The Curse

by Charles L. Grant

  They stared for a moment before Terry held out her arms and Peg fell into them. But there were no tears nor words of consolation; only sounds that soothed and tried to bridge an incomprehensible gulf of loss. Terry asked if she wanted some lunch, but Peg refused.

  "Sis, do you think Syd would mind if I borrowed the car for a while?"

  "I don't think he's going anywhere. Why not? The keys are in the bowl on the breakfront. What's up?"

  Peg was wearing a deep navy dress with starched white at the collar. Her hand twisted around a thin silver belt and she kept her cheeks sucked flat against her teeth. "I have to go into town for a bit."

  "Peg, must you?"

  It was too much, the strain of pretending mourning was a simple thing, and Terry rushed to fetch the keys herself. Peg moved to the door and waited. "There are some things that have to be done, Terry. I have to find out about . . . about the burial."

  Though she knew she was being unreasonable, anger flared. "Damnit, why you, Peg? Haven't you been through enough? Let Denver or somebody else handle it."

  "No," Peg said firmly. "I want to. I have to. There's no one else. No one."

  How much more can she take, Terry thought as she watched Peg back out of the drive and move slowly down The Lane. Everybody keeps dying on her, one way or another.

  When the phone rang she hoped Syd would gallop out of the bathroom to spare her the effort, but after the fifth summons she cursed at the air, slammed the door, and snatched the receiver off its cradle.

  Syd came into the kitchen as she was talking, his eyebrows lifted, a finger at his chest. She shook her head, listened, made what she hoped were the appropriate responses and hung up.

  "Creditors, right?"

  "Wrong," she said, sitting at the table. "You're not going to believe a word of this."

  "Try me. And hurry up. You've made me hungry."

  "That was Jim Griffith. Seems he was Pritchard's lawyer. The old fool made out a new will the beginning of this month."

  "So?"

  "Guess who's leaving our cellar for a new house?"

  He blinked, scratched his head, and grinned. "Well, well, she had more on the ball than I thought. Got a little loot?"

  "More than that. All of it."

  His grin faded to astonishment. "All?"

  "The house, the store, enough to pay a few years' taxes."

  "Jesus H. Christ!"

  "This," she said, "has been a weird day."

  "Does she know?"

  "I don't think so. Not yet. Jim was looking for her."

  "Brother," he said. "Some people have all the damned luck."

  Chapter VIII

  Late afternoon reminded Terry of a day she'd spent at the shore as a little girl. She and her father had been walking for hours, racing the waves as they died in the sand, digging furiously after the bubbles left behind by sand crabs. Most of the bathers had left for supper, and there was only the two of them, and a few stringy clouds that obscured the horizon. They'd found a dune and lay facing the ocean, pretending to be great celestial artists carving animals from the fluff that approached them.

  Suddenly a wind swirled debris into their faces and a cold pebble rain soaked them before they'd had a chance to get to their feet. What she had seen had been her first and last squall line; and now, holding Syd's hand and sprinting across the field toward the trees, she felt the same tingling apprehension. The sky, once a brilliant eye-stinging blue, had hazed, and the sun's platter had blurred until it diffused like a flashlight in fog. Storm warning, she thought, and uttered a quick prayer to make it hurry.

  There was little food in the hamper she was carrying; most of the space was occupied by a pair of wine bottles swaddled in ice-encrusted towels, a trick Syd had learned, he informed her, during his trainee days at Ft. Gordon, Georgia. The idea, he said, was to get just drunk enough to loosen a little of the strictness that clung to their morality and find out if making love in weeds and leaves was all it was cracked up to be. Terry wanted to tell him she didn't need the wine, but he was so excited she gladly played his game.

  They gave the hill wide berth, having tacitly agreed to temporarily forget dreams and Indians and the death of an old man. Peg, too, was forgotten; but here Terry felt stirrings of guilt. Peg had been too much forgotten the past few weeks; too often they'd neglected to invite her to spend an evening though she was but a staircase away. And too often they were guilty of wishing she hadn't accepted the invitations she did. It wasn't fair that sisters should feel that way about each other, she thought, and wondered if Pritchard had had anything to do with the shift in their attitudes.

