Cursed Be the Child

Cursed Be The Child

© 2009 by Mort Castle

Cover art © 2009 by Erik Wilson

This digital edition © 2011 Overlook Connection Press

Published by

Overlook Connection Press

PO Box 1934, Hiram, Georgia 30141

http://www.overlookconnection.com

[email protected]

A signed limited hard cover of 500 copies is available from OCP and Specialty Bookstores.

This book is a work of fiction. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without the written permission of the Publisher, Overlook Connection Press.

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 please return to Amazon.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Book Design & Typesetting:

David G. Barnett

Fat Cat Graphic Design

http://www.fatcatgraphicdesign.com

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Thanks to Jan Yoors, whose THE GYPSIES first got me started with this "Romany thing."

Thanks to Jane Castle, who first handed me the book.

The poem "Waking Alone in Darkness" by W.D. Ehrhart is used with his permission and can be found in THE SAMISDAT POEMS OF
W.D. Ehrhart
, Samisdat Publishing.

"Connections" by Jane Castle is used with her permission and can be found in the chapbook SMOKE AND COLD, Eads Street Press.

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For Jane: that says it all.

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WAKING ALONE IN DARKNESS

It's only the wind, mothers

tell their children in the night

when upturned leaves rattle on the

windowpane,

furious and black;

only the wind

when night cries in children's dreams

and children cry out

in the darkness,

—W.D, Ehrhart

From CONNECTIONS

and reconnect

our

fading lines

tracing

our ways

back

together

through

the paths

created

in the night.

—Jane Castle

"0 detlene tat o Beng nashti beshen pashasa."

"Neither the spirits of dead children nor the

devil can remain at peace."

—Pola Janichka

The Castle Tshatsimo:
An Introduction by Gary A. Braunbeck

Before discussing some specifics of
Cursed Be The Child
—re-released by Overlook Connection Press in this spiffy new edition you hold in your hands—we need to chat about Mort Castle, the writer.

Like a lot of you, I’m guessing, my first exposure to Mort’s work occurred in the early 1980s, with the appearance of his story, “Altenmoor, Where The Dogs Dance” in
Twilight Zone Magazine
(it can also be found in
Moon On The Water
, so go out and buy a copy now). “Altenmoor” is a tale reminiscent of the best of Ray Bradbury or Rod Serling. I say “reminiscent” because—though it may wear its influences on its sleeve—it is very much its own story; assured of voice, rich in characterization, and surprisingly epic in scope, considering that it’s less than 10 pages long and takes place in only three rooms of a single house. A young boy’s dog dies, you see. But his grandfather, now living with the boy and his family, tells him otherwise. Grandpa, now blind, once wrote books about this fantastic land called “Altenmoor.” He tells his grandson that his dog isn’t dead, he’s gone to Altenmoor to dance with the other dogs, because Altenmoor is a wonderful place, and you’ll have to track it down and read it for yourself; I won’t spoil it for you. What sounds like a three-layer treacle cake (thanks to the inadequacy of my description) is a very literate, gentle (but never sentimental), honestly haunting piece that has yet to achieve the status of “classic” it deserves. There are moments in the story where Castle expertly hits you with something unexpected—a moment of anger, a moment of hopelessness, a moment of remorse—and as a result, gives the story a slightly darker edge than it would have had in the hands of a Serling or Bradbury.

The key words in the above paragraph, by the way, are “literate” and “unexpected”—none could better describe Castle’s work in general, and this novel in specific. Castle writes from a very literate standpoint; he knows it’s just as important—if not more so—to read outside the horror field as within it; after all, how can a writer hope to bring a unique sensibility to their work if that sensibility is not informed by exposure to all styles and fields of fiction? Though a devout student of Hemingway, Castle’s own work never stoops to imitation of the renowned Ernest’s intensely clipped style; instead, Castle has mastered (and, in my opinion, even refined) Hemingway’s gift for effective understatement: he knows that a well-turned phrase can replace ten pages’ worth of description, and how the precise, exact, meticulously-placed word can completely change the rhythm or tone of a scene. Castle’s sentences have the deceptively easy flow that comes only after hours of backbreaking revision—and I chose that word—“deceptively”—with a great deal of care; like all of our best writers, Castle makes it look easy. Trust me, it isn’t. A smoothness of prose like his or that of Ed Gorman, Dean Koontz, or Jack Cady, is achieved over years of constant refinement and unwavering practice, and an undying respect for the craft.

I think that, of all the things I admire about Castle’s writing, it is that last that I admire the most; his reverence for what Harlan Ellison called “the holy chore” of writing. You cannot write a novel or short story without being deadly serious about it, and that, Castle is. He takes his work very seriously (it’s himself that he tends to make fun of, which is very entertaining after he’s had a few drinks and picks up his banjo, but we’re not here to discuss his dreadful personality problems).

But as serious a writer as he is, Castle never forgets that one of his primary duties as a story-teller is to entertain his readers—and do not take that word to represent only the light and fluffy and unchallenging: need I remind you that when Othello originally premiered at The Old Vic it was billed as “Wm. Shakespeare’s Latest Entertainment”?

And entertain he does; with his slightly skewed vision of the world in which we live; with his unflinching eye for the nuances in human behavior that make for the fully-realized character; and with his compassion for even the lowliest of people who populate his stories—and this is somewhere Castle really excels: it’s easy, even expected and acceptable, for writers of horror fiction to have villains who come up just short of a moustache-twirling Snidely Whiplash or faceless homicidal maniac; it keeps everything in black and white terms, makes it easy to tell the good guys from the bad and all that lovely, predictable, tiresome rot. Castle isn’t interested in pointing out the black and white to you—those are always obvious—no; his fascination lies within the moral and spiritual gray areas that all people grapple with but few are willing to talk about. In Castle’s world, his characters talk about these quandaries, they confront their moral dilemmas, they deal with the consequences of compromise; fairly commonplace stuff if you read Russell Banks or Michael Chabon or Alice Walker, but in horror? Who’re we kidding here?

You’re about to confront a novel that tackles many dark subjects—murder, rape, child molestation, adultery, alcoholism, ethnic and inter-racial prejudice—in a balanced, subtle, and thoughtful way, and it’s that very subtlety and thoughtfulness that gives
Cursed Be The Child
its lasting resonance; this is much more than just another book about a possessed child and the disintegration of another traditional nuclear family, this is a book that deals with issues of personal integrity, self-redemption, and the lengths to which people will go to protect the ones they love. It’s also—mostly, most probably—about loneliness and the fear that can arise, unbidden and unreasonable, from it.