Copyright © 2010 by E. Grace Diehl. All Rights Reserved
Originally Published by Kettlestitch an imprint of Drollerie Press
Second Edition Published by Woven Weird Press
Chapter I
The Witch of Barren Hollow glowered darkly at the sickly light fighting to break through the years of accumulated grime on her window pane. The light wasn’t what was bothering her, though. It was the noise. She stewed in ire and vexation and muttered a curse to silence the deafening hum of the insects in the surrounding valley. Those same insects never would have dared to stir or utter a whir less than a year before, when they had known that she was in charge. She would have to show them exactly how mistaken they were to think she would let their defiance go unnoticed.
With a final buzzing squeak, the insects fell silent, but it was all the worse because then she could more clearly hear all the devil-blasted birdsong. She threw up her hands in frustration, but refused to admit defeat. She started brewing a potion to emit a special type of smoke that would stop the birds’ voices for at least a week. She set the frothing and heavily smoking brew on the dead rocks of her front yard and was satisfied to note that the birds were silenced within the hour.
Of course, then it was all the worse because she could hear the wind in the trees and the whispering of the twisted faeries and living shadows, as well as the distant howling of the monsters, and none of those things were in her power to silence at the moment. She kicked an unoffending ceramic pot and took satisfaction in the sound of its breaking against the wall behind it.
Then she cursed vehemently, because that had been her only pot of proper Darjeeling tea, and the destruction of it and the scattering of its contents meant that she would have to venture out into the non-magical realm to purchase, steal, or bully someone for more.
“Rot,” she mumbled darkly under her breath, opening the window and sending the sharp pot pieces and loose tea flying out with a gesture of her hand. “Do one good thing in your life and everything goes to pot. See if I ever participate in saving the world again.”
***
Jordan Wheeler was an exceptionally careless and foolish man, and everybody in the town of Hollowsburg was quite sick of his antics. Completely by accident, he had just the prior evening tripped and contaminated the city’s primary well with the quicklime he’d been carrying to the public house’s outdoor privy, and that wasn’t the half of it. He’d tripped on the rope that tethered a famously violent goat that had then bucked and kicked the post behind it so hard that it knocked down a lit oil lamp, setting the contents of the public manger on fire; the resultant blaze of which ultimately burned down the school house, City Hall, and the town’s small public lending library. Thankfully, the fire had been controlled before it reached the pub, because that was the only building in the immediate area that still contained people who might have been harmed by the flame.
Not unnaturally, when the town assembled in the square the next morning to discuss the enormous problems caused by this series of events, the only person who did not vote for Jordan’s banishment was Jordan himself.
“Well, now that that’s been settled,” said the mayor, flipping to the next page of his agenda book, “We’ve only the lack of water, school supplies, textbooks, public reference materials, and three buildings left to be reckoned with.”
“And what about my goat?” demanded Mr. McGregor, whose goat had escaped when the fire had burned through its rope.
“We’ll send a search party out for your goat once we’ve finished rebuilding three-fifths of the buildings in the town square and dug a new well,” the mayor said dryly.
While the town was discussing the issues at hand, the banished man sullenly set about gathering his few worldly possessions and leaving town to seek his fortune in the great world beyond. He tried to convince himself that banishment was a great opportunity. He’d spent his entire life in Hollowsburg, and he’d always rather wondered what the rest of the world might be like. But then, he’d always assumed that if he left he’d have the option of coming back if the rest of the world turned out to be less interesting than it was cracked up to be.
He crested the hill on the road that led to the dark forest, and the first thing he saw once town was out of sight was the goat he held responsible for all his misfortune munching with unsympathetic disinterest on a bush. Jordan regarded it warily as he passed it, but the goat paid him absolutely no mind, which somehow goaded the man’s sullen mind into vengeful and self-righteous fury. As soon as he was past the goat, he found a somewhat jagged and heavy, fist-sized rock, carefully aimed, and threw it at the offender’s rump.
It made contact with surprising accuracy, and Jordan let out a whoop of triumph as the goat brayed in pain and offended goatly dignity. Jordan’s celebration abruptly ceased when the goat turned and charged at him in mad fury. Jordan’s mouth hung open stupidly for a split instant before he turned and sprinted down the hill with a speed born of utter panic. Miraculously he stayed ahead of the goat the whole way down the hill, though he could hear its clicking feet and agitated breathing plenty close behind him.
