The Curious Case of the Cursed Dagger (Curiosity Shop Cozy Mysteries Book 3)

by Constance Barker

  I moaned. “Any chance they are doing a satirical version. A musical comedy.”

  “Nope. They are going to come as close as they can to Bill’s original version,” Clarence said.

  "Actually it is called 'The Tragedy of Julius Caesar,'" Edgar said. "You do know that is an odd title for it.”

  “Why odd?” I asked.

  “Well, it’s not really about Julius Caesar, he’s just got the title role. Actually, Brutus has more than four times as many lines and the entire play is really about Brutus and his dilemma."

  "Still, Julius is the one who croaks," Clarence said.

  "Yes. The tragedy mentioned in the title isn’t that he died, Shakespeare was rather fatalistic when he was sober. He and Kit Marlowe both.”

  Clarence wiggled his nose. “Is that personal knowledge? Were you around then?”

  Edgar thought. “I don’t really know how I know. But I’m certain that the main story is the struggle Brutus faces between the conflicting demands of honor, patriotism, and friendship. He has to honor his beliefs by killing his friend. I really think Bill should've called it Brutus's Moral Choice."

  “There’s no box office in that name,” Clarence said.

  "Well, I'm not sure I'm up to seeing the play, by any name," I told them.

  "Not totally well, then?"

  "I’m okay. But listening to you two go on about it made me feel uneasy. Not your conversation, but something about the play itself is nagging at me uncomfortably.” Once again I was at a loss for the right words to express myself. “It’s connected somehow with my dreams. But, honestly, I'm not sure what it is."

  Deep in the tangled web of thought that was my waking brain, the story of the play was somehow intricately wound up in, related to, my odd dreams. "If I have to see a historical play, well I'd rather see Bernard Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra..."

  They both looked at me. "We should get going," Edgar said.

  "Come with us anyway,” Clarence said. “You are already uneasy and you need to get out. Watching high-school kids destroy Shakespeare should be good for a giggle that will put things in perspective."

  “Or you might figure out what is making you uneasy. Besides, if you don’t go, I can’t.”

  They were both right, and so, shortly after I found myself sitting through a moderately decent (for high school) production of a play I'd never cared for. As the play progressed, the willies I'd felt in thinking about seeing it grew stronger, but never quite came into focus.

  When we came outside at the end of the play, Clarence was bursting with joy. "That was great," he said.

  "It was?"

  He stared up at the night sky of Destiny's Point. It was perfectly clear and we could see a zillion beautiful stars. Orion was strutting his stuff on the horizon and other constellations I didn’t know danced overhead. Clarence cleared his throat. "As Brutus said to us, only a few minutes ago, 'I cannot by the progress of the stars give guess how near to day.'" Then he shook his head.

  "That's why humans invented watches," Edgar said.

  I looked at my watch. "And it's almost ten," I said.

  "So it is," Clarence said. He let out a long breath, suddenly looking sad, let down.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  “I don’t exactly know. Maybe it’s just the lack of poetry in our lives. Take that statement Brutus made. Edgar’s reply was sensible, yet diminished it. Somehow looking too closely at things wrecks the magic completely. Looking up there we see the ancient light that’s traveled here. That’s magical. But when a star is just a star...” Then he shrugged.

  And, with that profound statement hanging over us, we walked to Clarence's car. Edgar and I had nothing to say.

  Chapter Two

  The next morning I woke up feeling a lot less foggy. I'd had a pretty good night's sleep. It was relatively dreamless, as far as I could tell. Whatever angst I'd been fighting off seemed to be ebbing, happily. It didn’t go away though. Not entirely. The vague misgivings that I'd gotten from my strange dream, misgivings reinforced by seeing the play, still lurked in the dim recesses of my brain, nagging at me.

  I was sure that those uneasy feelings were trying to tell me something. I hoped that's what it was. I hoped that eventually they’d clarify themselves, let me know what I put off about, because the only other option I could come up with, the only other possibility was that I was rapidly losing my tiny mind. All things considered, I didn’t want that.