  She stumbled, cried out when Syd didn't loosen his grip quickly enough and her wrist twisted. Immediately he stopped and grabbed the hamper from her good hand. Taking her arm, then, he bent close and carefully turned the wrist until he was satisfied he hadn't broken one of the smaller, more fragile bones. Then he made her sit on a hummock while he unwrapped one of the bottles and used the towel to dampen her forehead and bind the already swelling area.

  "You do that pretty good, doc," she said. There was pain, now, and a faint but unmistakable throbbing. "Do you think I'll live?"

  "I doubt it," he answered solemnly. "There seems to be a fracture of the intregal fibia with an incaceration of the callipygian conundrum. I'm afraid we'll either have to shoot you or stuff you. Your choice."

  She stroked her chin and narrowed her eyes. "You shitting me, man?"

  "Not on your life, lady. It's a common trait with the female Irish all their bones are filled with liquid. In your case, sour milk."

  "Hey, that wasn't funny."

  He pulled the hamper under him and sat, his arms hung over his knees. "Terry, you would make absolutely the worst actress in the entire world, you know that? Lassie could lie better than you."

  "What is this?" she said, squirming uncomfortably, "the prelude to a brush-off or something?"

  "Or something," he admitted. "Look, angel, ever since I told you about that damned dream, you've been making like you want nothing more than to grab at my body and do all sorts of de Sade things to it."

  "Well?"

  He reached out and trapped her chin between thumb and forefinger, tried to lift her eyes to meet his, but she slapped his hand away and twisted to face the hill.

  "Come on, angel, let's get it out now, before we ruin the whole summer."

  "Well. . . ."

  He lowered himself to the ground and removed the remaining bottle from the basket. The top was already opened before she could stop him, and she reluctantly accepted it.

  "Drink," he ordered.

  "Without a glass?"

  "Snob."

  She tilted the bottle, too far the first time and squealed as the cold liquid dribbled down her chin and between her breasts. The second attempt was more successful.

  "Angel, are you trying to make a connection between the nightmare I had last night and the dream you had on New Year's Eve?"

  "I don't know," she said honestly. "I think so."

  "Well, what else do you have to know?"

  The question instantly triggered a dozen more of her own. She admitted to him a confused and hurt puzzlement at the behavior of Denver, the radical sweep of his temperament and the games he played with his Shawnee background. She told him how the older man had reacted to questions about the doll, and the unsatisfactory answer he'd given about rejecting her the day Alec died.

  "Well," he said, "I think I can see that."

  "If they were all that close, Syd. Somehow I doubt it. I mean, Alec never left the house. Ask Pegeen. She tried a hundred times to get him to sit in the backyard and get a little sun. Or just walk around The Lane and say a few words to the neighbors. But he wouldn't. Never. Like he was scared of us."

  When Syd made no comment, she jumped to William and the way he turned up unexpectedly while she was sketching.

  "Hell, that's easy. You ever see the way he walks? He should be in a Western, for crying out loud. He could s
neak up on a butterfly."

  "No, it's his attitude. When I was doing the marker, you'd think I was stealing something that belonged to him. And the book!" She threw up her hands, searched the sky for a sign that would make Syd understand. "You know, if he had his way, the book would never see print at all. He thinks it's demeaning to the Indian or something." Her face became pleading. "I don't mean it that way, you know. It's just a ghost story for children. Almost all of it is made up."

  "Okay, angel," he said, "take it easy. What else?"

  "I had another dream. Last night. About . . . well, not about the hill, exactly, but something like it, I think." She glanced to see that he was listening, then described the horrible reality of the experience and the peculiar resolution as the dream became a sketch on her easel. "Dumb, but I was actually afraid to go into the study this morning. And when I did—"

  "There was nothing there, right?"