Through the blood-red fog of the adrenaline pounding in his head, the long-time town idiot had a very good and practical idea. It occurred to him that it might be far easier to lose a grass-fattened domestic goat if he ran through the woods back toward Hollowsburg. He turned sharply and exploded through the trees and underbrush of the small wood, birds and small animals scattering before him. After a while, he looked back, and noting that the goat was no longer in sight, he stopped briefly to catch his breath before continuing his walk back toward town. He thought that perhaps it would be better to start his banishment in the other direction. This direction hadn’t turned out to be very fortuitous.
About twenty minutes later, he emerged from the trees, and the town was once again in sight. He started heading back down the main road when suddenly he heard a rather disconcerting noise behind him. He turned, and standing in the middle of the road was the goat, and it was looking very smug and confident in its superior intelligence. It had gone around the wood. Jordan gave a little yelp and started running again.
The goat sprang back into hot pursuit, and the pair went tearing back into town like a landslide or the biting winds of December. They came with mind-turning speed and with no regard for what stood in their way.
Jordan actually had his eyes closed when he slammed bodily into the back of the slightly bony crone, and he had no time to ponder what he’d hit. The old woman flew forward, tumbling into a puddle of ash-blackened, grimy mud, and the goat flew forward, tripped, and rolled over Jordan, painfully impaling one of the man’s buttocks with its abnormally pointy little horns.
“My goat!” yelled Mr. McGregor in concern.
“My skirt!” yelled the mayor’s wife, who had been spattered with the black mud that now more or less covered the old woman.
“My arse!” moaned Jordan, clutching his bottom and writhing.
“My word,” said the Witch of Barren Hollow, flicking the black mud off her face with a sturdy, strong hand. She radiated power like the sun radiates heat and light, and the square fell completely and utterly silent. “Heh,” the witch thought bitterly. “Now I get a little quiet.”
She stood to her full height, which was at least an inch taller than the tallest townsmen there present, and she focused her piercing glare on the village as a whole. She recognized, certainly, that the occurrence had been an accident, and she knew furthermore that it wasn’t the fault of the village in its entirety, but it was very clear that a point needed to be made. After all, she was evil, and she didn’t hold with wishy-washy fairness when she had an excuse to make people miserable.
“A pox!” she crowed, raising her arms and spattering more mud on the mayor’s wife. “A pox on your whole rutting, bloody, filthy, cursed town. May your livestock never produce milk, may all wells you dig be filled with dry dust, and may all your infants continually suffer colic.”
A baby at the back of the crowd started wailing, and the witch smiled her nastiest smile. Then she started to hobble away, back up toward the road.
Suddenly, the mayor (who was incidentally the father of infant twins and the owner of the local dairy) found his voice and called after. “No! Dear, revered and honorable madam, please wait! Is there nothing we can do to make up for… for this grievously unfortunate and terribly unforgivable error?” Babies had started wailing and fussing all over town, and the noise echoed through the burned and unnaturally unlucky square. “Please!” The uncommonly wise man threw himself down into a kneeling bow of supplication, bending his head all the way down to the sooty ground.
The witch turned her flinty gaze back toward the town square just in time to see the rest of the townspeople follow suit.
Well, Beelzebub and all the powers that be, she thought to herself while setting her face into a particularly nasty sneer. I do, after all, need to get that rutting tea. She cackled high and cold and raised her hands again, which set the supplicant people shuddering where they crouched. “I will lift the curse if you give me three things,” she said, setting the sky to rumble as with thunder for dramatic effect. “Will you heed?”
“Anything you wish!” declared the mayor desperately. His stomach knotted and flopped about like a fish on land when he realized the weight and danger of that particular promise, but he assumed that matters couldn’t possibly become any worse than they were under the weight of the witch’s curse.
“Three things,” the witch repeated icily, and she cast her wicked black gaze over the crowd people one final time. “First, I want a large, fine porcelain pot. Second, I want it filled with two pounds of the finest Darjeeling tea available. Third …” There was the briefest, subtlest of pauses while the witch considered what to ask for. It had to be something suitably evil after the benign nature of the first two demands, but she didn’t have much time to think about it, because she was loath to let wormling slime like the people of Hollowsburg think that she was indecisive. She pointed with a snap of her wrist. “That man’s first born child on the eve of its third birthday.”
The people looked up and followed the woman’s finger. They were all infinitely relieved to find that the old woman was pointing at the still groaning, banished idiot who had caused the whole mess in the first place.
