Family Skulls

by Luc Reid

  Uncle Guy slammed the door shut and gestured to the armchair he never used, his “Guest Chair,” a leather recliner that was broken and didn’t recline any more. “Sit, sit,” he mumbled. He broke open a new carton of cigarettes, took a fresh package, and rapped it against the side of his fist as he paced.

  “There’s something happening. I don’t know what it is, but I don’t like it. They’ve got their eye on us now, Seth. Watching and scheming.”

  He sat in a green armchair and plucked first the cellophane, then the foil from his pack of cigarettes. He crumpled it into a tight ball and placed it rather than dropped it into a wastebasket beside him. He watched Seth, as though waiting for him to say something, as he lit up from a metal lighter.

  “It’s to do with you,” Uncle Guy said in a low voice.

  Seth felt a shiver down his spine. Did Uncle Guy somehow know that he had been to the Larshes’?

  “I don’t think you should worry,” Seth said. “I’m sure the Larshes have their own problems.”

  Uncle Guy nodded. “They do, yes, that’s the thing. They have their own trouble. But you don’t go looking for trouble. That’s all I’m saying is don’t go looking for trouble.” His eyes kept flickering toward Seth and away, and he was jiggling his knee.

  Seth didn’t say anything, because when Uncle Guy was in one of these kinds of moods, anything you said might conceivably set him off. Besides that, Seth didn’t want to let slip anything about what he was really doing. Even if Uncle Guy did somehow suspect, it would only make things worse to confirm his suspicions.

  Uncle Guy was brooding, and every once in a while he would look around the room in darting glances, as though to catch something in the corner.

  “I’m just saying don’t rile them,” Uncle Guy said, finally. “If you rile them, they’ll do us worse than they’ve already done, something horrible … kill one of us, I bet. So we all sit tight and stick together, right? We’re a family, right? We sit tight until they’ve turned their baleful eye in another direction, and then we relax a little. Agreed?”

  Seth got up to go. “Sure,” he said. “Thanks.”

  “Sit down!” Uncle Guy said in a stage whisper. He put his cigarette to his mouth and sucked in deeply, barely touching it to his lips. “There’s something else. The girl. You know the one I mean?”

  Seth didn’t sit back down, instead stepping a little closer to the door, keeping his eyes on Uncle Guy. “What girl?”

  “Your girlfriend! The girl who was here the other night. You know the one I mean?”

  “She’s not my girlfriend.”

  “Could she be with them? Could she be one of them?”

  “The Larshes?”

  “The Larshes, of course the Larshes! Could she be …” Uncle Guy made a little apologetic shrug “… a spy? Working for them?”

  Seth sighed. He wished somebody could help Uncle Guy. Seth’s mom and Grandma Mary had brought him to three psychiatrists so far, but the curse seemed to work exceptionally well with psychological help. When something physical was wrong, you could go and pay the doctor to do some specific procedure: a checkup, a cast, prescribe antibiotics. But psychiatrists had to give much more general help, and the curse always seemed to prevent that.

  Still, maybe it was time to try a fourth one. Grandma Neddie, who never felt comfortable around Guy, had talked to Seth’s mom about sending him to the state hospital in Waterbury for a little while, but Seth’s mom had flatly refused, pointing out that the psychiatrists there weren’t any more likely to be able to help than the ones Uncle Guy had already seen.

  “She’s definitely not a spy,” Seth said.

  Uncle Guy nodded. “Good. Good. You’ve checked into it then, right? You’ve looked her up?”

  “She’s fine. Is there anything else we should talk about? Because I’d better get my homework started—”

  “The reason is,” Uncle Guy interrupted, “because they’re watching us.”

  “Got it. Why don’t we sit tight until they’ve turned their attention somewhere else, OK?”

  Uncle Guy relaxed visibly. Sometimes it helped to repeat what he said back to him. Then again, that probably helped with anybody: that way they can be sure you got it.

  “That’s right. That’s what we’ll do. Just … just don’t bother them, right? You’ll leave them alone?”

