Horus and the Curse of Everlasting Regret

by Hannah Voskuil

  “Perch!” Tunie cried. She leaped to her feet. The stack of cards scattered and the Moore fountain pen dropped to the floor. Tunie hurried to the window, stepping on the pen, which broke with a crack. She yanked on the sash. It was stuck. Tunie pulled with all her might until it opened a mere three inches. Perch flew in with a shriek. The tomcat yowled on the windowsill and stretched a paw into the room as far as it could.

  “What is the meaning of this?!” Miss Eleanor hissed in the doorway. Her pointy, powdered features were pinched with displeasure. “All the customers downstairs can hear you screeching and thumping!”

  “There’s…,” Tunie improvised hurriedly, “a bat! In here!”

  “What?” Miss Eleanor’s eyes widened as she turned around. Tunie motioned for Perch to come out and show himself.

  Miss Eleanor put her hands on her hips. “I don’t see any— Eeeeek!”

  Perch flew down and flapped around Miss Eleanor’s head a few times before disappearing behind a bookcase. She ducked and flailed her arms in an unladylike fashion.

  Tunie said, “I can get him out, ma’am.”

  “Well, be quick about it!” Miss Eleanor swiftly made her way to the door. “And for goodness’ sake, don’t tell the customers!”

  She fled down the stairs.

  Tunie tidied up her work space. At least she hadn’t stepped on the cards, though the broken pen would surely leak now.

  She opened the small drawstring bag she carried.

  “Hop in, Perch,” she said. Perch landed on the desk but made no move to get in the pouch.

  “I know you don’t like it, but Miss Eleanor’s upset! I need to tell her you’re gone, or we won’t get a plugged nickel for this work. I’ll open the bag the moment we’re outside, honest.”

  Perch took a few mincing steps toward Tunie and then reluctantly stepped into the bag. He peered grumpily up at Tunie from inside.

  “You are the very finest bat,” Tunie whispered to him warmly. She glanced around, went to the window, and shut it. Then she opened the door and called quietly to Miss Eleanor.

  Miss Eleanor appeared at the foot of the stairs. “Well?”

  “It’s…gone. I got it with a book and dropped it out the window.”

  A look of distaste crossed Miss Eleanor’s face, and she ascended the stairs and pushed past Tunie back into the room. She peered at the cards.

  “Good enough, I suppose,” she said of the elegant flourishes, the gorgeous lettering. Then she spied the pen and lifted it up to inspect it. A large crack ran down the side. “How on earth did you do that?”

  “I stepped on it when the bat startled me,” Tunie replied. Bat, cat. It didn’t matter, really.

  “Well, that will come out of your pay.” Miss Eleanor pulled out her change purse and counted out two fewer coins than usual into Tunie’s hand. “I left your bag of day-olds on the counter by the door. You may pick it up on your way out.”

  Tunie hid her dismay at the reduced pay and thanked Miss Eleanor. She hurried down the stairs, snatching her bag of day-olds as she left.

  Perch began squeaking the moment Tunie stepped outside, and continued even after Tunie released him from her bag.

  “I know, I know,” Tunie said. “The pen wasn’t my fault. I can’t argue with her, though, Perch. You can’t eat arguments, even winning ones. Come on—the apothecary closes in ten minutes!”

  Tunie took a shortcut through an alley. There was only one other neighborhood in all of Harbortown that Tunie knew this well—Northie, short for the Northeast End. Tunie had lived there in an apartment with her mom and dad for the first seven years of her life. There had been loads of children on their floor; the neighbors would leave their doors open, and the kids played together freely in the hallways. She could still close her eyes and navigate the Northie streets, though she hadn’t been back in two years. Memories of her mom there made it too sad to return.

  Tunie arrived, breathless, in front of Dringdon’s Drugs. Through the window, she saw the spectacled pharmacist’s assistant and felt a little lift. He was the nice one. The bell rang, announcing Tunie’s entrance.

  “I have…” Tunie counted the pennies in her hand, then gave them all to the pharmacist’s assistant. “That should be enough for a few days’ worth of aspirin.”

  “They are two for one cent. It’s enough for six pills only,” the assistant said regretfully. He dropped them into a little waxed paper envelope.

