The Curse

by Charles L. Grant

  I should have told him to stay where he was. But it's New Year's Eve; no sacrifice is too great. Stop it, she told herself in the middle of the hallway. There are sayings about people who talk to themselves like that, you know, she thought to herself.

  Flashes of newscasts she had seen in previous winters frightened her in spite of the warnings she gave herself for it: cars trapped in drifts like beached whales in white sand; men, wrapped to their eyes and breathing out smoke, digging down to extricate somnolent citizens buried huddled in their back seats; like a nightmare from Dali, the roads erased and the cars stretched to the horizon with no place to go.

  She hurried back to the living room and, after a moment's indecision, pulled back the drapes and stared at the faint yellow globe on the porch across the street. And as she watched, it flickered once and was extinguished. Lucky you, Alexander Pritchard, she thought. You've no one to wait for anymore. Unkind, she chided herself then. He's not all that bad for a part-time recluse.

  Not long after Syd's last bravado call, Terry had checked through the kitchen's larder and decided that if the storm was going to last very much longer, she would need a few things to keep her husband happy and her own appetite for snacks content (telling herself it was as good an excuse as any for getting out of the house before she drove herself into cutting out paper dolls). And having once decided, she drew on boots, greatcoat, muffler and headscarf, and trudged through the then gentle snowfall toward Pritchard's small grocery just around the corner on Hawthorne Street.

  Most of the children had been out with shovels, cleaning walks and driveways as though they really understood that to delay meant a more difficult job later in the evening, an impossible one in the morning. They waved to her as she passed, taunting her with snowballs and high-pitched challenges; but she only waved back, called out a name or two, and kept on. The slowly shrinking flakes were turning sharp against her cheeks, and the sudden gusts of frigid wind made her gasp and turn her back until the air calmed again.

  She wanted to stop when Bess Griffith poked a dark head over a crude snow wall and offered her a part in building her brother's magnificent fort.

  She was tempted to forget the store and the food when Val and Karen Dorinen dared her to ride their saucer sled on the driveway's ice. She did pause to trade a few poorly aimed snowballs with them, but she did not stop. She wanted to; she had been tempted to, but the cold had begun forays into her bones and aching teeth. Warmth became the only goal, and Pritchard's was the place to get it.

  Opposite the Denbeau house was a narrow trail which cut through the string of empty lots that ran bleakly to the end of The Lane. She had just stepped onto it when she realized the house was oddly dark, and neither walk nor drive had been touched since the snowfall began. She wondered for an anxious moment about the widow and her two teenage children, thought she might turn around and inquire after them. Only thought it, however, as she decided to leave well enough alone. Twice before, on her way to the grocery, Terry had been moved to offer the invalid woman a helping hand, and twice had been taken loudly to task for being pitying. True enough at first, she thought, but the pity had vanished quickly in the torrent of the woman's bile. Of all the families on The Lane, this was the only one that did not bid her and Syd welcome, nor had they taken part in the unofficial and irregular round of parties which were scattered throughout each month. Denver, when asked, had offered an explanation for Mrs. Denbeau's bitterness, and Terry had soon shrugged off what curiosity had remained.

  When she reached Hawthorne Street, thankful for the continual procession of feet that had tamped the trail's snow down to a brown ice, she'd stood for a moment watching the slow traffic and the encouraging mixture of chain rattle and engine roar of the huge yellow-and-black plows that hulked along the curb piling slush out of the way. Syd wouldn't have any trouble here at least, she thought, and tried to run the last hundred yards under the trees already dropping clumps of white too heavy to bear.

  Alec Pritchard's store was all purpose, serving the immediate area with tolerably high prices diluted with gratefully late hours. Pritchard himself was as cotton-strained white and willow-wisp frail as what remained of his hair. His scalp was liver spotted and shining, and his forehead was grotesquely disproportionate to his size—like a ledge punched too far out from a symmetrical hillside. And Terry was convinced that this was what made the old tradesman so gentle. He had to be with that deformity, or else fall into the clichéd role of the neighborhood ogre.

