The Curse

by Charles L. Grant

  I must be coming down with something, Terry decided. I'm not making any sense at all, like I had a damned fever or something. She laid a palm to her forehead and the back of her neck, hoping to discover traces of incipient illness or signals of strained tension that would explain her unusual mood. She felt, then, like a character in a Poe story, one whose canopy bed was slowly collapsing in on itself, ready to trap her in slow suffocation.

  Edward G. Robinson. Alexander Pritchard. She wanted to laugh and snap herself into a proper disposition, but the telephone's whispering of her name crept under her defenses like a persistent draught. She waited. Another commercial. The silence of the room and the storm outside.

  Suddenly she stood. "Syd, I'm a little tired. What is it, ten-thirty? Will you two wake me before midnight? I want to see the ball. I always see it, you see, and. . ." She looked from her husband to sister and felt her eyes beginning to squint. Pegeen moved to her side and carefully brushed a hand through her hair.

  "She's had a hell of a day."

  "So have we all," said Syd, and he turned off the set. "Come on, angel. I think this will have to be one midnight we'll pass on. Peg—"

  "If you think I'm going to stay up alone, you're crazy. Besides. . ." and she shrugged without having to explain.

  Terry wanted to change her mind, didn't want Pegeen's New Year's spoiled, but Syd had his arm around her waist and was leading her down the hall.

  "I'll lock up," Peg called and Terry, struggling to protest, could do nothing more than a weak hand and let her husband do the rest;

  The bedroom was chilly, and her skin reacted instantly as she stripped and mutely accepted the nightgown Syd pulled from the closet. While he undressed, she padded quickly to the bathroom and, while brushing her teeth, tried to recognize the hollow-eyed woman facing her. The countenance was vaguely unsettling, and she passed over brushing her hair, using a rubber band instead of a ribbon to hold it back from her face.

  The sheets were stiffly cold, but the pleasurable shock was absent. Hastily, she pulled the blanket to her chin, drew up her knees and tucked in her arms until her fists were at her neck. In the dim, nightstand light she watched Syd pull on his pajamas, stretch, sigh and, in the darkness, slide beneath the sheets.

  "Terry?"

  Time might have passed, but she couldn't tell. "Hey, angel?"

  His whisper brushed like a feather across her ear. "Listen, kid, I don't want you to worry about Peg. I don't mind if she stays a while. I never did like that drunk of hers anyway. She's well rid of him. Tomorrow I'll borrow a folding bed or something like that, and we can fix up my workshop for her. I don't use it all that much that I can't part with it for a few days."

  "Second, I'm sorry for the way the day turned out. I mean, our first New Year's in a house." He moved closer and kissed her shoulder, ear, the side of her neck. "I love you, you know." He kissed her cheek, his hand heavy on her hip. "Happy New Year." His hand remained where it was until she muttered the same, then he rolled over, pulled at the blanket, and became motionless.

  Damn you, she thought, it isn't your fault about the storm and my sister and . . . but it was Syd all over that he unthinkingly accepted the blame for anything that annoyed her. I love you, too, she said, then smiled as she realized she wasn't speaking aloud. And that's just like you, Sydney Guiness, falling asleep while I'm trying to be humble.

  The wind rose, and sleep only tagged her at the fringes. The snow became hard again, frantically moving like a clawing thing searching for purchase on the side of the house, groping for a way through the cracks and hidden gaps. It meshed, lulled, and occasionally was smothered by the clanking grumbling intrusion of a snow plow that had finally turned into The Lane. Her eyes flickered open as it passed the house, its whirling yellow light scattering black so quickly the furniture she could see took on the illusion of movement. She was fascinated for a while, then closed her eyes tightly and waited for sleep to become final.

