The Keeper's Curse

by Diana Harrison

  The Keeper’s Curse

  By Diana Harrison

  Copyright 2012 Diana Harrison

  Smashwords Edition

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes:

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  The following is a work of fiction. All people, places, and events are purely products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual people, places, or events is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design by Robin Ludwig Design Inc., http://www.gobookcoverdesign.com/.

  *

  For Mom and Dad,

  Who let me pace in the living room until I wore the carpet out.

  *

  Prologue

  It was never a good omen to end up in the hospital on your birthday. Until she died, Emmy would not forget when it happened to her.

  She had just turned eleven on a muggy day in March. The hot weather, fit for June, had luckily blown in for spring break. Her friends were still buzzing with post-school excitement, wanting nothing but to play outside, so she asked them – a group of raucous, dusty-faced boys – if they wanted to celebrate by playing some soccer behind their school. They agreed immediately. She ended up in the position of goalie, figuring it was probably not a good idea to get too banged up before for the birthday party her grandparents had so thoughtfully prepared for her. Of course nobody wanted to play goalie so she knew she would be teased, but just for today she would keep her sharp mouth shut. It was worth it; her mom and dad would murder her if she came home with a black eye again.

  Nobody had remembered to pack any drinks, so Emmy had to stand in the heat between the goalposts, wiping away the sweat and moisture from the air intermingling on her forehead. Her best friend, Jesse, stood to her left playing defence, itching for the ball to come his way.

  “Want to switch?” she asked. She was bored; she hadn’t had the opportunity to block a single goal yet.

  “Not really.”

  Groaning, she leaned against the goalpost, letting her eyes wander down towards the russet gravel beneath her. She would have enjoyed playing a one-on-one game with her brother so much more, but since he got accepted into that enigmatic boarding school, it was out of the question. She had written to him, begging him to come to her party, but he had insisted the school kept him too busy. In every letter he had given some excuse along those lines, so she hadn’t expected him to show up. Since he had left the previous year she had not seen him once, and sometimes wondered if he was ever going to come home.

  “Hey, Goldilocks! Pay attention!”

  Emmy snapped her head up in time to see a cluster of boys heading straight towards her in a stampede of legs and powered dirt. Before she had the chance to hunch down into position, Sam kicked the ball low and hard, and hit Emmy right in the forehead. She fell backwards into the gravel.

  “Way to go, Sam!”

  “Idiot – Mrs. Rathers is gonna kill us!”

  “She’s fine,” Sam defended himself. “She gets hit in the head all the time. Hey, Goldilocks, get up!”

  Emmy groaned, trying to reply, but she was having a hard time being able to move. Red spots started staining her vision, and there was a buzzing in her ears that wouldn’t subside. Strange. Sam hadn’t hit her ear.

  And that was when she first heard it.

  It wasn’t a buzzing at all, but whispers emanating inside her head, a susurration brushing against the edges of her mind.

  “Hey Emmy, are you alright? Time to get up,” Jesse said, leaning over to nudge her shoulder.

  She shook her head to clear the whispers away, but they didn’t stop. She tried to make out what the words were, but couldn’t recognize any of them. Soon she didn’t have to try. They began to chant louder and louder until she wondered if the whispers really were coming from inside her head.

  “Do you hear that?” Emmy asked.

  Jesse raised his eyebrows. “Hear what?”

  She closed her eyes, sparks of colour exploding behind her eyelids. The whispers started to mesh; she couldn’t catch any words, if they were even words at all. Not caring how childish it was, she covered her ears with her hands.

  “Emmy? Emmy! What’s wrong?”

  She was just about to try to answer him when a sharp, blinding pain cut across her chest and let out an involuntary scream instead.

  Somewhere off in the distance she heard Jesse shout at the boys to go get Mrs. Rathers.

  Emmy tried to answer Jesse, but the pain reached a peak and she could only scream louder, arching her back in agony. She looked down at her chest, sure a laceration would be there, but her shirt wasn’t even torn. Nothing.

  “I’m ... bleeding,” she said in between gasps.

  Jesse shook his head, grabbing her hand. “No, you aren’t.”

  The frantic colours on the inside of her eyelids were started to come together like an inkblot, making shapes that were recognizable to her until finally, she could see a true picture. They came in flashes: an ancient fireplace; a blood-stained wall; candles on a stone floor arranged in an obscure pattern in dark room; a thin, wide-eyed face.

  The only thing connecting her to the world was Jesse, the pressure of his hands on her trying to push the arch of her back down.

  Finally the whispers in her head sharpened, and she caught two words: “I’m sorry.” It was a woman.

  And just like that, the pain that felt like she was being torn open vanished, the voices disappeared, and her breathing steadied. When she opened her eyes this time the images were gone, and in their place were the boys huddled around her, their mouths open in horror. She rolled over onto her side to look at Jesse, the edges of his face fuzzy.

  “P – please tell me you heard it,” she panted.