  "Yes, damnit, there was nothing there. But Syd, something was there, even if I couldn't see it. Something about this reservation. Damn!"

  "All right," he said, laying a hand on her shoulder and pressing to keep her seated. "So you had this dream. Anything more?"

  "Well, while you were still asleep I walked out here, before I came on Denver." She thought a moment before covering his hand with hers. "I tried to. . . well, I tried to lose myself in the marker, commune with it, you know? I thought maybe I could force myself to come up with a reason why it's been pursuing me all this time."

  "Pursuing you? Come on, Ter, you're sounding like a late-movie heroine."

  "Well, damnit, I don't know how else to put it. It's just . . ." and without wanting to, she started to cry, furious at herself for her weakness.

  Syd waited until she'd finished. "Here," he said, handing back the bottle. "Have one on me."

  "I'm cracking up, right?"

  "Drink! And no, you're not cracking up."

  "You think not? Wait until you hear the last thing." He waited again and she wondered if what she'd just put together would sound like more of his heroine ravings. None of it had occurred to her before, and even now she wasn't sure the puzzle she imagined was there at all.

  "Now this is only a feeling, mind, but I don't think Denver's been completely honest about this place," and she pointed in the general direction of the marker. "There's something odd when a massacre that was supposed to have happened as big as that isn't even mentioned in history books. Something like that just doesn't go unnoticed."

  "It's happened, angel."

  "Maybe." She faced him, then, resting her arms on his knees. "But I don't think so. It's funny, but I never thought of that until just now, but I don't believe a word Denver McIntyre or any of his family have been telling us all this time."

  "Fine. A good thesis, as they say, but to what purpose? Why go to all the trouble to spin a yarn like that? Just to give you nightmares?"

  A blue jay screamed over their heads and landed a few feet from the hamper. Its breast puffed, and it stalked over the cloth that had been around the now nearly empty bottle. When the ice penetrated its claws, it squawked, pecked at the towel and flew off, scolding in a circle before wheeling toward the forest. "A sign," she said, making her voice as ominous as she could.

  "He's telling us: nevermore."

  "That was a raven, dope."

  "Raven, jay, what's the difference?"

  Terry watched the bird vanish into the leaves, then rose and pulled Syd to his feet. "I'm sorry, Syd, but I don't feel—"

  "I sort of guessed," he said, putting the things back into the basket. "But you still haven't told me why Denver would make up such a story?"

  "How should I know? To make himself seem more important, maybe, or give his family something to cling to while the white man moves into his world and keeps him from becoming part of it. How the hell should I know?"

  "Well, you don't have to get mad at me, kid. Maybe he's hiding a body."

  Maybe, she thought, and started walking.

  "Hey, you're going the wrong way!"

  "Nice of you to tell me, mister. I want another look at that stupid marker."

  "What the hell for, Ter? Clues?"

  "Exactly."

  He groaned, and she grinned without turning around, knowing he would be following, muttering imprecations and impotent threats. However foolish her fears had sounded once exposed to his listening, she had now caught herself up in a mystery of her own making, and as she rounded the base of the slope, wanted nothing more than to be proved wrong.

  She stood, hands on hips, in front of the marker. Slowly she read the inscription aloud, less for Syd's benefit than an attempt to glean sense from it, sense that would allow it a reasonable place in whatever she was groping for, whatever she feared.

  Who exactly were the Old Ones this tombstone—she couldn't help referring to it as anything else—mentioned? Just those who had been massacred? But suppose there hadn't been a massacre; then what? Strange Indian gods? Not necessarily impossible, she decided, but damned close to improbable. From what she had read, Indians didn't bury their gods, nor mark their graves with inscriptions.

  No gods, the possibility of no massacre. So who the hell were they?

  While Syd perched on a tabletop boulder, she knelt on the patch of bare earth and frowned as though the facial contortion would hasten understanding. Then she rocked back onto her heels. "Now why," she asked, "is this space here cleared while the rest of the place is all overgrown?"

  "Tell me, Sherlock. I'm all ears."