  And in waiting, then, shaped the dialogue she would have when Madeleine called with a million-dollar contract. And after the signing, she began spending the money; adding rooms to the house for the unborn children for whom she would surrender her career, the clothes by the closetful, a larger pair of cars, a trip to Europe that would last until they became bored and homesick, a savings account for the children's education, a home on the coast where they could waste every summer browning and bodysurfing. I will have a maid, she decided, and a manservant, and they will come when I call them, always on call twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, with substitutes for their days off, which they won't take because they love us so much. I'll have a cord installed by the bed, and whenever I pull it she—her name will have to be Alice—when I pull it, Alice will run upstairs like her life—

  She snapped her legs straight and yanked her arms out from beneath the sheet. She was completely awake, her eyes open and shifting to find enough light to allow them to focus. The digits of the clock-radio on the bureau were blurred, but she was sure it was already well past midnight. She realized she'd been listening to but not consciously registering a noise muffled somewhere in the house. Reaching behind her, she pushed at Syd but there was no response, and she knew she couldn't expect one unless she sat up and shook him violently; Her head lifted off the pillow and she looked toward the door. It could have been Peg, prowling for something in the kitchen, or just being unable to sleep and therefore pacing. It could have been, but in an unfamiliar house she would have had to turn on a least one light, and there wasn't a glow beneath the door.

  Syd grunted in his sleep and yanked the blanket tighter around his neck. She shoved him again, but the awkward movement hurt her shoulder and she stopped. The plow returned, faded, and finally she tired of indecision and slipped off the bed. The floor was cold, and her legs tightened in reaction, while sleep fled as though it were morning. She pulled on her robe and fumbled in the bureau's top drawer for the penlight she'd picked up at Pritchard's. She tested it against her palm, first, then flashed it at Syd and smiled.

  So I'm a big brave girl, she thought—and almost changed her mind. Oh hell, as long as I'm up I might as well get on with it and prove myself the dope he thinks I am.

  The beam from the small flashlight was narrow and far less effective than she'd hoped. Like peering through pinholes in black fabric, she thought as she opened the door to the workshop opposite the bedroom, then down the hall to the bathroom and her study—left and right. She was beginning to feel slightly foolish playing heroine in a decidedly non-Gothic home.

  Reaching the hall's end, she checked the living room as best she could from where she was standing, but there was nothing out of place, and the noise had faded, making her more annoyed when she couldn't remember precisely what it had sounded like. Again the light sliced across the room. Peg was still huddled on the couch beneath a pair of drab green blankets. Her face was hidden by the couch's arm, and Terry decided not to move into the kitchen, the risk of waking her sister too great to chance.

  Storm noises was what she was hearing, and the plow thrown in for added effect. All that, nothing more, and the day's worry had twisted it all. And so to bed, Theresa, she ordered, perversely not feeling the least bit tired. But as she turned back toward the hall, she heard it again. The sound of a man walking barefoot through grass, a woman gliding across a thickly piled carpet, a child's deep-sleep breathing—the images contorted without resolving into clear pictures and were all the more puzzling for it, as though a kaleidoscope were trying to bring sense to madness.

  The penlight darted again, and again there was nothing to see. The sounds shifted and became louder: the man on dirt, the woman on wood, the child panting in a nightmare. Peg, little more than a shadow, hadn't moved, and Terry shook her head to see if it would clear.

  Distance. Desolation. Dragging despair. She tried to characterize what she was hearing, to affix labels in order to spark comprehension. The light picked holes in the front door, glinting off the chain latch still in pl
ace, glaring briefly from the brass knob. Not in the crawlspace, she thought as she looked toward the ceiling, relieved she wouldn't have to pull down the steps and climb into the musty cold. There was only one place left, then, and she turned around to open the door to the floor below.

  It was as though the basement level didn't exist. Except for an occasional trip to the laundry room, they had stayed away, added a door, refusing to abandon the living room for what she considered to be a recreational dungeon. And now, as she descended the steps and felt the smooth wood beneath her feet, she wondered if there hadn't been another reason—but on the face of it, this made less sense than her sudden confusion during the movie. As she flicked on the light switch midway down, she decided neither were rational enough to worry about.

