How to Break an Evil Curse

by Laura Morrison

  “Don’t touch that!” barked Farland with anger and alarm.

  Bernard’s hand froze an inch away from the bottle, and he stared at Farland with astonishment. “What--?”

  “Fool! Do not meddle with things you do not understand!” Farland spat. “Imbecile!” he added for good measure as he swooped over to the shelf and laid a protective hand on the side of the bottle. It was only then, when it was far too late, that he remembered that the contents of the bottle were supposed to be mere harpsichord maintenance crystals, not potentially explosive minerals used to concoct an invisibility spell. He winced at his overreaction and turned to meet their shocked gazes. Farland cleared his throat, and, after an awkward pause in which he was painfully aware of the ticking of the metronome, he said, “I take harpsichord repair and maintenance very seriously.”

  “Clearly,” said Corrine, looking at him with an expression that indicated what she thought of his sanity, or lack thereof. Every move Farland made and every word he uttered further convinced her that something was off with him.

  “Look,” Bernard said, “I have no doubt that a person who feels as deeply as you do about your art will be able to fix our harpsichord. You’re a little loony, but I don’t care as long as you can fix my kid’s harpsichord. He’s a sensitive boy, and I want him calmed down as soon as possible. You see, he’s been injured and I want him to take it easy and relax so he can heal, but he’s not going to do that until the harpsichord is repaired. He’s got some strange connection to that thing that defies reason. So, if you are willing to come with us aboard the pirate ship, then I think we have a deal!” Bernard stuck his hand out to shake Farland’s.

  “A strange connection that defies reason?” Farland mused as he absently shook Bernard’s hand. Now that sounded like something that could indicate magic was involved–when a thing defied reason, it could very well be because there was a spell or potion involved that was bending things in a way that was contrary to the norm.

  Farland would have loved to read their minds right about then (assuming they were weak-minded enough), but he was currently out of his mind-reading powder (it was expensive to concoct), and even if he’d had the powder, he had to have been taking it for 48 hours, one dose every 12 hours, in order to effectively read minds at will. Without the help of the mind-reading powder, his skills were remedial at best; it was physically draining without the powder, and mostly he heard just a bunch of muffled rumbling, and jumbled up sounds, with only a hint of the subject’s actual thoughts. He missed the good old days in the castle when he’d had the ability to obtain whatever ingredients he wanted in whatever amounts he required. Currently, he only had one bottle left of his mind reading powder and he was saving it for a special occasion since he didn’t know how he’d ever be able to get any more of the key ingredient: the pollen of a flower that grew half the world away at only a certain altitude on a particular mountain, and, of course, it bloomed only once every three years.

  When he’d been pals with Conroy, he had sent expeditions to the mountain whenever he fancied.

  Sometimes Farland wished that when he’d been younger, he’d have realized what a cost to his material comfort this whole revenge thing would turn out to be. If he had consulted the magical pool of raven blood, would it have told him that the path of revenge would lead him to a slummy little apartment and a pittance of an income? Would it have told him of cold winter nights with barely enough fuel for the fire to keep the chill at bay, and weeks where he had to get by with nothing more than sandwiches made of sawdust-infused bread and mustard? And, if the magical pool of raven blood had actually condescended to reveal this information (which was unlikely since the magical pool of raven blood was moody and peevish on its good days), would the knowledge have swayed Farland from following his dreams?

  Probably not.

  He had been so darn idealistic in his youth.

  Fortunately, he had another plot brewing that would hopefully end up landing him back in the castle.

  It took Farland a moment to realize he had zoned out in the middle of the conversation with his visitors. Oblivious, the dad was talking. Farland cut in, “What? I—uh—I lost track of our conversation just now. I was—uh—pondering the intricacies of the inner workings of the harpsichord…What were we talking about?”

