by R. L. King
“Well, I’m glad to hear it. I stopped by your shop a couple of times over the past few months, but since you never answer your phone and didn’t leave a note, I’d no idea when you’d return.”
“How have you been, Alastair?”
Stone shrugged. “Got myself into something I’d rather not have, but I suppose it will be over soon. And it’s possible it could be…interesting.”
Kolinsky’s eyebrows crept upward. “Oh?”
For someone who’d spent as much time with the black mage as Stone had, it wasn’t hard to recognize the initial signs that Kolinsky was curious and trying hard not to show it. Unlike most people—even mages—his moods couldn’t be accurately gauged by a quick peek at his aura, since he was a master at concealing it, even more so than Stone himself. But sometimes when something tweaked his boundless need to know everything, his eyebrows developed minds of their own. “Yes. I’m consulting on one of those paranormal-hunting television shows.”
Kolinsky’s eyebrows returned to their resting state, and he frowned slightly. “Indeed. I’d hardly think you’d deign to involve yourself in such a…common pursuit.”
“Well, there were…circumstances a bit beyond my control, in this case. I didn’t want to do it, but there’s a substantial donation to the University involved, and…” he spread his hands, as if to say what can you do?
“Consulting in what way?” Kolinsky took a sip of his wine and sampled the fettuccine. It was clear whatever interest he’d shown before had all but evaporated, and he was simply being courteous by not immediately dropping the subject.
“We’ll be visiting a ghost town up in the Gold Country. They’re trying to revitalize it as some sort of boutique tourist destination, and the owner of what’s to be the local bed and breakfast wants to set his nephew and his wife up as the proprietors. It’s one of the few remaining original structures in the town, and apparently it has a reputation of being haunted.”
“So of course they want to emphasize that reputation, to attract tourists.” Kolinsky shook his head. “It disturbs me, sometimes, how ardently mundanes insist on pursuing the supernatural. I wonder what they might do if they actually found it, rather than dabbling with fakes and charlatans.”
Stone shrugged. “The way I see it, it should be an interesting holiday away. Of course, this time of year I’m not likely to be doing much more than hanging around my room catching up on my reading. Besides, they sent over a packet—apparently, it’s not just the building that’s rumored to be haunted. The whole town is supposed to be cursed.”
Kolinsky’s fork hesitated for a fraction of a second between his plate and his mouth. “Indeed. Tell me—what is the name of this supposedly cursed town?”
“Brunderville. Why? Do you know something about it?”
He contemplated as he finished chewing and swallowing. “The name sounds familiar, but I am not placing it at the moment. So you say you’re actually accompanying them to this ghost town? Not merely consulting with them on the occult aspects?”
“That’s the plan. It was originally supposed to be one of my colleagues’ project, but…well…I sort of got shanghaied into the cause.”
“When do you leave?”
“Shortly after the holiday break begins—mid-December. Why?” He grinned. “Want to come along?”
“Hardly. Just…idle curiosity.” He picked up his glass and swirled it. “This is an excellent vintage, is it not?”
Stone recognized Kolinsky’s none-too-subtle attempt to change the subject, and didn’t resist. “It’s all right. So come on—you must be willing to tell me something about your trip.”
Stone thought nothing more of the conversation with Kolinsky until the black mage sent one of his old-style engraved cards to the department office two days later. Laura, the admin aide, appeared in his office doorway with it that morning, looking puzzled. “You have some…unusual friends,” she said.
“That’s quite true,” Stone admitted. “What is it this time?”
“A young man in a suit arrived and left this with me,” she said, offering a cream-colored envelope with Dr. Alastair Stone written on it in a bold, formal hand. A wax seal held the envelope closed.
Of course. Kolinsky—it had to be. He was the only one of Stone’s acquaintances for whom “do I have to send you an engraved invitation?” wasn’t merely a figure of speech. “Thanks, Laura.”
She lingered in the doorway, looking uncertain.
“Is there something else?”
“Well—he’s still there. He’s waiting for your answer.”
Curiouser and curiouser. “Er—all right. Give me a moment, and I’ll bring it out.”
He waited until she’d left, looking a little disappointed that he hadn’t offered any further information about the envelope or its sender, then magically closed his door and broke the envelope’s seal.
Inside was a single matching card with a stylized K embossed on the top. Beneath that, in the same hand that had addressed the envelope, were the words:
Please join me for lunch today, if it is convenient.
I have made reservations at Pazole’s at noon.
Please send your response with my messenger.
I look forward to seeing you.
SK
This was strange indeed. Usually Kolinsky sent his lunch invitations to Stone’s home, through normal mail, a few days in advance. This was the first time in quite a while that he’d sent one for the same day; in fact, the last time he’d desired an urgent meeting, he’d broken his own stricture about using the telephone. So whatever this was about, it was important but not life-or-death imperative.
