The Warlock's Curse

by Hobson, M. K.

  Your brother always,

  Ben

  All the other apprentices at Tesla Industries got Sundays off. For them it meant a day of rest on which they could enjoy a special vegetarian meal in the cafeteria, a few extra hours of meditation in the Buddhist temple, or participation in a Tesla-approved gathering of unquestionable moral value. While the other apprentices—especially Court—grumbled about the dullness of their Sundays, Will would gladly have traded places with any of them, because it would have meant he didn’t have to deal with Jenny coming into his room at the crack of dawn to shake him awake.

  “Good morning!” she chirped in his ear. “Let’s make the best use of this day, shall we?”

  Growling, Will rolled over and turned his back to her. “Let’s just leave me the hell alone, shall we?” he mumbled sleepily. “We’re not doing anything but sleeping.”

  Jenny gave him a firm shake. “This Sunday and next Sunday are the only two full days we’ve got to work before the patent has to go in,” she reminded him. “Come on, get up.”

  Will found that he couldn’t care less. He was exhausted. In the past week, under Jenny’s merciless whip hand, he’d averaged little more than three hours of sleep a night. He had just drifted back into a peaceful slumber when a torrent of cold water came splashing down on his head. He leapt out of bed, spluttering. “Jesus!”

  Jenny had retreated to the other side of the room, water glass in hand. She was trying to look firm and resolute but he could tell she was also trying not to giggle. He glared at her.

  “It’s like living with Genghis Khan!” he yelled at her. “Can’t I take one stinking day off? Just a couple of stinking hours, even? Please?”

  “No,” she said. “You can’t. This has to get finished, and it has to get finished before the end of this year. Remember? Plans?”

  “Right,” Will sighed. “Plans.” He wiped water from his face. “Fine. I guess a couple weeks without sleep never killed anyone. Just made them wish they were dead.”

  Jenny’s smile returned, brighter than ever. She handed him a towel.

  “C’mon, there’s fresh coffee,” she said. “And I’ve got an idea that will make the time just fly.”

  After shaving and dressing and downing two strong cups of coffee in succession, Will felt almost ready to face the morning, even though the sun hadn’t yet risen and the apartment was still pitch-dark. Arranging his implements before himself—t-squares and protractors and mechanical pencils—he winced as Jenny switched on the light that hung over the kitchen table.

  As he was rolling up the sleeves of his old blue workshirt, he heard her gasp. He steeled himself to defend his sartorial rights—Sunday might be just another workday, but damned if he was going to dress up like it was!—but then he saw that she was looking not at his shirt, but at the burn on his arm.

  “William! What on earth did you do to yourself?”

  Will looked down at the place where he’d pressed his skin against the steam radiator to break Ma’am’s Send. It did look pretty alarming, luridly red and puckered. It was funny how burns actually looked worse after they’d had some time to heal up. He pulled the fabric back down over the ugly scabs, shrugged.

  “Nothing,” he said quickly. “Just an accident—down at the lab.” Time to change the subject. “So, what’s your great idea to make the time fly?”

  “I’m going to read to you, just like old times!”

  “Great,” said Will, unenthusiastically. The only book they had in the apartment was the fat leatherbound volume of patent law she’d picked up from the library. Or maybe she was going to read him the stock reports. “Better put on another pot of coffee.”

  “Oh, don’t worry, this will keep you awake.” To his shock, she held up a book with a brilliantly colored cover ... showing a boy’s face, bisected into halves of good and evil. The copy of The Warlock’s Curse that he’d brought with him from California—the book he had used to unlock Ben’s first letter.

  He struggled to hide his discomfort. “Where did you find that?”

  “I found it when I was tidying your room. I do tidy, you know.” She looked over the book. “And anyway, it’s my book, isn’t it? It’s one of the ones I left up in your hayloft.” She turned to the inside front cover where eight-year-old Jenny had scrawled her name in large, blocky letters. “Why’d you bring it with you, anyway? You didn’t bring anything else.”

  Will shrugged. “I brought my tools, didn’t I?” It was a trick he’d learned from Father ... when you didn’t want to answer a question, the best tactic was to answer without giving an answer.

