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

by Corey J. Popp

  As my shoulder impacts the floor, I realize my brother has only one last chance to escape. “Jeremy!” I yell to him. “Run outside! Get out of the church!”

  Jeremy looks at me sadly, as if he does not want to leave me, but he must run if he stands any chance of surviving. When the black-eyed boy recovers, he’ll come back slashing—expeditiously and without mercy.

  “Run, Jeremy!”

  Jeremy unloads the weight of the padlock and chain and rushes toward the open church door.

  The black-eyed boy recovers, disregards Spencer and me, and pursues Jeremy toward the door. I reach for his leg as he parkours the back pew, but I miss, and he leaps past me, unimpeded, to the entryway.

  But when his left foot touches the top of the handrail separating the entryway from the church, his leg buckles, and he crumbles to the floor, landing inches behind my fleeing brother. Lying on the floor, the black-eyed boy takes one last feeble swipe at Jeremy’s leg with the knife and catches my brother’s foot with the blade. Jeremy stumbles out the open church door with a yelp.

  Gone is the supernatural grace and defiance of gravity I saw the black-eyed boy use at the McGoverns’ house. His body now lies broken on the floor. His right arm is self-amputated at the elbow, and his leg must have given out due to a twist or fracture suffered during the fall from the chandelier. His newsboy cap is missing, and his clothing and face are scorched from the candle flames. Slowly, he gathers himself and stands.

  He looks back at Spencer and me, then out the door to the steps where Jeremy lies clutching his foot. He sheathes the knife behind the lapel of his wool coat and does his best to straighten the collar with his one remaining hand.

  Finally, he glares up into the rafters, fixing his night-trained, hideous black eyes on his sister still trapped within the chandelier. “Rules are rules,” he says. He limps out the door, passes Jeremy without so much as a glance, and disappears into the night.

  It is a peculiar ending following so much violence. Whoever enforces these rules and whatever the punishment is for disobeying them are mighty influencers indeed.

  “Jeremy, are you hurt?” I call, laboring to my feet.

  Jeremy looks at his slashed shoe. “It’s just my foot.”

  I lean on the pew. “Spencer?”

  “I’ll be OK,” Spencer says. “What about you?”

  I reach up to my chest and draw away a palm of syrupy blackness—blood.

  “Abby…” Jeremy says, worried.

  Eyes wide, Spencer says, “We have to get you to a doctor.”

  A dozen questions spin through my mind, none of them fully coherent. If we go for help now, will the police believe our story when they finally see the captive black-eyed girl? Will we still end up in jail or the psychiatric hospital? Most importantly, do we just let the black-eyed boy get away?

  “He’ll be back,” the black-eyed girl croaks from the darkness above, as if reading my mind. “Even without me, he’ll come again and again, night after night, until he finishes what we came to do.”

  I walk down the aisle and cast my voice up to her smoldering body. “Where’s the tomb?” I ask.

  She does not answer me.

  “Where’s the tomb?” I ask again, more urgently.

  Still, only silence.

  I cannot weigh the importance of our options fast enough. The black-eyed girl has been beaten and burned badly, but she must remain captive in the chandelier until daybreak if we want to permanently rid ourselves of her.

  Spencer and Jeremy are injured, their legs or feet cut open. They say they are fine, but we really have no idea until a doctor looks at them—looks at all of us. I’m injured, too, but the cut does not feel too deep, and my legs are still well.

  The thought which torments me is that we’re allowing the black-eyed boy to limp back to his hijacked tomb somewhere in the cemetery. If he returns to it without any of us seeing where it is, he’ll survive another night at the very least. The black-eyed girl is right. The longer the black-eyed boy survives, the greater the odds he’ll eventually kill Jeremy.

  But she’s not giving up the location of the tomb.

  “You two stay here,” I say to Jeremy and Spencer as if they had a choice.

  “Abby, wait—” Spencer says.

  But I’m already gone.

  Somewhere behind me, carried by the wind, I hear my name called out by Jeremy. As I left the church, he reached for me, but I sidestepped his grasp. He didn’t want me to go, but I’m certain he knew I must.

