Family Skulls

by Luc Reid

  “Yes, but I want to get Grandma Neddie to the hospital first,” she said, then looked at him closely for the first time since he’d arrived. “You’re all right, aren’t you? You’re not in any trouble?” Seth just shrugged, and his mom nodded decisively. “You’re fine, just soaked through. Why don’t you get a hot bath after you get Kurt to bed? And check in on Grandma Mary. I already made her take her pills.”

  “I don’t want to go to bed. I want to stay up,” said Kurt.

  “And yet you won’t,” said Seth’s mom. Then she locked eyes with Seth, wordlessly reminding him that he was in charge. “I’ll probably be back late. The hospital is Dartmouth-Hitchcock if you need to call us, room 307.” She set Kurt down and crossed the room. “Neddie!” she called into the living room.

  Grandma Neddie shuffled in and stopped short when she saw Seth. “What happened to you, honey?” she said.

  “I missed the bus back from the field trip.”

  “Then how did you get home?”

  “I got a ride, then I borrowed a bike.”

  One corner of Grandma Neddie’s mouth tightened. “Since when is anyone in this family able to borrow things?”

  Seth’s mom slung her purse over one arm and picked up the tote bag. “Neddie, can that keep until tomorrow?”

  Grandma Neddie’s mouth didn’t relax, but she lifted herself up on tiptoes and kissed Seth’s cheek. “I’m glad you’re home. Tomorrow we’ll talk about that bicycle.” She winked at Kurt and walked out the door as Seth’s mom held the door open.

  “And stay away from Uncle Guy’s room!” Seth’s mom called back. “He took the phone again.”

  She slammed the door. Seth walked over to it and locked it from the inside.

  So Uncle Guy had taken the phone into his room: that meant he was making angry telephone calls to the spring factory where he used to work—and where Seth’s father worked now. Seth had to figure out how to disconnect Uncle Guy’s telephone jack some time, but for now he didn’t need to be reminded to stay away from that corner of the house. Uncle Guy preferred to be left alone. He took his meals in his room and spent his time there scribbling notes on index cards and smoking himself to death.

  “Did you steal a bike?” Kurt demanded.

  “It’s going back tomorrow. Come on upstairs.”

  “I want to stay up longer.”

  “Don’t make me grainsack you.”

  Kurt giggled and held out his hands to fend Seth off. “Don’t … !”

  Seth hardly felt like playing haul-the-brother, but he definitely didn’t have the energy to spend half an hour arguing with Kurt. He bent down and seized Kurt, then slung him over his shoulder. Kurt drummed his fists on Seth’s back, laughing, and Seth staggered up the stairs, grabbing the railing to keep steady as Kurt squirmed.

  Kurt’s bed was still unmade, and the floor in his room was strewn with toys. Seth accidentally stepped on a Lego and nearly dropped Kurt when he jerked his foot off it. He turned the stagger into a drunken pirate walk and threw Kurt onto his bed. Kurt clicked on the reading lamp and pulled down two dinosaur transformers from the dresser by his bed. Technically playing with Transformers at bedtime wasn’t allowed, but Seth didn’t have the energy to enforce minor rules that night. He turned off the overhead light and slipped out in the hallway to stare emptily at the stairway, grateful not to have to think or move for a moment. Then he shuffled down the hall to Grandma Mary’s room.

  The door was open, and Grandma Mary was on her hands and knees in her blue nightgown. When she looked up and saw Seth, she breathed a sigh of relief and laboriously pulled herself to her feet.

  “There you are, honey. I lost my pearl drop earrings.”

  “Grandma Mary, you gave those to Mom when she got married.”

  She didn’t seem to hear, but baby-stepped to her bedside table and took out a very small bag of beans.

  “Help me find my earrings, will you, dear? Here’s a bag of beans for your trouble.”

  “Mom has them,” Seth said more loudly.

  “What?”

  “Mom has them.”

  “What’s she doing with my earrings?”

  “You gave them to her.”

  “I most certainly did not. If she told you that, she’s lying,” Grandma Mary said.

