Dark Debts

by Karen Hall

  He tossed the ducks another handful of corn, then put the bucket down on the ground and sat beside it. She didn’t know whether she was supposed to join him or not. She sat, careful not to get too close. He didn’t even seem to notice.

  “So are you going to tell me what ‘the thing’ is?” she asked, as gently as possible.

  He nodded slightly and stared at the ducks for a moment before speaking. When he did, his tone was matter-of-fact.

  “My mother had this theory that there was a curse on our family,” he said.

  “Was this theory based on anything?”

  “A seventy-five-cent fortune-teller she saw at a county fair when she was nineteen years old.” He smiled, remembering.

  “Do I get to hear the story?” Randa asked.

  “Sure, why not? My parents had been married for about a year and they were still living somewhere down near Savannah, where my mother grew up. One night, while my father was out somewhere getting drunk, my mother and her best friend, Bird, decided to go to the fair that was in town. So they went, they rode rides, played bingo, all that stuff. Just as they were leaving, they saw this cheesy fortune-teller’s tent, so they decided it would be fun to have their fortunes told. Bird had a brainstorm: she put on my mother’s wedding ring. You know, to test the fortune-teller.”

  He paused for breath, then continued. “So they go in and pay their buck and a half to this old woman, who was wearing what my mother described as a tacky gypsy outfit—as opposed to a classy gypsy outfit, I guess—and the old woman looks in her crystal ball for a few minutes, then she looks at Bird and she says, ‘Why are you wearing that ring? You’re not married, and you’re going to have a lot of trouble before you’re ever married.’ Now, Bird’s kind of impressed with the ring thing, except that she’s engaged and getting married in a month. She decides the old woman must have seen her take Mother’s ring. Meanwhile, the old woman turns to my mother. She looks at her, she looks into her crystal ball, she looks back at my mother. Then she gets this look on her face like she’s just seen a ghost, and she says to my mother, ‘You’ll have to leave.’ My mother says, ‘What are you talking about?’ The old woman says, ‘When I see this, I don’t go near it. That’s my one rule.’ My mother says, ‘When you see what?’ But the old woman just keeps telling her to leave. Well, Mother’s not about to leave now. Finally the old woman says, ‘You’ve taken on a debt you don’t know about. You’ll pay, your children will pay, a lot of people will pay, for a long time.’ That’s all she would say, and she wouldn’t explain what it meant. She just kept saying, ‘I don’t go near this,’ and practically shoved my mother and Bird out of her tent.

  “So my mother and Bird decided the old woman was a nutcase. Then, a couple of weeks later, Bird’s fiancé got drunk and wrapped his car around a tree. Died instantly. Whereupon my mother decided the fortune-teller was the real McCoy, and there was a curse on our family. Everything that went wrong after that, she blamed on the curse. When we were kids, we believed it. Then we got older and started using it. Told her we had this strange compulsion to get into trouble. We tried hard to resist, but it was just bigger than we were.”

  “Did she buy it?”

  “Of course. It was a hell of a lot easier than believing she was raising a bunch of sociopaths.”

  “Where did she think this curse came from?”

  “That was the big question. She spent the rest of her life trying to figure it out. She imported mediums from five counties and held séances in our house regularly. They consulted Ouija boards, they threw tarot cards, you name it.”

  “And?”

  “Pick a theory. My personal favorite was that my father’s father was a direct descendent of Genghis Khan and his spirit was haunting us. Mediums loved the fact that my father was a bastard, and not just metaphorically, because it left them wide open for the evil-ancestors stories.”

  “What did your mother believe?”

  “Whatever was the last story she’d been told. Although I think she liked the Genghis Khan one, too.”

  “And that’s the thing?”

  He nodded. “We used to call it Mother’s thing, or the curse thing. Then, eventually, just . . . the thing.”

  “Then that’s it. Ryland and Tallen are trying to tell you that there really is a curse.”