  “Please,” Tunie begged. “He’s in bad shape. He has a sore throat and a fever. He really needs these to sleep.”

  The assistant sighed. He had a lined countenance and a gentle voice. “Everyone needs medicine, my dear. I can’t just give it away, as much as I’d like to; the shop would close in a single day if I did!” Seeing Tunie’s face, he softened. He glanced around and slid an extra pill into the envelope. “Oh, I’ll say I dropped it,” he said. “But I can’t keep this up.”

  Tunie thanked him repeatedly, and even offered him something from the bag of day-olds, but he told her to keep them.

  “Your dad will need to keep his strength up,” he said. “If he has diphtheria, as I suspect, it is serious business. You need to be vaccinated so you don’t contract it yourself. Aspirin might lessen his discomfort, but it won’t cure him. If he isn’t treated with a toxoid soon, he could develop severe complications like…”

  Tears filled Tunie’s eyes as the pharmacist stopped midsentence. A look of regret crossed his face.

  “Well. You just take care of him as well as you can,” he said.

  “I’m trying,” Tunie whispered.

  “More, more!” shouted Randall, gripping Peter’s arms tightly behind his back. Pain sparked around Peter’s shoulder sockets, and his ribs pressed uncomfortably against the ceramic sink. Larry, who was backed up against the wooden door, held Peter’s chin in a pincer grip. The three of them hardly fit in the small lavatory. There was a disturbing trace odor of dog bombs in the close space.

  Peter’s eyes watered and he choked and gagged, twisting his jaw out of Larry’s grip. Larry had been brushing Peter’s teeth forcibly, using his father’s bayberry shaving cream. The bitter flavor and chemical odor had brought Peter nearly to vomiting.

  “How’s it taste, smarty-pants?” Larry mocked, waggling his furry blond eyebrows. He waved the toothbrush back and forth before Peter’s face. “Maybe just one more time. Dental hygiene is important. Open wide!”

  Peter was too busy spitting out soap into the basin to respond. The corner of his mouth was bleeding from Larry’s rough handling of the toothbrush. Larry startled when he caught sight of the blood, and his hand holding the toothbrush lowered.

  A knock on the bathroom door made the twins jump. Randall shoved Peter away. Larry quickly fumbled the toothbrush and tube of shaving cream back into the medicine cabinet.

  Peter’s father called through the door. “Peter, are you in there? I have a letter for you, and Miss Cook said you never had your afternoon tea.”

  Peter’s stepmother had gone to boarding school in England for a few years, and though she’d returned to the United States over a decade ago, she still insisted on afternoon tea.

  Peter pushed past the twins and opened the door. His father stood there, slim and spectacled. He was holding a tray, upon which rested milk tea and biscuits, the newspaper, and a letter. He frowned, seeing the blood on Peter’s lip as Peter tried to wipe it away.

  “What’s going on?” his father asked.

  Once, after the twins had filled his underwear with prickly burrs, Peter had told on them. As a result, they’d all three been punished—no dessert for a week—and the twins had picked on him even more afterward.

  “Nothing,” Peter said. “I’m really hungry. Thank you!”

  He grabbed the tray and ran past his father. Upstairs, he triple-locked the door. Peter’s room was half bedroom, half workshop. On his desk, he had organized boxes of nuts and bolts, all kinds of metal pieces he’d scavenged, and various pliers and tools. On
a shelf above them were machines in progress. On the cork wall, he’d pinned up articles from Modern Mechanics and sketches of projects he had in mind.

  Peter sat down on the rug beside a small windup robot—his favorite creation of all—whom he’d named, suitably, WindUp.

  He’d begun constructing WindUp a couple of weeks after his mother’s funeral. Unable to sleep, he’d taken out his screwdriver and started angrily dismantling a music box his mother had sent from Switzerland, where she’d supposedly gone to recover. With brimming eyes, Peter unscrewed every tiny screw, laid bare the pieces—the neat little drum and comb, the flywheel, the spring and gears. Then he started on a clock, and next a radio. For days, his entire room was littered with parts, every surface twinkling with wires and dials and pins.

