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

by Corey J. Popp

  “It’s happening to us,” Jeremy says from behind me.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “We’re runaways now, completely on our own with almost nothing to our names. How much longer before we’re knocking on strangers’ doors, complaining we’re cold and hungry just like the black-eyed kids?”

  I rattle the gate, searching high and low for a way in. “I told you to stop with the creepy stuff. Help me find a way in.”

  “I just thought of something else,” he says. “In England, on execution day, prisoners were brought to the Tyburn Tree from a prison miles away, an hours-long journey. We just walked across the city to get to the home of Mount Herod’s very own Tyburn Tree.”

  “You’re talking nonsense, Jeremy. The Mount Herod Tyburn Tree is long gone, and we didn’t come from a prison,” I say.

  “Oh, didn’t we?” he says with strong inflection in his voice.

  He’s suggesting the McGoverns’ house was a prison. Or maybe even our very own house was a prison. That’s what it felt like, after all, once the black-eyed kids started trying to ring, pound, and talk themselves into the house. The metaphor requires quite a stretch as far as I’m concerned, but it works, I suppose.

  Jeremy’s getting inside my head with this garbage.

  “Enough Jeremy. Stop babbling and find a way in,” I say. “You’re just scaring yourself.”

  And me.

  Another gust of wind punches us both. I look out over the bluff. Across the rolling water on the horizon, I think I detect a thin line glowing a slightly brighter shade of midnight. The sun lurks below the edge of the earth, as if submerged below the surface of the water itself. I know everything will look much better in daylight, but that’s only if we don’t freeze to death before the sun has a chance to crest the Great Lake.

  “Over here,” Jeremy says, walking into a mess of trees lining the fence. “There’s an old stone wall on the other side of the fence, and it’s crumbling.”

  I follow Jeremy into the trees. We push their dry thin branches out of our way as we slink along the fence. A branch snaps back and whips across my face, causing me to cry out. I touch my palm to my stinging cheek and check it for blood. It’s clean.

  “You OK?” Jeremy asks.

  “Fine,” I say, adding it to the inventory of cuts and scratches I already have from the McGovern’s rose bush. “Just keep going.”

  “Here,” he says. The low stone wall on the other side of the fence has tumbled over, rupturing several of the fence’s iron pickets. Kneeling, Jeremy pulls at one of the pickets and it falls loose. I catch it just before it strikes the top of his head. Its weight is substantial and its surface is the temperature of an icicle. I push it to my right, where it binds itself in spindly tree branches.

  “Be careful. We’ll be lucky to get in alive at this rate,” I say.

  Jeremy pulls another picket loose, but we work together now, more cautiously. We push a third picket to the side and are able to twist a fourth out of the way. A fifth is missing entirely. Jeremy pulls aside a few stones and says, “I think we can get through here. I think we’ll both fit.”

  “Go,” I order him.

  Jeremy squeezes through the fence between the upper and lower horizontal rails, then climbs over the broken and jagged stone of the interior wall.

  I follow him, shuffling through the bars and over the collapsed stone, my skinned and scratched and dry red palms scraping the sooty surface of the cold rock. Once inside, I push myself to my feet and scan the landscape. The cemetery I see now is much different than the one I saw before.

  “This is the oldest part of the cemetery,” Jeremy says.

  “No kidding,” I say sarcastically, nearly whispering.

  The silvery light of the moon and stars still shining brightly in the west lights the shapes emerging before us, and it is like something out of a dream. A dream where Jeremy and I chased a bizarre tiny boy through a graveyard.

  The land is canopied by the branches of two-hundred-year-old oaks. The wind drags dead leaves along the ground, sometimes in slow steady pulls, other times in short, shotgun bursts. Weathered and wind-beaten gravestones are set wide apart and hardly aligned. They tip to the side, heaved into bows and slants by a century and a half of frost and wind. Some stones are completely fallen, uprooted by the oaks or pushed over by gales. Other gravestones lie in pieces on the ground or lean against trees. Some shattered stones are stacked as respectfully as possible into neat piles of pagan-like cairns.

