The Curse

by Charles L. Grant

  "I'm sorry," she said quietly.

  "Why? Your people are Irish, aren't they?"

  Terry became annoyed that her emotions had been questioned by a man who seldom even bothered to greet her on The Lane. "I said I was sorry it happened, William. My own people are not without tragedies of their own, you know."

  Now that was really dumb, she thought; you're beginning to sound like a damned parlor liberal, and a smug one at that.

  William bent over and grabbed a handful of grass, shredding each blade between thumb and forefinger. "I didn't mean to impugn your honesty, Mrs. Guiness. You've been good to my children."

  She nodded a curt acceptance of the apology and walked back to retrieve her pad. "William," she called over her shoulder, "Denver said something to us about giants and things—or was it giants or things?—anyway, something that had been here before the reservation, eons before. Do you know anything about it?"

  When she turned back for an answer, he hadn't moved except to face her. There was a faint thrumming, and the angry red sun made her blink tears away. When she recovered, rubbing her head against the possibility of a headache, William stood beside her, the box of charcoal in his hand.

  "It's only a story, Mrs. Guiness. It was invented by those who came after to explain why the graves are unmarked except for. . ." and he gestured over his shoulder. "It's a way of saving face, by saying the bodies were slaughtered for god food." He smiled, and she was startled. "We all have our pride, Mrs. Guiness, but sometimes the Indian feels a need to embellish."

  She felt then as though she were expected to say something, but William merely nodded and strode down the slope toward The Lane. She watched him, a black shadow, until he disappeared into the stand of birch, then hurried back to the drop. Stuffing her pad and box under her arm, she descended, half slipping, half running until she tripped over a protruding branch and sprawled onto her knees. When she looked up, she was facing the ancient marker. The words had been greatly obliterated by a century of weather, but what she saw made her flip open the pad and begin to draw. A rubbing might be more impressive, she thought as she completed the sketch, but the sun had already begun a tightrope act on the trees, and she didn't relish a trek across the meadow without sufficient light.

  "Look," she said to Syd as soon as he had come in the door. She shoved the pad at him, forcing him to drop his attaché case.

  "What's so important? A nude of Miss Traub the younger?"

  "Look at it, dope. It's something I found on the other side of the hill in the field this afternoon."

  "Looks like a gravestone or something. What's it say? Your writing, printing, is worse than a kindergarten dropout."

  "It says, 'To the old ones, Rest.'" She waited for a comment, but he only shrugged and handed it back. "Well, it doesn't sound like something you usually read—"

  "My dear," he said, grabbing her wrist and pulling her toward the kitchen, "it sounds exactly like something you find on a gravestone. What the hell else could it be?"

  "But—" She wanted to protest, to demand inspiration and the opening of a conspiracy to decipher the inscription, but Syd only sniffed at the pot of simmering soup on the stove and pronounced it done.

  Straightforward, he said, and perhaps it was; but Terry refused to believe it was as simple as that. If the marker had been erected by one of the victims' ancestors, it was obviously a salute to their souls so violently taken from them. But it was too stilted for such a poetic idea; as though, instead, the author had little knowledge of English, or at best, a white man who had tried to imitate some Indian proverb or other.

  She slammed the lid onto the soup pot and found herself staring at the telephone. "For what?" she asked herself. "To call Denver and say, 'Hey, would you believe I have a mystery here where there isn't one? Tell me all you know about the past hundred years or so.'"

  "Are you talking to yourself again?" Syd called from the bathroom.

  "Are you taking a shower with the door open again?"

  "What's it to you?"

  "You want to catch double pneumonia or something?" She raced out of the kitchen just as the water thundered. She stopped, cursed, and ran again, poking her head into the bathroom. Already, steam had billowed onto the mirror, and she grimaced and slammed the door shut.

  "Hey, why don't you join me? The water's fine."

  "Not a chance," she yelled. "I'll burn the soup."

  "How the hell do you burn soup?"

  She pounded on the door twice and returned to the kitchen to sit and stare toward the meadow. All right, she told her faint reflection in the now dark glass, so there's no mystery. But there must be something there I can use; what a waste if it just stays out there and rots. Those people deserve more than that, for crying out loud.

  When Syd joined her, she was already doodling on a small pad she kept tacked to the wall by her chair. He was singing when he entered the room, immediately quieted when he saw her working. She smiled at him absently, gratefully knowing he wouldn't interrupt her concentration until the inspiration had passed. In fact, she was surprised she hadn't seen the possibilities before. What, she asked herself, was the biggest commodity in the market nowadays? The ethnic game, that's what. Teach the kids that differences were not necessarily evil, but something to be proud of when handled properly. Here were all the elements of just such a lesson—and directly from history, at that—and also a whacking good suspense story, if she worked it well. A book of her own. She grinned and cupped her chin in one hand. For so long she'd been stabbing blindly at equally blind muses, and the final answer had almost literally knocked her over the head.

  "Excuse me."

  She looked up blankly.

  "I know it's verboten to interrupt genius, but unless I'm mistaken, I've just found out how one burns soup."