  "Tourists who like to look at it, or take pictures, or even chip off pieces of it for souvenirs? Not likely. Tourists we would know about because unless they hiked all the way through the park to get here, they'd have to come up The Lane, right? And we'd see them, right?"

  "If you spend all your time playing Madame Defarge with your knitting on the porch, then you're right."

  "Come on, Syd, cut it out."

  "Okay, then, I'll grant you that much. No tourists. What then? Secret sermons by the dark of the moon?"

  "That was a lousy Peter Lorre."

  "It was supposed to be Boris Karloff."

  "For a Boris Karloff, it was a lousy Peter Lorre." She held up one hand. "So," she said, touching one extended finger. "No tourists. No neighbors because they don't come out here except for the kids, and they usually keep to the far side of the hill. And kids couldn't play here for long without scribbling something on the rocks or the marker."

  She turned around to face his scoffing, and was slightly unnerved to see him staring, not at her but at the weathered wood. "So it's not a lot of people, or even a few. A couple at the most."

  She smiled and passed her hands lightly over the dirt. In spite of the heat, rapidly more oppressive as the sun inched toward the horizon, it was cool and painstakingly cleared of twigs, dead grass, and sizable rocks. Then she leaned forward into the shadow and saw a darker area of loosened earth. She hesitated, looked back to Syd, who nodded. As her fingers carefully pulled the dirt toward her, she thought her hands should have been trembling with excitement, or fear. But she was preternaturally calm, probing the hole carefully every few seconds. Nearly six inches down, she encountered something soft, but definitely not more loose dirt. With two fingers she scissored until she took hold, then pulled gently.

  "I'll be damned," Syd muttered.

  The doll was of the same design as the one she'd taken from Pritchard's house and had hidden in a bottom drawer of her dresser. With a fingertip she flicked off the clinging moist earth and held it close to examine its face.

  "What is it, an Indian?"

  "I don't know, Syd. Take a look."

  He moved to kneel beside her but refused to take it from her hands. "Beats me, kid. What do they call these things, totems? Amulets? I don't know."

  "Me neither. But why bury it, I wonder? I mean—"

  "Terry, put it back," Syd said. He nudged her back until she complied, talking while she tried to replace the dirt and sweep the small area clea
n of what had been left over. "It must be some kind of religious thing. And maybe it's not so sinister after all, you know what I mean? Some kind of offering to the gods of whoever believes in this marker, or whatever it stands for. We shouldn't be disturbing it, then."

  "But Syd, why was its forehead pushed out? Like Alec's?"

  He pulled her back toward the house, not running, but she was afraid of his solemnity. He was obviously thinking along the same lines as she, and she didn't like it. What she wanted was Syd to tell her to take two aspirin and lie down for a while. Instead, he had accepted her mystery without much more than a token struggle. Again she wondered how long this had been bothering him, and a flash of impatience made her wish he'd opened his mouth sooner. But for what, she thought, not wanting to believe she could have somehow saved poor Alec. I tried, but they wouldn't let me. Let me do what? Who in hell were they?

  "Come on," he said, pushing her through the front door. "Make yourself less wanton and more like a respectable conservative matron digging into the most fascinating subject that ever crossed your path."

  "What in hell are you talking about?" she demanded as he pushed her down the hallway and into the bedroom.

  "The history of Prynne Lane—Jesus Christ, did you ever hear of such a name for a street in your life? Listen, if the biggies don't carry the so-called massacre or even the reservation in their precious pages, there's only one other place we can find it."

  "All right," she said, her shirt doffed and in her hand. "I refuse to budge one more stitch until you tell me what you're talking about."

  Syd had already changed into a short-sleeved white shirt and dark pants. "If I've learned one thing living out here, angel, it's that this place is no different than any other in the state. Look, a lot of the Revolution passed through the county seat, as well as travelers West. Doesn't it figure there must be a local historical society to record these momentous occasions?"

  She shook her head, changed her mind and nodded. It had to be, and she told him she knew who was in charge.