Curses, Inc. And Other Stories

by Vivian Vande Velde

  "Oh yes." The woman dropped the acorn into his hand. "But that's hardly a fitting reward for saving my life. May I offer you some other spell in addition?"

  Kedric shook his head, feeling very foolish now that he actually held the acorn in his hand.

  "Well, but I am grateful," the old woman said. "Good-bye and good luck," and with that she stood and nodded and began walking in the same direction she'd been running, following the river that flowed through the woods, down the hill, and eventually led—so Kedric had heard—to the sea.

  Kedric was glad he'd taken the acorn, because the woman was obviously poor and had just as obviously wanted to reward him for saving her from the bear. Whether the acorn allowed him to understand the speech of animals, it had already accomplished something.

  Kedric turned to continue on his way, and a bird swooped in front of him to land on a tree by the side of the river.

  "My tree," the bird chirped. "My tree, my tree, my tree."

  Kedric almost ran after the old woman. But she knew the acorn worked. He was the one who hadn't believed.

  "Don't worry, little friend," Kedric assured the bird. "I won't try to take over your tree."

  "My tree," the bird called back to him. "My tree."

  Kedric closed his eyes to listen better and heard other birds calling out, "My tree," or, sometimes, "My branch," or, once in a great while, "Bug!"

  So, Kedric thought, birds don't have much to say. But he was sure his pets would.

  As he hurried home, there was talk all around him. But none of it was interesting. The butterflies constantly murmured to themselves, "Sip, sip, I'm sipping nectar, now I'm fluttering, flutter, flutter, now I'm sipping, sip, sip, now I'm fluttering." And the squirrels were too busy playing to pay attention to him. They chirped, "Wheee!" as they jumped from branch to branch. And, of course, the birds continued to call, "My branch." Kedric stopped only once, when a chipmunk darted across his path, chattering, "Winter's coming—gotta store."

  "Winter's seven months away," Kedric called after the chipmunk.

  But the chipmunk only paused for a moment. Its cheeks full of seeds so that its voice was garbled, it still clearly insisted, "Winter's coming," and dashed off.

  As Kedric hurried up the path to his house, the dog must have heard him. "My house," the dog barked.

  "Oh no," Kedric said, thinking of the single-minded birds.

  But as soon as Kedric entered, the dog began jumping up and down and excitedly proclaimed, "My master, my master."

  "Well, hello," Kedric said, delighted.

  "My master's home early," the dog barked. "Is it because Master loves me? Sorry I drooled on Master—it's because I'm so excited. Does Master love me?"

  As soon as Kedric reached down to pat the dog's head, the dog dropped to the floor and rolled over to expose his belly.

  "Welcome, Master, am I cute? Do you love me?"

  "Why, yes and yes, assuredly," Kedric said, scratching the dog's belly.

  While he was doing that, the cat walked into the room. "Is he here to feed us?" she purred.

  Kedric was surprised at the question. "Didn't I feed you this morning?" he asked, wondering if he had somehow forgotten.

  "Pay attention to me," the dog said.

  The cat told the dog. "Get out of his way. He's trying to get to the food to feed me."

  And for the first time Kedric realized that while he could understand animals, animals couldn't understand him.

  "I was sure I fed you this morning," he said anyway, by way of apology.

  As he stepped over the dog and walked into the kitchen, the cat walked back and forth in front of his feet, saying, "He is. He is going to feed us. He's going to the feeding room."

  The dog said, "Hey, look at me. Doesn't Master love me anymore?"

  "Yes, yes," Kedric said. In the kitchen, he saw that there was still food in the cat's bowl. "You are not starving," he pointed out to her.

  She rubbed against his leg and meowed, "Are you going to feed me? Are you going to feed me now?"

  Kedric gave her some fresh food, in case there was something wrong with what he'd given her in the morning, but she only nibbled. "Nothing new, nothing exciting," she complained. "You said he was home early. I thought that meant something new and exciting to eat."

  "Is the master going to play with me now?" the dog said. "Ooo, I've got an itch"—he began biting at his side—"but I'll be ready to play in a moment."

