Mothman's Curse

by Christine Hayes

  “Not anymore,” I snapped. I stood and snatched the pin back. Maybe it only worked for the person who was cursed. I took a deep breath. I’d never know unless I tried.

  Sure enough, as soon as I put it on, Goodrich reappeared. He was two feet in front of me, lips moving, though no sound came out.

  The tiny hairs on the back of my neck stood straight up. “He’s trying to say something.”

  Fox fixed his gaze on me. “What is it?”

  “I don’t know! I’ve never played charades with a dead person before!”

  Fox leaned in close and whispered, “I think he’s here to help, Josie.”

  I thought about what Eva had said about John Goodrich when he was alive, that he was a good man. Plus his ghost wasn’t doing anything scary or destructive at the moment. He was just standing there.

  Maybe it was time to take a leap of faith.

  “Just try, okay?” Fox said.

  I nodded. “Mr. Goodrich?” I squeaked. My voice failed. I swallowed and tried again. “I—I can’t understand you.”

  The man’s lips moved even faster. His hands joined in, stretched toward me in a desperate plea. He took a step forward. I took a step back and ran into the door, the knob digging into the small of my back.

  “What kind of a curse is this, anyway?” I ranted. “How am I supposed to fix anything if I can’t even hear him?”

  Fox gave me a push away from the door. “Take it easy, Josie. We don’t want to scare the nice ghost away with all the shouting. Take your time. Try yes-or-no questions. Then he can just nod or shake his head.”

  “Okay.” I cleared my scratchy throat. “Mr. Goodrich, in the storeroom you kept saying ‘Save them.’ Is something bad going to happen? Is there going to be a disaster?”

  He gave a vigorous nod.

  “How soon?”

  He pointed to his wrist, like someone tapping their watch when they wanted you to hurry.

  “Today?”

  John shook his head.

  “Tomorrow?”

  Another head shake.

  I clenched my fists and turned to Fox. “John and Nora had years, and they still didn’t stop the landslide. How are we supposed to—” I broke off, the answer coming to me in a flash of clarity. “The paper from the safe. Remember? It said ‘Save them’ and had a group of numbers. Maybe it is a date. Do you remember what the numbers were?

  Fox closed his eyes. “Zero three two three two … zero one five.”

  It took me a few seconds to work it out. “March twenty-third? But that’s this Monday!”

  “Less than a week away,” Fox said.

  “Is it Monday, John?” I asked. “Are we supposed to stop a disaster this coming Monday?”

  Goodrich nodded.

  “Where? What are we supposed to stop?”

  His silent monologue started up again, much faster than I could ever hope to translate.

  I sighed and slumped down at the table. “This is hopeless.”

  Fox glanced around for a solution. “Maybe he could write down his answers or something.”

  “Great. I’ll just get him some ghostly paper and an invisible pen and he can get right on that.”

  Fox rummaged in the cardboard box where we kept odds and ends and came up with a pen and a dog-eared notebook. “Remember the storeroom? He was controlling solid objects, making them float. Maybe he can do it with smaller objects, too, like Marcus’s statue. It can’t hurt to try.” He placed the pen and paper on the table and backed away, gaze shifting around the room. “Mr. Goodrich, where is the disaster supposed to happen?”

  John stepped to the table. Instead of reaching for the pen, he lowered his head and closed his eyes, as if concentrating. The pen skidded and jumped a few times, and after several tries John was able to “lift” the pen to the paper, seemingly by thought alone.

  We waited, but try after try, he produced only splotchy scribbles on the blank page. John looked as frustrated as we felt. His lips were moving faster than ever.

  “What about something bigger, less precise?” I seized the box and started digging. I held up a piece of blue sidewalk chalk like a trophy. “The wall!” I blurted. “Use this on the wall. Would that work?”

  John stepped forward again. His eyes fell closed. The chalk lifted straight up out of my hand and into the air and flew toward the wall, where it collided so hard it crumbled into powder.

