Cursed Be the Child

by Mort Castle

  No! I will not die! He loves me! He won’t let me die!

  He burst through the back door, screaming, “Who is it? Who is in my house?” Vicki was terrified. She thought he had truly gone totally insane. She tried to explain, to tell him what was going on.

  He heard the name Selena Lazone, and it registered faintly. He heard the name David Greenfield, and that registered with a reverberating clang. David Greenfield, the goddamn philandering bastard, the old hurt, the old fury, the long suppressed and nearly forgotten hatred!

  And then he heard her, he was certain he did, heard her calling him!

  “What are you doing? What are you doing?” Vicki tried to stop him. He pushed her aside. He wanted to smash her face in.

  She called him!

  He ran out of the kitchen, up the stairs, Vicki trailing behind, trying to hold him back and failing completely.

  Face glowing like a madman, eyes bulging, he confronted David Greenfield. “You…in this house…our house!”

  “Calm down, Warren,” David Greenfield said. “We’re here because of your daughter.”

  “You fucking sonofabitch!” Warren roared, and the punch he threw had all his weight powering it.

  It caught David flush on the jaw. The back of his head thudded against the doorframe, and blackness rapidly pooled throughout his mind.

  He ordered himself not to lose consciousness, but his legs couldn’t hold him up, his knees wouldn’t stay locked, and he was sliding down the wall, getting punched again.

  And through wavering black puddles, he watched the mulengi dori, the Romany string, slip from his fingers.

  Selena’s words were Romany words, imploring and commanding. “Lisette, unhappy child, as the knot is untied, so may you be set free to journey beyond, anda I thema. As the knot is untied, may I be set free of your sorrows and pain and return to dwell once more among the living, o juvindo.”

  In a voice that was not the product of lungs and vocal cords and lips, Selena Lazone called to David Greenfield.

  The mulengi dori must be undone.

  Now!

  Just before he blacked out, David Greenfield heard her.

  He came to in less than 30 seconds to a scream that filled the world. It was Selena’s agonized scream.

  Groggily, he managed to stand and stumbled into the bedroom and into pandemonium.

  On her knees, Selena looked as though she had just barely survived a terrorist bombing. Blood seeped from her ears and ran freely from her nostrils and the sides of her mouth. She was groaning, a throaty bubbling of blood and mucus.

  The little girl sat at her table. She looked confused. She shook her head as though she’d just awakened from a wispy bad dream.

  Kneeling by Selena, an arm around her, David saw the jagged red lines cutting through the whites of her eyes. The pupil of the left eye was the size of a dot, the right as big as a teddy bear’s. She is dying, he thought, as she tried to talk to him.

  “Pain, all her pain…in me. The pain…” Each “p” sprayed his face with coppery droplets of blood. Her left eye rolled up and disappeared.

  “Gone…” she said.

  “Let me go!” The little girl broke free of Vicki’s arms and knelt by David and Selena. Gently, she touched Selena’s graying face.

  “The diakka…” Selena said, her voice thinning on each syllable.

  “You saved me,” the child said. “You saved me.” Tears rolling down her cheeks, she whispered, “Thank you.”

  She pressed her lips to Selena Lazone’s bloody mouth and kissed her.

  With that kiss, Selena Lazone died.

  — | — | —

  Forty-Six

  It was the second week of November, turning seriously and consistently cold, and when it turns cold outside, Vicki thought, it was fine to be warm inside. Eyes half-closed, leaning back, she luxuriated in the heat of the bath water and the fragile bubbles on her skin. She was not unhappy, nor could she say she was happy. There had been too much terror and dread, too much pain and loss, and so she could not trust any feeling of happiness.

  But at last she was starting to think there would be a time when she would be happy.

  Indeed, when they could all be happy.

  The doorknob rattled and she sat up, putting her arms across her bosom. Curiously, she felt as though she had done something embarrassing. She’d thought the bathroom door locked. She liked, even demanded, her bathroom privacy, but…

  “Melissa? What is it?”

