Read Online The Curse of Crow Hollow by Billy Coffey - Free Book Online

Friend, I don’t think she even saw it.
    Scarlett tried tilting her head away. She felt the witch’s arm squeezing her tighter and saw Alvaretta stand, so close that she could smell the stink on the old woman’s breath. A trail of blood poured from the gash on the side of her lip. Scarlett shook her head No as the demon in the shed spoke again. Alvaretta shook her own head Yes, yes . With one arm she squeezed Scarlett tighter. The other came around front and produced a gnarled and swollen finger that gathered the blood from her own lip like a dark harvest. Alvaretta reached out and touched Scarlett’s forehead, then made a straight line of crimson down the bridge of Scarlett’s nose.
    â€œYesss,” she whispered. “Curse ye.”
    Scarlett cried out. She wrenched herself from the witch’s grasp and took off, they all took off, not minding the crows watching them from their nooses nor the dogs chasing them nor the long hill to the top of the ridge, minding only the raging wail of what the witch had been hiding and the witch herself screaming Curse ye over and over, Curse ye all for ye sins. Oh yes, friend, they scampered. And know you would have scampered as well. You would have hastened to the ends of the world to be away from there, and what you’d find after your hastening was done would be just what those poor kids found: you could run from Alvaretta Graves, but you could not run from her words.

IV
    The curse takes hold. At the hospital. The prayer chain. Naomi makes a video.
    -1-
    I’d put it about seven that morning when Scarlett struck Alvaretta Graves and so sealed the fates of us all. Let’s call it an hour later when the kids neared the mines again. Those are guesses, a course. By then, Cordelia and the rest were too scared and tired to worry about the time. Naomi never even bothered to check her phone. But time was about the only thing on the minds of everybody else back in the Holler. It was the Sabbath, and that meant gathering down to the church.
    Friend, I don’t know where you come from or how the people there handle matters of the soul, but round here religion is king. All the proof you need’s to look yonder at that sign. F IRST C ROW H OLLOW C HURCH OF THE H OLY S PIRIT ON F IRE , R EVEREND D AVID R AMSAY P RESIDING . Mouthful, ain’t it? Church looks about as run-down now as everything else. But you have to remember I’m talking about how things was then, and back then, everybody come down to the Holy Fire. Every Sunday morning and evening, then again for Wednesday Bible study. And if you weren’t there and Doc Sullivan ain’t provided you a reasonable enough excuse, you can bet people wondered. They wondered plenty.
    About the time Cordelia was getting her first eyeful of dead crows at the edge of Alvaretta’s wood, her folks was pulling out of the gravel drive a dozen miles off. Bucky had on his best Sunday suit, having kept it hanging off the shower curtain in the bathroom since paying respects at Henrietta Slaybaugh’s funeral two days before. Angela wore a pretty red dress and her hair down, which she thought made her face look less fat. They were late, having first waited for Cordelia and then given the roses a good watering. By the time they figured Scarlett could just as well drive Cordy and Naomi straight to church from Harper’s Field, Bucky barely had time to grab his King James.
    Angela asked him to keep the window down, it stunk in the car. Bucky turned the crank and promised he’d rode all the way home like that the day before, after his shift at the dump, which was true. Bucky was always conscious of the way his vocation made him smell. Still, Angela rode most the way to town with her fingers pinched against her nose. She tried prying the two kitchen sponges out from between the frame and window of her door. Bucky asked her to stop, telling her if that window fell there’d be no prying it up, and then