A Widow's Curse

by Phillip DePoy

  “To save us a little time,” I managed to call out, “I’m digging your grave here. It won’t be quite deep enough, but then, you won’t be quite dead when I put you in it, so it all evens out.”

  I didn’t know whose voice I was using—it was one I’d never heard before. I realized I hadn’t slept much in days and was probably on the verge of genuine mental trauma.

  The killer seemed to rally, almost reading my mind, realizing I was near the breaking point. Or was that my own paranoia? Perhaps his face hadn’t changed at all. Maybe he wasn’t inching toward me through the scars of moonlight that separated us.

  “I’m ready,” I whispered.

  He hunched lower, took a clear step my way.

  I steadied myself, bent my knees, held the shovel in front of me like a broadsword, eyes locked.

  He lumbered forward, bat low to the ground, shoulders slumped—a troll. He was a smaller man than I, and older. Other than that, it was impossible to determine anything about him in the relative darkness.

  Without any warning, he suddenly flew toward me, as if on springs, thumping directly into my chest. I rocketed backward too suddenly to comprehend completely what had happened.

  The next thing I knew, he was sitting on top of me, with the cricket bat raised high over his head. Miraculously, I still felt the shovel in one hand, though he’d somehow managed to pin my arms with his knees. If I bent my elbows just a little, I figured, I might be able to hit him in the back of the head. It wouldn’t have much force, but it would prove a distraction, and maybe I could get him off me.

  I flailed, hitting nothing, but his head snapped around in the direction of the shovel. Maybe he thought there was someone behind him. I kicked and rolled, and he was tossed off balance, falling to one side. He landed on his shoulder with a good thud, and I scrambled away from him as best I could.

  I tried to put one of the tombstones between us and get to my feet, but he moved too quickly. He was up, snarling and swinging his bat.

  I jabbed the shovel at his shins. He danced backward, and it looked to me as if he were smiling wildly.

  I tried to quell a growing fear that nothing would stop him. Nothing physical, at any rate—but I hit on another, more psychological ploy out of abject desperation.

  I jumped up, shovel in front of me, though much less confidently than I had moments before.

  “If you kill me,” I rasped, “you’ll never find the coin.”

  He stopped dead still. He could have been one more of the graveyard statues: no movement, no sound, no life.

  “The coin is hidden in my house, where you’ll never find it. Even in a century, when my home looks like that one up there on the hill, no one will ever find it—unless I show them where it is. If you kill me, if you threaten me, if you so much as hurt my feelings, you’ll never see the coin again.”

  I wasn’t certain why I’d ended exactly that way, as if he had seen the coin at some time in the past.

  Alas, I could not leave well enough alone. “Besides, it belongs to my family.”

  I don’t know what that sentence triggered, but the man exploded in every direction, howling, waving both arms, one holding his bat aloft. It was the cry of an animal caught in a trap.

  I was so startled, I staggered backward once more. Red fear pulsed in my burning forearm and I lashed out with the shovel savagely, smashing it into his kneecap with one swing, cracking a rib with another.

  I might have kept swinging—I felt at that moment I would be capable of bashing his bones even long after he was dead—but he knocked the shovel from my hands with one casual swipe of his bat.

  I tried to keep running backward, but I slammed my thigh into a tombstone and took a tumble, my head thumping hard on the ground.

  My mind was swimming, my eyes unfocused. A sudden inexplicable sleepiness swept over me, the kind a drowning man feels, a surrender to black water. My limbs were thick, weighed a thousand pounds. My tongue filled my mouth, blocking the airway. I went deaf—there was no sound anywhere on the planet.

  In that moment, I was convinced that a door between worlds lay open, a bright door made of new stars and piercing memories, bits of melody and an intuition of being not quite human. A sensation of serenity washed over me.

  And in that same moment I saw quite clearly the golden bat moving infinitely slowly toward my skull.

  A popping sound, a champagne cork, roused me from my graveyard sleep. It was followed by cheers and some sort of dancing. An odd moment for a celebration, I thought.