  Chapter VI

  Terry wrapped a loop of telephone cord around her finger and pretended it was Duchette's neck. "Maddy," she said, "you don't know how frustrating it's been. It took me three weeks to get the outline and prelims done. The least you can do is give it serious thought."

  "Darling, I always give your work serious thought."

  "Not nearly enough lately, if you don't mind me saying so."

  A pause Terry refused to fill with an apology. "All right. If I say go, what do you plan to do with it?"

  "Win a National Book Award. Come on, Maddy, you have the outline in front of you. Yes or no, or let me get on the wire with someone else on the street."

  Another pause, and Terry grinned at the study wall.

  "You are a stubborn woman, Theresa Guiness. Only your potential keeps me from dismissing this out of hand. You will, of course, have to do further research into this camp thing, and more details from the locals there. However, I will not promise you a sale on this, only that I'll take a look at the finished—"

  "Hey, Maddy, remember me? Theresa O'Hare Guiness? What you're telling me is that I could starve to death praying I'll hit you on a good day when all your work is done. Sorry, Maddy, but you know better than that."

  "You have a husband, dear. You shan't lose too much weight."

  "Suppose he runs away with my sister?"

  "He won't."

  "Suppose he gets fired? He might, you know, the way the firm is dropping clients; or the other way around, actually."

  "Write a book."

  "On speculation? You're out of your mind. Offer me an advance commensurate with my past record, send me half with the proviso being that I give it back if the thing's no good. All you lose is a little time."

  "And my job."

  "Send me a check and a confirmation and I'll start before the week's out."

  "You're impossible, Terry Guiness."

  Terry agreed and hung up before Duchette could change her mind.

  Following the call, the rest of the morning vanished between the desk and easel in equal portions of self-congratulations and angered frustration: a cycle that spiraled into routine and varied little save in intensity well into
June.

  She spent a light-to-dusk week at the county seat library, checking the education files on elementary vocabulary and word/association impact, reread a dozen books whose audience she was after, and spent several hours sitting on the curb with Bess Griffith and the Dormen girls, talking.

  Pegeen, who had been using her own back door exclusively and had been seldom seen on the main floor after dinner, took to handling the cooking and mollifying Syd's bruised ego when Terry found her time compressing frighteningly toward a self-imposed deadline of the thirtieth of the month. She regretted, fretted over Syd's piteous moaning whenever she excused herself from the table and vanished into the study, telling herself he was a big boy and not likely to begrudge her an opportunity to slice a chunk of popularity for herself should the project be successful. His outbursts of temper she passed over with an equanimity that startled him into more tantrums; and when he subsided into moping around, the lawn and taking long meadow walks, she told herself he was working it out and would soon come around to the excitement that kept her awake at night and rushing during daylight.

  She visited the McIntyres in hopes that either William or Denver would spend time checking the stories they'd told her about the reservation, but neither man seemed particularly interested. William only shrugged, maddeningly indifferent, when she explained her work. Pressing, she forced him into an admission that he cared little for his heritage except as something he had to escape in order to survive.

  "I put up with the bad jokes in the tavern because if I don't my children will starve," he said, "but it does not mean I have to like it. I do not. And I do not, if I may be frank, appreciate the idea that you are unearthing this misfortune in a children's book, of all things."

  "But they must learn, William," she said. "And besides, it'll be the fantasy aspect I'll lean on, not the horror of the actual fact."

  "I do not like it. There is no feeling."

  Denver was less adamant, but no less displeased. "It's all nonsense, Theresa Guiness, and have you considered what disservice you might be doing to the descendants of those who died out there? Not to mention the Indian population at large?"

  Terry shook her head, puzzled at the unforeseen objections. "No, Denver, I can't agree. In the first place, by your own admission, there are no descendants, or at least none that we're aware of; and secondly, the Indian population at large thinks the whole thing is a hoax anyhow."

  She laughed at his gape. "Right, I've been doing some checking, you see. A few letters here and there among the Councils in the East, and all of them wonder where the hell I got such an outlandish bit of distorted history."

  Denver darkened, his eyes vanishing in the shadows of his brows. "It is not outlandish, and it is not distorted, young woman. And I'll thank you not to question my honesty again."

  "Denver, you're as bad as Syd sometimes. I am not questioning anything. All I'm saying is, there'll be no harm done by the story. Don't you understand this will be a book for children, not a mass market adult collection of purple prose?"

  Mary entered at that moment and stood between her men, her head reaching only to their shoulders, her girth heavy with the expectation of her third child. Terry attempted to enlist her support as a mother who hopefully would grasp what the men could not, but the woman only allowed that her husband had the final say and what she thought was of little consequence.

  "Impossible," she said to Pegeen. "The whole damned bunch of them are impossible."

  "You're stealing something of theirs, sister dear," she said. "Naughty."

  "Crap."

  "Theresa, sometimes you're not nearly as sensitive as you like to think you are, artist or not."

  A Monday afternoon, and the two were alone in the store.

  "I'm as sensitive as anyone in this business has to be, Peg."

  "Not if you're going to call it a business, you're not."