He found a pen and wrote across the bottom of the card: I’ll be there. See you at noon. Then he put the card back in the envelope and used a tiny bit of magic to melt the broken wax. He didn’t have a seal to finish the job, but he didn’t think Kolinsky would hold that against him.
As Laura had indicated, a tall, pale young man in a black suit stood attentively in the department office reception area, looking out the window. He looked like a junior-level mortician, but at least his suit appeared to have been made sometime in the current century.
“Here we are,” Stone announced. “All ready to go.”
The young man turned, made a polite bow, and took the envelope. “Thank you, sir. I’ll deliver this right away.” He nodded to Laura and quickly made his exit.
“That was…weird,” Laura said.
“You don’t know the half of it,” Stone assured her.
He wondered if Kolinsky was actually going to pay for lunch this time.
The black mage was already waiting when Stone arrived five minutes late and the hostess showed him to the small, private table. “Sorry,” he said, dropping into his chair. “Student with a last-minute question before I could get away.”
Pazole’s was an excellent little Italian restaurant near the Sunnyvale edge of Mountain View, which meant it wasn’t overrun with the downtown Palo Alto and Stanford crowd at midday. Stone took a moment to peruse the menu.
“I recommend the abalone with truffle risotto,” Kolinsky said. “I’m told by reliable sources that it is excellent today.”
“Good enough, then.” They placed their orders, and Stone settled back and regarded Kolinsky. “So—why the urgent invitation? I don’t think you’ve ever invited me to lunch for the same day before. Has something come up?”
“I was doing a bit of research on your upcoming endeavor.”
Stone blinked. “Really? I thought you regarded it as a colossal waste of time.”
“Something about the town’s name, along with your mention of a curse, triggered something in my mind. I couldn’t place where I’d heard of it, so I investigated further.”
“All right…” Stone said, ti
lting his head. “Are you going to tell me what you found out? Or will I have to agree to redo your wards again first? I’d imagine they’re fraying a bit around the edges since you’ve been gone so long.”
“I will tell you what I’ve discovered.” Kolinsky paused to taste the wine the waiter offered, then nodded and indicated for him to pour for him and Stone. “But you’ve done an excellent job on the wards, and they’re still quite formidable. In any case, that is not the exchange I would require.”
“What is it, then?”
“I will get to that.” As usual, Kolinsky appeared unmoved by Stone’s growing curiosity. “But first, I will give you some advice, free of charge. Your response to it might change the remainder of our conversation.”
This was getting odder by the minute. “What’s that?”
“I suggest that you remove yourself from your involvement with this television show.”
Stone stared at him. That certainly wasn’t what he’d expected to hear. Stefan Kolinsky was one of the few people he’d met—mage or not—who possessed a level of curiosity about the supernatural unknown that equaled or surpassed his own. If there was a magical puzzle to solve or a bit of occult lore to ferret out, Kolinsky’s tenacity generally made spawning salmon look like slackers by comparison. In fact, that mutual insatiable curiosity was pretty much the basis for their relationship. “Wait—you’re suggesting I back out?”
“I am suggesting,” Kolinsky said, “that while the town of Brunderville could potentially be a highly fascinating topic of study with proper preparation, your involvement with a project created, directed, and arranged by mundanes, without an appropriate level of advance research, could prove…dangerous.”
“Dangerous in what way?”
Kolinsky took another sip of wine. “Ah, but that moves us into different territory. My advice is offered without charge. The details will require something more.”
There was no point in getting frustrated with Kolinsky’s way of doing business. Stone had known him for several years, and it wasn’t as if he’d ever shown any signs of changing. He let out a long sigh. “Fine. But regardless of what you’ve managed to dig up, I can’t get out of the project. I’ve signed a contract. And in any case, one of my colleagues will be participating as well. We’re hardly members of each other’s fan clubs, but if there’s something nasty up there, I can’t very well throw her to the wolves, can I?”
Kolinsky pondered that as he savored a bite of abalone. “I hadn’t expected you to follow my advice, in all honesty.”
“I’d be surprised if you were. So you’re telling me this place actually is cursed? The way they pitched it to me, it’s a little ghost town out in the middle of nowhere. Most of the buildings are falling down, and nobody’s bothered with it since sometime around World War II. You’ve got me intrigued now, so tell me what you want in exchange and let’s get on with it, shall we?”
“As you wish.” Kolinsky’s expression was unreadable, but his eyes glittered with curiosity. It wasn’t clear if he was pleased, exactly, that Stone had chosen to ignore his advice. He might have offered it in good faith, and accepted the results with grace if Stone had decided to opt out of the filming. Or he might have known all along that Stone would no sooner back away from an interesting supernatural mystery than he’d don a cowboy outfit and go cruising for one-night stands at the local country-western bar. “My request is simple: if you do choose to see this endeavor through and accompany this group to Brunderville, I would like…your professional assessment of the situation, in the form of a detailed report on any paranormal anomalies you might discover.”
