The Curse of the Vandermeers

The document Dr. Cray laid before me that night was not, properly speaking, a document at all. It was a photocopy of five pages of handwritten foolscap, dated in the margin, dressed up with a typed transcript and a page of notes in her own small upright hand, the whole thing bound in a plastic sleeve of the sort used for seed packets.

"You copied this out of what?"

"Out of the county historical society's collection, where it has sat in a box since 1952. It is the only known copy. The original is in the family's own papers, and the family's own papers are in a fireproof cabinet at Harrow Reach, which I have not been invited to open." She shrugged. "This is what the county has. Everybody up there has read it. It is printed in the visitors' guide at the lighthouse, in abridged form, and it is told to children at Halloween as a joke, and it is not a joke to anybody over the age of sixty."

The manuscript was written in 1851 by a man named Josiah Vandermeer, then the head of the family, and it is a plain account of a thing his grandfather's generation had done, set down at last because the writer believed himself to be dying and wished the truth of it recorded inside the family rather than outside it. The hand is that of an educated man of his period, and the paper was already foxed in 1952; the transcript ran as follows.

In the autumn of 1811, the family's then-head, a hard man named Absalom Vandermeer, had a daughter, and the daughter had a suitor whom the father forbade, a young man from the flats named — and here the transcript had a gap, the name erased by water damage a century ago — a young man whom the father had beaten and driven off his land with a shotgun and a threat. The young man went away, and after some months there began to be trouble in the cove. Cattle were found with their throats opened. A hired man came home on a November evening with his arm ruined and would say nothing about it. In that same winter, Absalom's own hound, a great grey beast that slept under the porch, went mad — the account is circumstantial here, and the word used is 'possessed' — and was shot by Absalom himself in the yard, and ran, dying, into the trees, and was never found.

Then, in the January, the daughter went out at dusk to meet somebody at the gate, and did not come back. She was found three days later in the rush ground below the house. The account does not say what had been done to her. It says only that her father, when he came to the place, did not speak, and that a dog's prints were in the mud all around her, of a size no dog on the coast could have made, going in a circle around her body, over and over, 'like a thing that walks the round of a fence'.

Within the year, Absalom Vandermeer was dead. Within the decade, his eldest son. The manuscript's author, writing forty years later, lists the deaths by name and year: nine of them in three generations, all of them sudden, all of them at night and in the open air within sight of the house, and every one of them, in his phrasing, 'with the marks of the running dog about him, near or far'. In the middle of the column he stops, for one of the nine, and writes four lines instead of one: a boy of seventeen, the eldest of the next generation, found on the shingle below the house at five in the morning with his boots on and his coat folded on a rock beside him, and the coroner's finding, and then back to the column. It is the only place in forty pages where the man writes like a man. He gives the family's own view of the matter in one sentence, which Dr. Cray had underlined twice in the transcript:

'That we are pursued by a beast of the night for the sins of our house, and that it is our blood it wants, first or last, and that it will take a Vandermeer in every generation for as long as the line holds the land.'

"Nine in three generations," I said.

"Nine that are documented, in the manuscript, by a man who was there for four of them," said Dr. Cray. "There are two more in the county records afterward — a drowning in the cove in 1877 that the record calls an accident and the family called otherwise, and a woman in 1911 who was found on the beach road — so: nine in the manuscript, two more in the records, which is eleven in all since 1811, and with Ambrose, five days ago, twelve."

"And they all died the way he died."

"They all died outdoors, at night, alone, and in a state of extreme fear. I have read the certificates. Three of them say 'heart'. One says 'exposure'. The 1877 one says 'drowning'." She drank the last of my coffee, which she had helped herself to during the reading. "I am not a fool, Dr. Ashby, and I am not a mystic. I have been the coroner's physician in this county for twenty-two years. I have written to the state medical board and to two cardiologists in Sacramento about this family, and I have spent four hundred dollars of my own money having a geneticist look at the one branch of the family that is still willing to give a blood sample, and here is what I know."

She laid a single sheet of paper on top of the manuscript sleeve. On it was a family tree, hand-drawn, with dates.

"The Vandermeers had a bad gene. A channelopathy — the kind that shows up as nothing at all on a routine examination and then takes a person in the dark when their heart is running hard. Long QT. It runs in the line. It skips generations. It does not care how strong you are. It prefers the young, and it is very reliably provoked by sudden fright. A person with that gene who is woken from sleep by an unexpected shock, or who is taken by surprise in the dark by something loud and large and fast, can go into an arrhythmia and be dead on the ground in ninety seconds, with no marks on the body and no smell of trouble in the air." She tapped the tree. "Every one of these deaths is consistent with a young or healthy heart stopping under a fright. And that is, I am quite certain, what killed Ambrose Vandermeer." She said all of it in the tone of a woman reading out a diagnosis she had been carrying around for twenty years, and then she stopped, and said, in a different voice: "The heir has it too. I have not told him. That is what I want you up there for."

"You think he was frightened by something, and something had a dog with it."

"I think," said Willa Cray, "that somebody has worked out what this family's blood does when it is surprised, and that this somebody has a use for a dog that is the size of a pony, and that the two things came together on the twentieth of October."

She closed the plastic sleeve and put it back in her bag and stood up.

"There is one more thing, and then I will let you go home. Ambrose was the last of the direct line. He had one brother, who died in 1988 in a rockfall at a quarry in Sonoma, unmarried. There is exactly one surviving heir, a great-nephew, thirty-four years old, an engineer named Cole Vandermeer, who has lived in Chicago his entire life and has never set foot in Mercy County, and who is — I am told — flying out this week to see the house and settle the estate." Dr. Cray put on her scarf. "The estate is four thousand acres of the most valuable conservation land on this coast, and a house with a library and a harbour. And the family's own document says what happens to a Vandermeer who comes back to the land. So I want Ronan Varley. And I want him this week. Please call him tonight."