  She hadn’t always been like this. A couple of years ago she had been as lucid as Grandma Neddie. They were still good friends, but it was getting pretty one-sided. Some days Grandma Mary didn’t even remember the curse, and she had lived with it since she married Grandpa Justin Wall in 1940.

  “I’ll have mom bring them to you in the morning. Why don’t you get some sleep for now?”

  “Oh? Well, I am feeling a little tired. I don’t know why. I’m as strong as an ox, you know, still as strong as an ox.”

  “Everybody needs their sleep, Grandma.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t mind a little nap. Just wake me up in a little while though, would you? I can’t stand to sleep too long. It makes it hard to think.”

  “OK.”

  Before Grandma Mary could change her mind, Seth closed the door and set off down the hallway, past Kurt’s room and toward his own.

  “Seth?” Kurt called out. Seth closed his eyes and thought about not answering, but then he opened the door a little and stuck his head back into the room. The toys on the floor made irregular shadows in the dim light of the reading lamp.

  “Yeah?” Seth said.

  Kurt yawned, then chewed a little on his lips. “Do you think that Dad wouldn’t have gotten hurt if, you know, people could’ve helped him?”

  Seth had been wondering the same thing. “I don’t know, Kurt.”

  “I wish we didn’t have to live like this.”

  “Well, don’t worry. I’m going to do something about it.”

  Kurt looked up at Seth, suddenly wide awake, his eyes gleaming. “What? What are you going to do?”

  He shouldn’t have said anything, Seth realized. It had been meant as an offhand comment, a meaningless bit of comfort. But Kurt seemed to guess that Seth was hatching a plan, which he was—if you could call it a plan.

  “Go to sleep. We’ll talk about it in the morning.”

  “Is it the Larshes?”

  Was it that obvious? Or was it just that the Larshes were the only ones who could do anything about the curse?

  “Go to sleep.”

  Kurt knitted his eyebrows in anxiety. “Just don’t let them get you, OK? Remember what Mom says.”

  Seth remembered. I know it’s bad, Mom always said. But they could have done much worse. It’s best left alone.

  What would be worse than the curse they already had? A disfiguring disease? Blindness? Poltergeists? Falling off a cliff? Seth didn’t doubt the Larshes could do any one of these things, but would they? How cruel were they?

  And what if Seth found a way to turn the tables on them? Would they fight worse or back down? The first thing he had to do was find out what kind of people they were. If he was going to give them a good fight, he had to know what he was up against.

  Kurt was still looking at him, a forgotten dinosaur in each hand, waiting for his answer.

  “I’ll remember,” Seth said. And he closed the door and dragged himself down the hallway to bed.

  He needed his sleep: tomorrow he had to become a spy.

  Chapter 3

  The echo of the dismissal bell was still ringing down the halls when Seth pushed open the door to leave the school.

  “Hey!” a girl yelled behind him.

  He didn’t turn to look. Whatever was going on, he didn’t have time for it: it was a long ride to the Larshes’ and back, and he had to be home early enough not to raise his Mom’s suspicions, or Grandma Neddie’s. He pushed the door open and rushed down the steps.

  “Hey! Why’d you run off into the sunset like that yesterday?” the girl shouted again. He turned around: it was Chloe, striding toward him and swinging her backpack.

  “Sorry,” he said, and headed o
n toward the bike rack. Chloe got into step beside him. As he was unlocking his bike, she smacked him across the head with a rolled-up spiral bound notebook.

  “Why are you hurrying off? Afraid you taught me it wrong?” Chloe went to her own bike and spun the combination lock back and forth, holding the notebook between her teeth. When she was done, she wrapped the cable around the post under her bike’s seat and crammed the notebook into her backpack. “I did fine. I got it.”

  “You got your grade already?”

  “Of course not. But I know when I’m failing a test. I didn’t fail.”

  “Great,” Seth said. He mounted his bike and rolled down the sidewalk past the busses, threading his way through the students waiting to board. Chloe shot past him and braked suddenly. He had to swerve not to hit her.

  “So are you going to tell me or not?”

  “I told you. My uncle. You get that flat fixed?”

