The Warlock's Curse (9 page)

As he’d grown older, Will had learned how to muscle his way through a text—he could hardly have kept up with his classes at the Polytechnic otherwise. But even now, he found reading a tedious, headachy chore.

Not wanting to forestall her own enjoyment, but still wanting to include Will in it, Jenny had come up with the idea of reading the books to him aloud. And this Will
had
enjoyed very much, because Jenny had a flair for the dramatic. In this way he and “Scuff” had passed many a fine hour.

But he wasn’t a kid anymore, and there was really only one thing up here that now interested him. Reaching past the books, he felt around behind them for the half-empty bottle of rye whiskey he’d hidden up here long ago. Like everything else, it was covered in a layer of dust, but he ignored this as he pulled out the cork with his teeth. He took a pull, finding it no mellower than it had been when he was fifteen, but the harsh burn of the alcohol nicely reinforced his feeling of being unfairly treated and all-around hard used.

“Did you even read the terms of the apprenticeship contract, Will?” he mimicked Father’s voice to himself. He took another swig. “Bastard!”

He threw back a few more angry mouthfuls, but getting plowed was not really what he wanted to do. He suddenly remembered the letter in his pocket—a letter from Ben! He drew it out quickly. It was thin and light in his hand, but at least it was something. First, he examined the seal. Will wouldn’t put it past Uncle Royce to have read the letter before handing it over. But the seal seemed intact, and if it had been steamed the ink would have smudged.

He tore it open quickly. To his surprise—and dismay—it contained only a single sheet of paper. It was a very fine piece of stationery, bordered and engraved with a rampant eagle which had clasped, in its claw, a two-sided scroll. One side of the scroll read “
Ex Fide Fortis
” and on the other side, “From Faith, Strength.” Beneath the eagle were the words:

T
HE
S
TANTON
I
NSTITUTE
N
EW
Y
ORK
C
ITY

A beautiful piece of paper, clearly swiped from Ben’s employer. But it hardly seemed worth the swiping, for Ben had only written eight words on it:

Dreadnought Stanton 32: “The Warlock’s Curse.” Page 153.

Will puzzled over this for a moment. He knew what the writing referred to, of course; Volume 32 of
The True Life Tales of Dreadnought Stanton
. Ben didn’t even have to give the volume number. While
The Warlock’s Curse
had always been one of the lesser known installments, the fact that Edison Studios had recently selected it as the basis for the first-ever Dreadnought Stanton photoplay had caused it to skyrocket in prominence. The motion picture was to debut with great fanfare on New Year’s Day, and all the movie magazines were filled with news of the production, which was rumored to be the most lavish and expensive Edison had ever undertaken. Even Walnut Grove, the small town nearest the Edwards’ ranch (which didn’t even
have
a moving picture theater) was plastered with handbills from rival theaters in Sacramento and Stockton advertising the film’s premiere.

The Warlock’s Curse
was among the many volumes that Jenny had left behind. He pulled it from the shelf and blew dust off it. On the cover was a picture of a young man’s face drawn in two halves—one half that of a nice all-American boy, the other half twisted and sneering, demonic. The picture gave away just about all there was to the plot—the kid on the cover had inherited a family curse or something, and Dreadnought Stanton had to defeat the evil spirit who possessed him.

Will quickly turned to page 153. It was a page of illustration, showing a magical sigil, but with no other explanation. Will flipped back a couple pages and was laboriously scanning the text to try to figure out what part of the story the illustration was in support of, when a voice called from below:

“Hey, you up there?”

It was Jenny. Goddamn it! But of course she knew where to find him, this was where they’d played together as kids. Still, it annoyed him that she assumed she’d find him here—as if nothing about him had changed or ever would change. Why did everyone treat him like that?

“What do you want?” he growled forbiddingly. But Jenny had already climbed the ladder to the hayloft and was settling herself in next to him, taking care with her tidy costume. A shining curl had escaped from the thick mass of hair piled atop her head. Her very presence here seemed outrageous. It was one thing for her to come up here when she was a girl, with scuffed knees and freckles. But now she dressed like a woman and smelled like a woman, and it was a clear violation of every secret hideout code ever written.

Will quickly tucked Ben’s letter into the pulp novel, and shoved them both inside his coat. Jenny didn’t notice, too busy eyeing the dusty bottle of whiskey in his hand.

“Thank God!” She seized it and wrenched out the cork before Will could protest. “I was hoping you’d have a drink. And I wasn’t about to squeeze in between Laddie and Lillie looking for one. Those two are like the stones of the pyramids, you can’t get a piece of paper in between them!”

Will did not comment, but watched Jenny take a long swallow of the rye. She only gagged on it a little, then wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

“And of course, after you stormed off, your father felt it was his duty to make small talk with me. You ever try to make small talk with your father? Especially when he’s mad?” Jenny shivered at the memory. “Your family tires me out.”

“You too?” Will said. Jenny took another snort, then capped the bottle and settled back comfortably, looking around. “Hasn’t changed much,” was her conclusion. “You’ve still got my books!”

“Yep, it’s like I’m still twelve years old,” Will said bitterly.

“Boy, I sure liked the Dreadnought Stantons.” Jenny looked over the titles, smiling. If she noticed the absence of Volume 32, she didn’t mention it. “You remember the fight we had over those? I wanted to be Admiral Dewey and you gave me a bloody nose.”

Will rolled his eyes. It had been a ridiculous fight. Jenny had been reading him an especially patriotic Stantonade in which the great Sophos was called upon by Congress to investigate the magical theft of a jeweled sword presented to Admiral Dewey by President McKinley. They’d both been so excited by the action in the book that they’d quickly dispensed with Jenny just reading it and went on to playing it out. It had been great fun—until Jenny demanded to play the role of Admiral Dewey. She said it was only fair, because Will had gotten most of the other good parts. But he found the idea so preposterous he’d been forced to object to it just on principle. She called him a nincompoop. He told her to both “go soak her head” and “dry up.”

