The Malediction of Llewyn Glass
The Night of October 30th, 2015
The Crossroads Pub Fenway, Massachusetts
I wasn’t much for believing in scary stories about witches, monsters, or things that go bump in the night. My father, William Martus, would tell the many legends of our family’s famous property every night before bed.
I would never believe him, even as a child, because I always believed in the rational. My father would laugh when I would try to find a way to explain what really happened without the supernatural Aspect of urban legends; he would then give a forced smile and tell me that I got my skepticism from my mother. She passed away from an aneurysm when I was 6. I don’t remember much of her anymore, but what I do remember was the confusion of her being with mw one moment and then gone forever in the next.
My father had a rough few years with drinking after my mom’s death. It didn’t help that he owned one of America’s most beloved pubs, but he never let the drinking interfere with his role as a father or a business owner. If anything, he was a highly functional alcoholic, but I would sometimes hear him cry at the end of his drunken stupor for my mother. He would moan and curse God for taking the love of his life away and cry himself to sleep. But every morning, he would clean himself up, hide his sorrow with a mask of a believable smile, and get me ready for school.
He raised me the best he could by himself, but he often had help from the local patrons of the bar or his bartenders. I learned so much from the Pub; I learned how to gamble, make any cocktail in the world, and perform first aid from a few bar fights we had. Since my dad did not know how to take care of a daughter going through puberty, he had one of the bartenders, Missy-Jo, teach me about menstruation, make-up, and how to be a young woman. Missy-Jo was an Irish-Puerto Rican from Tennessee who was fascinated with the lore of my family’s property, and when she came to visit the Crossroads Pub, she fell in love with the Pub itself and hasn’t left. Call it female intuition or, as she called it, “a bitch’s itch,” but I could tell she stayed for my dad.
Either out of pity or love, Missy-Jo always took care of him and helped run the Pub when his drinking became too much for him. My father gave her creative freedom with the Pub, and she was able to renovate it to its former glory. She started history tours during the day and ghost tours at night and created the Crossroads Pub Annual Halloween Festival. She brought beauty and love into our lives. I couldn’t tell if Dad felt the same way, but he was at least just grateful to have her as a surrogate mother for me. I was glad she was able to fit the role for the few years she was with us.
When I was a senior in High School, tragedy struck again. Missy-Jo was found dead in the woods outside the pub. The police told the press that a bear had attacked her, but it was a lie. They did not want to spook the town with the truth, but she was killed ritualistically. Her organs were ripped out and hung across the branches of the tree she was found under. Her eyes were missing, and she had strange claw marks on her body from an animal the police could never identify. I remembered the stories my father and his father would tell about the monsters and the evil that haunted our woods, and I started to believe there might be a bit of truth to them.
I cried for months for her, but it was my father who took it the hardest. He became overwhelmed with grief and took his drinking to a new level. One night he was found choking on his vomit in the pub by one of the bartenders. He was rushed to the hospital, but he couldn’t be resuscitated. Overcome by grief, I locked myself in my bedroom for days, unable to get out of bed or even eat; I lay there only wanting to sleep so I could not feel the pain anymore.
My uncle Ulysses reluctantly took over managing the pub after my father died. He was always sweet to me and would tell me stories not only of the family’s history with the pub but of his adventures after escaping the family business. He was a well-known bar manager across the U.S. as he managed upscale bars and helped them increase their profits. He loved the bar business, but he never wanted to manage the Crossroads Pub; as he stated, “the responsibility of bearing witness is too much.” When I asked what he meant by that, he told me that since our family settled on this mysterious and haunted land, it seemed, whatever eerie or creepy occurrences happened here, our family’s role was to bear witness to it. Then he would look into my eyes with heavy guilt and say, “You will be the first lady Martus to manage the business when you come of age, and you will have to bear witness; this is our family’s curse.”
