Family Skulls

by Luc Reid

  Then his eyes closed and he drifted off into unsettling dreams.

  Chapter 16

  Seth jerked awake from a dream in which he was back at the Larshes’ house, with the book, trying to run out the door … and every time he escaped, he found himself back inside the house. He checked his clock: 2:41 A.M. He was tired, but not exhausted or muddled. He had at least gotten enough sleep to think straight.

  He was still wearing his clothes, he noticed, and his hip hurt where the rivet on his jeans pocket had been digging into him. But it was probably for the best. He would have liked to sleep until morning, but the longer he waited the more likely it was that Grant would strike first. Anyway, he was wide awake again now. He rubbed the sand out of the corners of his eyes and found his way to the desk by the light of the digital clock. He drank the rest of a flat root beer from the night before and paced quietly while he tried to think.

  The skulls … so he’d have to go into the house and destroy the skulls, and he’d have to be quick. Should he use a hammer? Maybe a crowbar? What would be ideal would be a tall vertical tube, made out of thick aluminum, say, about a foot wide and with a steel plate riveted on the bottom to hold it steady. He’d have a very heavy, cylindrical weight suspended above. Seth would pile up the skulls inside it and drop the weight, crushing all of the skulls at once if everything worked properly. Although if it didn’t, there might not be a second chance.

  And of course Seth didn’t have anything like that. Maybe some kind of huge vise …

  No, he was letting his engineering side get away with him. Given a week and enough money for materials, he knew he could design and construct any number of multiple-skull crushing devices. With the time constraints he had, a crowbar would probably be his best option. He’d just better make sure the skulls were corralled somewhere with a solid floor beneath them—preferably concrete or stone or something—so that they would break easily. And he’d need safety glasses, because if he was blinded by a flying bone chip in the middle of the process he’d be out of action.

  He could find safety glasses with his dad’s tools in the garage, and they had a crowbar in there somewhere, probably with the winter tires.

  Seth was tempted to leave the plan at that and go immediately, but Grant knew that he had the book, and probably he’d done what he could to protect himself. At the very least, that probably meant “a means to be warned of trespassers” from the book, and probably more dangerous protections. Those were going to be the real problem.

  Or maybe they wouldn’t: there was Uncle Guy’s St. Christopher medal. If it worked the way Uncle Guy thought it did, it should make it difficult or impossible for Grant to know where Seth was and might even foil spells meant to detect him, at least until Seth smashed the first skull. Assuming he even got that far. He needed the medal then, obviously. That and the crowbar and the safety glasses would have to do.

  A light glowed from downstairs, one of the little reading lamps in the living room. Seth crept down the dark stairs, avoiding the third from the top because it squeaked much louder than any of the others. Cautiously, he looked through the opening into the living room.

  Chloe lay there on the couch, asleep, her mouth slightly open and her hair fanned out over a throw pillow. She was still fully dressed, and the blanket she had borrowed from Seth’s room had slipped onto the floor. He wondered if she was cold. Against his better judgment, he tiptoed into the room—because she was cold, of course, not because he wanted to look at her lying there on the couch for a minute. He picked up the blanket and gently lay it over her, then turned to go.

  “What are you doing up?” she said sleepily.

  Seth turned. “Shh. Go back to sleep,” he said.

  “You’re going after him, aren’t you?” she said. “Are you going alone?”

  Seth didn’t say anything. Of course he was going alone. The only one who might help him was Chloe. And she wouldn’t volunteer, obviously.

  “Don’t go alone,” she said, yawning. “You should have someone to help you.” And she rolled back over and went to sleep again. Seth wondered if she would have fallen asleep if it weren’t for the curse: it certainly was a convenient way to prevent her from helping him. You can’t volunteer if you’re not conscious.

  Seth crept to Uncle Guy’s room and as quietly as he could, opened the door, which thankfully didn’t squeak. The smell of stale cigarette smoke washed over him. He went slowly to the desk and began to open the drawer, hoping it would be as quiet as the door had been.