  “I’ve got something neat to show you. It is just totally rad.”

  “Couldn’t it wait?”

  “Uh-uh.” A giggle. “It’s something I want to show you now!” She skipped over to the vanity, stooped and opened the cabinet. “I saw this on a television show. It is just so cool.”

  “No!” Vicki said. Hands on the rim of the tub, she pushed herself up but knew she wouldn’t be able to move quickly enough. Her knees were still bent, her buttocks brushing the bubbly water.

  And the red plastic blow dryer was plugged in and a small thumb had pushed the “on” switch and a small hand and thin arm swung the slowly rotating dryer up and toward her—and it fell.

  And Vicki was horrified, but, more than that, she was sad, she was just so sad, as one lucid and oddly comforting thought filled her mind: it is not my daughter who is killing me.

  Then the hair dryer plunged into the bubbles and the water sizzled and the overhead light dimmed and Vicki Barringer’s muscles jerked and knotted into tight cramps as she slipped down into the bath.

  Her final sight, a placidly smiling little girl’s face, was obscured by a watery film as her blood boiled and her brain burned.

  Midnight approached, and the jukebox played Merle Haggard. The television showed a truly ancient rerun of Hollywood Squares, so old that Wally Cox occupied the center box.

  He sat at the bar, drinking whiskey. He drank fiercely and steadily as he had been drinking for weeks. He drank because Selena was dead.

  And he drank here because this was where he belonged.

  The Pit Stop was a workingman’s bar as well as a bar for those who got welfare instead of wages. Cigarette smoke, residual and new, hung heavy. No one ever ordered white wine. The Pit Stop was rough and raw-edged, a place to bring your sorrows, so that to jukebox accompaniment and the click of pool balls, you could feel that sadness in all its heavy intensity. It was no less a good place to bring your anger and to vent it in a fight in which you beat someone and perhaps got beaten yourself.

  The Pit Stop was a bar of thick and dark feelings.

  And David Greenfield belonged here because he had made a discovery.

  Mandi Rom. I am a Gypsy. He was a man of feeling, a Gypsy man with a Gypsy heart.

  And in all its varieties and permutations, the feeling that had filled him since the death of Selena Lazone was grief. Grief was an enfolding blackness that suffocated, then left off just so you could draw half a breath before it seized you once more. Grief was a taloned hand that clawed into your chest and tried to rip your heart out.

  Grief was churning anger.

  And it was regret.

  It was the shattering instant when you knew you grieved because grief was the inevitable end product of the loss of what you love. Oh, yes, you loved, goddamnit, and damn that stiff-necked stupidity that would not permit you to feel, that denied you the pleasure of knowing the silly, comforting, warm, good feeling of being loved and that would not let you say, “I love you.”

  Selena, I love you. He said that often now, silently and sometimes aloud. He said it at her funeral. Said it, hell! It came upon him in the first wave of feeling he had ever known in his manhood, and he howled it when he threw himself on her coffin.

  Selena, I love you. There were times he said that and thought he was heard.

  Because he was a Gypsy, Mandi Rom, he kept Selena Lazone’s memory alive with the proper Romany rituals. He sponsored a Pomana, the traditional funeral feast for the dead. He anonymously contributed $
1000 to the library at the University of Chicago. Te avel angla tute. This is done in your memory.

  Sometimes, when he absolutely could stand no more, just could not abide any more grief, he consoled himself with the thought that the diakka is no more. The little girl, Vicki’s child, is saved. There is purpose and meaning. Selena is dead, but her death has not been futile.

  Suddenly, there was something on the television set that made him tell the bartender to turn up the volume. The midnight news was reporting “…a horrifying accidental death in Chicago’s far south suburbs…”

  A grainy black and white photograph of Vicki Barringer’s face shown on the screen. The nose seemed to be pressing against the glass of the picture tube. “…of Vicki Barringer…bath tub…electrocuted…”

  With a solemn newscaster’s voice-over, the picture cut to a videotape of the husband and the child, the seven-year-old girl “…who discovered the body of…”

  “Grieving...” Warren Barringer. Melissa Barringer.

