Cursed Be the Child by Mort Castle Read Free Book Online

grandfather had intercourse with her. She recalls the experience as being painful.” No, Selena thought, nothing unusual about what had happened to Kristin Heidmann, nor about the emotional toll it had taken—not unusual, only terrible.
    The hour came to an end with the girl saying, “That’s it, I guess, all of it.” She sniffled, having run out of tears.
    No, Selena thought, this was only the beginning, but it was a real beginning.
    “So,” Kristin said, “do you think…can you help me?”
    “Yes,” Selena said. Kristin Heidmann had to believe that she could be helped, and, for that matter, so did Selena if she were to aid the girl. “I’m sure I can help you,” Selena said, “and I will.”
    And she wished she could be so positive that she’d be able to help herself.
     
    A bath and two glasses of chablis had not relaxed her. In a green velour lounging robe, she stood gazing from the picture window at serene Lake Michigan, a view that boosted the Lake Shore Drive apartment’s rent a hundred dollars above those on the opposite side of the building.
    For the thousandth time, she wished David were here, but he wouldn’t be in until late. He was working hard, taking pictures for the new collection that would be published as The Blues In Black and White.
    Selena didn’t want to be alone with the past that threatened to enfold her, to become the present.
    Her stomach rumbled. She realized that she had not eaten since breakfast, and it was now nearly eight o’clock.
    She’d fix something light, an omelet, and then sip wine until she could fall asleep.
    In the kitchen, she cracked an egg into a mixing bowl, then another.
    The yolk of the second egg plopped into the bowl and staining its center was blood, a blob of deep red the size of the nail on the little finger, a clotty, mucusy mass that was a face, a face with a piglike snout and demonic, close-set, tiny eyes, and a twisted mouth.
    It was a miniature face from hell, and it was an omen.
    “Diakka! ” Selena screamed.
     
    — | — | —
     

Six
     
    Invisible steel arrows, the notes from King Pemberton’s Gibson electric guitar shot through the smoke and alcohol redolent fog, each arrow aimed straight at your soul, each a bulls-eye. On the small stage, King Pemberton leaned away from the microphone, as though he needed no electronic amplification. He was a gut-shouter, a huge black block of a man, and maybe he was 65, or maybe 75, or maybe a few years younger than Methuselah (he’d recorded 87 albums and never offered the same year of birth for the liner notes on any two of them!), but he hadn’t lost a thing. Just the same as when he cut his first sides in the mid-thirties, King Pemberton could still wail and moan and holler and come at you full force.
    It was one in the morning, the final set at Big Red’s Stony Island Lounge and Nightclub.
    At the table directly in front of the bandstand, a man raised his Nikon and sighted through the view finder. He was the only white person in the club, likely the only one within ten square blocks. He had no sense of not belonging here because he had no sense of belonging anywhere.
    It was a strange thing. When he had his eye to the camera, he often thought of himself as invisible. He disappeared, ceased to be. There was only the camera, of itself impersonally recording reality without even the most subtle comment or imposition of viewpoint from the man behind the lens.
    When he was taking pictures, he often felt he did not exist. No less often, he felt that when he was not taking pictures.
    He zoomed in tight on King Pemberton’s face to catch the glittering beads of sweat rolling down that black skin. He triggered the shutter, the auto-advance, tick-tick, zipping the film along at two frames a second.
    Not yet, not yet, but we’re coming up to it, he thought, his photographer’s gift of seeing becoming more acute by the moment. There were preliminaries, of course; you had to shoot frame after frame, and