I suppose that, by the spring of 1969, we’d settled into a routine, a sort of torpor that meant acceptance of our respective lots in life. The cabins had been all but forgotten about by then—the boys would soon be too old for them anyway. The Fortiers were withdrawing from public life, such as it was in a town so small. You hardly saw Marie out and about anymore except when she drove around in that humongous car he got her, smoking cigarette after cigarette, which scandalized the town gossips at the church. The Fortiers withdrew into their empty house and shut the doors and windows. I might have been the only one who knew, but things had started to go sideways for them financially. It would be years and years before it became apparent and the whole town knew, but things had begun to fray at the edges around then.
I suppose the flood became the catalyst. So many things could simply no longer stay the way they were. Something had to happen, and that something came in the form of a force of nature. Act of God, the newspaper called it. It sure felt like an act of God, nothing more and nothing less.
By then, things with Sophie were coming to a head. She’d taken to disappearing for days on end, and I knew people in town talked. Some said she had a lover in the next town over. It seemed preposterous at first glance—Fat Sophie, with a lover, this grim, ruddy-faced, prematurely aged woman with her mean little eyes glinting in her doughy face, this woman in her dirty shift dresses crudely hand-sewn from the cheapest fabric. We had money back then, but she didn’t take it, maybe on principle, preferring to look like a beggar. It was a ludicrous thing to imagine, but you never know. Unspeakable potions slipped into meals, spells murmured at midnight, shrines to strange gods. She’d done it with me, that was the rationale, and now she could well be doing it with someone else. Maybe there was some truth to it after all.
At that point, I must say I hardly cared. Life went on.
I got word from other people in town that the cabins got flooded. Most of them, maybe all of them, would be unlivable now. Then the water receded, and at first, I was happy to let them fall into ruin. It was Fortier who came to see me and asked for my help to clean out the Fortier cabin. And so we went into the forest one afternoon in the spring.
Behind the cabin, we found Sophie in the process of burying something in a wooden box.
When she saw us, she looked up, and her eyes were completely inhuman. A streak of blood was smeared on her cheek. She leaped to her feet. Without a word, she turned around and ran into the forest.
That’s when we heard crying coming from the box already half covered with wet earth.
I chased Sophie down, even though it turned out to be a lot more difficult than you might think. Somehow, she ran fast, almost as fast as me. I caught up to her on the riverbank. She fought me, animal-like. She clawed and scratched at my face. She growled like a beast—there was nothing recognizably human about her at all. I know you’ll think I’m just making up stories to justify what I did next—what we did next. But it’s God’s own truth. I don’t remember how I came to wrap my hands around her throat, I just know that I did, and I kept squeezing and squeezing until her eyes rolled back and she went limp. And then I squeezed some more until I could be sure she was dead.
I stood up. Sweat was running down my forehead in a river. My heart hammered like it never had before. I looked down at her, in a heap at my feet, dead, unable to harm anyone anymore.
She was dead, and that newborn baby was clinging to life—just barely at that.
Fortier said something about calling the police. Except, I reminded him, that would be me, I was the police. Well, we’ve got to call someone, he said.
We didn’t call anyone. Imagine what would have happened if we did. Imagine the uproar. I kept thinking about the boys, how badly it’d affect them, or maybe that, too, was just an excuse.
So what happened that day was, we buried Sophie under the floorboards of the cabin, right by the window. There you should be able to find her. Neither of us would ever tell anyone.
Fortier said he’d keep the secret, just like I knew he would. And the little baby, the little girl would be given to Marie. The only child Marie would ever have, Fortier said. They’d gone to church every Sunday and asked God to give them a child, but in the end, it was the Devil who answered the prayer.
That’s how it was.
For a few years after that, everything seemed to get better. At least on the surface. The little girl was growing up healthy and beautiful. Sophie was never found, and no one really questioned her disappearance anyway, as if they’d half expected it for a while. There were all those crazy stories about a witch in the woods who watched the town, but those were just stories. Life went on.
