A sudden October wind gust rattles the kitchen window, sucking me from my daydream and dropping me back into my yellow vinyl chair. My brother, apparently unsatisfied by his birthday glucose fix last night, excitedly munches a bowl of sweetened corn flakes. A sugary stream of milk dribbles from his pimpled chin.
The three of us seem to feel a bit cheerier now that we’re soaking in the gray light of Sunday morning—cheerier, tired, and maybe even foolish.
Grandma slides a blank recipe card closer to jot herself a note. “Everything’s always better in the morning, isn’t it? I must remember to write to Ms. Coolidge and Mr. Gordon today to thank them for their help.”
Six hours earlier, we sat in the family room with Officers Mary Coolidge and Roger Gordon of the Mount Herod Police Department, recounting the strange midnight encounter we’d had with the two bizarre children.
“Did you recognize them from school?” Officer Coolidge had asked, turning her attention toward Jeremy and me.
“No,” I said.
Jeremy shook his head. “I never saw them before in my life.”
The doorbell and knocking had ceased a mere minute before the squad car pulled in the driveway. Neither of the police officers caught a glimpse of the mysterious children, they told us.
To the two officers who sat on our dated paisley sofa, the non-traditional family sitting before them—a fifteen-year-old girl, her thirteen-year-old brother, and a sixty-eight-year old grandmother—must have looked like a paranoid, patchwork collection of losers. I was certain we’d already been pigeonholed as backward, so I decided I stood very little chance of having my story about the boy’s black eyes taken seriously. I left it out of our statement, and neither Jeremy nor my grandmother said anything either. Jeremy simply followed my lead, but Grandma had likely dismissed it as quickly as she’d heard Jeremy say it, never bothering to commit it to her already shaky memory.
“It certainly sounds like a prank,” Officer Gordon said. “We have no reports of any accidents or emergencies in this area, but we have another patrol car checking roadsides, ravines, and ditches right now, just in case.”
“They probably ran off as soon as they saw our car,” Officer Coolidge added.
“Well, how rude and kooky,” Grandma said.
Now, in the daylight, I trivialize the whole thing in my mind just as she had done.
How rude and kooky.
I speculate the boy’s eyes were simply an illusion or a trick, and maybe as I move around the teen scenes of Mount Herod over the next week, I’ll watch for that boy and that girl, and I’ll give them a piece of my mind for scaring the daylights out of us and upsetting my grandmother.
Still, there’s that schoolyard legend in the back of my mind, and I can’t shake it.
Grandma watches Jeremy wolf down his cereal with a disgusted look on her face. Patting Jeremy’s arm with her fingertips, she says, “Jeremy, honey, slow down. You’re going to give yourself gas.”
I push away an empty oatmeal bowl and excuse myself from the table.
Twenty minutes later, I’m in front of the bathroom mirror pulling my damp hair back into a ponytail. I am average-looking on my best day, and that will have to do because what little income we have includes no allowance for makeup or professional hairstyles.
Though Grandma works a very part-time job as a cashier at Harold Donaldson’s small hardware store in Old Downtown, she depends mostly on government aid to keep our household running. My clothes are secondhand. They are almost always last-year’s fashion, but Grandma spends an inordinate amount of time sifting through thrift store inventory with me to ensure they at least fit properly, and despite her own poor taste in clothing, she never questions mine.
The woman is an exceptional seamstress. Whatever defects we find in our clothes, she simply alters or repairs with her calloused fingers, a needle, and a thread. Larger jobs sometimes cause her to haul out her sewing machine and go to work humming and singing, mumbling on about bobbins and feed dogs while I watch television or do my homework. Inside, I am frustrated and wonder why some people are blessed with normal or elite lifestyles while the three of us must live like paupers on the outskirts of a kingdom.
Just as I begin to spiral down the vortex of self-pity, a thunderous knock rattles the mirror on the wall and causes me to jump out of my skin. My fear morphs to irritation when I realize it is Jeremy’s fist on the bathroom door and not the return of the peculiar boy and girl.
“Abby, hurry up!”