  It wasn’t: it made a faint squealing noise as he tried to open it, and to keep it quiet he tried opening it very, very slowly. That strategy resulted in a series of loud squeaks, so he gritted his teeth and pulled it all the way out at once and snatched the Band-Aid box, which he could see by the glare of the porch light from outside, which came through the thin curtains. He turned immediately to look at Uncle Guy, but he still seemed to be sleeping.

  He opened the Band-Aid box and took out the medal. Should he wait until he was almost at the Larshes’ to put it on? No, because what if Grant had ways of knowing where Seth was? If that were the case, it might look suspicious when Seth suddenly “disappeared,” but not as suspicious as Seth leaving and heading in the direction of the Larshes’ house. And maybe, if he did have Seth under surveillance, Grant would think that the effect of the medal was just a problem with the spell or charm or whatever he would try to use. Seth put it on. Immediately he felt a kind of lifting inside him, a sensation as though of something heavy being drawn out. It was unfamiliar and a little uncomfortable, as though he had taken off a jacket he always wore.

  Should he close the drawer? It seemed stupid to, since he already had the medal. But if he didn’t, Uncle Guy would know someone had taken the medal as soon as he woke up, and if by any chance he happened to wake up before Seth had left … well, it wasn’t worth chancing that. As smoothly as he could, Seth pushed the drawer back in, wincing at the squeak it made.

  Uncle Guy made a startled noise and woke all at once, sitting bolt upright in bed. “Who’s there?” he shouted. He stared at Seth, then burst out in a wail that might have been either anger or anguish. Seth bolted from the room and ran toward the kitchen door.

  He wasn’t out of the hallway when it happened: in at least two different directions, flames burst on the walls all at once, without warning and for no apparent reason. A moment later, the fires were burning merrily.

  “Fire!” he yelled at the top of his lungs. Before the panic of his situation hit him, he had a moment to wonder at the strange feeling of being able to help his family. Temporarily free of the effects of the curse, he was the only one, at the moment, who could help.

  He charged up the stairs, bellowing as he ran. “Fire! Get out! Fire!” Downstairs he glimpsed Uncle Guy in the hallway, staring up at him. Seth’s mom and dad burst out of their room next to Uncle Guy’s.

  “Mom!” Seth’s dad shouted up the stairs to Grandma Neddie. He hopped toward the stairway, but his broken leg made him slow.

  “I’ll get her,” Seth’s mom said, apparently thinking of helping Neddie—the only family member who wasn’t cursed—more than of helping Seth’s dad, but he seemed to be getting down the stairs and to the door OK.

  Seth ran down the hall to Kurt’s room and opened the door, almost hitting Kurt in the face as he did it. Kurt looked three quarters asleep, his pajama shirt snagged up above his stomach and his stuffed Tyrannosaurus Rex under one arm. Smoke drifted into the room. Kurt began to cry.

  Seth picked him up and ran out of the room with him.

  “My toys!” Kurt screamed.

  “That’s the firemen’s job,” Seth said. “Come on!”

  Seth’s mom was already with Grandma Neddie on the stairs. She glanced at Seth and Kurt, a worried but confused look on her face. Clearly she couldn’t concentrate enough to help Kurt at all.

  Seth pounded on Grandma Mary’s door. She opened it with a look of bewilderment, and seemed to become preoccupied wit
h Kurt’s crying.

  “It’s all right, sweetie,” she said. “Don’t cry, sweetie.”

  “Come on! We have to get outside!”

  “I’ll just get my robe.”

  “There’s no time!”

  “Now, just wait for me,” she said. Unable to grab her and bodily haul her out of the room without putting down Kurt, and unwilling to run out without her, Seth waited while she pulled on a gauzy, aquamarine bathrobe and wandered out of the room. With his spare hand, Seth took her by the arm and steered her toward the stairs. Seth’s parents and Grandma Neddie were already gone. Uncle Guy looked up for a moment, then finally lurched toward the living room and the front door.

  Chloe wasn’t in the living room when he came through it. Seth could see random objects on fire: the television set, a doily … what kind of fire started like that?

