Everywhere that Mary Went

    There were legends in our part of town, ghost stories you tell each other on the school yard that everyone believes longer than they should. Ridiculous, maybe, but even the adults were in on it. Striking terror like Stephen King was better than the grim alternative: seeking the real reason behind all the gruesome murders.

    Every month, around the same time, with the careful rhyme and reason of a mother goose poem, someone was found murdered in their bed. A bloody mess under the sheets, mutilated and barely recognizable. Marks on their bodies looked like parts of them had been chewed, or crushed somehow.

    It wasn’t just anyone, though. Without fail, the victims were never any younger or older than elementary school. Someone had a sick, twisted desire to kill and they were darn good at leaving no traceable tracks in their wake.

    And so it was that the rumor had circulated. New to school in third grade, I first heard word of it during my first recess there. I’d made friends easily with a kid named Jeremy, who talked to me through the whole class and had to pull his behavior card twice because of it. When the bell rang, he had me trail him out to a shady area by the corner of the fence where a group of kids I assumed were his other friends sat too.

    “Hey Billy, hey Jerome. So this is Michael. Michael’s new in town. He doesn’t know about… you know.” He shot an eyebrow wiggling glare at his buddies, who smirked and looked at me like fresh meat.

    “Aw man, you can’t live in Shoreline and not know about… you know.” The one called Billy said.

    I didn’t know. Soon, though, I would.

    The three of them jumped into a seemingly choreographed, graphic storytelling of child murder. I wasn’t too phased, it honestly just seemed like an elaborate scare-tactic people do to haze the new kid.

    “So no one’s figured it out. No one knows who's up to it, or WHAT’S up to it for that matter.” Jeremy whispered, sitting cross-legged and leaning towards me. “Some kids think it’s like that movie where the dude kills you in your dreams. But we know what’s really up. A couple years back, this one girl, well, it happened to her brother and she saw the whole thing. Isn’t that right, Jerome.”

    “Yup. Anna Horvitz. She woke up in the middle of the night, heard some weird noises coming from her brothers room. Like loud eating sounds, demonic noises, man. So she went to check it out. And what did she see, Billy?”

    “Mary.” He said this with a serious, dead-pan expression. “And a couple months later, it was Anna who got gone.”

    Ok, now I knew this was a joke. “Bloody Mary? Seriously? Guys, we had this at my old school. It kept the girls out of their bathroom for almost a whole week last year. You had me going for a minute, but that’s so stupid. I’m not falling for that.”

    Jeremy stopped me then. “Michael, no, you don’t get it. Not Bloody Mary. Mary like in the nursery rhyme. You know, like Mary had a little lamb? You’ve heard that before, right?”

    Now I was really confused. How could that, even in the wildest circumstance, sound threatening. A bedtime story I was too old for by the time I was, like, six. I mean, you’d think if you were trying to scare the paste out of the new kid you’d pick something scarier than a girl in a bonnet and her fuzzy pet lamb.

    “Yeah, sure guys. Real funny.” I was getting a little tired of this, and was getting up to leave. The end of recess bell would probably ring soon anyways.

    “We’re serious.” Jeremy said, more solemn than an eight-year-old should look. “She comes to your house. And the lamb… it’s not like a regular lamb. It eats people. That’s how she keeps going, we think. They feed off the power of one kid a month. Some crazy demon energy thing. This isn’t a joke.”

    “You gotta believe us.” Billy said, looking at me the same way Jeremy was. I glanced at Jerome, to see if he was breaking their cover, but his eyes bore into me the same way.

    “Why?”

    “Because, if you don’t? That’s when she gets you.”

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            Around two weeks later, I had learned to fit in easily. The leaves had begun to fall, and it was beautiful here. I’d stuck around with the same group of friends, and we got along great, but they still hadn’t stopped pretending to be scared for my life. Apparently, it had been almost a month since the last murder. They were convinced I was next.

            This didn’t bother me, even a little bit, other than being a little annoying. I was safe, curled up under my spiderman bed sheets as the fall chill blew against the window panes. I was close, so close to sleep, when it started.

            All the sound in the room de-crescendoed, like someone had turned down the volume on life. As the sound went down, the brightness of my room began to illuminate, as if the moonlight outside was getting brighter. But the light didn’t come from my window. It came from my door.

            Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was white as snow. And everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go.

            A glowing specter, white and luminescent, roughly the shape of a sheep stood in my doorway. It’s legs were mangled backwards and it floated slowly with an awkward gait. It’s head tilted permanently to the side. My scream did not make noise.

            It followed her to school one day, which was against the rules. It made the children laugh and play to see the lamb at school.

            Jeremy, Jerome, Billy. They hadn’t been wrong. And I knew that they would never be able to see me again to say ‘I told you so.’ The lamb was frozen in its tracks, as if unable to move forward.

            And so the teacher turned it out, but still it lingered near, and waited patiently about, till Mary did appear.

    Behind the lamb figure, a little girl emerged. Little girl in the loosest sense of the word. Her eyes were hollow, her glow depleted and grey. She needed nourishment, spirit energy. Then, it came to me. It was like being in a dream, where you don’t know how you know something, you just do. I knew that’s exactly what the lamb was for. Somehow, it was connected to her. A child herself, it was the spirits of other children she needed to keep going. I was nothing more than food. The lamb lived for her, and in turn she cared for it. They floated through the specter world together, keeping each other alive.

    This realization was my last sentient thought. The last thing that went through my head before I looked into the dilapidated girls waning face as she mouthed two words. “Goodbye, Michael.”

            “Why does the lamb love Mary so?” the eager children cry; “Why, Mary loved the lamb, you know”, the teacher did reply.