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

by Constance Barker

  The Curious Case

  of the

  Cursed Dagger

  by

  Constance Barker

  Copyright 2017 Constance Barker

  All rights reserved.

  Similarities to real people, places or events are purely coincidental.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  The Curious Case of the Cursed Dagger

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  "He who establishes a dictatorship and does not kill Brutus, or he who founds a republic and does not kill the sons of Brutus, will only reign a short time."

  Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli

  Chapter One

  I was moving slowly, more slowly than I wanted to, forcing my way through what I can only describe as a thick soup. It was, I knew, a soup of tension—viscous, vision-blurring tension. I moved slowly and unsteadily, tottering as the fog would give way. The resistance, the force it exerted to hold me back was uneven and I’d break through with a hand, only to have a foot restrained.

  Yet I kept my footing somehow, managed to stagger forward (was it forward?) but reeling with an overwhelming sense that something terrible, something tragically bad was about to happen. It wasn't a premonition... I knew it was going to happen. I knew it would happen soon.

  I just didn't know what. Whatever it was, it was bad. But I had no idea what it was, or who would feel its consequences.

  The tension grew stronger, the resisting murky atmosphere closed in around me more tightly. It clung to me like some melodramatic fog from a Hitchcock movie. Only there was no fog machine, no bucket of dry ice just off stage. This was the real deal, and as it wrapped itself around my body it began squeezing me, constricting my chest and making it hard to breathe.

  I peered through that soupy grayness, trying to see the others. I knew they were ahead of me and I could hear their muffled footsteps. When I strained I could see their shapes, moving unevenly, mummies stumbling through this horror movie swamp, just as I was.

  I forced myself closer and they came into better focus. Enid and Mason walked side by side, lumbering forward, holding hands, moving cautiously. I began to see the edges of the place we were in and it had an odd familiarity coupled with a strange sense of danger. I forced myself to hurry, to catch up with them before they disappeared again. I closed the gap, and when I came up right behind them I saw that we were winding our way down aisles defined by gigantic, shadowy rows of shelves. There were shapes on the shelves. I stared at them until I could make out that they were filled with an assortment of odd objects that part of me labored to identify.

  Somehow I knew we were hunting something, looking for a specific thing that was stored here, perhaps on one of those obscure shelves. I knew what it was, that object we sought, and thinking of it made me anxious, yet I couldn't summon the words to describe it or even define the object in any way that my conscious mind could picture it.

  Suddenly Enid stopped and Mason turned toward her. "What's the matter?" he asked. "Did you hear something?"

  "No. Nothing.” She twisted her head from side to side. “For a moment, a brief instant, I thought I saw it. When I looked straight at it, it wasn’t there. I must’ve been wrong."

  "Then we'd better get moving again," he said. “Standing still is dangerous.”

  “But it’s so hard to move,” she said.

  “It is,” I agreed and they turned to see me.

  “You caught up,” Mason said. “I was worried.”

  “I lagged behind. I had trouble moving.”

  "Yes,” Enid said. It’s this... and I'm afraid," she said. "If we get caught..."

  Mason's smile was thin and I saw a sadness in it. “That’s always possible, Enid. That never changes. Even outside of here we can be caught.”

  “We shouldn’t have...”

  He lifted her hand and kissed it with an amazing delicacy. "I'm afraid that doesn't matter now, my dear. We have to take this risk. It’s not much more risk than before and I don't see that we have any choice." He turned to glance at me, his eyebrows arching. "How about you? Are you okay, Cecelia honey?"

  "I'm fine, daddy," I said. Hearing my own words jarred. There was something that struck me as wrong about what I'd just said, but I had no idea what it was. Whatever had jarred was overshadowed by the tension. I moved closer to Mason, feeling a little safer with his comforting presence within reach.

  "We will fix this," Mason said. "Don't you worry."

  "I'm not worried," I lied. I couldn't let daddy think I couldn't be brave.

  "Well, I'm scared," Enid said. "I am frightened of what you want to do."

  "It will be over soon," Mason said, sounding sure of himself, calm and confident.

  Enid nodded. "Yes, that's true. One way or another it will be resolved. I'm just very unsure of this, I don't like the idea of using the Antikythera Mechanism to do it."

  "I don't like it either," he said. "But you know we have to. We need to undo the mistakes," Mason said hoarsely. “We’ve all made too many mistakes and the consequences... we can’t let things stay this way.”

  Enid turned and stared at Mason. She shook her head. “It’s so risky,” she said again. "And tell me this: how do you know the changes we make will be improvements? How can you be sure we won’t just make things even worse?"

  Mason shrugged. "There’s no real choice, Enid. We haven’t got any other options. Leaving things as they are is unthinkable.”

  “They won’t punish us if we stop and we might do bad things.”