Those words still strike a new chord every time I think of them. I tried to play coy in whatever Uncle Ulysses meant, but the denial was a cheap facade whenever I went to visit the cemetery. I would sit in front of my father’s grave, wondering to myself if the stories were true. Are we cursed to see unspeakable things, and to what end? Why is my family cursed to this land of mysticism and fear? Why must we witness the terrifying events? Why keep us at the pub? I did not have the answers, but I resolved to get as far away from the Crossroads Pub as I could and not to let some twisted fate keep me on that land.
My Uncle Ulysses continued with Missy-Jo’s ideas. He was able to make the pub the most profitable it has been since its creation by creating a micro-brewery that garnered national recognition. But, I was not content with staying, so I snuck off after graduating high school and became a United States Marine, a title I loved dearly. I loved being in the Corps. I loved the pride, the adventure, and the new family I made within my unit, but I found out that my family curse cared not where I went, for it would always follow.
It was in my second year when my unit was deployed to Afghanistan to help train the new Afghan Army. We were a highly decorated Military Police unit selected to be an example to the liberated soldiers. It was a challenge I looked forward to, and I was excited to finally be deployed because I wouldn’t have felt like I was a full Marine until I experienced war. I wished my naivety didn’t lead me blindly into the horrifying event which destroyed my life.
It was the 31st of October 2014, and we were halfway through our deployment. We had completed training the Afghan soldiers, and now it was time for them to perform in the field. A squad of us accompanied a unit of Afghan soldiers to see how they performed and provide support for them. We were given a mission to a village 15 miles from the base to help them investigate a possible opium ring that was funding the Taliban. The sad thing was the beauty of the day; the weather wasn’t too hot, and the desert landscape was beautiful to drive across once you forgot we were in a war zone. We came to the village and let the Afghan unit take charge as we followed behind. We scoured each house and found the town to be vacant, which was strange because our intel told us that the village was occupied.
The last house we searched was at the far end of the village. The overwhelming smell of death saturated the air as we approached it. I usually had a cautious feeling whenever we conducted a mission, but this one made my heart race. The Afghans kicked the door down and cleared the house halfway until they suddenly stopped, with one of them turning around and vomiting violently. The smell was so pungent; it smelt like I was walking into a slaughterhouse. I felt my boots stick to the floor as if I was stepping in puddles of syrup, but when I looked down, I saw the floor was flooded with blood. We made our way to where the Afghans stopped, and I saw what I couldn’t possibly imagine war could have depicted. The entire house was filled with the butchered remains of the villagers. Their mangled corpses had their limbs torn from torsos, and the bodies were positioned in repulsive sexual positions. I nearly cried when I saw children were also among the dead.
Before our Gunny could give an order, we were fired upon from outside. We took cover inside the house and went to the windows to see the enemy. There was a caravan of fighters speeding toward us.
When the Afghans saw this, they immediately abandoned the house and cravenly ran in the opposite direction. As if he wasn’t surprised, Gunny got on the radio and called for immediate support.
We had fifteen minutes to hold off the fighters, fifteen minutes in Hell, so we did what Marines always do in an ambush; kill. We raised Hell to the fighters and took out as many as we could, but they had the numbers and surrounded us. One by one, my friends, my Marines, were gunned down until I, too, was shot in the leg and vest. I laid on the ground in agony next to the dying Gunny as blood gushed from his neck. I went to help him, but the gunfire suddenly stopped, and the multiple thuds of running feet came to our building. I looked into his eyes, and his last look wasn’t of fear but of grave concern. I was the only woman in the squad, and, with the last ounces of life, he realized that raping and killing me was the very least these men were going to do once I was captured.
He took his pistol from his holster and aimed at my head as we both began to cry, and I gave a quick nod. He pulled the trigger, but the bullet didn’t fire. He dropped the gun as he took his final breath. I cried for death to take me with him and spare me from the vile acts these men were going to do to me.
The stomping of boots stopped, gunfire erupted from all around us, and then it suddenly stopped. The front door was suddenly kicked open, and the Marine support unit came rushing in; they had overtaken the caravan while I was on the floor. The Corpsmen checked on us and found only me still alive.