I undo the lock, open the door, and find myself pushed aside as Jeremy rushes in while undoing his belt. I step into the hall and close the door behind me. I roll my eyes; for whose sake I don’t know, but it makes me feel better.
Grandma and I pull on our coats while we wait for Jeremy at the foot of the stairs. We head for the car at the sound of the flushing toilet.
The ride in Grandma’s fossilized sedan to Good Shepherd Lutheran Church takes twelve minutes. As we round the corner on Greenway Street, I spot the familiar small church standing on a grassy hill, a lonely white building with a steep black-shingled roof, arched windows, and a towering bell tower at its entrance. We’ve never missed a Sunday.
We park in the lot, get out of the car, and pass by the evergreen bushes and dried-out daylilies lining the church’s walkway. I imagine we blend in well with the rest of the congregation as we ascend the church steps—all of us bundled in fall attire, shuffling and scraping our heels on the concrete like marching soldiers.
We nod at familiar faces while making our way to our regular pew seven rows from the front. I take my place in the seat next to the side aisle. Jeremy sits to my right. Grandma sits next to him.
The elderly and sinewy Reverend Martin starts the service promptly at eight, and it proceeds predictably for the next thirty minutes until the entire congregation settles in for the sermon.
Reverend Martin is only five minutes into his sermon when Jeremy leans over and whispers to me, “What are we going to do?”
The sermon, what I’ve heard of it so far, is about tithing, so Jeremy’s question baffles me because we can’t give anything when we don’t have anything. “Nothing,” I say.
“What if they come back?”
What is he talking about? “Who?” I ask.
Jeremy jabs a finger into my ribs. I flinch and scowl.
“The black-eyed kids,” he says. “What if they come back?”
I roll my eyes, this time for my brother’s sake. “They’re not coming back. It was a prank, a dumb prank.”
Jeremy’s speech gains tempo. His breath grows louder than his words. “No, it wasn’t. It’s exactly what happened to that kid. They killed his father and brother.”
He’s talking about the Mount Herod boy everyone knows about but no one’s ever met, and I’m not going to have anything to do with it. “His mother killed them. Be quiet.”
“She said it was the black-eyed kids.”
“And they put her in a padded room.”
Grandma leans over from the other side of Jeremy. Placing her finger over her lips, she shushes us sharply.
My brother sits back against the pew and stubbornly folds his arms. We behave ourselves and listen to the dull sermon for several minutes until Jeremy leans into me again and utters, “Just because they say someone’s crazy, it doesn’t mean they are.”
I pop my eyebrows and whisper back, “Um, yeah it does.”
Jeremy sits back again and tucks his tongue into his cheek. A moment later he says, “His uncle’s a priest. He lives with him.”
My interest is suddenly piqued—not by the information itself, but by how it was obtained. “How do you know that, stalker-boy?”
“I instant messaged Tommy Wexler this morning. His brother has a friend who’s aunt works at Saint Thomas University.”
I can handle being a non-traditional family, and I can handle being a Plain Jane, and I can handle being poor, but I can’t handle being weird. I pinch Jeremy’s upper arm. “You told
Tommy Wexler?”
Jeremy knocks away my hand. “Ow!”
An instant later, the red hymnal in Grandma’s hand crashes down on Jeremy’s thigh. “Ow!” again.
“Shush, now,” Grandma hisses.
Ugly, obnoxious Tommy Wexler has a big mouth. I can’t stand the kid. Our midnight encounter will now be the topic of the week at Lexington Middle School. It’s only a matter of time before the story finds its way to Mount Herod South High School. I’m still unsure of what happened last night, but I am certain of one thing: I don’t want to be another branch on the Mount Herod grapevine of weirdness.
I warn Jeremy, “When we get home, IM Wexler right away and tell him you were just kidding.”
“Abby, no. We have to do something. We need help.”
I stand, grab Jeremy’s arm, and pull him from the pew. Grandma shoots me a scowl. I’ve shown disrespect and I feel terrible, but I need to deal with this now. I apologize to Grandma silently with a sheepish nod of my head.