  Kedric pointed at the cat. "You are spoiled," he said.

  "He's pointing at me," the cat said. "Do you think he's got food behind that finger?"

  "Stop talking about food!" Kedric shouted. "You've got food!"

  They might not have understood the words, but they knew shouting. "Good," the dog said. "Now Master's mad at you; he'll love me more. He'll think you chewed up that shoe."

  "He's shouting because he's trying to tell me where there's food," the cat said.

  "Stop it!" Kedric said. "Stop all this mindless chattering." Disappointed, he sat down at the kitchen table and rested his face in his hands. He was aware of the dog and the cat each looking at him with their large soulful eyes.

  The dog said, "Is Master sick? Is Master unhappy? If I chase my tail, will that make Master feel better?" The dog began to chase its tail.

  The cat said, "Do you really think he's sick? If he dies, do you think we should eat him?"

  Kedric jumped up from his chair. He threw the acorn down on the floor and stomped on it until it broke into little pieces.

  This didn't help. He distinctly heard the dog say, "I can do that, too!" Then the dog ran through the pile of crumbled pieces, scattering them all across the floor.

  "I don't think he's dying," the cat said. "We'll never get to eat him."

  Kedric clapped his hands to his ears. "Aaaaagh!" he cried. Maybe it wasn't too late to catch up to the old woman, to ask her to come back and take the spell off the acorn, since breaking it obviously wasn't enough, and now he could never find all the pieces.

  "Fine game!" the dog cried. "Master's so clever! I can play, too! Aaa-rooooo!" But the dog couldn't run and cover his ears at the same time, and he kept tipping over.

  "This is squirrel food," the cat complained, sniffing at the remains of the acorn. "This isn't for us to eat."

  Still holding his hands over his ears, Kedric ran screaming out of his house and down the path. The door didn't slam behind him until he was halfway across the clearing and into the woods.

  The dog and the cat looked at each other in the silence of the house.

  "Was it something I said?" the dog asked, biting at his itch again. "Doesn't Master love me anymore?"

  "Don't worry," the cat assured him. She began to lick herself dean. "He just went to find better food."

  Boy Witch

  CLARENCE'S MOTHER was a famous witch. The three of them—Clarence and his parents—lived in a cottage that was near several villages but not in any one of them. People came to buy spells and healing potions, to have their fortunes told, and to ask advice. Clarence's mother specialized in good magic, so if she used a spell to remove stones from one farmer's fields, she made sure they didn't show up in his neighbor's, and she only worked weather spells if everybody in the region agreed on what they needed.

  "There are enough sorrows in the world without me making more," she would tell anybody who asked for something that would harm another. "Magic is complicated enough already without setting out to do ill."

  One day in earliest spring, the snow was melting so fast that several villages sent to Clarence's mother to say they were in danger of being flooded. As Clarence's father hitched up the wagon to take her from one overflowing creek to another, he told Clarence, "We'll be gone all day and maybe into tomorrow. You're more than old enough to be on your own and to take care of the animals"—for they kept several, since Clarence's mother didn't make enough money as a witch to support the family.

  "I can do that," Clarence assured them.

  "Be goo
d," Clarence's mother said, which she always did, and Clarence said he would. Then he stood in the doorway and waved good-bye as his parents rode off in the wagon. He milked the goats, then let them loose in the meadow. So far, so good. He fed the chickens and the pigs, and everything went fine there, and he was just sitting down to his own breakfast when someone knocked on the door and called, "Hello. Anybody home?"

  Clarence got up and found that his visitor was a girl who looked about sixteen or seventeen years old, which was three or four years older than he was. She was very pretty. "Hello," he said to her. "Who are you?"

  The girl tugged nervously at the scarf that covered her head, as though to make sure that it covered every bit of her hair—which it did. "My name is Emma," she said. "I'm looking for the woman who's a witch."

  "She's not here," Clarence said. "She won't be back until tomorrow."