  He smiled. “Enid, I can’t see how we could possibly make things worse than they've gotten already. Can you?"

  "Unless," she said.

  "Unless what?"

  "How do we know that what we are seeing is real?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Time has gotten so... malleable. Space too.” She let out a weak flutter of a laugh. “I was wondering... what if the reality we see now is the result of what we want to do?”

  “I don’t understand,” he said. “We haven’t even found it.”

  “But maybe we have already. What if we already found it and changed things, and this is the result? What if what we are doing now causes this?”

  I was worried about Enid. She sounded like she might be right on the edge of a breakdown. I could see her face trembling.

  Suddenly we heard a woman’s scream. There was no way to tell what direction it came from. It seemed to come from everywhere at once. We all looked at each other
. "That was Beatrice," Enid gasped.

  "Then our diversion didn't work," Mason said.

  “We have to find her,” Enid said, looking at me.

  There was an accusation in her eyes that burned. I swallowed hard. I didn't know what had happened; I didn’t even know for sure the screaming woman had been Beatrice, but I knew somehow that it was my fault. "I was so sure..."

  "You did what you could," Mason said. "We are all doing our best. And now, Enid, there is no way to find her. All we can do is go ahead with the plan. Now we will have to move even faster."

  “But we don’t even know which way to go!” I shouted.

  In that moment, I woke, sitting up in my bed. My body shook violently. I was sweaty and feeling incredibly vulnerable but, at the same time, an overwhelming sense of relief rushed through me. It had been a dream. A terrible, frightening, soul-wrenching dream. As much as it was disconcerting that my unconscious could dredge up such a nightmare, it was delicious to realize it was a dream, only that.

  As I regained control the shaking stopped and I smiled at myself, at the irony of being frightened by a dream with undefined horrors and being happy to find myself back in a world that included ghosts, cursed objects, and magic of all sorts on an everyday basis.

  You had to wonder why the dream seemed surreal and this one more "real"? I know that I did.

  WHEN I FINALLY WENT down the stairs to the curiosity shop I own, I found Clarence, who manages it, engaged in an odd discussion with Edgar. Edgar is the ghost in my world, the presence who made the fearfulness in my dream seem ironic. He was standing beside the old roll-top desk I inherited from Uncle Mason along with the shop, tapping his finger on its oak top. Clearly, he was considering something Clarence has said. "Transmutation is basic to the science of alchemy," he said finally. “It’s the essence of it.”

  Clarence sat in the chair with our old-fashioned account book in front of him. Given that we sell old things, taking a ‘computers are for wimps’ approach serves us well. Apparently, he'd been doing the bookkeeping, but now he was considering Edgar's assertion thoughtfully.

  Giving Edgar’s statements due consideration was another thing that I could categorize as both ironic and amusing. Not that long ago he would have dismissed a statement about alchemy as the errant nonsense he'd been taught it was. These days, after seeing some of what we'd seen, even if Clarence wasn't totally open minded about things outside of the narrow confines of mainstream science, he did tend to hedge his bets a lot more. "That's not necessarily true. It's not the essence of alchemy. I mean the concept of transformation is, but only allegorically. Many alchemists are more philosophers than scientists and view the physical stuff as nothing more than an analogy for the essential personal transformation."

  Edgar snorted. "Many alchemists, indeed. Clearly, you’ve succumbed to reading Hermes Trismegistus. That man soft pedals alchemy as badly as modern research scientists do to get grant money."

  Clarence smiled. "Mason has a ton of fascinating books. His is in there. I admit I’ve taken a peek."

  "The mere fact that some people take it that way doesn't change what it is. I'm talking about the real deal—the core goal of the alchemist.”

  ‘The idea that you could transmute elements is speculative at best.”

  “It is a science."

  "You expect me to believe that the ability to transform one thing, even a basic element like lead, into something else entirely is scientifically proven?"

  "Such as lead into gold? Exactly. I've seen it done."

  I knew Clarence didn't like accepting a personal statement like that as a valid argument. Someone seeing something wasn't proof, after all. They could be fooled. And the idea flew in the face of everything he had studied in school. On the other hand, the person he was talking to was, verifiable, a ghost... or at least what he imagined a ghost would be if there were such things, but of course, there weren't, despite the fact that he was talking to one. And the existence of ghosts was just a silly idea.

  Having your head in two worlds, the way ours were, made the situation irreconcilable. The dilemma wasn’t restricted to dreams.

  "Fine, Edgar, I'll admit that the idea is intriguing. In fact, I want to believe it's possible. Alchemy, if it exists, would be the key to controlling our environment."

  Edgar shrugged and stroked his chin. "As a start."

  "A start?"

  "We'd need to decide if, for instance, a supernatural creature, a superior being such as myself is fundamentally part of your environment..."

  "Of course you are."

