by Vic Kerry
He glanced into the rearview mirror. The taillights of the car that had approached from Maple Avenue shot up Raiders Street. The car seemed to be accelerating. The taillights looked familiar to him. They were not modern lights but off a classic automobile from a time when Detroit made everything a little too auspicious. He hoped that Corey was either well on his way or still sitting in the parking lot, because whoever that driver was meant business.
That hope drifted away when a loud crash tightened his guts. It was the loudest car crash he’d ever heard. Alan’s stomach sank as he looked back into his rearview mirror. The orange glow of fire flickered from the school.
Josh got comfortable in bed ready to delve into the book Jessica had brought with her. Christine lay ignored on the night table. As he opened Mrs. Windham’s book to the story called “Hazel’s Curse and the Homecoming Dance,” he hoped Christine didn’t decide to make its fiction reality and attack him in a jealous rage. A chuckle escaped him in spite of himself. A killer book would make a good Stephen King novel.
The story started with a black and white picture of the old Pinehurst High School gym. A little cartoon ghost floated over the title of the story on the page opposite the picture.
Hazel’s Curse and the Homecoming Dance
The once sleepy town of Pinehurst is nestled in the dwindling foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in northwest Alabama. The small unassuming town holds a dark secret and a haunted past. It is a tale told in two parts. One involves a curse left by an old slave woman named Hazel. The other is a gory tale of mass murder and lynch mobs in the Jim Crow 1950s.
It is said that after the Civil War, there lived an old black woman named Hazel. Most of the folks around the Harrington Plantation near the town Mount Pisgah, now called Pinehurst, believed this woman to be a voodoo priestess and witch doctor. Many people from the surrounding county would come to her for cures from a toothache to the gout. She seemed to cure them all. Until a man named Silas McAdams came to her for help to cure an ailment his sister had.
Josh stopped reading as soon as he saw his last name. Had Jessica read the story and passed it on to him for that specific reason, or because the story took place in their town? He skimmed over the next few paragraphs. The author’s lolling prose had its time and place, but this was not one of them. He needed to get to the meat of the story.
But Hazel was not able to cure McAdams’s sister’s condition with her powders and potions, according to the story. She told Silas that she needed to see his sister in person.
Silas was by no means a man given to messing with former slaves. He and his family were already outsiders in the community for being rather freshly off the boat from Scotland. Their deep accents made them hard to understand, and the simple folk of Mt. Pisgah were suspicious of them because they came after the surrender of General Lee and might be carpetbaggers. Despite the stigma it might put upon his family, Silas agreed to take the old woman to visit with his sister.
The meeting occurred on a stormy afternoon in October. The day had been unusually warm, a precursor to the storms. Silas’s sister lay in her bed at the back of the very small house that they shared with their mother. They found her in a full fit of a seizure.
Hazel took out a special mixture of roots and herbs she had made to help stop the disease and placed it underneath the sister as she lurched in the fit. Then the old voodoo priestess chanted and danced around on the floor for a few minutes. Finally, she drew symbols on the floorboards in chalk.
“Give this dram to her two hours after the fit passes,” Hazel said to Silas, giving him one last concoction.
As thunder rolled in the distance, Hazel left to walk back to her shack at the Harrington Plantation. Silas followed her instructions. Two hours after the seizure ceased, he forced the dram down his sister’s throat. Instead of getting better, she died.
Josh looked at the photograph under that section of text. It was of an elaborate tombstone from the local cemetery. It was a broken column with a wreath carved into it. C. W. McAdams was carved in the base. They had taken flowers there when he was kid.
The caption underneath the picture told him exactly why Jessica had given him the book. It read “The grave of Charlotte Winifred McAdams, Silas’s sister, in Pinehurst Hill Cemetery.” A cold chill ran though him.
Josh skimmed over the rest of the story. Delving too deeply might freeze him to death. As he suspected, Silas went to Hazel’s house that night and lynched her. As she died, she cursed not only him but the town because others in the community had helped him dispatch her. All the town needed was a little motivation to rid themselves of a witch, even if she had helped them many times. A growing unease built up in Josh’s stomach. Most of the stories that Kathryn Tucker Windham wrote about in her books were campfire tales. Every now and then one appeared to have more truth to it. He thought about the courthouse in Pickens County, where a ghostly face could clearly be seen in the window. His dad pointed it out every time they drove to the Tombigbee River to fish.
The next page picked up with the contemporary story that the title of the book promised.
The old witch’s curse gave everyone forty years before she would return in reincarnated form. With her dying breath, she said it was so people would forget about it and never expect it to strike. And so nothing happened for years after that fateful, stormy night the people of Mount Pisgah lynched the old woman. However, forty years to the day after old Hazel cursed the town, a devastating tornado hit, destroying everything in a mile wide swath. It had spun off of a storm that many survivors described as coming from nowhere. Obituaries recorded in the newspapers of the day listed among the dead a few of the citizens alive at the time of the lynching. Others were the young descendants of people who participated in the lynching. Silas McAdams, who was 80, was found with a hemp rope wrapped around his neck. A self-styled preacher with a traveling gypsy revival, known as Reverend Junkins, was killed as well. This is only worth mentioning because a variety of strange articles were found in his belongings, including locks of hair and what locals described as voodoo dolls. When the town was rebuilt, the citizens called it Pinehurst for the original founding family of the town. Many thought that the destruction of the town would have appeased the old curse, but that did not seem to be the case.