  But the answer was in his mind before he had fully framed the question: this was a fire kindled through magic, Grant’s retaliation. And if Seth hadn’t been wearing the medal, it might have succeeded even better than it already had: Grandma Mary, for instance, might have been left to burn in her room, because no one would come to help her. Kurt might have been trapped. Or if Seth hadn’t happened to be awake, they all might have burned.

  Out on the front lawn a breeze was blowing, cool and damp. Chloe and Seth’s family stood between the two big spruces in the front yard, watching Seth’s mom with dismay. She held her emergencies-only cell phone, and kept wandering around the yard, staring at it.

  “I can’t get a signal to call the fire department,” she said weakly. “Damn! Come on, two bars, two bars!”

  Seth put Kurt down. “Let me try, mom.”

  “You won’t get anything.”

  “Let me try,” he said, and pulled the phone out of her hands before she could object again. He watched the screen, and after only a moment a signal display of three bars appeared. Seth’s mom couldn’t call for help, but with the medal, Seth could. He dialed 911 feeling more amazed at the ability to get help than at the burning house behind him.

  *

  Seth didn’t wait for the fire trucks to arrive. As soon as he had made the call, he ran to the garage and dug out the crowbar and the goggles. Chloe caught him as he was trying to find a comfortable way to hold the crowbar across the handlebars of his bike. She went to her own bike, propped up against the side of the house, and climbed on.

  “You can’t—” Seth began.

  “I’m coming with you,” she said. “You explain the plan on the way, and I’ll help however I can best figure out to do it.”

  “No! You’re not coming.”

  “We can go together right now, or we can argue for half an hour and then go together,” she said.

  A mixture of worry for Chloe and relief that she was coming with him made Seth snort with laughter.

  “What?” said Chloe.

  “Nothing. Good thing you didn’t pack any pajamas.”

  “Come on, let’s go,” she said. “Try to keep up.”

  The rode off the driveway onto the black pavement. As the house receded behind them, the only light came from the stars and a faint crescent of the moon. The wind smelled like wet grass, and the loudest sound there in the darkness was the hiss of the bicycle tires on the pavement.

  It felt as though the world were suspended, paused, put away on ice for the night. Seth took a moment to suck up as much calm as he could from the surroundings before filling Chloe in on the details of his plan—if you could even call it that.

  Before two minutes had passed, a wail rose in the distance ahead of them and grew rapidly louder. Two fire trucks barreled past them and headed toward the house. Seth thought about it long enough to hope the house wouldn’t be ruined and then put it out of his mind: he needed to focus on the job at hand. Then he pedaled harder to pull up alongside Chloe.

  “OK,” he said. “Here’s what I need you to do.”

  Chapter 17

  They parted ways where the Larshes’ little dirt road split off from the pavement. Chloe turned off there, and Seth kept going a little farther, to the logging road.

  Which of two plans they would follow depended on whether anyone was awake or not. If so, Chloe would knock on the door and pretend to have had a huge fight with her parents. She’d do her best to figure out what Grant was doing now, if anything—after all, they’d already seen what his main plan was—and would somehow make sure the back door into the kitchen was unlocked.

  If no one was awake, Chloe would wait on the porch and watch the hallway. If and when Grant came downstairs, she was to try to distract him from Seth.

  Seth, in the meantime, was supposed to sneak in the back, find the skulls in the store room, and smash them. Chloe would give him a few extra minutes before she came to the house, so as not to draw attention to the outside just when he was sneaking around back.

  He hid his bike behind the broken-down barn and studied the house. Apart from an outside light, it was dark. Had Grant gone to bed, or was he just waiting in the dark, still expecting Seth’s visit? But then, he wouldn’t expect Seth to show up just after his house had caught on fire, would he?

  Seth went around behind the house, keeping to the shadows, and was crossing the lawn when he saw something through the open door of the tool shed. It was the snowblower, and there was a chance that it was exactly the tool he needed. It would have a rotating blade to scoop up snow and fire it out a chute at high speed: would that same blade scoop up skulls? He contemplated the snowblower and the stone foundation of the barn, which was seven or eight feet high a little further down from where he had propped up his bike. Would the snowblower be a better bet than a crowbar?