  "But you don't believe in ghosts and, the narrow way you define things, I'd have to exist to be in your environment."

  "I know you are here, in my environment... I just don't totally accept the ghost hypothesis."

  "And yet..."

  "Okay, we’ve all agreed, even you, albeit reluctantly, I’d point out, that you do seem to be a ghost by every definition we can come up with."

  "I haunt, therefore I am."

  Clarence glanced at me. "But you haunt Cecilia, not me."

  That part was true. Edgar and I were joined together cosmically, meaning that he couldn't get very far away from me if he wanted to. I was pretty sure his travel down to the shop while I'd been sleeping had about exhausted his range.

  Edgar wasn't having Clarence's argument. "Oooh, now you are getting picky. That's a clear sign of a weak and nebulous argument."

  "You are the one who is nebulous," Clarence said. "Seeing as you want this to be a scientific argument, not a philosophical debate."

  "Sometimes I can be nebulous," Edgar said. "But never weak."

  The argument about what Edgar was, or wasn't, had become a continuing, unresolved bit of banter that they both enjoyed. Neither of them had any intention of claiming victory. After all, if friends resolved arguments like that, if Clarence conceded the point, they'd lose the chance to spar and they didn't want that. He enjoyed Edgar too, not to mention the prospect that he might be among the very few people in the universe who had a chance to argue about the existence of ghosts with a ghost.

  I knew the argument, as unsettling as it was, made his day.

  "In reading up on alchemy," Clarence said, "I’ve come across an awful lot things that are obviously bogus and it makes me wonder about the rest.."

  Edgar snickered. "I was reading some of the history books of Mason’s and I can safely say the same thing about your body of knowledge in that field."

  "What are you going on about?"

  Edgar faced him squarely. "The garbage presented as fact in your books. I mean, all that stuff about William McKinley and the Spanish-America War being about the incursions of Spain in the Caribbean and The Philippines. I'm talking about books that claim the war started for reasons that Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst invented. They wanted a war and got one.”

  “The winners write the history books,” I said.

  Edgar liked that. “And given the bias there, why should we expect science to be any different? Whatever occupies the mainstream poo poos anything else. Look how long it took for medical ‘science’ to begin to accept the value of ancient medicines and treatments, like acupuncture. It’s all political."

  Clarence snorted. "And I prefer to stay clear of politics, even old politics."

  Edgar laughed. "That's a good thing. A very good thing, because I'm quite sure that you couldn’t ever get elected to anything."

  Clarence pulled himself upright. He knew an insult when he heard one. "Not that I care about being electable, but why do you say that?"

  "Not to be unkind, Clarence, but you have no charisma.”

  “Another indefinable quality.”

  “No more indefinable than a particular color,” I said. “Saying someone lacks charisma means they don’t inspire. It means that who you are doesn’t resonate with people. It doesn’t mean who you are is not good.”

  Edgar tapped the desk top again. “You don't really like people, in general, all that
much, and they sense it." He paused. "Now Cecelia, on the other hand..."

  Clarence gave me a nervous glance. "She isn't interested in politics either." I gave him a reassuring nod.

  "No, but she has a certain charm, a definite political appeal about her. Her kind of smart often comes across well. For whatever reason, people tend to like and respect her. Call it a leadership quality." Edgar turned to smile at me. "Of course, if people knew her evil side...”

  “My evil side? What is that?”

  “If they knew how you had a habit of persecuting your very own ghost, if they were to know that you locked him in a tiny pen box for eons on end, they might see you differently."

  “Not if they knew my very own ghost,” I said.

  Clarence sniggered. "And I should point out that there are a fair number of folk who don't think so well of her. Consider that if you held the election and only allowed Cabal members to vote..." Clarence chuckled at his own joke.

  "That's a special case. Besides, all politicos make enemies," he said. "Hers are just more lethal and less ethical than some."

  "It's good to see you up," Clarence said to me. "Feeling better?"

  I'd taken a nap because I'd been feeling out of sorts. Not ill, but tired and a little punchy. The dreams I’d been having meant that sleeping wasn’t necessarily as restful as it should be, and the dream I’d just woken from wasn’t the first of that sort—the kind where things were like they really are, but with sinister and sad differences. "I’m better, I think. I just wish I could stop having such strange dreams." Then I looked from Clarence to Edgar. "Of course, I have a strange life."

  “Dreams are the window into the soul, even more than eyes,” Edgar said solemnly. “Maybe your soul is sick.”

  Clarence nodded. "We don’t have any band-aids for souls, but maybe the play will cheer you up."

  "The play? What play?"

  "The big presentation of the Destiny Point High Summer Theater," Edgar said. “The play we planned to go to about a week ago.”

  I’d totally spaced out. “What play are they putting on?”

  "The Death of Julius Caesar," Clarence said.