Curse of the Black-Eyed Kids (Mount Herod Legends Book 2)

by Corey J. Popp

  Mr. Donaldson nods. Then, folding his arms proudly and doubling the volume of his voice, he calls to Grandma. “You know what, Rosie? If those kids come back, you let me know.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  MY DREAM IS bizarre. Jeremy and I chase a tiny boy through a cemetery at night. The child is incredibly small and creepy, almost elf-like. He dodges in and out between headstones, laughing at us as we try to catch him.

  The cemetery is hazy. My brain can’t draw a complete picture of it. Anything farther than a few dozen steps away from me fades to inky blackness.

  Jeremy, relentless, pursues the small boy. Leaping over headstones and tripping upon tree roots, he will not abandon the chase. I’m reluctantly trying to help Jeremy corner the bizarre creature, but all I feel inside is a longing to return home before someone sees us engaged in such foolishness. I desire nothing but my own bed. Yet, this disturbing tiny boy, whose facial features lie in shadows, easily evades our capture, laughing hysterically at our ineptitude.

  Suddenly, Jeremy goes missing, the pursuit ceases, and the terrifying thing perches itself atop a gravestone just before me. He is a nondescript outline against a starless blue-black sky. Crouching, placing a finger over his mouth as if to hush me, he begins to whisper. Clouds part, a moonbeam strikes his face, and rather than the features of a monster or a stranger, I see Jeremy staring back at me.

  I awaken with a start. My right arm is numb, and my neck and back ache. I’m in a seated position with my head lying on my forearms, which are folded on a flat surface. I don’t know where I am, and I can’t remember how I got here. I raise my head and open my eyes, but what few dark shapes I see are unfamiliar—until I hear the whispers behind me.

  Spinning around, I see contrasting shades of black heaps spread before me on a bed, and I remember where I am. I’m looking at Jeremy in his bed, and I am seated at his computer desk.

  To the left of Jeremy, on a nightstand, I see his digital clock. It is one-fifty-three in the morning.

  I remember now how I got here. I laid awake in my bed until my clock read eleven-thirty, at which time I got up for two reasons, both having to do with Jeremy. The first, to make sure he hadn’t barricaded himself in his room again. Finding his door wide open—as it should be—and him sound asleep—as he should be—I sat down in his fragile, creaky desk chair for the other reason.

  The whispers.

  Without any other explanation for the sudden visits of the black-eyed kids, and after the terrifying incident of Jeremy barricading himself in his room, I’ve come to suspect the secret of the black-eyed kids might actually lie within my brother himself. Even if he isn’t consciously aware of it.

  No matter how long I had to sit in his room, regardless of the discomfort and peculiarity, I needed to witness firsthand exactly what I’m seeing now. Lying before me in his bed, Jeremy whispers in his sleep.

  It is a ghastly sound, a cadence of hushed gasps set amongst pops and cracks proceeding from his lips. I remain motionless, holding my breath, hoping to decipher his cryptic, subconscious message from across the bedroom.

  I recognize the unmistakable sound itself. It is the same eerie, drumming echo I heard from my bedroom and the hallway on previous nights, clearly present yet entirely indecipherable. I don’t know how much time I have before the doorbell rings.

  Shaking the numbness from my arm, I rise out of the chair and creep to the foot of Jeremy’s bed. He continues to whisper, but I still cannot understand him. I sneak to the side of his bed and peer down at his face.

  He wears no expression other than the dullness of sleep. His lips urgently recite a message I still don’t understand, but leaning closer, I manage to catch a fleeting, bewildering word.

  I hear him say my name.

  An icy bolt shoots up my spine. Startled, I shiver, trying to roll away the chill. Within me all mettle yields to terror. Only the insatiable craving for understanding keeps me at his side. I must know what he’s saying.

  I lean even closer, turning my ear to his face, shuddering so violently I feel as though I might collapse.

  He falls silent, and I’m concerned I may have woken him. I glance sideways and see his eyes are still shut. I hold my breath and wait for him to resume whispering.