  It couldn’t be. Vicki Barringer, dead? It made a joke of Selena’s sacrifice! It was too cruel a comment on all that happened.

  Vicki…Dead. For a dizzily spinning moment, he felt a new burst of grief, and it was for Vicki, and he wondered if perhaps he had loved her—or if he loved her now, now that he had learned he could feel.

  Vicki Barringer was dead. That was the fact. But was it simply an accidental death?

  “No,” he said to the shot glass of whiskey in his hand. His voice was low. He could not believe it, could not accept that bad luck and a hair dryer worked together to kill Vicki Barringer.

  And if that was what had happened, he needed to prove it to himself.

  Outside, he did not zipper his leather jacket. The temperature was down to the low 20s, the lake wind sharp and stinging, and he wanted the cold to brace him, to clear his mind. The stars above were brilliant and the pointed slice of moon was burning silver. For more than an hour, he was a walker in the night city. Sometimes he tried to think and sometimes not to think. And it was in one of his nonthinking moments, a time when he had no thought of his own, that he heard faintly but clearly a voice in the night and in his mind:

  It was not an accident.

  He was certain; he did not doubt for an instant that Selena had spoken to him.

  It was three-thirty in the morning, and his fists battered the front door. He pounded, he rang the bell, hammered again, pushed the bell. He yelled, “Come on, come on!” Above, lights blipped on the second floor. As though thinking about the actions of someone other than himself, he realized he was creating a hell of a racket, and he wondered if even now hours later there were police still at the scene of the accident, or if they would soon be summoned—and he didn’t give a damn.

  Then the door opened, and he stood face to face with a bathrobed Warren Barringer. “What is it? What do you want here!”

  “I want the truth,” David said, and he pushed his way into the foyer.

  There was a look on Warren’s face that David could not quite fathom, but that expression was in addition to a look of fear—and David found satisfaction in that. David leaned back against the front door. He hooked his thumbs in his jacket pockets. “Tell me about Vicki,” he said. “Tell me how she died. You tell me everything, and you do it now.”

  “You…You can’t make…” David saw it then, saw it as cleanly and clearly as he would have had he been gazing through his camera’s lens. Warren Barringer was a man with something to hide, something terrible.

  “Let me say it for you so it all gets said and we get it out of the way.” He took his hands from his pockets and ticked off the points on his fingers. “I can’t burst into your home this way. I can’t threaten you.” He laughed. “You’ll call the police. You’ll see I go to jail for this. You’ll have them haul me off to the asylum.”

  David lunged. He grabbed Warren by the lapels of his robe, and he twisted with both hands, his knuckles grinding into Warren’s collarbone and throat. He slammed Warren into the wall. Then he did it again.

  Warren’s eyes bugged out. He gripped David’s wrists. David cut his wind off, pressed him back, lifted him up, hanging him. Warren tried to bring up a knee into David’s crotch, but David twisted a hip, blocking Warren’s knee with his own. “This the way?” he said, and levered his knee into Warren’s groin. “Like this?” He did it again, and crashed Warren into the wall and felt the whole house shake.

  “How did Vicki die?”

  Warren’s cheeks were purple, and he was caving in, turning to putty. David cranked down the pressure of his hands a notch or two. “Tell the truth and you have no regrets,” he said. “The truth will set you free. Let’s communicate, professor.”

  Warren wheezed, and David turned it on again. “How…” He pounded Warren into the wall. “Did.” He pounded him against the wall harder. “Vicki.” He pounded him into the wall harder still. “Die?”

  Then he paused and waited as Warren tensed, bracing for another encounter with the wall. It didn’t come. Warren sobbed.

  “How did Vicki die?”

  “Killed her… “ A whisper, just audible, and it chilled David. And then, a whisper once more, but each word precise and crisply articulated.

  “She killed her.”

  From above came a little girl’s teasing and amused laugh. “Daddy, it is not nice to tell!”

  In white underpants and undershirt, she stood halfway down the stairs. Her smile was the perfect smile of a perfect child.