  Jack shook his head. “My family was cursed, all right. It started when my mother married Will Landry, and there was nothing supernatural about it.”

  “Then how do you explain me seeing Ryland?”

  “He’s still alive, he’s turned on me for some reason, and the family is after Cam’s money. They think if they scare the hell out of me, I’ll stay away.”

  “What about the phone call?”

  “I imagined it. Or I dreamed it. Who knows? I’m being taken over by the family insanity.”

  “So you’d rather believe you’re losing your mind than entertain the notion of an afterlife?”

  “An ‘afterlife’ is not a pleasant concept to me. This one will have been enough, thank you.”

  “But a good one, to make up for this one.”

  He shook his head. “It just seems so stupid to me. The idea that if you survive this quagmire—not that you’re going to survive it, because there’s only one way out of here—but if you endure it, and stay reasonably good-humored about it, surprise, there’s all sorts of meaning and order in store for you after you die. What kind of sense does that make?”

  “Maybe it’s too big to understand,” Randa offered.

  “Maybe it’s nonsense.”

  Suddenly he stood up. He offered Randa his hand and pulled her to her feet.

  “Come on,” he said. “I’ll show you the house.”

  Randa hadn’t expected that, and wasn’t sure that Jack had, either. He seemed to be trying to get out of the conversation more than anything. She followed him without speaking; she didn’t want to say anything that would make him change his mind.

  He unlocked the back door, pushed it open, and stood back.

  “After you.”

  Randa brushed past him, crossed the threshold, and stood in their house. The back door opened into the kitchen—an old farm kitchen with beadboard walls covered in yellow-white paint that was flaking in random and somehow sinister patterns. The appliances were all several decades old, and the floor was a hideous gray-and-maroon marbled linoleum, rippled by time and curled in the corners. Jack turned on a light, which she knew only from the sound of the switch; the room didn’t get any brighter. There was nothing ghostly about the place. The eerie feeling had nothing to do with the threat of diaphanous apparitions or a sudden drop in room temperature. It was something much more insidious. Something blacker.

  Evil.

  She didn’t know what that meant, or if she even believed in such a thing. Still, the word came to her like someone was whispering clearly in her ear.

  She looked around the room, taking it all in. Jack seemed to understand (or at least be willing to indulge) her need to do that. He stood in silent patience. He followed her when she moved on.

  The living room was even drearier than the kitchen. The same beadboard in a worse state of peeling. The sofa and chairs were covered with dusty sheets. Randa couldn’t imagine why Jack would feel the need to protect the furniture, or that there was anything under the sheets worth protecting. The end tables were probably halfway decent antiques, under about twenty coats of black varnish. There were a couple of fringed Victorian lamps and even framed photos on the tables, mostly various school pictures of the boys. (Randa spotted a gap-toothed six-year-old Cam grinning up at her.) Overall, the room looked as if the family had just gone out of town for an unknown period and simply never come back.

  There was a hallway on the other side of the room. Randa glanced down it and could see an open door and a little bit of a bedroom that seemed to have similarly depressing decor.

  “My parents’ room,” Jack said, answering her unspoken question. “Our rooms are upstairs.”
/>   “It’s very . . . dark.”

  Jack nodded. “It always was, no matter how many lamps you turned on. The rented places were nicer, but my father liked it that way.”

  “Why?”

  “He wasn’t exactly a cheery guy. Cam may have mentioned that. I think he was attracted to the house’s history, too.”

  “The man who murdered his family?”

  Jack nodded. “His name was Bennett Reece. I think he was Will’s hero.”

  “Because he murdered his family?”

  Jack nodded. “I think Will admired him for having the guts to do the full job. Anyway . . . have a look around. I’ll wait outside.” He went out the back door, leaving it open behind him.

  Randa was not at all happy about being in the house alone, but she didn’t blame him for wanting to be away from all the reminders, and she wasn’t about to relinquish this opportunity.