  Now, my shoes pound the ground of the cemetery. I run east, the same direction I saw the black-eyed boy fade into when he limped away from the church.

  The cold wind hisses in my ears. I breathe in rhythm with my strides. Where I find blacktop, I take advantage of it as long as possible. Otherwise, I hurdle headstones and zigzag trees.

  I scan the graveyard, watching for any movement at all. There should be blood, spattered trails of it on the ground, but there is none. He severed his arm and not a drop of blood has dripped from his body. I don’t know whether he has somehow fashioned himself a crude tourniquet or his veins always run dry. The passing thought causes me to wonder if a heart even beats within his demonic body.

  Fractured clouds roll through the sky, carried by strong winds blowing thousands of feet over the earth, accelerated by Lake Michigan’s nearby cold waters. A moonbeam slips through, and the black landscape before me brightens. In the distance, against the now blue-black sky, among the silhouettes of swaying trees and warped memorials, the black-eyed boy clumsily vaults a headstone.

  I gather speed and pursue him. I pass the same large stone about twenty seconds after I saw him leap over it.

  Catching someone who has a twenty-second lead is nearly impossible unless the runners’ paces are vastly different. It is, obviously, the difference between an eight-forty mile and an eight-twenty mile, and it goes without saying it would take a full mile to close such a gap. The cemetery is only a square mile in total area. Neither time nor distance is on my side. My only two hopes are either his pace falters to the highest degree due to his injured leg or my line of sight becomes so perfect I can watch him enter a tomb from a great distance away.

  Right now, I don’t see him at all, but I can’t slow down for fear of falling further behind. I maintain a steady pace in his general direction, hoping to once again catch sight of him.

  The conditions are horrible. I’m losing blood—how much, I don’t know. My joints ache, and my muscles are cramping in the cold. Although the rain has stopped, my shoes have become soggy and heavy, and the water they retain feels as though it was poured from a bucket of ice. The only good news is a significant amount of moonlight now spills down on the graveyard.

  To my right, I glimpse a figure with an apparent destination. The shadow of what I believe to be the black-eyed boy closes in on a building near the bluff. It’s another funerary monument.

  A hijacked, unbeliever’s tomb.

  I am closer to the black-eyed boy than I calculated I could be, somehow having closed an impossible gap in a short amount of time. I’m not certain how I gained ground unless pure adrenaline drove me to a pace which would otherwise be considered divinely inspired.

  The moon glows brightly now, but the black-eyed boy is a phantom, vanishing and reappearing without explanation. Having once again lost sight of him, I head for the monument, clutching the cut on my chest, trying to keep pressure on the wound as my pulse thumps beneath my palm. I try not to think about the blood leaving my body with every beat of my heart.

  When I reach the blacktop footpath surrounding the monument, I discover the building is enclosed by a fence similar to the one which surrounds the entire graveyard, a 10-foot high wrought-iron barrier tipped with spear-like finials. A plaque is mounted on the fence’s only gate. It’s too dark to see what’s printed on it, and right now it certainly doesn’t matter.

  Perhaps the black-eyed boy has already entered the monument, or maybe this isn’t the correct tomb
. I made a presumption from a great distance…maybe I was wrong. I scan the concrete structure through the fence’s iron pickets, watching for motion amid the monument’s many pillars and buttresses.

  Nothing.

  I bend at the waist to catch my breath, clutching the bars of the gate as if standing outside a jail cell. I feel weak and dizzy. My sweatshirt’s neckband is heavy with blood. I don’t know if I can make it back to the church to tell Jeremy and Spencer where to find the tomb. But again, I don’t even know if this is the right tomb.

  I’m scared.

  Then, at once, I know he’s here. I can feel his presence as if I willed him here myself. But he’s not in the tomb.

  I spin around. The black-eyed boy stands at the edge of the blacktop surrounding the monument, staring at me. The cleaved stub of his arm dangles at his side. His other arm is crossed over his chest, the knife gripped tightly in his fist. We consider each other in silence for a long moment, each of us waiting on the other.

  Finally, I ask, “Is this the unbeliever’s tomb you stole?”