  The floor was tiled an uninspiring gray, the semi-paneled walls lifelessly flat. In the glare of the fluorescent rectangle in the ceiling's center, she halted at the bottom step and glanced around. Void of furniture, the room was cavernous, the cold intensified and seeping through her legs. She jumped once, nearly screaming when she saw without immediately recognizing her wraithlike reflection in the uncurtained glass doors. Then she laughed at herself—thinking that perhaps she was a little too loud—and stepped closer. Snow was banked across the bottom, was sweeping out of the darkness to strike the glass and slither in stop-start dashes to the patio. It was like another room in the glass, and Terry wondered if Alice had started out this way on her road to a child's madness. Theresa, watch it! and she tried to smile at herself, and couldn't.

  Turning her back on the storm, she rubbed at her throat and concentrated on locating the source of the noises. The wind, she noticed, was far more constant in the basement, more insistent. The room blurred. Tears welled. She blinked them angrily away, scrubbed at her eyes with her knuckles. Her vision remained distorted and she took a stumbling step forward before she realized she couldn't see the staircase, or the rectangular black space that was the upstairs doorway.

  The narrow dusty shelf that divided the wall into panel and plaster wavered, then elongated, moved toward and away from her and became a brown and desolate tableland stretching to a horizon shimmering white. Staring unmoving, through rising twisting bands of desert heat, she saw what appeared to be figures, but the perspective was wrong; they were far too small and the angle confused her. The cold on her back drew away and was replaced by a penetrating heat that broke perspiration along her spine. Her hands rose and the robe slipped from her shoulders, pooled at her feet, and she stepped onto the cloth, her soles warming instantly. The heat increased. She reached behind her neck and pushed her hair up and away from her head. The exposed skin tightened in anticipation. She thought nothing, felt only the heat, saw only the odd figures moving steadily toward her. She knelt, bent over until her forehead touched the floor and she was aware of tiny pebbles and dried tips of grass.

  The sounds, then, not a walking nor a breathing, but a rhythmic persistent sighing. A tone so low, so far below the scale she could feel the vibrations. She stretched out her arms, turned her hands so that her palms lay flat against the floor, against the ground. In time to the sighing, she rocked back and forth until her muscles stretched and she pressed her buttocks against her heels. Her breasts became heavy beneath the flimsy gown, pulled down her chest until she was prone in an attitude of supplication. Her fingers began to spread, but she didn't feel the ache of skin growing taut almost to the point of splitting. Her soles began to burn. An urge to roll onto her back and tear at her nightgown so to allow her skin to shrivel under the sun.

  A roaring intruded, gathering momentum: earthquake, stampede, a waterfall thundering along a dry riverbed driven by a sudden spring shower. The sky from white to gray to roiling black. The thundering, louder, deafening to the level of needling pain that exploded within her skull. The heat, held for what seemed like days, subsided as the roaring began again.

  A chill broke through and fastened itself to her limbs, her breasts, stomach, palms. Louder still until she opened her eyes in panic, opened her mouth to scream for help, and did nothing but gape as the thunder fell into the faint and familiar grumbling of the snow plow on The Lane.

  There was dislocation, and a disturbing sense of error in the manner in which the house had been arranged. She pulled back her arms and lifted herself to her elbows, peering around the room until she realized she wasn't where she should have been.

  "What the hell? This isn't my bedroom." She knew she sounded ridiculous talking aloud, but confused anger and a lingering fear kept her from stopping. "This is dumb! Where the hell is my bedroom, damnit?"

  She sat up quickly and swept the robe into her arms, nuzzling the narrow band of fur that trimmed its neck. Then, clutching it tightly, pushing it against her breasts until they ached, she rose and backed slowly toward the stairs. There was a gap, but she was too bewildered to locate the first span of the bridge.

  As far as she knew, sleepwalking had never been one of her idiosyncrasies, but on the basis of the evidence . . . She stopped halfway up the stairs, almost dropped the robe as she leaned against the railing. The gap again. Too puzzled to be more than nervous, she toyed with the light switch and watched the room blink white-black, white-black, a strobe effect on the snow that froze its direction.

  With one hand guiding along the wall, she moved to the first floor where her foot-stepped on something small and cold. When she bent down, her fingers felt metal. "Now what the—" It was the penlight. Quickly she switched it on, relieved that even its slender trembling finger could push back some of the black.

