Ch. 10: You will lose

Wyland tapped his pencil impatiently on Dr. John Brands desk, as he hungrily stuffed a donut down his throat. The pencil eraser made little scuff marks on the brilliant sheen of the Mahogany desk. The donut left crumbs on the grey carpet, and on Wyland's shirt. 

He was staring at Sofia and Jonathan through the office glass as they finished talking to John. Sofia was looking better now, though she still had the look of one who really needs to head home and pour herself a stiff drink. 

Jonathan looked grim and defiant, and a bit confused. The rest of the meeting with Wyland was already fading from his memory. It was a jumbled, rambling session of mostly jibberish, and impassioned pleas from Wyland to remember things he couldn't even know how to speak if he did remember them. How does one speak such a noise? Were there words, or just the noise? Had he spoke them to Wyland? Why was Wyland looking at him with such a look of concern? Jonathan's brain felt like gritty mush.

Sofia nodded in agreement to some unknown statement from John, shook his hand, and they turned towards the door.

Wyland stared at her butt on the way out, appreciating the way the conservative grey skirt and pumps shaped her cheeks and forced each one up, then back down in an alternating rhythm as she strode out. 

John walked into his office and brushed some tiny piece of lint from the breast of his very expensive suit, and said "So, Blake, whatd'ya think?"

With a very serious, almost innocent face, Wyland replied, "well, she's a lovely lady." John let out a guffaw. Snickering, he said "I agree, not that it'll matter to you. I was talking about the case."

Wyland tried to ignore the slight insult, although he knew John was right, and he tried to scrunch up his face until it was stern throughout. He was breathing heavily, and his brow was furrowed in anger. The two men looked at each other, John standing and smiling, Wyland sitting and frowning. 

Wyland relented and looked away, then sighed, then looked back into John's eyes and said, with as much pleading as possible, "why did you give me this case? This might be a winnable case."

John casually strode to his executive leather chair, pulled it out silently, and sat down, also silently. Then he said "just like in England, right? The magistrates wouldn't even look at it, the media were the only people listening, and they were just speculating the whole time. I expect the same here, except we already have the gag order, so no media to worry about." John was still smiling.

Wyland, still pleading, "But if I do get before a judge..."

"Then, you will lose." John's face was suddenly stone. 

Wyland's face went beet-red, and he slapped his hand on the desk, palm down, as hard as he could. His palm suddenly started to sting, but it didn't matter, he was angry. "Damn it, John! No bullshit! Why would anybody need to lose this case?!? Blaise is a worthless pile of crap, there's no need to protect him!"

John looked down, his voice now sputtering against Wyland's anger. "I...I... there's, well...uh." He had never seen Wyland this upset. He laughed lightly and blinked rapidly while staring off into space. He finally replied, himself now pleading, "there are larger considerations here. We don't care about Blaise at all. We just can't have a precedent go the wrong way. There's too much on the line. The First Amendment, for starters. The danger to corporations, the reinterpretation of libel suits, national security... I mean, fuck, man! Think of how we would have to deal with hear-say if this went through?! And you know every jackass whose grandma died in some weird way would cry 'curse'."

Wyland's face was now covered in an angry sweat, and he was livid. He stood up now, leaning over the desk, and shouted "that's bullshit and you know it! This is goddamned murder, and it's provable!"

The rest of the office had gathered around John's office, drawn by the commotion and the unfamiliar sound of Wyland screaming. John tried waving them away with his hands. Wyland ignored them, and stared at John, trying to burn a hole right through John's soul with his own eyes, as if that might uncover the truth.

John rubbed his eyes and lowered his voice. "Alright, alright. Calm down, there's still more. You know cases are routed to us by powerful interests. This is the same story as before, we give you the case, you sincerely defend it, and you lose in the end. We need plausible deniability from anyone who looks at you in the courtroom. You have to try and win this, but we also know you will lose. That's why were paying you to do this, and it goes high up, trust me. I'll double your hourly, and full expenses. You have to do this."

Silence penetrated the room as Wyland leaned back, still angry, but the wind was knocked out of his sails. John, in a quiet, calming voice, said "Look, Wy..." 

