“The police are on their way again,” Grandma says, entering the family room with her back to the curtains. “I’m sure they’ll be none too pleased coming back here two nights in a row. These children are about to get an earful.” Grandma turns to the curtains. “Mischievous children,” she says, frustration building in her voice. “You’ll get what’s coming to you!” Leaning over the sofa, she whips the family room curtains open in a demonstration of her renewed boldness, but she retreats backward with a shriek.
The boy stands on the other side of the window, one pale palm pressed against it. He raises his head just enough to display the bridge of his nose beneath the brim of his cap. His white cheeks are visible in the moonlight, and I swear he’s smiling. He begins to drum eerily on the window with his fingertips.
For several seconds, the three of us stare in frozen horror at the beastly child. When I realize neither Grandma nor Jeremy know what to do, I march forward. Stopping mere inches from the boy’s face, I snap the curtains shut.
“They’re here to kill us,” Jeremy cries, and I cannot believe he has said this in front of Grandma.
Grandma looks at him in raw disbelief. “My word! What nonsense is that?”
He lowers his head and puffs out his bottom lip. Sometimes I wonder if he is thirteen or three.
Grandma sighs, slaps her palms on her thighs like she does when she’s frustrated, and says, “Everyone upstairs. We’ll wait for the police up there. Abby, get away from the window. Everyone into my room.”
It is the best idea I’ve heard in two nights. I retreat from the window, grab Jeremy’s hand, and pull him up the stairs. Grandma is just a few steps behind us. When we reach the top, the children send the doorbell’s sickening ring through the house yet again. It is now a sound which will tie a knot in my stomach for eternity.
As I hasten Jeremy to Grandma’s bedroom, I look back to watch Grandma grip the staircase railing and shout down to the front door, “Go away! Go home and don’t come back!”
For the next thirteen minutes, we listen to the children plead for entry at both the front and back doors. We try to watch them from Grandma’s bedroom window, but we can see nothing from this side of the house, so we draw back to her bed. Jeremy and Grandma huddle together at the head of the bed by the pillows. I sit pretzel-legged at the foot of the bed with my elbows on my knees and my chin cradled in my palms, brooding.
After the house becomes entirely still for nearly a full minute, I hear a car engine revving as it comes down the street. I jump up to look out the window. Grandma’s bedroom window doesn’t face the street, but I can see blue and red strobes flashing across the neighbors’ lawns. The police have arrived with their lights on but their sirens off.
“They’re here,” I say, and before I can even reach the stairs, a far more reassuring knock comes from the front door.
The stern voice of a grown woman calls from outside. “Police.”
Five minutes after they arrive, Officers Coolidge and Gordon once again sit in our family room amid its retro plaid and paisley fabrics and take the exact same statement from us as they did last night. They ask the same questions, receive the same answers, and inform us for the second time in as many nights that they saw no children near the house as they approached in their squad car.
Handing the officers cups of freshly brewed hazelnut coffee, which has sent a rich, soothing smell throughout the entire house, my grandmother rambles on about the night’s events in a convoluted, confused manner. She’s shaken up, and it’s left her scatter-brained.
I find my eyes wandering between the two young officers before finally coming to rest on Officer Coolidge. While the deep grooves and pock marks of Officer Gordon’s face can’t even come close to hiding his boredom, Officer Coolidge’s flawless, creamy skin is just as ineffective at masking her pity. I resent both their attitudes.
Jeremy sits on his hands in a chair next to the end table where the two officers have set their hats. He has said nothing since they arrived, and I’m hoping he won’t say anything before they leave. Undoubtedly, he’s bursting to tell them our meddlers are none other than the fabled black-eyed kids, but the officers would have no idea who he was talking about because the infamous legend hasn’t circulated beyond schoolyards. He and I both know mentioning the myth would do more harm than good. Still, I catch his eye and send him a hostile stare, just to keep him in his place. He can read my glares like he’s reading my mind, and I’m confident he’ll remain silent.
