by Mort Castle
Cursed Be The Child
by Mort Castle
Kindle Edition
Overlook Connection Press
2011
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Cursed Be The Child
© 2009 by Mort Castle
Cover art © 2009 by Erik Wilson
This digital edition © 2011 Overlook Connection Press
Published by
Overlook Connection Press
PO Box 1934, Hiram, Georgia 30141
http://www.overlookconnection.com
[email protected]
A signed limited hard cover of 500 copies is available from OCP and Specialty Bookstores.
This book is a work of fiction. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without the written permission of the Publisher, Overlook Connection Press.
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Book Design & Typesetting:
David G. Barnett
Fat Cat Graphic Design
http://www.fatcatgraphicdesign.com
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Thanks to Jan Yoors, whose THE GYPSIES first got me started with this "Romany thing."
Thanks to Jane Castle, who first handed me the book.
The poem "Waking Alone in Darkness" by W.D. Ehrhart is used with his permission and can be found in THE SAMISDAT POEMS OF W.D. Ehrhart, Samisdat Publishing.
"Connections" by Jane Castle is used with her permission and can be found in the chapbook SMOKE AND COLD, Eads Street Press.
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For Jane: that says it all.
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WAKING ALONE IN DARKNESS
It's only the wind, mothers
tell their children in the night
when upturned leaves rattle on the
windowpane,
furious and black;
only the wind
when night cries in children's dreams
and children cry out
in the darkness,
—W.D, Ehrhart
From CONNECTIONS
and reconnect
our
fading lines
tracing
our ways
back
together
through
the paths
created
in the night.
—Jane Castle
"0 detlene tat o Beng nashti beshen pashasa."
"Neither the spirits of dead children nor the
devil can remain at peace."
—Pola Janichka
The Castle Tshatsimo:
An Introduction by Gary A. Braunbeck
Before discussing some specifics of Cursed Be The Child—re-released by Overlook Connection Press in this spiffy new edition you hold in your hands—we need to chat about Mort Castle, the writer.
Like a lot of you, I’m guessing, my first exposure to Mort’s work occurred in the early 1980s, with the appearance of his story, “Altenmoor, Where The Dogs Dance” in Twilight Zone Magazine (it can also be found in Moon On The Water, so go out and buy a copy now). “Altenmoor” is a tale reminiscent of the best of Ray Bradbury or Rod Serling. I say “reminiscent” because—though it may wear its influences on its sleeve—it is very much its own story; assured of voice, rich in characterization, and surprisingly epic in scope, considering that it’s less than 10 pages long and takes place in only three rooms of a single house. A young boy’s dog dies, you see. But his grandfather, now living with the boy and his family, tells him otherwise. Grandpa, now blind, once wrote books about this fantastic land called “Altenmoor.” He tells his grandson that his dog isn’t dead, he’s gone to Altenmoor to dance with the other dogs, because Altenmoor is a wonderful place, and you’ll have to track it down and read it for yourself; I won’t spoil it for you. What sounds like a three-layer treacle cake (thanks to the inadequacy of my description) is a very literate, gentle (but never sentimental), honestly haunting piece that has yet to achieve the status of “classic” it deserves. There are moments in the story where Castle expertly hits you with something unexpected—a moment of anger, a moment of hopelessness, a moment of remorse—and as a result, gives the story a slightly darker edge than it would have had in the hands of a Serling or Bradbury.
The key words in the above paragraph, by the way, are “literate” and “unexpected”—none could better describe Castle’s work in general, and this novel in specific. Castle writes from a very literate standpoint; he knows it’s just as important—if not more so—to read outside the horror field as within it; after all, how can a writer hope to bring a unique sensibility to their work if that sensibility is not informed by exposure to all styles and fields of fiction? Though a devout student of Hemingway, Castle’s own work never stoops to imitation of the renowned Ernest’s intensely clipped style; instead, Castle has mastered (and, in my opinion, even refined) Hemingway’s gift for effective understatement: he knows that a well-turned phrase can replace ten pages’ worth of description, and how the precise, exact, meticulously-placed word can completely change the rhythm or tone of a scene. Castle’s sentences have the deceptively easy flow that comes only after hours of backbreaking revision—and I chose that word—“deceptively”—with a great deal of care; like all of our best writers, Castle makes it look easy. Trust me, it isn’t. A smoothness of prose like his or that of Ed Gorman, Dean Koontz, or Jack Cady, is achieved over years of constant refinement and unwavering practice, and an undying respect for the craft.
I think that, of all the things I admire about Castle’s writing, it is that last that I admire the most; his reverence for what Harlan Ellison called “the holy chore” of writing. You cannot write a novel or short story without being deadly serious about it, and that, Castle is. He takes his work very seriously (it’s himself that he tends to make fun of, which is very entertaining after he’s had a few drinks and picks up his banjo, but we’re not here to discuss his dreadful personality problems).