  “Okay, it’s okay, we have more,” I babbled. Before I could go digging for more chalk another piece floated up and out of the box, this time ending in a gentle kiss to the wall. Fox and I stood wide-eyed as halting strokes of the chalk formed shaky letters across the planks of the Cave.

  SAVE THEM. SAVE THEM.

  “Yes, we know,” I said. “Where?”

  FIELD HOUSE.

  “Field House,” Fox echoed. “There’s, uh—the field house at Turner High School for track and football practice.”

  John shook his head and held his arms out to his sides, as far apart as they would go.

  “Bigger?” I said. He nodded. “There’s the one on the OU campus.” The new building was a joint project between the city and the university. It hosted community events and some sporting events, too. It wasn’t as big as the Convocation Center, where the Bobcats played basketball, but it could still hold thousands of people.

  “So which one is it?” Fox said.

  But I knew by the hollow pit in my stomach it was the one on campus, even before Goodrich pointed at me.

  “The one at OU,” I told Fox. He drew in a breath, his eyes wide.

  “John,” I said, “were you supposed to stop this disaster?”

  He nodded.

  “But you died before it happened. So … you’re still cursed?”

  He hesitated, then nodded again.

  “He says yes,” I told Fox.

  “Is there any way to break the curse for good?” I said.

  He ignored me. The chalk started up again. The same phrases appeared, messier this time.

  SAVE THEM

  FIELD HOUSE

  SAVE THEM

  MARCH 23

  John’s face twisted as if in pain. His image flickered. The chalk fell and shattered.

  “What’s going on?” Fox said.

  “He’s losing control for some reason.” John’s lips were moving double time. I had no hope of following along. Suddenly he flinched and disappeared. The room began to glow red.

  “Josie, what’s happening?” Fox demanded.

  “He’s gone!”

  A piece of red chalk rose and began writing, picking up speed, moving across the wall so fast it was a blur of motion and color. More pieces, all of them red, rose from the box to join the first, creating a tangle of scrawled messages filling every free surface. The writing was harsh and ugly, like ragged graffiti.

  At last the chalk, worn down to stubs, was flung to the floor. We turned a slow circle, reading the same few phrases again and again:

  THEY WILL ALL DIE

  YOU CANNOT STOP IT

  YOU WILL DIE WITH THEM

  And the most chilling of all, the one that made my vision swim and turned my knees to jelly:

  JOSIE FLETCHER,

  YOU ARE MINE MINE MINE

  * * *

  We stumbled back to the house, soggy and shaken.

  Mason met us at the door, bouncing on his toes, tripping over his words, eyes alight. The shock of normal hit me hard after such an upsetting afternoon. “Fox! Josie! Want to see what I’m making?”

  He clutched the clock radio Fox had scrounged for him from the storeroom. A tangle of wires trailed out the back. An old flip phone was attached to the top with duct tape.

  “That’s great, kiddo,” I said, trying to muster a smile.

  “It’s not done yet. Don’t you want to know what it does?”

  Fox ruffled his hair. “Maybe later, okay?”

  Aunt Barb poked her head out of the kitchen, cheeks flushed, her red hair sticking up every which way. “Just
in time for dinner. Fox, plates and silverware, please. Josie, you’ve got drinks. Wash up first. Have you done something different with your hair? How was the library? Homework all done? Your brother’s been quite the handful. I’d keep a close eye on your cell phones if I were you.”

  I felt a twinge of guilt for lying about what we’d been up to, but I also felt glad that Aunt Barb didn’t know what we’d gotten ourselves into. She had enough to worry about. And so did we.

  * * *

  It was the longest dinner in history. I choked down food I didn’t feel like eating, pretended to be interested in conversations that didn’t matter. I didn’t dare look at Fox for fear of collapsing in a fit of tears.

  After clearing the table, I ran out to the storeroom and grabbed the books and shadow box I’d stashed. Then, while Aunt Barb settled on the couch with her knitting and Uncle Bill watched Law & Order reruns, Fox and I tried to lock ourselves in Dad’s study, hoping to do some research on the curse. Mason had other ideas, though. Using his outside voice he demanded to know if we’d seen any more floating objects and if the ghost in our house planned to stick around for a while.