  Vines invade all of it. They slither up the faces of graveside obelisks and the trunks of oaks, intent on strangling them, but the wise and long-established oaks are far mightier than the vines realize, and the obelisks are just stone, as cold and indifferent on the inside as they are on the surface.

  No friends or relatives care for the graves here, having died long ago themselves. The care is solely up to the cemetery’s staff, and considering no one has reason to come back here, it has received the lowest of priorities, merely a notch above complete neglect.

  Every horror I once believed was the product of movies and imagination is suddenly real, and the possibility we’re not the only beings in the cemetery tonight terrifies me.

  Who or what lurks behind the headstones? Who will be standing in a clearing when we come through the trees, the black-eyed kids themselves, or someone even worse, unbound by arbitrary rules, territorial of the cemetery, insane, or all together inhuman?

  “The map,” I say, shaking myself free from the surroundings before I become a part of them. “How do we get to Cattail Pond? That’s where my backpack is.”

  “Oh, right,” Jeremy says absently, taking out the map. His eyes dart between the map, the landscape, and the sky, analyzing our surroundings like a human sextant. “It’s this way,” he says, and the map disappears back into the pocket.

  The trees become less dense after we find a dirt path. The gravestones fall into closer alignment to either side of us, and several shed-sized stone mausoleums begin appearing. In the far distance, back toward the bluff but further to the north, the silhouettes of self-important spires and pillars emerge in the dark.

  “What are those?” I ask. “Churches?”

  Glancing over his shoulder toward the bluff, Jeremy replies, “No. Funerary monuments, probably. People sometimes build them for an entire family or for a group of people that all died at the same time, like in a fire or something. Sometimes a politician or other rich dude will build one all for himself, then have himself buried in it.”

  Even in death they are narcissists.

  Jeremy and I continue to follow the rutted path, walking side by side. It is wider than a walking trail but narrower than a road. Over one hundred years ago, it bore horse and carriage, I realize, and the image of two side-by-side coffins on a horse-drawn wagon appears in my mind, replacing Jeremy and me on the path. I push away the morbid thought.

  Twice I nearly turn an ankle stumbling over stones and potholes before we finally come to a waist-high fieldstone wall.

  “This is the same wall we climbed over back by the fence,” Jeremy says. “It must circle around to here. I bet it marks the original cemetery.”

  “Glad to leave it behind us,” I say, and we follow the path through an opening in the wall to a less claustrophobic and far more manicured cemetery.

  It’s like stepping through a portal, and while I can’t deny the terrors of wandering a cemetery in the middle of the night still weigh on me, the dread and fear smothering me moments ago now feel more like a sheet than a quilt.

  We find a gravel path, something wide enough to drive a vehicle down. Minutes later we upgrade to blacktop, and minutes after that we arrive at Cattail Pond and the bench where Spencer Hawkins once sat eating his lunch. From there we trace our steps back to the tree where I set down my backpack.

  “It’s gone,” I say, truly shocked.

  “I knew someone would take it.”

  “Shut up,” I snap. “That psycho took m
y backpack,” I say, referring to Spencer. “He probably dug through the whole thing like a creeper. My food. My money. Even my stupid homework.”

  “Abby, what do we do now? What are we going to do without food or money, and no place to go?”

  Jeremy may have been correct earlier when he said we’re turning into black-eyed kids—cold, hungry and homeless—victims of an “accident.” Our pupils, now completely adapted to the night, must nearly encompass our entire iris. How many more nights will pass before they evolve into owl-like black orbs? Once again, I find I must shake off the crazy thoughts, and I do so with a shudder.

  We can’t move around during the day with the police looking for us. We can’t enter any type of dwelling at night for fear the black-eyed kids will find us, bewitch us into opening a door, and murder us. Our predicament overwhelms me.

  I touch my nose and cheeks. The cold winds of an October night spent on the lake’s bluff has nearly numbed them. Or maybe it’s the icicles which were once my fingers that are numb. “Let’s just get out of the cold,” I say to Jeremy.