  Bernard blinked. “You were asking about my son’s strange connection to his harpsichord. I was just saying how he’s a born musician when it comes to his banjo and accordion, but with that harpsichord he touches it and it sounds like a rabid squirrel is running across the keys. But he keeps trying and trying.”

  Farland’s eyes bugged out and his jaw dropped. He thought, Banjo, harpsichord, and accordion?! Those are the instruments specified in my counter-curse! This is it!

  The girl was staring at him with a funny look.

  Farland realized the expression on his face was pretty crazy. He shut his mouth, blinked his eyes, and tried to contain his excitement. But now that he was almost 100% sure he had found the one who’d break the curse, it took every ounce of his self-control to remain in character and not fly out the door demanding they take him at once to the pirate ship or suffer the consequences.

  Then it occurred to him, why couldn’t he just do that? Demand that they take him to their son/brother pronto or be cursed with some dreadful curse?

  But no, if he did that, something could go wrong; they could try to be heroic and alert the lad once they neared the ship, or they might be wearing protective amulets--doubtful, but possible, and he had waited for so long that he didn’t want to take the risk of messing it all up just because he couldn’t be patient for a few more hours. No, it was best if he tried to play it cool for a bit more. He cleared his throat and said carefully, “How odd! Well, it sounds like this harpsichord is very important to him. Let’s get it fixed up all shiny and new! The sooner the better, I say!”

  “Indubitably!” Bernard said with a grin.

  The two men capered out the door, one happy to have found someone who could help Warren and give him some peace of mind, the other happy to be shortly killing Warren dead.

  Corrine watched them go, eyes narrowed with suspicion. She didn’t like Farland one bit, but she couldn’t put into convincing words what exactly it was that bothered her, so she followed at a distance, close enough to listen to him talking to her father, but far enough that he’d be disinclined to try to talk to her.

  “So, have you always liked the harpsichord?” Bernard was asking, trying to strike up a conversation with Farland.

  “Oh, yeah. Totally,” Farland said, sounding like he was not paying much attention.

  “What do you like most about it?”

  “Oh—the–um–the plinky plinky things—you know, the black and white bits—”

  “The keys?” Corrine supplied incredulously, finding herself unable to keep quiet.

  “Yeah, them!” Farland replied. “They’re what I like best about the harpsichord for sure.”

  “Ah, yes, they are nice,” Bernard said, still trying to give Farland the benefit of the doubt. “But I didn’t mean what part of the instrument do you like best—I meant, what drew you to the harpsichord as opposed to some other—”

  “Dad!” Corrine roared. “This guy doesn’t know what keys are! If it weren’t for the fact that there is no conceivable reason a person would impersonate a harpsichord repair man and venture onto a ship filled with pirates, I would say he was not who he says he is! Something is not right!”

  “You don’t need to know what keys are called in order to fix them,” Farland pulled out of the blue, and even managed to say it condescendingly.

  Bernard nodded in agreement at this logic. “That does make sense.”

  “No it doesn’t!” Corrine exploded.

  Bernard said to Farland, “Will you please excuse me for a moment while I talk to my daughter?”

  Farland said, “
Indeed,” then gave Corrine a shifty glance that Bernard didn’t see and wandered down the road a bit to do some window shopping.

  “What’s up, kid?” Bernard asked her. “You’re acting weird.”

  “I’m acting weird?”

  “I’m not saying he’s not weird, dear. I’m just saying that you are, too. So what if he’s got some quirks? Like you said, there’s no conceivable reason for him to be impersonating a harpsichord repair man. To get onto a pirate ship, no less. If he can fix the darn instrument and thus make Warren calm down and rest so he can heal, then that is all I care about.”

  She glared at Farland’s back but said, “I guess you’re right…” Farland was looking into the window of a gourmet dog food boutique, appearing to be surveying some baked-on-site bone-shaped biscuits and a pyramid of bejeweled food and water dishes “For that special pooch in your life!” as the sign in the window said.