  Hell, yes. He slipped back into the shadows and made his way over to it. Inside the shed, he unscrewed the gas cap from the snowblower and moved the machine back and forth just a few inches. The sloshing sound and the sharp smell assured him that there was enough fuel. He screwed the cap back on and took out the snowblower, dragging it through the tall grass, until he came to the side of the barn.

  From inside the barn he found three sections of recently-broken, heavy timbers from the collapse a few days before. He dragged each one out and made a U shape from them, just wide enough for the snowblower. With luck, they’d pen in the skulls so that they wouldn’t roll off while the snowblower tried to pull them in. He parked the snowblower so that it was ready to push forward into the U and turned the chute to point at the stone wall five feet away.

  Chloe should be waiting on the porch now, or soon. Seth had just made his next task more dangerous, because now he needed to actually take the skulls outside the house, and he had a suspicion that Grant would sense when that happened. The book had made it clear that the Larsh dowsers had a deep connection with the skulls, but it hadn’t been clear on exactly what that connection might tell them. But then, why would it? It was written by Larshes for other Larshes, all of whom knew just what that connection felt like.

  He was a little surprised when he found the back door unlocked. He opened it cautiously and stepped into the kitchen, closing the door silently behind him. The rest of the kitchen was hidden from him because the outside door was beside the refrigerator, so Seth was startled when he stepped into the kitchen and saw Grant sitting there, in the dark, waiting.

  Seth froze immediately, waiting for Grant’s reaction, but he gave no sign he could see Seth. Grant seemed to be having a hard time staying awake. Even so, his eyes were still open and looking generally in Seth’s direction, as far as Seth could tell in the dimness.

  Of course: the medal. Either it was preventing Grant from seeing him at all, or Grant was playing with him. He rushed across the kitchen, grimacing at the sound his sneakers made against the tile floor. Grant didn’t seem to notice. Seth slipped into the carpeted hallway and let out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding.

  He realized, too, that his original plan probably wouldn’t have worked. He wouldn’t have been able to destroy all the skulls in the t
ime it would take Grant to sprint from the kitchen to the storeroom. He was lucky the snowblower had been there to spark his imagination.

  No noise from the front door. Chloe wouldn’t be much help there, since Grant had been waiting in the kitchen, but it wasn’t worth the risk to go tell her that now.

  He reached the storeroom and went in, at which point he realized that he had missed an important detail.

  Seth had forgotten the pain and dizziness he’d felt the first time he was in the storeroom, that he’d walked in and almost immediately passed out. At the time he hadn’t thought about it having to do with the room, but as he entered it again the same feelings rushed over him. Yet this time it was muted and not immediately debilitating. Was it some kind of protection Grant had placed on the room? It made it hard to concentrate, and he wasn’t sure how long he’d be able to withstand it. Given a few minutes with it, he might faint like he had when he’d first been in there. He began opening boxes, wishing he’d brought a flashlight and a jackknife.

  A little light came through the one small window behind the boxes, but it wasn’t enough to properly see their contents. Fortunately the boxes by and large seemed to be sealed by folding the flaps together rather than with tape. He decided to check the top box on each pile first, pulling each one open and reaching inside to identify the contents by feel. The first had a bunch of hard, plastic things, which after a moment he recognized as cassette tapes. The second box was full of something hard and smooth, covered with cloth. He pushed the cloth aside and felt bone beneath: the skulls.

  It wasn’t a minute too soon, either; things were already beginning to look blurry to him, and he felt dangerously lightheaded. He pulled down the box, which was lighter than he thought it would be, and lurched into the hallway. The effects of the storeroom began to subside.

  Had the medal been shielding him from whatever was making him sick? If it was, that seemed to confirm that it was Larsh magic that made the storeroom a problem for him in the first place, which seemed the most likely thing anyway. What kind of magic was it? Something to guard it against intruders? Did it affect everyone except the Larshes? But they had seemed genuinely shocked when Seth had fainted in there, so either they never showed anyone the store room, or else no one else had ever had that reaction.