The feeling of dread and anticipation wound tightly in him. Even Christine, written by the skillful hand of a suspense master, couldn’t wind such a tight wire.
Forty years to the day after that horrible tornado, a far more devastating tragedy hit the town of Pinehurst. On the eve of the big Homecoming dance in 1956, a group of students from the high school and one of their teachers were murdered in cold blood. Although the murderer was never brought to trial, local townspeople killed a suspect.
Tobias Abernathy, a black youth whose parents worked for the Harrington family, and who was the only non-white student at the local high school, was lynched for the crime. He was captured by a group of three local men, one of whom was a descendant of Silas McAdams.
Locals say that the curse is hogwash, but they talk about it only in hushed voices out of the earshot of anyone. A few openly say that the vengeful spirit of Hazel drove the boy to kill the students in revenge. Most all of them wait to see what the next forty-year anniversary might bring.
Josh closed the bright pink cover of the book and tossed it across the room into the chair at his desk. He wanted the book away from him. It was sinister. The book probably came into existence only for the anniversary. Paranoid thoughts about the author being a witch in her own right bothered him even more, because Joshua didn’t believe in ghosts or witches.
He grabbed the Stephen King novel and delved back into it. The comfort of a fictional story was what the doctor ordered. It seemed strange that an author recognized for instilling terror into people would help him feel at ease, but there it was. After a while and several chapters, Josh fell asleep. His bedside lamp stayed on all night.
Chapter Twelve
195
6
Three weeks after the Massacre
Charlotte sat in her backyard under the shade of a magnolia tree. The musky smell of the tree filled her nostrils. It had been like this for a few days, ever since her mind started working again even if her body still wouldn’t cooperate. After giving her the series of bitter pills the doctor had prescribed, Mother would help her dress as if she were going to school, and would lead her out to sit for an hour under the tree before taking her back inside. Today, Charlotte wore a heavy sweater. It wasn’t a letterman sweater or even her cheerleading equivalent. It was a long woolen one her mother wore to town on brisk autumn days.
The sun shone brightly in the November morning. She wished that maybe her mother would have set her in the sun. The shade was too cool, but the sun would have warmed her perfectly. A ray of it hit her ankle and charmed it with jovial radiance. No matter how much she yelled at herself from the depths of her own mind, Charlotte couldn’t make herself move or speak on her own, but in a little while her mother would come back out and help her stand and walk back into the house. Sometime after that, she’d be spoon-fed lunch, usually a hearty soup which didn’t need much chewing. Once the food was in her mouth, things seemed to run on instinct. She could chew some and swallow with no problem.
The back screen door slammed. Charlotte couldn’t see who it was. The footsteps coming up behind her rustled in the leaves. Over the last few days, as she became less overwhelmed by all the stimuli entering her mind, she’d learned her family by the heaviness of their steps and cadence of their stride through the unraked leaves. In the autumn, keeping the front and back yards tidy was her chore. Her folks decided not to do it for her, perhaps as motivation to make her get up and do something. They moped around so much they probably couldn’t do it. Depression gripped her parents. She’d seen her daddy come in from work; even in her current near-catatonic state, Charlotte could tell that he looked like he had aged fifteen years in the last few weeks.
Now the person behind her got into his actual true stride. Sim had come for a visit. He’d started coming more frequently the last few days, and he always brought her something.
“Hey, Charlotte, it’s me, Sim,” he said as if he was talking to a little kid. “I brought you something.”
He bent down so that his face took up most of her vision. Charlotte noticed that her brother had started looking a lot older too. Ever since he and Sally had divorced, he’d begun taking on the qualities of a craggy old man, but her brother looked in his mid-forties now instead of shy of thirty. He held out a very beautiful, long-stemmed pink rose and put it in her hand, forming her fingers around the stem, avoiding hitting any of the pricks. Her hand would hold it there until someone changed the position.
“I brought the boys with me. I’ve got them this weekend. They’ve been asking about their Aunt Charlotte. Alan seems very concerned. He’s a bit older than his age would tell.” Sim smiled. “Would you like to see them? It’s been a while.”
Of course she wanted to see them. She loved her nephews much more than she did her brother, especially now. Every day he would come and leave a gift, whether a beautiful rose or a stuffed teddy bear. Charlotte knew what he’d done. They, her family, her friends, and other townsfolk thought she couldn’t hear as well as all the other stuff she couldn’t do, but nothing slipped past her attention after a few doses of the medication her mother dissolved in a glass of water every morning and evening. He and his goofy friends had caught poor Tobias and hanged him. There was no way that Tobias had killed her friends. The extremeness of the murders was too much for one person to pull off. Plus, he was a gentle soul that only she truly understood.
“I’m going to bring them out,” Sim said. “I’ll be right back, and they won’t stay too long to bother you.”