  As she watched him at the window, she caught his gaze through the reflection. Had he been watching them through the window’s reflection? Creepy. There was definitely something more going on here than innocent harpsichord repair.

  “Sweetheart, let it go. You’re just stressed from these past few days. The storm, Warren’s injury, your first time off a ship in your entire twenty-two years of life. There’s been a lot going on.”

  Though she knew she was indeed a bit stressed, she also knew that stress didn’t make her imagine things. However, she supposed she might as well ignore this Farland’s weirdness and just keep an eye on him to make sure he didn’t try anything stupid.

  And of course, she didn’t have to worry for long. Once they were back on the pirate ship surrounded by a hoard of murderous thugs, she’d feel worlds safer. This Farland didn’t look like he would be able to hold his own in a fight against even the pirates’ scrawny, asthmatic cabin boy, Frank. “Okay, Dad. I’ll let it go. But once he’s seen to the harpsichord and been paid, he is off the ship.”

  Bernard nodded in agreement and went over to let Farland know that they were ready to move on.

  Chapter Nine

  Julianna paced around her room, glancing at the clock on her fireplace mantle a few times every minute. She was making Curtis, Montague, and Dexter nervous as they hovered around watching her. Every so often they tried to talk to her, in hopes of snapping her out of her crazed anticipation, but she barely heard them, and didn’t respond.

  The previous night, Julianna had finally gotten so close to breaking through the end of the tunnel that the soil had been loose enough for her to push through with her hands. Though she had wanted nothing more than to break through that last bit of dirt and be free at last (if just for the night), she’d refrained since she didn’t yet have all the supplies packed for her adventure. Also, she hadn’t been sure what time it was, and there was no chance she was going to risk digging out into the world if it might be around sunrise. It was most certainly not her intention to finish her tunnel at long last only to bumble out at the wrong time of day and have the curse come to its culmination.

  So, she had hurried back down the tunnel and continued her planning.

  Now she was prepared at last and just waiting for sunset, which, according to her consultation of a chart of the Fritillary skies she’d found in her library, was going to occur at 7:06 pm.

  For the third time in the past hour, Julianna pulled out from under her bed the bag she had filled with all the things she had packed for her escapade.

  “You’ve looked through that bag a hundred times,” muttered Curtis. “Julianna, just give it a rest. You’re making me anxious.”

  Wordlessly, she pulled out the little pouch of money she’d stolen from her mother, some food scavenged off the table when Delia’s back was turned, a steak knife from last night’s dinner, and a heavy, thick blanket to cover herself with just in case she somehow got trapped out in the sunlight and needed to take cover.

  She only needed one more thing: once Delia was in a drugged sleep, Julianna would pry out the brick that Dexter’s spirit was tethered to. Part of her had wanted to be alone for her first adventure, but the closer the clock ticked to sunset, the more Julianna realized she wanted the company of a friend. She was at heart a cautious, worrying type, so it gave her comfort to have not only a friend, but a sneaky, criminally-minded friend who might be able to give her some advice on the off chance that she got into a sticky situation.

  Dexter was very happy to be accompanying her but wasn’t nearly as restless. He’d been a ghost for 83 years, and before that had been alive for 23, so he’d had plenty of time to acquire patience. “I wonder how much the town has changed,” he mused as he lay stretched out on the floor. Surely things on the outside would look completely different from what they had last time he’d seen the city.

  Montague grumbled something cranky, but Dexter didn’t bother asking him to annunciate, figuring that he was just saying something about how it wasn’t fair Dexter was going to be able to get out of the dungeon and not him.

  “Oh, Montague, you know I’d take you if I could,” Julianna said, “But there’s no way I could pry that rock off the bathroom wall and lug it up the tunnel and outside!”

  Montague shrugged.

