“So where are you going now?”
“Away, where my feet guide me. Never to return to this place.”
“Did you mean it when you said it was cursed? Did you curse it?”
“The worst curses are those that men bring upon themselves. There are places where evil has grown so heavy it weighs down the Earth, and the tips of Hell reach up to touch it. Many such places have existed in history, and they have all been destroyed by the evil they wrought and the doors they opened.”
“But what about me? That’s my home. Does that mean I’m cursed?”
He placed his palm across my forehead, his cool skin meeting my sweaty brow.
“I give you my blessing, that you may be purged from this place. That you may resist evil.”
I’ll never know his intentions in that blessing. I’ll never know if he knew what was going to happen, or even if the blessing caused it.
But I do know that it did happen.
And to this day I call that blessing a curse.
Chapter 4 - I See More
I’ve never had good vision. My glasses have always weighed heavy on the bridge of my nose, their thick glass panes earning me many nicknames at school ranging from Cyclops to Fishbowl. But as much as my mind hated the names, my eyes failed to improve. And in the back seat of my stepfather’s truck, seat belt tied to a broken holster and cracked window sputtering gusts of air, my glasses bounced in and out of my line of sight, constantly reminding me of the blurry world beyond their panes.
From behind the wheel, my stepfather sighed, releasing a thick huff that muddled with the sound of the engine. My mother reached across the armrest and squeezed his knee, offering a faint smile. I knew the double purpose of her action, that she held his knee like a driver holds a stick shift.
“I know this is difficult for you, but her final wish was to see her grandson one last time. We’ll be in and out.”
“That’s what you said last time. And the time before that. Hell, every few years she knocks on death’s door then pops back to life.”
“It’s serious this time,” said my mother, her mouth pursed. My stepfather turned back to the road, but not before one last comment.
“Better be,” my stepfather said, glancing in the mirror. “That bitch belongs in the ground.”
My mother frowned, but found nothing to say in retort. She herself had no blood relation, and my original father had detested his mother as well right up until his own death. Of the rest of my grandmother’s family, only a smattering of uncles and aunts remained, as she had completely outlived her own children. And of those living, we were the only ones coming.
After an hour we pulled into a hospital lot littered with cars that had handicapped tags hanging within their interior. Clouds brewed overhead, making the noon sky appear like night. And despite the warm humid air, I shivered. It had been two years since I had last seen my grandmother, but I always remembered how cold her hands were.
The nauseatingly sweet smell that can only be found at dentists’ and doctors’ offices filled my nostrils as we entered her room. A heart-monitoring machine beeped in the corner, while an instrument attached to her finger glowed, casting her face in a deep red light except for the creased wrinkles that remained dark. Her breathing rasped, her eyelids flickered half open, and her mouth curled into a slow, satisfied smile.
“You came,” she whispered, the words slithering from her throat and pushing me backward with a slight pressure. “No one else bothered.”
“It’s been a rough few years,” my mother said. “After, well... after Doug passed away last year, his family hasn’t made it out much.”
“Ah, yes. So young to die.” Her tongue flashed across her lips. “I had the pleasure of seeing him one last time before the incident.”
“You did,” my stepfather said, the tone of his voice just short of accusatory. I knew why.
Even at my young age, I was no stranger to funerals. In the past five years, no less than seven members of my family had dropped dead, from suicides to a particularly nasty plane crash that had made the news for a solid month. Each of them had been young and healthy. And each of them had paid my grandmother her last respects beforehand, when she was hospitalized for one of her major ailments. And each time, she recovered.
With an effort my grandmother raised her hand, beckoning me forward.
“Come,” she whispered, “let me kiss you one last time.”
My mother pushed me forward as my heels left skid marks on the white tile floor. My grandmother’s hand touched my face, her fingers so cold that it felt as if she had been holding a glass of ice water just a moment before. Around her neck she wore a silver necklace with a centerpiece shaped like an ear of corn.
“Ah,” she said, “we’re not so different, you and I. I see much of myself in you.”
I felt the cold spreading from my cheek to the rest of my face and reaching down my spine. My breath became short, as if the oxygen in the room had spread thin, and I gulped in the air.
“I’ll miss you, my sweet,” she continued, and I felt the words wrap around me, pulling me forward as her voice became stronger. My vision blurred, and I wondered where my glasses had gone, though I was certain they were still on my face. Her hand tightened.
“Now give me one last kiss.” The words barely took shape in my mind, and I felt myself lean forward involuntarily. I could just make out the outline of her overused lipstick.
Stop, I thought, even my blood now cold. Stop.
I lifted my foot to move backward, and felt it catch on the bed. Her hand glided along the front of my face, ripping my glasses away, and I felt a wrenching as if she still held my face as I fell. The last memory I have before my head hit the floor was of her shocked whisper.
“No!”
***
The one positive aspect about passing out in a hospital is that no ambulance is required. Blankets were packed around me, but the tips of my nose, fingertips, and toes suffered from a cold that emanated from my chest.