  Eventually, Peter began reassembling some of the intricate cogs and circuits into something new—WindUp. The painstaking soldering and connecting gave him something to focus on besides how he was feeling. Still, the robot saw more of Peter’s tears than anyone living. Peter had grown to think of WindUp as a kind of friend.

  He set the tea tray on the floor beside them, first reaching for the letter with his name on it. The return address on the envelope was for Camp Contraption. Peter had written them a pleading letter, enclosing a school report card that showed his grades, and asking if they had scholarships. He tore the envelope open. Inside, there was just an advertisement, a small slip of paper with a drawing of a tent and a camper happily building some kind of scaffolding. Beneath it was printed, “There’s still time! Spaces are available on a first-come, first-served basis. Full payment must be received by June 15. Don’t miss out on a summer of creative fun at CAMP CONTRAPTION!”

  “We have less than two weeks to come up with that money, WindUp,” Peter said, holding a kerchief to his injured lip. He slumped back against the foot of his bed.

  “We have got to think of something.”

  Then his eye fell on the copy of the Harbortown Gazette his father had inadvertently left on the tea tray. The headline drew Peter’s attention:

  SEARCH CONTINUES FOR MISSING DOROTHY JAMES

  Though the fair has packed up and moved on, Harbortown police continue to scour the city fairgrounds and surrounding areas for ten-year-old Dorothy James, daughter of shipping magnate Christopher James and Catherine James. Inundated with tips from citizens, police detective Dedrick Shade has followed several leads, but so far has had no luck locating the missing girl. The James family is offering a generous $1,000 reward for information leading to Dorothy’s safe return. The reward has yet to be claimed.

  Dorothy went missing on May 14 at the city fair’s Mummies of Ancient Egypt exhibit, on loan from the Harbortown Natural History Museum. Her father was buying popcorn at the booth across from the exhibit. He says his daughter entered the tent, but he did not see her exit. When he followed her inside, she was nowhere to be found.

  Dorothy James was last seen wearing a light blue satin party dress and matching blue ribbon headband. She has dark curly hair, brown eyes, and a heart-shaped birthmark on her left forearm. If you have any information on Dorothy’s whereabouts, please contact Detective Dedrick Shade at the Harbortown Police Station on Oak Street.

  “This is it, WindUp,” said Peter. “I know a way into that museum! I found it on a field trip last month.”

  He shivered a little, just remembering it. He’d stopped for too long at the mummy exhibit and gotten separated from his school group. Trying to find them, he ended up in a narrow passageway along the side of the building. Peter noticed a street-level window with an open latch, when all the others were locked. This was exactly the kind of thing that drove Peter crazy—he always closed cabinet doors left open, adjusted paintings hung crookedly. If five socks drying on a clothesline had toes pointing left and one pointing right, he’d flip the last so they all pointed the same direction. Seeing a single window unlocked, when every other in the row was locked, he closed the latch. Then he hurried down the hall but found it dead-ended. Peter turned a moment later and headed back the same way, only to spy the same window latch open once more. The back of his neck tingled as he glanced around the echoing hallway. He was alone. Peter figured the latch was faulty. He closed it one more time but felt disturbed enough not to look behind him as he left. He ran and found his classmates.

  If he was lucky, no one had fixed that window. Despite the spooky experience he’d had, he felt a curious longing to return to the museum.

  “If the police are focusing on the fairgrounds and finding nothing, I should take a look at the exhibit itself,” he said to WindUp.

  WindUp’s blank eyes stared at Peter. Peter picked up a biscuit and munched.

  “It’s a place to start, anyway,” he said.

  The steady thuds of the twins’ footfalls sounded on the stairs, followed by pounding on Peter’s bedroom door.

  Randall called in a menacing singsong, “Oh, Peetey! We have a new kind of pomade to try on your hair. It’s better than brilliantine!”

  The twins giggled.

  Peter moved WindUp closer and whispered, “Don’t worry, WindUp. I’ll get us out of here. Promise.”

  Tunie and Perch hurried down the dirt lane. The leaves rustled in the thin woods. This small stretch of forest had been preserved as part of the Harbortown Natural History Museum’s property, and the semicircle of ramshackle sheds in it housed the museum’s employees. Tunie’s father was the janitor for the museum. He and Tunie lived in a two-room cabin that listed on its beams, half sunk into the dark earth of the woods. They’d moved in two years earlier, broke after paying her mother’s medical bills. The cabin wasn’t much, but Tunie knew they were lucky to have a place to live, when lots of folks were on the streets.

