Kathryn Dahne - Curse of the Nun

She’d come close to death before, her mind instinctively shying away from the night she had told Lex she was leaving. She’d nearly overdosed more than a few times in her quest to numb her feelings of guilt and shame. Inadequacy.

Their heads snapped up at the sound of grating metal gears. The garage door rose slowly, letting in the golden-tinted light of day. KK immediately stood up and walked over to it.

“Wait!” Anna hissed.

KK gave her a questioning look. Anna shook her head firmly at him. She wasn’t about to trust anything that obvious.

“Throw something outside first.”

His eyes lit up as her caught on to her plan. KK moved over to the far wall and grabbed the closest thing to him. It was a sledgehammer.

“Something small ,” Anna added in a strangled tone.

They didn’t need something that lethal to come flying back at them.

“Oh, good point.” KK offered her another sheepish smile.

He dropped the sledgehammer. Walking over to a tool bench he selected a smaller nail hammer instead. KK moved until he was just inside the line of the garage door, planting himself squarely in the middle of the opening. He cocked his arm back and threw the hammer out the open garage door. It struck the driveway and skidded a few inches, spinning from the force of its own momentum. They waited, barely daring to breathe.

It remained still and lifeless.

Maybe this really was their chance?

A faint rattling noise reached their ears as the hammer shivered slightly against the concrete. Anna tensed. It lifted free of the pavement and hurtled through the air directly at her face. She ducked to the side as KK let out a startled yelp. It impacted hard on the wall behind her with a sharp crack. The deep gouge it left was a testament to what it would have done to her face.

“I should have seen that coming,” KK admitted.

Anna huffed. “I’ve been hallucinating like this since she showed up.”

KK nodded as if that actually made sense to him. Anna was slightly impressed at how calm he was being about everything. He certainly wasn’t someone who would strike her as particularly brave had they met in other circumstances.

The handyman looked more like someone Anna would have mercilessly teased as a nerd in high school. Lean, bookish, and sloppily dressed. The type that would spend all day playing video games in mom’s basement.

KK nodded in response to her statement. “Yeah, that’s her physical form. It’s how she walks around, makes you see things, messes with the pipes. You ever see that movie, Ghost ?”

Anna smiled enthusiastically. “I LOVE that movie—”

“Great,” KK cut her off. “You know how it takes Patrick Swayze’s ghost a ton of energy to interact with the physical world?”

“Yes! Like in that scene when—”

He interrupted again. “Exactly, so if we wear her out she won’t be able to use her physical form and we can get out.”

KK pulled an EMF reader out of his backpack and handed it to Anna.

“Follow me,” he instructed softly.

They chose to set up in the living room. Anna was skeptical when KK had first suggested his plan, though she had to admit that he seemed to have a far better handle on the situation than she did. They sat cross legged, facing each other, in the middle of the floor. KK set a recorder next to him and pressed record. A little light blinked, indicating that it was working. He flashed Anna a reassuring smile.

“June 17th, I’m with Anna Winter attempting to speak with Sister Catherine,” KK spoke into the recorder.

Anna handed him the EMF meter, watching curiously as he switched it on. The indicator hovered around the 1mG mark.

“EMF meter,” KK explained off of her look. “The higher it gets, the closer she is. If it passes five milligauss it’ll beep…” He shrugged slightly. “That means you’re fucked.”

Anna swallowed and eyed the device warily to see if the indicator had moved at all.

KK then pulled a ouija board out of his backpack and set it on the hardwood floor between them. Anna failed to hold back a laugh. He couldn’t possibly be serious.

“Are you kidding?”

“What?”

KK looked up at her, cocking his head to the side like a confused puppy.

“That’s a toy,” Anna pointed out skeptically.

They sold those things at every tacky toy and game shop she had ever seen. It was meant for children to spook themselves with on sleepovers, or Victorian age-grifters to bamboozle wealthy widows out of their money.

KK shook his head and shrugged.

“So is Chucky,” he said. “That doesn’t matter.”

Chucky , Anna thought, is also completely fictional.

“Does it really work?” Anna still felt pretty hesitant.

“No, I put it out for decoration,” KK deadpanned.

Anna made a face at him as he slipped on headphones attached to the recorder. He looked up at Anna for a moment, studying her, before reaching into his pocket and pulling out a pentacle pendant.

It was made of a dull metal, slightly larger than a half-dollar coin. The five-pointed star was encircled by a braided, Celtic design.

“If anything happens use the pentacle,” he said, extending the pendant out to Anna, “but be careful. Sometimes it scares her off. Sometimes it just pisses her off.”

Anna stared at him a bit dubiously-that was an uncomfortably large margin for error. She accepted the pendant, her hand dipping slightly when it turned out to be much heavier than she expected and slipped it into her pocket.

“Good to know,” she replied, a touch sarcastically. “Where does she come from, anyway?”

KK flashed her another confused puppy look.

“What do you mean?” He asked.

Anna thought about the photos of Sister Catherine she’d seen. She’d looked so sad, so tortured in life, it was hard not to feel the tiniest flicker of empathy for her. Especially if she’d been tortured enough to do… that to herself.

“Sister Catherine. What’s her story? What was she like?” Anna clarified.

She wanted to know why Catherine had felt like she’d lost all hope. What had been the circumstances in her life that had led to her being in the convent in the first place? Anna could only assume she’d be trying to find something that she felt she was missing. She wondered if Catherine had been trying to run away from her life, just like Anna had. KK just shrugged again, fiddling with his devices. He appeared largely indifferent to Catherine’s plight in life.

“No clue. We can check ancestry.com when she’s not trying to kill us.”

Anna nodded absently. For someone as obsessed with proving the existence of ghosts as KK was, he seemed to be ignoring what she would consider a pretty fundamental part of the picture. Didn’t how they die factor in? It seemed to in movies. He did have a point, however, in that they needed to focus on getting out of the house. He seemed hopeful that they could reason with Sister Catherine. Anna hadn’t found the dead nun to be particularly reasonable so far, but she didn’t exactly have any ideas of her own. Maybe she could find some sympathy in Catherine if she felt that Anna might understand her pain. Maybe that was their way out.

KK placed both of his hands on the ouija planchette, moving it in a couple of slow circles before indicating that Anna should do the same.

“Sister Catherine, Anna and I are here to apologize,” KK called out.

Silence. The EMF meter sat at a steady 1mG and the planchette was unresponsive beneath their fingers.

“I’m not a threat,” Anna added. “I want to leave.”

The planchette flew across the board to “NO” as the EMF meter spiked up to 2.5mG. Anna pulled her fingers away as if they had been burned. She shook her head in firm denial. Her stomach flipped in fear.