  Jenny hmphed. “Well anyway, I’m glad you brought it. It’s just about the most hilarious one there is. And I promise I’ll do all the voices like I used to.”

  The True Life Tales of Dreadnought Stanton books were not supposed to be hilarious—they were supposed to be dramatic, moving, thrilling—but the effort they expended to be the latter was exactly what made them the former. When they were children, Jenny used to read the books without irony, delivering each dire pronouncement or witty quip with breathless appreciation. In the years that had passed, however, she’d developed an exquisite knack for pricking the inflated bombast and poking fun at its deflated remains.

  “Chapter One: Down on the Farm!” she announced, after she’d Voice-Of-God-ded her way through the prologue, which was as tedious and irrelevant as prologues in a Dreadnought Stanton book usually were, written in a distant third person and reminding the reader that the True Life Tales of Dreadnought Stanton were, indeed, based on tales drawn from true life as it was lived in those United States, and that readers wishing to assert their status as patriotic Americans should read each and every one of them diligently and repeatedly, and also buy them as gifts. “Oh boy, here we go. I can’t remember, is the villain in this one a stone-stupid animancer or a bloodthirsty sangrimancer? Sangrimancer, probably. They’re the ones who come up with the best curses.” She paused. “You know, just for once I’d like to see Dreadnought Stanton go up against another credomancer. Now that would be a book I’d buy as a gift.”

  Will smiled. “C’mon, Scuff. You know credomancers are always the good guys,” he commented, rubbing out a stray mark with a gum eraser.

  Indeed, it was a formula so pat and unswerving as to be unworthy of comment. Credomancers—warlocks who wielded the power of faith—were represented by the series’ titular hero as unfailingly decent, noble, patriotic, and wise. The other kinds of magical practitioners were cast, by contrast, in predictably repetitive shades of unflattering light. Animancers—witches or warlocks who drew power from the vital spirits of nature—always had a mental capacity on par with a brick. A very small brick. When they were the villains, it was usually because they couldn’t even begin to comprehend the terrible forces they were attempting to control. And it was, of course, Dreadnought Stanton’s duty to enlighten them.

  Sangrimancers—blood sorcerers—made much better villains. They weren’t stupid, rather they were utterly depraved, usually in some wonderfully lurid fashion. But no matter who the villain was, the Great Credomancer, Dreadnought Stanton, Sophos of the Stanton Institute, always won the day with good manners, clean morals, and American ethics.

  “It was blooming spring, and young farmboy Dick Smith stood at the edge of a freshly plowed field, dreaming of the bountiful harvest that would reward his diligent efforts.” Jenny stopped, unable to even get through the first sentence of the first chapter without rolling her eyes. “For pity’s sake, why are the heroes in these things always named ‘Dick’? I swear, I’ve read a hundred of these things and it’s nothing but Dicks as far as the eye can see—”

  “Just get on with it,” Will interrupted, reddening. Jesus, this was going to be a long book. “And keep your thoughts to yourself on the plowing part, if you please.”

  Lips twitching mischievously, Jenny continued, in a very serious tone:

  “But little did he know the terrible fate that was about to descend upon him,
the result of a dire family curse laid upon his ancestors,” she read. “Young Dick’s shining eyes were filled only with dreams of prosperity, of his crops that would laden the tables of American citizens from sea to shining sea, providing bountiful sustenance to support the great efforts of a nation on the march.” She peered at the sentence more closely. “Is ‘laden’ really a verb?”

  “Sure, if Dreadnought Stanton says it is,” Will lifted an eyebrow. “I can’t believe you’re even questioning it.”

  In this fashion they proceeded to fill their Sunday with the tale of a standard-issue farmboy, who grew up in a standard-issue town in some standard-issue state, who was called upon to weather unimagined tragedy so that ultimately he might be delivered from it and learn a valuable lesson. The action proceeded swiftly. By the third chapter, it was revealed that young Dick had inherited a terrible family curse. One of the farmboy’s fool ancestors had apparently annoyed a depraved warlock (a sangrimancer, just as Jenny had predicted) causing said depraved warlock to lay a curse on their lineage for as long as the gravid Earth should twirl ‘neath the sun’s beneficent splendor.