  We hurried him into the study and shut the door.

  “Shh, Mason, that’s a secret, remember?” Fox said.

  “I know,” Mason said. I searched his face for signs of how he was coping with everything. After the chaos in his room Sunday night, on top of Dad getting hurt, I wondered if he was having nightmares. I’d been too distracted to even ask.

  He didn’t look scared, though. Just curious. My heart swelled with pride for the little goofball.

  We told him the basics: Yes, there was a ghost, but it wanted our help and wouldn’t hurt us and didn’t plan on staying long.

  “What kind of help?” Mason said, his expression eager.

  “Um,” I said, looking to Fox. “He can’t find his way to heaven. If we help him save some people, we think he can finally move on.”

  “Maybe he can say hello to Momma when he gets there.”

  Tears burned my eyes. I kissed the side of Mason’s head. “Maybe so.”

  We talked about Momma being in heaven all the time. None of us could bear to think that she wasn’t anywhere anymore. Now that I knew ghosts were real, that there was an after, I felt hopeful I would see her again someday.

  It was the one bright spot in this whole jumbled-up mess.

  Mason settled himself on the rug to work on his “invention.”

  Fox and I started with the journals. Our eyes met in surprise when the very first one fell open to an ink drawing of a man with leathery wings and beady red eyes. With an unsteady hand, I skimmed page after page of sketches: some of a human figure in flight, wings outstretched, others of a tall, too-thin creature, all shadows and angles, a fusion of moth and man. Some were bare-chested; others wore tattered robes. Some of the wings looked brittle, others thick and tough. Many sketches had dimensions of height and wingspan labeled in number of feet. I flipped to find a signature inside the front cover of the journal: J. Goodrich.

  Fox took the book and held it close to his face, nose wrinkling, mouth ajar. I nudged him to let him know I couldn’t see. He lowered the journal and together we read paragraphs of notes about Point Pleasant, with eyewitness accounts of Mothman sightings, dates and times and locations, all in the same small, neat handwriting. Halfway through the book, the focus switched to Clark. Sightings were less frequent, eyewitnesses reluctant to talk. Why so many sightings in Point Pleasant? I wondered. And if he liked to show up where the next disaster was due to strike, why hadn’t other people seen him in Athens?

  “All these sightings,” I said. “Do you think he’s actually causing the disasters?”

  “Don’t know,” he murmured, engrossed in his reading. “Makes sense, though.”

  I rested my chin in my hand, lost in thought.

  On the last page of the book, a single phrase jumped out at me: I must save my Nora. I frowned. Save her from what? The landslide? Hadn’t they been working together to stop it?

  It made me feel fragile, like bad things would find you no matter how careful you were. But I knew we had to move on. As interesting as the journal was, it didn’t provide much help. We still had little clue what we were supposed to stop, or how, or what would happen if we didn’t except that people would likely die.

  And we were running out of time.

  I set the journal aside.

  Fox used his phone to look up Monday’s event schedule for the Field House while I fired up Dad’s laptop.

  Though I didn’t have Fox’s people skills, I did know a thing or two about computers.

  I started by checking theater costume sites for clothing styles like the ones I’d seen in my vision. The nearest I could pin it down was sometime in the late 1800s.

  I looked for records of Edgars, Elsies, and Williams in Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia from the 1880s onward, but without last names or a specific town it was all but impossible, until I added the word murder. Within minutes I pulled up a scanned newspaper article from Ravenswood, West Virginia, in July 1879, reporting the death of William Bennett by gunshot wound. The weapon was fired by longtime friend Edgar Tripp, who disappeared without a trace. William was survived by his fiancée, Elsie Archer.

  It was real. All of it. I shuddered, thinking again of my vision and the look in Edgar’s eyes when he’d pulled that trigger.

  At least now we had a place to start.

  Finally we decided to call it a night. Mason had fallen asleep on the rug, clutching his roll of duct tape. I shook him awake and sent him off to bed.