  She stood in the doorway of the master bedroom and stared at a double bed with a wrought-iron headboard. She wondered how any woman could lie down and go to sleep beside a man who routinely sent her children to the emergency room. What sickness had bound the two of them? She knew it was too late for questions like that to be answered. It was too late for them to even matter.

  When she returned to the living room, Jack was still outside. She could see him in the front yard, walking aimlessly, gazing out at the land. He didn’t look her way as she headed for the stairs.

  The old wood creaked in protest under her weight. The stairs were sunken in the middle from too many years of use, and the entire stairway, wall included, listed toward the left side of the house. About halfway up the stairs, the beadboard ended, and Randa was amazed to find that the remaining walls were unfinished. The planks were gray-brown and weathered like the side of a barn, and there were cracks between them on the inside walls. At the top of the stairs were three tiny rooms; all still had small beds and dressers. Twin beds and a small dresser filled the middle room, leaving no space for anything else. Randa assumed this was the room that Jack and Tallen had shared.

  She felt a lump rise in her throat as she thought of Cam and Jack, and even the ones she didn’t know, living up here in what was barely more than an attic. She thought of them lying in bed, listening to their parents try to kill each other in the rooms below. Cam had told her he was the only one of the four who’d ever ventured downstairs to try to break up the fights. The rest of them had either put their heads under their pillows or climbed out windows and gone off into the night, looking for trouble they could control.

  She made her way back down the stairs slowly. She stopped when she saw Jack. He was standing just inside the door, staring at an empty spot in the far corner of the room. He didn’t show any sign of noticing her.

  “Jack?”

  He broke out of his trance and saw her looking at him. “Sorry. I just . . . flashed on something.”

  “What?” she asked, as she eased down the last two steps.

  “The day they killed Tallen,” he said in a quiet voice. He breathed deeply, collecting himself before he continued. “He didn’t want any of us there, so my mother and Cam and I were sitting here the next morning . . .” He nodded toward the corner. “There used to be a TV over there, and we were watching the news. This sports—”

  He stopped; laughed to himself, a bitter laugh. “I almost said sportscaster.” He shook his head; took another moment.

  “This reporter was interviewing people on the street about the execution . . . and there was this woman . . . she had on this hat. I don’t know why it matters, but something about that hat just irked the hell out of me. Anyway, the reporter asked her if the execution made her feel like justice had been served, and she said that it did, then she said, ‘Some people are just animals, and you kill rabid animals, so what’s the difference?’ ”

  He stopped again and took yet another breath, upset by the memory.

  “My mother had this antique iron she used as a doorstop. I grabbed it and . . . kind of . . . hurled it through the TV screen.” He smiled sadly.

  “That couldn’t have been good for the TV,” Randa said, trying to lighten the mood.

  “No, but it sure felt great.” He chuckled, looking at the corner again. “Glass flew everywhere. Smoke, sparks, the works. My mother screamed.”

  “What did Cam do?”

  Jack’s face clouded over. “Saint Cam was not pleased. He just picked up his suitcase and walked out the door. Went back to LA. I didn’t see him again until my mother’s funeral a year later.” Jack looked out the window, as if he were watching Cam go.

  “That seems like a cruel thing to do to your mother. Just walking out, on that day?”

  He paused for a second, letting the anger pass.

  “My mother,” he continued, “was so far gone by that point. Tallen’s death was really the last straw.” He took a few steps away from Randa, as if he needed the distance. She could see his face go taut with pain. “Have you ever read a detailed account of what happens when someone is electrocuted?” he asked.

  “No,” Randa answered, without admitting that she’d tried to once and hadn’t been able to get through it.

  “I read every one I could get my hands on. I hunted for them. It was like a compulsion. I just had to know.”

  Randa prayed he wasn’t going to share any of it with her, but she knew what was coming.

