Lee Klein - Jrzdvlz

“Those already cursed are impervious. Ancient curses benefit our sort.”

“Two negatives multiplied make a positive,” said Jermaine.

“Let us be released from the curse our family has suffered forever,” said Gus, so much squatter than his brother he often doubted they shared a sire. An omni-allergic child whose swollen freckled cheeks concealed ever-replenished deposits of snot, he had been half-blind until fitted with glasses yet still seemed wary of an unclear world.

“Give it to me.” December snatched the little coffin from Gus’s hands and snapped its little latch open and held it so they could see what’s inside. Thanks to life with the Altruists her face had brightened, her cheeks no longer in need of an insistent scrub. Her straight black hair, no longer cut at the shoulders by her mother with a dull handsaw, was long enough now to frame the object of their curiosity.

December opened her light eyes wider as the boys shaded theirs.

“Look closely for hidden treasure,” Jermaine said.

“A sufficient quantity,” she said, “perhaps could buy our freedom.”

“No treasures shall we discover greater than the precious metals of the mind and heart afforded to us by our new families,” said Gus, sniffling all the while.

Now on this warm November day, they proceeded northwest from Umbria instead of toward the ruins near Leeds Point and, beyond that, marshlands and the bay. The empty coffin hung on a cord around Jermaine’s neck. He hoped it contained ballast to steady every memory of his father. How his grandfather had died, his great-grandfather too, what his own father had done, he hoped this coffin hauled in their stories and revised them until they all ended happily ever after. They passed their old home, visible now that the trees were nearly bare. They did not speak of it, as though to see which of them had been most successfully civilized, a state that required no memory of living like hairless cubs, surviving on tea and cranberries and small game and fish from the Mullica. They maintained a good pace, lithe bodies empty of the sorrow and static that accompanied nature’s descent into winter, into areas they could not recall.

They came to the Mullica. A ferryman on the other shore offered to row them across. They walked north along the bank instead. After a mile the river narrowed and there was a bridge and a path leading to a house larger than all those in Umbria combined, a sprawling construction of wings interconnected by windowed corridors.

Seeing this uncommon cathedral, it seemed they’d discovered their future resting place, or so Jermaine thought but did not say, afraid such statements might be understood as unstable. It was the type of utterance they had been counseled to avoid. Indulgence too often in first thoughts became habitual weakness, especially for children of a man who’d streamed words from his mind, unfiltered by tact. Put thought before speech, the children were taught, like horse and carriage. Mouths were gates restraining wild animals: release of one eased the release of others until the world reverted to savagery.

“It can’t be a single place,” said Jermaine, “more like a string of palaces.”

“Who could live there?” said Gus.

December shrank as she looked at the tower of Larner’s estate. Apple trees grew in rows, none too tall, as though less than a decade ago the area had been leveled. The air smelled of fermenting fruit, not yet in the thick of the orchard. Time enough there and they would stumble into the river, drunk on fumes.

Jermaine loped toward the house, a lone soldier invading an army, as his siblings held their ground. December crouched as though to hide behind her knees. Gus crossed his arms low across his belly, protecting upset guts the best he could.

“A house like any other,” said Gus, “no need to worry.”

“What’s that?” December whispered and pointed toward the entrance.

“What do you see?” said Gus.

“Through the trees, along the ground,” she said.

Jermaine returned to their side. “Let’s wait,” he said.

“For what?” said December.

Coming toward them, a white apparition in the orchard. December started across the bridge. Her brothers looked at what walked toward them as their sister’s legs propelled her down a footpath along the other side of the river. Her brothers ran, too, more not to lose her than to flee the orchard, or so they later claimed.

December had no trouble distancing herself from that bridge. She saw her brothers running, if not screaming as she’d be if she were closer to whatever she’d seen. Her first thought when she saw the wedding dress: her father’s story was true.

Jermaine and Gus caught her, nearly to the ferry.

“Does it follow?” she said. “Did you see it? Do you know what it was?”

“I saw a wedding dress,” said Jermaine, “but that cannot be.”

“If father saw what we saw and—” said December.

“We chased after you,” said Jermaine.

The ferryman was so settled in middle age his skin resembled chalky stone. Like his father and grandfather, he floated everyone across the river unwilling to swim. One could wade with careful paces along the coppery silt when it was slow and shallow. But who would do so as the ferryman watched? Now the river was swifter, colder, wider. Bridges had been built nearby but few walked to them when they could punt across here. The ferryman had a dinghy for larger groups, but mainly served solitary travelers.

“Seen a ghost?” he said to December.

She had expected something reassuring. “An apparition in white,” she said.

“And these, your brothers, they also saw it?”

“We all did—yes,” she said.

“I have seen a much more terrifying sight.” The ferryman paused, unwilling to continue until they pressed him. But his three visitors stood as though a thin film now existed between them and him.

“Have you seen this dress,” December said, “like the one that consumed our father?”

“Your father?”

“Branley Jukes, who—”

“You are his children?”

“Did you know our father?” said December.

“I knew to warn travelers of his presence. He did more damage to my business than the worst winters, but now I see he stole so his young ones might survive and become children as healthy as these three.” The ferryman seemed caught in a spell. “Excuse me. Yes. Terrible what happened to him.”

“What was that?” said Jermaine, on guard, taller than the ferryman by a head.

“You must know better than I do.”

“Do you know what became of him?” said Jermaine.

“Some believe he took the form of the beast he talked about and—”

“What is the house there?” said Jermaine.

“Only every few years do I see its owner. Rumor is he’s not alone, but, as I mentioned, that orchard harbors something far more chilling than a dress.”

The children stood as he communicated as though with someone well beyond an arm’s length. “I have always been here,” he said, “my father had always been here before me, and those who have passed through have always told us what they have seen and heard. Forever we’ve invoked legend when we fail to explain peculiar circumstances. We throw baffled hands in the air and assign misfortune to a mysterious force. We blame the Leeds Devil. Recently the beast has been seen, there have been sightings, many, many, but people keep largely quiet, not wishing to remind anyone of your father, whose madness assumed the form of taking arms against it, whereas everyone else who’s seen it, myself included, hesitates to mention it to those who might question our faculties.”

“What have you seen,” asked Gus, “and where?”

“I have seen it soaring overhead and stop to quench its thirst with river water. It has even approached me, cautiously, not at all ferociously. The feeling from it, my single lingering impression, was of fear—that it was afraid of me. Even if it’s harmless as a water bug, it is too terrifying to treat as anything other than a threat.”