Family Skulls

by Luc Reid

  Chapter 12

  When Seth opened the door from the mud room into the kitchen, he was greeted by the sound of Uncle Guy shouting. Half-cooked chicken and cashews with broccoli was cooling in a big skillet on the stove, and the only person in the kitchen, which was usually overrun at dinner time, was Seth’s dad.

  “Your uncle Guy’s having a bad time, so your mother’s helping him,” he said. “I turned off dinner until he settles down.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  Seth’s dad shrugged. “I don’t know. A few minutes ago he came out of his room and started hollering about boiled skulls.”

  “Skulls?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine.”

  Seth dropped his backpack in the corner and followed Uncle Guy’s shouts and shrieks.

  Uncle Guy was huddled in a corner of the living room, almost hidden by the brown recliner. Seth’s mom was trying to comfort him, but he wouldn’t even look at her.

  “Do you want some hot chocolate, Guy?” Seth’s mom said. “It might help you relax.”

  Uncle Guy shook his head, still not meeting her gaze. Seth felt someone brush past him and looked up from Uncle Guy to see Grandma Mary shuffle into the room.

  “What’s wrong, honey?” she asked Uncle Guy quietly.

  “It’s the skulls, mama,” Uncle Guy said. “I shouldn’t have said anything about the skulls, I shouldn’t have.”

  “I can do this, Mom,” Seth’s mom told Grandma Mary. “Why don’t you have some tea while—”

  “You go help with dinner, Dana,” Grandma Mary said crisply. “I’ll take care of this.” Seth’s mom started at the unaccustomed tone of command in Grandma Mary’s voice. Grandma Mary wasn’t often this lucid.

  “Shouldn’t I … ?” Seth’s mom said, but Grandma Mary stepped between her and Uncle Guy, as though Seth’s mom was already leaving the room. Seth’s mom sighed and walked out. On the way past Seth she gave him a peck on the forehead. “Hi, honey,” she said.

  “You can go too,” Grandma Mary said to Seth, without turning.

  “I want to hear about the skulls,” said Seth.

  Grandma Mary jerked her head around. “What skulls?” she said. “There are no skulls. Your uncle is crazy, don’t you know that?”

  “Skulls at the Larshes,” Seth said.

  Grandma Mary was silent for a long moment. When she did open her mouth to speak, Uncle Guy beat her to it.

  “It’s you!” he said. “You’re disturbing them. Didn’t I tell you to sit tight? Didn’t I tell you it was dangerous? They’ll hurt you!” He ground the heel of one hand into his forehead. “They’ll hurt your mind. They can see you. They can see you!”

  “What about the skulls?” Seth said. “What do you know about them?”

  Uncle Guy stared at the floor, clamping his mouth shut. “I shouldn’t have looked. I shouldn’t have told.”

  “Guy!” Grandma Mary said sharply. “He obviously knows something about it. Better you tell him the rest. Come with me.”

  “They can see you!” he told her.

  “Nonsense,” Mary said. “Get up and go to your room. Seth, come with us, please.”

  Even when Grandma Mary was lucid, usually she was quiet, sometimes a little snappy … but rarely did she just take things over. At least, rarely in Seth’s experience. He’d heard different stories from his mom about when she and Uncle Guy were kids.

  When they reached Uncle Guy’s room, Uncle Guy lit a fresh cigarette and seemed to relax just a little as he sucked in the smoke. Seth sat on the edge of the bed, the piece of furniture farthest from the chair Uncle Guy had chosen. Grandma Mary sat in the broken recliner, her gaze moving back and forth between Seth and Uncle Guy as she absently patted her white curls against her head.

  “Shh,” said Uncle Guy.

  “Tell him,” said Grandma Mary in a hard voice.

  “No, no,” said Guy. “Jerry will hear.”

  “Then put on your St. Christopher medal.”

  Uncle Guy glanced from side to side, as though he were checking the room for hidden witnesses, then ran to his desk and opened a drawer where ancient-looking office supplies—rubber erasers, boxes of paper clips, staplers, index cards—were neatly stacked together. From their midst he took out an old metal Band-Aid box, and out of the box he took a little oval medal on a chain, the kind Seth’s mom had, given to her in Catechism class when she was a girl. Uncle Guy slipped the chain around his neck and sighed, finally seeming to come more to himself.