  Of course, that assumed I hadn't done that, lost my mind, some time ago. I couldn’t be positive, after all, being crazy would more than explain the sequence of events that had brought me back to Destiny’s Point. In a strange way, it would be reassuring to discover that I hadn’t really left the city and my to-date futile pursuit of a job in journalism. It would be interesting to see how my life had gone if I hadn’t returned to take over the curiosity shop I inherited from my Uncle Mason when he died. It would be a better explanation of how I came to be haunted by my own private ghost and why I'd been convinced, or convinced myself, to take over Uncle Mason's crusade—the collecting and hiding away of cursed objects, artifacts from some strange and exceedingly magical world.

  Unfortunately, it was more likely that the world as I saw it was pretty much the way things were. Even crazy, my pragmatic nature would assert itself.

  Taking over the crusade, however, well, that you could write off to my romantic nature (yet another part of my complex being). I found it easy to be swayed by good intentions and a desire to make a positive difference in the world. After doing it for a time, however, I’d come to wonder if that was me deluding myself. Although the work we did was more or less aimed at saving the world, mostly it ended to seem far more puzzling, chaotic, and often frightening than heroic. Yet, day after day, here we were, doing what we did to keep the world safe from cursed objects.

  I went down to the shop and said a cheery good morning to Clarence, who had just arrived to open the Curiosity Shop (he had managed it for Uncle Mason and I seemed to have inherited him with it). “I’ll see you later, Clarence. I’m trotting over to Enid’s for a visit,” I said.

  “Are you trotting on foot or horseback?” he asked.

  “She’ll take that horseless carriage, most likely,” Edgar put in.

  “Then it’s hardly trotting, is it?” he asked. He often got irritatingly literal when he wasn’t in the best of moods and now seemed to be one of those times.

  “True, so I’ll drive to Enid’s,” I said. “The wiseacre ghost here can trot alongside.”

  “Have fun. I’ll be here sorting,” Clarence said. One job that never ended in a curiosity shop was sorting. We had boxes of things bought from estate sales and most of it was junk. Figuring out what in those boxes might actually have value was where we made money and understanding what we had required research. So, what Clarence did was separate out what he thought were the more valuable, or more interesting objects and then try to see what they might be worth, looking online, in catalogs, and talking to other curio dealers. Then we’d put the rest in bins and mark the price low to get rid of them. The valuable stuff was naturally awarded valuable shelf space and a higher price.

  In some ways, it was the same sort of treasure hunt as looking for artifacts, and I wondered if that was how Uncle Mason had gotten into tracking them. Or perhaps it was the other way around, and tracking artifacts got him interested in the more benign treasures out there.

  I knew that although Clarence had sounded whiny when he said that’s what he’d be doing, he actually enjoyed it; he enjoyed it even more when no one was around to bother him, so he was glad I was going to Enid’s house and he’d have some peace.

  Enid had been my late Uncle Mason’s girlfriend until they broke up, and his partner in hunting artifacts. She lived in a neat cottage at the edge of town. She often advised us and she and I tried to get together at least once a week for tea and a chat. I liked doing that because from time to time information accidentally came to light –
things that Enid forgot to tell us about the pursuit of artifacts, some of which could be important. Edgar hated the visits because I often made him go into his pen box just so we could talk privately. It was the only way I got any real privacy since I’d opened that cursed pen box when I found it in the closet. I’d opened the box and been, well... cursed.

  Fortunately, for me, the upside of doing it was that I was in charge, not the ghost. Up to a point, at least.

  When I arrived at her house and she swung the door open to greet me, I looked past her and stopped. A large crate was sitting in her tiny, prim living room. It was far too big to miss and looked out of place.

  "What’s that?" I asked. I was sure that Enid hadn't gone out and bought herself a crate—she didn’t go out, and wasn’t the type to go for the rustic look in a new table. It looked odd sitting there, crammed in front of the overstuffed print-covered sofa with lace doilies on its arms, and behind the Victorian coffee table with its shiny maple top and curved legs.