“Ninety three degrees,” I heard a voice say. “Martha, get me another thermometer, this one is busted.”
I rubbed my head, where an ache throbbed just behind my eyes.
“Looks like somebody just woke up,” said the voice. “How are we feeling?”
I groaned in response.
“I’m Doctor Harrison, and I’m going to need you to open your eyes for me so I can make sure you don’t have a concussion. Alright?”
“Alright,” I said, and felt his gloves press against my eyelids. I felt the light of his instrument against my retina, and sensed its proximity, but I saw nothing.
The hospital released me two days later, when the doctors felt my body temperature had reached a level resembling homeostasis. I had come to the hospital empty handed, but I left with a cane. I never returned to my grandmother’s room.
“It was a freak accident,” I heard the doctors explaining to my mother. “He hit the ground just right. It’s like his eyes were just unplugged from his brain. There isn’t anything we can do.”
But with my blindness, I still see shapes. Faint blurs and outlines that push just at the edge of where my sight would be. It took me nearly a week to realize they were pieces of my grandmother’s hospital room. It took me another twenty-four hours to realize it was from her perspective.
Two weeks after the incident, she drew her last breath. And the shapes changed. Their hues were now reddish, and I saw faces—laughing faces with hideously sharp smiles and dark eyes. No matter where I turned, I saw chains and creatures that thrashed and beckoned me toward them. When these visions grew the worst I shivered, slipped into a coat and waited until my body temperature rose and they went away.
After her will was read, I discovered my grandmother had left me something. Just after my visit she had amended her will, writing me into it as the sole benefactor. It arrived in the mail—a small envelope, with nothing but a note and the silver-chained necklace she had worn around her neck.
My
mother read the note aloud for me to hear.
“To Caleb, I will always hold a piece of you within my heart. I give you this token to remember me by, though even without it, I know you can never forget.”
Chapter 5 - Circling Hawks
Most people don’t believe in ghosts. It’s probably because they’ve never seen one.
Technically, I’ve never seen one either.
My parents withdrew me from school after my sudden blindness. Whiteboards and books tend to be much less informative when they can’t be seen. My classmates would no longer be able to mock me for my glasses, but I knew the jokes would hit much harder when I couldn’t see them coming. Before the doctors had cleared me for a concussion, my mother had already learned the entire braille alphabet, and had taught me half of it.
The ride home from the hospital was immersed in silence, and I waited for a comment from my stepfather about how we never should have visited my grandmother. But he did nothing to interrupt the silence, and though I could not see, I knew my mother’s hand rested on his thigh, waiting for a comment.
Without sight, home was not home. Each step along the gravel surrounding our trailer home posed a new obstacle, while the handrail of the doorstep no longer existed for mere scenery. My room became a prison, where darting figures fled just beyond the corners of my eyes as the walls suffocated me.
And at all times, there were still the figures hovering in my nonexistent sight. Shapes that hung about like the after-flash of a camera, framed by a darkness that corroded their features. They clung to the edge of my vision, never revealing themselves fully, prowling in the concealed corners of my eyes like predators stalking a wounded prey. I could ignore them, I could push them away, but I could never make them disappear.
At dawn my mother slipped into the checkered uniform of the diner while my stepfather pulled on his greasy mechanic’s overalls.
“I’ll be back soon, Caleb,” she said each day as the screen door clicked shut behind her. “I left you some books to read. Promise that you’ll practice for me.”
“I will, Mother,” I responded and settled down with one of the braille books she had ordered in the mail. But they were written like picture books, and without pictures they lost their appeal. When Mother left I turned on the radio, which now topped the television in my entertainment schema, and adjusted the dial until the static died away.
A smile crossed my face, a rare occasion at the time, as Let It Be twirled from the speakers. In my recent obsession with music, it had quickly become my favorite song, and played quite often with its recent release. There were still many songs I was unfamiliar with, but I knew Let It Be before the first chord faded away.
Even the figures seemed affected by the music, slipping away until they were meshed indistinguishably into the darkness. For a while I felt alone, my fingers trailing over the braille while the notes trailed over my consciousness. And I forgot about the last few weeks in those few moments.
The notes continued and the songs changed, morphing from one tune to another in a seamless transition of melancholy rhythm. Maybe it was the comfort that it gave me, but music was better back then. Or maybe it just had more truth in it, a remembrance of an older lesson washed away by time.
Again the music changed, switching to a tapping beat that jittered against my eardrums. My shoulders tightened as I felt the figures return, their numbers multiplying about me, the burning red stretching as far as I could sense. My breathing intensified as heavy chords began to fall, streaks of red and gray dancing in a leaping whirlpool in time with the music. When I tried to fall deeper into the book I found myself sinking to the floor, and my finger shook so much that the braille words became blurred.
The figures circled closer than ever before and my breath escaped in cold mists that congealed before my face. My eyes slammed shut, trying to block away images that my mind reminded itself were not truly there.
Until I felt something brush against my leg. Something long and sharp, like a bramble, that set me running like a horse stung by a whip.