  “Can’t wear it too long,” he said. “They’ll notice I’m missing.”

  “Then tell him quickly,” said Grandma Mary.

  “About the skull?”

  “All of it,” Grandma Mary said.

  Then Uncle Guy began to talk. He still wasn’t speaking like a normal person, and from time to time he glanced around the room as though trying to catch something just out of his sight. But he was surprisingly clear-headed and understandable, for him. Then, that may have been at least in part because Seth was paying such close attention to what he said. He was talking about the Larshes.

  “Do you remember Mr. Proulx, an old man, used to have a farm on Black Mountain Road? No, I forgot: he was dead by the time you were born. Well, I used to help him with odd jobs when I was a teenager, and he was a friend of Chet Larsh’s father, Bernie Larsh. Bernie gave Mr. Proulx a charmed medal before he went over to fight in World War I. This medal.” He held the medal up without taking it off. Seth leaned forward to look at it, but realizing that Seth would get close to it, Uncle Guy jerked it back.

  “Bernie gave it a charm so the enemy couldn’t see Mr. Proulx. It was a Larsh charm, you understand? One of their own. They can’t see me when I have it on, so the curses lift a little. And they can’t hear what I’m saying.”

  “They’re not—” said Seth.

  “Shh,” said Grandma Mary. “Listen. He doesn’t stay like this for long.”

  “So I used it. Years ago, I started to use it. I went to their house and lurked in the woods and the barn, looking for something I could use against them. Not every day, not even every week, but a lot. For a long time I came up with nothing. Chet was too old to come outside much; he stayed inside, away where I couldn’t see, and Jerry never did anything outside for a long time. I almost gave up.”

  “But then there was a night, it must have been a year ago—”

  “Five years,” said Grandma Mary.

  “Five years?” Uncle Guy said, bewildered. “That long?”

  “Just tell him what happened.”

  “It was … I was there, at night, very late. I was thinking of breaking in, of going in their house, but I thought they would catch me for sure if I did. And … and curse me worse than they had …” he trailed off.

  Grandma Mary waited, folding her hands in her lap.

  “Sometimes I went and looked through the windows. I never looked when they were inside, because they might catch me. But I looked in their living room and I saw a shelf full of skulls. Human skulls.”

  Seth sucked in a sharp breath before he could stop himself. Grandma Mary looked up, but Uncle Guy didn’t seem to notice.

  “You’ve seen them, too,” she said.

  Seth nodded.

  “That’s why you need to hear this.”

  “Then one night late I was out behind the house and I saw Jerry Larsh coming outside. It was too dark to see much, but I knew him by his old blue raincoat. He went to their old sugarhouse. They have a little sugarhouse out back, although I think Chet was the last one to do sugaring in it.

  “Jerry was carrying a bag with a lump in it the size of a cantaloupe, and he went in, but he didn’t close the door all the way. I crept up while he did things inside there; I just heard metal and something sloshing. Then I looked in and I saw him from behind. He was bent over a Coleman stove, with a big pot on it, full of water. He reached into his bag and he pulled out …”

  Uncle Guy leaned toward Seth, and the strain was visible as he said
“a head. Some guy’s head. And he threw it in the pot to boil it.”

  He stopped, taking his head in his hands and swaying from side to side. “I shouldn’t have said anything,” he said. “I shouldn’t have said. But I went to him, the next day. I went right to his house and knocked on the door. When he came to the door with his boy, I told him he’d better lift the curse on us or I’d tell everyone. The whole town would know. He’d go to jail.

  “He said I was crazy. I think he wanted to make the boy think I was lying, but the boy wasn’t even paying attention. Jerry said he wasn’t up that night, that he didn’t have a head in the sugarhouse. But he was scared. I saw he was scared, in his eyes, and I went home. I’d wait a day or two to see if they’d take the curse away, and if they didn’t I’d tell. They had to take it away, didn’t they? They should have just taken it away. But they didn’t. No, no. They cursed me more instead.