He ran back to the house. The screen door creaked opened but didn’t slam shut. Her brother yelled into the house for the boys. Usually, her two nephews would bound down the stairs with lots of rambunctious boy-noise. Now, their hard-soled shoes clicked on the wooden back steps as they walked softly down them. Sim, and probably her mother, had instructed them on how to act around their crazy Aunt Charlotte. They probably told the boys to act like they were in church.
The screen door slammed, and feet shuffled through the leaves. One of the boys, most likely little Mikey, kicked at them. Sim hushed him down in a whisper. They walked into her view. Her bother had his hands clasped down on her nephews’ shoulders, holding them fast. They looked cute, overdressed as if they were going to church. Each had on a wonderful little coat too warm for the weather. Mikey fidgeted a bit. Alan stood rod stiff. Both had precocious little dimpled smiles on their faces. Alan’s cowlick stuck straight up from the crown of his head like Dennis the Menace in the comic strips. Mikey remained pudgy like a toddler despite nearly being old enough for school.
“Boys,” Sim urged them.
“Hello, Aunt Charlotte,” her nephews said at the same time. Alan’s voice was clear. Mikey still had a little-boy lisp.
She longed to say hello back. They both seemed to have a longing on their face that said they did as well. The doctor must have told her family to bring them by to see if it would help break her out of this state. The doctor and her family had been talking about sending her down to Bryce Hospital in Tuscaloosa until she started walking and talking on her own. He’d given her mother and father little hope for her recovery. This had to be the last ditch effort. Everyone knew how much she loved those two boys, especially Alan.
“Aunt Charlotte, they said that you were gone someplace in your head and couldn’t find your way back out,” Alan rubbed her hand that didn’t have the rose in it.
Sim squeezed his hand hard on the boy’s shoulder. Her favorite nephew flinched. His daddy was such a big bully. She hated to think how mean he was to his sons even at that age. He never showed it around her, but she could only imagine.
“All right,” Sim said with very tight lips. “We’re going to go back inside now.”
“No, daddy,” Alan said. “We just got here. She hasn’t told us a knock-knock yet.”
Sim jerked on his sons and started away from Charlotte. “She ain’t going to tell you a knock-knock joke. We talked about this.”
“Why?” Mikey asked.
“Because she can’t,” Sim sounded angrier. “We’re going back inside so these boys don’t bother you.”
“No,” protested Alan.
“Yes.”
Charlotte concentrated all the effort she could. He didn’t need to take her nephews away so quickly. Even if they couldn’t have their usual interaction with each other, their presence alone made her feel better. Now Sim was going to take them away. They wouldn’t be waiting inside, playing in his old bedroom when they brought her back inside. They’d be gone, not to be seen again until probably Christmas, when they would be whisked away as quickly to keep from bothering her. She needed those little rays of sunshine to warm her on this chilly day, in her cold existence.
“Come on boys,” he said.
“No.” Charlotte barely forced the word out of her lips. She wasn’t even sure it was loud enough to overpower the sound of the rustling of the leaves.
Sim stopped and stared at her as if into her soul. “Did you say something?”
“No.” It came out louder but still a whisper. “No.” Her voice gained strength. “No.” It was a spoken word, soft, but not whispered.
Sim let go of the boys and ran toward the house yelling for his Momma and Daddy. Alan and Mikey smiled. Even at their young ages, they recognized what had happened. Alan took her free hand again and squeezed it.
Knock. Knock, she said to herself and answered who’s there. Your Aunt Charlotte. Alan looked at her and laughed as if he had heard the joke.
Chapter Thirteen
Alan sat at his kitchen table. A glass of whiskey sat in front of him. The glass sweated as the ice melted, watering down the booze. Diane had poured it for him not long after he arrived home around 11 p.
m. He’d taken two sips from the glass. The smell of whiskey usually made him queasy. He only kept it in the house because according to his father, it was a man’s drink. After that evening, he needed a little bit of the manly bravado that a slug of whiskey brought.
Diane sat across from him in silence. Her glass of hot tea had gone cold a long time ago. She, too, had barely touched her drink. The grandmother clock in the living room chimed midnight—the witching hour, when nothing good ever happened.
“We probably need to go to bed,” his wife said. “We still have to go to work tomorrow. I’m sure it’s going to be a long day for you.”
“You’re right. I was hoping that this drink would make me drowsy. I’m not sure I can sleep.”
“Try.” She stood with her teacup in her hand. She took his glass of booze and put them both into the sink.
Alan stood and followed his wife out of the kitchen, turning the light out as he went. As they crossed through the living room, his shocked imagination flashed police lights outside his window. The real lights had dazzled him a long time that evening, and his mind didn’t seem to want it to drift away.
“Do you think I should wake Thomas and Josh up to tell them?” he asked.
“It can wait until tomorrow.”
“I don’t want them to find out at school. They need to be prepared for this kind of thing. He was on the team with Thomas and was Josh’s classmate.”
Diane stopped at the base of the stairs. “As I remember, Josh didn’t like him very much, and Thomas called him, and I quote, ‘douchebag’.”
“The boy’s dead. Have some compassion.”