Stone tilted his head. “That’s it? You realize I probably won’t discover a bloody thing. I doubt the bed and breakfast is truly haunted, and what little I’ve read about the town doesn’t indicate anything other than the typical boom-and-bust cycle of a ghost town. First mining, then logging. Easily explaining why it died both times.”
“That is all I ask. If you find nothing, you find nothing. But if you agree to my request, I will tell you what I have found in my research, which—as you might expect—is likely to be both a bit more detailed and a bit more in line with your interests than whatever the production company has provided you.”
“Fine, then,” Stone said immediately. “Poking around a bit and writing up some notes will give me something to do with my free time. You’ve got a deal. So what do you know about this Brunderville?”
“It is indeed, apparently, cursed,” Kolinsky said. “And the most interesting aspect of my research is that I have been unable to discover the nature of the curse, or who was responsible for it.”
“How so? Curses are rare as it is, and when you find them at all, they’re usually on a person, an item, or a single structure. I’ve never heard of one on a whole town before.”
“I have, but as you mention, they are rare.”
“So you know it exists, but you don’t know anything about it? That doesn’t make sense.”
“All I have been able to determine so far is that it is likely related to the man for whom the town was named: Jacob Brunder. He was a wealthy merchant from Seattle. When it became obvious that the Gold Rush could prove lucrative, he set off to the area and began selling various wares—at wildly inflated prices, of course—to the local miners.”
Stone nodded. The information Duncan’s people had sent him had mentioned Brunder—it was the remains of his impressive mansion that formed the basis of the bed and breakfast the show would be focusing on. “So this Brunder is the one haunting the house? And you’re thinking he might have put a curse on the town? Why? Was he one of us?”
“All of that is unknown. I am not even sure whether Mr. Brunder was the curse’s caster, or its target—or even if he was involved at all. I have spent significant effort searching, but have thus far been unable to find any further information on Mr. Brunder’s time in California. There are rumors—again oddly uncorroborated by anyone—that in both the middle 1850s and the middle 1930s, the majority of people in the town died over the course of an alarmingly short time.”
“Wait,” Stone said, leaning forward. “That’s not possible. That many people can’t have died that quickly without anyone keeping records. There must have been doctors—churches—someone.”
“Indeed. And now you see why this is so intriguing,” Kolinsky said. “Deaths of this magnitude, whether they be due to violence, disease, or other causes, should not simply slip from history’s memory, especially not as relatively recently as less than a hundred years ago. But yet they have.”
Stone paused to consider that. None of the information Duncan had provided had mentioned anything about these mass deaths. The assumption was that the town had simply died after the gold strike fizzled out, been reborn during the Depression when the logging industry provided the promise of work, and died again when World War II had drafted the majority of young able-bodied men. “Do you have any speculation about what might have happened?”
Kolinsky shrugged. “A powerful curse could indeed explain it. But again the question is: who laid the curse in the first place, and why?” He bent to his side and pulled a folded paper from his briefcase, which rested next to him on the floor. He pushed his plate aside and unfolded it. “This could contribute to the explanation of how the curse could have been so potent, of course.”
Stone recognized the paper instantly: it was a smaller version of the ley-line maps he had back home in his library. Crisscrossed lines in different colors covered an outline of the western United States. Kolinsky had placed a small adhesive note on the map, with an arrow pointing at a spot a hundred and fifty or so miles to the northeast. One of the ley lines ran directly through the spot. No others crossed within twenty miles of the area. “So Brunderville’s on a ley line.”
“Yes.”
Stone glanced at the map again, but he was
no longer seeing it as his mind spun possibilities. “So…if there is a curse on the town, it’s possible the ley line could have sustained it—even amplified it—past the time when it normally would have naturally lost potency and waned. Which could explain why it affected two different groups of people nearly eighty years apart.”
Kolinsky inclined his head. “Even more possible if whoever was responsible for the curse had knowledge of ley line configurations.”
“Good point,” Stone said, half to himself. Practitioners familiar with ley lines and how they functioned could design their spells to work in conjunction with them, effectively powering them indefinitely. It was the way the wards on his house back home in England had been sustained for nearly three hundred years without ever needing to be refreshed.
He looked up. “So do you think this curse only activates when there are enough people in the area, or is it time-based? If it only triggers once every—” he did a bit of mental math “—eighty years, give or take, then it’s due to show up again. And if it’s based on population, then this new influx of tourist trade could likely be problematic as well. Either way, if you’re right, they’re buggered.”
Kolinsky shrugged. “I do not know. They are both reasonable hypotheses. Perhaps when you are on the scene, you might discover more. And if the curse is indeed dependent upon a certain critical mass of people, it’s possible that you could study the beginnings of it before it becomes overly dangerous.”
“If it becomes dangerous,” Stone pointed out. “This is all still conjecture. It might be that the reason you haven’t discovered anything about any of this is that there isn’t anything to discover.”