I was evacuated to the base and then to Germany to recover. I spent the days attending therapy and the nights screaming in my sleep. To my disgust, I had found out that the politicians back at homespun the truth to say that the Afghan soldiers were not cowards but had fought beside us and even helped protect me. The lie didn’t make any sense, but I was given a stern warning by some General who visited me in therapy that I was not to disclose what happened for the sake of the war.
I didn’t know what was more disgusting: the cowards who ran or the people who protected them, but I am sadly now one of the reluctant people who must protect the cowards and live with a lie. I could never look the families of my Marines in the eyes because I knew that I told them a lie, and if I told them the truth, then I would find myself in Leavenworth.
I was medically discharged, and I came home to Crossroads Pub, where Uncle Ulysses had remodeled my room and did his best to make me feel better, but I couldn’t be reached. I reverted inside myself and did not leave my room for weeks. Uncle Ulysses was patient with me and did his best to help me heal from the trauma. He paid for therapy, got me a moped to get around town, and called my old high school friends to keep me company, but I couldn’t break out of my depression. Even when I started to leave my room and go back to working in the Pub, I would feel immense dread and hopelessness. I couldn’t stop having flashbacks of the bodies and Gunny attempting to mercy-kill me. I couldn’t stop grieving and feeling guilty that I knew the truth but couldn’t tell the families of my Marines.
Halloween was approaching, and I remembered the stories of the monsters my father would tell me as a kid. The terrifying creatures my father painted in my imagination were gentle compared to the horror humanity can perform. Thoughts began to race in my head: “I don’t think we should survive as a species because there is no good left. Where have the good men gone? Can we even save ourselves from our demise? Is there justice? Do we deserve to live on?”
The questions were repetitive, manic, and draining, all of which were answered with a sober but nihilistic answer: there is no good left in the world.
I decided on October 30th, nearly a year after witnessing the deep depth of the horrors of humanity, to bring myself peace and not live to see November 1st.
A Brief History Lesson
Date: February 16th, 2015
To: Llewyn Glass, Esq
From: Sister Abigail LeFay -Vatican City, Rome
Subject: A Brief History of the Crossroads Pub
Situated in the Town of Fenway, which is on the outskirts of Boston close to the Charles River, The Crossroads Pub’s location had an eerie history even before it was erected in 1723. Before Boston was colonized, the Massachusetts tribe respected and feared the land where the Crossroads Pub would one day sit. Stories were passed down from generation to generation of the mysterious land and the strange events which took place there. Tribal leaders would go there seeking wisdom during the day and come back with their black hair turned gray and their tanned skin turned ghostly white, with obtained knowledge so overwhelming that they could not repeat it. The tribes' most honorable and bravest warriors would go hunting on this land and return babbling uncontrollably of horrifying creatures that could only come from nightmares.
After the colonization of Boston, the land was left forgotten until 1692, when the Salem Witch Trials took place. Thirteen women of free thought fled south of Salem to escape the unjust and heinous persecution of witchcraft. They were only guilty of trying to enlighten themselves through curing ailments with herbs and expressing creativity through dance and chanting, but close-minded settlers had seen this as the work of the Devil. The thirteen women fled to Boston for safety with a hunting party following suit when they came across Massachusetts’s cursed land. The women, exhausted from their escape, rested on the cursed ground and hoped to use the cover of night to conceal themselves from the hunting party, but, despite the blackness of the night from the cycle of the new moon, the hunters found them. The thirteen women were flogged ruthlessly as the hunters repeated verses from the Bible in the hope of cleansing their souls.
After savagely beating the women, the hunters wrapped nooses around their necks and hung them from a tree with barely enough slack to stand on the tips of their toes. The hunters stacked kindling and bushels of wood at the women’s feet while joking about burning witches for warmth. Twelve of the women begged and cried for their life. One was silent.
