The Curse Of Mr. J.
Chapter One: They Took My Heart. (Horror Story Coming Soon)
Dear Readers,
They say a man dies once, when his body gives in to the grave.
But I died long before that.
I died the day they looked at me and didn’t recognise their father.
June's little hand had once wrapped perfectly around my thumb when she was born. She didn’t cry much, not like Eli. He howled like a wolf the night he came into this world, and I smiled through my exhaustion because even then, I knew I had a reason to survive.
They were my breath. My blood. My small world is in a large, unkind one.
And she, my wife, once the moonlight in my window, began to darken. Her voice got colder. Her smile is more polite. Her words are sharper. It started with distance, then came the judgment. Then… the whispering behind closed doors.
I ignored it at first. I worked. I built. I sang to my children and told myself love was enough.
Until one day, it wasn’t.
I still remember the day the door closed behind them.
There had been a quiet war raging in our house. The kind without screaming. No broken plates. Just tiny cracks that split the walls wide open. Her family, righteous, meddling, cruel behind their holy masks, told her I was too harsh, too emotional, too unmanly. They told her that my tears were weakness and my grief made me dangerous.
“The children shouldn’t see him like this.”
“He’s unstable.”
“He’s not well.”
I heard it all. And she let them.
They convinced her that the father of her children was a ghost of a man. Unworthy. Dangerous. Mad.
Then one evening, while I was at the cemetery laying a single flower for my own mother & Father, I returned to an empty home. No toys. No shoes by the door. No laughter. No trace.
Only silence.
And a note.
“This is what’s best for them. Please don’t try to contact us. It’s not healthy for them to be around you right now.”
No signature. No goodbye. No explanation.
Just an execution written in ink.
I searched. Oh, how I searched.
I stood outside their school in the rain for weeks, waiting for a glimpse. I got restraining orders instead of answers.
I wrote letters. Dozens. Each returned unopened.
I sat outside the family church, hoping someone would speak to me, the priests with fire in their sermons.
But they averted their eyes.
To them, I had become something to be avoided. Not pitied. Not helped. Just removed.
One by one, they turned. Her brother, her mother, even my neighbours. The families. The children I once helped carry across puddles. The men I once fixed broken doors for. They crossed the street now. Some even spat.
And worst of all, my children…
They forgot me.
When I finally saw them again, at a distance, supervised, behind glass, June wouldn’t look me in the eye. Eli flinched when I reached for him.
They were afraid of me.
I cried that night. Cried until my throat gave out and bile burned my chest. Not out of anger. But because something sacred had been stolen, and no one could hear the screaming, it left in my soul.
Weeks passed. Months.
I stopped eating. I stopped shaving. I stopped being “Mr. J the good father” and became “Mr. J the ghost who lives down the lane.”
People gossiped that I had gone mad.
That I practised dark things.
That I cursed children under my breath.
No one remembered how I once rocked them to sleep. How I once built cradles by hand. How I loved them so fiercely, I would’ve died to protect them.
No, they remembered the grief. And they feared it.
They feared me.
Then came the final cruelty.
They accused me of sending letters with threats. I hadn’t. But that didn’t matter.
One morning, the sheriff came. Not with warmth, but with cuffs. They dragged me from my bed, shirtless, barefoot, cold.
The villagers watched.
Watched and smiled.
I begged. I pleaded. I screamed for them to believe I just wanted to see my children.
One woman, I think it was her cousin, spat at me and said, “You already did too much.”
They locked me in a church cellar.
Damp. Dark. Alone.
And there, in the blackness of the rectory basement, with only rats and rot for company, I cried for the last time.
That night, I spoke to no God.
Only to myself.
And then... something else began to listen.
The stone beneath my knees grew warm. The candle would not light. My breath felt strange, like the air didn’t want to be in my lungs anymore.
I felt the floor breathe.
And something whispered back.
Not in words. In grief.
A grief older than mine. Deeper. Hungrier.
And in that moment, I made a vow:
“If I die alone, may none of them sleep in peace.
If I never see my children again, may their bloodline end in silence.
If they curse me in life, may I curse them beyond death.”
They thought chaining me in darkness would erase me.
But they misunderstood something vital:
You can’t kill a man who’s already been murdered by love.
So I waited.
I whispered.
And I began to change.
To be Continued…
Coming Soon Chapter II…
JacobM
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