  Pegeen groaned in her sleep, and Terry jumped, fairly ran down the hall to the bedroom. My God, she thought as she dropped the robe to the floor. What a hell of a night. First Peg, then Syd; I miss New Year's Eve in my first house, the damned plows keeping me awake all night with their goddamned noise—

  She was sitting on the bed, one leg cocked to slide beneath the sheet. The noise! The pillow was welcomingly cool on her cheek. There was a noise, something that had awakened her. Not sleepwalking at all. A noise. But—

  She twisted around and groped until she found Syd's back. It had to have been a noise or she wouldn't have gotten up. She tried, then, to find it again, to resurrect it. She remembered she had been trying to find images for it, trying to untangle confusion so she could fill out safe and sane labels. But she could no longer remember what it had sounded like. Nor why she had been lying on the floor in the basement.

  Her fingers moved until she could grip Syd's arm. A dream, most likely. But she didn't believe it. "Syd," she said, and was asleep before she could finish.

  Chapter V

  After commenting on her bleary-eyed look, Syd had listened with a great show of concern to the story of her sleepwalking, but when she admitted not recalling what had happened between checking the living room and waking on the floor, his immediate reaction was a stifling of laughter. "A dream? Damn, Terry, but you have a hell of a way of catching up on your sleep. Are you sure you didn't dream you were dreaming? You were kind of restless, you know. You might not have left the bed at all."

  She glared and slammed a platter of sausage and eggs onto the kitchen table. "How would you know that?" she said angrily. "It didn't take you very long to go dead to the world, you know. And in case you're interested, I did not get much sleep, and the least you could do is give me a little sympathy."

  "Oh, come on, Terry! Telephone calls and dreams—what the hell's going on around here?"

  She kept her back to him, waiting at the stove for the kettle to boil. "And would you mind keeping your voice down? You'll wake Peg."

  "You're kidding." His sarcasm clamped her mouth shut. "It's almost noon, for crying out loud. Isn't it about time she joined the rest of the world?"

  Terry sat stiffly, pouring the hot water into his cup without regard for its slopping over onto his saucer. She placed the kettle on a folded towel and swallowed to keep from shouting. "Honestly, I really don't know what's come over you today. Th
e girl has been through hell, you know. Vic's gone, and she had to come all the way through that storm from—"

  "Excuse me for breathing, madam, but I seem to remember a certain husband of yours who made a bitch of a trip from the city on what was supposed to be a joyous and exciting holiday." He bit into a sausage and chewed once before grimacing. "Jesus, woman, these are almost raw!"

  "Suits your mood," she snapped.

  "Oh, beautiful, that's really nice. Happy New Year to you, too." He slammed his fork down so hard she thought he would shatter the plate. "I'm going to watch some—"

  "But Peg's still—"

  "Hell's bells!"

  She listened, trembling, and heard the door of his workshop close as though it had been kicked. Tears fought to brimming but she refused to let them come. She thought she had sensed it the night before, and now she was positive: her episode with the telephone was being tolerated by an indulgent husband, was being summarily written off as the inevitable result of womanly nerves hallucinating under stress. And the dream? That, too, was predictable—the thrashings of an overtired mind seeking a way out of fear because of Syd's drive, and the explosion of relief at his safe return. It was all so rational that she wanted to scream, all so reasonable that she nearly doubted the evidence of her senses. Nearly, but she did not abandon them. If pressed, she might be able to ignore the puzzling dream, but the telephone calls were indisputably real. Peg was a witness; she had heard the instrument ring, had answered it twice herself and heard the noises. But what she hadn't heard was the calling of Terry's name. But it had happened. Theresa. There was no mistake, yet the continuing possibility of her mind's playing tricks on her made her increasingly angry. Forgetting her own admonition, then, she straightened the kitchen as noisily as she could, with each gunshot slap of a plate or pan a point in her favor.

  And the mood continued for most of the afternoon, dissipating only, and slowly, when Denver and the Griffiths came pounding on the front door with a challenge to a snow war. Though Pegeen balked at first, pleading weariness, Denver would have none of it. Bellowing through the house for Syd, he ordered the Griffiths to uncover coats and boots for the women, then stood glowering at their leaving before tramping down the hall to drag Syd out from his pout.