  "Oh." The girl's voice was little more than a sigh. "Never mind, then." But her shoulders drooped as she turned to walk away, and Clarence could tell that tomorrow would be too late.

  He called after her, "Is there anything I can do to help?"

  The girl Emma whirled around and asked, "Are you a witch, too?"

  There was such hope and awe and delight in her tone, Clarence felt very important. He stood straight, which made him almost as tall as Emma, and he said, "Yes," which wasn't exactly true. His mother said he had talent, but she also said magic was too important and too dangerous to play with. "When you are entirely grown up," Clarence's mother would tell him, "when you can understand the consequences and know how to weigh the choices, then I will teach you."

  But now, seeing the way Emma looked at him with such respect, he said, "Yes, I am a witch, too."

  But then Emma began to look suspicious. "You seem very young," she said in the same tone his mother used when she thought he'd done something especially foolish.

  "Actually," Clarence said, "I'm one hundred and seven years old. This is the appearance I give myself magically."

  That impressed her, he could tell, more than a thirteen-year-old boy who wasn't even apprenticed yet.

  Emma tugged once more on her scarf to make sure it was secure, then she said, "I want to buy a magic spell from you. Can you do magic?"

  "Of course," Clarence said, eager to please. "But I need to know what you want done. Our family doesn't believe in doing harmful magic." He said this to prepare her for her disappointment later, when he would say that the spell she asked for would have far-reaching consequences.

  The girl began to cry. "I don't want harmful magic," she told Clarence. "I just want my hair back."

  "Your hair?" he repeated, taking a closer look at the scarf.

  Emma pulled the scarf down, and Clarence saw that her hair had been cut off in ragged chunks so that it was shorter than a boy would wear it. "My brother did this, for a joke, while I was asleep," she told him. She used her scarf to blow her nose. "You see, today I'm supposed to meet the young man I'm to marry, the son of an old friend of my father's. He's coming to our village this afternoon. We've never met before, and I'm afraid"—she began crying all over again—"I'm afraid if he sees me looking like this, he'll call it all off."

  "Oh," Clarence said, "I'm sure he wouldn't..." But he drifted off, not sounding convincing, because he wasn't sure at all: She did look frightful, especially with her nose all red and runny.

  "It wouldn't take much of a spell to make my hair grow back, would it?" Emma said.

  "I—" Clarence caught himself before he said, "I wouldn't think so," and he said, instead, "I'm sure we'll find just the right spell for you." His mother had all sorts of books and scrolls, and he hoped one of them would say something about growing hair, for surely making hair grow could have no consequences, and he very much wanted to impress this girl who—with longer hair and a dry nose—would be beautiful.

  But even the answer Clarence gave made Emma suspicious. "Find the right spell?" she asked. "Haven't you done this before?"

  "Certainly," Clarence said. "Lots of times. But ... uh, it all depends on the conjunction of the planets, and atmospheric conditions on the particular day of the spell, and ... well, too many things that someone as young as you would never understand."

  Emma looked impressed again.

  "Come inside," Clarence said. "Have some tea while you wait."

  Emma came in and sat down on a stool at the kitchen table, but she grew impatient as Clarence piled book after book on the table and looked through scroll after scroll. "You don't seem very well organized," she told him. "You don't seem to know where to begin to look."

  "As a matter of fact," Clarence said, hoping not to sound too relieved, "I have it right here." In one of the ancient books, he had found a heading that said:

  for Thick, Longe hair for a Younge

  Personne Without Anye Yet

  And there was a subheading that promised hair "fully down to ye waist," with adjustments to the spell for those who preferred longer or shorter.

  Clarence looked again at Emma's head. Well, she was young, and she had hardly any hair left. This was probably a spell to make a baby's hair grow in faster, he thought, but it certainly seemed to fit Emma perfectly anyway. "Waist length?" he asked.

  "Oh yes," Emma agreed.

  "Now, let's see...," Clarence said. He read the incantation out loud, sounding the words out, making the proper gestures that were drawn in the margins of the book.

  Emma screamed and fell backward off her stool.

