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  THE CURSE

  Charles L. Grant

  Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  © 2012 / The Estate of Charles L. Grant

  Copy-edited by: Patricia Lee Macomber

  Cover Design By: David Dodd

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  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  OTHER CROSSROAD PRESS PRODUCTS BY CHARLES L. GRANT

  The Oxrun Station Series

  The Last Call of Mourning

  The Grave

  (More Oxrun Station books coming soon)

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  PUBLISHER'S NOTE:

  This is Charles L. Grant's first horror novel. It is rife with the clichés of the day, and we are told that mention of this novel made the author grumble. That said, it's an important milestone in his career, and we are proud to bring it back to a new generation of readers. This is where it all began…

  David Niall Wilson

  Crossroad Press

  Chapter I

  Terry was glad she had chosen to stay in the back seat. The way the real estate agent was driving, she thought it the safest place to be, certainly safer for her than for the highway drivers who were forced to guess what his next move would be. She considered leaning forward to ask Syd if he'd paid up their insurance, then decided neither he nor the agent would appreciate her sense of humor.

  My curse, she thought, and again ignored the driving by staring with reluctant envy at the car's massive interior. Carefully, almost reverently, her fingers kneaded the sable leather upholstery, then traced the elaborate Castilian designs in the doors' inserted metal-work—all the motion executed in studied avoidance before lingering over the panel of toggles topping the armrest in the seat's center. The temptation to palm them into operation simultaneously made her smile, and had her husband not been with her, she knew she just might have done it. Fighting such obvious lures for the weakly adventurous caused ulcers, she believed, and she wondered again how Syd had managed to fend off her spending urges long enough to spirit away funds for the down payment.

  "You're a bloody incurable hedonist," he'd accused her one autumn evening. She was modeling a new winter coat trimmed with synthetic fox and belted with rattlesnake. Her turns in front of the secondhand sofa were just sharp enough to keep him from snatching the price tag. "You're downright obscene sometimes."

  "I am an Epicurean," she corrected primly, and deftly detached the tag and folded it into a pocket before he could read it. "I have taste, you see. That's the big difference between you and me, Sydney Guiness. Taste." And she aimed a mock bump and grind at her shadow on the wall.

  "Your innocent little readers should only see you now," he said and stretched out, his hands cupped behind his head, a foam throw pillow kicked to the floor to make room for his feet. His eyes, as dark as the close-cut beard that softened his jaw, wandered rapidly over the ceiling in feigned terror, and his lips began to tremble violently. He groaned once, and she took an involuntary step closer. "They're coming down," he whispered harshly, clutching at his throat, pulling at his collar. "They're coming down to crush me." He gagged and twisted onto his side away from her. "I can't escape, Terry. They're going to bury me alive and I'll never be heard from again. Never, do you hear?"

  "What?" she asked, caught in spite of herself. "What's coming down? The ceiling?"

  "The goddamned bills!" he shouted, and rolled to his feet to grab her shoulders before she could back away. "You're trying to drive me mad, aren't you? Admit it, love, and spare me all this agony. You're trying to be like that guy in Gaslight, right? To control my money without the unseemly mess of a murder." He leaned closer, his eyes wide, thick brows pulled low. "But you won't get away with it, my one true love. You'll never succeed in driving this man mad no matter what you do. I'm on to you, Theresa Ann Guiness. You'll never get away with it."

  "Well, God knows I try," she said, punching him lightly in the stomach before hugging him tightly.

  But he'd paid the bills, as usual, and had taken her out to dinner a week later, which was decidedly unusual, and, in the middle of the Baked Alaska, dropped a smudged and battered passbook onto her plate.

  "Open it," he ordered. His frown vanished, and she thought the grin that split beard and moustache was uncannily wolfish, and smug. "Come on," he said. "Open it before it disappears."

  She did. Wiped at it with a finger. Choked. Tried to laugh and choked again. A waiter rushed over with a brimming glass of water, then tapped her gently in the back. A moment later she waved him away with sputtered thanks, and stared at the figures recorded on the last page.

  "The house?" she said, almost too frightened to believe it. He nodded and she drained the water. "But how? I mean . . . Syd, where? I mean, where did you get it all?"

  He'd gloated and rubbed the side of his nose. "Superb budget planning, m'dear." He leaned back in the chair and stroked at his beard. "That, and a few subtle lies about my take-home pay and a bonus or two you never got your slippery little hands on."

  "But that's unfair! We could have bought a lot of things!"

  "Right," he said. "It worked, didn't it?"

  And even now, as the taurine real estate agent struggled with his Cadillac through the summer weekend traffic, she found it difficult to believe that they were finally on their way to freedom. That after five years of high-rise cubicles and increasingly expensive inner city complexes, they could actually be browsing in the market for a home of their own.

  You're a damned sneak, she thought to her husband in the front seat. You knew what this is doing to me.

  Immediately after they'd opened the search—how far back? In April? It seemed so long. What century?

