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Tabs brushed against her ankles in a pattern of figure eights.
“What do you think, Tabs?” Devra whispered, conflicting emotions twisting inside her. “Should we let him in?”
The cat meowed.
“Of course you’d think that, traitor. What about you, Squally?”
“The current temperature is minus ten degrees Celsius. Are you having a good day, Devra?”
“I didn’t ask you for a weather report. I asked if we should let him in.”
“Let who in?”
“Bradley.”
“Bradley! Your friend who speaks very quickly and likes chocolate- covered strawberries.”
“Yes, yes, that’s him. I’m not asking you who he is. I’m asking you if I should let him in.” The excitement of him. The risk of him.
Squally’s face began to twirl as it struggled to process the request.
Bradley knocked again, and Devra’s pulse pounded to the rhythm. “Why is your response taking so long? Please don’t tell me there’s another bug in your conversational algorithms. What do you think? Yes or no, Squally?”
“Based on the information I’ve compiled from the internet so far, I would not recommend opening the door if Bradley is (a) a loan shark, (b) an ex-partner after a night of drinking, (c) a serial killer, (d) a—”
“Oh, never mind.”
Bradley shouted from the other side of the door, “You’ll never believe what I’ve found.”
Perhaps it was curiosity that lifted her from the office chair. Or perhaps it was the awareness that the past few years spent using every free hour of every free day trying to turn Squally into what it could never truly be simply wasn’t as gratifying as the past few days she’d spent talking to a kind man who made her laugh.
Either way, she stood up and opened the door.
Bradley burst in. Books and notepads and file folders were haphazardly pressed against his chest. A few loose pieces of paper fell onto the ground as he bustled over the threshold as if late for a scheduled meeting. His blond hair, which usually held a tousled bed-head look, was now reaching mad-scientist levels of messy, strands sticking out every which way.
“Bradley, what are you—?”
He brushed right past her and into the living room, where he dropped the books and folders onto the floor. He knelt beside them and started to organize the documents into piles in a jerky, slightly unhinged manner.
“Bradley,” she repeated. “Are you okay? What is all this?”
“So there’s this man down in Iowa State,” he began, speaking full speed ahead, “perfectly healthy for forty-two years, reckless driver, texting, drinking, you know how it goes, ends up causing a fatal car accident, gets off with a manslaughter charge, rich guy, two years’ time served. As soon as he’s released, he develops this awful skin condition. Rashes, pustules. Doctors diagnose it as a form of eczema, but you can tell from the pictures”—he flipped to a dog-eared page in a dark-brown, almost woody-looking book and held up the ugly image—“it clearly wasn’t eczema. Anyway, turns out one of the women who died in the crash was a practicing witch, part of some nasty coven that was less about reclaiming feminine power and more about enacting revenge.”
Before Devra could think to respond, Bradley dropped the book and continued.
“Then there was this woman whose father passed away.” He flopped open a file folder and started flipping pages. “The father was a bit of a recluse, had these wild ideas that made the family take a step away from him. Took them three days to discover he’d died inside his home. Natural causes, they say, but the family never did an autopsy, so who really knows—”
“Bradley—”
“Right, not important. So, okay, the daughter ends up tasked with going through the man’s house after he dies. She sorts through his personal effects and ends up taking a fancy-looking watch for herself as a keepsake. The very next day, she begins experiencing a series of misfortunes. A smashed window, a brush with a speeding car, a broken finger, day after day, month after month. Once, she fell into a hole in her backyard, twisted her ankle up fierce. But she swore there was no hole there before. It just appeared, like maybe a blast of rain concentrated all its power into that one spot and then lured her outside to rescue a chair cushion by blowing it off her deck for the sole purpose of—”
“Bradley,” Devra shouted. “Slow down. What are you going on about?”
He jerked his head up. His eyes were glassy. “Curses, Devra. I’m talking about curses. Hundreds of them.” He waved his hands at the books, the stacks of paper, the scribbled notes and scanned images. “Maybe thousands. I found this self-published audio documentary that goes through mystical case reports and their supporting evidence. It was incredibly compelling. So I kept digging. Which led me to this site on the dark web—didn’t even know what that was until yesterday—Ms. Esmerelda’s Odd and Wonderful Things. To the untrained eye, it’s just a bit of entertainment. At worst, it’s a woman’s delusions. But I have police reports. Clippings from newspapers. Pictures. Witness accounts. It’s all right here.”
Devra’s head was still trying to catch up, but her voice warbled with understanding. “What…what are you saying?”
“I’m saying some of these stories are verifiable, Devra. I’m saying…” For the first time since he’d entered her home, he slowed down. He met her gaze fully. “I’m saying I think curses are real.”