  “They shave the person’s head, you know, so they can attach the electrodes. And then they have to rub this gel in—something that helps conduct the electricity. The gel has to be rubbed in really well; takes about forty-five minutes. Imagine sitting there for forty-five minutes while someone rubs gel into your head so they can kill you easier. But that’s really nothing compared to the rest of it.”

  Randa wanted desperately not to hear the rest of it, but she sensed he needed to tell her. She braced herself.

  “The body reaches a temperature of about nineteen hundred degrees—there have been cases where a body was so hot it melted the electrodes. The skin turns bright red and stretches, almost to the point of breaking. The brain reaches the boiling point of water. The eyes pop out of the sockets and end up resting on the cheeks. Witnesses say there’s this loud sound, like bacon frying, and it smells—I don’t know, like however it smells when you cook a person. Smoke comes out of the person’s head, sometimes flames. And this is all if everything goes well. I read about this one where something went wrong and it took twenty minutes and three separate jolts of electricity to kill the guy. He stayed conscious for a while, and in between jolts, he was begging them to hurry. By the time he was finally pronounced dead, the body was so hot they had to wait an hour before they could even touch him to move him out of the room.” He stopped for a moment, but he wasn’t done. “In one of the articles I read, a doctor described it as ‘setting a person on fire from the inside.’ ”

  Randa nodded. She wanted to tell him he was preaching to the choir, but there’d be time for that later.

  “Can you imagine having all that happen to someone you love? Your brother? Your child?”

  “No,” Randa said quietly. There was no way she could imagine it.

  “Well, if it does, there’s no way you can avoid imagining it.” He took a breath, then: “So . . . if you want to know how my mother was . . . that’s how she was. The warden might as well have strapped her in next to Tallen. When she finally killed herself, it was just a formality.”

  Randa didn’t know what to say, yet the silence was too sensitive to bear. Jack stared at the floor, unable to meet her eyes. She had a strong urge to go over and put her arms around him, but she couldn’t imagine him letting her (or anyone) do that.

  “I’m really, really sorry.” It sounded ridiculously lame, but she didn’t know what else to say. “For what you went through.”

  He looked at her, frowning. “For what I went through?”

  “All of you. The whole thing.”

  He just stared at her, not knowing what to make of it.
>
  “Why don’t we go,” she suggested. She was uncomfortable under his stare, and he needed to get out of the place, whether he knew it or not. He nodded, looking enormously relieved. He turned and headed back through the kitchen. Randa followed. She reached up and put her hand on his back. She felt him flinch under her touch; she pulled her hand away.

  Outside, he locked the door behind them. Then, after staring at her face for a brief moment, he reached for her hand. Randa wouldn’t have been any more surprised if he’d slapped her, and she doubted she was doing a good job of hiding that fact. He led her back toward the car, gripping her hand tightly, as if they’d come to some kind of an understanding. When they reached the car, he stopped. He looked at her as if he had something important to say, but didn’t speak. Then she noticed that he was leaning closer. Was he . . . was he going to kiss her? She hadn’t had time to wonder how she felt about it when he quickly pulled away, and his head jerked in the opposite direction.

  “What was that?” he asked.

  “What?”

  He cocked his head and squinted, as if reacting to a sound. “That!” He looked at her. “You didn’t hear that?”

  She shook her head. “I didn’t hear anything.”

  He took a few steps toward the house, listening. After a moment, he turned and hurried back to her. “Let’s get out of here,” he said, and got into the car. Randa, left with no option, followed.

  “What is going on?” she asked, slamming her door.

  “Nothing. It must have been the wind.” He was gone again, back inside his shell. And there was no wind, but Randa knew it would do no good to point that out.

  Neither of them spoke on the ride back into town. Randa didn’t know what to say, and Jack just stared out the window. He asked if she would drop him off at his place, and she pulled up in front of the boardinghouse and turned the engine off.

  “Look, why don’t we go out to dinner tonight?” she said, pressing her luck. “We can relax, talk some more.” She stopped. A look had come over his face, as if she’d just told him the tumor was inoperable.