“Just remember. I always really did love you.”
It doesn’t look like much.
A metal rectangle, larger than a credit card, but smaller than the kind of index cards we used to use in school. It might have been made of copper—it had that reddish-gold look to it—but I couldn’t say for sure. The metal had a dull glow. Not like it had been polished, but like something deeper in caught the light and held onto it a little. It should have made the words etched on the card harder to read, but it did the opposite. The thin, precise lines of each letter jumped out at you, catching your eye even if you weren’t trying to read them.
That’s how, when I saw the card for the first time, I knew what was written there, even though it sat on a table five feet away and was turned so the letters were all upside down.
Drowning
My father’s hand covered the card a moment later, but it was too late. I looked up at him questioningly. I’d been staying with him for less than a week after nearly ten years of not seeing him at all. He was wealthy, and he’d always made sure me and my mother had what we needed financially, but when they’d separated, it seemed that he was gone from our lives for good, and the only sign that he was still alive came in his messy, freshly inked signature at the bottom of every check.
When my mother died six weeks earlier, he had one of his lawyers reach out to me. Ask me what I needed, and if I’d be interested in meeting my father and spending time with him. I’d almost refused, but something wouldn’t let me. Maybe it was fear of losing out on financial support—I was only three months out from graduating college, and I’d started receiving my own checks from him the month I turned eighteen. Yeah, I’m sure some of it was the money, but it wasn’t all of it. It was also the fact that I was alone now, and if I turned away a chance to meet my father and come to know him as an adult, I’d be turning away from the only family I had left.
He was older than I’d remembered, but he seemed in good health and was excited to have me visit, telling me that I was welcome to stay for as long as I liked and to come back whenever I wanted. Initially I’d only planned on staying over the weekend, but the longer we were together, the more I realized I wasn’t quite ready to go back to my old life yet. I still had a few more days before classes started back, and I felt like I’d only begun to scratch the surface of who my father actually was.
He was a good person, or he seemed that way. He didn’t have to go into work very often, and the times he dealt with someone over the phone or a video call, he always seemed pleasant and kind. And he’d talked with me candidly about his regrets in life, including how he’d removed himself from our lives years before. He told me it had been because he knew he wasn’t made of the right stuff to be a good husband or father, and it had seemed better at the time to just make sure we were financially secure without inflicting himself on us at a more personal level. When I asked him what that meant, he just shrugged, telling me that he had not always been as nice of a person as he was now, and he still was hard to be around for long periods of time. That he knew it was too late to be a husband to my mother or a father to me, but maybe he could at least be a good friend. Then he hugged me, thanking me for coming and staying with him, and in that moment, I could tell that he was just as lonely as me.
When he covered the metal card with his hand and slid it into his lap, my first thought wasn’t that he was being secretive, but that he was joking with me or being silly. I asked him what he had there, and for a moment I could see he didn’t want to answer at all, or perhaps he wanted to lie to me instead. Swallowing, he shook his head. “It’s nothing for you to worry about.”
I frowned at him. “It said drowning, didn’t it? Is everything okay?”
Forcing a smile, he nodded. “Yes, it’s fine. Everything’s okay.”
I didn’t believe him, but our new relationship was…well, very new, and I didn’t want to push my father away by prying into his private business. And if the twisting in my stomach told me it was something instead of nothing, well, I needed to be patient. I could always ask again once we’d had time to grow closer.
Except we didn’t have that time. Because three days later, my father had drowned.
Everyone agreed it was a terrible accident, though it also seemed very strange. I’d just left the morning before, and he was still at his house deep in the middle of two hundred wooded acres when he apparently fell into a two-inch mud puddle back behind the house. He’d had the land cleared to put in a greenhouse that summer, and the recent rains had turned the soft dirt and clay into a soggy chain of islands partially submerged in the remnants of afternoon showers. Even that next morning, the morning of my father’s death, the ground was pockmarked with puddles. Apparently he slipped and fell into one, and somehow, despite my father’s good health and strength, he was unable to pull himself free from the water before he slipped away.
They questioned me and other people who had been to the house, of course, but there were no signs of foul play. When I called the attorney who’d reached out to me originally, I was told that the autopsy showed no signs of anything other than death by drowning. When I asked if my father had any enemies, he just chuckled softly and said he’d be in touch.
Three weeks later I was in the lawyer’s office. His assistant offered me coffee or water before leaving us alone. The man across the desk from me was in his fifties, probably a few years younger than my father had been, and the expression on his face was that of someone settling down to eat an unpleasant meal.
“There’s no easy way for me to tell you this. Death is an unpleasant subject, and the things that sometimes come along with it…well, it comes with the territory of my work, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. And I also don’t want you to think this was easy for your father. He was a very private man, but he was always fair with me, and I think he was always honest too. And when he told me that he was proud of you, that he loved you, I believed him.” He stared at me then as though he expected a response, and while I was on the verge of tearing up at his words, I wasn’t sure what I could say. When he continued to watch me silently, I just asked him to go ahead with whatever he wanted or needed to tell me.