My hand still clutching his arm, I urge Jeremy to the back of the church, past the bell tower door, through the vestibule, and out the front door.
The air smells of damp leaves, and the parking lot is deserted. We stand on the steps while the cool October air whistles in my ears and bites at the flesh on my arms. I’d rather be back inside, so I intend to make my point quickly. I hold my finger in Jeremy’s face and enunciate every syllable. “You will IM Tommy Wexler when we get home and tell him you were kidding.”
“Abby, the last time the black-eyed kids visited a house, they killed half the family. It wasn’t a prank—”
“Tell him you were joking!” I yell.
Jeremy lowers his head.
I’ve hurt him, but I refuse to apologize, and he refuses to speak. We stand on the church steps, just the two of us, facing one another. I fold my arms and wait for his response. He stands silent and still, his head down and his arms limp at his sides. I can’t see his face, but I think he’s crying.
“So, what are you going to do, cry now?” It’s a carefully crafted question intended to maintain dominance yet find out just how hurt he is.
But to my astonishment, when he shows me his face, there is not a single tear in sight. “You saw the boy’s eyes, too,” he says.
I don’t respond because I’m no longer sure what I saw.
“Why are you denying it?” he asks.
“Because there’s no such thing as black-eyed kids. That guy’s mother killed her husband and son, not black-eyed kids. They aren’t real.” I wait for a reaction but he shows me none. “Jeremy, what happened last night was a prank.” And when I say it aloud, I know I’ve finally convinced myself.
“Then who were they?” he snaps.
I shrug and scoff, “Who knows? Look, our family is different. The years between us and Grandma are twice that of other kids and their parents. We don’t have money. Our clothes are practically homemade. We have no skinny jeans, no satellite TV, no mobile phones, no family vacations. We’re different. We’re targets.”
Jeremy studies me. “Targets?” he repeats. “Abby, is that really what you think of us?”
It is, but now that I’ve said it, I regret it, and I won’t say it again. Instead, I say for the last time, “Tell Tommy Wexler you were kidding. Don’t make things worse for us.”
A wind gust jolts us. We shiver and move closer to one another. Jeremy’s breath is visible in the early-morning air when he asks, “What if they come back?”
My timid brother is very intelligent. As a matter of fact, utilizing secondhand parts, he built our only luxury, a home computer. He’s the smartest person I know, and I wonder how I can be logical about this but he cannot. In his mind, the three of us are in life-threatening danger.
Somewhere within me, I find enough sympathy to put my arm around him. I turn him back to the church and pull open the door. As we step inside, I promise him, “They won’t come back.”
CHAPTER THREE
IT IS THE middle of the night, and my eyes burn. I scrunch my toes up under the bare soles of my feet, an absurd attempt to prevent them from touching the cold linoleum. Across from where I sit, an orange plastic flame twinkles atop a candle-shaped nightlight, casting warped and flickering shadows across the bathroom ceiling and walls. I’m cold and anxious to get back to bed.
I flush the toilet, rinse my hands with ice cold water from an antique steel faucet, and step out onto the hall carpet, which is coarse but warm beneath my feet. The old house creaks under my lean frame, complaining and whining as I scuttle toward my bedroom.
But at my bedroom doorway, I stop at the sound of whispers. Turning, I see the grandfather clock bathed in drapery-filtered moonlight at the bottom of the stairs. The only sound in the entire house is my own breathing, which is now uneven.
The whispers stop. The clock ticks. I watch the minute hand slide to one-twenty, and the doorbell rings.
No one else in the house stirs. Grandma and Jeremy linger in deep slumbers while I am awake and choking on the promise I made to Jeremy yesterday on the steps of the church.
I creep to the top of the staircase and peer down at the front door. It stands still and silent in the night. Just then, a light rap echoes through the house from the other side of the door. A girl’s sweet, enticing voice calls so softly that it is perhaps heard only in my own head. “There’s been a terrible accident. Please let us in.”
The old wooden steps groan as I descend. I stop and stand next to the towering grandfather clock, and I stare at the front door as if I have the ability to somehow peer through it.