  “I didn’t hear anything,” Jesse said, trying to keep his voice level. “Sam hit you in the head and you fell over and started screaming like crazy. He must’ve knocked you pretty hard.”

  She was about to protest this when Sam arrived back with her mother in tow, in nothing but a bathrobe. Before Emmy could explain, her mother scooped her daughter up off the gravel and into her arms. As her mom carried her back towards the house, Emmy buried her face in her chest. She felt awful. Her mother was so overprotective already and would not take this lightly. She knew that if the boys told her parents what happened, and they would, she would be sent to the hospital to be examined for both her physical and mental health state.

  Her mental health.

  She wanted to ask Jesse one more time if he had heard what she had heard, but from his bleak expression that seemed to only carry concern for her, she was pretty sure he hadn’t.

  Despite this, she knew what had happened. She had never felt pain like that before in her entire life, and it couldn’t be possible to imagine something you hadn’t experienced before, was it? She was still breathing heavily, her skin prickling from the pain, but by the time they got her to a doctor she would have returned to normal. She knew everyone would deem her crazy, and soon she would start to believe it herself. Maybe she was crazy, maybe she wasn’t.

  Emmy had to wait a long time to get an answer to that.

  Chapter 1

  The Glass Ball

  “Don’t you think I’m getting a little old for this?”

  Jesse grinned. “If you’re not too old to sneak out of the house, you can’t be too old to climb back in through the window,” he dec
lared. “It’s common sense.”

  Although Emmy begged to differ, all she did was grin back. At one o’ clock in the morning, she would come up with a retort later. They both had school the next day; if her parents caught her outside she would be skewered and roasted alive. By not letting her go out, she reasoned, her parents were stunting her maturity so she had no choice but to scale the wall and climb back in through the window. Clearly their poor parenting forced her do to this, which didn’t reflect on her at all.

  “You aren’t going to get into too much trouble are you?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “Nah, they probably didn’t even notice I left the house. Anyways, I better leave you to your beauty sleep. With your grades, you need it more than I do.”

  Emmy made a face at him. “Thanks. You can go now.”

  “Anytime,” he said, turning on his heel and waving goodbye. She watched him sprint back down the street, into the darkness, a shadow in only a few elapsed seconds.

  She began making her way up the lattice lining the side of her house that led up to her bedroom. She had forgotten to bring her gloves, so her fingers clamping onto the wood were numb with cold in seconds; Christmas break might have been over, but winter sure wasn’t. The heavily humid Montréal air not only made the summers hotter, but the winters colder, and although she had lived there all her life, Emmy had never quite gotten used to the drastic temperature changes.

  When Jesse had said he wanted to do something fun before their second semester of grade ten started, she thought he had meant something cozy and indoors. Going to a party with kids she barely talked to wasn’t really her idea of a good time, but she ended up enjoying herself more than she thought she would. Jesse was always trying to get her to expand her circle of friends, making a special effort to get her to talk to more females. She had ended up talking to the girls that normally scared her (on a dare by her friend Miles), but had been pleasantly surprised by how nice they were.

  When she levelled with her bedroom window, she wedged her arm into the tiny crack she had left open for herself, and slipped through as silently as she could. No one was waiting in her room to bawl her out, so she figured the coast was clear. She slipped into a pair of pyjamas, and without turning any lights on, tiptoed down the stairs to get herself a glass of water before bed. But just as she opened the fridge door, she heard something clatter from behind her.

  Without volition she squeaked, jumped, and spun around. She saw someone – a dark silhouette in the middle of the living room outlined by the moonlight shining through the gauzy curtains. It took her a split second to realize why he was there. A thief. The shadow stopped moving when she gasped, tilting his head in her direction.

  She knew she was supposed to run, but her legs were paralyzed, so she did the next best thing. She screamed.

  This was not what she should have done. When the man in the dark bounded towards her Emmy’s senses snapped back to life and her legs started working again. Nearly tripping over the carpet, she ran towards the staircase but wasn’t fast enough. The man caught her, and they both toppled over onto the floor.

  She struggled as best she could and attempted to scream again. He covered her mouth with his hand, but she had enough sense to bite him. Her mind raced so quickly a coherent thought couldn’t form and became trapped in a circle of panic, not knowing what to do. A fully grown man was on top of her – she wasn’t strong enough. There was only one thing she could do ...

  With all the strength from the adrenaline pumping through her, she kneed him right in the crotch. To her amazement, he rolled off of her. Shaking, she got up and began to sprint to the stairs, when she heard a series of noises. Clashing, smashing, shattering.

  “What the –”

  She looked behind her and screamed again. Everything in the living room – the only way for her to understand it – was defying the law of gravity. The mirrors, the pictures hanging on the walls, the china, the ornaments – they were all swirling in a vortex, driven by what looked like a black cloud, light coming from inside it. The intruder got up and bolted out of the house at the sight of it, while she could only tumble backwards. This couldn’t be happening.

