How to Break an Evil Curse

by Laura Morrison

  He hurried back up the stairs.

  Lillian watched him go and sighed contentedly. “He will make a wonderful father,” she said. Then she looked at Daisy, waiting for a response.

  “Oh... Yes, very, Your Highness,” Daisy responded automatically.

  “Well then,” the queen said, “I must go as well. You take a look around and report back to me with your ideas.” Then Lillian and her maid were off.

  Daisy looked around and squinched her mouth in distaste. Even empty of all its horrible apparatuses and its prisoners, the dungeon was horrible. So cold and dark and cavernous. And perhaps it was only because she knew it had been full of suffering for generations, but the very air seemed to her to be heavy with an oppressive something.

  She could have no way of knowing that this oppressive something was a trio of ghosts who were at that very moment gathered around her, discussing all that had unfolded.

  “No way will she be able to turn this place into a nursery,” grumbled a tall, bald ghost wearing a pair of scraggly shorts held up by a rope tied around his bony hips. All three ghosts were scrawny, but this bald one was the most so. If he weren’t a ghost and thus already deceased, I would be very concerned for him. Maybe invite him over for a pot pie and some cake.

  “Oh Curtis, who knows...” said the short one in a guard uniform. “The real question is: why are we still here when all the other ghosts disappeared with the dungeon stuff?” There had been twenty-three ghosts in the dungeon before the cleaning crew had descended that morning, but now only these three remained. Twenty-two had been prisoners, and one (the short ghost who had just spoken) had been a guard who had been a victim of a failed prison break about a hundred years prior.

  The third ghost watched Daisy as she hugged herself uncomfortably and muttered under her breath, “I bet this place is haunted.”

  “Perceptive, this one,” the third ghost, Dexter, said, nodding his head in her direction. He had been in his mid-twenties when he died and hadn’t been too long in the dungeon before he met his demise, so he wasn’t as skeletal as his friend Curtis. He had a nasty cut running down the left side of his face from his forehead to his chin.

  Daisy began to walk and they all followed, curious because this woman was going to transform their home into a place fit for a royal infant. The notion was quite jarring. As she moseyed around, taking notes and getting inspired thinking about color swatches, flower arrangements, and cribs, they moseyed along with her, peeking at her notes and testing her receptivity by speaking ideas into her ear and seeing whether she seemed to notice.

  “Hang a swing from the ceiling,” Dexter spoke clearly into her ear, and was pleased to see seconds later when Daisy wrote down in her notebook: hang swing from ceiling.

  They saw she had heard him and the ghosts all moaned excitedly in unison, making Daisy shiver and look around nervously.

  Over the days, weeks, and months that followed, the trio of ghosts watched the transformation of their home with great interest, supplying ideas to Daisy whenever they could, and generally trying to make the most of the situation.

  Then one morning, Curtis was watching with interest as some day laborers (two of whom were former prisoners) laid intricate ceramic tiles down on the floor of the future bathroom, when the prison guard ghost (Montague) came in and said, “Hi, what’s going on?”

  Dexter and Curtis didn’t often talk to Montague. Though Montague had not been a guard at the same time Dexter or Curtis had been prisoners, a guard was a guard, and they saw no reason to be friendly. This made things pretty lonely for Montague—the only other souls in this world who could see him would barely even speak to him. Even before the other ghosts had disappeared from the dungeon, it had been the same: since Montague had been the only guard ghost, the others had all taken a savage delight in making things as unpleasant for him as they could. And though Montague understood, on a purely rational level, why they acted that way, understanding didn’t make things any easier as the years marched on.

  Suddenly, there was a great ruckus from the main room. The ghosts floated out to join the workers and Daisy where they were gathered to watch a doctor bustling around, barking orders to a group of nurses. “Boil some water!” and “Get some clean cloths!” and other such labor-and-childbirth phrases. The nurses sprang into action.

  “Oh,” Curtis said.

  “She’s having the baby down here?” Montague asked.

  Though they had no desire to witness it, they were stuck in the dungeon; you see, being ghosts, their spirits could not stray from the scene of their demise. So, much to their discomfort, the dungeon’s ghosts could not escape the birth of Princess Julianna.

  Chapter Five

  Baby Julianna was a sweet kid. Not abnormally cranky, nor surprisingly mellow. She was just pretty much a normal newborn—except that she was a cursed princess. But that detail was surprisingly irrelevant in her early years. Conroy and Lillian had been obsessing about the curse and its implications since the beginning of the pregnancy, but now the new parents were so caught up in the joys of parenthood that at first the curse didn’t even cross their minds.

  It wasn’t until Julianna started to become noticeably observant of her surroundings that her mother began to wish she could take Julianna outside to watch waves crash up on the shore, or look at the trees which were sprouting fresh green leaves. The best they could do was bring in fresh flowers and cuttings from tree branches, and put them in all the vases that Daisy had supplied for this exact purpose all over the child’s living quarters.