“It is as good as done!” said the mayor, leaping to his feet.
“No,” growled the witch. “He must agree to it first.”
The mayor scurried to Jordan Wheeler’s side and prodded him hard on his injured rump. “Hurry and accept,” he commanded in a harsh whisper. “Or we’ll tear you limb from limb rather than banish you.”
Jordan, in the private, more rational part of his mind, figured his prospects of ever getting married and having children were remarkably slim. He was, after all, famous for being a terrible and destructive imbecile. This had a very strong influence on his ultimate response. “I will agree on one condition.”
“And what is that?” asked the mayor, who was terribly sick of the whole messy business and wanted it to be over with.
“I would like to receive medical assistance and be granted healing time before I am eternally banished.”
“Done,” said the mayor.
“All right, then.” He turned to the witch. “I agree.”
The witch nodded abruptly, and the wailing of the babies quieted. In very little time, she had her pot of fine loose tea in hand, and she left the people to deal with their other problems, which in fact seemed rather less important in light of slightly more recent events.
***
Sometimes unfortunate people can have startling changes of fortune just when the change is least fortunate. Nothing could have possibly changed Jordan’s life more than getting skewered through the rear and being banished from Hollowsburg, and very few people could disagree that it was markedly a change for the better.
Though he had been promised medical care and a slight delay on his banishment sentence, that hardly meant anyone wanted Jordan to remain actually in the town. As soon as the witch was well on her way up the hill, they loaded the man into a cart and took him to the doctor in the village of Stonewell, some miles away, and they paid the good doctor to keep him and tend to him until he recovered.
During the course of his stay, Jordan fell madly and hopelessly in love with the doctor’s shy, dark-haired daughter, who in turn found that Jordan’s natural clumsiness drew her out of her long-established shell and made her laugh. Rather than leave to seek his fortune in the world after healing, he accepted a job at a nearby stone quarry and built himself a sturdy cottage at the edge of the village. When he felt he could support her respectably, he asked the dark-haired doctor’s daughter to marry him. Even after he told her what that might mean in the future, she accepted without hesitation.
Chapter II
Curtis Wheeler could not pronounce his name, which his mother found slightly irksome, and sometimes downright disturbing. He could speak whole sentences, and he showed all signs of being an exceptionally bright boy, but he always left off the “ti” part of his name, which made it sound distinctly like “curse.” What was worse, he seemed to perversely take great joy in his mother’s reaction to his continued mispronunciation, and he gurgled with glee and clapped to see the disappointment and frustration in her face every time he said it.
“Curse!” he squealed, pointing at himself and grinning. “I’m Curse.”
“No, darling, I wish you’d stop saying that,” said Emily, sweeping a long strand of silken dark hair from her face and taking the boy into her arms. The little boy faced his mother seriously.
“Not darling. Curse.”
She sighed and he laughed. She lifted the boy and sat him in his roughly hand-carved high-chair. At the very least, the boy was good natured, and she couldn’t fault him his happiness, even if it was at her expense. “That’s right, dear. Curtis.”
“Curse,” he corrected her.
She decided that she’d argued with her two and three-quarters year old son quite enough for one day.
“Well, if it makes you happy.” She fetched the mashed yams from the counter and put the bowl on the table in front of the boy with a little spoon. Eleanor started crying in the nursery next door, and she ran to tend to her while Curtis (or Curse, as he would have it) set about finger-painting on the table with his dinner. He ate some of it for good measure while he was at it. “Oh, honey!” she exclaimed, wiping his face with the corner of her apron and inspecting his handiwork. She bounced Eleanor on her hip.
“It’s Eleanor!” said the little boy, pointing. “See? Eyes, nose, mouth, stripes.”
“Curtis, Eleanor doesn’t have stripes on her face. You do.” She finished wiping his face and fetched a towel for the table.
“Curse!” he corrected her harshly.
“Now, don’t you be snippy with me,” she scolded. “Your father and I named you. We ought to know.”
The boy ate a spoonful of yams and did not deign to continue the argument. After a long period of silence, and after he was quite finished eating, the little boy peered at his younger sister, who was nursing quietly, and said, “Eleanor has stripes.”
“What a strange little family Jordan and I have,” said Emily, “If one of our children is named Curse and the other has stripes.” It was meant to be a joke.
“Yes,” the boy agreed earnestly.
Emily sighed.
