CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Timeline
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
New Releases!
The Real Oswulf's Stone
Acknowledgments
Legal
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CURSE OF THE BLACK-EYED KIDS
MOUNT HEROD LEGENDS™
BOOK TWO
Corey J. Popp
www.coreyjpopp.com
Copyright © 2017 Corey J. Popp
All rights reserved.
ASIN: B074DN2KGD
Cover Art Copyright © 2017 Jerzey Popp
@jerzeypopp
For Mom,
who never batted an eye
when her 12-year-old son asked
for a typewriter for Christmas.
Seven years prior to the events in the book
BENEATH CLAIRE'S HOUSE
CHAPTER ONE
I WAKE TO the sound of whispers, but when I open my eyes, the house is silent and dark and still.
An eerie, surreal chill shoots through me. The lingering emotions of an already forgotten dream have left me disoriented, unsettled, and feeling vulnerable to the monsters under my bed that I haven’t believed in for years.
The clock on my nightstand shows midnight. Vague yet familiar shadows stand in place of the furniture in my bedroom. An endless black void spans above me and to all sides, absorbing the corners between the walls and the ceiling and the floor until everything is indistinguishable from everything else, and all that remains is the unyielding ink of midnight.
The brain doesn’t work correctly in the middle of the night. It reverts to a primitive state. It abandons reason. I should just go back to sleep.
But somewhere in the house something ticks, like things do in the night, and it rouses me further into awareness. Maybe the sound came from a faucet or maybe the refrigerator or maybe the grandfather clock at the foot of the stairs. It doesn’t matter, because it’s just a noise a house makes at night.
I pull the blankets to my chin, jostle myself from my back to my side, and push a naked foot out from under the covers into the coolness of the room.
The brain reverts. I should go back to sleep.
The stillness of the house gnaws at me. I feel melancholy, as if I’m the only person awake in all the world. The quietness pulls at my sanity, and just as I touch the precipice of complete irrationality, the doorbell tears through the silent house like a scream, and my heart nearly bursts.
In daylight, the sound of a doorbell is usually delightful. It means someone has come to visit, almost always with good intentions. Perhaps a neighbor borrowing a cup of sugar, a Boy Scout selling popcorn, a Girl Scout selling cookies. But at midnight—at midnight in a dark and lonely suburb on the edge of Mount Herod—absolutely nothing good can come from the ringing of a doorbell.
I am now entirely awake and bewildered. I hear my grandmother stir down the hall, her movements slow and heavy. There is no noise from my brother’s bedroom. He has either slept through the startling noise or lies petrified in his bed.
My grandmother’s silhouette passes my doorway, heading to the stairs. I jump from my bed and stagger into the hallway.
“Grandma,” I call softly.
She turns, fixing her crooked glasses, awkwardly trying to stab the temple tips through the rollers in her gray hair. “Abigail,” she whispers. “Was that the doorbell?”
I nod.
My brother suddenly appears in his bedroom doorway, wide-eyed and tense. Though he is two years younger than me, we stand nearly eye to eye. And yet, he has the courage of a mouse.
Anxiously drumming his fingertips against his chubby palms, he says, “I heard it, too, Grandma.”
Grandma says, “Jeremy, you’re as white as the sheet you just crawled out from under. Now, you two go back to bed. I have no idea who that could be at this hour, but I’ll take care of it.” She turns and proceeds down the steps to the foyer.
Jeremy takes one slow step back into his room, but I shoot him a look that freezes him in his space. He sees my frown and he knows he has no choice. Grabbing his hand and pulling him with me, I scamper to the top of the staircase.
Kneeling, we peer down through the banister posts and watch my grandmother pull aside a faded plaid curtain on the front door.
She gasps at the site of something outside. “Oh, my! For heaven’s sake,” she says and immediately fumbles for the lock.
I squeeze Jeremy’s hand as an ominous feeling settles upon me.
She cracks the door and peeks around the edge. “What on earth are you children doing out at this hour?”
I look at Jeremy. “Children?”
He shrugs.
I sneak down the stairs, pulling Jeremy along. When I reach the bottom step, I hear a child’s voice, but I cannot distinguish the words.
“Are you hurt?” my grandmother says.
I slip into the adjacent family room where a sofa is pushed against the wall beneath a large window. I kneel on the sofa and grope for the curtains. As I do, I hear the youthful voice again, but I still cannot make out the precise words.
“My telephone?” Grandma says nervously. “Well, I don’t know about that. Where are your parents?”
Between the parted curtains I spot two children, a boy and a girl, each perhaps in their early teens, standing on the front porch. They are illuminated by the full moon. Their heads are lowered, chins drawn to their chests, arms at their sides, seemingly refusing to look at my grandmother. Behind them, the slumbering neighborhood and motionless homes are dark, and the contours of bare oaks and crooked birches reach their bony fingers upwards into the clear October sky as if trying to pull the shimmering stars down to their deaths.