  “Your uncle.”

  “You didn’t have to wait too long, did you? For the tire?” Seth said. This was getting uncomfortable, and Chloe was a good biker on a good bike, whereas he was a decent biker on a lousy bike—his own this time, at least. He didn’t have a way of getting out of the conversation.

  “So I’m going to have to figure it out myself? I can’t stand not knowing a secret, you know. I won’t let you alone.”

  “I told you, my uncle.”

  “Yeah, whatever. Thanks for the math tips. I’ll be seeing you again before my next test,” she said, and hopped the curb, setting off in the other direction—probably toward where she lived.

  Seth wanted to yell after her: No, you won’t!, but it seemed like a stupid thing to yell. He coasted out to the road, then started putting some energy into the pedaling. He had checked Google Maps on a computer in the library to find the Larshes, and then he’d double-checked by looking them up in the phone book and plotting a route in the Vermont Atlas and Gazetteer, which had all the local roads in it. It was about five miles there and eight miles home, with a lot of dirt roads in between.

  *

  The Larshes’ place didn’t stand out from other old Vermont houses Seth had seen. A rocky dirt road that badly needed grading led off the highway through stands of young birches, where the wood had probably been clear-cut twenty years before, and into a clearing. There, a white clapboard house with a stone foundation sat not far from a weathered, unpainted barn. The barn leaned like it was about to fall over into the overgrown pasture beside it.

  Seth stopped before emerging into the clearing and rolled his bike into the woods there, watching the house through the young trees and lowlying plants. Two cars were parked out front, one of them a police cruiser. The police cruiser started up.

  Seth dragged the bike into a bunch of ferns and threw himself down on last year’s wet dead leaves, hoping he was invisible through the bushes. He could see Jerry Larsh, in a police uniform, lean out the car window and wave. Seth’s dad had pointed Mr. Larsh out in the street once: a lanky man with a big, gray-blonde mustache. Seth hadn’t known he was a policeman, though. He kept his face down close to the leaves while Jerry beeped the horn twice, then drove away up the dirt road.

  He didn’t look like a man who was doing harmful magic, but he was. Time and time again, as Seth’s mom and Grandma Mary had told him stories about curses and the Larshes and the Walls all the time he was growing up, they made it clear: a curse can’t live by itself. It’s magic that a person does, so a person has to keep it.

  Seth sat up and brushed a beetle off his arm. One car left, and someone was still home. He couldn’t get much closer to the house and stay out of sight, because there was no cover near the house on any side. But the barn was different: the woods had stretched out over the years and came all the way up to one side of it.

  The barn didn’t look like it was still in use. Sticks were heaped up on one side of it, and the main barn doors were opened and decaying in place. Inside, Seth could see a rusted, antique tractor half buried in old farm implements, with leaves drifted up around the rotted tires. He dragged the bike a little deeper into the fern brake until he was sure no one could see it from the road and made his way through the trees to the barn. He did his best to keep down behind the brush while looking out for poison ivy.

  Not far from the barn he came across a pile of stones about as high as his knee, nearly invisible in the old leaves. Or not quite a pile: it seemed to have been stacked together carefully, made of thick, flat rocks. It formed a rough pentagon and was capped on the top with another flat rock as thick as a bible. From the shape of it, it seemed likely it might be hollow.

  Why would someone build something like that? And what would be inside it? Even if it didn’t tell him much about Jerry Larsh, Seth figured he ought to investigate the thing. He pulled at the top stone, which felt weirdly cold.

  He couldn’t budge it.

  He got down on his knees in the leaves and felt water seep up into his jeans as he studied the bottom edge of the capstone. No sign of mortar, and it couldn’t be as heavy as that. Maybe something was anchoring it from the inside. That would be weird—and hard to build. He got a firmer grip on the capstone and tugged hard at it, but it didn’t slide at all, and his hands became very cold, quickly. He jerked them away. It felt like the rock had just been pulled out of a freezer, even though it must have been 80 degrees outside.

  What was this pile of stones supposed to be for?