  Abruptly, like a jagged twist of lightning, his arm flashes across the bed and he captures my pajama collar in his balled fist. I clutch his wrist with one hand and pry at his fingers with the other, trying to uncoil his grip. His face remains dismal and flat, absent of awareness. He’s still asleep.

  “Jeremy,” I mutter, suppressing panic.

  I consider crying for help, calling Grandma, but Jeremy’s grip is on my pajamas not my throat. I am trapped, and I feel frightened at what may come next, but should I need to, I feel I could tear away from my pajama top and scuttle away without causing a commotion which might wake and upset Grandma. For the moment, I prefer he just let go.

  “Jeremy,” I say again, trying to wake him.

  Struggling, pulling, twisting at his wrist and hand, I find his grip constricts further with every movement of my resistance. Then, at once, he begins to whisper again, and I cease my struggle.

  He whispers in metered syllables. I am close enough to hear and understand all the words this time, and now that I am, I wish I weren’t. A terror envelops me unlike anything I’ve ever felt before.

  Jeremy recites four unsettling, dual-syllabic words. “Darkest, blackest, maddest, saddest.” His next terrifying stanza flows with a haunting rhythm that chills me to the marrow of my bones. “Once caught by Hell’s darkest, blackest eyes, life ends with my maddest, saddest cries.”

  He whispers something else, once again inaudible, and it ends with my name.

  I know this is essential information, and it frustrates me I’ve missed it yet again. Still held captive by Jeremy’s iron grip, I wait for the next round of whispers.

  He begins again. I concentrate on every syllable, digesting the first four words and memorizing the horrifying, prophetic, concluding verse, going so far as to whisper it aloud myself.

  He suddenly lurches forward, wrenching me to his face. His eyelids flash open revealing nothing but the bloodshot whites of his eyes, for his pupils are rolled up inside his head as if staring inward at the terrifying images this nightmare has imprinted on his brain.

  He growls from the depths of his trance. “Here they come, Abby!”

  I don’t know if he released me or if I broke free on my own, but I hurl his hand away and run to the window. I scramble for the curtains and yank them apart.

  The deserted street of our neighborhood lies below. At the far end, just before a thick grove of evergreen trees, stands a street light. It casts a yellow glow down the block, exposing the stillness of the other homes and spilling long shadows across sidewalks and yards.

  A moment later, the street light goes out, plunging the entire neighborhood into perilous darkness. A breath catches in my throat as two figures emerge from the grove of trees. They walk in unison, side by side. They are nothing more than opaque shadows from where I stand, but I can plainly see it is our tormentors returning.

  They cross the sidewalk and walk to the middle of the street. They turn—again in unison—to face our house. They pause a moment, perhaps speak to one another, then begin to walk down the block toward our home.

  I am terrified, and I no longer want to be the only one awake in the house. I spin away from the window and return to Jeremy. When I get back to the side of his bed, he is whispering again. I’ve had enough of all this. Placing my hands on his torso, I bounce him up and down on the bed like a basketball.

  “Jeremy, wake up,” I rasp, jolting him harder. “Wake up, Jeremy!”

  Finally, his eyes snap open. This time his pupils are visible. The brief fog of sleep clears from his face, and I don’t have to repeat what his nightmare has already told his subconscious. He says, “They’re here, aren’t they, Abby?”

  I motion to the window. “They’re coming up the str
eet right now.”

  Jeremy tosses off his covers and springs from his bed. We scamper to the window together, trembling.

  “I see them,” he says.

  They’re only two houses away. Every step they take is deliberate, methodic. Their arms hang at their sides, rhythmically swaying with their steps. They stare straight ahead at our house, distracted by nothing else on the street. It suddenly occurs to me our own silhouettes may be visible from below. I whip the curtains shut and drop to my knees. Instinctively, Jeremy drops down beside me.

  “What are we doing?” he asks.

  “I don’t want them to see us watching them.”

  “But I want to know what they’re doing.”

  I part the curtains several inches and peer over the sill. Jeremy sneaks in next to me.

  The shadowy pair stand frozen in the middle of the street, and though they remain side by side, they’ve lowered their heads and appear to be conversing.

  Jeremy whispers, “Why did they stop?”