  Once inside the establishment, far smaller than most of The Lane's homes, she had simply wandered along the cramped aisles until winter had fled her taut and raw skin. Pritchard had been seated on the high stool he kept in the middle of the horseshoe counter. He nodded when she arrived, told her as she prowled that he was closing up early because of the storm.

  "I won't be long, Mr. Pritchard. Just need a few things," she said, smiling. "Syd's stuck getting home. I'll want some hot chocolate, a ton at least, for when he finally gets here."

  "Oh, he'll get home all right, Mrs. Guiness." The words were coughed out, as though his larynx was too stiff to work. "It isn't as bad as it looks."

  "Still," she said, "you can't help worrying, can you?"

  He eased off the stool and leaned forward over a ramshackle display of razor blades and garishly bright combs. "I'm telling you as best I can, Mrs. Guiness. Your husband will be home safe and sound. It's the way of it, you see."

  She had shrugged, then nodded and smiled. Though his voice had demanded she believe him, his expression bugged her. She backed away, bumped into the display case reserved for local artisans of pottery and toys, and stiffened. Still smiling. Slowly relaxing. Pritchard had a way, sometimes, that the others found was what they called New England folksy, but Terry only called it the prattling of an old man preparing to back out of the world, leaving behind a trail of unintelligible, and therefore profound, epigrams. Yet there were also times when the fierce color in his cheeks faded, his voice stopped coughing, and she could lean on the counter for hours and listen to his stories of the growth—desecration, he called it—of the area. He was, in the last, lonely.

  Later, when she'd arrived back home, she couldn't help thinking that as much as she enjoyed listening to and gossiping with the old man, there were moments when his stubbornly positive approach to the simple and the complex became annoying. Like his conviction of Syd's safety.

  Like the afternoon, a month back, when she had seen a collection of dolls arranged in the special showcase. In looking closely, she had found one that matched exactly the doll she'd found the day Enfallo first brought them to Number Three. When she mentioned it to the storekeeper, he insisted she had made a mistake. The elder McIntyre had fashioned each one of these himself, he'd said, and since they were being sold as a set, what she had found in the lot could only have been a similar, manufactured toy; there was no possibility that it could have been the same one. There was no use in arguing, his tone commanded, and she hadn't. Several days later, when she realized she hadn't asked what the set was selling for, she returned to the store and found in their place a set of scale antique automobiles clumsily carved from what looked to her like a discarded collection of a child's building blocks. Pritchard had been close-mouthed about who had purchased the dolls, admitting only that it was someone passing through from Pennsylvania.

  "I dislike mysteries," she said to the empty room, instantly regretting the sound of her voice. At best, the house was an ideal size for two people to live in and, when one of them wished to be alone, to be lost in temporarily. But when either half of the pair was out, it became cavernous to the point of nightmare. The silence she enjoyed while Syd was working became wind tunnels for stray breezes to expand into hurricanes. The serenity grew cracks that separated into branches of juniper scratching against an outside wall, the periodic thunk of the furnace in the basement, the off-key hum of the second-hand refrigerator.

  She circled the room to touch each piece of furniture as a
charm, then returned to the kitchen to put the kettle on. And as she cradled the cup in her hand, she decided, the steam whistle piercing would be too much to take while she was alone. Anger masked her nervousness, and she walked quickly to her study, deliberately coming down hard on her heels to drive away her imagination's demons.

  The room, first on the left, was crowded, as she liked it. A broad-topped desk, several painted bookcases, four eye-level rows of veneer shelves Syd had swearingly affixed to the front wall by the window. An easel in front of the window faced the storm, and Terry stepped around it to appraise the sketch she had begun that morning. It was an extrapolation, a guess, a freeform dream of the meadow in spring, tinted in green, based on yellow. There was no book to fit it yet, there had been none at all since her last assignment had been completed several weeks before they gave up the apartment. Publishing, too, was affected by the slump, and those who had generally asked for her collaboration first were not producing. She reached out a hand to straighten the stiff paper she liked to use, and felt beneath her fingers the fear that what little popularity she'd enjoyed in the industry was starving. The same old story, she thought as she toyed with a worn piece of charcoal, the eternal march from the promising young newcomer to can you tell me whatever happened to what's-her-name.