  “Of course,” Seth said out loud, but to himself he thought Not until I’ve found out how to get them to lift the curse. “Good night, Uncle Guy.”

  He got out of the room quickly, in case Uncle Guy wanted to stop him again, but Seth’s last glimpse before he closed the door was of Uncle Guy slumped in his armchair, staring at the growing ash on the end of his cigarette.

  Out in the hallway the air felt fresher and cooler; Seth took two deep breaths before heading upstairs to work on his bridge and then on homework. His mind felt clearer too, as though talking with Uncle Guy had settled some question. But then, it had: Seth wasn’t sure what he was going to do next about the Larshes, and now he was. The plan hadn’t changed. It didn’t matter if Uncle Guy was feeling jittery or if the Larshes were pretending he was a friend of the family. He still had to find some way to force Jerry Larsh to lift the curse. And if Jerry didn’t know who Seth was, the way he pretended, so much the better. And if he did, well … well, in that case, Seth just had to figure out what Jerry’s game was.

  And then beat him at it.

  Chapter 8

  Seth got halfway through his history paper that night, but he was up until 1:00 A.M. doing it.

  That night he had a dream that he couldn’t recall well the next day. He was in the barn again. The beam was giving way, and he was calling out for help, but someone else was shouting and nobody could hear him. He looked up and saw Chloe through the roof of the barn.

  That was all he could remember.

  In the morning he put on his bathrobe and went downstairs, following the sound of cartoons to the living room. Kurt lay there on his stomach, three feet from the TV, an empty cereal bowl beside him. Seth’s father had the vacuum cleaner in pieces, probably trying to find the reason it kept making that grinding noise. He didn’t know anything about vacuum cleaners, Seth’s father, but he was never afraid to take something apart, and he usually managed to get things back together OK.

  “Where’s Grandma Neddie?” Seth said.

  “Shh!” said Kurt.

  “Visiting cousin Violet in New Hampshire. She’ll be back for dinner,” said Seth’s dad. He looked up at Seth. “Want to help me with this vacuum cleaner?”

  “I’ve got to do some things,” Seth said. “Good luck getting it back together, though.”

  “Oh, I’ll get it back together, all right. It’s just that it might end up as a blender or a snowblower or something.”

  “A snowblower would be really cool,” Kurt said. “We wouldn’t have to shovel.”

  “Yeah, good luck with that,” Seth said, and went back upstairs to shower and get dressed. What next?

  The dream was still bothering him, with Chloe’s face, weirdly white against the blue sky, peering down through the roof in the barn. He remembered what Uncle Guy had said. You’ve checked into it? You’ve looked her up?

  He hadn’t checked into it. What had she been doing at the house the other night? She’d said she just wanted to find out why he ran off, but he didn’t buy it. She hardly knew him, and yet she showed up and pried information out of Grandma Neddie and even ate dinner. What was she up to?

  It was probably nothing: he knew that. Things that didn’t seem that strange to him—like walking away from a car with a flat tire—might seem a lot stranger in other families. Still, he couldn’t return the bike, and he wasn’t going to show up first thing in the morning at the Larshes: that would look suspicious even if somehow they still didn’t recognize him. So there wasn’t any harm in going out for a bike ride and finding out about Chloe. He went into the kitchen and pulled out the phone book. What was her last name again?

&nb
sp; He’d get the address from the phone book and then hope he could find the place. For what was probably the tenth time that week, he wished they had a computer, but they had given up on computers after trying to use two of them. You always needed somebody to help you with them sooner or later, unless somebody in the family got really good with them. Seth kept meaning to, but computers didn’t fascinate him the way structures did.

  Morgan, that was it. Chloe’s last name was Morgan. The phone book listed two Morgans in Caledonia, but one was just Harold J., so the other one, “MORGAN Scott & Wendy 2208 Groton Rd Cldonia” must be it. Not far from the school, and pretty easy to find. The question was, what would he do once he’d found her?

