Page 2 of The Curse

I swear to God a cold breeze wafted through the room out of nowhere and slipped down the neck of my shirt. I shuddered and opened my eyes wide to really look at this woman. “Ma’am, if you don’t mind my asking—and I really hate to be an asshole and all—but just who the fuck are you?”

She smiled. “I already told you. I’m your great-aunt Hephzibah. Don’t you believe me?”

“I’m not exactly sure what to believe right now.”

“What I’m telling you is the truth. I assure you your parents’ love for you never wavered or diminished in the least, but they both changed almost overnight from excited and happy parents-to-be to paranoid people who began to let fear rule their lives. Your mother’s health deteriorated. She was doing everything in her power to keep her little family safe. Unfortunately, it didn’t work.”

She reached down in that bag again and brought out an envelope. “I made a vow to your mother that if anything should happen to her and to your father, I’d find you when the time came and give you this letter. The fact that my family did nothing to stop this thing from happening to your parents still haunts me to this day, but our hands were tied. We were devastated, but were powerless to stop it. There was a curse, you see.”

I gave her a look of blatant disbelief. “A curse?”

“Yes, and don’t give me that look, young man. Curses, like witches, have existed throughout all time. This was a curse of black magic. An evil curse so powerful that none of us could break it. The spell was made with a blood sacrifice, you see. An unthinkably evil one.”

She held the yellowed envelope out to me, and for a minute I was actually afraid to even touch it. I felt another chill run down my back.Somebody just stepped on my grave.I looked up wordlessly at Mrs. Banks, the woman who called herself my great aunt Hephzibah, and she shook the envelope a little. “Well go ahead, boy. It’s not going to bite you.”

I jerked it out of her hand with maybe a little more force than I absolutely needed to and opened it up. The envelope contained some faded pink stationery, five pages of it stained with tears. It was written in a flowery longhand that I could barely even read. It took me a while todecipher it. It was from my mother.

Like my visitor had already told me, my mother declared in her letter how much she and my father loved me, how much they’d wanted to stay with me. There’d been sweet details about the first time my mother had felt me move inside her or how amazed my father was when she’d placed his hand on her belly and let him feel the butterfly flutters. There’d been plans for my future, all the things they wanted to see me do—like take my first steps, hear my first word, witness my first day of school, throw a football—the list had gone on and on. Then on page four, the letter had taken a decidedly malevolent turn.

“Darling, if you’re reading this, then my worst fears have come true and I wasn’t able to stop the curse from taking your father’s life. Without him, I simply can’t go on, but for you I would have tried. I would never have left you in the world alone and defenseless. So since you’re reading this now, my backup plan to save myself has failed too. I can only tell you that someone is coming for us and I’m afraid that no matter what we do to stop them, we won’t be able to survive. I’m enclosing a family tree with as much detail as I could in the short period of time we’ve had to prepare. Read the information carefully, darling. It describes an evil curse that originated in 1717, in Marblehead, Massachusetts—one that directly affects all the male descendants of your father’s line.”

That page ended, and curious, I turned it over to read what came next. I had to read it three times before the words began to make any sense—before they finally imprinted themselves on my brain.

All the males on your father’s side of the family commit suicide on the occasion of their twenty-fifth birthday.

I read that line again and really let it sink in. This was April, and my twenty-fifth birthday was only a few weeks away, on May fifteenth.

And despite how truly evil that is, once every one hundred years, another event coincides with that death. On that occasion, the man who commits suicide is the actual reincarnation of Nicodemus Bailey, a young man who lived and died in Salem in 1717. Nicodemus was the soul mate and true love of Corbin Hargreaves, a powerful witch who lived in Marblehead, Massachusetts, and who disappeared without a trace the same fateful night his true love died.

That terrible event—Nicodemus’s suicide—takes place again every one hundred years. Nicodemus is reincarnated into the body of on one of his descendants, and this is where the storygets even murkier. That descendant somehow finds his lost love not long before his birthday and is reunited with him. He and Corbin Hargreaves are deliriously happy once again—until the descendant has his twenty-fifth birthday. Then, even Corbin’s magic is unable to save him, and Corbin is forced again to watch him die. And again, Corbin disappears, not to resurface for another hundred years. The year of your twenty-fifth birthday, 2017, will be the third time this atrocity recurs. Unless you can find a way to stop it. I think you can.