  Clarence ran around the table to help her up and saw that the hair on her head had not changed at all. But Emma had grown a beard—a Thick, Longe beard—that reached to her waist.

  "Oops," he said.

  "What have you done?" she screamed, feeling the lower part of her face, as though she couldn't quite believe that the long beard she could see was actually attached to her.

  "I think we need to make a slight adjustment here," Clarence admitted. He hoped that the next page in the book would say:

  For Getting Rid of Thick, Longe hair

  But it didn't. It was something about how to get gravy stains out of wool.

  He looked through the next several pages. Emma continued to scream all the while, which was quite distracting. "Well, if you're going to be that way about it," he said, "we'll just cut it off and start all over again." He got out his mother's sewing scissors, but every time he cut off a section of Emma's beard, it grew right back again.

  "It's a magic beard, you idiot," she told him, snatching the scissors out of his hand. "You'll have to take it away magically."

  "You may be right," Clarence said. "Just calm down. Are you calm now?" He didn't like the way she was looking at him while she still held the scissors. "I have the magic power," he said, to remind her that she needed him, "the books have the words. I'll find the right words." She finally let him take the scissors back.

  "Let's see..." Clarence frantically looked through his mother's papers. "Ah! Here we go!" He'd found an entry in another book that said:

  hair Removal

  The book told him what words to say and instructed him to wiggle his fingers at the part of the body from which he wanted to remove the hair. ("Syche as," the book said, "ye limbs, ye back, ye face, &c.")

  Clarence said the words and wiggled his fingers at Emma's face.

  The beard promptly disappeared. So did her eyebrows and eyelashes and most of the hair that had been left on her head.

  "Oops," Clarence said, trying to make the gesture smaller. Too late.

  "What oops?" Emma said. She felt the bottom of her face, but then her hands drifted up around her eyes and forehead, and she began screaming again.

  "Wait, wait, it's all right," Clarence said. "Look." He held up a scroll, pointing, then read it out loud in case Emma couldn't read.

  Moving Thyngs

  "I'd like to move you right out of here," Emma told him.

  "No," Clarence said. "Don't you see? We'll do the spell to make the beard again, then move tiny bits of t
he beard to your eyebrows, and the rest to your head."

  Emma thought about this. "No...," she started, but by then Clarence had relocated the For Thick, Longe Hair for a Younge Personne Without Anye Yet spell.

  "Trust me," he told her, and once again he said the incantation.

  Once again the beard appeared on her chin, looking even more foolish then before in the absence of eyebrows and lashes. Then Clarence read the incantation for moving things—moving, as he read, a wisp of beard above either eye, and the rest of the beard to the top of her head.

  "How does it look?" Emma asked.

  "Fine," Clarence told her, though in truth it looked as though she had tiny beards for eyebrows, and the beard on top of her head stuck straight up in the air and ended in a point, just like an upside-down beard.

  Wisely, Emma didn't take Clarence at his word. She touched her head, and a low growl started deep in her throat. "Where's a mirror?" she asked. "I demand to see a mirror." Her fingers found her eyebrows, and she began to twitch.

  "We're not quite ready for a mirror yet," Clarence admitted. He began looking frantically through the books while Emma muttered, "Where are those scissors?" and rummaged through his mother's sewing supplies.

  "Here we go!" Clarence announced. He'd found a spell called:

  Rich Golden hair

  The bits and pieces on Emma's head were blond. This was sure to work. She'd probably look better than she had before.

  Clarence recited the incantation. Emma tipped over and fell to the floor again with a loud clunk!

  "What happened?" Emma asked somewhat groggily from the floor.

  "Nothing," Clarence said.

  But Emma reached up and touched her head. "Why is my hair metal?" she demanded.

  "Actually," he admitted, "it's turned to gold." It still looked like an upside-down beard, except that now it was a solid chunk of gold. "It'll be worth a fortune," he pointed out. "You can knock pieces out of it, and new pieces will grow back—just like it did when we tried cutting it off with the scissors. You and your new husband will be rich. Neither one of you will ever have to work again."