Curse of the Black-Eyed Kids (Mount Herod Legends Book 2)

by Corey J. Popp

  Any remaining thoughts I had about these children being simple pranksters evaporate. The dark aura of their presence and their soulless black eyes tell me they have literally come straight from Hell. I have no idea what they want or what they intend to do next. I only know they are completely, entirely malevolent. At this moment, I’m not certain anyone in the world can help us, but I wish someone would at least try.

  “Jeremy,” I call again. “Call 911!”

  Mr. Donaldson continues to shriek and Grandma has begun to sob. Around us, the windows of the neighbors’ houses begin to glow.

  The boy and girl acknowledge the lights with turns and bobs of their heads. Visibly frustrated yet speechless, they turn around and begin their march back up the street.

  They allow no witnesses.

  Lying on the ground, shivering against the cold, cradling Grandma in my lap, I watch the black-eyed kids withdraw. They do so expeditiously yet entirely composed and in a manner that has nothing to do with fear. They depart as if simply obeying rules.

  The spiders, too, suddenly retreat, peeling away from Mr. Donaldson and Grandma like water off a stone.

  Over my shoulder, Mrs. McGovern’s front door hesitantly opens, and her chubby silhouette appears in her doorway. Two doors down on the other side of the street, I see Mr. Benedict peering out his window, the orange walls of his kitchen blazing behind him. Across the street from Mr. Benedict, old Mrs. Sanchez stands on her front porch within a shaft of light cast from her open front door.

  Grandma cries in my arms, and Mr. Donaldson lies bloody and whimpering in the fetal position on our sidewalk. Everybody stares at us, but nobody does anything.

  Frustration and anger swell inside me. Is there any common sense left in the world, or has everyone become frightened, useless drones who are unable to do anything of their own mind—captives of their own stupidity?

  Must I do everything myself?

  “For the love of God,” I scream, “someone call 911!”

  CHAPTER NINE

  OLD SERGEANT BRECKINRIDGE sits across from me in an old wooden chair behind an old wooden desk in a small wood-framed office in the middle of the second floor of the Mount Herod Police Department. His office is lined with windows on four sides. Unfortunately, the view in all four directions is of just more desks.

  Pock-faced Officer Roger Gordon enters, hands the sergeant a sheet of paper, and walks out, ignoring Jeremy and me the entire time.

  Sergeant Breckinridge studies the page. He looks at me from over the top of his wire-rimmed glasses. “Your grandmother would like you to be temporarily turned over to the care of Mrs. Ennis McGovern. Do you know her? Is she a relative?”

  Jeremy, dressed awkwardly in a coat, pajamas, and canvas shoes like myself, sits in the chair next to me. He raises his head at the mention of Mrs. McGovern’s name but says nothing. He recognizes the name of our neighbor—and the woman from whom he has been stealing Internet service.

  “She’s a neighbor,” I say softly. “We have no relatives. Only Grandma, and how is she?”

  Sergeant Breckinridge deposits the page amongst a disheveled collection of other papers on his desk. “Your grandma’s going to be OK. She’s awake and talking, obviously, but the hospital wants to keep her overnight as a precaution.”

  “Can I talk to her?”

  “Later, I’m sure.”

  “How much later?” Jeremy asks.

  Sergeant Breckinridge shrugs. “That’s up to the hospital.”

  “What about Mr. Donaldson? How’s he?”

  “The hospital is working on contacting his daughter now. They said she lives in Pensacola—or something like that.”

  “Palmetto. Is he OK?”

  “He’s alive. That’s about all I can tell you. Must’ve been quite a nest he stumbled into. Have you had problems with spiders before?”

  If Jeremy wants to spill everything to the sergeant about the black-eyed kids, I’d let him, but we both know better than to waste what little energy we have left trying to convince anyone of what we saw. Even Grandma never saw their faces and wouldn’t necessarily even draw a direct connection between the black-eyed kids and the spiders. Even if she did, the doctors and police would write off her account as delusional due to the combination of her age and the injuries she suffered in the spider attack. The same goes for Mr. Donaldson, who’s likely in far worse shape than Grandma at the moment.