Caught somewhere within the triad of fear, anger, and curiosity, I debate what to do next. I’ve half a mind to throw open the door and frighten the two pranksters, giving them a taste of their own medicine. Yet, another thought lingers at the edge of my mind. It’s regarding what big-mouthed Tommy Wexler knows about the chatter surrounding one of Mount Herod’s most bizarre murder stories.
I’m not entirely ignorant of the legend, though I always considered it a lame excuse to further isolate the strange surviving boy who now, according to Wexler, lives with his uncle the priest somewhere in Mount Herod. But, because I’ve been so dismissive of the tale, the details of the murders are unknown to me other than the well-established claims of an exceptionally bloody crime scene and the mother’s assertion that the murders of her husband and one of her two sons had been committed by a mysterious pair of “black-eyed children,” who without explanation appeared on her doorstep one evening. It was an alibi so extraordinary it resulted in her committal to a psychiatric hospital. As for the boy himself, while most people believe the mother to be the true murderer, others speculate he was the actual murderer, a circumstance which they say drove the distraught mother to insanity.
Regardless of who actually committed the crimes, the legend of the black-eyed kids quickly circulated schoolyards throughout Mount Herod and resulted in two immediate fallouts: a sick escalation of the late-night prank known as ding dong ditch and the instruction to never allow unexpected visiting children into one’s home after dark.
So, here I stand, either the victim of a sadistic schoolyard prank aimed at me and my uncustomary family—a thought which annoys me nearly to fits—or the next victim of the infamous, homicidal, mythological black-eyed kids. The thought is so irrational I feel flush with shame, yet I am so terrified I nearly crumble to tears.
“We are so cold.”
I first look to ensure the door is locked, then I step up and draw back the faded plaid curtain a fraction of an inch. I peer out with just my right eye, as if looking through a telescope.
The two haunting children stand on the porch just as they did last night, heads bowed, eyes hidden. If the clothing they wear are costumes, they are extravagant, and if they wear wigs or masks, they are immaculate. If this is a charade, these children have arrived not to prank us but to commit some kind of crime.
With the hope of frightening them away, I feel to my left for the por
ch-light switch, but just like the light failed last night for Grandma, it fails tonight for me.
Abruptly, a voice calls from the darkness. “Abby, get away from the door!”
I spin around, and my eyes land on a silhouette standing at the top of the stairs. Grandma calls down to me. “You yourself said we don’t know those children, now get away from the door. I’m calling the police again.”
Jeremy appears behind her as Grandma begins to descend the steps. I meet them both at the foot of the stairs. “Don’t go by the door, and stay with your sister,” Grandma orders Jeremy, and she disappears into the dark kitchen.
“You said they wouldn’t come back,” Jeremy says.
My mind reels with excuses, answers which would affirm my promise yet not deny the fact they returned. When I realize there is no excuse for my broken promise, I simply stand in quiet defiance.
“Come on,” I finally say, and I tug the sleeve of his pajama top. I tiptoe to the family room sofa, dragging Jeremy along behind.
While Grandma speaks with the 911 operator in the other room, I slowly part the curtains over the sofa like I did last night, just wide enough for Jeremy and I to gaze out at the children on our front porch.
The girl’s head bobs faintly as the sound of her bewitching voice penetrates the door. “We are so frightened. Please help us.”
The boy reaches up with his fist and knocks on the door. The thumps thunder through the house like the clamor of jail cells closing. Jeremy trembles at the sound.
The boy lowers his arms to his sides. Clenching his fists and hunching his shoulders, he nearly growls his first terrifying words. “Little pigs, little pigs—”
He stops when the girl quickly flattens her hand over his mouth.
Jeremy turns and seizes my pajamas at the shoulders. Pushing me back and away from the window, he cries, “Abby, did you hear that? Did you hear that, Abby?”
I pry his fingers loose from my pajama top and push him away from me. “I heard it.”
“What was it? It sounded like a man’s voice, not a boy’s.”
Curse of the Black-Eyed Kids (Mount Herod Legends Book 2) Page 2