  The two silhouettes simultaneously look back over their shoulders toward the grove of trees from which they emerged. A moment later, they turn and walk perpendicular to the road toward the sidewalk.

  “Where are they going?” Jeremy asks.

  “How should I know? You’re apparently the psychic of the family.”

  The two figures disappear between our neighbors’ houses just as a Mount Herod police car turns the corner up the street. It looks like the sergeant has made good on his promise two nights in a row. The car’s headlights sweep across the tree trunks and sidewalks lining the road.

  “The police. They scared them away,” I say.

  “They didn’t look scared to me.”

  “They totally ran away.”

  Jeremy shakes his head. “They weren’t scared.”

  The police car’s spotlight comes to life as the vehicle nears our home. As the bright beam swims over front yards and porch steps, I slowly pull the curtains shut and sit back on my heels. Jeremy’s curtain glows a fiery red as the spotlight sweeps past outside.

  “They ran away. They got scared,” I insist.

  Jeremy shakes his head again. “They allow no witnesses, remember?” His round young face shows child-like sincerity contrasted with doctorate-like intelligence.

  “Do you really believe in that stuff, Jeremy?” I ask sincerely, not knowing how I’d answer the question myself.

  “What stuff?”

  “Ghosts…monsters. ESP and the supernatural. Stuff like that. Do you believe in it?”

  Jeremy parts the curtains for another peek outside. He glances back at me and shrugs a shoulder.

  “You were whispering in your sleep again,” I say.

  He squints. “What was I saying?”

  “Some stupid rhyme,” I say, trying to play it off easy when in fact it terrified me.

  “A rhyme? What do you mean a rhyme? Like a nursery rhyme?”

  “Not so much.”

  “Then what kind of rhyme?”

  “I memorized it.”

  “Tell me.”

  I move away from the window, make my way to the side of his bed, and sit back down. Staring at the floor, I recall and recite his eerie poem. “Darkest, blackest, maddest, saddest. Once caught by Hell’s darkest, blackest eyes, life ends with my maddest, saddest cries.”

  I wait for Jeremy to respond. He’s standing by the window, peering out through a crack between the curtains. He sighs with indifference, as if nothing surprises him anymore. “That’s a Tyburn.”

  “A what?”

  “A Tyburn poem. Twenty-six syllables with four repeating words at the thirteenth and twenty-second syllables. It’s a form of poetry named after the Tyburn Tree.”

  I imagine a beautiful, blossoming, fruit-bearing tree planted in the gardens of the sunny Deep South. I offer up a glint of optimism in the hopes of quenching the unearthly fire slowly engulfing this night. “It sounds pretty.”

  “The Tyburn Tree was a manmade gallows large enough to hang two dozen people at a time.”

  I make a duck face. “Not so pretty then.”

  Jeremy throws open the curtains, exposing the entire neighborhood. “They’re gone.”

  “The police or the kids?”

  “Both.” He turns and walks back to his desk. Pulling a potato chip can from a drawer, he says, “They’d sell tickets.”

  “Who?”

  Jeremy unwinds a cable connecting his computer to the potato chip can. “To the hangings.”

  He fastens the crude antenna to a makeshift six-inch metal tripod by tightening a pair of thumb screws. He walks to the window, opens it, and sets the tripod on the window sill, pointing it toward Mrs. McGovern’s house. He returns to his desk and says, “Some people hung on the Tyburn Tree for hours before they finally died. Then the crowds would riot over the bodies. Family members would have to fight off doctors and artists who wanted to dissect the corpses.”

  “How in the world do you know this, and why are you reciting Tyburn poems in your sleep?”

  The desk chair creaks beneath Jeremy’s weight when he sits down in front of his computer. “I’ve never heard that poem before in my life.”

  “How can that be?”

  “I don’t know.”

  His answer isn’t good enough for me. People don’t conceive poems in their sleep. “Have you heard your friends say it? Is it going around—”

  He shakes his head before I can finish. “No, Abby. I’ve never heard it before.”

  Neither one of us knows what to say. We’re both struck dumb. Jeremy wipes his eyes. I don’t know if he’s wiping away sleep or tears. “Are you all right?” I ask.

