by Nash Summers
“A man was crouched down next to her, leaning over her, looking at her, his hand at her waist. I don’t remember if I thought anything besides ‘That’s the man who killed my mama.’ And then he looked up and saw me.
“I was a fuckin’ kid, Levi. A damn kid. But I was the man of the house and I knew how to protect myself, even if I hadn’t been there to protect her. We kept a shotgun behind the chair in the living room. I was standing right next to it. When I grabbed it and cocked it in my hands, it felt like the most normal thing in the entire world.
“He screamed something, shot up, put his hand out. I dunno what he said. I couldn’t tell you a damn thing about him to this day. I thought he was the man who’d killed my mama. He came toward me. I don’t know if it was panic or instinct or fear, but I pulled that trigger. Not once did I ever think about not pulling that trigger. Not for a second did I recognize him.”
I leaned back against the arm of the sofa and looked at the man who was bleeding out in front of me. After all these years, he was still dying from this. I couldn’t tell if it was from the guilt of pulling that trigger or the guilt of not being able to be there to save her, but I knew as well as I knew that the sky was blue that this was killing him.
“And it was your dad,” I said, my eyes not leaving his face.
“I didn’t know it was him,” he replied softly. “I hadn’t seen him in almost a year. And even then I barely remembered what he looked like. He was never around. Even when the sheriff and his boys showed up and asked me if I knew who that man was, I told them I didn’t. And it was true.”
“But no one believed you?”
“I got in trouble as a kid. I knew the sheriff on a first-name basis. I fucked around, I messed up a lot, made stupid choices. Only thing the old man ever said to me was how big of a disappointment I turned out to be.”
I furrowed my brow. “I don’t get why they’d still hold that against you if it had been an accident. You were a kid.”
He smiled sadly as he looked down at his hands. “Daddy was a cop. He could also be a mean son of a bitch, but he was a cop.”
“Did you have any other family?”
“An aunt, not that that made the whole mess any better. She’s my dad’s adopted sister. Lived up in Baton Rouge, but came down as soon as she heard. Only met her a handful of times before that. Never saw her again after that day.
“I’ll never forget the look in her eyes when the sheriff told her what I’d done. Her eyes became blank—not dark—just… blank. The last words out of her mouth to me were a curse. She cursed me to forever be followed by darkness.
“I was at her house one time—couldn’t have been more than seven years old. Always hated going there almost as much as she hated me being there. I wandered into the spare bedroom this one time, found boxes of books, strange jars on shelves full of shit that smelled like something dead. These books had pictures in them I didn’t understand. My mama found me and snatched the books away when she caught me looking. Said I was never to go back into that room and never look at those books again.”
Monroe leaned back and scratched the back of his neck. “I’d never really put much thought into it until I was older and thought maybe there was a darkness following me around. Now, I’m not so sure. Never believed in curses or anything supernatural, but this kind of feeling in my chest—I ain’t sure it could be anything else.”
“There is darkness in your soul. A curse,” I told him. His eyes met mine. “I can see it strangling you. It’s not a feeling or a shadow, it’s as real to me as the moon in the sky. It’s a serpent around your neck, an endless pit of darkness swallowing your soul.”
“Is that what you see when you look at me? A tortured soul?”
I looked down at my hands, trying to force my gaze away from the snake slithering up Monroe’s side. Its tail rattled and scales rustled when it rubbed against the fabric of his thin T-shirt.
I couldn’t force myself to look, to accept that the snake was part of him, that they would always be one and the same. It had wrapped itself around his neck, and as badly as I wanted to look at Monroe and see a man, that’s not what I saw when I looked at him.
“Levi,” he said gently.
“It’s almost always there, coiled around your neck.”
“The snake?”
I nodded. “Your soul.”
“How can you see things like that? How can you see a person’s soul?”
“Our family blood is laced with something that pulls darkness our way. It’s in our blood. We can see and feel things most people can’t. And while my gran could talk to those who have passed, and Mama can sometimes see things that haven’t yet happened, I’m a magnet for darkness.
“Evil things love me, Monroe. And it’s so damn tough trying not to love them back.”
He leaned over. I closed my eyes.
I thought of the swamp out back, its thick, mucky waters and evil that whirled beneath the surface. How badly I wanted to dip my fingers into its pools, to feel the cool wetness of it against my skin. I yearned to fill my lungs with it, let it brush its fingers against my body, to hold me tight, to turn all the light around me into darkness.
A hand rested on the side of my neck.
I opened my eyes.
It wasn’t Monroe’s eyes I saw. It was the swamp. His soul was that swamp, those deep, dark waters, and I wanted it—him—so fucking bad.
“You have to go.” His voice was hard.
“Why?”
“Because you look like you did that night I found you half-drowned in the swamp. You look reckless, and you have to go.”
His hand slipped away. The place on my neck where he’d touched me felt like ice. He walked over to the chair, picked up my bag, and headed toward the door. I stood and followed him.
When I was barely outside his front door, I turned. “It’s not your fault a curse is haunting your soul.”
“That doesn’t make it any easier.”