Perhaps it was the contradictory nature of these two statements that had made Jenny shove him. Will had shoved her back. And then there had been hair-pulling and fists started to fly, and finally Jenny ran to his mother, crying, her nose bleeding. Ma’am, who tended to be quite democratic about such things, did not scold Will for hitting a girl, or even for hitting someone younger than him. Instead, she had given Jenny a clean rag to staunch the bleeding and then told her if she wanted to be Admiral Dewey she had to keep her guard up. Additionally, she confided that, like the Spanish Pacific fleet, Will had a tendency to leave himself open on the right. Jenny was an apt pupil; the next time she and Will got into a scuffle, she walloped him handily.

“Yeah, I remember,” Will said, watching as Jenny smoothed her serge skirt over her thighs. Her button-top shoes peeked out under the ruffled hem of her silk petticoat, and his eyes wanted to linger on her slim ankle. He looked away, clearing his throat. “Now, I’ve bought you a drink. So why don’t you go ahead and get lost? I’m sure Ma’am will wonder where you’ve gotten to. Sorry I can’t offer you any Sen-Sen, but there’s peppermint growing just outside the barn door if you want to chew some ...”

She frowned at him. “What do you have against me, anyway? We used to have lots of fun together. You got a girl or something, afraid she’ll get mad at you for sitting with me up in the hayloft?”

“No, I don’t have a girl,” Will said. “I’m twelve years old, remember?”

“Oh, cut it out. You’re being mulish, and it doesn’t pay,” Jenny snapped. “You and I have more in common than you think. Probably more now than we ever had when we were kids.”

Will smirked indulgently. “What do you figure we have in common?”

“Everyone expects too little of us,” she said quickly. “You always hear people complaining about how horrible it is when others expect too much of them. But it’s worse the other way around. Isn’t it?”

Will pondered this, then nodded in slow agreement. “But you’re an heiress. Why
should
anyone expect anything of you? You don’t have anything to prove. You don’t have to make a living. You just have to sit back and let everyone treat you like a queen.”

“Treat me like a set of silver being polished up for a shop window, you mean,” Jenny grumbled. She reached for the bottle of whiskey again, but Will quickly tucked it away, mindful of her father sitting at the dinner table just a few hundred yards away.

“Miss Murison’s is pretty good ... as
girls’
schools go ...” Jenny parroted derisively. “I’ve only learned one thing in that ‘girls’ school’ that’s worth more than two pins—and that’s excellent French. Without it I could never have read Monsieur Bachelier’s thesis. You would love it, William, it’s on the use of Brownian motion to evaluate stock options.” She paused, sighing dreamily, as if she were discussing the latest moving picture star. Then she frowned again. “Of course, when I try to discuss Bachelier’s work with my mathematics tutor, all he wants to do is stare into my eyes.”

“Gee, you got it rough,” Will deadpanned. “Math tutors staring into your blue eyes. How can you stand it?”

“I
can’t
stand it!” she countered sharply. “And don’t you dare poke fun, William Edwards. You don’t understand what it’s like to have no one—not one single person—take you seriously. Your teachers, Mr. Tesla ... they all think you’re a genius.
Everybody
takes you seriously.”

“Not everybody” Will muttered. Not the one person who mattered.

Jenny heaved a sigh. “Well, that’s how parents are,” she said. “How
fathers
are, at least. I couldn’t say about mothers.”

Jenny had lost her mother when she was three years old, and despite the fact that Ma’am was a loving witchly godmother, it wasn’t the same. Will hastened to change the uncomfortable subject.

“That’s how
people
are,” he said. “They’re unpredictable, they don’t make decisions rationally or logically, and they usually don’t make much sense. It drives me up a tree.”

“I suppose that’s why you like machines so much, right?” Jenny mused. “Because they do what you expect?”

Will nodded, surprised. She leaned forward.

“But you see, I like things that do what you
don’t
expect,” she said. “For instance, when most people think about mathematics, they think of boring equations—you know, like two plus two equals four. But there are other equations, William. Equations that seem just as simple, except when you put in different numbers, the strangest things come out. They seem so boring on the surface, but then when you realize how incredibly, beautifully complex they are it’s just ... wonderful.”

Will was transfixed by how radiant her face had suddenly become. He recognized that kind of rapture. He smiled at her, and she smiled back, and through some unspoken agreement, they decided to be friends again.

And now that they were friends again, Jenny leaned toward him and dropped her voice low.

“William,” she said, “I’ve got a proposition for you.”

“Miss Hansen!” He feigned outrage. “I’ll have you know, I’m not that kind of fellow!”

Snorting, Jenny punched him in the arm.

“You want to get out of here, right? I mean, get to Detroit, get to your apprenticeship, everything?”

“Yes,” Will said. “More than anything.”

“All right, then hear me out. Don’t say anything until I’m done.” She took a deep breath, then seemed to lose her courage. “It’s just that I’ve been thinking about it for a while, but until I heard your situation it never quite gelled, you know?”

“No, I don’t know,” Will said. “Spit it out. What are you talking about?”

Jenny drew another deep breath. “All right. You know my mother died when I was very young. And you know that she came from money, and she left a bundle. That bundle was put into trust for me and my sister.” She paused. “Now, in Claire’s case the money goes to ... her support.”

Will said nothing, but nodded. He had heard about Jenny’s older sister Claire. She was a victim of the Black Flu epidemics, and was, according to his brothers’ whispered gossip, horribly disfigured and deformed. She lived in an asylum somewhere, they said.