  “I hate you Abigail Cooper,” the black-eyed boy spits. “Never have I seen such stubbornness, such irreverence, such selfishness.”

  Hate has a different meaning to the black-eyed boy than it does the rest of us. I can tell by the inflection in his voice. Most of us toss the word around casually, saying we hate green peas or our science teacher, but the black-eyed boy has used it within proper context. He truly does hate me—the way evil hates good.

  He continues. “Your interference has been reprehensible. You bought Jeremy Cooper another day, but no more than that. Now, move away from the gate.” His too-deep British accent echoes off into the night, having issued a command all too easy for me to disregard. Besides, I’m not sure I can move without passing out.

  If he gets inside, the nightmare continues. A list of victims passes through my mind: Grandma, Mr. Donaldson, Mrs. McGovern, Dooley, Spencer’s father and brother. Even Spencer’s mother is locked away from him on account of the black-eyed kids.

  They upended Spencer’s life, and they hunted my brother like an animal for the past week. I probably can’t stop the black-eyed boy from getting back inside this tomb—I’ve watched him slaughter two people, run across a ceiling, survive a two-story fall, and parkour over church pews still and all. Yet, I’m all that stands between him and a stay of execution.

  Let Jeremy and Spencer find my body here. At least they’ll finally know which tomb the black-eyed boy has hijacked. “You’ll have to come through me,” I say, choking on a throat which has gone dry.

  The black-eyed boy scowls, lowers his chin to his chest, and glares at me from beneath his brow. “I consider your refusal to move away from the gate an act of aggression, Abigail Cooper.”

  His words are at first meaningless, a statement of the obvious—wasted speech. It then occurs to me his words were actually a verbal affirmation of the enactment of a rule.

  From the ground around me comes the sudden, sickening sound of rustling leaves. Hairy bodies scurry out from long grass. Legs wriggle. Tails twitch. Longer, thinner bodies emerge, all slithering in the same direction.

  Rats and snakes, dozens of them, materialize exponentially, the same way the spiders did the other night, and they’re all coming directly for me.

  The black-eyed boy has summoned a distraction. He’s going to make an attempt at the gate. He’s going to try to come through me, just as I dared him.

  Within seconds, the vermin are upon me, scurrying over my feet, striking at my shins with jagged yellow fangs, and gnawing at my ankles with razor-like teeth.

  The rats run up my legs, clinging to my clothing with claws as fine as sewing needles. I slap them off, flinging them back into the grass even as they bite my hands. A dark serpent coils around my left calf, drawing tight, constricting, slinking upwards.

  When the black-eyed boy feels confident I am completely distracted and overcome by these monsters, he bounds forward, seemingly in slow motion.

  Long strides carry him. His intact arm is bent 90-degrees at the elbow, a textbook arm-swing positioned for a sprint. He grips the knife within his fist, the curved blade shining in the moonlight. The stub of his amputated arm dangles at his side, definitely dislocated at the shoulder, awkwardly flopping with every step.

  Even as he runs, he can barely plant his injured left foot. He can’t possibly be balanced. Yet he leaps nearly straight up when he’s just a few feet away from me, surging over my head like a great wild cat.

  I discard any thought of the rats and snakes, and I reach up with both hands, desperate to stop the black-eyed boy. Jeremy’s life depends on it.

  I catch him by the shoe. It is ice-cold, sopping wet, and slippery, and his speed and forward momentum are so fantastic, so unnatural, I am lifted off the ground several inches before he slips out of my grip.

  The fence behind me rattles with an awful crash. My back and shoulders strike the iron bars, and my head—

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  I WAKE TO the sound of a bird singing.

  Despite its cheery song, my eyes open to a dark cemetery. The bird is high atop a mighty centuries-old oak near the bluff, which means he can see a great distance over the horizon across Lake Michigan. If he’s singing, he sees the start of a sunrise, and daybreak must be only minutes away.

  The rats and snakes are gone.

  I’m lying on the blacktop, my left shoulder pressed against the cold iron fence behind me. My head throbs in a way it never has before. My face lies in a slimy puddle of stink. Lifting my head, I realize I have been lying in a pool of my own vomit.