  Really, so what if their daughter couldn’t go outside? That meant they knew where she was all the time, and that she was safe, which is a load off the mind of any parent certainly, but especially so for royal parents who have to fret about their kids being taken for ransom and revenge and those sorts of dreadful things. When Julianna got to be a teenager, Conroy in particular was glad his daughter was contained within the safe sphere of the palace instead of roaming about the city being flirted at by knights.

  There is a little part of every parent that would like to keep their kids safe from the evils and temptations of the world, and Lillian and Conroy were living the unhealthy, overprotective dream. Every so often one or the other of them would comment in a vaguely guilty manner about how Farland had actually done them a favor.

  And so it went until the fall of Julianna’s nineteenth year.

  It was the middle of the night and the Princess’s living quarters were silent but for the snoring of her nurse and companion, Delia. The woman was fast asleep in a rocking chair in the central chamber that had once housed the torture devices, but was now lined instead with bookshelves.

  As it did most evenings, peace reigned supreme this calm and tranquil night.

  Unless you happened to be a person who could hear ghosts, as Julianna could. As far back as she could remember, she had been able to see the three ghosts who haunted her rooms. The ghosts had been really excited about this, especially Montague who at long last had a shot at being able to communicate with a person who didn’t hate him. As Julianna grew, they had just as much, if not more, involvement with her upbringing than her nurse, parents, and tutors. When she was too small to understand that she should keep them a secret, the ghosts told her they were imaginary friends so people wouldn’t think she was too crazy, since imaginary friends are acceptable for kids to have but seeing people who aren’t there is schizophrenic. When Julianna got too old for imaginary friends, she started to pretend she didn’t see them anymore, which was tough—imagine living in close quarters with three other people and not being able to acknowledge them.

  But whenever Delia was gone and Julianna had no visitors, she was able to converse with the ghosts freely, and had a lot of fun learning all sorts of stuff that she’d otherwise never have learned as a severely over-protected princess.

  This midnight found our long-suffering heroine crouch
ed at the end of a tunnel she’d been digging as an escape out of the dungeon ever since Curtis had let slip that, when he’d been alive, he’d been digging a tunnel behind a loose stone in his cell. Horrified, the other ghosts had begged him not to let her know where the tunnel was, but at the time Julianna had been eight years old and thus highly skilled at the fine art of whining and nagging, and she hadn’t give him a moment of peace until he finally folded and revealed to her the stone’s exact location.

  From that day onward, digging to freedom had been her dream and every night, she drugged Delia’s nighttime tea and climbed into the tunnel with her digging implements. She had made so much progress with the tunnel over the years that her ghost companions could no longer accompany her to the end since their spectral tethers held them back.

  So, if they wanted to speak to her, they had to yell.

  And yell Curtis was doing.

  The further along the tunnel Julianna progressed, the more he regretted letting her know it was there. It’s not like he didn’t want her to have freedom, and he knew she hated being confined down in the depths of the castle when there was a whole world to see, but he also didn’t want to be the reason that she escaped to the outdoors. His biggest fear was not that she would finish the tunnel, but that the thing would cave in. She’d read a book on mining, and both Dexter and Montague could offer plenty of practical advice since they had had brief stints working in the country’s infamous coal mines before moving on to safer professions—Dexter to thievery/poisoning and Montague to prison guardery. In theory, Julianna had the basics of digging a tunnel down, but Curtis still couldn’t keep himself from fretting every night that she crawled into that “dark dangerous deathtrap” as he called it, quite alliteratiously.

  “Seriously Julianna, you need to give it up for the night. You’ve been up there for hours! You’re going to get sleepy, and then you’ll make a silly mistake!”

  Way up at the top of the tunnel, Julianna could barely make out Curtis’ words, but she knew the gist of it because he’d been hollering the same stuff up at her for more than half of her life now. And, she had to admit, as she paused to scratch an itch on her nose, smearing it with dirt in the process, Curtis was right. No need to get stupid and cause a situation she couldn’t fix. Sighing, she gently, almost lovingly, laid down her garden trowel. Her dear trowel had been her digging tool since one of the gardeners had come down to the dungeon a few years back to check on some of her potted plants. She’d managed to swipe it off his tool belt while the gardener had been distracted by an interesting fungus that had taken root in the soil of one of her plants. The trowel, a huge step up from the serving spoon she’d been using, had sped up her work by at least fifty percent.

  She gave it a fond pat as though it were a pet dog and scooted over to a device she had constructed by putting the wheels from an old rolling toy horse on the bottom of a plank of wood she’d taken from the underside of her bed. Then, she rolled over so that she was on her back on the wheeled board. She reached up to grab the line made of tied-together bits of fabric and guided herself down to the bottom of the tunnel. The wheeled board saved her tons of crawling time and made it so she didn’t have to build the tunnel too high, since she had to only accommodate her supine position.

  Once at the bottom, she stood, gave Curtis a grin, stretched her cramped limbs, slid the two bags of dirt from that night’s work off the board, and pushed the loose stone back into place.

  “I’ve told you not to spend so much time up there!” Curtis fussed.

