WARNING: This story contains adult content
Chapter Fifteen: “Please,” I pray. “Remember me like this: smiling, happy, alive.”
The Sweater Curse
Chapter Sixteen
Hey, let me see that. In the magazine you’re reading. The sweater—it’s Jay’s! I designed it for him. It’s the one I gave him at Christmas. It is. I would recognize it anywhere. I designed the arms, shoulders, and neck detailing. I developed the stitch pattern.
Of course, it’s my sweater pattern. It’s what brought me here to you. You have my pattern, and so I’m here. It’s how I found you.
The sweater is mine, but I’m not credited as the designer. The name under the title… Heather Newsfeld. She singled me out as unprofessional, and she had the nerve to claim the design as hers. She stole it.
Steal from the dead, and there are no ramifications. Her secret is safe.
I have more to show you. Come with me.
Tears pour down with the rain in this place. Grey and black dominate all other colours. Crosses and headstones mark beloved bones. The living cower under umbrellas, shielding themselves from the rain. They stand around a freshly dug, six-foot-deep dirt pit. They huddle together, weathering through their grief.
A coffin is slowly lowered into the pit as a minister speaks of a life once lived.
Why are we here? Is Heather Newsfeld dead? Is this her funeral?
“This is the end. This is my end,” a man announces. “How did this happen? How? I was young. I was healthy. Vital. I was alive with her. I was alive in her.” The voice comes from the coffin.
I see through the layers of oak, cotton, satin to a handsome man with blond hair and a well-groomed beard. I bend down, through the layers, and whisper in his ear, “You’re wearing Jay’s sweater. Where did you get it? Who knit it for you?”
“My wife, Heather Newsfeld,” he answers as his body stirs. He leaves your world and wakes in mine. He steps out of the coffin. He looks down fondly at his shell. “I look…looked…good. Handsome. The sweater—the colour, the style—it suits me. My wife was always busy. I needed what men need. So I found her. She was so beautiful. What man… What man could resist her? She liked how I looked in the sweater my wife knit for me. I wore it for her. I wore it to her hotel room. How we enjoyed each other. My last memory is of her—us—in bed together. There she lays, naked, beautiful. I’m tasting her. I want more. I’m removing the sweater, one sleeve, then the other. I’m trying to pull my head out of the neck of the sweater. I try, but someone is choking me. Is it her? Or my wife? Has she caught us? Hands tight around my neck. I try to knock them away. I try to break her hold, but my hands swing into the air. No one is there. It’s… it’s…the sweater. It must be. The turtleneck constricts my neck tighter and still tighter. I fight for every breath. I panic. And now… and now… I’m dead.”
He is not alone. There are more and more men. They all wear my sweater. Why are men who wear my sweater dying? Have you guessed? Do you know what I have done? What I must continue to do.
You must stop me.
On this blog in February