John never called him "Wy." 

Soberly, he looked at Wyland. "It must have occurred to you the other reason we gave you this case." Wyland's head cocked sideways in confusion. "I've seen your record. I'm one of the few who has. I've seen you in court. You're a good lawyer from the outside. There is no good reason why you lose every single goddamned case. Some of your older stuff, the defendants could have won by defending themselves, while drunk; While fucking the god-damned judge's daughter right in front of him on the bench, they could have won. But by having you defend them, they lost." 

"Every. Single. Time." He emphasized this with a closed fist pounding the table to the rhythm of the syllables.

John laughed softly and shook his head. "I mean, c'mon, man, you can't get a woman to save your life, despite health, wealth and OK looks. You can't win a case. That time, in Vegas, you dropped two hundred dollars on nickel slots without winning once."

A deeper silence now. The cool hum of the air conditioning was the only sound the men could hear. Tears started welling up in Wyland's eyes. 

John now spoke in a whisper. "Me... the partners and I gave you this case, because we want you to crack it. We need you to lose, and you will, but there's something else there. You are of great value to us for losing cases, but don't you think, maybe..."

He rubbed his eyes, again, looked right at Wyland, leaned towards his face, and as calmly as possible, said, "Don't you think, I say this as a friend, Wy, that maybe something similar is your problem? Maybe this is a curse?"

Wyland stared at John, dumbfounded. It had crossed his mind, but to hear someone say it out loud... he shook his head. Nothing matched, it was all confusion and hear-say. Wyland was still alive, he never heard or felt anything like what Jonathan, or Dick Yarrow, or the Duke of Northstead reported. How could he have been cursed?

But then again, it had all started suddenly. He had been an A student his first two years of law school, and had no trouble with women. And then, everything changed. He failed two classes the following year. His girlfriend, whom he had hoped to one day marry, dumped him and refused to speak to him ever again. He hadn't ever won a case, and failed the bar before passing it with a bit of "help". Now, he had trouble even convincing a prostitute to sleep with him. Why? What changed?

Old memories, faces, test sheets, smiles from pretty young women, congratulatory praise from professors, then, one failure after another after another.  All this went though his mind as he sat staring at John with a stupidly bovine look on his face. A tear fell off the tip of his nose. 

"I..." Wyland forced out a choked response, "I'm going to England."

Wyland got up and left the office.

Ch.9: Right 'n fair

Stephen McAlerod sat lonely in the large, yellow earthmover that earned his pay. The day was done, his last 30 tons of stone dumped near the crusher, and the tractor powered down, sputtering and wavering to a stop as the last of the fuel in the engine was messily burnt. 

He slowly removed his hard hat, exposing the curly reddish-blond hair underneath. His freckled face, hair, short stature and oddly mixed north-south UK accent made him appear to all as a real life, red-headed stepchild. He was an easy man to make fun of.

He pulled off his hearing protection, and popped the earbuds out of his ear. The silence was a welcome relief after 8 hours of blasting music over the drone of the old diesel engine and spotty transmission that would hum and rumble even through the large earmuff protectors that he wore. Stephen suspected that the vibrations were hitting his eardrum from the base of his skull, as he could hear it even over music turned all the way up. He wasn't, of course, allowed to listen to music during his shift, but balls to that. The job would have been completely unbearable if not for the music. 

Really, the job was still completely unbearable. It wasn't the monotony, or the constant noise, or the dreary, grey, drab Scottish sky that hung over the quarry like a nice day in purgatory. It wasn't the mud, or the pay, or the uncomfortable truck seat, or even the idiot, hypocrite, hippy protesters outside the quarry, standing on roads that this mine had built from the bones of the earth. His co-workers made it unbearable. A loutish lot of toothless imbeciles, they were. Brash and boorish, stupid beyond all reckoning, and loud. But they were also vicious and mean, and they stuck together, and they hated Stephen. Stephen was an outsider, and had cemented his status as an outsider early on, by cold cocking an annoying young man named Crom after he made a particularly rude comment about his mother.