  I look around. A grove of trees, even thick evergreens, will not be sufficient. We need a building, something with walls—but no door on which a black-eyed kid can knock.

  “We have to go back,” I say.

  “Home?” Jeremy says hopefully.

  “No, to the old part of the cemetery on the other side of the wall.”

  Jeremy throws his head back and pulls the hood of my coat down over his eyes and nose, trying to hide from life, trying to hide from reality.

  “The funerary monuments,” I say. “We can sit inside a monument, one without a door. We can hide in a corner or behind a pillar. Anything just to get out of the wind. No one goes back there anymore. We won’t be found. When the sun comes up, I can think of what to do next. Right now, we have to rest. I have to rest.”

  Jeremy nods in silent, reluctant agreement, and we begin to retrace our steps back toward the fieldstone wall, but on the way I spot a garden shed standing alone and away from all the gravestones. It is camouflaged by evergreens and a rustic wooden fence.

  “Here!” I say, and I divert us to the shed.

  We follow a pea-gravel driveway to a small garage door on the front of the shed. I push my palms flat against the garage door and push up. Jeremy tries to help, but the door doesn’t budge.

  A maintenance door stands to the right. I cup my hands to the sides of my eyes and peer through the window. Pitch black. I try the doorknob. Locked.

  “Abby,” Jeremy says from my left, swinging open a chain-link gate between the shed and the wooden fence. “This is open.”

  Walking over to Jeremy, I spot the silver steel of a forgotten padlock hooked on the wire fence. I step through the gate and find myself in an alley-like enclosure between the shed and the fence. The wind does not penetrate here, and the awning of the nearby evergreens acts as a natural blanket preventing some of the ground heat from escaping and blowing away with the night air.

  “This is it,” I say. “This is where we’ll stay until the sun comes up. Prop open the gate so we’re not shut in. I don’t want to give them a door to knock on or even a fence to rattle.”

  “OK,” Jeremy says, his voice lifting with optimism and relief, and he props a nearby patio brick in front of the open gate. The narrow alley is strewn with random junk and tools—steel rods, wooden boards, and empty pallets. Some of it is tipped against the side of the shed or stacked in untidy piles along the fence, but all of it is abandoned and disheveled. Anything which has lost its place in the cemetery has landed here, including us.

  We follow the alley around to the back of the shed where we find an overhang off the roof. Not only is it even warmer back here, but now we are no longer visible to anyone who might wander up the driveway during the first few gray moments of daylight.

  I sit on the dirt ground, tucking myself in a corner next to a stack of pallets. I draw up my knees to my chest and wrap my arms around them. With my weight finally off my feet, I feel them begin to throb. Yet I don’t dare remove my shoes and expose my feet to the cold night air.

  Jeremy drops down next to me. He leans forward and struggles to free himself from my coat, turning the sleeves inside out as he does. He places it over the top of us like a blanket, and that’s when I notice the white lining peeking out from a tear down the center seam on the back. Jeremy sees it at the same time I do, and he freezes.

  “Abby—”

  “Never mind, Jeremy,” I say bitterly. “I don’t care. Just go to sleep.”

  He leans his weight against me and snuggles his fists up under his chin.

  “I’m sorry, Abby,” he says. “I didn’t mean to.”

  Inside, my heart breaks at his sincerity. I love my brother, and the coat doesn’t really matter. It really doesn’t. It makes me sadder that he thinks I’m angry. We are alive tonight, and somehow we’ve even found a place to sleep, and that’s all that matters. But my exterior, my exterior must remain strong. There can never be any sign of weakness.

  “It’s just a coat,” is the best I can manage aloud.

  We lie in silence for a long moment, our heartbeats and breathing falling into rhythm. I will sleep, I have no doubt, but my mind races for the moment, replaying the night.

  I see the McGoverns lying on the floor of their home in my mind as clearly as I saw them with my eyes. Surely they are dead. I wonder if they’ve been taken from the house yet. I wonder if they’re in the hospital morgue already.

  “He’ll never build the skyscrapers,” Jeremy says in the dark.

  “What?”