  “Fever?”

  Jolted out of my rapture by a name I barely recognized, I struggled three times to open my eyes before I saw Skidmore’s face.

  “Hello.” I couldn’t think what else to say.

  “Thank God.” Skid’s eyes closed. “He’s okay!”

  Andrews appeared.

  “Andrews,” I said dreamily, trying to sit up. “What are you doing here?”

  I had no idea where here was.

  “He hit his head,” Andrews said to Skid, as if I weren’t there. “Look.”

  He pointed to a place behind my ear.

  I realized that the spot was wet and cold.

  I lost a weight of euphoria suddenly, and struggled up on my elbows in the strange cemetery.

  “I hit my head,” I repeated. My voice sounded like thorns. “Where’s the man—”

  Andrews stepped aside.

  The maniac with the golden bat was sitting on the ground, clutching his right shoulder and rocking back and forth. He was also wearing a set of silver handcuffs.

  “Skidmore shot him,” Andrews explained.

  What was left of my delirium cleared instantly.

  “Help me up.” I held out my hand to Andrews.

  “Should he be lying down?” Andrews spoke, again, as if I were not present.

  “I think you’re not supposed to let them sleep when they hit their head,” Skidmore answered, voice shaky. “Better let him get up.”

  I finally noticed that Skidmore had his pistol in his hand.

  The cemetery was flooded with flashlights’ pale fire; the moon had retreated behind a bank of black clouds. Aside from my two friends, I counted three more men in different uniforms, milling about us.

  The killer was bent over not five feet from where I sat, his bat nowhere in sight.

  Andrews offered his hand and I got myself to a standing posture, dizzy and more than a little confused.

  “What happened?” I said it to no one in particular.

  “Well,” Andrews began immediately, anger rushing into his words, “the second you left me standing on the porch, I went into your kitchen and called our sheriffing buddy. He was almost as mad as I was when I told him you’d taken off after babbling about someone attacking you.”

  “And after what Crawdad told me about your conversation with Dan Battle,” Skidmore went on, “I was pretty sure I knew what you were up to. And I told you that if you went anywhere without telling me that I would hunt you down with my pistol in my hand.”

  “You two figured out that the Cherokee artifact—”

  “Listen.” Skidmore’s voice was a cold wall. “You spent most of your childhood avoiding the gossip in our little town, and I can understand that. But don’t be so surprised when I tell you that I paid attention to it, and it’s been one of the three or four most valuable tools I have in my current chosen profession. Stories about the Barnsley curse are famous all over this part of Georgia, and the role of the Cherokee in the curse is hardly a secret. Dan tells you that the thing your great-granddad bought here was a cursing tool, and it has to be put back where it belongs and I put two and two…damn it, Fever, you’d have to be a moron not to figure out where you were going tonight. You don’t think I’m a moron, do you?”

  His words were tight as a violin’s E string, and just as ready to snap if they were played too hard.

  “I don’t think you’re a moron,” I answered softly, filling the syllables with a genuine astonishment at t
he question.

  “Okay.” His hands were shaking a little.

  “Skidmore was at your house five minutes after I called him.” Andrews was somehow talking to me as if I were a child. “And we were on the road a second later. His car can go really fast, and, you know, he’s a policeman, so we weren’t really worried about speeding. I’m surprised we didn’t get here before you did.”

  Andrews was talking funny, clearly adrenaline-buzzed himself.

  “So everyone knew where I was going tonight at the same time I was—wait.” I started suddenly toward the path. “Dan Battle’s down there in the water!”

  One of the uniformed strangers responded.

  “The man down in the well house? We’ve got someone with him, and we called the ambulance man.”

  “How is he?” I stared at the stranger.

  The stranger shook his head; his face betrayed my worst fears.

  “I have to go down there.” I turned toward the path down the hill.

  “You have to stay put and let these men take care of it!” Skidmore barked.

  I was shocked by his vehemence.