  The apartment began to shrink inexorably around them like some diabolical machine in a low-grade horror film. What she had found utterly charming when they'd taken possession was exposed as cheap corner-cutting by the builder; what she'd bragged to her friends about as being modernly convenient became cramped, and with a suddenness that astonished her. Every Saturday, then, they fled to ride through Long Island, southern Connecticut, and New Jersey, checking the visible market against that which appeared daily in the newspapers. And as they searched, her dreams of Edwardian mansions and rambling estates fragmented and scattered under the relentless wind of fiscal reality; but following a fortnight of self-pitying depression during which she had surrendered all hope, Syd brought her protesting to an agency a coworker had recommended, and the cycle resumed: the tours, the wanderings, the poking through bedrooms, baths, family rooms, kitchens. She would have run crying from every one of them. She would have gladly apologized to the apartment for even thinking about abandoning it, but she was trapped and there was no shaking it: the fever had returned, and she was getting weary of fighting it.

  A sharp turn off the highway led them into the low hills between New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and she snapped back to the car.

  "Of course, it isn't all that spectacular," Enfallo was saying to a silent, always silent, Syd, "but
for your basic starter home, I think you'll find it exactly what you're looking for. More important, of course, it's what you two young folks need right now."

  He shifted his ungainly bulk and thumbed up the air conditioning, pushed the blower a notch higher. His fingers, well tanned and weighted by heavy gold rings, drummed on the steering wheel while he muttered at the traffic. Syd only grunted as she knew he would, and turned his head to watch the monotonous green blur past them.

  There has to be a book of some kind, she decided, one with a million pages and a zillion pictures of nice young couples representing every age and salary bracket combination. And with each there has to be two pages of dialogue cues that every agent has to memorize before he can pull away from the curb. There has to be. They all say the same stupid, inane things; like an overly patient mother explaining a picture book to her two nice, but dense, children.

  "Now the living room in this house—" and Enfallo suddenly hunched over the wheel in a violent coughing fit. The car swerved and Terry feared her first and only home would turn out to be a pauper's casket. She grabbed for the armrest and inadvertently lowered the window at her shoulder. As the humid heat slapped her, she tugged at the first switch her fingers touched and blew out a held breath as the window closed again. Enfallo, meanwhile, fought the car off the partially eroded shoulder and glanced into the rear-view mirror. Terry smiled quickly, and nodded as she leaned expectantly forward, blinking at a blast of cold air from the dashboard.

  She was beginning to feel like a puppet, or better, an actress playing a part for the twentieth straight year. Her role in this particular production was that of the female numbskull, breathing heavily at every dozen words as though they and they alone would free her from the bondage of eternal rent damnation. She received all the lurid descriptions, the miraculous possibilities, the plans for elaborate formal gardens, while Syd was made to suffer through the double-talk technicalities and glossed-over-finances—and it had severely disconcerted every agent they'd yet encountered when it was Terry who demanded exactitude on quotations about taxes, heat, electricity and water; Terry who questioned ceiling stains, floorboard gaps, construction materials, and caulking in basements. She and Syd had written their own little scenario, which more often than not proved more exciting than the houses they saw.

  "I smoke too much," Enfallo apologized. "One of these days I'm going to switch to cigars or a pipe. But what can you do when the world's like it is, right?"

  Syd grunted. Terry nodded again, shivering and wishing she had brought a sweater. She was sure now that darting in and out of air-conditioned cars was going to give her pneumonia, terminal.

  "But as I was saying, the living room is certainly large enough to hold even that Spanish kind of furniture, the big stuff, if you know what I mean. Say, aren't you Spanish, Mrs. Guiness?"

  "Black Irish," she said, delighting in the small victory. "If my hair was shorter, you could see that right away. My skin's also a little too pale to be Mediterranean."

  The agent shrugged, and poked at jowls sprouting gray whiskers that shouted for an afternoon shave. "Well, you can't win them all, right? Anyway, the kitchen has been completely remodeled, absolutely up to date. And the bedrooms are easily large enough to hold queen-sized beds, if you like that sort of thing. You'll see what I mean. The basement, of course, has been paneled—by one of the earlier owners, I believe, and refloored so you can have a rec room, if you like that sort of thing. There is, naturally, six-inch insulation throughout," and he turned to Syd who nodded as if he understood all the implications and was taking them into serious account.

  "What the hell do I know from dry wells and furnaces?" he'd demanded once, his frustrations no greater but more visible than hers. "Look, Terry angel, all I want is some place where I can yell without having someone pounding on my ceiling because I'm disturbing their idiot cats."

  "Don't you worry about it, love. I'll take care of everything."

  Which she did. As always.