  The Mount Herod police have been to our house this week more times than I can remember, yet they could do nothing to prevent sweet, blameless Grandma from getting hurt. They failed to protect my grandmother, the love of my life and my rescuer, the only one in the world who ever cared about Jeremy and me.

  Or maybe I failed her.

  Everything changes from this point forward. All I want from the doctors is for them to get Grandma healthy. From the police, I want nothing.

  “No,” I say dully.

  Sergeant Breckinridge shifts in his chair and pulls a handkerchief from his back pocket. Draping the handkerchief over his index fingers, he jams his fingertips up his nose and wiggles his stubby, hairy fingers as if he’s scratching an itch.

  “So,” he continues, his voice now nasally and stifled from the two fingers shoved up his nose. “I’m going to have the clerk call…Mrs. McGovern…and make arrangements for her to pick you up here at the station.”

  He blows his nose into the handkerchief, inspects it, rolls it into a ball, and returns it to his pocket. “She’ll become the hospital’s primary contact, and she will be able to tell you anything you need to know about your grandma from this point forward.”

  “She doesn’t drive,” Jeremy says.

  The sergeant’s eyebrows descend into a V. “Say again?”

  “Mrs. McGovern doesn’t drive. Her dorky son drives her everywhere, and good luck getting him out of bed.”

  Sergeant Breckinridge and Jeremy’s conversation fades into the office walls as I recall the nightmare that played out on our front lawn two hours ago.

  After someone—I don’t know who—finally called 911, two police cars, an ambulance, and a fire truck all arrived within five minutes. Three paramedics tended to Mr. Donaldson, fearful he had suffered so many bites that he could go into shock or cardiac arrest.

  Grandma sat on the curb next to the ambulance in the street. Tearful and dazed, comforted by neighbors I barely knew, she allowed a paramedic to clean the blood and spider remains from her face and hands. Aside from the spider bites and the fact the incident seemed to add another twenty years to the creases already in her face, her overall health appeared intact.

  One of the patrol cars which arrived carried Officers Coolidge and Gordon. Pressed again for yet another statement, Jeremy and I told them the spider attack had followed the return of the children. We explained what had happened as objectively as we could, trying not to inject the idea we believed anything supernatural had occurred for fear it would further discredit us. Even so, the officers still looked at us doubtfully as they recorded everything we said.

  Of course, none of the neighbors saw the black-eyed kids. The two shifty children had slipped away into the shadows of the trees and homes lining the street before the first neighbor ever stepped outside. The police had decided on their own that Mr. Donaldson had stumbled into a massive spiders’ nest on the front lawn, and Grandma was injured trying to help him. Jeremy once told me Ockham's razor is the primary guiding philosophy of police investigation. The simplest explanation is the most likely explanation. I wonder how many cases they botch every year due to it.

  Once the paramedics stabilized Mr. Donaldson, they placed him and Grandma on gurneys and loaded them both into the ambulance. After the police allowed us to retrieve our coats, shoes, and a house key from inside, we rode with Officers Coolidge and Gordon to the police station to be babysat while the ambulance took Grandma and Mr. Donaldson to the hospital emergency room.

  We've been apart ever since. Once the police found out the hospital intended to keep
Grandma for longer than just a few hours, they began hunting Mount Herod for someone—anyone—to take us off their hands. They must’ve finally convinced someone at the hospital to break into Grandma’s ward and ask her what to do with us. Her response indicated her desperation to find us a place to stay.

  Stiff-mannered Mrs. McGovern is about as prepared to take care of us as the old wooden desk sitting between the old sergeant and me. Mrs. McGovern’s withdrawn middle-aged son, Dooley, lives with her under the guise of a caretaker, but Jeremy and I have always suspected it’s he who’s still under the care of his doting mother. Worse still, peculiar Dooley shares his personality with the same aforementioned desk.

  In the past, Grandma had told us we’d live with Mr. Donaldson if anything ever happened to her, and that was agreeable to Jeremy and me mostly because the only other option was foster care, something we were able to avoid the first time around.

  In and of itself, foster care doesn’t scare us. It’s the fear of being separated from one another that frightens me. Despite how often and how much he frustrates me—like freezing on the front porch when I needed him to call 911—I can’t imagine a day apart from Jeremy. My little brother needs me.

