by The Blumhouse Book of Nightmares- The Haunted City (retail) (epub)
“I am not old,” he said. “I am cursed. The same could be said for you.” The man nursed the whiskey. Savored it. “Mulţumesc, young man. Kindness begets kindness. You have helped me. Now I help you.”
“Only God can help me,” Sam said.
“God doesn’t visit Brooklyn.” The old man swished the whiskey around his dentures.
“The devil does,” Sam said.
“You made a mistake.” The old man pointed at Sam’s iPhone resting on the bar. The picture of their brownstone was visible. “You shouldn’t have bought that house.”
The old man pushed away from the bar and rolled his wheelchair through a curtain of beads across the hallway. Sam gave a glance at the bartender, who was all consumed with the soccer: “Kick the ball, you fucking lama!”
Sam pushed through the beads, walked down the wood-paneled hallway, and found himself in a dilapidated banquet room. Parquet floors. Upholstered booths. A small altar of some kind in the corner. The walls were filled with framed photos of immigrant families from different eras. The old man in the wheelchair was occluded by shadow.
“What do you know about my house?” Sam asked, inching toward him.
“It’s not your house,” the old man said. “You didn’t build it. They did; 1946.”
The old man pointed at the pictures on the wall. A Polaroid from the 1970s of a Romanian wedding. A birthday party. A wake. And there, amidst the sea of Kodak moments: a faded black-and-white photo dated 1946. A dark-haired family of three (husband, wife, young daughter) posed in front of a brownstone: 223 Midwood Avenue. The house looked immaculate. The masonry just completed. The shingles in perfect condition.
“The Minka family,” the old man said. “They got off the boat from Bucharest in 1944. They were rounding our people up. Sending us to Dachau or Treblinka.”
“Jews?”
“Romany. The Roma. Gypsies.”
“You’re a Gypsy?”
“I’m not a unicorn. Don’t sound so surprised. Lots of Gypsies settled in Brooklyn. The diaspora washed us ashore. The Ustaša wanted to wipe us off the face of the earth. The Einsatzgruppen were skinning us alive in the streets. The Gypsies almost went extinct in the Porajmos. Almost. The Jews were considered enemies of the state. The Romany were witches.”
“Witches don’t really exist.”
“We don’t really fly on fucking broomsticks. In America, witches are bedtime stories. In Romania, witches are taxed by the government. They are very real. And very powerful. They poured mandrake in the Danube to curse President Băsescu. And they have cursed you, young man.”
“Are you telling me my house was built by witches?”
“Vrajitoares. The house was inherited by their daughter, Rodica, who lived there until last year. Until the bank foreclosed.”
Sam looked at the photo. The little girl, with dark hair and dark skin, was wearing an amulet necklace. A pointed obelisk. She was holding a doll with a burlap head. A doll that Sam immediately recognized.
“My son found that doll in the house.”
“That is no doll. That is a poppet from Ulmeni.”
“A voodoo doll?”
“Voodoo is for Haitians. But the same principle applies.”
“Like you stick pins in it?”
“Like you break every bone in somebody’s body,” the old man said. “How do you think I ended up in this wheelchair?”
“That little girl did this to you?”
“Rodica. I was the little boy next door. We grew up together. Rodica wanted to get married. I didn’t. Let’s just say she doesn’t handle rejection well. She ruined my body. Ruined my life.”
“My life is just about over too, old-timer. The cops think I’m criminally insane, and I’m starting to think they’re right. I mean, here I am. Talking to you—a geriatric Gypsy in a wheelchair. I can’t believe you expect me to believe this shit. I have to go.”
“It doesn’t matter where you go. She will hunt you down.”
Sam stopped and said, “Why is she doing this, huh? What does she even want?”
“What our people have wanted for centuries. A home. You took it from her. She is taking it back.”
“She took my wife. My child. Can I save them?”
The old man rolled his wheelchair over to a small wooden altar. Votive candles encircled a deck of ancient tarot cards. The old man picked up a card that featured a faded illustration of a round symbol. Circles within a circle.
“That’s it!” Sam said, showing him a cell-phone picture of the symbol. “That’s the mark she made in my basement.”