The two children are dressed oddly. Their gloomy clothes look like long-ago school uniforms, steamed and pressed and certainly out of season.
The boy’s britches end just below his knees where they meet the tops of the long black stockings covering his calves. He wears a waist-length wool dress coat fastened with large silver buttons. A dark gray neck tie sits knotted beneath his square chin. Crowning his black straight hair, which is so long it covers his ears, rests a brimmed newsboy cap. The downward position of his head and the angle of the brim conceal all of his facial features except his pale jaw.
The girl wears a black pleated jumper ending just below her knees, and my eyes follow her black opaque stockings down to a pair of sable Mary Janes. Her long-sleeved white blouse is drawn up at the collar by a criss-cross tie, and—like the boy—her facial features are obscured, hers behind a curtain of long coal-black hair which falls forward over her shoulders.
My view is suddenly obscured by the back of Jeremy’s head. “Who are they, Abby?” he says, his breath fogging the
glass.
“I can’t see with your fat head in the way.” I push him aside and wipe away the condensation with my bare palm. Gross.
Grandma toggles the light switch for the porch, but the bulb refuses to glow. “Oh, my,” I hear her say, more to herself than to the children, “I’ve no porch light.”
Jeremy returns to the window, slowly parts the curtains just below me, and pushes his face to the glass once again. “I can’t see their faces.”
“Wonder what they want,” I whisper.
I hear Grandma say, “I don’t understand, and I’ll ask you again, where are your parents?”
Again, the soft voices come back, barely audible.
“I can’t hear them,” Jeremy says, and his tugboat-shaped body tumbles forward as he loses his balance. He catches himself on the long curtains, nearly pulling them down, and his forehead thumps the glass.
And that’s when I see them.
The boy snaps his head in our direction, revealing eyeballs colored as black as the night sky itself and completely void of iris and pupil.
I grab Jeremy’s thick shoulder. “His eyes!”
The black-eyed boy realizes his error and quickly returns his gaze to his silver-buckled slate shoes, but not before I hear Jeremy gasp too, and I know he saw what I saw.
I recall portions of a schoolyard legend, and they tumble in bits through my mind like dice on a table. A Mount Herod boy comes to mind who everyone knows about but no one’s ever met.
“I suppose you could use the telephone,” I hear Grandma say, and she begins to pull open the door.
Jeremy abruptly pushes away from the window, nearly sending me tumbling to the floor. He scrambles to the front door and slams it shut with both hands just before the toe of a Mary Jane taps the threshold.
“My word!” Grandma says. She places her wrinkled, veiny hands onto her round hips, a position which immediately indicates authority. “What is going on here tonight?”
“Grandma, you can’t let them in,” Jeremy says, his panicked voice higher than it should be.
The doorbell rings again.
“Jeremy, open the door,” Grandma orders, but Jeremy blocks the door with his entire body and protests with a shake of his head. Grandma motions for him to move. “Come on, mister. Out of the way. Enough of this.”
I step slowly into the foyer, feeling disoriented, as if walking out of a fog. If Jeremy and Grandma are two sides of a coin, I am its edge.
Jeremy turns back to the door, pushes the faded plaid curtain aside, and looks out onto the porch. “They’re gone.” He lets the curtain fall closed, then turns to Grandma and says, “His eyes…Grandma, he had black eyes.”
“What in the name of Sam Hill are you talking about?”
Three rapid knocks echo through the house from the direction of the back door. All three of us turn to face the pitch-black void that lies between us and the back of the house.
Jeremy, eyes wide and hands wringing, says, “It’s them. They’re on the back porch now.”
Three more knocks—slow, methodic, and intimidating—boom from the impenetrable darkness before us.
“How in the world did they get to the back porch so quickly?” Grandma says. She coos a soft sigh and fixes her glasses. “Abigail, I do believe they may be hurt. The girl said something about an accident.” Placing her palms on the front of her thighs, Grandma shuffles into the darkness. “It isn’t right to leave them out there. Jeremy, I don’t know what’s come over you.”
Jeremy looks at me with doe eyes. “Abby, I’m scared.”
I turn my brother around by his shoulders and push him down the hall. “Just follow Grandma.”
Our grandmother’s featureless silhouette flips the light switch in the hall, and the wire filament in the overhead bulb emits a dull glow that reminds me of an X-ray. It sizzles, crackles, and flickers before burning out.
Grandma stops and stares at the bulb for a moment. “Well, my word. What a crazy night.” Then the darkness swallows her as she continues on to the kitchen toward the back door.
I fight a brief inner battle between reason and instinct. These children, this boy and this girl outside my grandmother’s house, may not be the monsters of an obscure schoolyard legend, but neither are they our friends, and whatever may be the case with the boy’s eyes, be he injured or blind or simply the victim of a miscast moon shadow, these children do not belong in this house.
