Vision of Serpents

by Vincent Morrone

  “And then there was Bryan,” Ian continued. “Things were getting bad before the explosion, so theoretically, Bryan’s death should have made it worse. Normally, as with Blasé’s suicide, one family would blame the other for the tragedy. It’s happened before. When Payne’s mother was killed in a car accident, the McKnights blamed the Blackburns. When Jared went missing, many people assumed a Blackburn was responsible, and that your uncle, as police chief, was covering for them.”

  “No,” I said. “Uncle Mark tried really hard to find out what happened to Jared—both Payne and Aunt Breanne knew that. They said that even before Payne and I were—y’know.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Ian said. “It was still part of the pattern. There have always been a few people in each family that didn’t fit the overall pattern, but they were drowned out. And it wasn’t just the McKnights.”

  Ian seemed to hesitate, afraid I wouldn’t like to hear about things from my family, but I urged him to go on. I needed to hear this.

  “Bristol, before your grandmother was killed,” Ian continued, “rumor has it that she and Payne’s grandmother were best friends, and that your grandfathers were friendly, too.”

  “That’s true,” I said. I’d once had a vision where I saw my grandmother’s death. Varick had tried to hold Grandpa back from healing her, although she was already dead. “I think they used to be close. Best friends, even.”

  “That fits within the parameters of what I’ve graphed out,” Ian said.

  “Graphs?” I said. “You have graphs?”

  “I have tons of them. Would you like to see one?”

  Dante and I exchanged bewildered looks and shrugged.

  “Why not?” I asked. “I always love the idea of seeing my family tragedies mapped out.”

  “It is pretty cool,” Ian said, completely oblivious to my sarcasm as he walked over to his desk, and began to page through a large stack of papers. “They’re over here somewhere.”

  I watched as he flipped through one pile, then another. He tripped over his Mr. Spock garbage can as he made his way across the room to a giant dresser. I had assumed that was where he kept his clothes, but instead, there were more notebooks. Ian seemed to struggle to get the middle drawer open to the point where he banged on it from nearly every angle. Once he managed to pry it open a bit, he stuck his fingers in and pulled out a notebook. Once that was out, the rest of the drawer shimmied out with a great amount of effort.

  “Got it,” he exclaimed. He tripped on the way back to the small coffee table, but managed to put down the notebook in his hands, and then tried to pull the table closer to him. Dante watched him struggle with this for a moment, rolled his eyes, and then reached over with one hand and yanked the table into place.

  “Thanks,” Ian said. “Here, look at this.”

  Ian show me what I recognized as a scatter graph, with a red line going up indicating a seventy year time span with blue and black dots arranged in clusters along the way.

  “This red line charts the number of physical incidents involving members of both families. It includes accidents and assaults, both fatal and none fatal.” Ian explained.

  “You’ll notice it stays high, but not extraordinarily so. Normally, neither family likes the other too much. They don’t mingle. They say bad things about each other, and there’s plenty of hate, but not too much physical aggression. You’ll also notice that it does dip at times. Those dips are usually followed by peaks.”

  I studied the red line as it tracked over a fifty-year span. It seemed to stay level for a while, then would drop slowly over what I assumed was a few months to a year, and then spiked again.

  “What are the black and blue dots?” I asked.

  “The blue dots represent whenever I could find some mention of friendship or even a romance between the families. You know you and Payne weren’t the first.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “My grandpa mentioned that. He said those . . . romances . . . usually don’t end well.”

  “He’s right,” Ian agreed. “The black dots are deaths. I charted deaths between the families, excluding ones where the family member died of natural causes at an age where it wasn’t suspect.”

  “Wait,” Dante leaned forward, looking worried. “So all these dots are murders?”

  “No,” Ian replied. “Many of these deaths were caused by accidents, fires, suicides, drug overdoses, or in some cases, natural deaths where the person was suspiciously young, like someone dying of a heart attack at thirty.”