Sure enough, Tony became strange not too long after. And Frank became gloomy and withdrawn, and I started hearing things about him, ugly things. I insisted he follow in my footsteps and become a police officer, hoping to channel all that violence into something useful.
And as for Michelle, it didn’t take long for things to take a bad turn.
It was small animals and birds at first, then cats and dogs. The first time she escaped from the Fortiers’ house, she had to be no more than six or seven years old. The Fortiers called me, and we searched for her up and down the river and in the woods. Marie was beside herself, certain the girl had drowned. But then we found her at the cabin, of course, alive and well. She’d caught a rabbit and dismembered the thing right in the middle of the floor.
She started running off often after that. She stole Marie’s jewelry, and at first, we didn’t know it was her. Marie even filed a police report because she’d thought she’d been robbed. Then we found one of the missing pieces in the pocket of Michelle’s dress. The Fortiers put a fence around the house. They put bars on the windows. Still she kept finding a way out.
And when she died, I was relieved. When I came to the Fortiers’ house in the middle of the night and saw her dead on the basement floor, I felt, at last, a lightness unlike anything I’d felt in decades. It was as though some sort of curse had at last been lifted. So I wrapped her in a tarp, kind of like her mother once did, and I buried her in the wall of a house that was being built.
This is the story. It did nothing for the curse, of course. The curse was alive and well. It never went anywhere. It claimed the sanity of one son and the conscience of the other, and now it’s claiming my physical health too, little by little, inexorably, every day.
The curse isn’t finished with us all. I think the whole town might be cursed. Our patron saint, Saint David the exorcist, couldn’t help us in the end. Or maybe he was never here, and all the stories were lies. Lies we were told and lies we chose to tell ourselves. Or perhaps the town has nothing to do with it, and the only people who pay will be ourselves.
I can’t have much time left before my hands are no longer able to type this. At least it’ll be done. Everything else is out of our hands now. We did what we did, and it turned out the way it turned out. Do I regret any of it? Yes, I do, but in the end, regret is a useless thing.
One day we’ll die, and then God will judge us.
Laura and I went out to the woods for a second time the very next day. I hesitated before getting her involved, but in the end, there was nobody else I could trust to help me with this.
The weather had had time to warm up, and even though it had been only a matter of a few weeks, the place had become unrecognizable. The day turned out to be sunny and hot, and the sunlight filtered not through bare branches but through the bright green May foliage. The air smelled fresh, full of the sound of insects and chirping birds, and lily of the valley had sprouted out of every crack in the ground. I could hardly tell this was the same place where I had run for my life back in March. So much that I might not have found the cabins without Laura’s help.
Her health was declining, and the hike to the cabins took what little energy she had. At first, she guided me—I would have gotten hopelessly lost in the forest otherwise—but as we got closer and closer, she fell behind, breathing hard. I kept looking over my shoulder to check on her. Her face had gone gray, but whenever she caught me looking, she’d nod encouragingly and gesture for me to keep going.
Finally, the cabins did emerge from the encroaching forest, lopsided structures covered in green moss, a little bit more a part of the surrounding greenery with every spring. Eventually, the trees and underbrush would simply swallow them up.
But not before we could make sure of one thing.
In my defense, I’d wanted to call the authorities. It was Laura who insisted we first go and have a look for ourselves. She hadn’t really given a reason, but the look she gave me made me shut up and do as she told. And because of Laura’s role in all this, I figured she had every right to make this request. If anyone should get to decide, it was certainly her.
The moment the door of the cabin creaked open, releasing the smell of damp and mold and stale air, goose bumps raced up my spine. The memory of last time tugged at me, and reflexively, panic made my heart speed up and sweat break out along my hairline. I stole a glance at Laura, who looked almost as uncomfortable as I felt.
“It’s not too late,” I said. “We can still—”
She shook her head.
“Mom, we’ll have to tell someone eventually. It only looks worse if we go poking around.”
“This somehow stayed buried for fifty years,” Laura said.
“And you want it to stay buried?”
“I mean…” She shrugged, looking a little lost. “Is there any point?”