Jeremy and I enter the kitchen. The shadowy remnants of a small three-person celebration lie scattered throughout the room. One end of a homemade paper banner, which reads HAPPY GOLDEN BIRTHDAY JEREMY!, has fallen to the floor, where it lies amongst a patch of partially-deflated balloons. Shredded wrapping paper and frosting-smeared, crumb-covered paper plates lie scattered across the kitchen table, everything abandoned until morning in favor of bedtime.
My grandmother stands at the back door. Just as her hand touches the doorknob, I call to her. “Grandma!”
Startled, she turns to me.
“Don’t let them in. We don’t know them,” I say.
There is enough moonlight in the kitchen for me to see her bottom lip quiver, and for the first time this peculiar night, I see her bewilderment turn to fear, and she either falls victim to the same panic that infects Jeremy and me, or she finally realizes the potential peril of trusting two strangers ringing doorbells at midnight.
“I’ll call the police,” she says just before recoiling at the sound of another thundering knock. Placing her bony fingertips on the rims of her glasses, she shouts through the back door, “We are calling the police! If you need help, wait on the front porch.”
A moment later, I hear the girl clearly for the first time. Her voice is soft and sweet and childlike with a hint of a British accent. “Please, ma’am,” she pleads from the other side of the door. “We are cold.”
Grandma frowns and shakes her head. “The phone, Abigail,” she says, and I rush to the landline on the desk in the corner of the kitchen.
Another knock drums through the kitchen. And then, contradictory to the immense power behind the knock, a delicate voice calls from outside. “There’s been a terrible accident. Please let us in, ma’am.”
When I raise the telephone to my ear, I discover the line has succumb to static. Through it, I hear the trace of a dial tone. I look at Jeremy, who has already read my expression.
“It’s dead, isn’t it?” he whispers.
“Static,” I say, and suddenly Grandma is upon me, gently removing the telephone from my hand and punching 911 on the keypad.
“Operator?” she says. “I can barely hear you.”
The doorbell rings, and all of us turn, once again, to the front door.
“They’re back on the front porch,” Jeremy says.
The girl calls from outside: “We are so cold and so hungry.”
Now I realize it was no dream that woke me. Somehow, as I slept in my bed, I must’ve heard the two visitors conspiring on the front porch only moments before they rang the bell, and with that realization comes the revelation that every make-believe ghost and monster I’d ever feared as a child suddenly feels alive.
“Did you hear them whispering before the doorbell rang?” I ask Jeremy.
He shakes his head with an accompanying expression of fear that has an intensity I’ve never seen on him before this night. “No.”
Schoolyard legends are not the things a fifteen-year-old girl should fear, but I can’t dislodge the sight of the boy’s black eyes from my thoughts.
From behind, Grandma’s hands find our shoulders and pull us close. “The police are on their way.”
Jeremy looks at me, his swollen lips shiny with saliva. Trembling, he mutters beneath Grandma’s hearing, “It’s them, Abby.”
I know what he’s talking about, or rather, I know who he’s talking about. “Shut up, Jeremy,” I whisper back, because if he’s right, I know what’s supposed to happen next.
And it terrifies me.
CHAPTE
R TWO
“WELL, WASN’T THAT a night to remember?” Grandma says, pouring herself a glass of high-pulp orange juice. She shuffles through a sunbeam to the breakfast table and sits down to my right, across from Jeremy.
She’s removed the curlers from her hair, leaving behind a knotted silver bird’s nest atop her head. Her fingernails are clipped down to her fingertips in a practical manner. She wears no makeup, and a floral pink and green apron covers her yellow sweater and high-water, elastic-waist powder-blue slacks. Upon her feet are white sneakers.
The woman looks ridiculous. She’s old-fashioned, technology-illiterate, naive, and the absolute love of my life. She’s my guardian angel in the flesh, and if it weren’t for her, who knows where Jeremy and I would have ended up.
The eat-in kitchen has finally been wiped clean of all evidence from Jeremy’s birthday, and Grandma’s outdated decor is much more painful to the eyes in sunlight than it is in moonlight.
The room is finished with yellow-checkered linoleum and emerald-green walls. The table, like the countertops, is canary-yellow laminate. Antiquated white metal cabinets line the walls, each door held shut by the strongest magnets I’ve encountered in all my life.
For now, this is home, but as soon as I’m old enough to escape the bizarre suburbs of Mount Herod, I will move south—as far south as I can drive. Maybe I’ll even move to the Southwest. A state like Arizona sounds nice—or better yet, Southern California.
I dream of a large stucco home boasting an orange terra-cotta roof, majestic columns, huge arched windows, and an enormous turret for an entrance. Every evening while sipping whatever beverage it is they sip in Southern California, I will watch the sunset from my backyard infinity pool as my four children play in my sprawling avocado orchard. Neither money nor clothes nor food will ever be a concern again. I do not know who my husband will be; I only know he will make me laugh and be neither lazy nor obnoxious.
Curse of the Black-Eyed Kids (Mount Herod Legends Book 2) Page 1