Part 4: Dying of the Curse


    Chuck was at home. So were three or four of his gangster friends. I nearly fell off the horse when I arrived, making the beast chuckle in his nose. Leaving him to go where he wished, I staggered into the weathered, clapboard shack. A fine rain was starting to fall, pattering on the roof. Wind soughed around it and whispered in through the cracks.


    Chuck sat with his boots up on the table, thumbs in his pockets.


    “Well, look what the horse dragged in.” He sat up and put his boots down with a thump. “You don’t look too healthy, Leaflow. What happened to my mission?”


    To keep the story brief, I’ll simply say that there was an altercation when he learned how the mission had ended up. He was furious when he found out that I had bungled the poisoning. I wasn’t too happy about the witch that I hadn’t been told about, the magic that had been downplayed or the fact that a curse was eating into the back of my mind at that moment.


    I explained to Chuck that the falsified paperwork had been left in the Duke’s desk, and he was actually dead, so there was still a chance for Chuck to inherit. We both knew that it would be a slim chance if people questioned the death and started putting clues together.


    While he was still in the middle of a red-faced, gurgling fit of fury, his thugs looking on with sly eyes, I decided to leave.


    “It seems our business relationship is over,” I remarked sardonically. Turning on my heels as best I could without falling over, I made my way out into the rain. Behind me, Chuck cried something about that not being the only thing that was going to be over.


    He sent the boys out after me. In the rain and darkness I gave them the slip, for the moment at least. The horse was gone, so I went on foot. To the north of his place was an area of scrub and hills, remarkably fit for getting lost in. I crawled into the dripping brush, head reeling. The waves of color were dancing before my eyes now, everywhere I looked. One arm was a dead weight.


    Under the vague cover of an overhanging tree and some scrubby bushes, I crouched with my head on my knees. For a short time, I was able to rest and catch my breath. But then I heard the sound of people moving through the brush, calling quietly to each other. They must have had a tracker among them, or simply have guessed where I would hide. If I had been thinking clearly then, I might simply have found a better hiding place and let them go by me. After that, I could have found a place to use my dimensional jumping apparatus and left this world behind.


    Instead, I moved off in front of them like a hunted beast. I went uphill, hoping to cross it and dive into the twisting ravines beyond. The brush was in patches, sometimes thick and sometimes little more than a few sagebrush in a clearing. I staggered through it, hearing a roaring noise growing in the back of my head.


    My guess is that the thugs split up around this time, hoping to pen me in. Whatever the reason, I pushed through a patch of brush and stopped on the edge of a steep cliff with a rocky, dry river bottom below, only to find that a gangster was right behind me. There was an open space on the edge of the cliff, a strip of crumbly ground with no scrub on it. Chuck’s thug stepped out a of the brush a few yards from me, checking the cliff with a sideways leer before turning to me, raising a rifle. He opened his mouth at the same time, probably to shout for his companions. Even in my fuzzy state, I knew that was not what I wanted happening. Fumbling for my sword left-handed, I lunged at the fellow.


    This thug was not a stupid fellow. Instead of trying to bring the rifle to bear on me when I was already almost too close for a clean shot, he swung it like a club. I barely got my sword up in time before the rifle butt came crashing down. The shock almost numbed my left arm as badly as the right already was. The sword blade slammed down into the dirt and he raised the butt for another blow. I abandoned the sword and leapt at him.


    This isn’t the point in the story where we both go flailing over the cliff and smash on the rocks below. Not yet, at least. Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.


    Instead, we fell to the ground and rolled around, fighting for the upper hand. He dropped the rifle in the first impact and we both grabbed for a pistol on his belt. Somehow, I ended up holding it by the grip. We rolled over once more, closer to the cliff, while he tried to pry the gun away from me by the barrel. Realizing that reinforcements would be an asset to him, he gave a strangled shout for help. In the next instant, I pulled the trigger on the pistol. He shrieked, as it wasn’t a clean shot, and I pulled the trigger again, silencing him for good.


    The whole world was whirling by now. It seemed ridiculous, but after all that fight, all the care to keep myself alive, I simply tried to pry myself away from him and fell off the cliff. One moment I was staggering away from a rain-soaked corpse, the next I was on my way to becoming one.


    On the crumbly ground my foot slipped and I was dropping through the air, cloak flapping crazily around me. For a brief moment, my mind was clear of all curses and pain. In that moment, it was a joy to fly without the need of wings. The wind all around me, falling like the rain.


    Then I hit a projection and bounced off. Everything flashed black and red before I smacked the rocks at the bottom.


    Was I dead as soon as I hit the rocks? I’m not sure. There seemed to have been an interim of darkness in which I knew nothing. It was like a long, restless sleep when you’re worried about waking up and being sick or in pain once it stops. The surprising thing was, I was neither. All feeling of pain or discomfort was gone.


    A sort of blue light seemed to surround my mind. I heard the words of the witch repeated softly, like a dying echo,“may your death be long, until you pay full score for your evil ways!”


    But, all things taken into account, I had died fairly quickly. The elixir, mixing with the curse, bent it in strange ways. Instead of dying slowly, my time in death, but on terra-firma, will be long. Until I can pay off my evil ways, I suppose.


    I opened my eyes and stood upright. It was a drifting movement, like a man swimming. It took me a moment to realize that my body had not come with me. Looking back, I saw it laying on the ground. The cloak was a little cut up and rumpled from my previous adventures. It was rather pitiful, really. My body looked like an old, black sack someone had discarded. One boot was missing and a foot showed pale and wet in the rain.


    I drifted around a little, floating to the top of the cliff to watch the thugs find their comrade’s body. They took in the whole scene and were not sure if I had escaped unscathed, or fallen over the cliff. Cursing the rain and the darkness, they decided to come back in the morning to find out. They picked up their pal’s body between them and moved off, leaving my sword lying in the mud behind.


    It was a strange feeling, to be without a body. I was like driving home to find that there was no house there anymore, or eating something without tasting it. I drifted around, looked at the wet brush and trees, came back to inspect my corpse dispassionately, found where my other boot had gone and, well, simply moped about.


    It took me a while to figure out that, with an effort, I could touch things. If I concentrated very hard, I found that I could actually see my hands, like a pale blue mist, and use them to grasp objects. Leaning down, I took a glove from my corpse (he wouldn’t need it any more) and slipped it on one of the ghostly hands. There always was a little magic in that cloak and suit of clothes. The glove stayed on even when I didn’t think about it. Feeling a little ashamed to leave myself naked to the world, I stripped the body and dressed my new, empty form. The clothes seemed to weigh me down, so that I stood on the ground like a normal person and could even move like one with little effort.


    I didn’t like to see my body laying there, wet and pale with no one at home, so I picked it up and carried it off to a convenient spot for buriel. By morning, there was no trace of my having fallen from the cliff. It had stopped raining, leaving the sky smeared and overcast. I stood looking down at the rough grave I had made for my mortal remains, feeling depressed. With a wispy sigh, I trudged away.


    That is just about the end of the story of my death. Chuck figured I had killed his henchman and escaped alive, returning later to retrieve my sword. It was true, I did get the blade back, but not as a living man.


    I’m still uncertain if a ghost can travel dimensions. I haven’t tried it yet. I’ve wandered this world for two years, and just now come back to Lansteer. My intention was simply to pay respects at my grave. An understandable weakness.


    But Charles Feltman had been waiting, hoping that I would come back into town so that he could pay me back for the mistake I made in the Duke’s castle two years ago. He attacked me first. I suppose I could have just let the bullets go through me and walked away. But old habits die hard. Harder than a fragile human body, apparently.