by Gary Jansen
The lamp was off in the toy room, which was just beyond our dining room, but there was a soft blue glow from the computer screen illuminating the wall. I stood up and slowly walked across the floor, and the church bells had been replaced by the sound of drums. And it was getting louder. I stepped inside the toy room, where there was music coming out of the speakers. iTunes was on, and metallic guitars were pumping to the beat. It took me a brief moment, but the song registered in my head. It was “Hell’s Bells” by AC/DC. I remembered leaving the computer on before I started reading, but I was positive there wasn’t any music playing. The vocals kicked in and, as I stood there listening to the song, I felt the electric surge that I had mostly only felt in Eddie’s room roll over me as lead singer Brian Johnson intoned, “I’ll give you black sensations up and down your spine. If you’re into evil then you’re a friend of mine.”
“You’ve got to be shitting me,” I said to myself. “There is no way this is happening.” I switched off iTunes, shut down the computer, walked upstairs, and got into bed with Grace. Eddie was sleeping soundly next to her. I put my arm over the both of them and, for the first time since all of this began, I felt afraid.
Chapter 7
Fall turned to winter, and the holidays came and went. I was still seeing shadows moving out of the corners of my eyes, toys continued switching on by themselves, and the strange surges continued in Eddie’s room, only not as frequently. I did my best to ignore these things when they happened. If Grace had been picking up on anything, she didn’t say so. And I’m pretty sure even if she had, she wouldn’t have cared. She was in the last stages of her pregnancy, and the past few months had been a struggle. A sonogram a few months earlier had shown a small spot on the baby’s brain. The doctors said it could be nothing or it could be something and that we should get an amniocentesis to make sure. We opted not to do that, kicking it up to God’s will.
“My father will watch over the baby,” Grace had said. “He’s his guardian angel, too.”
Though we tried to be positive, little fissures of doubt nonetheless crept in, at least for me. Moreover, Grace was experiencing pain and discomfort in a way she never had when she was pregnant with Eddie. Nothing felt right and what should have been a happy time preparing for a new child was riddled with painful cramps, sometimes debilitating backaches, and severe nausea. The doctor reassured her that everything looked normal, but since she was going into the last leg before delivery, he wanted to see her at least once a week just to make sure everything was fine.
Three weeks before her due date, her symptoms seemed to dissipate. Still, a visit to the doctor was mandatory, and one afternoon I left work early so she and I could go see him together. While in the office, the nurse took her blood pressure, grimaced, shook her head, and took it again. At the end of the second time, she looked frightened, told us to wait in the room, and stepped outside. She and another nurse entered a minute later, and the new woman took the reading again. After she was done, she quickly pulled the stethoscope out of her ears, unwrapped the Velcro blood-pressure band around Grace’s arm, and said matter-of-factly, “Honey, you have to go to the emergency room. Get dressed. We’ll call for you now.”
Grace and I looked at each other and asked what was wrong. The nurse said that Grace had the highest blood pressure she had ever seen and that there was no time to wait. She asked us if we wanted an ambulance, and I told her no, I would drive.
From her doctor’s office it was a ten-minute ride to Winthrop Hospital in Mineola. Along the way, Grace looked and felt fine and we thought the nurse had been mistaken. But when we arrived at the hospital emergency room, a nurse was waiting to wheel her in. A doctor saw her immediately. She was hooked up to a monitor and quickly admitted to the maternity ward.
Grace had developed preeclampsia, a dangerous medical condition that can arise in some pregnancies. It causes high blood pressure in the mother, which in turn affects the amount of oxygen and blood the baby receives inside the womb. If undiagnosed, the disorder can turn into full-blown eclampsia, which can lead to embolisms and seizures and can be fatal for both mother and child.
She was in the hospital for a week and during that time she had daily sonograms to monitor the baby’s heart rate. It was a long week, filled with uncertainty and doubt, but on February 27, her doctor decided that enough time had elapsed and the baby was far enough along to be delivered. He induced Grace, and she gave birth to Charles Jansen at 4:51 p.m. while Judge Judy ranted and raved on the TV in the background.
Charles was fine.
THAT NIGHT, after all the visitors had left, I sat with Grace and Eddie in the hospital room and stared at the new little boy who had just come into our lives. “You were a difficult little guy, weren’t you?” I said to him. He didn’t respond. Not that I expected him to. He was, after all, only a couple of hours old. But he was beautiful and calm and radiated peace. Wrapped in his terry-cloth hat and blanket, he looked like a tiny white bean. Grace was exhausted, and I needed to be back at work the next day, so Eddie and I left. Grace cried because she was happy and tired and was sick of being in the hospital and just wanted to go home.
I dropped Eddie off at his grandmother’s. He wanted to stay with me and I wanted to stay with him. I hadn’t seen him for much of the week. I had taken a number of days off from work to be with Grace while she was in the hospital and I needed to go into the office the following morning, if only for a few hours. Grace’s mom had agreed to take the day off to babysit, and after I kissed Eddie good night, I drove home. It was nighttime and I could barely keep my eyes open behind the wheel. For the last week I had been terrified of losing Grace and losing the baby. Now that Charlie was here and Grace seemed to be in good shape, relief had set in. My body had been running on nerves and adrenaline, but now I was coming down—and coming down fast. I thought about getting Starbucks to wake up, but decided against it. I just wanted to close my eyes and rest.