  As she stretched her hand to the sketch, she saw her watch and realized she'd better get cracking on a prayer for eight. Then a thought as the charcoal hovered without touching: as long as she was going to wallow in such morbid moods—and to pass the time, Theresa, admit it—she reached for the telephone nestled in the desk's clutter and dialed her favorite number.

  Madeleine Duchette was the children's editor Theresa had happened upon during her first intrusion with portfolio and hopes—and she had seldom left once Duchette had seen what she had been doing. It was the editor's patience, in fact, that eventually led to her first substantial contract whose royalty clauses had enabled her to buy without overly worrying what she was doing to Syd's painfully advanced budget. She'd been putting off the call for days now, afraid that Madeleine would say in her pseudo-London accent: Terry, you're a very talented woman, and we're all quite pleased with your progress here at the house. But let's have a look at the record, love, if you don't mind, thanks very much. You still need a bit of seasoning, you see. A bit of freshening up. A vacation from trying so hard, if you hear me correctly. The Golly series went well, of course, but the last two books about that creature in Connecticut did not come up to your standards at all. Not at all. I think we will remainder them.

  It was always far easier to blame the illustrator for the books the children disliked. Terry had learned that well enough, and early.

  While she waited for the connection to be completed, she stared at the window and wished she had been able to put up curtains instead of blinds. Even the royalties were conspiring against her this month. The line was busy, and Terry hated herself for being relieved as she quickly hung up.

  A moment later the telephone rang, startling her. Her hands washed dryly in front of her. Syd, she thought instantly, and immediately the house became cold. It rang again, and she picked it up. "Hello, Syd?"

  She frowned. There was no dial tone. Someone was clearly on the other end, but she could hear nothing. "Syd, is that you? I can't hear you, darling."

  Still nothing. The line seemed hollow, like a well long deserted by man and water.

  The thoughts came machine-gun rapid, each deadlier than the last. He's dead. The police. A hospital. A stranger, calling from a roadside booth to say he'd found the car overturned in a ditch. Under a bridge. At the bottom of a dry riverbed. It was half buried in snow, Syd's hand frozen to the steering wheel he had covered in leather the summer before.

  "Syd?" Empty. An autumn street hissing dead leaves. When no one responded to further prodding, she slammed the receiver down and pulled at her hair, her blouse, the rope belt at her waist.

  Less than half a minute later, it rang again. She thought of not answering, not playing the game somebody obviously thought was funny and clever. There was always that possibility, however, that it could be about Syd. It was too much to ignore.

  This time there was static. Intermittent. Like someone talking and waiting for an answer, she thought. "Syd?"

  Static.

  "Syd, I can't understand you. There's a lot of damned interference on the line."

  Static bursts. One word almost clear: Theresa.

  "Syd, I'm sorry but I can't understand a word you're saying. It must be the storm. Syd, can you hear me? Can you?"

  Static. Prolonged. Nothing she could recognize.

  "Syd, listen to me. Can you hear me? Listen, hang up and try again, all right? Hang up and try the number again."

  Her fingers ached where they gripped the mouthpiece, her ears strained to sift sense through the constant noise. The effort was pushing a headache up the back of her head, and she was about ready to cry. It wasn't fair not being able to talk to him!

  "Syd, are you coming home? Are you stuck, Syd? Is there anything the matter?"

  Static. One word: Theresa. Static.

  The doorbell chimed. "Oh, damn!" She vacillated, made to put the receiver down on the desk, then shouted into the hall, "Come in, it's open!" To the phone, "Syd, there's someone here. Please hang up and try again, okay?"

  A single word, clear now, echoing in the well: Theresa.

  The doorbell? The phone went dead, and the hollow sensation returned. Inexplicably frightened, she hung up and ran for the front. Panting, more from nerves than exertion, she opened the door slowly, just enough to see the woman standing under the porch light.