  “This man,” Andrews said, pointing to the killer, “was standing over you with his cricket bat, about to make meat loaf out of your brains. Skidmore and I came up the path just in time, and Skidmore shot him.”

  Skidmore shot a man.

  That’s why Skidmore was so strange, of course. He wouldn’t have hesitated in the heat of the moment, but he was a kind-enough soul to indulge in the shock of remorse afterward.

  “Skidmore.” I tried my best to get him to look into my eyes. “Jesus. Thank you.”

  “He saved your life.” Andrews sounded only a little belligerent.

  “I know.” I nodded at Skidmore. “He’s been saving my life in one way or another since I was nine years old.”

  Skid looked down at the graveyard dirt. I hoped he knew how I felt.

  “So, Mr. It’s All Chaos,” Andrews chided, “what do you make of the timing of this little thing? I mean, you can’t think it’s only another instance of hazard. There’s more to it than that and you know it. You’d be dead if it weren’t for Skidmore and me—and something more than a meaningless series of random events.”

  Instead of pointing out the logical fallacies in his theory, as I would have at any other moment in my life, I was suddenly taken by the image of Dan Battle’s spiderweb with a drop of water at every nexus, a human spirit at the junction of every strand.

  But before I could elucidate my thoughts, the killer groaned, raised his head, and spoke—impossibly—with the perfectly British voice of Henry Higgins.

  “He wouldn’t actually be dead, you know.” He smiled, an authentically meek expression. “I was only trying to frighten him.”

  Twenty-one

  “I told you the killer was a Barnsley!” I exploded.

  The killer reacted with equal force.

  “A Barnsley!” He tried to stand, but the handcuffs made it difficult.

  Skidmore raised his pistol.

  “I don’t want to shoot you again,” Skid said calmly, “but I will do it if you can’t calm down.”

  “He calls me a Barnsley!” the man howled.

  “You’re not?” I stammered.

  “Barnsley” was all he would say.

  “You are the one who killed Carl Shultz.” I leveled a look at him that I hoped would eat his liver.

  “It was a mistake,” he moaned, collapsing even closer to the ground, closing his eyes. “That was just—he wanted to call off our deal.”

  Andrews and I exchanged looks; Skidmore still had his pistol trained on the man.

  “‘Deal’?” Andrews mumbled.

  I could hear sirens wailing faintly in the distance: the mourning of the dead.

  “And you killed Dan Battle.” I looked down the hill.

  “Who?” The man looked startled.

  “The person down in the water whose head you bashed.”

  “Oh.” It was a hopeless sound.

  He put his head in his hands, staring at the ground, and began to sob.

  “That was an accident. I only wanted—”

  But it seemed he could not articulate exactly what he had wanted to do.

  “You only wanted to frighten him,” I told him as viciously as I could, “the way you were trying to frighten me just now.”

  “But—”

  “I have to get down there,” I interrupted, standing as best I could. “Dan wouldn’t be hurt—or dead—if it weren’t for me.”

  “You’re not going anywhere else tonight.” Skidmore’s voice was iron. “Sit down and let the medical people and the Barnsley Gardens crew do their jobs. If Dan Battle is dead, there’s nothing you can do; if he’s not, you’ll only be in the way.”

  I didn’t sit down, but I didn’t argue, either. He was right.

  “Is my fatalism rubbing off on you?” I asked him vaguely.

  “Please sit down and shut up.” But his voice was softer than before.

  “Well, if no one else is going to ask,” Andrews began, staring at the killer, “I suppose it’s up to me. Who the hell are you and what are you doing in those shoes?”

  The man sniffed and glanced at his shoes.

  “These? I suppose I should have gotten substitutes where I found the rest of my disguise—at the Goodwill thrift store—but I’m a little fussy about footwear. I got these at Marks and Sparks.”

  “I told you!” Andrews gazed at me triumphantly.

  “I thought it was Marks and Spencers,” Skidmore said, at last holstering his gun.