  Fox and I didn’t talk much. We said good-night to Aunt Barb and Uncle Bill before plodding upstairs, knowing we were in over our heads.

  I carted the journals and shadow box up to my room and set them on my desk. I was afraid to keep the pin too close or too far away, so I settled for placing it on my bedside table, as far away as possible from Momma’s picture.

  Climbing into bed, I realized I had school the next day. I sighed. It seemed like such a waste of time.

  I wanted to call Dad, but Aunt Barb had said he was resting, trying to get better. Tomorrow I would remind her about her promise that we could go see him. But tonight … I knew he had his cell phone with him. He was probably asleep. I sent him a text anyway:

  Hi Dad. How r u?

  I waited ten minutes with no response. Maybe he had his phone turned off. Maybe he wasn’t allowed to use it in the hospital. I stared at the screen, willing it to light up.

  Finally my text alert pinged. I grabbed the phone.

  Hi Josie Bug

  How r u? Miss you.

  Wanted 2 come c u today.

  Miss you too. Tired. Bored.

  When do u come home?

  Few more days

  Need anything?

  Cheeseburger?

  I would if I could

  We texted back and forth for a few more minutes before saying good-night. I held the phone tightly, wanting desperately to hug him for real.

  I stared at the shadow box on my desk. Was it John’s? Was it just a coincidence that he collected bugs, or did the fascination start after he found out about the curse?

  Either way, the thing was creepy as sin. The moths looked like they could crawl out from under the glass at any moment and start flying at me with their scratchy brown wings. I tried setting a stack of papers on top of it so I wouldn’t have to look at it. Every few minutes I glanced over at it anyway. It was just as hideous every single time.

  Finally I tumbled out of bed. I grabbed the shadow box, hurried into the hall, and stuffed it deep down into a clothes hamper.

  I switched off my light and burrowed down under the covers. As I drifted off to sleep, the phrase from John’s journal haunted me: I must save my Nora.

  Did John know she would die in the landslide? Why wasn’t he with her?

  Why couldn’t he save her?

  10

  When I opened my eyes the next morning, the pin
was the first thing I saw. The picture of Momma was the second. She smiled at me like she always did, with laughing eyes and rosy cheeks and a kind face. I sat up in a panic. I’d forgotten to kiss her picture good night. I hadn’t missed a morning or evening since she died. It felt like a betrayal, and a bad omen besides. I picked up the photo and kissed it twice for good measure.

  Fox barged in around six forty-five and tossed the shadow box on my bed. “Aunt Barb found this in the hamper. You might want to put it somewhere safe.”

  I made a face. “Thanks.”

  “Don’t worry,” he said, clapping me on the shoulder. “I think it’s creepy, too. I would have done the same thing.”

  We begged to skip school again so we could visit Dad. Aunt Barb was having none of it.

  “But we haven’t seen him since Monday,” Fox said.

  “You’ve missed too many days already.”

  “But next week is spring break!” I said. “It’s not like we’re doing anything important in class this week anyway.”

  She stood firm. “After school,” she said, and the conversation was over.

  School dragged by, minute by agonizing minute. Three of my teachers caught me staring out the window. They were sympathetic, but I could feel the other kids’ eyes on me, curious. I didn’t want the attention or the sympathy. I just wanted to be with Dad.

  * * *

  I gladly left it all behind when Aunt Barb picked me up at the end of the day. We drove from the middle school to the grade school to grab the boys, then made our way to the hospital. I insisted we stop on the way to get Dad a cheeseburger.

  But Dad’s room was quiet and dark when we got there. His face was too pale, his body too still, tucked under a scratchy blanket that made me itch just looking at it. A nurse was writing something on a chart at the foot of his bed.

  Aunt Barb whispered for us to wait in the hall. She talked with the nurse for a couple of minutes while we stood there watching, afraid to meet one another’s eyes. A fretful silence settled over us, the scene not so different from our last few visits with Momma.

  Finally Aunt Barb returned. She led us to a bank of chairs at the end of the hall. “Your daddy’s had an allergic reaction to his antibiotics, so they’ve had to change his medication.”