They had taunted him relentlessly. He had hoped the move would establish respect and fear; get them to back off a bit. He wagered that these sorts of people would take note of that sort of thing, kind of like in prison. It had worked during his school years. He was short, but strong and stocky, and desperate to prove he was not to be trifled with. 

He miscalculated horribly. 

The whole lot of them had intensified their attacks as a result. Crom was more powerful than he had guessed. Now, every couple days, as he stepped out of his tent in the morning, he would find a dead animal. Not just dead, but mutilated beyond recognition, cut specifically through the innards to smell terrible. In the mess hall, they would throw food at him. Pudding cups, spoonfuls of spaghetti sauce, the messier, the better. The cook had taken pity on him, and now served him dinner in his tent. They had taken to calling him Pecker-nump, which should have been a relatively benign insult, but they said it with a joyful malice that always surprised him.

Two subsequent fights, one of them hospitalizing a young lad named "Dilly", had convinced him of his course of action. He feared retribution. He knew it wouldn't get better. He had to quit. The job sucked anyway. He would move south, see his mum, and find a new job. 

He sighed deeply, opened the door, and trundled slowly down the ladder of the truck. The job site was empty. The wet mud squished softly under his heavy boots, and made a squishy noise in the moist, sullen air.

Good, he thought. I'll just clock out, pack up, and go. 

He got back to camp as dusk was settling in, after the quarter mile walk from the quarry to the barracks. He hoped the cook had left him some food, as it was another mile walk to the bus station in Lanark, and he was hungry.

The barracks ground was also empty. He thought nothing of it until he reached the tent camps on the far side. There was nobody around. He wondered if he had missed a company meeting or something...

As he rounded a larger 10-man tent on the way to his own small tent, he heard behind him, "Oy, Pecka."

Stephen swiveled around, his arm high to deflect an incoming blow. The blow never came. It was Crom's older brother, Oliver, standing in the shadow behind the big tent, far out of range to hit Stephen. Stephen froze in fear. He must have a gun, then. Oliver stepped out of the shadows holding only a 2x4. Stephen, relieved momentarily, just wanted to leave in peace.

Stephen backed up apace with Oliver, towards his tent. He said, almost shouting to the night air, "Ya got me, boys. I give. Imma leave t'night. I swear t'ya."

Oliver, equally loudly, replied, "An' we jus' gonna let ya' go, aight? Afta' all'n ya did ta Crom and Dilly?"

Stephen, quieter now, responded "T'was only right 'n fair."

In the fading light, Stephen could see Oliver smile his scraggly toothed smile. Several more men who had obviously been hiding in the big tent, stepped out behind Oliver. 

As the men closed ranks in front of Stephen, Oliver said "Right 'n fair ain't 'dis world, ya fuckin' keech."

Just then, Stephen felt something cold and metal hit him hard in the back of the knees, and felt his legs buckle, then felt his head hit the soft, wet dirt. 

As Stephen opened his eyes, Crom now stood over his head, smiling a sinister grin with a crowbar in his hands. His smile was missing a front tooth, a tooth that Stephen had knocked out of his face. The other men now crowded around him, silent, with Oliver at his feet. 

Stephen, the fear slowly leaving him and replaced by an impotent defiance,  looked up angrily at Crom. "So now what, Crommy, ya gonna kill me?" he sneered.

Crom leaned his crowbar against the ground near Stephen's face, casually putting his weight upon it. He pulled out a crumpled piece of paper and opened it. He then spat square in Stephen's face, smiled even broader, and in his annoyingly nasal voice, said, "Naw, Pecker-nump, we ain't here ta kill ya. We jus' gonna 'ave a lil' talk is all, ta send ya on ya merry way. The boy's is here to, uh, ensure you listen. Right 'n fair, I say."

The other men chuckled ominously.

Ch. 8: Growling through a rag

Wyland asked Jonathan to wait a few minutes and then come into his office. He seemed more than happy to comfort his mom out in the waiting room. He also seemed suspicious that Wyland would put him through the ringer, probably rightly so, based on what Sofia looked like when she came out.