  I touch the back of my head. An enormous welt rises under my palm. I feel the stickiness of blood on my hand. My legs tingle with what feels like hundreds of tiny pin pricks, the remnants of rat and snake bites. I wonder what infections and venom runs through my veins right now.

  I sit up. The cut across my collarbone feels stiff and bruised. If it had clotted and closed as I lay unconscious, it may have just tore open. I cross my arm over my chest and clutch the wound. It burns.

  A light-blue thread of sky sits over Lake Michigan’s watery horizon. As I guessed, the sun is about to break. I think of Spencer and Jeremy, and I wonder if I’ll be able to make it back to them to tell them where the tomb is, or if I should just lie here until discovered, dead or alive.

  “I was hoping you had bled to death,” a deep voice says from above me.

  I gasp and shuffle away from the fence, my palms and heels scraping the gritty blacktop. Looking up, I see the black-eyed boy hanging from the fence. One of the spear-like finials topping the fence posts impales his right shoulder, entering from the pit of his arm and protruding bloodlessly straight out the top. His arm is helplessly stretched out in front of him, his knife still gripped in his fist. The stub of his amputated arm dangles uselessly at his side. His legs sag beneath him. There are no footholds or crossbars within reach of his feet. He’s hanging on the outside of the fence as helpless as a fish on a hook.

  I’ve done this to him. I caused his leap to fall short, and it resulted in him being skewered by the top of the fence. If he somehow wrenches himself free, he can attack me according to his rules. I should get up and run.

  But I’m too weak. I can’t stand, certainly not quickly, and even if I do get to my feet, I’ll never be able to run. It takes all my concentration just to focus on the blurry sight of him. Besides, he hangs so wilted I can tell he gave up the struggle to free himself long ago.

  I say, “Do you hear that bird?”

  He doesn’t answer.

  “The sun is coming up. What happens now? Do you die?”

  He allows my question to simmer in long silence before he says, “My fate is worse than death.” His tone is sad and sour, that of a quitter.

  “What’s going to happen?” I ask.

  “I’ll go back to Hell.”

  I slide across the blacktop toward the fence. With every movement comes another wave of nausea, and
I have to pause to stop myself from throwing up. When I reach the fence, I lean against it. It is cold, icy. I don’t care.

  A second bird joins the first one in song. The black-eyed boy doesn’t have much time left.

  “Why did you want to kill my brother?” I ask, hoping to unlock the mystery surrounding the curse of the black-eyed kids, hoping to get an answer before he disappears in a flash of black smoke or turns to ash or melts before my eyes…or whatever theatrics will accompany his departure once daylight hits him.

  The black-eyed boy says nothing again for a long moment, seemingly longing for entrance to the monument which lies just out of his reach. After much silent deliberation, he answers my question with a question. “Is he even your brother?”

  Jeremy is likely my half-brother, and the black-eyed boy somehow senses this. I do not answer him. First, I owe him no answers. Second, if he can “sense” such a thing, then he already knows the answer. I won’t validate it.

  I ask my question again, reshaping it, “Why does Oswulf’s Stone think my brother is a threat?”

  Once more, the black-eyed boy stalls his answer, but when he does answer, he speaks slowly and eloquently, as if reciting poetry. “Oswulf’s Stone possesses a gravity which pulls across unseen boundaries. It binds the natural to the supernatural. It inhales the ordinary and exhales the extraordinary. It does so to sustain itself—to nourish its spirit, a spirit you would call ‘dark.’ All humankind is touched by the umbra cast by unearthly things. Some embrace it. Some deny it. Some take no notice at all. But the most dangerous ones are the ones who confront it, untangle and thwart it.”

  That doesn’t sound like Jeremy. At least, not a week ago, anyway. But things seemed to have changed in a short amount of time. “My brother will do those things?”

  “Hawkins and Cooper will put much to rest in your city,” the black-eyed boy says, yet neither his voice nor his vocabulary are that of a boy. He is otherworldly, a demon masquerading as a child.