  David flung Warren to the floor and went after her. She tried to get away and nearly reached the top step. He stretched, fell, but snared her bare foot. He had her! His fingers crawled upward, and he tightly grasped her ankle.

  She yelled, “Let me go, let me go!”

  She kicked out. He yanked her down toward him. Her chin, forehead, knees and elbows thumped against each stair and she cried out in pain.

  He pressed the flailing, kicking, screaming little body beneath him, rolled her over and pinned her with his weight. With the heel of his left hand braced on a stair, he raised his upper body and clamped his right hand around her neck. He felt the jittering pump of her pulse in the slim column of warm flesh.

  He squeezed.

  You are murdering a child! The voice of reason suddenly shouted within him.

  But another voice spoke, the voice of tshatsimo, and he knew it spoke the truth. This is not a child. Not anymore. Not now. This is diakka. You must destroy it!

  Her eyes rolled back. Like a hungry baby bird, her tongue stabbed the air. Her jerks and wriggles weakened, no longer voluntary attempts at escape but waning reflexes as he choked the life out of her.

  He had her.

  Then he felt an inexplicable circle of pressure on his back.

  He turned his head and saw Warren looming over him.

  Warren pulled the trigger of the .25 caliber pistol pressed between David’s shoulder blades.

  The report was the loudest sound David had ever heard. It was as though a bomb had gone off inside him. He was vaguely aware that he was rolling down the steps, that an ankle twisted painfully, that his lips were split and bleeding, and then he was on the foyer floor.

  He got to his hands and knees and then, try as he might, he could not find the strength to rise to his feet. He heard a delicate wet sound and realized it was blood leaking from the exit wound in his chest. He had to get up, he had to…

  Warren came up behind him and shot him again, low in the back.

  David crawled toward the door. By gripping the knob, he managed to pull himself up. He opened the door and staggered outside.

  Above, the stars and moon shone in the clear sky. It’s a fine night; David thought, cold, so cold, but fine. He could walk no farther. He lay down on his back in the front yard. A Gypsy death, he thought, the sky overhead, and it is all right.

  It is all right.

  I am a Gypsy.

  Mandi Rom.

  — | — | —

  Epilogue

>   It is Wednesday, the middle of February, a few minutes after four o’clock. On either side of the four lane highway, Route 57, irregular islands of dirty snow melt into the muddy, southern Illinois fields. The ebbing sunlight is misty but still bright and penetrating.

  Days are always too bright now, bright and condemning.

  The Volvo travels south. The child sleeps. The man drives. There has been so much traveling these past months—up to Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa; over to Indiana, down to Missouri and Kentucky.

  Why the Midwest? Why only the Midwest?

  Perhaps because he is crazy, fixated, locked into psychotic patterns of irrational but precise and regimented behavior.

  Or perhaps because he sees the Midwest as his maze. And he is The Rat, and The Rat must run the maze.

  He realizes with crystalline paranoid awareness that they cannot stay anywhere, any one place, too long. They are fugitives and so…

  Oily perspiration polishes his blotchy, alcohol-puffy face. He squints, his hands a tight grip on the steering wheel. Concentrate on the driving, he tells himself, as he checks to see that the speedometer needle is set at exactly 55.

  He is driving well.

  He reaches down. The uncapped pint bottle of vodka is angled upright in his crotch. That is what he needs. A sip. Maintenance dosage. Just enough to keep him steady, to center him, to keep him focusing.

  Listen to the tires on the road. Listen to your snuffling ragged breathing. Listen to the voices in your mind, the voices that will not cease.

  Drive…drive…drive…

  Must get away.

  Cannot stay anywhere too long. Cannot take a chance. They will find us.

  It would be all over for them.

  It would be all over for…her.

  And if he turns his head now, will he catch her sleeping, truly asleep and genuinely unaware? Will he therefore really see her, behold the face of a monster/demon or the face of The Rat, his own Rat face.

  Around and around we go. A maze. Survival, perhaps, but not life.