Wyland went through his notes again as they waited. Recorded statements from 15 witnesses to the curse, and none of them matched. Sofia's recitation of the curse matched exactly what she had said earlier in her written testimony. The police report matched her story of the altercation. But the boy wasn't part of any of the written testimony. His name was mentioned as having been there, but not as an eyewitness. Wyland hadn't considered talking to him before today.

He shuffled his papers, and went through each witnesses' statement of the curse:

"By the fires of Hades, I condemn your soul to hell fire. May you never feel the warmth of Christ's love." This was the curse, as heard from an obviously devout christian.

"From the cold void, may you never find peace. May your legacy rot to dust, and may those you love forget your name." An atheist, perhaps?

"I hope you rot in prison like the filth you are. I wish all the evils that men do, they do upon you, for all the remaining days of your miserable, little life." A pragmatic curse, but also one of the coldest and meanest versions of the curse, in Wyland's opinion.

One was in Spanish. Heard, as it were, by a Mexican expatriate named Miguel and translated thus: "All of your family will dis-own you. Your ancestors will not know you, and you will live in no home, not in this life, or afterwards." Wyland suspected the translation left holes in the true meaning. Oddly, however, he insisted that he heard the curse in his native tongue.

One just read: "Fuck you. Fuck you in the ass with a cactus." This from a teenaged boy, obviously with little existential dread. To a kid like that, what could be worse than getting fucked in the ass with a cactus?

And so on they went, each seeming to be a reflection of the fears of the listener, rather than the actual curse, as described from the sparse information of the London affair and the ridiculously obscure medieval texts he'd found. Wyland's hope was fading, he began to fear that maybe this was just a random unfortunate coincidence. Or at the very least, it could not be shown in court to have been the cause of Dick's gruesome demise. But Jonathan might still be the key here. Wyland tapped on the glass and waved Jonathan into his office.

Jonathan entered with trepidation, unsure, it seemed, of why he was even there. Wyland attempted a comforting smile and softly told Jonathan, "come in and have a seat." Jonathan looked at him as though a snake had just smiled and talked to him. 

Wyland continued "I don't need as complete a testimonial from you as from your mother. It was... a difficult thing for her to recite again. However, you haven't been interviewed for this, have you?"

"No. I wasn't in the room."

"But you did hear it, and your mother says you were out of sorts for the next few days. Presumably, as a result of this."

Jonathan's gaze tightened, his young face showing where the lines of pain and age would slowly appear. "I'm fine. It was nothing."

Wyland again attempted a comforting smile, though again it seemed to have no effect on the boy. "Where were you then?" 

"At the party? I was outside, playing with... a girl. We were having a water fight. Um, balloons and a squirt gun. It was a hot day."

"A girl? Who? Blaise's daughter was the only girl around your age there, yes?" As Wyland said this, he felt a little like a proud father, prodding his son about girls.

"Yes." Jonathan said sheepishly, as though he were Wyland's son and didn't want him to know what girls he was hanging out with.

"Have you seen her since?"

"No." His eyes left Wyland's gaze, and Wyland could tell he was lying. Wyland cracked a light smile, and shrugged it off. "It's not important. What's important is, I need to know what you heard Blaise say."

"I heard Blaise yelling, but didn't think anything about it. It was a party, and Blaise is a noisy guy. But then, I heard gunshots and screaming coming from the house. I ran inside, and then it got cold, like opening the freezer on a hot day, a blast of bitter cold air. Like..." He stared at the wall for a moment... "Like Minnesota winter cold. The coldest thing I've ever felt. There's not even any air conditioning in that house. I was in the landing, the, uh, like, mud room, and I got scared and froze up."

Wyland's left eyebrow pitched up when he heard that. "A deep, biting sensation of cold" was a description he had heard before. As soon as he felt the look of surprise on his own face, he tried to regain his stern but friendly lawyer face. "And then?"

"And then I heard Blaise say something. It was strange, like someone growling through a rag. It was a scary sound. Like a wild animal or something."

Wyland stopped him by putting up his hand, palm facing the table, to emphasize his words. "It's very important that you tell me exactly what you heard next. Exactly."

Jonathan just looked at him blankly. "I... I don't know. It was mostly in a foreign language." 

The hair on the back of Wyland's neck stood up, and a chill ran down his spine.