  Curtis was too nervous about Julianna’s departure to think about what he’d be missing. He was fuming in the corner of the room, arms crossed over his chest as he glared at her. Earlier, they’d had a fierce fight where he had yelled as loudly as he’d pleased because he was a ghost, and she had whispered ferociously since she didn’t want Delia to overhearing anything. What the fight had boiled down to was that he didn’t want her to get stuck outside at sunrise, and she didn’t understand how he thought for a moment that, now that she was so close, she would actually give up on the one dream she had ever had—the thing she had been working toward for more than half her life.

  Of course, the fight had not changed her opinion one bit about finishing the tunnel. So, they had called a truce of sorts. He was still very mad, but she was too preoccupied with her preparations and with her excitement about what was to come to let it bother her too much. Besides, she was so used to Curtis hounding her about the danger of her tunneling project that she was really not as fazed as he’d have liked.

  A consultation of the clock on the mantle told her she only had an hour to go. Julianna realized she hadn’t had dinner and remembered that Delia had knocked on her door more than an hour earlier to let her know it was ready. Even though she was too excited to eat, she decided she’d better try anyway, if only to keep Delia from wondering if something was wrong with her. Also, dinner was a good time to slip some of the sleeping potion into Delia’s tea.

  Julianna wandered out, sat down, ate a dinner she barely tasted, paid just enough attention to Delia’s questions to avert suspicion, and then drugged Delia’s cup when the old woman left the room to refill the pitcher of water.

  She finished her food, swiped a slice of bread and stuffed it in her pocket, and got up and walked in a giddy daze back to her room to change into the plainest dress she could find.

  Then, she waited.

  “Look, kid, just don’t drop that brick,” Dexter said from where he was hovering beside Julianna as she guided herself by her makeshift rope to the top of the tunnel.

  “Of course I’m not going to lose the brick that your soul is tethered to,” Julianna said as she grabbed up her trowel that was waiting for her at the top of the tunnel where she’d left it. “Give me some credit.”

  “Because,” he went on as though she hadn’t spoken, “If you drop that brick down some chasm or something and can’t retrieve it, then I’m stuck in a chasm forever. And as boring as your dungeon is, a chasm would be worse.”

  She ignored him, then sunk the trowel into the dirt in front of her and began to dig. Almost immediately, what remained of the tunnel gave way and she was staring out of a hole into the real, honest-to-goodness night sky.


  She gasped and stared.

  Stars everywhere.

  It was beautiful.

  The cold breeze on the edge of the cliff tossed her hair around.

  “Oooh!” she breathed. “Wow! Stars! Wind! Let’s go!” and she scampered out the hole without a backward glance.

  “Careful! That’s a cliff!” Dexter barked, then sighed as he poked his head out the hole in time to see the princess careening down a thankfully-shallow bit of cliff that ended with a wide outcrop of rock. She rolled to a stop and gasped, then looked up at her friend as he joined her.

  “Do you realize you could have just died!?” he screeched. “Working on that tunnel since you were eight years old, and then you fly right out like an idiot and nearly roll off a cliff to your death!”

  Julianna winced at his rage, swallowed, and nodded. “You’re right. I have to be more careful.” She peered cautiously over the edge of the outcrop of rock and felt a horrible chill as she saw the sheer cliff below her and the ocean crashing up against its base far, far, far, far below.

  “You have to pay attention to where you put your feet,” he lectured, and floated down to sit beside her. “You’re used to walking around on level ground. You’ve never walked on an uneven surface in your life, Princess.”

  She glared at him. He had a tendency to only refer to her as “Princess” when she was acting in an ignorant or silly way that was a byproduct of her pampered, sheltered existence. “I know.” She shoved aside her apprehension about the cliff and looked up at the stars. “Look, there’s the Great Bumblebee and the Lesser Bumblebee!” she pointed out, then proceeded to show Dexter all the constellations of the Fritillary sky, even though she knew that he didn’t care and was probably only pretending to pay attention. She’d memorized them from a book as a kid, and was proud of herself when she realized how much of what she’d memorized had been retained in her brain.