Luna lifted the doll out. She was heavier than she looked, and cold, the way the bathroom tile was cold first thing in the morning.

“Where’d you get her?”

“Second Chances. On Main.” Mom turned back to the stove, and her hand went to her throat, to the bare spot where Abuela’s silver locket used to hang before it got lost in the move. “The lady said she’d been waiting for the right girl.”

Luna hooked a finger through the ring and pulled. The string slid out with a long purring zip, reeled itself back in, and from somewhere deep in the doll’s chest, a small scratchy voice said, “I’m a good girl!”

Luna laughed so hard milk came out her nose. Mom laughed too, a real one, head back, and for a second the kitchen was warm all the way into its corners.

On the little TV by the toaster, the noon news out of Duluth slid a graphic across the weather map: TOTAL LUNAR ECLIPSE TONIGHT. BLOOD MOON VISIBLE AFTER 10 P.M.

Neither of them looked at it. Later, Luna would think about that a lot: how it had been right there in red letters, and they’d both been looking at the doll.

* * *

Mrs. Lindqvist from the next farm over brought a hotdish for supper, which in Minnesota means a casserole, which in this case meant tater tots baked on top of ground beef and cream-of-mushroom soup until the whole thing could hold up a spoon. She stood dripping on the porch and said, “Happy birthday, hon,” and looked past them into the front hall the way people in town always looked at the Reyes girls, like they were trying to work out a math problem.

By ten the rain had quit. The clouds tore open over the lake, and the house settled into its night sounds: the gutter dripping, the furnace ticking, a cow lowing somewhere across Halvorsen’s field.

Luna lay in bed with Cathy on the pillow beside her. Mom was downstairs making the midnight cake. That was a Reyes family rule. Luna had been born at 11:58 p.m., so the cake came at midnight, no matter what, even on a school night, even this year.

Abuela had started that rule. Abuela had started a lot of them. She’d sat on the edge of Luna’s bed, smelling of Vicks and rice water, and told riddles until Luna fell asleep. She’d died in February. Her rules hadn’t.

If something in the dark calls your name, mija, you don’t answer it. You make it answer you.

Luna pulled Cathy’s ring.

“Let’s play school!”

She pulled it again.

“I love you!”

Outside, the moon was going wrong. It had risen white over the tree line, but now a shadow was sliding across its face, and what the shadow left behind was red. Not fire-truck red. Darker, like the inside of a cherry. The light came through the window and lay across the quilt the color of a scraped knee.

Luna pulled the ring a third time.

The string went out smooth, but it came back slow, grinding, catching on something inside. The little voice crackled, and what it said was:

“You’re mine, Luna.”

Luna went still. Her toes curled under the blanket. The flannel was suddenly too hot, the room was suddenly too quiet, and she could hear her own heartbeat in the ear pressed against the pillow.

It’s a record. A record from the sixties. It doesn’t know my name.

She threw the doll off the bed and ran.

* * *

Mom was at the counter with a butter knife, frosting a yellow cake with chocolate. Her eyes were pink around the edges, the way they got after a double shift.

“It said my name.”

“What did, baby?”

“Cathy. It said, ‘You’re mine, Luna.’”

Mom set down the knife. For a second she looked at Luna the way she’d looked at the eviction notice back in Minneapolis, like she was too tired to have one more thing go wrong. Then she smiled.

“Sweetie, she’s sixty years old. The record’s probably warped. It said ‘You’re mine, honey,’ or something, and it came out funny.”

“It wasn’t funny.”

“I know. Old stuff is creepy.” Mom kissed her forehead. Her lips smelled like chocolate. “Go put her on the shelf. Face her to the wall if you want. I’ll bring the cake up at midnight, okay? Reyes rule.”

Luna went back up. She set Cathy on the bookshelf with her face to the wall, the white ring dangling down her back like a tail. Then she climbed into bed and pulled the quilt to her chin.

For a while there was only the drip of the gutter.

Then, from inside the wall behind the shelf, thin as air through a keyhole, a voice whispered, “Play… again.”

* * *

The bedside lamp flickered. Once. Twice. Then it steadied, and in the steadiness Luna heard it.

Click. Clack. Click.

Hard plastic feet on hardwood.