“This nonsense must stop,” Grandma says, easing herself into a chair. “How do I make them give up this awful prank? Abby and Jeremy have school in just a few hours, and here we sit at nearly two a.m. talking to the police again. These kids will be dead-tired tomorrow, and there’s nothing more important than a child’s education. This is no good, no good at all.”
Although I can think of many things more important than a child’s education, this is neither the time nor place to start listing them.
“If you could tell us who they were, we could talk to their parents, and that would be the end of it,” Officer Gordon says drearily. He looks at Jeremy and me as if we’re keeping secrets.
I shake my head. “I don’t know who they are. I think they’re wearing disguises.”
“And by disguises you mean the school uniforms you mentioned in your statement?”
“Yes.”
Officer Gordon shifts his attention to Jeremy. “Young man, any ideas?”
Jeremy shakes his head and softly says, “I don’t know who they are either.”
Officer Coolidge is writing in her notebook when she pauses and says to Officer Gordon, “I wonder if the sergeant would send a patrol by the house a couple times a night for a few days.”
Grandma slides to the edge of her chair and clasps her hands as though praying. “Oh, that would be wonderful!”
Officer Gordon shrugs one shoulder as he stands. “Depends if he has a cruiser available. We can talk to him when the first shift comes in at six, but putting a cruiser on the house would be unusual. We wouldn’t do it for harassment, so I don’t know why we’d do it for a prank.” Again, he glances accusingly at Jeremy and me.
Officer Coolidge clarifies: “What Officer Gordon is saying is that we really need to catch them in the act.”
Grandma’s excitement quickly fades, and she slouches back in her chair. “I have been trying, but they run away when you come. I honestly can’t believe they came back. Why aren’t they afraid of the police?”
“Well,” begins Officer Gordon, “obviously they are afraid of the police if they run away as soon as our cruiser comes within sight.”
“In harassment cases, we’ve seen some people have luck enlisting friends or family for help,” Officer Coolidge says. “What about your neighbors? Did you talk to them? Have they seen anything?”
“I haven’t spoken to anyone else about it yet. Well, except for Harold after church yesterday, but you know Harold,” Grandma says, rolling her eyes at me. “He just laughed like it was a big joke.” She thinks for a moment. “But tomorrow I can ask some of the neighbors if they’ve seen anything. Abby, maybe you can ask around at school?”
Not a chance. “Sure,” I say, and I see Officer Gordon fix a critical glare on me yet again.
Grandma redirects her attention to Jeremy. “The boy seems to be more your age, Jeremy. Maybe you can talk to your friends too?”
Jeremy brightens at the opportunity Grandma has given him because he knows hers is the only authority which trumps mine. I will straighten him out after the police leave, which they do about ten minutes later.
It’s nearly two-thirty by the time we’ve all gotten back to bed. I’m wide awake, and I’ve no chance of falling back asleep, even though Officer Coolidge reassured us they’d take a couple more drives past our house prior to daybreak.
I wait until the house has been still for fifteen minutes, and then I creep across the hall to Jeremy’s room.
I push his door shut b
ehind me and sit down in the creaky office chair he has pushed against a secondhand computer desk. I snap on his desk lamp, swivel around to face his bed, and wait for him to acknowledge me.
Remaining motionless beneath the covers, he says, “What do you want, Abby?”
I nod toward the piecemeal computer on the desk behind me. “Did you IM Tommy Wexler?”
He sits up. “He wasn’t online.”
“I’m supposed to believe Tommy Wexler never touched his computer all day? You boys live on these things, Jeremy.”
Jeremy sets his jaw and looks away.
“This is your reputation, too, Jeremy.”
“Reputation? This is our lives, Abby.”
Although the disturbing children are certainly up to no good, I won’t let myself give in to the same illogical panic that consumed me last night. There’s a methodic way to handle this, a reasonable solution. “They’re not going to kill us,” I say. “You heard Grandma say it herself: ‘that’s nonsense.’ And now that the police are involved, those kids would be crazy to do something. If you want to be afraid of someone, be afraid of the boy Tommy Wexler knows…”
“Tommy doesn’t know him. His brother has a friend whose aunt—”
“Whatever. Look, no one talks to this kid, right? What’s his name, anyway?”