A hunter brought a torch close enough to her face to make her dried blood sizzle and pop from the heat, but she didn’t move. She gazed stalwartly into the woods, which slowly became darker and colder. One hunter slammed the butt of his rifle into her pelvis, but she continued staring back into the woods with a terrified expression before saying in an otherworldly voice, “I accept your offer.” The torches of all the hunters simultaneously extinguished, leaving the woods pitch black and filled with bloodcurdling screams.
The morning sun soon came, and all thirteen women walked out of the woods, pale from fright and unable to utter a word from shock. The woods they left were littered with the detached limbs and ravaged torsos of the hunters. The trees were painted with their blood.
The thirteenth woman who had accepted the silent, mysterious offer kept whispering to herself, “What have I done?”
In 1721, a Puritan named Jacob Martus and his family sailed to the New World to start a new life. He came across the same piece of land while hunting and was bewitched by the beauty of the forest. Jacob told his family that he felt an urge, a need to settle on the grounds. The family agreed and cleared the land and built their home and farm on top of it, not knowing the disturbing history of the woods. Jacob became a successful fur trader and saw the need to establish a pub so other fur traders could relax and conduct business before going into the wilderness to hunt for their pelts.
In 1723 the Pub was built and christened the Crossroads Pub, for it was where fur traders, explorers, and other settlers would come as they were entering the wilderness or heading back to Boston. The family prospered, and a small town was built around the Crossroads Pub with no unusual activity of any sort until the Fall of 1732.
It was a joyous night as the fur pelters were celebrating a good hunt with the local farmers who were celebrating a good crop. Everyone was drunk and merry except a haggard old woman who sat by herself weeping loudly. Mrs. Martus went to comfort her and asked her what was wrong. The only thing the woman said was, “I have to pay him back tonight.” The Pub went silent over this strange statement. The woman slowly stood up and walked out the door into the woods.
Everyone watched from the windows as the old woman stopped and stood at the wood line. A large dark figure appeared and loomed over her. The coldness of fright went through the spectator’s spines as they watched the old woman talk with the terrifying figure. The conversation could not be heard, but the noise the creature made could only be described as bones cracking with a snake’s hiss in the background. Suddenly there was silence and no movement from the two. The patrons and the Martuses watched in suspense as the world went still around the two. In an unholy act of mutilation, the creature tore the woman’s torso from her legs and dragged the halves into the woods. The patrons collectively gasped, and some went into shock, but none of them spoke nor left the pub until the rays of the rising sun illuminated the empty woods.
The hunters and the militia went into the woods searching for the lady’s corpse and the creature. They found only a plot of scorched earth a dozen yards from where the butchery happened. The bark of the trees surrounding the plot was burnt to a crisp, with a putrid, rotting smell lingering in the air.
Whispers traveled throughout the colony of the uncanny event, which brought forth the curious and the bold to hunt for the creature, while the Martus family and those who witnessed the incident knew better than to trifle with the beast or the woods. Nothing more was found.
Years went by, and the Crossroads Pub flourished among the travelers and the fur hunters. Jacob Martus died, and his son Samuel Martus took over the Crossroads Pub. The town grew larger and was named Fenway, for it was close to the same-named swamp. There was prosperity and peace in the town of Fenway until 1776.
When the British took over Boston, many Bostonians took refuge in Fenway. With the rooms of the Crossroads Pub filled to the max, Samuel gladly fed and housed the refugees as the Colonial Army tried to take back Boston.
Fenway felt safe until the night of March 13th when a platoon of Redcoats rowed covertly up the Charles River and landed at Fenway. They initially tried to land behind the Colonial Army in Boston, but they got lost and found Fenway. A firefight broke out, and Fenway’s militia raged a fierce battle causing the retreat of the Redcoats but not before twenty bystanders and thirty-three militia members were killed in the process. Samuel Jacobs despised the brutality of war and wished to do right by the dead. He had the land outside the pub cleared, and a cemetery was made where all the bodies, even the fallen Redcoats, were buried.