  *

  It was an unusually hot day for May, and he was already wishing he had brought a water bottle by the time he was halfway there. What he needed more than water, though, was a plan. The only two possibilities he’d come up with so far were spying on Chloe’s house and knocking on the door to ask to talk to her. There didn’t seem to be any point in spying. It wasn’t like the Larsh’s house, where he might learn something just by nosing around: this had to do with Chloe herself. So what was she up to? Why had she come to the house? Was she connected to the curse, or even, as Uncle Guy had suggested, to the Larshes?

  But Uncle Guy was crazy, Seth reminded himself. Chloe probably had nothing to do with anything—which meant he might be about to make a big fool of himself.

  There were worse things than making a fool of yourself, though. Like ignoring something that might be a danger signal just because you weren’t sure.

  As he turned onto Groton Road and neared the house, he kept telling himself that it was ridiculous to suspect Chloe of anything. Why would she have anything to do with the Larshes, and what use would she be to them even if they were trying to spy on him? And why spy on him in the first place? He had met Chloe entirely by accident, before he had even decided to do anything about the curse.

  But that wasn’t right: he had actually met Chloe the minute he had made the decision to do something about the curse. Even the Larshes, though, couldn’t possibly know Seth’s thoughts, or act on them within minutes from an hour away.

  Not unless they could see into the future.

  For Remy Larsh finding water was as easy as sucking eggs, Grandma Neddie had said. He could tell you where a sickness had come from, or find where to build your house for the best luck, or predict three weeks in advance when an early snowfall or a hailstorm was coming.

  He still didn’t have any answers: he was just driving himself crazy with the questions.

  He reached the house, and still no strategy had come to mind. Well, he’d never been good at planning conversations in advance. He’d just open his mouth when the moment came and hope something appropriate came out. He was used to thinking on his toes.

  Chloe’s house was small and rectangular, with white aluminum siding and a back yard not much larger than the garage at Seth’s house, fenced in with chain link. A big dog barked from somewhere in that yard, but Seth couldn’t see it. The old white Volvo Chloe’s mom drove was parked out front, next to a powder blue Ford pickup with rust around the wheel wells.

  He propped his bike up against a tree and headed for the door. Belatedly he realized he could have dressed a little nicer: he was wearing jeans with paint spattered on them from when he’d helped repaint Kurt’s room and a blue t-shirt with a tear near one shoulder.

  Well, he wasn’t about to go home and change. He tucked the shirt in and went up the concrete front steps. He pressed the doorbell and waited, but he didn’t hear anything inside, and after a long moment he finally rapped on the storm door. Only a few seconds went by this time before he heard footsteps. The inside door swung open and he saw Chloe, wearing only an oversized t-shirt that hung to her knees, with an apple in one hand and her hair in two braids. She looked like she hadn’t woken up long ago, but she also looked … well, kind of cute. Without all that baggy clothing he could see that she was almost pretty, if you liked that kind of girl.

  Seth already felt stupid for coming. Of course she wasn’t involved. She would either invite him in or tell him to wait while she changed—

  “What are you doing here?” she whispered, her eyes wide.

  “Who is it, Chloe?” shouted a man’s voice.

  “Nobody!” Chloe shouted. This didn’t seem to satisfy the man, because Seth could hear footsteps coming toward them from deeper inside the house.

  “I can’t believe you came here!” she said. She kept glancing over her shoulder, and he couldn’t mistake her angry tone. What was wrong?

  “You came to my house,” Seth said.

  “That was different,” she said hotly.

  The footsteps came closer and a man appeared behind her: her father, Seth assumed. He was a tall man, well over six feet and broad in the shoulders, with a graying blond brush cut. His nose had a bit of a bend in it, as though it had been broken once and not set right.

  “What do you want?” he said, frowning at Seth.

  “He wants to cut the grass, daddy,” Chloe said. “I already told him we don’t need him.”

  Seth had half a mind to object, but she was obviously trying to lie her way out of some kind of trouble. The question was this: was the trouble with her father, or was it with Seth? Was she worried about her father meeting Seth, or Seth finding out something from her father?

  “I don’t know,” Mr. Morgan said, his looking changing from hostile to appraising. “I damn sure don’t want to mow it. Can anybody around here vouch for you? You work for anybody in this neighborhood before?”