  Enid’s house was cluttered, but everything in it fit together into what I, irreverently, called old lady décor, right down to the smells of lilac and lavender that permeated her house. The large crate of rough wood didn't fit in at all.

  She gave me a sly little grin. "It’s something of a gift. Beatrice and Albert sent it to us.” That explained a lot. Beatrice and her son Albert were Antique Dealers. We’d worked with them before in our attempt to secure artifacts. I knew there was a small community of people that were referred to as Antique Dealers, although I’d met just them. I had no idea how many there were, and now I realized that it had never occurred to me to ask. Up to that point, Clarence and I worked alone, assisted by advice from Enid and Edgar’s erratic although enthusiastic efforts.

  “Did they say anything about it?”

  She shook her head. “They never even said they were sending it. I was, to say the least, surprised when it arrived yesterday."

  "Do you have any idea why they might’ve sent it? Dare I ask what this is about?"

  "Don't be silly. Of course you can ask, Cecelia. And I can guess, because no, they didn’t say. My guess is that they thought you could put them to good use and thwart the Cabal. You and Clarence probably do need them."

  “Them?” I felt a little shudder. Her cavalier response meant that the crate had something to do with cursed objects we collected. In the best of all possible worlds, thinking about artifacts, and especially about the Cabal, was not a good start to the day. "Put what to good use?"

  "Open it and see," she said, rubbing her hands together, enjoying my rising curiosity.

  It had already been opened, so all I had to do was lift off the top. Clearly Enid had already peeked. I tried to picture Enid attacking the crate with a crowbar to find out what was in it. I couldn't make the image appear.

  Under the top we found it filled with a huge, mind boggling variety of boxes packed in foam peanuts. Some of the boxes were fancy, some were plain, some were rectangular, some odd shapes. When I picked them up, they all seemed to vibrate gently, soothingly. "So Beatrice and Albert sent us a box collection?"

  She smiled. "Unless I miss my guess, these are rather special storage boxes."

  "Storage.." Finally, the light bulb came on... I had my little epiphany. "Boxes suitable for storing cursed objects?"

  "Exactly. They are shielded.”

  “Shielded? Is that what I’m feeling when I hold them.. the shielding?”

  “Right. And that’s very good, for us, because it will make them harder for the Cabal to locate, not to mention that it will help protect us from the power of the artifacts."

  I hefted one. Going by weight and balance, they could’ve been ordinary cardboard boxes. I tried to imagine the kind of shielding they might have. When it comes to that sort of thing, I’ve learned that staring doesn’t work, so I closed my eyes and let myself just feel the vibrations. Then I felt it and I understood. I was not, however, thrilled by my revelation. I dropped the box back into the others and looked at Enid. "These boxes are cursed?"

  She sighed. "You make it sound so bad.”

  “Well...”

  “I suppose they are cursed, technically speaking. But context is important, dear, and when something has a spell put on it in order to do good, we tend to say it's enchanted rather than cursed. Cursed has such a horrid and negative sound to it, don't you think? Enchanted sounds delightful."

  "In my frame of mind I'm not sure enchanted is much of an improvement. It makes me think of fairy dust."

  "Well, I’m sure that religious people would call them blessed. Is that any better?"

  I wasn't sure that it was. "Right now, a spell by any other name would sound just as worrisome.”

  “You seem edgy.”

  “I suppose I am. Partly I think it’s from being surrounded by cursed things constantly. I thought you’d understand.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you are the one who urged Uncle Mason to leave them alone. You said you can’t trust them to not backfire on you or even know totally what you were getting into if you used them."

  "That’s true enough, although that wasn’t quite my choice of words. But there you are, or here we are, stuck in a quandary. We needed something, some way to store the objects. Beatrice and Albert sent the boxes. I just wanted to see if I couldn’t help you feel better about using them. We can't let a little tiny semantic problem keep us from doing what is necessary.” She furrowed her brow. “Part of the issue with Mason was that I thought he was taking them for granted, which is certainly not your problem.”