“This symbol is called a naibu. This is the infernal curse.” The old man flipped the card over, revealing a stanza in Romanian. The curse itself. “She has opened a hole to hell. A door into the darkness.”
“Is there any way to get my family back?”
“The only way to reverse the curse”—the old man hesitated—“is to put the curse on her.”
“Tell me what to do,” Sam said. “Tell me how to find Rodica.”
“First things first. Do you happen to have a goat?”
—
Sam pulled the hoodie over his head and snuck around the corner of Third Street in Gowanus and hurried inside Whole Foods. On the streets, he was a wanted man. In Whole Foods, he was just another customer, blending in with the bearded clientele.
He ordered ten pounds of organic goat meat and waited as the tattooed butcher wrapped the loins in wax paper.
“Sam!” Sam turned to see Rachel, Martha’s friend from undergrad. “I didn’t get to tell you at the party, but your house is so amazing. Please put me on the list if you guys decide to flip it.”
“It’s our house. We’re not leaving.”
“I don’t mean to throw you into the middle of the scrum, but is Martha mad at me? I’ve texted her like two hundred times. She’s not texting me back.”
“She’s gone,” Sam said blankly.
“Where did she go? Astoria? She mentioned she might go see her sister…”
Sam felt Rachel inspecting his appearance. He looked like shit. Like a homeless man on methamphetamine. A man possessed.
“Where did she go, Sam?”
“Martha and Max went to hell,” he said. “But I’m going to bring them back.”
Rachel stared in abject befuddlement as Sam grabbed his goat meat from the butcher’s counter and walked away.
By the time Rachel took out her phone and called the cops, Sam was running out the door.
Sam took the 3 train to Brownsville in the eastern ambit of Brooklyn. The subway car was crowded with Sunday passengers. A couple of Sikhs, some Jamaican nurses, and a Ghanaian woman wearing kente. Sam tried to blend in. It wasn’t working.
Maybe it was the fact that his clothes were caked in black. Maybe it was the smell of the goat meat. Everybody was staring.
Nobody saw what Sam saw. Locusts on the light fixtures.
Sam started to sweat. Panic.
He pushed his way between people when he saw a homeless man in the adjoining subway car holding a cardboard sign: REVELATION 20:14. HELL IS HERE.
Sam reversed direction. Elbowing the crowd. Looking through the glass door, Sam saw that the subway car on the opposing side was empty. There were no people.
There was just a goat.
The goat was covered horns to hoof in black tar, as if it had been christened in motor oil. No one else paid any mind. The goat started shaking. Convulsing. An epileptic seizure.
The goat opened its mouth. A snake emerged, slick with lipids. Then another. Another. The snakes coiled themselves on the subway poles. Hissing.
The goat’s mouth cracked open even wider. A hand emerged. Then a forearm. The hand was wearing a wedding ring. A face emerged, pushing through the dilating trachea. Plastered with placental fluid. It was Martha.
Sam screamed her name and kicked the door. It wouldn’t open.
He felt a hand grab his shoulder, and a hipster with a mullet yanked him around. “Calm down, man. You’r
e scaring people.” Sam frantically looked back at the opposing subway car. Nothing but commuters. The goat was gone. So was Martha.
The train stopped. Suddenly. The hipster lost his balance and staggered back. Sam pushed him and exited the train, wedging himself through the closing doors. A narrow escape.
—
Lugging the goat meat, Sam ran all the way from the Rockaway station, down Dumont, until he ran out of breath in Brownsville. The old man had written her address on the back of the old black-and-white picture of young Rodica Minka and her parents: BROWNSVILLE HOUSING AUTHORITY, 307 BLAKE AVENUE.
The projects weren’t hard to find. There had to be more than twenty run-down buildings crammed into twenty run-down city blocks. The barred windows and fenced-in basketball courts made Sam think more of a penitentiary than subsidized housing. Someone had spray-painted a graffiti mural of Satan. This wasn’t just squalor. This was hell on earth. Sam was in the right place. Somewhere inside this labyrinthine slum, a Romanian witch was about to be deported to the underworld. First he had to find her.
Sam slung the hood over his head and approached the stoop of the first tenement building. A couple of black teens were playing on their PSPs. They made no effort to conceal the guns bulging in their waistbands. Sam decided to risk it and muttered “Eight ball” under his breath. Surprisingly, they let him pass. He did resemble a crack fiend.