  He nods. “Do you really want to know how I know about the Tyburn Tree?”

  Maybe it’s the unnerving tone in which he delivers the question, but his words hit me with a shudder. “I’m not so sure anymore.”

  He turns to his computer. “The Tyburn Tree was built in the village of Tyburn in England.” The computer monitor on Jeremy’s desk flickers to life, casting his bedroom in a dim blue glow. He clicks the mouse and types something on the keyboard. “They executed people there for two hundred years.”

  Even for Jeremy it seems like an unusual thing to know. “I didn’t know you were into English history,” I say.

  “I’m not. There was a second gallows.”

  I try to swallow, but I choke on a clump of terror. I know what he’s going to say next, and I don’t want to hear it. “Don’t say it, Jeremy. Don’t say it.”

  Pushing away from his desk, Jeremy reveals a digital image of a black and white pencil drawing on his computer monitor. At least a dozen bodies, some of them women and children, hang from a three-post giant triangular gallows. A crowd of onlookers stands nearby, and a horse-drawn cart full of coffins is pulled off to the side. The entire spectacle takes place atop a hill overlooking an endless body of water.

  Jeremy says, “Mount Herod had one.”

  I slide to the end of the bed for a better look. A few mouse clicks later, using maps of Mount Herod from the Internet, Jeremy shows me a street named New Tyburn Road lying on the eastern edge of our city and running parallel with the Lake Michigan shore.

  “This road runs up to Chokecherry Bluff Cemetery, where it dead ends.” He taps the image of the map with his fingertip. “That’s the original gate facing Lake Michigan. Behind it is the oldest part of the cemetery. Some of the gravestones date back to the late 1700s. In sixth-grade History we had to write a report on a historic landmark. I was assigned Chokecherry Bluff Cemetery. Mr. Brunswick didn’t like what I found. He gave me a D.”

  “I never liked Mr. Brunswick. What about the Tyburn Tree?”

  “It was built somewhere on the cemetery grounds but torn down a long time ago. The Chokecherry Bluff website doesn’t say where it was. I don’t think they know.”

  “How can they not know?”

  Jeremy looks over his shoulder at me. “When the past is messy, people sometimes lik
e to forget the details.”

  His statement has no less than two meanings. On the surface he’s talking about the Tyburn Tree of Mount Herod, but the undercurrent carries the unpleasantness of the circumstances that landed us with Grandma.

  Disowned early in the first decade of our lives, Jeremy and I don’t even know if we share the same father. As for our mother, my grandmother’s daughter, Jeremy would have no idea what she looked like if it weren’t for the pictures Grandma keeps.

  Jeremy’s correct, the more I don’t think about those two awful days ten years ago, the less I tend to remember, and the better I feel. At least, that’s what I tell myself. It seems the historians of Mount Herod feel the same way about their Tyburn Tree.

  “So, what does it all mean?” I ask. “You recite a Tyburn poem in your sleep that you say you’ve never heard. And according to your sixth-grade history report, for which you received a D, there used to be a Tyburn Tree in Chokeberry Bluff Cemetery. What does it all have to do with the two creepy kids ringing our doorbell?”

  “I have no idea.” Jeremy suddenly swivels in the chair to face me. He folds his hands in his lap. “What were you doing in my bedroom tonight anyway?”

  I feel like I’ve been caught, and it takes me a moment to realize I’ve done nothing wrong. I explain to him: “You’ve been waking me up since Saturday night, talking in your sleep.”

  “Since Saturday?” Jeremy looks confused.

  I look my brother in the eye, and I only tell him what I’m about to tell him because I’m hoping it may lead to more answers, but at the same time, it could terrify him even more. “Jeremy, every night just before those weird kids show up, you start talking in your sleep. At first, I just heard whispers but I didn’t know where it was coming from. Do you remember me asking you about the whispers?”

  “Yes.”

  “Every night, shortly after I heard the whispers, the doorbell would ring. Then yesterday morning when you locked yourself in your room, I found out the whispers were coming from you. So, tonight I waited in your room to hear exactly what you’ve been whispering.”