Cathy was walking. She came across the floor in the red moonlight, stiff-kneed, arms out a little from her sides, and the sound she made was the sound of somebody tapping a fingernail on a window. She stopped at the foot of the bed. Her glass eyes caught the moon and held it.

Behind her, the ring slid out by itself, all the way, and zipped back.

“You’re scared of the dark,” Cathy said. It wasn’t the record voice. It was smoother. Closer. “You sleep with the closet light on. You told your abuela it was so the monsters could see where they were going.”

Luna’s mouth went dry as chalk. She’d never told anybody that but Abuela.

“Ask your mama about the locket, Luna.”

“She lost it.”

“She sold it.” The string zipped. “To the lady at Second Chances. Rent was due. She traded your abuela’s locket for rent money and me, and she told you she lost it because she couldn’t stand for you to know.”

“That’s a lie.”

“Ask her.”

Luna thought of Mom’s hand going to her throat at the stove. Turning away too fast. Her eyes stung, and she hated it, hated that the doll could see.

On the nightstand sat the glass of milk Mom had brought up, and next to it, a pink plastic spoon from Luna’s old tea set. Cathy’s arm jerked up. The spoon flew. The glass exploded, and milk went everywhere, cold across Luna’s wrist, dripping off the nightstand onto the floor.

Luna screamed.

On the front of Cathy’s dress, a dark stain was spreading, round and red, like the moon outside.

* * *

“Luna?” Mom’s feet pounded up the stairs. “Luna, what happened?”

The bedroom door slammed shut. Not blew shut. Slammed, so hard the picture frames jumped on the wall.

The knob rattled. “Luna! Open the door!”

“I can’t! It’s locked!”

“It doesn’t lock, baby, it doesn’t even have a lock!” Mom hit the door with her shoulder. The whole frame shuddered, and dust sifted down from the ceiling like flour.

Out the window, the moon slid all the way into red. Luna would learn the word for it later: totality. Right then, all she knew was that the light changed. It went thick. It went syrupy. It poured through the curtains and into the doll, and Cathy’s eyes began to glow, faint and red, like coals somebody had blown on.

When she spoke again, her voice had dropped. It sounded like a grown woman. It sounded like a lot of grown women, all talking at once in an empty church.

“All the girls who ever pulled my string,” Cathy chanted. “Now I pull theirs.”

Then the power went out.

* * *

The lamp died. The furnace sighed and stopped. In the sudden dark, the house began, very softly, to play.

Up in the attic, in the last family’s boxes, a music box started tinkling a waltz with half its notes missing. Something rolled across the attic floor on little wheels, back and forth, back and forth. Somewhere downstairs, a wind-up horse whinnied, a tinny, rusted sound, the way a horse might whinny if it had been dead for fifty years and was trying to remember how.

“Luna, stay put,” Mom called through the door. Luna could hear how hard she was working to keep her voice steady. “I’m getting the flashlight. Stay right there. One minute.”

Mom’s footsteps went down the hall.

Then, from the far end of the house, from the dark at the top of the stairs, a little girl’s voice called out.

“Mommy?”

Luna’s skin went cold all over, because that was her voice. Her exact voice, the one she heard on Mom’s phone videos and hated.

“Luna?” Mom said, far away. “Baby, how’d you get out? Where are you?”

“Here, Mommy. In here.”

“Okay. Okay, I’m coming.”

Don’t, Luna thought. Don’t answer it. Mom, don’t answer it.

A door opened somewhere. Then it closed.

Then nothing.

The music box stopped. The wheels stopped. The whole house held its breath, and Luna held hers with it until her chest burned.

Then, from inside the wall beside her bed, close enough to touch, Mom began to cry.

“Luna. Luna, baby, where are you? It’s so dark in here. Please. Just tell me where you are.”

Luna’s mouth opened. The word was right there, here, I’m here, pushing up her throat like a hiccup. She clapped both hands over her mouth so hard her teeth cut her lip. She tasted pennies. Tears ran hot over her knuckles. She pressed her forehead to the cold plaster and shook, and the wall shook back, very slightly, like something on the other side was leaning on it too.

You make it answer you.

“Let’s play a game,” Cathy said from the foot of the bed. “Your abuela’s game. I know all her riddles now.” The red eyes brightened. “Answer my riddles, and I’ll let you go. Both of you.”