He nodded. “Well, the first thing is, your father was not entirely honest with you. In the years after he left you and your mother, he had another family. A wife and two children, as a matter of fact.”
I stared at him, my sadness beginning to curdle to anger. “What? So all that stuff he said about leaving us because he knew he wasn’t right for a family was just bullshit?”
The man shrugged. “I can’t speak to that. Like I said, your father was a private man, and while I knew of his other family, of course, I don’t know what his motivations were for lying to you before or instructing me to tell you the truth after his death.”
I sniffled. “Because he’s a fucking coward. Or he was.”
“Maybe. I don’t know. But there is more, if you’d care to hear it.”
Waving my hand, I wiped at my eyes with my forearm. “Sure. Whatever.”
“Well, while he left the majority of his estate to his wife and other children, he did establish a trust for you in the amount of two million dollars, with payments to be sent to you in increasing amounts over the next ten years, at which time the remainder will be yours to do with as you will. He also left you this.”
I looked up as he was sliding a sealed tan envelope across the desk to me. “What is it?”
“I don’t know. I only had instructions to leave it sealed and give it to you. If you’d like to open it here, I can set you up in one of our conference rooms so you have privacy.”
I picked up the envelope and felt something shift inside. There was paper in there, but something else too. Something small and thin and hard. Glancing at the attorney, I nodded. “Yeah, if you don’t mind.”
“Not at all.” He led me out of his office and down the hall to a larger room with a long table surrounded by high-backed chairs. Gesturing for me to go in, he had stepped back out and was moving to close the door when he hesitated. “You know, you must have made quite an impression on him the last days of his life.”
I looked at him, confused. “Why do you say that?”
He gave me an awkward smile. “Well, the trust, the envelope, all of this? He set all of that up two days before he died. Like I said, I think he loved you very much.” With that, he closed the door.
My body felt heavy as I sat down. All of this had happened so quickly—finding him, starting to know and love him again, only to lose him and then all this? Lies and money and weird envelopes filled with…what? Sucking in a breath, I opened the envelope and dumped its contents out onto the polished wood of the conference table. There were two pages of folded stationary, and beside them, the copper card I’d seen my father hide from me. Even in the soft recessed lighting of the conference room, the engraved letters seemed to glow out at me from the reddish skin of the thing.
Drowning
I wasn’t surprised by the card being in there. Not really. Hadn’t there been a dozen times when I’d thought about telling someone what I’d seen? Asked the cops or the doctors or this lawyer if it was really possible that my father would die of accidental drowning just days after I see him with a metal card warning of just that? And yet I never had because I knew what they would say. They hadn’t seen it themselves, and even if they had, how could a word kill a man?
I felt myself asking that same question as I unfolded the last words my father had for me and began to read.
I should start by saying I’m sorry, but that would sound cheap and hollow, wouldn’t it? If I was that sorry, I wouldn’t have done the things I’ve done. I wouldn’t have abandoned you, lied to you, put you in this position. I can try to pretend that the money I’m leaving you, the chance for a life I’m giving you, is some step toward making things right, but that’s dishonest too. The truth is…or at least part of the truth is…I’m too big a coward to end this myself.
The other part, and I’m being honest here, is that I truly am proud of you and love you. I didn’t realize that, any of that, when I had you contacted and brought to the country house. I wanted to meet you, had to meet you for any of it to work, but I had no idea I would like you so much. Had no idea it would be so hard to kill you, even if it meant saving myself.
I need to explain, both so you know what you’re facing and so you don’t think I’m so insane, though that might be a tall order given what I’m about to tell you. Still, I have to try, if only for you to have the best shot of beating it, or at least know what your options are.
I am a very wealthy man. Some would consider me a fairly powerful man as well. But as with everything, that wealth and power comes with sacrifices. I’ve done things I’m not proud of, and I’ve made enemies along the way. Most of them can’t touch me—wealth can insulate you from most things if you have a brain—but there are some…
The metal card enclosed with this letter is called a Funerary. It is, for lack of a better or specific term, a cursed object. Despite several years and much expense and effort, I still don’t know exactly who put it on me, and I only know what I do about it as a consequence of that same money and energy. When I first found it laying next to me on my pillow, I didn’t know what it was. A debit card or a passkey, perhaps.
Then it began to change in my hand.
As I watched, amazed, letters formed on its surface. Drowning. At the time I had no clue what that meant, but as I learned about Funeraries, it became all too clear.
Initially, the Funerary acts like a death omen. When you first touch it or it is bound to you, it will tell you the manner in which you will die. Not where or when or who else might be involved. Just how.
And for days or months or years, it will stay just like that. You can try to throw it away, but it will find its way back to you. If you melt it or destroy it, same thing. Always just that small detail of your death and nothing else, taunting you and filling you with dread.