I knew it was wrong to ask, but I couldn’t seem to help myself. I asked anyway. “Can I stay?”
Monroe’s jaw locked. His knuckles turned white as he squeezed the doorframe. “No.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re a little too close to heaven, Levi. And I’m a little too close to hell.”
He stepped back and closed the door.
Chapter 6
“WHAT KIND of book are you going to get, Silvi?”
Silvi, Ward, and I walked down Main Street toward the library. The tangerine sun hung low in the sky, beaming down against our already tanned skin. The air was thick with heat. Sweat dripped down the side of my face, my lower back.
She gave me an exasperated look. “You already know what kind of book I’m going to get.”
“You don’t want to try something new?”
“Why would I?” Her dark eyebrows lowered.
“What kind of book are you going to get, Levi?” Ward asked.
I hesitated. Things had been strained between Ward and me since we’d argued last week about me going to the Poirier house. We hadn’t discussed it again, but when I’d come home that evening, he’d asked me if I was all right and then dropped the subject.
Going to Monroe Poirier’s house had been a bad idea. Asking Monroe Poirier if I could stay had been a worse idea. The effect the evil of the swamp had on me was growing. Its cries were louder. Its pull was stronger. I dreamed of it—of the house, of Monroe—every night. I dreamed of a young man with colorless eyes holding a shotgun. I dreamed of an impossibly black snake. “Research,” I said.
“What kind of research?” Ward pressed.
“Monroe told me what happened those years ago with his mama and daddy. He said his aunt, a practitioner of voodoo and witchcraft, cursed him that day. I want to know more about it.”
“This is a bad idea.”
I sighed heavily. “There’s nothing else I can do, Ward. I dream about it every night. The only thing I can think to do is try to understand this cu
rse and maybe break it.”
“It is too powerful.”
“I don’t have a lot of other options.”
He knew I was right.
The library in town was an old, massive brick building. The cement between the bricks crumbled easily, and the bricks on the corners were cracked. The windows had metal bars on the inside, and the one railing leading up the staircase to the door had rusted through in places.
Silvi once told me it looked more like a prison, and I had to agree with her. There wasn’t even a sign on the outside of the building stating it was a library.
We took the stairs, Ward and I side by side, Silvi a few paces in front of us. The teenage girl sitting behind the front desk didn’t look up as we walked past. She smacked on a piece of gum and twirled her hair as she stared at a computer monitor.
“Where do you want to start looking?” Ward asked.
“Town history, I guess.”
The bookshelves were all metal, stacked high, and painted light brown. The natural lighting did nothing to help the ugly carpet that looked like it had been there since the building was first constructed. Hanging signs indicated the different sections for genres.
Silvi pointed toward the horror section.
“I’ll be over there,” she said.
“I will go with her,” Ward said.
The section for local history sat in the far back corner. No sign hung above that section, but I’d inquired before. An old wooden table sat against the far wall, just beneath the window. I went to one of the shelves, grabbed the books labeled Malcome Local History, and took them back to the table.
I began scanning the pages looking for anything that mentioned the swamp or the Poirier house. After a few minutes, I came across a newspaper clipping dated nineteen years ago. The headline read:
OFFICER POIRIER, WIFE, DOUBLE MURDER
The article outlined the gruesome facts involving the murder case. It stated that Monroe’s mama had bled out. The coroner thought her death to be suspicious because the amount of blood loss was great, but there hadn’t been any wounds on her body. He went on record stating it looked as though it had happened over the course of a few hours. The police chief and other officers were questioned by a local journalist on why they thought she hadn’t tried to call for help. No comment had been made on the matter.
A toxicology report came back, the results indeterminate. The writer of the article hinted that because of the violent death of the husband, Officer John Poirier, that his wife’s murder had been second on the priority list of the Malcome police department.
When I flipped the page, a faded photograph in the article showed a young boy: eight-year-old Monroe Poirier, bright, clear eyes with black-as-night hair and a solemn expression on his face.
The writer of the article stated that when Monroe had been asked to give a statement, he said nothing, just looked vacantly off into the direction of the swamp.
After Monroe had been acquitted of murder charges, the article read that he simply… vanished, as if into thin air. A strange thing, it was, for a child to disappear. I read on, my eyes snapping on a mention of Monroe’s aunt.
There was a picture of her smiling at the camera, the line beneath it reading Germaine Poirier. Her skin was a beautiful mocha color. Her dark eyes matched her big black curls, giving her an exotic look. Even in that picture of her, there was something about her eyes—her smile—that made my stomach turn.
The article read that she was Monroe’s daddy’s adopted sister, like Monroe had told me. It didn’t say much on her other than she was a widow who lived in Baton Rouge. She’d been the one who’d shown up to collect her dead brother’s body.
As I was about to flip the page, I noticed something odd. The last line of the article stated that while Monroe’s mother had been buried in the local cemetery, like most Malcome folks were, Germaine Poirier had insisted that her brother’s body be cremated, and that his ashes be spread throughout the swamp behind the Poirier house.
A chill ran up my spine.
“What is it?” a deep voice startled me. I looked up to see Ward hovering above me, Silvi by his side.
