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18/50: GRAVEYARDS

NORMAL TEENAGERS, on New Year’s Eve, might be planning a number of things:

1. Getting drunk and making poor life choices. A very popular pastime.
2. Wishing they were getting drunk, but going to watch the fireworks with their parents instead because they couldn’t get alcohol.
3. Ignoring the institution of New Year’s Eve entirely, because there was far too much pressure on you to have the Best Time Ever, which usually resulted in a terribly disappointing night.

The group had collectively decided that since the holiday coincided with 18/50: graveyards, Esther, Jonah, Heph, and Eugene would spend their New Year’s Eve at Paradise Point Cemetery.

The cemetery was the oldest in town, packed full of graves that rose from the earth like crooked concrete teeth. People were still buried there now, so the headstones were a strange mishmash of styles going from nineteenth-century gothic behemoths to these weird black marble blocks that seemed to be the hot ticket in the ’80s and ’90s to the graves of today, which were sleek and white and minimalistic.

There seemed to be no discernible pattern in the way bodies were buried. Two-hundred-year-old graves were next to corpses that had been interred just months ago; remains seemed to be kind of squeezed in wherever they fit. They walked along a trail through the older part of the cemetery shrouded in trees, where the graves were moss-covered and the headstones cracked and every second statue looked like one of the Weeping Angels from Doctor Who. Then they walked through the newer part, dotted here and there with mausoleums and glossy marble slabs alike.

The fireworks went off at midnight. The four watched them from perches on the cemetery walls, bright dandelions that burst like stars and were blown away into the night. Jonah stood behind where Esther sat on the wall. When the clock struck twelve, he placed his hands on her waist and pressed his lips to the small patch of bare skin at the back of her neck, only once, quickly enough that Eugene and Hephzibah didn’t see. Esther closed her eyes and savored the feeling, as though the kiss might melt through her like a red-hot ball of nickel dropped into her flesh.

They hadn’t planned to sleep in the churchyard. It was freezing, for one thing. Each of them was wrapped in half a dozen layers to stave off the cold and had to rub their hands together and breathe on their fingers to stop them from going numb. For another, Eugene couldn’t be expected to remain in the open dark for any stretch of time, especially not in a cemetery. He needed walls. He needed electricity. He needed all the things humanity had invented to separate themselves from the old wild, a time and place that was full of monsters now forgotten by all but those who were still hunted by them. The dozen flashlights and solar lamps they carried between them weren’t enough.

But it was Eugene who found the small graves of the Bowen sisters, Christina and Michelle, their little rectangular plaques set side by side in the grass. The girls were not actually buried there, of course. The ground beneath the markers was still waiting for their bodies, which Little Creek had claimed and kept for decades. It was Eugene who built and lit the fire. Eugene who knelt in front of the plaques and suggested that they should stay there and drink instead of retreating back to the Solar house.

They didn’t mean to fall asleep, but the fire was warm and the wine was strong and the whispers of ghosts lulled them into fitful slumber.

Esther woke sometime later to Eugene clawing at her wrist. The fire had smoldered down to embers and now gave off only fleeting flickers of light. Eugene was panicking, tearing at his throat, eyes coin-wide as he tried to breathe. “Esther. Esther. Esther,” he whispered, trying not to wake the others. “There’s something out there in the dark. I can hear it.”

“Hey, you’re okay. There’s still light. You’re fine here, you’re safe.”

The fire popped. A twig snapped at the base of a nearby tree. Eugene gave a strangled sob. “It’s gonna kill me.”

“Hey, hey, look at me. Eugene, look at me. Focus. Ground yourself. Remember. First five things you can see. List them.” It was an old trick from when Eugene used to see a therapist, but sometimes it worked. “Come on, Eugene, list the first five things you can see.”

“Hair. Grass. Shirt. Grave. Fire.”

“Okay, good. Really good. Now list four things you can touch.”

“Stone,” he said, placing his palm flat on the empty grave of Michelle Bowen. “Dirt.” Touched the ground. “Fabric.” Esther’s sleeve. “Skin.” Her cheek.

“Three things you can hear.”

“My heartbeat. Your voice. A party happening somewhere nearby.”

“Two things you can smell.”

“Burning wood. Your dirty socks.”

“You cannot. Liar.”

“Can too.”

“Ugh. Last one. One thing you can taste.”

“Impending doom.”

“Survey says: not an option.”

“I don’t know. Saliva? I haven’t eaten all day.”

They sat cross-legged on the grass as Esther finished setting up a spread of baked goods she’d brought with her. There was very little left of her savings after paying to have the heating fixed, but she’d been determined to start again, and so the smuggling of treats into her high school continued.

“Do you remember how it started?” Esther said around an inhaled piece of caramel shortbread. “Your fear of the dark. I’m not even sure I really remember starting my list.”

Eugene didn’t look up from his food. “I remember.”

“Can you tell me?”

“You don’t remember that night? The night everything changed?”

“The night Grandma died.”

Eugene nodded. “We were in the car on our way to Pop and Grandma’s house for dinner, and we were listening to the radio, and this story came on the news about a little girl who’d been missing. Alana Shepard. Do you remember her? She was our age, like ten or eleven. She’d been gone for three days or something, and they ended up finding her in a dam way outside of town. She’d been raped and stabbed with a screwdriver and weighed down with bricks. I’d never really paid attention to anyone dying before. I didn’t even really know what dying meant yet. But I can still see her clearly, the way I did in my head. Her body weighted down among the lily pads. Forever trapped in shadow. I’d always been scared of the dark, but after that night, I never slept without the light on again.”