  Peg stalked around the shelves with a feather duster, attacking each section as if dust found there would bankrupt the entire business. Since assuming most of the small operation's management, Peg had changed, and Terry wasn't at all sure she liked it. An air, as her father used to say, an indefinable something that lent itself to examples of self-reliance, confidence, and all the other Emersonian virtues Terry's Old World background had early assigned to men. It was an inconsistent attitude in view of her own career, but Peg, she told herself, was a different case.

  Suddenly Peg stopped, brushed back a strand of dark red hair from her face and leaned against the central counter, toying with the register's keys. "I'm worried, sis."

  Terry blinked, wondering if it was Vic.

  "No," Peg said, guessing the thought. "It's about Alec. I'm worried about him."

  "What's to worry? Aren't you doing well here?" She looked around; knowing the place had never been so clean nor the inventory so well-stocked and moving. "The recession bothering you that much?"

  Her sister waved the idea away impatiently, then hoisted herself to sit on the counter, her sneakers banging lightly against the glass case that displayed luncheon meats and dairy products. "We're doing very well, thank you. So well it scares me sometimes. No, that's not what's bothering me."

  "So? What? You got a man on the sly or something?"

  "Don't I wish," she laughed—too loudly, Terry thought. "No, it's the old man, Alec. He just hasn't been right, not himself for the past few days."

  "Is that all?" Terry said. "Well, if you ask me, he hasn't been right for the last few years, but—"

  A woman trailing four preschool boys interrupted them, and Terry shifted to one side while Peg mounted the stool that was hers by default and kept her eyes on the convex mirrors mounted in the corners of the ceiling. Her arms folded across her breasts as she smiled vacantly at the woman, and Terry wondered without apology if she would soon begin to develop a protuberant forehead like Pritchard's. She hadn't been aware before of how many of the old man's mannerisms Peg had adopted and, like Pritchard, how laconic she'd become. It's not right, she thought, but waited for clarification; though she hadn't noticed anything herself, Peg's working with Pritchard so closely might have made her more sensitive to his condition. It was making Terry uncomfortable.

  After the woman and her charges had left, Peg shook her head at the shambles of the candy rack and angrily set the bars and packages back in their places. "Look, Ter," she said as she worked, "you know how he can be, right? Cranky, sometimes so damned set in his opinions."

  Terry shrugged and said nothing.

  "Well, not anymore. He temporizes, procrastinates, agrees with anything and everything I say." Absently, she tore open a chocolate bar and took a bite. "I could tell him we're going to have an earthquake this afternoon, he'd only nod and wipe his face with a handkerchief. You know, he hasn't been—want some?" She held out the candy but Terry shook her head. "I'm eating too much of this garbage lately. Nerves, I guess. He really does get on my nerves, you know. He hasn't been here all day. In fact, he hasn't put in a full day for nearly two weeks. Almost exactly. I'll bet he doesn't even eat right. He sure doesn't get anything here at the store. You sure you don't want any? I went over to his house the other night to see if I could get him something—you know, a tonic or something like that. He was standing in front of the fireplace, and I swear to God he was praying. And I never thought I'd hear something like that coming from him, believe me. When I saw him and he saw me, I thought for sure he was going to have a heart attack. No fooling, Ter." She paused, squinting. "You know, he as much as threw me out then? Told me to mind my own business or I'd get hurt, too. Too? I don't know, I just don't know."

  Terry closed a hand on Peg's arm as she was about to open another candy bar. "For crying out loud, Peg! Pritchard's an old man. God, he must be trampling all over seventy. His age has finally caught up with him, that's all. He's sucked you into taking the lion's share of the work here, and now his bones are settling in, fairly crying out in relief." She spread her arms wide in a dramatic gesture that collided with a
mobile advertisement for ice cream. Startled, she glanced up at the whirling colors, and when she looked down she saw Mary standing at the screen door, beckoning anxiously. Terry pointed to herself, and Mary shook her head.

  "You got company," she said, turning her sister around by the shoulder. "The Indians are coming."

  "So why doesn't she come in? I got the plague or something? She's got two good legs. At least, I think she has. You can never tell with those stupid long skirts she's always wearing."

  She crooked a finger, but Mary refused, the smooth lines of her face distorted by an anguished frown.

  "Damnit, Terry, doesn't she know I have better things to do than play stupid games?" She untied her apron and threw it over the counter. "Keep your grubby hands out of the till, sister. I know exactly how much is in there. To the penny."

  "I love you, too," Terry said, grinning, then began reading the magazine displays on the counter in an attempt to ignore the pantomime conversation outside. But it didn't work, and when she looked up she saw Peg clutching at her skirt, tugging at the material nervous1y. Then there was the flash of a key ring and Terry realized she'd be locked in if she didn't move quickly. A half-dozen rapid steps and she punched at the door until Peg moved back to let her out. She had a quip ready, but a concentration of tension kept her quiet, and she quickstepped out of Peg's way so she could lock up and turn the "closed" sign over.

  "Hey, Mary, Peg, what's going on?"

  Peg rattled the door to check the lock, then straightened slowly and turned, her hands pressed to her hips. Her face was drawn, older, an illusion of translucence in the afternoon light. She started to speak once, licked her lips and said, "It's Alec."