“Look,” I slid the binder toward him and pointed to the part of the article indicating what I’d just found.
“Can I take out two books, Levi?” Silvi asked me, holding two paperback books in front of her for me to see. “I can’t make up my mind.”
One of the books was called The True Haunted Houses of Maine, while the other was called Midnight Ghost Stories: Based on True Events.
Silvi liked ghosts. In fact, ghosts were one of the only things she did like. That might’ve been odd for other children her age, but in our family, it felt as natural as waking in the morning. Mama liked to speculate that when Silvi grew up, she’d be able to connect with those who had passed, just like Gran. She showed no signs yet, but it was hard to say. When I was her age, the darkness had already found me.
The swamp had already begun singing to me nightly. I’d often waken to find the old cats in the neighborhood dead on our doorstep. Mama told me that animals came to me when they were in their final hours, when the darkness was strongest and they felt some of the light from my soul shining through.
“Will you read both books?” I asked Silvi.
Her brow furrowed. “Of course.”
“Then, yes. We can bring them back next week.”
Silvi turned and pranced off toward the front desk. Her library card was one of the only things she constantly carried around with her.
“This is disturbing.” Ward tapped his finger against the binder. “Do you think his father’s ghost is haunting him?”
I shook my head. “It doesn’t feel like a haunting. It feels… like a curse. A deep, deep curse. It has to be the curse Monroe said his aunt placed on him.”
“Why would someone curse a child?”
“I’ve seen the darkness that rests in the souls of mankind.”
Ward thought this over for a moment, nodded, and then handed me two small books. “Here,” he said. “I found two books on curses. Perhaps these will help.”
I grinned. “What would I do without you, Ward?”
“You will never have to find out.”
ONCE EVERY few weeks, I stopped by Mrs. Mayberry’s house to collect some rare herbs from her that she had shipped in. She owned a local café that doubled as a baked goods shop, and was an extraordinary chef. While my mama liked the spices and herbs for cooking, we always used them for spells and enchantments.
Mrs. Mayberry was a sweet lady who always gave me more muffins when I stopped by. Her hair was completely gray, always curled to perfection, and she always wore purple lipstick. She and my gran had been friends when my gran was still alive.
“You’re such a sweet boy, Levi.” She handed me two small glass jars filled with rosemary and thyme. “And it doesn’t bother me a lick that you’re a bit of a dandy.”
I smiled at her. She had a kind soul and the best intentions. When I looked in her eyes, I saw no malice and no darkness. She was warm, cozy nights by a stone fireplace, a freshly baked apple cinnamon pie.
Growing up in a small town in the South was hard when you were queer. But I’d heard it all before. Most folks in Malcome paid me little attention since I kept to myself, but it hadn’t always been that way growing up. It was easier to forgive people with beautiful souls, though.
Gran used to tell me that kids could be cruel no matter where you were growing up. She’d told me that most of them were scared or confused, and the only way they knew how to cope was to put other people down. So I’d taught myself to look into people’s souls instead of listening to the words they said.
“How’s your mama?” she asked.
“She’s good.”
“Oh, we miss seeing her—” She paused, frowning at her choice of words.
“It’s all right,” I said. “It’s harder for her to get around now. It was bad at first, but she’s doing a lot better.”
She grinned wide, the unease leaving her wrinkled face. “Such a shame it happened to such a lovely person. Your mother is such a kindhearted woman, Levi.”
“She is.”
Mrs. Mayberry glanced over at the clock ticking away on the wall. “Oh, my goodness! Look how late it is. I don’t want you walking home alone in the dark.”
Even though I was in my twenties, most of the people in Malcome who I’d grown up around still treated me as though I was a child. I didn’t mind. It was just another one of those things about growing up in a small town.
“Will you do me a favor, Levi?” she asked.
“Of course,” I replied.
“You’ve got to walk by the bar on your way home. Would you be a dear and stop by the bar and tell my good-for-nothing husband to get his butt home?”
“I’d do it gladly, Mrs. Mayberry.”
“Oh, Levi. Call me Marie. You know how old I feel when you call me Mrs. Mayberry!”
We said our good-byes and I set out, my bag filled with spices and muffins slung over my shoulder.
The night was warm, the indigo sky twinkling with tiny, bright flecks. Streetlights flickered overhead. The air was buzzing, charged with electricity, tingling my skin. My amulet I wore around my neck felt cold pressed up against the warm skin of my chest.
Downtown Malcome was never busy, especially on weeknights. It was a quiet town that never attracted any tourists and mostly kept to itself. People went to bed early, woke at the crack of dawn. Young people usually left Malcome the second their eighteenth birthday came. They’d move to a bigger city, one with brighter lights and louder noise, a city where their futures weren’t looking them directly in the face when they shopped for food at the supermarket or borrowed a book from the library.
I passed by a girl I knew, smiling as I did, but saw no one else. Closed shop signs hung in store windows, and a vacant park was on the opposite side of the street. The roads were absent of cars, the wooden, handmade benches clear of people. A gentle hum from the one open bar sounded from down the street.