  Mr. Donaldson promised Grandma he’d never separate us, and with that he’d gained Grandma’s trust. All of this, of course, was contingent on us losing Grandma while we were still under her guardianship, and the plans were made under the unspoken and incorrect presumption that no event would actually occur to force anyone to see the plan through. Regardless, contingency plans never seem to come off correctly anyway, and this was no exception. Grandma never considered both she and Mr. Donaldson would fall on the same day.

  Now, desperate to put a roof over us as soon as possible, Grandma had been forced to make a decision under duress from a hospital bed. As a result, we are about to be turned over to Mount Herod’s version of the Bate’s Motel.

  I emerge from the fog of contemplation to hear Sergeant Breckinridge say, “I’m going to ask the two of you to wait for Mrs. McGovern in the lobby.”

  After a mind-numbing forty-five minute wait in the lobby, we’re finally on our way to the McGovern household, riding behind a mesh cage in the cramped backseat of Officers Coolidge and Gordon’s patrol car.

  “I knew they wouldn’t come get us,” Jeremy says, trying to get comfortable on the backseat’s hard plastic bench.

  Mrs. McGovern eventually picked up Sergeant Breckinridge’s call but apparently refused to come get us at such an hour. We sat in the lobby watching a parade of drunks and druggies file through the police station one after the other until Mrs. McGovern convinced the sergeant to have a patrol car drop us off at her house.

  The sun still hides somewhere below the eastern horizon. The front seat of the patrol car is afire with glowing digital displays, and according to one of them, it’s 4:39 a.m. A laptop computer has been mounted to the dash and currently displays a GPS map of the streets of southern Mount Herod. The light streaming from the screen casts eerie, twisted shadows across the car’s interior and the officers’ faces, adding to the night’s dreamlike grip.

  When we pull in to the McGovern’s driveway, I absorb the surreal visual of our unlit house next door. It’s as if we were transported one hundred years into a heartbreaking future. Set against the starry blue-black early-morning sky, our house appears long abandoned and lonely…haunted.

  Beneath widely-dispersed, transparent streaks of night-pink clouds, Officer Coolidge escorts Jeremy and me through the cold night to the McGovern’s porch where she knocks on the door. Officer Gordon waits in the car, despising us.

  Butterflies take flight in my stomach at the sound of footfalls from within the small square single-story home, and soon Mrs. McGovern opens the front door. Standing in the doorway in a yellow and white striped nightgown with her silver hair standing all on end like an elderly clown, the old woman displays a sly smile and says, as if she wasn’t expecting us: “My, my. Now who do we have here?”

  “Mrs. McGovern?” Officer Coolidge asks.

  The old woman nods. “Yes.”

  Officer Coolidge places her hands on Jeremy and my shoulders. “This is Abigail and Jeremy. Your neighbors.”

  “Abby,” I say, correcting Officer Coolidge.

  Only Grandma calls me Abigail.

  Mrs. McGovern chuckles and hushes Officer Coolidge with a wave of her hand. “Oh, I know these two. Come in. Come in.”

  Inside, the foreign stink of an unfamiliar home nearly gags me. Beneath our feet is a small tile floor that’s been cut into the living room carpet to pose as a foyer. To my left is a narrow door I presume is the coat closet. Forward and to my right extends the living room. Beyond the living room sits Mrs. McGovern’s kitchen, from which a hallway presumably leading to the bedrooms branches off.

  “Why don’t the two of you have a seat on the davenport while I talk to the nice police lady?”

  I’ve no idea if Officer Coolidge appreciates being called ‘police lady,’ nor do I know what a davenport is, but Mrs. McGovern has indicated the sofa, so Jeremy and I awkwardly drift over to it and sit down on its boulder-hard cushions.

  My eyes wander over the formal decor surrounding me. Swirling green carpet. Cream-colored walls. Dark wood-trimmed furniture.

  Bulky chocolate-brown curtains cover the windows while a border of black chair rail moulding encircles the entire room. Above us, hanging over the sofa, is a rectangular green and orange watercolor painting as large as the sofa itself. It appears to be of an ancient colosseum.