  “But those things happen everywhere,” Dante said. “My mom died when I was young. Scarlett’s dad died, too. It stinks, but it happens.”

  “Yeah, it does. But look at the suicide of Blasé McKnight. How many people found it easy to blame Bristol? You and I know that Bristol didn’t harass Blasé. They mostly avoided one another. But that’s where people’s minds went first.”

  “I know they did,” Dante said. “But that was just crazy. Like you said, she had nothing to do with it. Any rational person should be able to see that.”

  “But they didn’t,” Ian said. “As an outsider, it must have seemed really strange to you. But if you ask people who have lived in this town for a long time, none of them were surprised. Nor did they dismiss it. It’s just a part of Spirit tradition.”

  I sat back and closed my eyes.

  “Some tradition,” I muttered. “What was the second thing to keep in mind?”

  “The frequency of deaths,” Ian answered. “Statistically speaking, in this town you’re twenty percent more likely to die before the age of fifty if you’re a Blackburn or a McKnight.”

  “Twenty percent?” Dante said.

  “More or less,” Ian confirmed. “It varies by a few points here and there.”

  “That’s too much to be a coincidence,” I said. “But considering how many Blackburns and McKnights are in this town, that’s not enough to qualify as a pattern.”

  “Unless you’re looking for it,” Ian said.

  He shuffled around until he found another scatter graph, this one also of the same seventy-year time span. There were clusters of dots on this graph as well, in many different colors. They seemed to follow the same pattern as the dots on the other chart. I could see the lines that indicated the dates of whatever the different dots represented.

  “I’ve charted the deaths here,” Ian explained. “I broke them down by type and category of death. The red dots are the violent crimes. The green ones are natural deaths—usually too early. Yellow are suicides. Orange indicates overdoses. The brown ones are accidents, such as car crashes, or falling off of a ladder, or even dying in a fire. The gray ones are undetermined deaths, or instances when someone went missing, like Jared.”

  Ian pointed to a dot a few years ago that matched the date when Jared had disappeared.

  I looked over the chart and wondered about all the stories behind these deaths. Payne’s mom was there somewhere, and so was Uncle Mark’s wife, my Aunt Eve. Since coming to Spirit, I’d heard plenty of stories about aunts, uncles and even grandparents from both sides, and knew that there had been some pretty devastating deaths.

  “What about this chart?” Dante asked. He pointed to one that Ian had laid on the table.

  Ian grabbed the chart and held it up. “Friendships or romances. You’ll notice that there are different dots connected by black lines. The red ones are romances. The white ones were friendships that didn’t go very deep, the blue ones are deeper friendships that lasted years, sometimes decades. The lines are where friendships started and then ended. This one,” Ian pointed to a blue dot from about sixty years ago, “is your grandfather and Varick McKnight.”

  Ian pointed to one dot, glancing at me. “You and Payne.” His finger travelled back about twenty years. “One of Payne’s third cousins, and your fourth.” He pointed to a third dot, back sixty years ago. “Your great aunt, and Payne’s great uncle.”

  “Not many of those,” Dante sai
d. “I guess there was never a lot of love between the two families.”

  “No,” Ian agreed, “there wasn’t. Now, the purple dots represent where these romances ended. You’ll notice that most of them end pretty quickly.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It can be hard to be involved with someone if their family doesn’t approve. I got a small taste of that when Payne and I started to see each other. But I think my family was pretty okay with it for the most part. Except my Grandpa, at first.”

  “Your grandpa loves me,” Dante said.

  “You say that like it’s a point in your favor,” I said.

  That got Dante to hush up.

  “Usually,” Ian said, “there’s a lot of pressure on the couples to stop seeing each other. I think a certain percentage of these relationships can be attributed to general rebellion. They usually burn out pretty quickly.”

  “Yeah,” I said looking over the fifty-year history. “There’s not even a dozen.”

  “Keep in mind that both Blackburns and McKnights predominantly give births to boys,” Ian added. “Right now, in our high school, there are only two girls from either family. You and Hunter. If you extend that down to kindergarten, there are only a total of four. Counting the adults, in all of Spirit, there are only seven girls from both families.”