  Julianna glanced at her still-sleeping nurse and grumbled back at him, “I know what I’m doing.” She smiled apologetically when she saw his downcast expression. “Listen, I’m sorry. I know you’re just worried. But, Curtis,” she said, suddenly excited, “up there, digging those last few feet, I swear—” and she whispered the last bit, “I swear the air felt…different. The soil wasn’t packed as hard. I—I think I may be close to the end.”

  Curtis scrunched his ghostly nose up disbelievingly. His expression was so full of doubt that he might as well have just said aloud that he thought she was crazy.

  “Well, what’s so crazy about that?” she asked, perturbed. “I’ve been working on that tunnel ten years now. I figure the thing’s got to have an end at some point!”

  Montague floated over and interjected, “Odds aren’t that great you’ll find the end. The dungeon’s really deep. Really, really deep.”

  She glared. Of course it was. It was a dungeon. “But I’ve studied blueprints of the castle and topographical maps of the city,” she sighed, explaining yet again how she knew there was hope, “and the castle is on a hill. And when I look at the castle blueprints and compare them to the layout of the building on the topographical map, it clearly shows that my tunnel is going the right direction to eventually end at the edge of the hill on the ocean side!”

  “Geez, guys,” Dexter muttered from where he was trying to read a book nearby, “let the kid have some hope.” Then he asked Julianna, “Could you turn the page for me?”

  As she walked over to the table where Dexter was hovering over an open book, she said, “Yeah, I need a project or I’ll go mad, right?” to Montague, who had told her that very thing not too long ago, drawing on his observations from his stint as a prison guard as evidence. She gave Dexter a smile and flipped the page. Dexter continued reading. Of the three, he was the one most likely to side with and defend her against the others, probably because he’d led such a life of danger and excitement before he’d been imprisoned. He had had a lot of fun skirting the law and taking risks and thought that being daring and having as much adventure as she could was just the thing for Julianna to keep her mind off her troubles.

  Montague nodded but said, “Yes, but it’s just that the tunnel... well, it might cave in.” He had a great skill for stating the obvious.

  “You have no faith in me,” Julianna sighed as she slung a bag of dirt over her shoulder and hefted it to the bathroom, then did the same with the other bag, turning a page for Dexter on the way. Once back in the bathroom, she started to run the tub, and then pried the grate off the floor—the grate she assumed led to some sort of sewer system. The only reason she hadn’t crawled into it long ago to explore was because by the time it had occurred to her to do so, her shoulders had grown too wide to squeeze through. Peering wistfully down the grate, she asked, “Could one of you make sure Delia is still out?”

  Montague floated over to investigate and Julianna began to carefully pour the bags’ contents into the depths of the space below the grate. Once the bags were empty and each speck of dirt swept off the floor, Julianna went to hide the bags behind some books in her library, passing Montague as she did.

  “She’s coming out of it,” he said. Julianna nodded. After hiding the bags, she went to another shelf and retrieved a thick book entitled, “An Unabridged History of Mulch.” It was hollowed out, housing an array of glass vials wrapped in cloth to stop them breaking or clattering around. These were the concoctions that she had brewed with Dexter on the sly. Some were for drugging her nurse and some were painkillers. The painkiller she had found to be quite handy when she got hurt in the tunnel and had to pretend that she was fine, since her injuries were unexplainable to people who thought she frittered her days away doing nothing more dangerous than cross stitching, playing her clarinet, and reading.

  “One drop is all you’ll need,” Dexter said from his place by the book he was trying to read, though he had to rely on her to turn the pages, which was irritating because she was scurrying all around and he was just getting to a good part.

  She nodded, grabbed the vial, and hurried over to her sleeping nurse. She tilted Delia’s head back and dropped one drop onto the elderly woman’s tongue.

  “You’ll need to lay off the drugs for a night,” Dexter added. “You’ve used it five nights in a row. Another night and you get into the danger zone.”

 
She sighed and nodded, having known from years of experience that he was going to say that. And he was right, of course. She didn’t want to endanger Delia. Delia was a sweet, kind old lady. And heck, even if she was mean and crabby, one still doesn’t drug people willy-nilly.

  Her nurse duly neutralized long enough for Julianna to wipe all traces of her tunneling excursion from her person and the rooms, she turned another page for Dexter, took a bath, then scoured the tub of residual dirt. Julianna had, as a byproduct of the tunneling, developed much better house-cleaning skills than any royalty in the history of Fritillary. She was so proficient at sweeping, scouring, and scrubbing away any evidence of dirt around the dungeon that Delia had not found anything suspicious in years.

  Even if Delia had found suspicious dirt on the floor, she might not have thought too much of it anyway since there were already so many odd things about Julianna. For one thing, the girl mysteriously exhibited knowledge and language that was shockingly inappropriate (all things Julianna had picked up from her ghost companions, but of course Delia couldn’t know that). Then there were the odd quirks she had, like leaving books open on the desk and not reading them but at regular intervals turning the pages, and seeming to be watching something that wasn’t there, and muttering quietly when she thought Delia wasn’t listening. Also, in consequence of her never having once been touched by sunlight, she had a fierce vitamin D deficiency which resulted in depression, forgetfulness, and icky problems with her gums. The vitamin D deficiency also caused another quirk of hers, which was a constant craving for fish4.