Chair legs snapped beneath me, showering the linoleum floor in pine splinters as I fled to my room. More brambles brushed past me, tearing through my T-shirt as I rushed into my room, the door bouncing on its hinges behind me. Still they pressed as I ripped open my sock drawer and rummaged through its contents, feeling for a hard piece among the soft fabric.
My tears froze to ice upon my cheeks.
A clammy hand gripped against my shoulder.
And I found it.
As if stricken by a wave, the figures fell back, hisses audible as they were expelled backwards. I sank, curling into a knot, my knees against my chest and my great grandmother’s corn necklace gripped so tightly in my right hand that it dug into the flesh. Blood trickled from my palm, and like the tears it froze against me as I shivered.
Four hours later my mother came home and found me unmoved between my bed and the wall.
That was the first time I had heard the Rolling Stones song, Sympathy for the Devil.
Chapter 6 - Definitions
Night and day mesh together when light disappears. There’s the telltale signs of each, the warm breeze that drifted in through the windows in the mobile home, or the fluttering of bats in the roof that signified deep night. But the borders between them disappeared, and I felt myself needing less sleep, staying up later into the night and waking earlier into the morning.
It was on one of these such nights that I heard my parents’ hushed voices leak through the cardboard-thin walls, well past dark when they thought me asleep.
“It’s hard for him Irad, imagine your entire world going dark overnight without reason or purpose. It has to be terrifying.”
“That’s not it, Monica. Something ain’t right with that boy. He don’t walk straight. Like he’s avoiding something that ain’t there.”
I heard my mother sigh.
“Irad, you would wander about if you were blind, too.” But her voice was tinny, the same tone she used when she had particularly rude customers at the diner and produced faux kindness.
“I know you’ve seen it too, Monica. And the gashes he had on his arms that one time you found him in his bedroom—boy’s probably cutting himself now.”
“No! He would never. He’s just been bumping into things. I can’t believe you would even suggest that.” Her voice now had a sharp edge, not for cutting but for protection.
“I ain’t sure,” said my stepfather, in a tone barely audible. “I been thinkin he’s lost something more than his sight. Lost some brains, too.”
“Stop. No such thing happened. He’ll live a normal life, a better one than us. He’s quicker than us, smarter, just like his father. Blindness won’t stop him.”
“And what of his father? Ain’t he be having strange tendencies too? Like that one time you mentioned, back when he lost his job from—“
“How dare you bring that up? Clay had nothing wrong with him. Nothing.”
“Whatever,” muttered my stepfather, and I heard my mother’s bed sheets rustle as she returned to sleep. Some time later her breathing became regular, and two hours after that, I too drifted into light slumber.
Over the next few weeks, my father’s time at home dwindled as he stayed later nights at the mechanic. And in his place, two weeks later, I received the first visit from my personal tutor.
Six months had passed since my accident. After spending hours a day reading braille I now held a volume much thicker than before, and was beginning the last chapter when they arrived. I frowned as I heard the screen door open, followed by my mother’s footsteps accompanied by another pair.
“Caleb, I’ve brought you a tutor until we can figure out your schooling situation.”
I grunted and looked up, as if to survey the intruder, and to my relief there was nothing but darkness.
Over the past few weeks, I had taken to wearing my grandmother’s necklace, and in turn the figures had kept their space. Sometimes they even left me ent
irely alone, for hours or even days at a time, which seemed to be a return to sanity. Perhaps my grandmother had given me the corn necklace to keep me safe, but somehow I doubted that.
And even when I was wearing the necklace, there were times that they returned, clustered in space that should have been occupied by actual people. There was Pete, the occupant of the trailer across the lot that had spat upon the preacher man, who seemed nearly swarmed with red. Once, at the grocery, Jake Kimbrel spotted me and took advantage of my loss of sight to trip me at the end of an aisle. Red objects floated about him then, as red blood gushed from my mouth where I had bitten through my tongue during the fall. My stepfather also had a dull, red glow of his own.
But the darkness about the teacher that now stood before me was void of any red.
“Fine,” I said, crossing my arms, and waiting for my new teacher to speak.
“Caleb, if you look this cross during our first lesson, spare me the time and I will walk out the door before we begin.”
My arms unfolded and I laughed, for I recognized the voice of Mrs. Derundi.
Chapter 7 - Higher Education
I enjoyed home school more than regular school. Gone were the bullies, the day care employees posing as teachers, and the rules that seemed to do nothing to support learning. Each morning Mrs. Derundi spent an hour and a half at the trailer before her eleven o’clock class, left me lesson work, then returned at three thirty for the remainder of the day. And each day I learned, soaking in knowledge to both eradicate boredom and to displace my visions.
But I sought Mrs. Derundi’s lessons not for the knowledge, but rather for the authority that had been lacking up to this point in my life. She was harsh, but in this harshness I felt care underneath.
“You will sit up straight if you expect to learn, Caleb,” I remember her saying one day. “This may not be a school, but that does not mean there are not rules. You do want me to teach, correct?”
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