Mine was like that for over four years. It’s funny, you know. My father, your grandfather, used to joke about death. He’d say that he has seen exactly zero proof that he’d ever die, and until he did, he wasn’t inclined to believe it. Now everyone knows intellectually that they’re going to die, but to have some proof? Not of the concept or the hypothetical inevitability of it, but actual proof of how you’re going to go?
Dread can be like gravity. It pulls on you, and the closer it drags you, the more the weight of it starts to buckle your bones and twist you out of shape. It doesn’t take long before you don’t recognize yourself anymore. I don’t think I’d have always been willing to sacrifice someone else to stay alive, but by the time the other side of the card came to life, I already knew what it meant and was eager for a chance to put some innocent lamb’s blood on my door.
Even if it was you.
When your death is growing close, the other side of the card will change. It will just be a name, and I guess if you don’t know what it means, it does you very little good. Maybe that’s part of the trick of the curse. If you don’t understand what it’s asking for, you can’t escape it.
But I understood. I had the resources to find out what it was and what it did, so when I had the image of the card suddenly burning in my mind, I quickly pulled it from my safe and examined it. And as I watched, the blank back of the card spelled out your name.
The Funerary only tells a name for one purpose. So that the cursed can offer that person’s life in exchange for their own. If they want to avoid their death omen, they have to kill the named person with their own hand.
Apparently it’s always someone you know or will know soon after. The window of time between the name appearing and the fulfillment of the death omen varies, but is always within a few months. Time enough for you to decide what you value most.
When I walked out to greet you, to hug you and welcome you into my home, I had no question about what I was going to do. I already had the sedatives to slip into your food. The drugs to inject—more than enough heroin to kill you quickly and humanely in your sleep. When I called the police, no one would think anything more than my estranged daughter apparently had a drug problem. That she’d taken some of my legally prescribed sedatives on top of the illegal drugs she’d brought into my home. That I was the victim in all this. I didn’t like the idea of killing you or lying about you after your death, but it felt necessary to protect me and my family.
But you…you are my family too. I see myself in you, and I see your mother, who, despite everything, I really did love once upon a time. I found myself stalling, putting off your death every day we spent together even as I felt mine crawling ever closer. I was terrified. I still am. But I’ve come to realize I’m more afraid of hurting you than I am of dying, and so I’ll accept what I have in store. And my hope is that you will believe what I’m telling you and know that I mean it to help you. And in that knowledge, forgive me a little for this last.
Because the Funerary isn’t just a curse of the person. It’s a curse of the bloodline. It only stops when either everyone in that family is dead or someone has sacrificed another in their place. I can select who in my family gets it on my death, but if I don’t choose, it’s random until everyone is gone or an outsider is sacrificed. I could tell you that I picked you because you’re the oldest of my children and it would come for you first anyway, but that’d be a lie. It could have come just as easily for my wife or other children, and while I do love you, I have to admit I love them more.
So please, for your sake and theirs, do the smart thing. The hard thing. When it gives you a name, you kill them in your place.
By my blood do I find you. By my will do I bind you. Offer yourself or another. The price must be paid and the covenant kept. So as it was and so as it will ever be.
Selah
When I put down the letter with trembling hands, I could already feel the change. Not just in the atmosphere, but in me. As leaden as I had felt before, there was a new weight and pressure on me now. Looking over at the metal card, the Funerary, I saw that the word etched across its skin had changed:
Burning
I guess I was lucky. I had ten years. Ten years of living my life, of learning to deal with the dread and lying to myself that my father had been wrong.
I tried to get rid of it, of course. To destroy it. But it always came back, and after awhile I just felt grateful that a name hadn’t appeared on the other side yet.
Then I met you. And well…I fell for you right away. The last six years have been the best of my life, and I can’t imagine what life would be like without you.
But that’s the thing, isn’t it? There’s so much we can’t imagine. I could never imagine curses being real. Of having to hurt or kill another person just to live. And the idea of hurting you? I don’t know how to even start thinking about that in terms I can understand.
I also can’t imagine death. Of dying or what comes after. The idea of an afterlife I don’t understand or nothing at all…it terrifies me, and my inability to even think about it, to truly imagine not existing or living as I am for as long as I can…There’s a purity to that fear, to that dread, that transcends even our love.
Like my father said, dread is like gravity. And perhaps it has twisted me into something terrible. I don’t know. What I do know is that I have to be free of the crushing weight of it, even if it means losing you.
That’s why I have you in that box. It’s all rigged up properly. I paid someone quite a bit of money to make sure it was done right. When this recording stops, the box will fill with gas and you’ll just relax and go to sleep until it’s over. And before you ask, yes, I am the one that turned it all on. It has to be my own hand, as horrible as that is.
But don’t worry. It’ll all be over soon. And I’m sorry, even if my father would say such an apology is hypocritical in a situation like this.
Just remember. I always really did love you.