Esther closed her eyes. She, too, remembered the story well, not because she’d heard it on the radio, but because they’d arrived at their grandparent’s house to find Reginald Solar crying. Reg, who was born in the 1940s, a time when being a man meant rubbing dirt in your wounds, drinking whisky for breakfast, and having the emotional intelligence of a wet dishrag. Guys didn’t cry, and Reginald Solar definitely didn’t cry, so Esther had been incredibly dismayed at the sight of him weeping as his old radio played a fuzzy recording of Johnny Cash in the background. The house was overflowing with vases full of orchids, their heady scent drifting through the halls. The place smelled like a florist, green and fresh; even the scent of the garlic and rosemary lamb roast in the oven was overpowered by the fragrance.

Reg had surrounded himself with purple blooms, just as Eugene would surround himself with lamps a few weeks later. A safety blanket. A shield from fear.

Florence Solar looked panicked. Peter wanted to call 911.

Reginald was crying for two reasons:

1. In his gut, he already knew what it would take forensics several weeks to piece together: that the DNA collected from the body of the murdered girl would match a cold case that had haunted him for more than a decade.

•   •   •

WHOEVER KILLED THE BOWEN SISTERS had never been apprehended. The investigation had been such a disaster that the case had come to be thought of as cursed, a sort of modern-day tomb of King Tut. The police captain had vowed not to stop working until the murderer was caught—he died of a heart attack five sleepless nights into the investigation. Files went missing. Evidence was mishandled. The two witnesses of the abduction gave conflicting reports on every detail of what they’d seen (to the point that the gas station attendant was certain that one of the sisters had been a boy and the man who kidnapped them reminded him of a harvestman spider, all limbs). The police sketch artist lost an eye in a car accident immediately after drawing the suspect. And at the precinct Christmas party some months after the murders, three quarters of the staff had to be hospitalized after drinking eggnog that later proved to be riddled with salmonella.

Some sixty-four men were brought in for questioning, but no suspect was ever named. DNA evidence, first used in a criminal conviction in the US in 1988, was collected but never matched to anyone. Without evidence, without motive, without a murder weapon, without a suspect, and without any leads, the case—much to Reg’s great despair—went cold.

It took five years before a bunch of kids who went down to the riverside to drink during school hours unearthed the murder weapon—a screwdriver—not far from where the girls had been dumped.

The case was reopened, and the moment the lid of the box was removed in a puff of dust, the curse began anew. A reporter who made copies of the case files was strangled in a mugging on her way home. Again, the police captain died of a heart attack. Some supposed evidence of the curse was so far removed that the case for a curse became a little thin (one of the cop’s cousin’s daughters was diagnosed with leukemia on the same day the case was reopened), but everyone connected every bad thing that happened to everyone they even vaguely knew to the curse, and thus to Reginald Solar, the discoverer of the bodies.

Everywhere he went, Reginald carried the mark of death. People could feel it on him. Smell it on him. They knew, without knowing exactly how they knew, that bad luck was centered on him, channeled through him, seeped from his skin as pus would seep from an infected wound. And maybe it was true. Maybe Death did leave his mark on Esther’s grandfather, but all he was to her was a good and gentle man left halfway broken by the terrible things he’d seen and a terrible truth that had left him unable to sleep at night. He’d never caught the Bowen sisters’ murderer, and now, for the second time—and possibly many more times than that—the murderer had struck again.

1. The second reason her grandfather was crying was because he knew with utmost certainty that his beloved wife was hours away from dying of a catastrophic brain aneurysm and was—understandably—quite upset about this, too.

•   •   •

REG STOPPED WEEPING SOON after they arrived and sat them on his lap and tucked orchids behind their ears and told them, at eleven years old, about the Man Who Would Be Death, about the war in Vietnam and some of the more terrible things he’d seen humans do to each other. He told them about the danger of strangers, about how the boogeyman was real and that it lurked in the dark, waiting to prey on wayward children. He told them about the Bowen sisters, what had been done to them, in as much detail as he thought appropriate for eleven-year-olds, which was far too much. He told them about the ghosts of all the children who followed him, the ones he couldn’t save, the ones that had died because he wasn’t a good enough detective to catch their murderer. When they’d been born, only the Bowen sisters appeared at the foot of his bed. By the night Alana Shepard was found, seven spectral children haunted his every waking moment, asking for their parents, asking to be fed, asking him to read to them, crying when he didn’t.

That night, their grandfather taught Esther and Eugene that monsters were real, and they looked just like them. They didn’t doubt—they had no reason to. They sat and listened and soaked it all up, because they were children and no one had ever taken them so seriously before.

Reginald told them of his cursed life in less than an hour, and instilled their tiny, wildly beating hearts with the kind of fear children didn’t normally stumble upon until they were older, when they came to understand mortality through the death of an older relative. They knew of their grandfather’s primal fear of water already, how he no longer so much as showered but washed his body with a damp cloth for fear of slipping in the tub and drowning. But it was on that night, the night they learned the curse would kill them, that the curse Death had given Reg when he told him he would drown became real in their heads.

Esther and Eugene ate their roast dinner in silence, both horrified, in their own way, to learn that Death was real.

Florence died the next morning, of a brain aneurysm, just as Reginald had known she would. One week later, when the story of the curse had fermented in Esther’s brain into something much larger and darker than her grandfather had perhaps intended, she started writing her semi-definitive list of worst nightmares to protect her from the Reaper’s spell.

What were the ingredients of a well-founded curse? Mix one part Death’s apprentice with twenty years of war and the unexpected death of a beloved grandmother, and then sprinkle the concoction with the serial murder of children by a man who came to be known as the Harvestman.

Then, ladies and gentlemen, you’ve got yourself a curse.