  “I suppose not.” The uneasiness was welling up in me again.

  “After all, I think of the Grand Storehouse as bewitched and yet we use it—you’ve used it."

  I laughed. "Isn’t the Grand Storehouse enchanted? But I agree with calling it bewitched because the place scares the bejeebers out of you, out of all of us, I think."

  She grinned. "Okay, you caught me there. The point being, I only go there when I have to."

  "Fair enough," I said. "But something about the Grand Storehouse is terribly unnerving to me.”

  “And me. But we have few options.” She pointed at the crate. “The boxes are an option.”

  “A lesser evil?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “So now we have half a ton of boxes we can use for storing whatever cursed objects we find. Oh boy.” I made sure there was no enthusiasm in my voice. I hate for sarcastic comments to be missed. “Did they at least come with directions for how to use them?"

  "Directions? I didn’t see any. I doubt there are any. Nothing else has come with directions, at least nothing I’ve seen.” She cocked her head. “Most people who cast spells don’t like to write things down. Passing them along orally, often as part of a tradition or rite of passage helps keep the information out of the wrong hands.”

  “So there are right hands?”

  She ignored me. “I expect we need to experiment with them, but how hard can it be? I assume that you put an artifact into a box that seems to fit it reasonably well, much the same way Edgar slips into his pen box. Only with the cursed objects you probably want to keep the lid shut once the artifact is inside."

  "But how tight a fit should it be so that it works best? I mean, does it matter if the box is a little too big? What do you do if you don’t have one the right size? Is it okay to force an artifact in? Is getting as close as you can manage good enough for the boxes to work? And then, once they are in there, are they safe from the Cabal or just safe to be around?"

  She stroked her chin as she watched me. "You really are nervous about all this, aren’t you, dear? A bit jumpy?”

  “Maybe so. Uneasy anyway.”

  “The truth, my thought anyway, is that we will never really know the answers for sure. Like I said, we know that they muffle the intrinsic radiations of the artifacts."

  "They do? You didn't say that at all."

  "Oh, didn't I? I should have because that’s what they do."
>
  "It would be nice to know how effective they are before the Cabal breaks down our door hot on the track of some artifact that’s calling to them."

  She laughed. "I agree completely. Any clarity or certainty would be absolutely delightful, but we are talking about the unknown. Unfortunately, that means not knowing, and anyway, you must learn to think in terms of avoiding absolutes when dealing with magic, Cecelia. Just add how they work to the list of things we don't know. As for how well they work, let's make a small test." With that, she turned and walked down the hallway and returned with a container of water. In it was a pair of old spectacles.

  "Oh, there are my least-favorite glasses of all time," I said when she held them up, shaking the water off them. We’d had a rough time getting the glasses. When an innocent person picked them up they were compelled to put them on, and then they were shown an alternative future. Usually, there was something horrific in that future, but if the wearer acted on what he or she saw, tried to prevent it, well, things went badly.

  Enid held them between two fingers as if they were filthy. "I'll be glad to get them properly stored. The water mutes their effect, their ability to call to you, but I can still feel it. Resisting it, just having that presence in the background has been tiring. So let's make them safer," she said. "We need to do it quickly or I could wind up seeing a possible future...they are trying to get me to put them on. So grab a box, any box at all, and let’s stick them inside and see what happens."

  I picked one up that was covered with a floral design and opened it. It looked as if it was perfectly sized. Enid put the glasses in and snapped the lid shut. As it closed the air in the room suddenly seemed fresher. Enid and I looked at each other and simultaneously let out long sighs of relief.

  "Well, I'd call that a good fit," she said, laughing. "And obviously the box makes a big difference.”

  “I wonder if the spell is permanent? Does it wear off over time?”

  “I suppose that is an unknown factor and I’ll ask Beatrice that question. She might know. For the time being, however, I'd say these boxes are just the ticket."