  Jeremy whispers, “I don’t want to stay here.”

  Neither do I.

  “It’s just for a day,” I assure him. “The hospital will probably let Grandma out tomorrow.”

  Mrs. McGovern and Officer Coolidge glance over to us from their conversation. I flash them a wide, fake, tight-lipped smile.

  I lean into Jeremy. “When the sun comes up, we’ll go back home to change clothes. While we’re there, I want you to IM Tommy Wexler and tell him I want to meet the cemetery boy.”

  Jeremy stares at me with wide eyes. “Really?”

  “Don’t make a big deal out of it or I’ll change my mind. I saw their faces clearly tonight. There were no shadows, no tricks of light. Their eyes were solid black, no whites, no pupils. I want to know who they are and what they want. If the cemetery boy is the only one who can tell me that, set me up.” I look down at the ugly carpet as one final thought occurs to me. “They somehow caused those spiders to attack, and they hurt Grandma.”

  Mrs. McGovern’s cackling laugh pulls my attention to the front door. Officer Coolidge casually nods and smiles at Jeremy and me before she turns and leaves. Once the door is closed, Mrs. McGovern sets the lock, twists the deadbolt, and fastens the chain. I don’t know if the world’s been locked out or we’ve been locked in.

  “Safe and sound,” she says. She turns, calling into the kitchen, “Dooley, come get the davenport ready for Abigail and Jeremy.”

  I correct her. “It’s ‘Abby.’”

  “Of course, dear.”

  From deep inside the dark kitchen I see a slender shadow stand from a chair at the kitchen table. Creepy Dooley McGovern had been sitting there the entire time. I hadn’t seen him, and I wonder if Officer Coolidge had.

  Slightly slouched, as if his spine’s been weakened from a lifetime beneath the weight of his mother’s authority, Dooley, whose head hosts a sad horseshoe of black bristly hair, enters the living room. He wears a stained gray jogging suit and battered slippers.

  Mrs. McGovern and her son have lived next door to us for as long as I can remember. Although they’re certainly not strangers, I’ve never been in such close quarters with them before nor interacted with them so directly. They are odd, but they seem harmless—at least on the surface.

  Dooley walks up to the sofa and motions with his hand. “You’ll have to move.”

  Jeremy and I quickly scamper out of the way. Dooley removes the sofa cushions and reveals the stee
l frame of a hideaway bed.

  “You’ll need as much sleep as you can get before school,” Mrs. McGovern says.

  I’m stunned. “School? We can’t go to school. Grandma’s in the hospital. I want to see her first thing in the morning.”

  “Oh, my. Well, you certainly must go to school. There’s nothing more important than a child’s education.”

  What’s with this generation that it equates a single day’s school attendance to an entire lifetime of education?

  “My Grandma is more important than a child’s education, and I want to see her.”

  “I work,” Dooley says from behind, pulling the screaming steel bed frame from the recesses of the sofa.

  “Yes, that’s right. Dooley works, and I don’t drive.”

  Jeremy mumbles, “Told you.”

  I fold my arms. I can feel my anger tensing in my shoulders. “Then when are we going to see my grandma?”

  “When Dooley’s done working tomorrow, I suppose. And the day after is Saturday. Certainly then if not tomorrow night. I talked to Rosie on the phone, and she’s going to be fine. Just some spider bites.”

  “You talked to her? I want to talk to her.”

  Mrs. McGovern opens the coat closet and retrieves a blanket and pillow from the top shelf. “You can’t anymore tonight. She told me the doctors were about to give her a sedative and I should make sure the two of you get to school in the morning.”

  Having unfolded the bed and de-wrinkled the yellowing mattress cover with his palms, Dooley meets his mother halfway across the living room to retrieve the bedding.

  “You’ll have to share,” he says to me, and he tosses the bedding onto the hideaway. Redirecting his attention to Mrs. McGovern, he says, “I’m going back to bed, Mom.”

  “You do that, Dooley,” the doting woman says. “You need your rest, too.” Then Mrs. McGovern points accusingly at Jeremy. “You and I, young man, are going to have a talk tomorrow.”