  Still, the dark shapes continued to fly through the air, destroying the living room. One piece of broken glass flew by her and scraped her knee. A few seconds later she could feel the pain and smell the iron of her blood, making her gag.

  She turned away from the sight, rolling onto her side and curling into a fetal position. She shut her eyes, but she still couldn’t block out the crashing sounds. Any moment now something would hit her; if she was lucky it would be something small, but it could be the television, the couch –

  “Emmy!” shouted a comforting but powerful voice from afar. Her head shot up, she saw her mother at the top of the stairs. So fast she was almost a blur, her mom sped down the stairs, grabbed Emmy’s arm, and attempted to pull her up.

  “Come on, we’ve got to go!” she shouted over the wind and crashing.

  Emmy shook her head wildly. “I can’t! I can’t –”

  “Yes you can. Now get up.”

  With her mother’s help she got back onto her feet. Her legs wobbled so much she had to be steadied, but she made it up the stairs taking three at a time.

  Her mom pushed her through the hallway. Emmy didn’t protest or scream or cry - she barely even carried herself; it was all done for her. She was led to her parents’ bedroom where her father was just getting out of bed, slipping on his glasses. The bedlam could still be heard from downstairs.

  Before Emmy could speak, her mother spun around with a fierce look in her eye and without a word, she pulled out a circular object Emmy could barely see in the dark and yanked it down onto Emmy’s wrist.

  “What are you –” she began when she heard a tremendous crash beneath on the lower floor. Only when she heard the ringing in her ears did she realize it was over. The violent clatter had ceased, leaving the three of them alone in the dark and breathing heavily.

  Her father turned the night lamp on, squinting at his two breathless girls.

  “Annalise, what the hell –”

  Her mom burst into tears. Emmy wanted to do something useful. Hug her mother, tell her father what happened. Anything. But she couldn’t. All Emmy did was stand there, useless, focusing on the ringing in her head.

  Annalise wiped her face with her arm. “It happened, Charles. It happened. She manifested. We have to go.”

  A silence followed where he darted his eyes back and forth between his wife and daughter. After a few moments his eyes filled up with tears.

  “No,” he said, raising his voice like it was a question.

  After a few more sobs Annalise replied, “Someone broke into the house, I think. It must have set her off. I could only keep her on frenum for so long.”

  Emmy, nonplussed, kept quiet, feeling the palpable tension in the air. Something was very, very wrong, but she seemed to have lost her voice. She began fiddling with her fingers, feeling something bump against her wrist and noticed what her mom had put on her. It looked like a simple glass bracelet, nothing special at all. She raised her head, focusing on her parents again.

  Her father began shaking his head manically, blinking the tears away. “Stay the night. Please.”

  “I can’t.” Annalise’s voice broke. “They’ll be here any minute.”

  Charles looked away to the bare wall they had never painted. Emmy wanted to ask what was wrong, why he was acting as if someone had just died.

  “But it’s so sudden,” he said.

  “I told you it would be.” She took a deep breath and turned to Emmy. “Your suitcase is in your closet. Go pack anything you want. Make sure it’s the important stuff. Things that are irreplaceable. You have five minutes.”

  Emmy didn’t argue. To do that would require thinking, and she couldn’t afford to do that right now. She flung open the door and closed it just in time to hear her father shout out, “You can’t go! I thought we’d have more t
ime!”

  Still shaking, she flicked the light on, dragged out her suitcase, and took a good look around her room. Things that were irreplaceable, her mother had said. She found herself looking at her room in a way she had never done before. She noticed the paint peeling off in the corners of the walls that hung posters of things she no longer cared about. Her duvet had holes in it. Clothes she hadn’t worn in weeks covered the floor like camouflage. She didn’t understand why she couldn’t stop staring at it all.

  Snapping out of it, she did as her mother said and began throwing everything she could get her hands on in the suitcase. Her clothes were top priority, but she didn’t forget her plaques from cross country running, or her gifts, or her photographs, or her favourite psychology textbooks, or the list of her favourite phobias, or her collection of journals. Within no time (definitely less than five minutes) her suitcase was bulging. She looked around, a cold feeling of dread creeping into her. She didn’t know where she was going. What if she had packed the wrong things?

  Out of time, she flicked the light off and dragged her suitcase back to the master bedroom where she found her parents on the edge of the bed. Her mother was crying on her dad’s shoulder; he had his arm around her.

  She didn’t want to invade their privacy, but she must have not been quiet enough because they both shot up at her presence.

  Annalise wiped her eyes and tried to smile but ended up with a grimace that could have broken glass.

  “Alright, time to go now, sweetheart. Say goodbye to your father.”

  Her jaw dropped. He wasn’t coming?

  Her father started crying again, taking Emmy’s head in his hands and burying it in his chest. The old, musty smell of their house permeated him, making her eyes burn. Why was she crying? They had been robbed, what was the big deal? Nobody was hurt, or killed, no matter how much her parents were acting like it. She knew something else had happened, but...that couldn’t have been real.