  “Now that’s a nice piece of writing right there,” Jenny had commented dryly, tapping the line with her index finger. “Makes it sound like the Earth’s about to have puppies.”

  The story really picked up on the first full moon after the poor sap’s eighteenth birthday, when the curse kicked in. Suddenly, and without warning, poor Dick Smith found himself bodily possessed by the revenant spirit of this vengeful old malefactor. And that’s when Jenny’s dramatic talents started to shine, as she read the lines of the evil warlock with malicious relish:

  “Do you not see, you sad mortal worm, that your body belongs to me, and you are powerless to stop me from using it to wreak whatever dark magical havoc my unquiet mind can conceive?” Jenny read the warlock’s words in a low, sneering voice, and if she’d had a moustache, she would have twirled it. The warlock proceeded to make the poor farmboy do all sorts of horrible things, culminating in a particularly thrilling scene where he set fire to a barn and his spunky girlfriend—who was named Tessie—had to risk her life rescuing all the little baby lambs from the ravenous flames.

  “Whew!” Jenny said, sitting back in her chair and fanning herself once Tessie and all the little baby lambs had escaped from the threat of being barbecued. But she did not rest long. “I wonder when Dreadnought Stanton is going to finally show up! We’re almost to the end!”

  “He’s a busy man,” said Will, sketching a careful line. “Give him time.”

  And indeed, Dreadnought Stanton arrived only in the nick of time, having arrived in the farmboy’s standard-issue state for a bit of rest and fresh country air. Poor Dreadnought Stanton, Will smirked. Goes out for some quiet relaxation in America’s heartland—maybe do a little fishing—and all he gets are cursed farmboys setting barnfires and attempting to murder baby lambs.

  At least it didn’t take long for the Sophos of the Stanton Institute to put things to right. As anticipated, Dreadnought Stanton quickly dispatched the evil spirit with a magical light show and a swirl of commanding Latin.

  Concluding this passage, Jenny wrinkled her nose.

  “I’d forgotten how weak the ending of this one was.” She frowned. “Jeez, you’d think it would take more than three paragraphs to send that filthy fiend packing. Usually they put up more of a fight.”

  “They’ll probably make it better in the Edison movie,” Will suggested. “I hear the special effects are going to be top-notch.”

  “Maybe,” Jenny said, but she sounded unconvinced. She quickly ran through the last few pages, which described how the farmboy and Tessie had thanked Dreadnought Stanton (who was probably more interested in getting on with his damn fishing, Will imagined), declared their undying love for each other, and then hugged some baby lambs.

  “And they lived happily ever after,” Jenny concluded as she closed the book. Her voice was husky from extended reading. Will glanced at his watch, then looked at it again in disbelief—it was almost seven! They’d been at it for twelve hours straight.

  “I can tell you one thing, all that talk of baby lambs has made me hungry,” Jenny said. Will’s stomach was growling too—they’d sustained themselves on nothing but melodrama and coffee all day. Jenny slapped the book down on the kitchen table and jumped to her feet. “That’s enough for today, William. Let’s go get some food!”

  “I’m not supposed to leave the apartment building without Grig,” Will said. “I promised.”

  Jenny made a face. “What do you mean, you promised?”

  Will pressed his lips together. He didn’t want to tell Jenny about the contract he’d signed in blood. Not yet, anyway. He was pretty darn sure he wouldn’t want to tell her tomorrow. Or ever, in fact.

  “They would just prefer that I not,” he evaded. “You know Mrs. Kosanovic is always watching us. Mr. Tesla likes to have control over his apprentices.”

  “He doesn’t own you,” Jenny said. “Honestly, William, you have to start thinking more like a genius and less like an indentured servant. Tesla doesn’t bring together bright young minds like yours for his health. He does it because he stands to profit by it. He is not your friend. He’s not your protector. He wants work and thought out of you, and he wants to profit from it. There’s a big difference between accommodating him to achieve your ends and putting your neck under his foot.”