***
The Witch of Barren Hollow had quite nearly grown to wish she’d let the magical world collapse around everybody’s ears. It would have been a glorious death, that. Chaos and darkness and destruction were all things she tended to like very, very much. What she tended not to like very much at all were butterflies, cheerfully oil-colored beetles, pixies, red and white spotted mushrooms, wildflowers, and songbirds, all of whom had moved in and persisted to occupy the neighborhood, no matter how hard she tried to hex them all away. It was insufferable. It was not to be borne. It was the sort of thing that could only really be prevented if there wasn’t a keeper alive and the old keeper’s bonds were either weak or severed entirely.
That was the part that disconcerted her most. It was pretty obvious that there was a keeper looming on the horizon of time for Barren Hollow, and she was sickened by how fast the turn-around had been. She’d killed Andrew all of … what? Five or six years before, maybe? And Haneth’s End had re-forged the broken bond system something like a year after that. It wasn’t fair, really. She’d hardly had any time at all to enjoy her handiwork, and if she killed another keeper and broke the bonds again, Haneth’s End would know because he could feel the whole, now, and would know if it were wounded. She’d divined that much when she’d checked to see if the hole in the world had been mended. She spat in the corner at the thought. She didn’t want to deal with him again because she liked to imagine him dead, and seeing him again would be purely detrimental to that end, what with his not even looking like he was dying anymore. She turned to kick her porcelain pot of loose tea and barely stopped herself in time.
“Oh, no,” she mumbled to herself. “I don’t need that sort of grief again.” She glared at the unoffending porcelain thing. It was beautiful and truly delicate bone china, and it was accented in black glaze and gold leaf. Looking at it made her pause for a moment. “How long has it been since I made that trade?” she wondered out loud. It had been something like four years, but she doubted that the man she’d seen groaning and clutching at the seat of his trousers could have managed to marry and have children.
Of course, it wouldn’t do for her not to collect on a trade. It would ruin her reputation at the very least. She thought it would probably be best to check, and if nothing else it would take her mind off of all the blasted noise and color that was coming back into the Hollow.
She started throwing together a quick locating-surface potion in her largest cauldron, and she mulled over that. She had noticed, actually, that the colors and sounds were rather different than they had been during the time of Andrew, not to mention Rosilyn before him and Maryweather before her. They were darker and richer and sometimes gave a sense of being significantly less than innocent. On a similar token, most of the wildflowers had substantial looking brambles and thorns.
“GAH!” she thought, shaking her head pointedly. She had been trying to avoid thinking about those things, and there she was thinking about them. It appeared to be an exercise in futility. “Ah, well,” she thought. “While I’m putting together the locating surface, anyway, I may as well look in on the new keeper. Always best to know one’s enemies early.”
She threw in a handful of mouse ears and a mole tongue and stoked the fire under the cauldron. About half an hour later, she was peering into the gleaming mirror surface of the brew and finishing the spell commands that would allow her to see the keeper. She figured she would check up on the man from Hollowsburg next. Not unnaturally, she was shocked beyond belief when she found herself doing both at the same time.
“Curtis!” the man insisted, pushing his son’s nose like a button.
“Curse!” rebutted the child.
“Your name is Curtis, and I ought to know. You’re my son, and I named you.”
The boy frowned deeply. “Curse.”
“Come now, you’re not even trying.”
“Jordan, perhaps we should stop bullying him so,” suggested a woman the witch assumed was the idiot’s wife.
“On the contrary, perhaps he should stop bullying us so!” objected the idiot. “Look at his face. He loves this.”
“Darling, he can learn his name later. He already says Eleanor’s name perfectly, have you noticed? And I would have said that Eleanor is a bit more difficult to say than Curtis.”
“Emily, he’ll be three years old in two months and I would swear that he understands every word of these conversations. The least he could do is say his name properly, if only to make his parents happy.”
“Oh, for the sake of all things vile and unholy!” exclaimed the witch. “Two months? Curse the day the world was made! Curse it all!”
“Curse!” the small boy exclaimed, almost as though he were in perfect agreement.
***
“Do you think we should try to hide him or something?” asked Emily, holding her son close, with her face in his shiny dark hair. “You know, in case the witch really does come.”
The man looked at Curtis wistfully and then met the eyes of his wife. “She’s a witch. I’m afraid it might not be possible to defy a witch without having some incredibly nasty consequences. If we tried to hide him, we just might lose both of our children, and maybe one another.”
Emily had never in her life believed in witches, but her husband believed in this one so strongly that it made her half want to gather their things and hop on a ship bound for the Americas. Maybe that would do the trick. She suggested it.