“I don’t know. Tommy calls him the cemetery boy.”
“Cemetery boy, that’s an awesome nickname. What do you suppose they’ll call us when we tell the kids at school the black-eyed kids are ringing our doorbell?”
“Tommy can get his real name for us.”
I nearly jump out of the chair. “You’re missing my point. Can’t you see I don’t want to be connected with that weirdo in any way, shape, or form? What if he’s the one who really killed his brother and father, did you ever think of that? And you want to go nosing around him? If you do that, you’ll only put us in real danger.”
“Grandma told me to talk to my friends about it. What else are we going to do, let them keep ringing our doorbell from now on and keep us awake forever? What if they decide to eventually break in? You want to do nothing, but what do you want us to do, Abby? What do you want Grandma to do? Stop being so selfish.”
“I’m not selfish.”
“You’re selfish and ashamed of who we are.”
I just about become unglued at his accusation, but for fear of waking Grandma, I stay composed and manage to grind away my anger using only my teeth.
He’s just upset, I tell myself. Yet, he makes a good point about what to do next because it certainly appears the police—particularly Officer Gordon, who seems to think Jeremy and I somehow brought this on ourselves—are in no hurry to help.
I’m at a loss, but more importantly, I know better than to try and overrule Grandma, so I offer Jeremy a compromise. “Do what Grandma says and ask around at school, but don’t say anything about the black-eyed kids. Just ask who’s been ding dong ditching lately.”
He fixes intense eyes on me. “In ding dong ditch, you ring the doorbell and run. These kids don’t run. They stay. They want us to open the door and let them in.”
His clarification chills me. It makes me wonder again who these brazen kids really are and why last night’s arrival of a police car didn’t frighten them enough to stay away from our home tonight. And, of course, I can in no way account for the mysterious whispers, something I’ve kept to myself so far. Yet I still don’t have it within me to acknowledge these children have somehow manifested themselves from myth. I’m confused and I need more time to figure this out.
Exhausted and out of arguments, I switch off the light and get up to leave. Opening the bedroom door, I say, “Let’s sleep on it and talk again tomorrow.”
“Like either of us will sleep,” he says.
CHAPTER FOUR
JEREMY WAS RIGHT. I didn’t sleep.
Now we both walk to school exhausted. I can’t imagine what the next seven hours will be like on no sleep, but they certainly can’t be as bad as the past five.
Along the sidewalk on which we walk, towering oaks drop leaves like raindrops. A chilly breeze spins a tiny whirlwind of dead leaves across a front yard and deposits it near a sewer grate in the curb. Jeremy, puffing heavily, walks by my side, but we haven’t spoken since we left home. We’ll split off in a block or so at Lexington Avenue.
We both are startled by a sedan which swiftly passes us from behind sending the leaves near the sewer grate scratching down the street in its trail. The sedan takes the corner ahead of us far too sharply and far too fast and bounces its rear passenger tire off the curb as a result. The sedan’s tires yelp as the driver rights the car, and he or she continues on their way without even a flicker of the vehicle’s brake lights. Had we left home ten seconds sooner, we’d have been in the crosswalk when it happened.
“Jerk,” I mumble beneath my breath.
“I steal our Internet,” Jeremy suddenly says, a peculiar response to what just happened, which tells me his mind has been elsewhere this morning.
“What are you talking about, Jeremy?”
“Don’t call me Jeremy. Use my nickname on school days.”
This again.
“It’s a dumb, boring nickname, Jeremy, and it could just as easily be mine, so why would I use it to talk to my own brother?”
“My friends do.”
“I’m your sister not your friend. To me, you’re Jeremy. Always will be.” I try to steer us back to the real issue. “Now, what do you mean you steal our Internet…Jeremy?”
He sighs. “I steal our Internet from old Mrs. McGovern next door. When her stupid, know-it-all son, Dooley, set up the router, he used a really old encryption protocol. I made an antenna out of an empty potato chip can. I point it out my window at her house when I need the Internet.”