  A noise like a bang echoed from the direction of the house, and Seth threw himself down in the leaves without thinking. Carefully, he lifted his head until he could see a little, and he glimpsed someone in the yard. The noise must have been the screen door slamming. He wriggled forward through the leaves, glad he hadn’t worn particularly nice clothes. If he stained something, his family wasn’t going to be able to replace it any time soon.

  The person came into view now, a woman in her mid forties, maybe: Mrs. Larsh. She wore jeans and a t-shirt with some brightly-colored material tied around her waist, and she was singing under her breath. The main thing that struck Seth was how normal she looked. Did she even know about the curse? Maybe it was just Mr. Larsh doing it, and his family didn’t even know.

  Mrs. Larsh climbed into the other car, a Subaru wagon that wasn’t new but didn’t have any visible rust yet, and started it up. She rolled down the windows; Seth could hear folk music ringing out from inside the car.

  Mrs. Larsh looked back at the house for a moment and then drove off. She seemed cheerful, relaxed: the kind of woman who wouldn’t even bother to lock her doors.

  Had she locked them? He’d have to find out.

  Seth waited until he couldn’t hear the car any more, then made his way out into the yard. Somewhere in that house there had to be something that would show him how to make the Larshes lift the curse, something he could use against them. If he didn’t find it this time, he’d have to come back again until he did. And if he didn’t find anything … but there had to be something. Everybody has some kind of weakness.

  The porch didn’t offer any useful information. Toys were scattered around by a porch swing, including a tricycle and an oversized, pink, plastic dollhouse. Maybe Mrs. Larsh was going to pick up the kid who owned those toys at day care. In any case, Seth had better be fast: he had no way to know how long she would be gone.

  Climbing the porch steps, he realized that mud clung to both his sneakers all around the soles. If he walked in the house with them on he’d leave footprints, not exactly the kind of thing you wanted to do if you were breaking into a policeman’s house. With an annoyed grunt he pulled them off and held them in one hand.

  He opened the screen door, keeping quiet even though he knew no one could hear him. Then he took the knob of the main, wooden door and turned it.

  It opened. He’d been right about Mrs. Larsh.

  Quietly, he eased the screen door back into place, then closed the main door most of the way. It creaked, making him wince.

  The front hall was dimly lit with su
nshine coming through an opening from another room. Two strips of wood were screwed into the wall, one at waist height and the other at eye level, with coat hooks on them for a variety of jackets, sweaters, and scarves. Boots and shoes from all seasons were piled on the floor underneath. Apparently the Larshes never put away their winter things. Did that have anything to do with the ice-cold pile of rocks?

  The hallway wasn’t wide, and it was empty except for the coat hooks. So far, nothing. Well, what did he expect, a big book full of Larsh secrets?

  He turned the corner into the living room. Amid three armchairs and a large couch the walls were floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, some covered with books and the rest with a miscellany of other things. Musical instruments and stands were jumbled in one corner, and the furniture looked like it could be ten years old or a hundred. For a moment, he felt as though he had stepped back in time.

  But a lot of the books were modern paperbacks, and he could see a little humidifier in the corner. The feeling of antiquity faded. He turned around to look at the wall that he hadn’t seen as he came in, which was nothing but shelves from one side of the room to the other. One long shelf was filled with human skulls.

  Seth swore and took a step back, staring. Definitely human skulls.

  The shelf below the skulls held a kind of aquarium with dirt in the bottom but no animal that Seth could see, a cluster of dusty little sculptures and models, more books, and three yoga videos without cases. The skulls were the only thing in the room that stood out, but they stood out plenty.

  Were these people the Larshes had killed? If so, Mrs. Larsh must have known about it, or their skulls wouldn’t be on the shelf. What had they told the little girl whose toys were on the porch?

  One set of books on the same wall as the skull were bound in faded leather. Of these, a series in maroon covers, had years stamped on the binding in gold lettering. Most of the lettering was faded, but Seth could read a few of the spines: 1894. 1902. 1905.

  He heard a light step from the next room: probably a cat. How long did he have? Should he look at some of the books? Should he steal one?