But as serious a writer as he is, Castle never forgets that one of his primary duties as a story-teller is to entertain his readers—and do not take that word to represent only the light and fluffy and unchallenging: need I remind you that when Othello originally premiered at The Old Vic it was billed as “Wm. Shakespeare’s Latest Entertainment”?
And entertain he does; with his slightly skewed vision of the world in which we live; with his unflinching eye for the nuances in human behavior that make for the fully-realized character; and with his compassion for even the lowliest of people who populate his stories—and this is somewhere Castle really excels: it’s easy, even expected and acceptable, for writers of horror fiction to have villains who come up just short of a moustache-twirling Snidely Whiplash or faceless homicidal maniac; it keeps everything in black and white terms, makes it easy to tell the good guys from the bad and all that lovely, predictable, tiresome rot. Castle isn’t interested in pointing out the black and white to you—those are always obvious—no; his fascination lies within the moral and spiritual gray areas that all people grapple with but few are willing to talk about. In Castle’s world, his characters talk about these quandaries, they confront their moral dilemmas, they deal with the consequences of compromise; fairly commonplace stuff if you read Russell Banks or Michael
Chabon or Alice Walker, but in horror? Who’re we kidding here?
You’re about to confront a novel that tackles many dark subjects—murder, rape, child molestation, adultery, alcoholism, ethnic and inter-racial prejudice—in a balanced, subtle, and thoughtful way, and it’s that very subtlety and thoughtfulness that gives Cursed Be The Child its lasting resonance; this is much more than just another book about a possessed child and the disintegration of another traditional nuclear family, this is a book that deals with issues of personal integrity, self-redemption, and the lengths to which people will go to protect the ones they love. It’s also—mostly, most probably—about loneliness and the fear that can arise, unbidden and unreasonable, from it.
Is it scary? Yes. But unlike many of the novels being published around the time of its initial appearance in 1990, the scare factor of Cursed Be The Child is not built upon a foundation of violence, cheap shocks, terror, and gore; it is built, rather, on the foundation of something that is still in danger of being left by the wayside if the next generation of horror writers aren’t careful: dread. Simple, powerful, irreplaceable dread. The threat of the horror you cannot see; the implications of what might be happening; the unconfirmed suspicion, the sudden silence from a child’s room, the aching fear that you might be losing control of parts of your character that you’d rather not think about.
Dread.
This novel is full of dread, and as a result, is one of the most genuinely suspenseful horror novels I’ve read in years. Without giving anything away, I will tell you that about mid-way through this novel, there is a sequence where Warren Barringer, one of the major characters in this book, goes out by himself to shop at a mall. In and of itself, doesn’t sound like much; but by the time you reach this sequence you are not going to want to accompany him on this little trip, and why?
Because you dread what might happen.
This novel is filled with dread, yes, but it’s also filled with some pleasant surprises; for once, we have a television evangelist in a horror novel who is not a hypocritical, self-righteous caricature—he is, in fact, a man of great humility and integrity; we have an “avenging spirit” who is uncomfortably sympathetic; we have a refreshingly low body count—only one person dies in the first 34 pages; we have a husband and wife who are trying to repair their marriage after the wife’s affair, and for once this painful and ugly process of healing is not presented in easy short-hand so the reader can pretend that such pain doesn’t exist—it’s depicted with all the anger, regret, and sorrow of the best of Raymond Carver’s work, and shares Carver’s tough sensibilities about how people react when confronting the reality of betrayal.
And there is an absolutely stunning sleight-of-hand that occurs about 2/3 of the way through, wherein we are jolted from the flow of the narrative and suddenly transported back to Auschwitz in the company of a young Polish Jew named Stefan Grinzspan, a man who has never been mentioned anywhere before and whose story—as compelling and exquisitely written as it is—seems to have nothing to do with what has been happening up to this point. Emphasis on the “seems.”
It is with these 3 chapters dealing with Stefan that Castle’s sure literary hand flexes some serious muscle, because it becomes evident as Stefan’s story unfolds that his fate is strongly tied into that of another character with whom we have spent time and think we have come to know. I won’t say any more, lest the revelations be spoiled, but I will say this much: the effect Castle achieves with this detour, and how he does it, is something that should be studied and taught in creative writing classes; it’s that good.