I arrived in Rockville Centre around ten o’clock. It was the first time in a very long time that I was in the house by myself. I immediately went upstairs, kicked off my shoes, climbed into bed, and fell asleep. I didn’t even change my clothes, which would have freaked Grace out if she had known. She thought hospitals were the dirtiest places in the world. I didn’t disagree, but that night I just didn’t care.
Around three o’clock in the morning I awoke to the sound of the doorbell ringing. I opened my eyes and didn’t move. For a moment I didn’t know where I was, but the sound seemed to hang in the room—as if someone had clicked a spoon against a wineglass—and then slowly faded away. My heart was pounding and I wasn’t sure if I had been having a nightmare or if there was someone at the front door. My eyes darted around the room, trying to adjust to waking up. I was breathing fast and panic rose and fell in my chest. There were few things more ominous to me than the sound of a doorbell in the middle of the night and I waited to see if it would happen again. I felt like a coward, but I just couldn’t bring myself to make a move. If it was just a dream, there wouldn’t be a second ring, and if it was real, then whoever was there would ring again. I waited and a tiny movie played in my head of all the times our doorbell had rung in all hours of the night when I was growing up. There was never anyone there. My father always wrote it off as kids playing pranks, but if it had been a bunch of punks fooling around they never made any sound—no laughing, no collision of boys tumbling over each other to get away. And when we looked out into the street there never was anything there except streetlights and shadows.
I waited for the next bell to ring and began counting Mississippis in my head the way I used to when I was a kid in between a strike of lightning and a roar of thunder to determine how far off a storm was.
One Mississippi.
Two Mississippi.
Three Mississippi.
Four . . .
Ding.
The bell rang again. The storm, which I hadn’t seen coming, was standing on my doorstep.
“Goddamnit,�
�� I said and jumped out of bed, pulled back the blind, and looked out the window. No one was there, but I had a limited range of vision because the alcove below blocked the view. I jumped out of my room, ran downstairs, and swung open the door. Standing there in the darkness was nothing. I ran outside in my socks. The ground was cold and wet and I stood on the sidewalk, the streetlight shining above me like a small moon, and looked around and there was no one anywhere to be seen. The streets were empty.
“Leave us the hell alone!” I yelled out loud. And I didn’t know who I was mouthing off to. Some kid, some ghost, a demon, myself? “What the hell is going on?”
I walked back inside with my heart still racing and boiled water for tea in the kitchen. The house was freezing. I warmed my hands over the stove and tried to quiet my mind. I started reciting the Jesus Prayer over and over in my head, but it didn’t do much good. When the water was ready, I made the tea, then walked into the front room and adjusted the thermostat. The pipes clunked awake and the furnace blazed to life in the basement. I sat down in the dark by the picture window and looked out at the cathedral in the distance. The streetlight cast an orange glow in the room and it reminded me of the burning stub of my mother’s cigarette and the night she sat in this very spot and told me of the darkness that hung over the church down the block from us. Next to me, an end table was stacked with books I was either in the process of reading or planning to read. They were mostly books on angelology and demonology. I thought maybe I needed to just throw them out and read a good Hemingway novel or dive into an issue of Sports Illustrated.
“Yes, strange things have been happening for the last year, but you’re probably not making it any better by reading this crap,” I said out loud to myself.
Then, for the first time, I thought that we should just move, sell the house, and just go somewhere else. I had been in this place for most of my life. Why hadn’t I left? I always thought it was because I felt sorry for the house and felt sorry for my parents, who tried their best to raise five kids and ended up breaking themselves in the process. I thought I felt sorry for what could have been, but maybe I didn’t feel sorry for anything or anyone. Maybe the real reason I stayed was because something was keeping me here. I had tried to be rational about everything in recent months, but by this time I was pretty well convinced that something was in the house. And if there was, had I been irresponsible for having not done anything? Had I put my family in danger? Nothing life threatening had happened. Or had it? Had Grace’s difficult pregnancy been the result of some kind of spirit, or was it just something that happened, something random?
Regardless of how strange or spooky some of the occurrences had been to me over the last year, I had no proof they were anything other than just natural events. But still something inside was telling me that there was more to the story. I knew it went beyond all logic and against everything I had believed in. Part of me still thought that maybe it was just stress, but I didn’t know. I just didn’t know.
In the pile of books was When Ghosts Speak. It was written by Mary Ann Winkowski, the woman Peggy recommended I call way back in the summer. One of our sister book clubs at work, One Spirit, had offered the book to its members in its promotional catalogs. The editor had passed along a copy to me after I had inquired about it a few weeks after my lunch with Peggy. Though my paperback division had signed on to offer the book in the summer of 2008, just on the strength of its title, I still hadn’t looked at it. I put down my tea, turned on the lamp, reached over, opened the book, and read until morning. And while I was fascinated by the stories of earthbound spirits who roamed the earth for many different reasons, I was most intrigued by something else: curses.