He wandered the graffiti-lined hallways of the projects, reverberating with the sound of subwoofer bass and crying babies. He passed a few open doors, catching glimpses of infinitesimally small living quarters. This wasn’t a place you lived. It was a place you waited to die. Just pick your cause of death: Bullets in the stairwell? Rats in the ventilation? Exposed wires dangling from the fluorescents? Sam saw a family of six crammed in one room. The toddlers huddled on a box mattress eating microwave mac and cheese. The smallest boy was wearing a paper-plate mask. Sam kept on walking.
At the end of the hallway, past a web of police tape, Sam saw double doors that led outside, where he could hear music. Flourishes of pastoral guitar. Tambourine. Gypsy music.
Sam followed the cadence outside into a courtyard. It was lightly snowing. There was some kind of event he couldn’t quite see through the clotheslines of laundry. A celebration around an improvised fire pit. About fifty people dressed in old-fashioned raiment of blouses and head scarves. A hirsute man banged a hand drum. A flaxen child ran around with incense. A small man with scoliosis released a chicken from a cage. A drunk guy pushed past Sam, carrying a flask.
“Happy wedding!” the guy said with a Romanian accent. “The lăutari are playing the fuck out of that flute!”
The drunk guy had a cleft-palate scar. The taxi driver who had driven them to Crown Heights. The guy dragged Sam into the wedding festivities and then darted off to dance with a trio of corpulent ladies who were missing several important teeth.
Through the throng of dancing peasants, past the pyretic flames of the fire pit, Sam saw a woman in white. She stared right at Sam. His body tensed. Despite the distance, Sam could see the pointed amulet she wore around her neck. Sam checked the black-and-white photograph. It was the same necklace young Rodica was wearing in 1946. That was her. The witch was here.
The witch was holding Mr. Sticks. Clothes on the line moved in the wind, blocking her momentarily. When she was revealed again, the old woman was holding Max. Max turned and smiled at his dad and locusts came out of his mouth. Sam tried to scream. He could not.
Another gust of wind moved the clothesline again. When the old woman reappeared, Max was gone and the witch was again holding Mr. Sticks.
Rodica had aged well. Even without makeup. She had an ageless, timeless sort of beauty. High cheekbones. Cerulean eyes. The faintest palimpsest of wrinkles. Her shock-white hair was more magisterial than matriarchal.
Sam’s eyes were playing tricks on him. Because, when the clothesline swayed again, Rodica now appeared to be fifty years younger. She was a virginal woman. Barely twenty years old. Wearing a wedding dress. Rodica smiled at Sam and removed her dress.
Against his will, Sam advanced toward her. Polarities of a magnet. She was drawing him in. Blocked by the linens, he could catch only glimpses of her pale skin exposed in the January snow. The outline of her curves silhouetted through the sheets. When the sheets parted again, the woman had become Martha. Sam’s wife was standing naked in the courtyard of a Brooklyn tenement. A circle of blood drawn on her stomach. Martha opened her eyes and two snakes came out of the sockets.
The witch was in his head. Controlling his mind. He had to break the spell. He had a job to do. Sam stuck his hand in the fire pit and screamed. Before anyone could stop him, Sam ran around the corner, between buildings, where they kept the Housing Authority dumpsters.
Making sure the coast was clear, Sam unwrapped the Whole Foods goat meat and smeared the goat blood into a circle on the pavement. He removed the tarot card from his pocket—the tarot card the old man had given him—and made sure the symbols matched. He flipped over the card and stared at the curse written in Romanian. He attempted to enunciate the words and ineffectually repeated the curse. His Romanian accent was wrong. The curse was not working.
At that moment, the taxi driver with the cleft-palate scar came around the bend to take a piss against the dumpsters. Sam had to hurry. He had to invoke the curse before he was lynched by Gypsies.
Sam took out his iPhone and opened Max’s favorite app, Google Translate. One by one, Sam typed the Romanian words from the tarot card into the interface. A male automaton spoke in stilted oratory and Sam repeated the words. Quickly. Quietly.
“Va merge în Iad. Diavolvu va inghiti. Osanda vesnica.”