  “Marks and Spencer,” Andrews informed him, “no s. And some people used to call it Marks & Sparks in the old days. Don’t know if they still do. Have I been away from England too long?”

  “So, you’re not bleeding that much,” Skidmore said to the killer.

  He went to the man and examined the wound on his shoulder. Blood had darkened the material of his coat where the bullet had torn away the seam at the shoulder. It appeared as if the bullet had not actually gone through the flesh, only glanced off it.

  “And you don’t appear to be in pain,” Skid said almost to himself.

  “I’ve had quite a lot to drink,” the man admitted almost jovially. “I’m sure it’ll feel much worse in the morning, if that makes you all feel any better.”

  “So I repeat,” Andrews insisted, “who the hell are you?”

  “Sorry,” the man said immediately. “You did ask, didn’t you. I’m Devin Briarwood.”

  My knees buckled and Andrews had to catch me to keep me from tumbling onto the ground.

  “Dr. Briarwood, actually,” the man went on casually. “University of Wales at Aberystwyth.”

  “Jesus Christ Mahoney,” Andrews exploded, actually laughing right in my face. “He’s one of yours!”

  “I’ve spoken with your secretary,” I said to Dr. Briarwood.

  “I know.” He responded distractedly, tilting his head at Andrews. “What does that man mean, ‘He’s one of yours’?”

  Sirens were louder, and the tree frogs fell silent. Night doves had gone. Red man-made screaming filled the night instead.

  “I think we’ll only have time for the short version of the story,” I said. “I have things to tell you; you have things to tell me. Fair enough?”

  He nodded.

  “Are you seated comfortably?”

  He blinked.

  “Then I’ll begin.” The sound of my voice was, once again, a stranger to me. “At the beginning of the last century, my great-grandfather fell in love with a woman in Ireland. He killed a man because of her and escaped to America. His name was Conner Briarwood.”

  If I’d hit the killer in the head with his own bat, I could not have stunned him more. His head twitched and his eyes were as large as the moon.

  “You’re one of Conner’s brood?” he barely managed to say, not quite believing me. “How could I not have known that?”

  “Because you’re a loony?�
�� Andrews offered disingenuously.

  “I gather that when Conner came here,” I went on, cold as the tombstone against which I was leaning, “he remained significantly incognito. He changed his name to Devilin and never contacted his family in Wales except through lawyers, who always used the name Conner Briarwood—not Devilin. But he had children and grandchildren, and, well, here I am. By the way, the trouble with your venom for the Barnsleys is that they are, in fact, our cousins or something. One of our kin sired the man who built that House of Usher up there.” I glanced toward the Barnsley ruins.

  “I know that.” He could no longer look at me. “I know that.”

  “Then I think it’s time for you to tell us a little something about yourself,” I hissed, barely able to contain a burgeoning anger.

  “Yes.” He drew in a huge breath.

  “Could you start with the difference between the way you were in Fever’s house and the way you are now?” Andrews cocked his head. “I mean, then you were Quasimodo; now you’re—”

  “Dr. Jekyll.” He smiled. “That’s my secret power, actually. I could never have done the…the things I’ve done. Not if I hadn’t adopted an alter ego. A Mr. Hyde—a Cro-Magnon persona. I am not, by nature, a violent man.”

  I could only picture the slavering madman who had stood over me with a club not five minutes before.

  “In fact,” he continued, voice tiny in the huge night, “I’ve always been accused of being a bit too mousy. Other professors at University were more aggressive, got promotions and tenure long before I did. Grants went to others, too. I languished. But there was one project no one could take from me, because it was mine in my bones—my life’s work.”

  “The coin of Saint Elian.” It wasn’t a guess; I knew his obsession.

  “My secretary told you, I assume. You must know that we were cheated, that the Barnsley scum rigged the race that lost us our coin.”

  “In fact, as I understand it, our ancestor tried that first. He knew a jockey, I believe. Your secretary told me quite a lot. But Barnsley found out about it and turned the tables.”