Chapter 8
The malocchio, or the evil eye, is a curse inflicted on an unsuspecting individual with malevolent intent. It is the product of envy and can be done deliberately, for instance, when someone wishes another person dead, or by accident, like one friend being jealous of another friend’s beauty. One casts a cold, bitter eye on another and the look can have serious repercussions. In many ways, it is akin to shooting someone with an envy bullet and is believed by many to cause headaches, misfortune, accidents, and sometimes even death.
Many believe it originated in Ancient Egypt—the eye of Horus is a symbol that protects one from its effects—and the evil eye, or a variation of it, has been documented throughout the centuries in countries as diverse as Italy, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Croatia, the Dominican Republic, and Tibet. Immigrants brought the belief to the United States and though it’s not often spoken about openly, many people believe in it and wear various amulets to protect themselves from it.
I first learned about the malocchio a month before my twenty-fifth birthday. I was excited after having bought a new car and told all my friends about it. Many people shared my enthusiasm and wished me well, even throwing dollar bills and coins on the floor of the car as a good-luck wish. I was happy to have the car and thrilled to know that in less than thirty days I would be paying lower insurance rates, since I would be moving out of the mandatory assigned risk category that all drivers under twenty-five are lumped into in New York State.
But a good buddy of mine pulled me aside one day and told me to be careful, that he knew for a fact a mutual acquaintance of ours had been jealous about the fact that I was going to be paying lower insurance premiums in less than a month. (You would think this guy would have been green-eyed because I bought a new car, but anyone under twenty-five who lives on Long Island knows all too well how much car insurance costs.) He said this person had given me the evil eye, and I asked him what that was and he told me. I laughed and told him I didn’t believe in such superstitious nonsense. He understood but told me to be cautious anyway. He didn’t want to see me get into an accident.
Accident?
I didn’t mention what my buddy told me to anyone because I thought it was nonsense, but he said the word accident and you know what? He planted a tiny seed in my head like Iago did to Othello and it took root. I tried to figure out who it was that might have been talking shit about me and soon found out. I wasn’t angry at the person. He was a jerk anyway, but I was furious at my buddy for having said anything to me. Now I was self-conscious and a little paranoid about crashing my car. I knew if it happened it would just be some variation of a self-fulfilling prophecy, but nonetheless, I found myself doubting myself every time I was behind the wheel. So what did I do? I drove as cautiously as I could for a month.
The morning of my birthday arrived and nothing had happened. I knew what my buddy had said about the evil eye was garbage and I felt pretty good, first for turning a quarter-century old and because I had avoided the dreaded curse!
My mother’s car wasn’t working at the time, so she asked to borrow mine. She needed to pick something up in Baldwin, a town right next to ours. I said sure. That morning, on a slick road, my mom plowed into the back of a pickup truck on Merrick Road, crumpling the front end of the car like paper. The air bag didn’t deploy, and she hit her head against the steering wheel and sat there, stunned. It was an overcast day and had been drizzling, but everything looked bright to her. She felt warm and peaceful and thought for a moment that she had died and gone to heaven. Then there was a tapping at the side window. She slowly rolled it down and there was a large barrel-chested man asking her if she was all right. She looked at him and stared into his eyes. He looked familiar and it took her a moment for it to register. It was Joey Buttafuoco. Three years before, the auto body shop owner had been involved in an affair with an underage Amy Fisher, the infamous “Long Island Lolita” who put a bullet in his wife’s head in a failed murder attempt.
My mom looked through the windshield at the smashed car and back to Buttafuoco and realized she hadn’t died and she definitely had not gone to heaven.
My mom wasn’t injured, but my insurance rates were.
A WEEK AFTER Mary Ann Winkowski was born, her grandmother bathed her in red wine, not only to ward off the evil eye but
to keep the devil away. It was an old Italian custom. Mary Ann’s grandmother, Maria, was from the old country, a place where a targeted glance could ruin a person in many different ways and precautions needed to be taken. Evil spirits and curses weren’t just the stuff of old wives’ tales, but things to be taken seriously. Baptism would protect the baby more securely from the ravages of Old Scratch, but something had to be done in the interim between the birth and the blessing by the priest with holy water.
Maria had a gift. She saw things other people couldn’t and could communicate with spirits of the deceased, mostly relatives or people she knew personally. Mary Ann’s mother didn’t disbelieve any of this, but she didn’t have the ability her mother had, and as the baby grew to be a toddler, both were curious to see whether a special talent would manifest itself. The gift had been known to skip a generation.
The family didn’t have to wait too long. When Mary Ann was two years old she saw and spoke to her first ghost. Her mother was in the hospital giving birth to her sister, and Mary Ann was staying with her grandmother. The young girl, who was verbally advanced for her age, began having a conversation with an invisible person standing in the corner. Maria questioned her about it, and the information Mary Ann relayed wasn’t anything a two-year-old could possibly know. The gift had shown itself and, by the age of four, Mary Ann began visiting funeral homes on a regular basis to talk to the dead and help relatives deal with the loss of loved ones, and sometimes, not-so-loved ones.