I looked up from the letter and shook my head. Reincarnation? Curses? True love and mysterious disappearances? Complete bullshit, right? Had to be. I sure as hell didn’t believe in curses and I didn’t believe suicide was ever the answer either.

My great aunt, if that’s who she really was, hadn’t been there more than twenty minutes, but she’d managed to alter my entire life in that short amount of time. Not that I believed it, of course. It was crazy! Nuts! I looked up from the letter to tell old Great Aunt Hephzibah exactly what I thought of this bullshit letter, and she was looking at me so sadly I didn’t have the heart to tell her what I wanted to say.

“I’m sorry, dear,” she said. “But if it’s any consolation, your mother truly believed you would be the one to break the curse. She believed it with every fiber of her being.”

“I don’t understand. Who was my mother? How did she know all this about my father’s family?”

“Your mother was Rosalie Banks. And she volunteered to come and meet your father on the occasion of his twenty-fourth birthday to try to warn him. Unfortunately, she took one look at him and fell in love. I say unfortunately, because once she fell in love, she refused to leave him and it sealed her own fate. We knew that in that year, 1991, he would meet someone, fall in love, marry and begin his family. We didn’t know that it would be with our Rosalie. She was so in love with your father that she couldn’t leave him to his fate. She hoped up until the last that she could manage to save him. But she was also a realist—she knew that she might not be able to. And she had premonitions of the future.” She looked over at me long and hard. “Your mother was a talented witch who gave her life for you and your father. She told me not long before you were born, “I still have hope to save my sweet husband, but if I should fail, my son, Nicholas, will be the one to stop this from ever happening again. He will find his true love, Corbin Hargreaves, and they will end this curse together. They will live happily ever after—unlike my sweet husband and I. But if the worst happens, then we will go to our deaths knowing that our baby will be the one. He will break the curse forever and end this terrible cycle.”

“Wait a minute,” I said, wiping some traitorous tears from my eye. I didn’t believe this bullshit. Not for a second, but the love my mother felt for me shone through the words on the page. I felt it as if she’d been in the room there with me. For the first time in my life, I felt loved—both by her and my father. And I felt cheated. Something had happened to take them away from me, and if it was the last thing I ever did, I was going to find out what that was.

“If my mother’s family knew about this, like you say you did, why did you leave me in foster care?”

“To protect you. It was your mother’s wish to save your life at all costs. She cast spells to help you survive until you were found. She thought going to foster care might help stop the curse from finding you before you were ready. When you turned twenty-four, I started looking for you, and I’ve only just found you. I’m sorry you had to go through that, dear. But know that it was done out of love for you and fear for your safety.”

My great aunt left not long after, saying that she would be in touch. I didn’t ask her any questions—just let her go. That night, I got shitfaced drunk and had a pity party for one. I’m embarrassed to say I cried for a long time. I cried for my mother who had called medarling. I cried for the parents I’d never known but who were so obviously disturbed. How could they both have believed that foolishness my mother was spouting in the letter? How had she convinced my father of her craziness to the point that he killed himself right along with her and left me high and dry? I cried for all those dreams of theirs gone up in smoke. All the things they’d planned for me, all the things I missed because they were dead, by their own insane choice.

Eventually, I moved on from crying to cussing. I cussed them for leaving me behind, and for leaving me a fucking note that gave me only a cruel taste of what might have been. For putting all these ridiculous doubts inside my head. Suicide at the age of twenty-five? Fuck that shit.

When I’d sobered up, I put my brand-new history degree to the test and began researching the small amount of information I’d received from my so-called great aunt Hephzibah and the letter, feeling one hundred percent certain that I’d find that my parents were total nut jobs and the supposed family curse was nothing more than a figment of their very vivid imaginations.

But that’s not what I found at all. And that, unfortunately, was when shit got real.

---