  “He wants thirty dollars,” Chloe said quickly.

  “Thirty dollars!” said Mr. Morgan, and the look changed back to a glare. “Go to Hell.” He pulled Chloe into the house and slammed the door in Seth’s face.

  What had that been about? Seth stood on the step trying to make sense of it until he saw a curtain pushed aside in a nearby window and Mr. Morgan looking out. Then he turned and went to his bike, climbed on it, and rode far enough down the street that he could stop and think without being watched.

  So Chloe was trying to hide something. And that was what he’d come to find out, wasn’t it? Or at least part of what he was trying to find out. But he hadn’t really been worried before, and now he was. Between Uncle Guy’s questions and Chloe’s own weird behavior, Seth had been curious, but he hadn’t thought she was up to anything. Yet she clearly was. What? And why? And for whom?

  More specifically, did she have anything to do with the Larshes? If not, Seth could probably safely ignore her, because the central question these days was this: was Jerry Larsh after Seth, or did he honestly have no idea who Seth was?

  Somehow the idea that Jerry Larsh was being straight with Seth didn’t seem very likely. And if he was lying, he must be plotting something. But what, and why plot in the first place, when he could just curse Seth outright? A trap, Seth thought again. But what kind of trap, and how was Seth going to evade it?

  Some part of Seth had an answer to offer: You could kill him. There was probably a way, especially since the Larshes trusted Seth, but the idea of something like that made Seth almost ill. For one thing, even though his brain said there could be no other answer, Seth’s gut said there was a chance that Jerry Larsh was really as nice as he seemed to be. For another, he wasn’t sure he’d be able to pull the trigger or whatever when the time came. No matter how much pain the Larshes had caused Seth’s family, he wasn’t ready to kill one of them in cold blood.

  And it was also a cold, hard truth that if Seth tried to kill Jerry Larsh, he’d probably be caught somehow, bringing on no end of misery for himself and his family. Whatever plan he decided to follow, he didn’t think it would be killing Jerry Larsh—which meant that going back to gathering information was about the only option he had.

  Seth climbed on his bike and pedaled toward the Larshes’ house. It wouldn’t be later than ten when he got there, but that wasn’t too unrea
sonable an hour to visit. Seth liked answers almost as much as Grandma Neddie, and he wasn’t going to find any at home.

  Chapter 9

  By the time Seth pulled his bike into the Larshes’ driveway, he had a plan. He’d take Jerry up on his offer of banjo lessons, and he’d say he didn’t want to haul the banjo back and forth all the time, so could he practice there, at the Larsh’s?

  And that would probably have one of two results: either Jerry would see through him and get angry—in which case Seth would retreat—or Jerry would say “fine,” in which case Seth would use every opportunity to search the house and find what he needed, hoping as he did so that he could figure out what was going on before he stumbled into the trap that was waiting for him.

  He leaned the bike against the porch and climbed the steps to the front door. His heart was pounding: somehow this was even more nerve-wracking than when he had snuck into the house thinking nobody was there.

  The inside door was wide open, but the screen door was closed. Seth rapped on it and waited, but almost immediately he heard the sound of gravel crunching under bicycle wheels and looked over his shoulder to see …

  Chloe. She rode up on her bike and swung off it before it even rolled to a stop, letting it come to rest against Seth’s bike and climbing up the stairs after him, looking at Seth in bewilderment. She had thrown on baggy sweatpants and an oversized sweatshirt. Her hair was still in those two short braids, which made her look younger.

  Uncle Guy had been right. Chloe did have something to do with the Larshes. Unless she had followed him, in which case … well, in that case Chloe was still obviously some kind of a spy.

  Tessa answered the door, carrying a thick paperback, her place marked with a finger. When she saw Seth she smiled.

  “Seth! Come on in, sweetheart. We hardly expected to see you so soon. I’m glad you came.” She opened her book to where she was holding her place and folded a corner down. In the process, she looked past Seth and she smiled even wider. “Chloe, honey! What are you doing here?” Tessa swung the screen door open, and Seth turned to glare at Chloe as he stepped inside.