  Will was reminded of the young labor organizer he’d grown accustomed to seeing outside the Compound. Whenever the street-corner radical managed to gather a small crowd (which wasn’t often) his speeches usually went along in a similar vein. It seemed dangerous to Will to get into the habit of thinking in such a way, even if it was just Jenny encouraging him to do so.

  “If I’m going to break another rule,” said Will loftily, “it’s going to be for a better reason than sneaking out to get food.”

  “But this isn’t just food.” Jenny assumed a seductive, cajoling tone. “It’s chop suey. When I was out walking yesterday, I came across a place that’s open all night. Their egg rolls are as good as anything I ever ate in San Francisco, and you know that’s saying something.”

  After a whole week of vegetarian meals in which unsalted mashed potatoes had featured prominently, the very thought of savory meat and rich oily fried noodles made Will’s stomach rumble.

  “Come on,” Jenny said, going to the hall closet and taking out her new fur coat. “We’ll sneak out the back. No one will know we’re gone.”

  Tiptoeing down the rear stairs, they crept along the side alley and out to Winslow Street. The night was bitingly cold, and a few flakes of snow drifted down through the glow of the moonlight towers. Jenny, holding the warm fur close around herself, led the way with brisk little steps, heels clicking on the frozen pavement.

  The restaurant wasn’t far, just a bit of the way up Piquette. It seemed to cater specifically to the many late-shift factory workers in the area, and when they arrived it was crammed with an off-hour dinner rush. It was brightly lit and decorated with colorful folding screens and gilt carved brackets; large decorative knots of silk hung on the walls.

  Will and Jenny were given a table in the back near the kitchen, and before long Will was ravenously devouring crispy egg rolls, greasy pork and vegetables over fried noodles, and thick, salty hot-and-sour soup. With each bite, Will felt strength returning that he hadn’t even known he lacked.

  “I just don’t understand how Mr. Tesla thinks that men can work without meat,” Jenny mused, reaching for another egg roll. “My dad used to say that two pounds of good beef and two pints of good beer would get better work out of any man than the fanciest French meal at Delmonico’s.”

  The mention of Mr. Hansen—who believed Jenny was even now on the way home to California, and who was due for another sad disappointment—made Will sigh.

  “You know, I really like your dad,” he ventured. “I wish things didn’t have to be the way they are.”

  Jenn
y played with her napkin. “You let me worry about my dad.”

  “You seem to like to have a corner on the worrying market,” Will retorted. “Honestly, I’m getting kind of tired of it.”

  “Really?” she said, lifting an eyebrow. “In my experience, most people like to not have to worry about things.”

  “They like to not worry about things that don’t matter,” Will said. “But this matters, Jenny.”

  “There are a lot of things in life that matter,” Jenny snapped. “But they don’t all matter equally. Sometimes you have to put one before another.”

  “You, for example, put your sister before your father.” In response to the flash of annoyance that passed over Jenny’s face, he said: “You made me promise that I wouldn’t ask, not that I wouldn’t deduce.” He paused, sipping his tea. “Whatever your plans are, they’re clearly for Claire’s benefit—and your father doesn’t approve. You’ve put Claire before your father. QED.”

  “Well, just who else is going to?” she said through clenched teeth. “My father has everything he needs to look out for himself. Claire doesn’t.”

  “She’s got an inheritance, just like you do—”

  “Do you think for one moment that anyone will ever let her use it the way she wants?” Jenny cut him off sharply. “My sister is as intelligent and conscious as you or I, William. But because of her ... infirmity ... she is not allowed to make decisions for herself, and never will be. They’ll keep her in a prison and treat her like a moron, they’ll cut her apart and take away even the dream of a normal life ... unless I help her.”

  “Help her how?” Will said quickly. But Jenny was not to be that easily caught. She just leaned back in her chair, crossed her arms, and glared.

  Will suddenly found himself thinking about the book they’d spent all day reading. He grinned wanly, taking the last eggroll from the grease-streaked plate.

  “You know something?” he said, biting into it. “You’re Dreadnought Stanton.”