Luna lowered her hands. Her voice came out a croak. “Promise?”

“Cross my heart.”

* * *

“First one,” Cathy said. “What lives in the dark but shines when the moon turns red?”

Luna stared at the two red coals at the foot of her bed. “Your eyes.”

The glow flickered. Dimmed, just a little, the way a candle does when somebody opens a door.

“Second. What can you break without ever touching it?”

That one was easy. Abuela’s favorite. “A promise.”

“Like your mama broke hers,” Cathy said softly. “She promised your abuela she’d keep that locket forever. Then she sold it for a doll.”

Luna didn’t answer that. She just watched the glow sink lower, embers now instead of coals. Her hands had stopped shaking. She noticed it the way you notice the rain has stopped.

“Last one,” Cathy said, and all the voices were in it now: the women in the church, her mother, Luna herself. “What belongs to you, but other people use it more than you do?”

Luna knew it. It was the first riddle Abuela ever told her, back when she was four and thought riddles were just jokes that didn’t make sense yet.

The answer was your name.

And all at once Luna understood the whole game, the way you suddenly see the second picture hiding in one of those trick drawings. Cathy hadn’t grabbed Mom. Mom had answered. Something in the dark had called, and Mom had said I’m coming, and walked right into it.

“Say it, Luna,” Cathy whispered. “Say the answer and you can go.”

Luna threw off the quilt, dropped to the floor, and grabbed the doll.

Cathy was cold enough to hurt, cold like a fistful of snow, and she bucked in Luna’s hands like a fish. Luna flipped her upside down, found the white ring, and pulled. The string zipped out to the end, and Luna kept pulling. She braced one foot against the bed and pulled with her whole body, and the voice inside Cathy went up and up, a dozen girls screaming on a warped record, until something deep in the doll’s chest went crack.

The string came free in her fist.

Luna swung the doll by the legs into the iron bedframe. Once. Twice. On the third swing, Cathy’s face split down the middle, and a tiny black disc, no bigger than a cookie, skittered across the milk-wet floor and broke in two.

The red went out of the window.

Just like that. The moon slid back to plain white, an ordinary moon over an ordinary lake, and the light in the room turned blue and thin. Cathy’s eyes clouded over, milky, like a fish on ice at the grocery store.

Something small and sharp landed on the back of Luna’s hand. A shard of the record. It was warm, warm like it had been riding in somebody’s pocket.

The bedroom door swung open by itself, slow, on a long creak.

“Mom?” Luna whispered. Now she could say it. Now it was hers to say. “Mom!”

The house didn’t answer.

* * *

Mr. Halvorsen heard the screaming around three in the morning and called the county. The deputy found Luna at dawn, sitting on the front porch steps in her nightgown with frost on the railing and her bare feet gone purple. She was holding half of a little black record against her chest.

Mom’s car was in the driveway. Mom’s work shoes were by the door. The flashlight was in the kitchen drawer, where it always was, and nobody had touched it.

On Luna’s bedroom wall, in red crayon, in handwriting nobody could match to anybody in the house, someone had written THE GAME ISN’T OVER.

The report said “possible domestic disturbance” and “child in shock” and “residence sealed pending investigation.” Mrs. Lindqvist wrapped Luna in an afghan that smelled like coffee and wet dog, took her home, and fed her lefse, a soft potato flatbread rolled up with butter and sugar. Luna didn’t eat it.

She kept the shard in her pocket. She held it at school and at the sheriff’s office and at night in the Lindqvists’ spare room, running her thumb along the grooves. Sometimes, if she held very still, she thought she could feel it humming.

I didn’t say it, she thought. I didn’t give it my name. So I can still come find you.

* * *

A week later, the bell over the door of Second Chances on Main Street jingled for nobody at all.

Behind the counter, a woman with a silver locket at her throat lifted a doll from a fresh box. Red dress. Blond curls. Blue glass eyes. She set it in the front window, facing out toward the street, toward the school bus stop on the corner.

Then she reached around and pulled the little white ring.

The string zipped out. It reeled back in. And from deep in the doll’s chest came a tired, warm, frightened voice, a voice that would have smelled like chocolate frosting if a voice could smell like anything.

“Luna? Baby, where are you?”

The woman smiled and touched her locket.

“There now,” she said. “Ready for a new owner.”