  "Now this is Hawthorne Street," Enfallo announced as though he'd just turned onto the Champs Elysees or Regent Street. "Quiet, as you can see, and all the homes in this section of the township are relatively new. Oh, a few older ones here and there, but you can see that the neighborhood doesn't suffer for them. In fact, they lend a kind of quaint charm to the whole area." He tapped Syd's thigh with a manicured finger. "You saw how easy it was to get here from the Interstate?" Syd nodded and Enfallo grinned, his lips self-consciously tight to hide yellow-stained teeth. "And this," as he turned sharply without signaling, "is Prynne Lane. A peaceful enough dead end, just like I promised you. Didn't I tell you I'd take care of you? You just have to trust me, right? I wouldn't steer you wrong, not at all. Of course, there's no heavy traffic. . . ."

  Terry watched the buildings ease gently into focus as the car slowed to a reasonable speed, and she was able to concentrate more fully by ignoring Enfallo's intensified pitch. Though the area was not a development, the buildings were obvious escapees from the same architectural nightmare: cookie-mold colonials, bi-levels, and ranches. Most of them newly green, white, or muted gold—all of them aproned by generous pampered lawns, coyly hidden behind decades-old red maples, willows, a scattering of cherry and dogwood, and a very few massively boled oak and elm. Hives of children played in several of the yards, and compact cars were parked in front of closed garages. It was pleasant enough, she decided. Probably screaming noisy during the first weeks of no-school summer, but pleasant.

  The street itself had been recently repaved and shimmers of old formed rainbows in several shallow depressions. And when she glanced up over the hood, she was surprised to see that the road ended as if someone had sliced it off with a carving knife. Instead of a gradual tapering, fading from tarmac to dirt to wilderness, there was, at the far end, an abrupt barrier of trees and tangled underbrush which prevented her from seeing clearly beyond it. But she remembered Enfallo describing to Syd how the lane stuck out like a finger into a vast meadow that itself bordered a state park. Should they take this place, he'd said, there was practically no chance at all that someone would build behind or next to them. Some arrangement with the neighborhood; but when Syd pressed for details, Enfallo had changed the subject with a promise of looking it up as soon as he could.

  "What do you think, angel?"

  Terry blinked and smiled. What do you think, with the emphasis on the think—whenever he stressed the you, all bets were off as far as he was concerned and he needed her to provide them with a polite way of telling an agent he was out of his mind for taking them to a place like . . . whatever.

  "It's nice." Simply saying nice would have indicated her own serious doubts.

  "Great," he said, smiling for the first time that day. To Enfallo, he said, "So where's this poor man's mansion of yours?"

  "You're looking at it."

  Syd slouched to stare across the fat man's chest; Terry merely turned her head, and tried not to sigh. No bells, she thought, no rockets, bands, or carousels. But she had to at least give the agent credit for not building their young hopes on sandy promises.

  The house was a standard Eastern ranch, indented where the front door began with a concrete porch set-tied on cinder block openwork. Judging by the array of windows, she estimated two bedrooms to the left of the front door, living room on the right flanked by a carport. Along the back would be the dining area, kitchen, bath, and a third bedroom. The outside was cedar shakes aged a dark brown, the trim an uninspiring white. There was a high-spreading dogwood in the center of the browning front lawn, and chest-high hedging that ran from the end of the street across the front and down the left side, and by its sudden downward slope, she realized the recreation room Enfallo mentioned would probably have a private entrance lower than the main part of the house. A black mailbox by the driveway was canted slightly backward, as if struck once too-often by careening red wagons. Silently they left the car, and she stood for a moment where slate walk joined the city's concrete, one hand restin
g lightly on the hedge. The tiny leaves were cool despite the sun, and she suddenly had hopes.

  But there were no surprises; once through the front door, everything was as she imagined it would be. The gleaming hardwood floors, the freshly white walls, the living-dining room el with facing picture windows. Two doors directly opposite the entrance: one a closet, the other leading down to the so-called family room. She poked into the three bedrooms, the tiled bath, the yellow-and-brown kitchen, and wrinkled her nose at the sun-heated mustiness of a house long closed to the living. No surprises, but she caught herself placing furniture just the same.

  They waited awkwardly in the narrow backyard while Enfallo stumped across the street to speak, he said, with a neighbor about any hidden problems the seller neglected to mention. Another part of the infernal drama; now she and Syd were to argue over trifles (or praising same), wonder about price, grope for the flaws that might change their minds. Instead, however, they said nothing. Watching, rather, a man and two small boys hiking across the field behind the house. A double row of winter-bent birch separated sod from the open expanse that rolled softly to a far line of forest; laurel and shrub filled the spaces, and Terry briefly closed her eyes to conjure a vision of estate-width the colder seasons and the dying of the leaves would bring. The man stopped, then—a dark figure against the blue August sky—saw them watching, and bent down to his small companions. When he straightened, they all waved, and Terry surprised herself by waving back. Then they vanished, over the crest of a low hill evidently much steeper on the far side.

  "Friendly," Syd muttered.

  "Damned good eyes to see us through all that tangle," she said, "but it's a nice change, that's for sure." She squeezed his hand and he pressed both against his side.