“We don’t have that kind of money,” said Jordan. “And I made a promise. I don’t know who would be affected or hurt if I successfully broke it, and I certainly couldn’t even hope to be successful for long.”
“I don’t want an evil person to take Curtis.”
“Curse,” the boy in question reminded her.
Jordan sighed. “I don’t, either, Em. Can I hold him for a while?” She lifted the boy up, and he compliantly reached his arms out for his father. “By all that lives, I love you.” He kissed the toddler squarely in the middle of his forehead, and the younger of the two giggled contentedly. “I wonder if he’ll maybe be able to write us letters when he’s old enough.”
Eleanor started crying again, and Emily ran back into the nursery.
“I love you, too.” The little boy met his father’s eyes gravely as he said it, and the man had to fight to keep himself from crying or giving in to his wife’s suggestion and run away to a different continent.
Instead, he settled for returning the boy’s gravity and saying “Good. Please don’t forget us if you have to go away.”
“I won’t.”
“Thank you,” said Jordan. “I suppose that’s more important than being able to say your name the way your mother and I like it.”
“Oh, I can say that. Curtis. Curse is funnier.”
The man laughed and embraced his son roughly. “You little imp! Your mother will never believe …”
“Never believe what?” asked Emily. Eleanor had quieted and fallen back asleep.
“This little scoundrel just said his name.”
“Curse,” he agreed.
“No. The other one. Just this one time, for your mother.”
“Curtis.”
“Thank you. Don’t forget that, either, all right?”
“I won’t, but I still like Curse.”
“Oh, you mean little dear,” said Emily, sweeping her son back out of her husband’s arms and smothering him with kisses. “You finally let us win.”
“Maybe,” Curtis admitted. Then he laughed and kissed her in return.
“Let’s hold his birthday party a couple days early,” said Jordan. “If she comes for him, she’ll come the evening before the day.”
“Oh, I don’t like this one bit!” declared Emily. “What makes that terrible old woman think that it’s your right to give someone to her. He’s your son, yes, but he’s a person, and he’s his own person.”
“I don’t think the witch can possibly change that, love,” Jordan chuckled.
“No,” Curtis agreed.
“See! Curtis can watch after himself.”
“Curse.”
“He’s not even three years old. That’s a terribly silly thing to say.”
“You don’t think he can?”
The boy pulled at his mother’s hair, nestled his head into her shoulder, and started crooning a tuneless song with “curse” as the only lyric.
“There’s steel in that one, Emily.”
“My better instincts scream out against the whole idea.”
“Good. You’re a mother. I don’t think you’re supposed to want to give your children to witches.”
“Whoever said that you were a fool?” She couldn’t help but laugh.
The family threw the party three days early, and it was a brilliant success. All the village children came, and so did Emily’s father, who had always delighted the children. There were games and songs and good things to eat. Even Eleanor, who didn’t understand any of it, seemed to have a particularly grand time after Curtis took to carrying her around. Of course, he could never do it for long because she was more than half his size already, but the baby loved every second of what her older brother could manage. For the rest of his life, Curtis remembered that party and most of the rest of his final week living with his parents with near perfect clarity.
***
“Keeper.” The witch looked down her nose at the boy and sneered. She’d frozen his family so that she wouldn’t have to deal with maudlin, teary goodbyes, and she’d found the boy standing with his arms crossed waiting for her.
“My name is Curse,” he said firmly. “Let go of them.”
The witch laughed, high and cold. “I’m not taking orders from you, whether or not you’re a keeper. You’ve been traded to me. You’re mine.”
“No more than you’re mine,” the knee-high thing insisted. The witch thought of how nice it would be to throttle him.
“I won’t let them go until you accept that I’m your mistress and come with me.”
The boy then did something extremely unexpected. He sat down with his arms still firmly crossed and glared. The glare wasn’t nearly as potent as it might have been because it was coming from a face that still had the soft, blurry quality of infant pudginess, but it was impudent in the extreme.
“Well, if you aren’t going to accept it, I’ll have to teach you,” said the witch. She extended her movement and awareness freezing spell to the boy, lifted him up by his elbows, put him in her sack, and carried him off. She let go of his family when she was comfortably back in the magical realm, and she decided to leave him as he was until the next afternoon. That should teach him his lesson.
The Kinlea Keeper Story Society (Msr. Timothy R. Jamison Presiding) 
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