As is the entire novel. Oh, some people will quibble about the last few chapters, I’ve no doubt—put any five readers of this book in the same room and even money says that all of them will have strongly divided opinions about the controversial narrative choices Castle makes toward the end—but even those who don’t agree with the ending won’t be able to argue that Castle didn’t set it up like an expert (hint: pay close attention to the Romany fables scattered throughout the book and you’ll realize, as I did on a second reading, that the ending Castle chose was inevitable); others might object to the way the novel is structured—though it’s the most linear of his books, in my opinion, Cursed Be The Child’s patchwork design may be a little off-putting to readers who expect horror novels to unfold with all the complexity of R.L. Stine; still others, weaned on novels inspired by splatter movies rather than challenging ideas, might complain about how much time he spends on characterization; but for me, this book was and remains everything that most horror novels in the ’80s were not; literate, intelligent, well-crafted, and thought-provoking—no small feat when you consider its subject matter.
Some are saying now that Mort Castle has arrived, which makes me laugh quietly to myself; I knew he was here, all along. As you will by the time you reach the final page. This novel reveals tshatsimo; it tells the truth.
You’ll understand that soon enough.
—Gary A. Braunbeck
Columbus, Ohio
July 3, 2003
GARY A. BRAUNBECK is the widely praised author of such works as GRAVEYARD PEOPLE: THE COLLECTED CEDAR HILL STORIES and the novel THE INDIFFERENCE OF HEAVEN.
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Prologue
Late summer, 1918.
She was calling.
Sweating, trembling with chill, he heard. He was sitting by the front window at the end of the second floor hall, a small man, feverish cheeks rusted by three days’ growth of reddish-brown beard. Suspenders held his baggy trousers up over a dingy union suit. He wore two pairs of heavy socks, feet crammed into leather slippers.
She cried out again.
God, how could he hear her so plainly? She was in the basement. That little whore, voice disguised as a child’s—begging, pleading, trying to lure him.
After the last time—yesterday? the day before?—he’d shut her away, slamming the basement door, locking it with the chain and the key.
Or maybe he was merely imagining that he heard her. That was part of the sickness. There were frantic chills that made you quake like you had the St. Vitus dance, blazing fever, a cough to rip your lungs out, and delirium, seeing and hearing things that were not real, things you could hardly bear to see or hear. Delirium and then death.
The Spanish influenza!
He had it. He couldn’t lie to himself anymore or try to pretend it was nothing but a cold, that it would leave him in its own good time. He didn’t need Dr. Lawson to confirm his diagnosis, and what good would a doctor be anyway? Dr. Lawson was dead, killed by the influenza. Everyone in the world was dying in this modern plague time—society’s high and mighty and its dregs, the saints and the sinners.
He peered out the window through the oak and silver poplar leaves whose sharply defined edges seemed to reduce the street below to miniature. In the dusk, no one sat on a front porch, drinking lemonade and stirring the oppressive, humid air with a funeral parlor fan. Three doors down, across the way, Baumer’s Model T stood in the same spot at the curb it had occupied for two weeks. Kramer’s wagon wasn’t making a final grocery delivery for the day. No junkman was singing out “Rags-A-Lye-Own” in hopes of finding one more bit of copper or lead before he had to return his rented nag to the stable. No whistle of the peanut vendor’s cart tried to catch customers on their way to Metz’s Uptown Kinema. Not a child bicycling, rolling a hoop, racing an orange crate scooter.
No one.
Grove Corner was still. Only the sun moved, slowly, slowly, descending in the west, perhaps forever.
He realized he had been holding his breath, waiting, and when she did call again, he exhaled with the thick, gurgling sound of water swirling down a sluggish drain. Even as he told himself he would not go, he was struggling up from the chair, an effort that made his head spin.
He had to go to her, go to the demon child that had destroyed him. Harlot! The sluttishness was in her blood, the birthright of his whore sister.
She called herself a danc
er, but he knew better. She’d done her dancing on her back in cheap rented rooms with her skirt up and a man between her thighs. And one of her “dancing partners” had planted his seed, a seed no less wanton than the whore womb that nurtured it, then spat it out to grow, to blossom into a lovely, poisonous flower.
He was dizzy. Halfway down the hall, the floor seemed to pitch and roll under his shuffling slippers. He reeled, tottering against the wall, bracing himself with a hand on the doorframe of the bedroom.
Her room! He peered inside. He seemed to see with unusual clarity and depth perception as though he were looking at a three-dimensional card in a stereopticon.
On the high dresser, gilded by the dying light, were some of the treasures she’d brought with her—a paperweight, a rose preserved for eternity inside a glass ball, and a white china doll, the figure of a seated little girl wearing a bonnet and holding a basket of eggs in her lap. On the washstand were her hairbrush, with a strand of hair curling up from the bristles, flaming in the light, and two vibrant green ribbons.
The room looked like a child’s bedroom. The irony was not lost on him. A little girl-innocent, carefree, playful.
A lie! Deception!
Oh, she had been so clever, pretending to be his loving niece who wanted only to please him.
She was always wanting to sit on his lap. Kiss him goodnight. Would he tuck her in…please?