  “Seven,” I said. “That’s not a lot.”

  “No,” Ian said. “Most of the ones who were older than you married within the family. Fourth, fifth, and even a sixth cousin. Some never married.”

  “Really?” Dante said. “Is that important?”

  “Here,” Ian said as he shifted charts again. “Look at this.”

  This one was different. It was a bar graph that pictured information about different cities, including Spirit, New York State, and the US in general.

  “What is this?” I asked.

  “Divorce statistics,” Ian said. “Look at the average amount of divorces in the US over this most recent ten year period.”

  I looked over the chart. For the most part, the statistics seemed to be fairly uniform for each region, except for Spirit’s, which was far lower. The same could be said for the charts depicting other decades. The statistics of divorce for other parts of the country were high in each one, but were barely noticeable in Spirit.

  “Okay,” I tried to process what I was seeing. Ian was making a point, but I wasn’t quite getting it.

  “Don’t you see?” Ian asked. “Look how low it is here in Spirit. This year, only about twelve percent of all marriages will end in divorce. That’s far less than the national norm. I’ve been checking court records. In the last fifty years, guess how many McKnight or Blackburn marriages have ended in divorce?”

  I looked over the data and tried to figure out the numbers, but I didn’t have Ian’s head for numbers. I wish I had brought Maggie with me. She was the math whiz.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “You never said anything about a quiz.”

  Dante laughed, but Ian didn’t.

  “None,” Ian said. “Not once, at least not that I’ve been able to find, has there been a divorced McKnight or Blackburn. There are plenty of widows or widowers. But no divorces.”

  “That can’t be right,” Dante said, looking stunned. “I mean, nobody likes divorce, but it happens. You telling me that no McKnight or Blackburn ever got caught stepping out on his wife? Or had what they call irreconcilable differences? Or just got plain tired of each other?”

  “Sure they did,” Ian said. “There are rumors of affairs that have happened here and there. There are also stories about couples who couldn’t seem to stand each other. And there’s also plenty of information about both documented and unsubstantiated domestic violence, unfortunately.”

  He met my eyes, and I understood where the conversation was going.

  “Look at Payne’s father. Your uncle seemed to believe that Balthazar was abusive towards both Payne and his mother, but nobody ever pressed charges.”

  I knew for a fact that Balthazar was abusive towards Payne. It didn’t surprise me to hear that he might have hurt Payne’s mother, too.

  “Okay,” Dante said. “This is all really strange, but what does it mean?”

  “Well,” Ian said, sitting back and looking like he was in his element. “Think of it this way. Traditionally, when a couple gets married, the children take the name of their father. Bristol, can you spot every cousin of yours or Payne’s on sight?”

  “Uh,” I thought about it for a moment. “Doubt it.”

  “Imagine this,” Ian continued. “You get to class, you meet a boy who happens to be there, and you become attracted. You date. You fall in love. Then you find out that they’re related to a member of the wrong family. Something you didn’t know, because they had a totally different last name. Every McKnight and every Blackburn carry the family name. The families don’t mix. That chart that showed romances? None of them ended in marriage. Sometimes, they’d break up pretty quickly on their own. Sometimes their families would break them up. Other times, usually when the relationship was serious, something bad would happen to one or both parties. So, when your grandpa said that things end badly, he wasn’t kidding. In Spirit, badly usually means violently.”

  That hung in the air a moment as Dante’s eyes went from the charts, to Ian to me. He looked alarmed.

  “My grandpa also told me the story of Tristan and Annabelle,” I said. I quickly relayed what my grandfather had told me of the first romance between the two families. They fell in love, and slowly each family seemed to accept the relationship, until Annabelle was kidnapped, and had eventually been found tortured and killed. Soon after that, Tristan took his own life. That had been the beginning of the curse, when members of both families started to develop powers.