The taxi driver zipped up and poked his head around the dumpster. Seeing Sam and the blood circle, the man smashed his beer bottle and charged, but not before Sam said the final word: “VESNICA!”
The circle opened. The concrete caved in and an ascendant geyser of tar arose. The guy was ready to slice open Sam’s jugular, but now he stared down, terrified, into the churning whirlpool. He had no time to react as ductile arms protruded from the magma and dragged him down into eternal servitude as Lucifer’s chattel.
Sam dove into the dumpster. He knew what he had wrought. He knew what was about to be unleashed.
A battalion of beasts crawled out of the hellhole, curled into balls of fetal fluid. When they stood, arising on cloven feet, they had to measure eight feet tall. They spread their wings of darkest sable and, opening their mouths in a hyenic war cry, charged.
It wasn’t a battle. It was a crime against humanity. Peering over the edge of the dumpster, Sam caught only fractions of the rampage. The hellion assault was unleashed. One by one, demons dragged people down into the hole. It wasn’t supposed to happen like this, Sam thought. He wanted revenge only on Rodica. Not on innocent bystanders. He didn’t want to depopulate the projects of the Brownsville Housing Authority.
Banshees stormed the tenements and hauled the apartment dwellers into the pit. The gun-toting teenagers stopped playing their PSPs and started taking cell-phone videos of the apocalyptic killing spree. Grainy images of Sodom and Gomorrah in mid-decimation. One boy ran and hopped the fence, but he did not notice the black-winged fowl circling above as it plucked him up and tossed him into the molten gullet.
Sam didn’t see the witch anywhere. He hoped she had met her fate. Sam started to climb out of the dumpster when a bottle of vodka fractured his face. He fell backward, clutching his bloody nose.
The witch hopped into the dumpster with surprising agility. Eyes rabid with rage, Rodica stood over Sam’s helpless body and howled. She raised the broken vodka bottle (sustainably sourced). She was ready to kill Sam.
Sam wasn’t ready to die.
He ripped the amulet from Rodica’s neck and buried the conical talisman into her trachea. Stunned, Rodica dropped the bottle. Blood seeped from her windpipe. She locked eyes with Sam. She didn’t seem afraid. Given where she was about to go,
maybe she should have been.
“Go to hell,” Sam said.
A demon swept down and wrapped Rodica in his wings, stuffing her body inside his marsupial skin pouch. Together they plummeted into the fulminating and fathomless hole. The hole closed. The asphalt was restored. The residual tar receded into the drainpipes.
Sam climbed out of the dumpster and surveyed the damage. A swing set creaking in the wind. A basketball bouncing across midcourt. Bloodstained laundry hanging on the clotheslines. The Brownsville Housing Projects had become a ghost town. This wasn’t Brooklyn. This was Chernobyl. Mass extinction.
—
Back in Crown Heights, Sam opened the front door. The house was back to normal, the way it had been before the curse.
“Martha?” he called out. “Max?”
Not hearing a response, Sam walked from room to room before heading downstairs.
On the concrete, inside the circle symbol, Martha and Max lay on the basement floor. They appeared to be sleeping. Sam knelt down and gently woke them. They stirred, bleary and light blind.
“I had a bad dream,” Max said.
“It’s all done, Mad Max,” Sam said. “The nightmare’s over.”
Dave the dog emerged from behind the washing machine and ran over to Sam, tail wagging, and licked his master’s face.
Martha sat up. “Where are we?”
“Home,” Sam said, embracing his wife and son. “We’re home.”
At that moment, a dozen NYPD officers stormed the basement and surrounded the Rathbone family. Their guns pointed at Sam. Martha held on tight to Max.
Sam just smiled. “Don’t worry, Mad Max, they’re taking me away. But I’ll be back before you know it.”
“Where are they taking you, Dad?”
“The place where they put pillows on the walls.”
—
The Broker gave a tour for two real estate developers in bespoke suits.
“The premises are vacated. All these abandoned buildings are just waiting to be torn down.”
The Brownsville Housing Projects had all been boarded up. The city wanted to rezone after the public safety violations.
“This neighborhood is a war zone,” one prospective developer said. “Wasn’t there just a mass murder here? Gang related? Nobody’s going to invest in this ghetto.”