It wasn’t until 1779 that the Martus family started to notice strange occurrences in the cemetery. At first, they thought it was their drunken guests walking among the graves at night, but they began finding strange sets of tracks in the land and were hearing horrifying noises of creatures unknown. The Martus family and their guests would sometimes catch a glimpse of silhouettes of people moving through the woods and among the graves at night and found archaic symbols carved into the trees with the bones of animals set up as altars in the morning. This occasionally happened throughout the years, but nothing truly sinister happened until the year 1852.
Fenway had flourished into a small trading and fishing town while the citizens had grown accustomed, even amused by the ghost stories of their infamous pub/cemetery. At the time, the Crossroads Pub was secretly being used as a station on the Underground Railroad by Jabidah Martus. He was housing runaway slaves and ferrying them secretly across the Charles River. Jabidah and the Martus family were using hidden crevices in the pub to keep the runaways from being found and using the lore of the haunted grounds of the Crossroads Pub as a cover story for citizens seeing figures moving across the cemetery at night or unsettling noises coming from the walls of the pub. Jabidah was able to ferry hundreds of enslaved people and was able to do so without anyone in the town taking notice until the night of May 4th, 1852.
Jabidah was about to lead a small band of runaways to the ferry when they were ambushed by slave hunters in the cemetery. Not respecting laws or life, the slave hunters beat them and whipped Jabidah to the brink of death. They barricaded the doors to the pub with the Martuses inside and began lighting torches to set fire to the place. They wanted to send a message to the slaves and whoever was helping them that death and misery would only follow.
Jabidah lay on the dirt helplessly as he was about to watch his family burn until he heard gut-wrenching screams coming from behind him. A loud thud sounded as something heavy landed close and rolled to the tombstone in front of him. Jabidah slowly looked up and saw the severed head of a slave hunter staring back at him. The head had been ripped from the jaw with its tongue hanging out. Jabidah went into shock and could not control his body, but he could hear the screams of the slaves yelling for whatever was in the graveyard to keep away as the slave hunters dropped their torches and fired their guns into the woods.
Jabidah could not move and kept staring into the eyes of the disembodied head lying in a pool of blood with its tail of torn flesh. He wanted to run, but his body would not listen to him; he could only empty his bladder into the cold dirt. He heard screams of the slave hunters and the wet sound of their limbs being torn from their bodies as a rain of blood fell upon his back, but he still could not move… until something grabbed him.
He was hauled onto his legs and dragged back to the pub by the runaways. They unbarricaded the door and ran inside. Jabidah managed to stand in front of the window as he watched the moonlight silhouetted figures of the slave hunters being torn to shreds by creatures he could not see in the dark. He tried to adjust his eyes, but a torn arm hit the window, smearing the glass with blood, at which he fainted.
He awoke after being asleep for two days. The slaves had left in the early morning but not before burying the bodies of the hunters so the Underground Railroad line would not close. Jabidah asked his wife what the runaways saw, and she said it was creatures not even Hell could produce.
Years went by, and then generations. Every once in a while, stories would circulate of strange things happening on the Crossroads Pub property, unexplained sightings of creatures, ghosts, and monsters, all dismissed as lore. During the early 1900s, people obsessed with the occult took trips to the Crossroads Pub, with some leaving disappointed while others wished they hadn’t found what they were looking for.
Eventually, the eyewitness tales of the supernatural died down with the tales becoming urban legends, while the Crossroads Pub itself slowly became a vacation and tourist destination as it was declared the Oldest Pub in America in 1999 and the longest family-owned business in 2014, having always been managed by a member of the Martus family. In 2004, an annual Halloween event at the pub became wildly successful as thousands flocked to the town of Fenway each year to take part in the celebration and the mystery of the Crossroads Pub. Everything was going well until the midnight hours of October 31st, 2015 when the myth would become a reality once again; because of you, Mr. Glass.
