The Watchman's Curse

I — 1726The Watchman and the Boy

The account below is the oldest in the Register, transcribed from families of the original Huguenot settlement. It is the version most residents already know, and it is given here only so that what follows makes sense.

In 1726 the ground where the Thomas Paine Cottage now stands was not a neat grassy landmark. It was dense oak forest at the edge of a muddy colonial farming tract, threaded with dirt paths that a boy named Remy LeRoux knew better than anyone alive. Remy was ten years old and the fastest child in the settlement.

The village harvest was guarded by a towering, greedy watchman called Silas, who cared for the profit in the fields and nothing else in the world. Every night he walked the property by the light of a strange cobalt-blue lantern that threw long skeletal shadows up the trunks of the oaks.

On Halloween night a freak nor'easter came down on the settlement. The rain fell in freezing sheets and turned the paths into churning rivers of mud. The elders ordered everyone to high ground — but Remy saw the blue light still moving down in the woods. Silas was standing in the sludge, refusing to leave the harvest.

Remy ran through the stinging rain to the edge of the trees. "Silas! You have to leave!" The watchman only laughed, cold and cruel. "My harvest is worth more than my life, boy."

Then the earth gave way. A flash flood of black mud tore through the woods, and Remy scrambled up the stone foundation of the old house and onto the roof just in time. From the icy shingles he watched the mud take Silas down. The watchman never reached for a branch. He held the blue lantern tight until the ground closed over him.

In the morning the villagers found Remy shivering on the roof. Of Silas there was nothing at all — only the shattered glass of his lantern, resting perfectly on a tree stump. Remy LeRoux lived to be an old man and spent his whole life warning the children of New Rochelle: a heart that greedy never truly rests. Once every hundred years, Silas gathers enough strength to crawl out of the mud and collect the harvest he lost.

II — 1826The First Return

The Register's earliest interval record is the testimony of a blacksmith working late on the last night of October 1826. He described a blue light moving steadily between the trees with no lantern-bearer beneath it, and the smell of low tide strong in the air more than a mile inland. He barred his door and kept his back against it until the sun came up.

One hundred years, to the night. Remy's warning was recorded and set aside.

III — 1926The Sterling Incident

Exactly one hundred years after the blacksmith, a ten-year-old girl named Clara Sterling made a mistake that moved the curse off the shoreline and put it inside a house.

Clara's father was the caretaker of the cottage grounds, so Clara had the run of the property and the run of the bay. In October 1926, after a heavy rainstorm, she was skipping stones at Echo Bay when she saw something shimmering in the wet sand: a jagged piece of cobalt-blue glass, worn perfectly smooth on every edge but one.

Clara had never been told the legend. She did not know she was holding the largest missing shard of Silas's lantern. She thought it was treasure. She put it in her coat pocket and walked the whole way home up North Avenue, and that afternoon she hid it under a loose, creaky floorboard inside the old colonial house, to keep it safe.

As the sun went down on Halloween night, the fog coming off the Long Island Sound did not stay down by the water where fog belongs.

It came inland. It rolled up North Avenue and swallowed the streetlights one after another, and then it filled the woods around the cottage until the trees were gone. Clara woke to a sound she would describe the same way for the rest of her life: the heavy, squelching tread of soaking-wet boots being dragged across the grass, around and around the house.

The cold in her room dropped until frost formed on the inside of the window. Something enormous, streaming with seawater, put its face against the wavy eighteenth-century glass. The shard was pulling him like a magnet, and he had come for it — but Clara had hidden it well, and he could not find it before the sunrise forced him back down to the bay.

Clara Sterling never dared move that piece of glass. It is still under the floorboards of the Thomas Paine Cottage today.

IVCaretaker's Log — Entered in Evidence

The Register holds one contemporary document from the Sterling incident: a single page from her father's grounds log, written the morning after.

VThe Interval

The Register tracks this record because the cycle has never once drifted.

Do the math yourself. Seventeen twenty-six. Eighteen twenty-six. Nineteen twenty-six. Two thousand twenty-six. The century is up, and this Halloween is the three hundredth anniversary of the night Remy LeRoux first ran through the mud to shout a warning that nobody took seriously.

And there is one difference this time that the Register wishes to state plainly. In 1726 Silas lost his lantern. In 1826 he was searching blind. In 1926 he came within the thickness of a single pine board of getting it back.

He knows exactly where to look now.