  Terry stared, initially disappointed it wasn't her Syd; then, suddenly mindful of the storm's cold, she threw open the door and grabbed the woman's arm, hustling her back into the house before returning to the porch to drag in the suitcase.

  Once the door was shut and the chill had left to moisten the insides of the windows, she leaned heavily against the wall and folded her arms over her breasts. "He got laid off again, right?"

  Pegeen shrugged out of her coat and draped it carefully over one arm. Her face, as pale as her sister's, was splotched with violent pink where the wind had penetrated the gray scarf that covered her from nose to neck. When she took off her beret, the short red hair refused to fall into place, and she pushed at it listlessly. Her head was down, but what Terry had first thought was snow melting on her cheeks, she now saw were the tears that prevented her from speaking.

  There was a prolonged, agonized moment when Terry didn't think she had the strength for more crises that day, then the grief that she faced galvanized her into motion. She grabbed her sister's shoulder for a quick and hopefully reassuring hug. Half pushing, mostly pulling, then she moved her down the hall into the bedroom where she goaded Peg into stripping off her wet clothes and donning the sweater and pants outfit she had received for Christmas.

  And she talked. Incessantly. Quietly, as she brushed at Pegeen's hair. Soothing, as she wiped her face gently with a mint-scented cream lotion and brought her to the kitchen table. She knew it was foolish, that nothing at all she was saying was registering, but Pegeen's continued silence only sparked her tongue to vault to new subjects, old jokes, gossip her sister wouldn't possibly understand because she didn't know the neighbors.

  Why don't you shut up, she ordered herself as she poured them both steaming dark tea unhesitantly laced with brandy. Haven't got time. I'm too scared.

  "So this old Indian—you should see him, Peg. He must be two feet tall and looks like a mummy. So this old man sits on a corner no matter what room he's in and talks to himself. Denver—he's the one I told you about, the one Syd's more friends with than me—Denver says it's because he's finally gone senile, thinks he's back at the tribe or something. But I'll tell you, kid, it's damned spooky. And how Mary—that’s Denver's daughter-in-law—how she puts up with it I'll never know. You should meet Mary, really. She never says a word, but when she does, everybody stops what
they're doing and listens. Of course, I don't always understand. . . ."

  Peg was hunched over her cup, her palms around it as though it were a fire. Terry pushed a plate of powdered doughnuts toward her and finally, when there was no response, reached out to tap her forehead lightly. "Hey listen, kid, I can't keep this gab up forever, you know. It's nice of you to come and keep me company while Syd's gone and all, but don't you think you ought to sort of hold up your end of the conversation?"

  She sat back and turned her saucer slowly, watching the steam twist toward the single light embedded in the ceiling. Though Pegeen was four years younger, her figure was larger in all respects, and the childhood jealousy that Terry had never quite shaken surged weakly as she looked at the curves beneath clothing. Her sister, she admitted, was actually far more attractive than she, despite the fact that her father had always thought Pegeen looked more Scots than Irish. Somehow her face had not remained starvation thin, and her nose had filled out and uplifted slightly, while Terry's retained her mother's sharp angles and blunted tip. Pegeen's chin, Terry continued without knowing why, blended roundly, not jutting just enough to interrupt the jawline and call attention to the family's broad-lipped mouth.

  More attractive, perhaps, but much more vulnerable. Pegeen had married at nineteen because she had been positive she had known what mature love was and had found it resting on the blacksmith shoulders of Vic Hogan. Four years later she was struggling to keep the image intact while the substance flickered into extinction, like a lighted candle before the wind. Terry herself had known Syd since their common New England college days, but they had put off marriage until two years after graduation while she learned that daily bread was harder to come by than a smile from a harried city cop.

  Now that's unfair, she thought as Peg began visibly to stir out of her shell. You didn't marry Syd so you could eat well, you know. Nor did you because you needed a decent roof to keep you dry while you tried to break into a field as competitive as anything any man could possibly imagine. And in talking to herself, almost forgetting Pegeen's presence, she wondered for the first time exactly how unselfish she really was, really had been.