  “I was at work when they cast it. It was another curse, a worse curse. It’s gone for now, because they can’t see me, but I have to take the medal off soon or they’ll realize I’ve gone, they’ll take the medal away and do something horrible.

  “They cursed me so I couldn’t think right any more. They made ghosts out of shadows and voices in the corners. I went to work but all I could hear was the other men whispering about me, whispering that they had to get rid of me, that they had to take my head. I didn’t want them to kill me! So I left. I left and I didn’t go back.” He crushed out his cigarette in an otherwise spotless, green glass ash tray, not taking his eyes off Seth.

  Seth sat unmoving, not daring to say anything. He’d been stupid: he knew the Larshes meant them no good, but he’d been acting as though they were as kind as they pretended to be. But they weren’t. Even Tessa—she knew about the skulls. How could she pretend to be a friend of Seth’s?

  Worse, why were they pretending? What did they have planned for him? It made his head ache to keep thinking about it.

  “It’s no good trying to hurt them,” Uncle Guy said. “They’ll only hurt us more. They have their eye on you, and you have to sit tight until they look away—months from now, years from now.”

  Seth wished he could vanish from the conversation without having to respond—or that he could stay, but talk about something else. Grandma Mary wasn’t this clear-headed more than once every couple of months, and he hadn’t seen Uncle Guy this close to normal in years. Should he argue with them, try to convince them that he needed to see things through to the end? Or should he deny being involved with the Larshes at all?

  One thing was clear: he couldn’t give up on it. Not now. The Larshes seemed to be onto him already, and his best hope was in finding a weakness he could exploit. “The best defense is a good offense,” the saying went. He wasn’t going to sit here and take whatever they dished out, like Uncle Guy.

  But he’d have to be more careful than he thought. Judging from what had happened to Uncle Guy, blackmail was a more dangerous route than he had imagined. So he’d have to find some way to hurt them directly, or to counteract their power. That wasn’t going to be easy.

  “Don’t sit there like a stump,” Grandma Mary said. “What have you been up to? How much trouble are you in?”

  Seth looked from her to Uncle Guy, who was clutching his medal in his hand as though it would slip off the chain. He couldn’t tell them the whole truth: they’d believe it, and they’d tell him he had to stop. They might both forget within a day or two, given their conditions, but in that time they might tell his parents or Grandma Neddie, and there was no way Seth was going to convince them to let him continue.

  “I took a bicycle, down in Bradford,” said Seth. “I was stranded down near there a few days ago, and I couldn’t get any help, so I took a bicycle, but not to keep. I went back today to return it, but they must have reported it to the police, because Jerry Larsh came by in his police car and saw me—”

  Uncle Guy was grimacing, and Grandma Mary’s eyes searched Seth’s face. She coughed a few times. The smoke in the room was probably harder on her than it was on Seth, and Seth didn’t enjoy it very much.

  “But he didn’t do anything,” Seth continued. “He just brought them the bike and brought me home. I think that’s what scared you, Uncle Guy, him being so close to our house. And maybe because I was with him.”

  “No,” said Uncle Guy. “They’re watching us.”

  “Dinner!” Seth’s mom shouted from the hallway. “Come and get it while the getting’s good! Last to the table doesn’t get any cashews!”

  “There’s more to it,” said Grandma Mary, but she looked tired. “You said you’d seen the skulls. When did you see them? What were you doing at their house?”

  “No, not at their house,” Seth said. Well, where else could he say he’d seen them? Ah: “He had a photograph, in his car. It looked like a library or someone’s living room or something. A shelf with skulls on it.” What else could he say? Details: he should distract them with details. “It was a really old picture. It looked like it’d been folded a lot, but he left it on the dashboard. I don’t think he even knew it was there.”

  “A picture?” said Grandma Mary.

  “Dinner! Last call before I send out a search party! Dinner!” shouted Seth’s mom.

  “I have to take it off. They’ll know if I keep it on,” said Uncle Guy, but he sat there, still clutching the medal. Then, with a sudden jerk, he pulled it over his head and dropped it back into the Band-Aid container, which he snapped shut and tucked away in the drawer.