  “Hello?” Tunie called quietly as she opened the door. Perch flew up to the rafter in the corner, his nook. Tunie had decorated it with a small homemade wind chime, some interesting twisty branches, and a crescent moon ornament she’d fashioned from a broken copper plate she’d found in an alley.

  Tunie had transformed the rest of the small living area into an otherworldly space; her father had indulged Tunie and her “artist’s eye,” allowing her to do what she liked. Tunie had no money for paint, so she’d made her own stains, soaking walnut husks in water, and rusty nails in vinegar, and using wild blueberries and beets to make colorful dyes. She’d painted patterns on every wood panel of the place. Using a hammer and old cans, she’d fashioned glinting tin stars and hung them on threads from the rafters. There was only one small bedroom, where her father slept, so Tunie had made a kind of screen in the living room from two damaged coatracks and a printed bedsheet strung between them. Behind it was her “room”: a clothing shelf made from two bricks and a board, and a mattress on the floor. She’d sewn a patchwork blanket from different scraps of fabric she’d come across, and on the walls she’d tied dried flowers she’d collected in the woods. Aside from Tunie’s room, the rest of the living area was big enough for only a tiny table, one chair, and a stool near the stove. Through the doorway to her father’s room, Tunie saw their elderly neighbor, Mrs. Shrubinski, carrying a jelly jar of water in her trembling hands as she approached the bed, where Tunie’s father lay.

  Tunie’s father coughed horribly, then rasped his thanks, accepting the glass.

  “How is he?” Tunie asked Mrs. Shrubinski when she tottered over.

  Mrs. Shrubinski shook her head sadly and answered in her quavery voice, “Worse, I’m afraid, though he won’t admit it.”

  Tunie opened the bag of day-old goods from Eleanor’s Elegant Sweet Shoppe.

  “Thanks for looking in on him. Here, take a roll for you and one for George. I’m sorry they’re day-olds.” George, Mrs. Shrubinski’s middle-aged son, was the night watchman at the museum. Mrs. Shrubinski accepted the rolls with a shaky nod of her head.

  “That’s a pretty headband, dear,” Mrs. Shrubinski said, touching her bony fingers to the light blue ribbon headband on Tunie’s head.

  T
unie smiled. “Thank you. Perch found it.”

  “It’s very tasteful,” Mrs. Shrubinski said approvingly.

  After seeing their white-haired neighbor out, Tunie checked in on her father. He smiled, though he looked terrible. His skin was a bluish tone, and he had dark circles under his eyes. He’d lost his appetite and was looking more and more skeletal.

  He waved a hand weakly toward the door.

  “Poor Mrs. Shrub. I ought to be the one taking care of her.” Then he joked, “Sweet old dame.” His laugh turned into a wretched coughing fit. The cough was loud and had a strange barking sound to it. He held a handkerchief to his mouth while his whole body shook.

  “Here,” Tunie said, handing her father an aspirin and a glass of water. She settled in beside him, passing him a rather tough cheese scone and taking one for herself. They chewed together quietly for a few minutes. Her father made a face.

  “We need to find a new bakery. The bread from this one always tastes stale,” he said.

  Tunie hadn’t told her father that they didn’t have enough money for groceries. Lots of banks—even New York’s big Bank of the United States—had failed in the last few years, and their own bank was calling in debts. Tunie’s father had taken out a loan to pay for her mother’s medical expenses. Since then, the bank had garnished most of her dad’s wages, leaving little for them to live on. Without her work for Miss Eleanor on the side, they’d be starving. As it was, they both could stand to gain a few pounds, and the aspirin wasn’t helping as much as it had been. What her father desperately needed was a trip to the doctor, but they didn’t have the money for it.

  “We just need a little soup to soften it,” Tunie said. “I’ll make some tomorrow.”

  The room was stuffy. She stood and opened the cracked window to let in the breeze.

  Her father smiled sadly at Tunie. “My little girl, so grown up already.”

  He started to struggle into a sitting position.