  “Dooley. He was building a city for his trains, remember? He wanted to build skyscrapers.”

  “That’s right, I remember,” I say sadly.

  The cost of a life interrupted comes in the form of energy unspent, goals unachieved, and plans unintentionally yet forever abandoned, but the world keeps turning for the rest of us. For better or for worse, the dead send us ahead without them.

  Cold, hungry, and exhausted, Jeremy and I cry ourselves to sleep for old Ennis McGovern and her son Dooley.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  I AM ASLEEP, but I feel someone towering over me, glaring. I emerge from sleep into dusky awareness. Before I open my eyes, the feeling of being watched passes, and I allow myself to sink back down into thick sleep under the assumption I was dreaming. Time evaporates. Perhaps I sleep another minute—maybe it’s another three hours.

  At the sound of a metallic crash, I catapult awake, painfully knocking heads with Jeremy. My eyes flash open, and my coat slips off my lap, tangling in my thrashing legs.

  The fenced-in area in which we lie is not lit by the hazy blue fog of dawn as I expected but is fully engulfed in bright yellow daylight. The Saturday morning sun casts long shadows on the ground, and the mysterious blackness which haunted the area hours ago has been boiled away by sunshine.

  “What was that?” I ask Jeremy, shaken by the crash.

  From behind his sleep-swollen eyelids, Jeremy says, “I don’t know. It sounded like—the gate!”

  We plant our palms in the dirt and push ourselves upright. Kicking up dust, we scramble around the corner of the shed and follow the fence line to the gate through which we entered.

  That’s when I see him standing on the other side of the chain-link gate, scowling at us from beneath his brow and squeezing the silver padlock closed through the latch. Jeremy pulls up, but I continue forward, charging at the fence. Leaping, I smash into it, arms outstretched, elbows locked. The flexible chain fencing balloons out and rattles with a clang like the sound of sleigh bells, but I am too late. He’s locked us in.

  I hook my fingers through the fence and sneer at the stocking-capped boy on the other side. “Open this gate, Spencer Hawkins.”

  Taking two steps back from the gate, Spencer shakes his head.

  I rattle the fence like a cage. “Open it. Let us out.”

  He squints at me suspiciously. “What are you doing here? Ho
w’d you get in?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Just let us out.”

  “The cops are looking for you guys,” he says. “Your names and pictures are all over the TV this morning.”

  On the way to the cemetery last night, Jeremy told me news stations monitor police scanners 24 hours a day, and as a result, he was certain the McGoverns’ grisly attack would be the lead story on the morning news. He even theorized the police had probable cause to search Grandma’s house for us just in case we had run back home. He believed the police would have immediately issued an all-points bulletin for the two of us once they confirmed we were missing. It turns out my brother was probably correct on every one of his assumptions, because here we are already “captured.”

  I unhook my fingers from the gate upon the realization it was Spencer’s eyes I felt on me in my sleep. The only questions remaining now are how long he’s known we’ve been back here and whether or not he’s already called the police.

  “It was the black-eyed kids,” Jeremy says from behind me, suddenly and awkwardly.

  Spencer tips his head to look past me at Jeremy. “Somehow I knew you’d say that. The TV said you’re missing and possibly in danger.” He pauses then adds, “But I’m betting you’re suspects, too.”

  I’ve been certain of the McGoverns’ fate since I saw them lying in the house, but I’ve been holding on to a match-spark flicker of hope one or both of them somehow survived. “Are they dead?”

  Apprehensively, Spencer says, “The police are calling it a double homicide.”

  My stomach drops as my hope is extinguished. Their deaths are no surprise after seeing the bloody scene in the house, but now, if I don’t convince Spencer we had nothing to do with the murders, it all ends here in a makeshift cage alongside a garden shed in a cemetery. Spencer will call the police if he hasn’t already, and if we’re not thrown in jail, we’ll be returned to Grandma, and the black-eyed kids will come to finish us off.

  “Jeremy’s telling the truth. It wasn’t us. It was the black-eyed kids.”

  Spencer looks at me doubtfully.