I’ve no idea how one steals Internet using a potato chip can, but that’s irrelevant. For a reason unknown to me, he’s decided at this very moment he must confess to what sounds to me like a pretty trivial crime. Maybe the presence of the police officers in our home the past two nights has made him nervous.
It’s awkward, so I joke, “I’m sure Pastor Martin will take your confession if you’re concerned.”
He stops briefly, hooks his thumbs into the shoulder straps of his backpack, and heaves the load further up onto his back before continuing down the sidewalk. “I’m not concerned. I’m just saying, Dooley was cleaning leaves out of the gutters yesterday, and that’s why I couldn’t get online to IM Tommy. I didn’t think pointing the antenna out of my window at their house would be a very good idea with him outside all day. By the time I got online after dark, Tommy was offline.”
So Jeremy proves he’s not entirely a liar, because it sounds like he had at least intended to IM Tommy. What’s more, despite the legal implications, my brother’s ingenuity makes me smile, and suddenly a somewhat irresponsible yet nevertheless worthwhile thought occurs to me. “Hey, can you get cable TV, too?”
“No,” he says. “That’s not wireless.”
Note to self: potato chip cans can’t steal cable TV.
We stop at the Lexington intersection. The middle school is within sight, no more than a block from where we stand. Again, Jeremy adjusts his heavy backpack. He says, “So, ‘who’s been ding dong ditching?’ right?”
It’s the approach with his friends I asked him to take last night. If I put too much emotion behind it, I’m worried he won’t comply, so I close my eyes, nod slightly, and say, “Yes. If you start talking about black-eyed kids, you’re going to be the laughing stock of the school by the end of the day.”
Jeremy looks at his shoes and scuffs the concrete with his toe. “Fine. We’ll do it your way.” He turns and begins his march down the block to Lexington Middle School. He suddenly stops and turns back to me. “We’ll meet back here after school, right?” he calls. He fears an empty street corner almost as much as he fears the mythical black-eyed kids.
When the school year began, Jeremy had to wal
k home alone while I stayed late for cross-country practice. Those were sad days for Jeremy but joyous ones for me. Not because I despised walking Jeremy home, but because running is therapy.
Nothing centers me like the focus required for a run. When my driving strides become long and smooth and the only sound in my head is my own winded breath, it feels as though I’ve stopped running and started gliding—or even flying—into a better future. Behind me, always, is the rest of the team, as if they were Mount Herod itself.
Sadly, therapy adjourns during Mount Herod’s winter months when paths, concrete, and grass lie concealed below sheets of ice and drifts of snow. Sessions resume in the spring when I trade the long, smooth gait of cross-country for the stomping, lightning pulse of track and field. A run is a run, I say, and as long as everyone’s behind me, I have no preference of the kind. But until spring, I’ll be here on the corner after school, waiting to bring Jeremy home.
I nod back at baby brother and assure him, “Of course. See you back here after school.” He’s as much my responsibility as Grandma’s, perhaps more. If it weren’t for Grandma, I’d be living on the street. If it weren’t for me, Jeremy would be dead.
He resumes his walk up the block. After he takes ten more steps without looking back, I leave him and head for Mount Herod South High School.
A quarter-mile later, I’m on the sidewalk along the high school’s bus-filled circular driveway. Newly-licensed students pack the nearby parking lot with their cars, a diverse mix of new foreign luxury sedans and long-discontinued American coupes.
I join the mob of backpack-laden students approaching the school. We proceed past flag poles and benches and plaques and statues until our pace slows to a shuffle as we funnel into the school through the front doors. The inside of the building smells heavily of commercial-grade disinfectant, and the halls are packed with students, a diverse mix of prosperity and poverty.
Morning classes drag. At one point in math class, I nearly snap my own neck as my head involuntarily springs out of a sudden millisecond nap I didn’t see coming. A quick glance around the room confirms there was a witness.
Curse of the Black-Eyed Kids (Mount Herod Legends Book 2) Page 3