  “She wasn’t the last person killed that way,” Ian said.

  “I know,” I said. “My Aunt Eve was. I never met her. Well, not really.” As I said that, my eyes found Dante’s and he nodded his understanding.

  “Exactly,” Ian said.

  “Any idea what it all means?” I asked him.

  “Well,” Ian mumbled, suddenly sounding very unsure and hesitant. “I’ve theorized, but I have no way of being certain. Besides, it’s probably crazy.”

  “Ian,” I said, taking his hand over the table. “Trust me, I’ve seen crazy before. Tell me what you think.”

  Ian looked from me to Dante, and then shrugged.

  “I’ve wondered if there’s something going on besides a normal family feud. I mean, no matter how much one family hates the other, it doesn’t explain the genetic probability of having nearly all boys. Globally, there are one hundred and seven boys born for every one hundred girls. But for both the McKnights and Blackburns, it’s more like two girls for every one hundred boys. Plus, given the lack of divorce, it’s interesting that no branch of either family ever seems to leave Spirit, at least not for very long, and often not without dire consequence.”

  “Like my parents,” I said.

  “Yes,” Ian said. “Although, it’s not just them. I’ve found articles about plenty of family members who have tried to stay away from Spirit for long periods of time. Usually something bad happens to them. Many died, some went crazy while some lost the will to live. Others reported just not caring about anything or anyone, like a type of depression.”

  I thought about how my parents became more and more detached from me as time went on. I had always assumed it was because they suspected that there was something different about me. I had always assumed they thought of me as a freak. Could there have been some other reason for the way they acted?

  “I think,” Ian continued, “there’s some other force at work here in Spirit. It has a vested interest in the feud between the McKnights and the Blackburns. It might not be quite . . . human.”

  Ian let that last word hang in the air. I think he was expecting one of us to laugh or ridicule the thought.

  We didn’t.


  “Can I ask you a personal question?” Ian asked.

  “Yeah,” I answered.

  “Okay,” Ian said. “Let me apologize in advance for this. You and Payne . . . before whatever happened between you two, how close had you become? I mean, we all know you didn’t want to be labeled boyfriend and girlfriend. But were you? I mean, did you consider yourself serious?”

  I hadn’t expected this. I knew Ian wasn’t just being nosy, but it was a touchy subject. I looked over and saw that Dante didn’t like it either, although I imagine that was for different reasons.

  Still, Ian wouldn’t have asked if he didn’t think it was important.

  “Yeah,” I admitted. “It was serious. He told me he loved me. He’d said it a while ago, but I didn’t say it back. The night of the party, he wanted me to tell him.”

  I stopped there and hoped Ian wouldn’t ask me to describe how I felt.

  “But you haven’t said it back,” Ian said. “You haven’t committed yourself to Payne.”

  I shrugged, not liking the way he said it, but it was true.

  “I guess. Why?”

  “I don’t have a chart for this,” Ian said, looking apologetic. “However, I get the impression that once a McKnight or a Blackburn fall in love with someone and that love is returned, that’s it. In cases where there were cross-family romances, it either never went that far, or one or both of them were killed. I think if you and Payne said you loved one another; then there wouldn’t be any turning back.”

  Dante sat forward, clearly disturbed by what he was hearing.

  “Wait,” Dante said. “You’re saying that if she says she loves Payne, she’ll be trapped?”

  Ian shrugged. “I don’t know if trapped is the right word, but I don’t think that feeling will ever go away. McKnights and Blackburns don’t remarry once they lose a spouse. Sometimes their surviving spouses do, but it’s rare.”

  There had been something holding me back from telling Payne I loved him. Could this be part of the reason?

  “Look, Bristol,” Ian said. “I like you—and you and Payne are two of my best friends. But if I were you, I wouldn’t rush back into that relationship unless you’re really sure. I hate to say it, but it might be safer for you not to be involved with Payne. I never told Payne that, and I won’t tell you what to do, but you should know the odds aren’t on your side.”