  That medal would be useful, Seth reflected. Was there a way to get it? Uncle Guy was always in his room, except when he used the bathroom across the hall or was going extra crazy. Was it worth trying to take the medal? He couldn’t ask for it. That was clear.

  Grandma Mary began coughing again as a knock came at the door. Seth’s mom swung the door open and carried in Uncle Guy’s dinner tray, but she stopped when she saw Seth and Grandma Mary.

  “Are you feeling better now?” she asked Guy. He didn’t meet her eyes, but curled over, crossing his hands over his stomach and muttering. Grandma Mary was still coughing. “Mom, come out of here,” Seth’s mom said. “It stinks of smoke. You too, Seth. Wash up for dinner.”

  Grandma Mary tried to say something, but she couldn’t stop coughing to do it. Seth leapt up and ran upstairs, glad to have gotten away without having to answer more questions. Lies tended to break down the more you had to elaborate on them.

  Downstairs, he heard his mom and Grandma Mary in the hallway. Grandma Mary finally mastered her coughing and called out after him in a voice choked by coughing. “Seth!”

  It was barely audible, and Seth pretended not to hear.

  Chapter 13

  After dinner, Seth distracted himself from the problem of the Larshes with his history paper. He might find himself very busy over the next couple of days, he told himself, so he should work on the paper. Then he wouldn’t have to think it while he was working on the Larsh problem.

  A memory of Chloe saying “I’m sorry” and turning away interrupted him. He grabbed the next library book from the pile on his bed and whacked it onto the desk. Here we go. The Great Depression.

  Someone knocked on his door at about 9:00. “I’m doing homework!” he shouted, and eventually whoever it was went away, the weight of their feet making the old wooden floor creak.

  He went to bed at 11:45 with the paper still unfinished.

  *

  He woke up at 7:15 the next morning, the sun glaring through the window and the problems of the Larshes—how to get back in the house, what to do when he was there—tumbling around in his head like coins in a dryer. He tried to go back to sleep, but his mind wouldn’t settle. Finally he washed up, dressed, and went downstairs to have some breakfast.

  They didn’t have any really good cereals, but there were Rice Krispies, so at least they weren’t down to All-Bran and corn flakes yet. He poured a little maple syrup over the Rice Krispies so they wouldn’t be so bland, bro
ught in the Sunday paper, and read the comics while he ate.

  Grandma Neddie appeared as he was eating, still in her bathrobe but with her hair fixed and her face already made up. Neddie didn’t believe in being disheveled in front of people. She went to the refrigerator and took out a honeydew melon to cut up.

  “I returned the bike,” he said.

  “Mary told me,” Neddie said. “She said the police picked you up.”

  “I didn’t get in any trouble.”

  “Not that we know of, anyway,” said Neddie. “But evidently you got a ride home. Doesn’t that constitute help? I’ve been trying to puzzle out how you managed that.”

  “I already had a way home,” Seth said. “I didn’t want a ride in a police car.”

  “Well, maybe that was it,” Neddie said dubiously. “Any news from the girl who is not your girlfriend?”

  Seth grunted a negative as he ate.

  “You know, in my day we used to use actual words when having a conversation,” Neddie said.

  Seth swallowed. “It’s still your day,” he said.

  “I admit I’d like to think so. So what about those words? Have you kissed her yet?”

  Seth stuffed an overloaded spoonful of mapley Rice Krispies in his mouth and tried to look very interested in The Family Circus—which was difficult.

  “You have kissed her,” said Neddie. “And her response was … ?”

  “I’d really like to finish reading the comics,” Seth said through a mouthful of cereal.

  “I bet you would,” said Neddie. “Does that mean she didn’t reciprocate?” She waited for a response, but Seth only chewed. “Hello? Oh, too well-mannered to talk through our breakfast cereal now, are we?”

  The truth of the matter was that Seth really would have liked to talk about Chloe with someone, but he made a habit of not keeping close friends at school. The curse made friendships hellish sometimes.

  And you don’t talk to your younger brother or your parents about girls. And you especially don’t talk to your grandmother.

  But then, some things were better kept private anyway. He’d just keep silent until Neddie dropped it.