Games Creatures Play

  Atheena could run.

  BELL, BOOK, AND CANDLEPIN

  TONI L. P. KELNER

  Though Toni L. P. Kelner is not a native New Englander, she has grown fond of candlepin bowling since moving to Massachusetts. Not that she’s any better at the game than she is at ten-pin bowling—she’s no good at any sport—but at least she isn’t as likely to drop the ball on her foot. Games Creatures Play is the sixth anthology she’s coedited with Charlaine Harris, and this story is her second about the Allaway Kith of Salem, Massachusetts. Kelner won the Agatha Award for Best Short Story, and other stories have been nominated for the Anthony, the Macavity, and the Derringer. Under her own name, she’s the author of the “Where Are They Now?” Mysteries and the Laura Fleming series, and as Leigh Perry, she writes the Family Skeleton Mysteries.

  I should have noticed the curse as soon as I walked into the Candlepin Castle, but it’s not like I’ve got a lot of experience with evil spells. Or with any spells. I’m Elspeth Allaway, and we witches of the Allaway Kith don’t wave wands or spout magic words. We have Affinities. Sure, all of us can sense magic and smell lies, but the big action is in Affinities, and each one is different, as if we were a magical Legion of Superheroes. My mother can weave emotions into rugs and blankets, and my cousin Maura’s thing is absorbing energy via phones. Another cousin is the Pied Piper of plants—I’ve seen vines reach for her when she walks by. My own Affinity was what was responsible for my being so eager to get to work that I didn’t notice the curse.

  Well, that and being pissed at my mother. She’d called just as I was heading out the door and had ripped me a new one. Oh, she hadn’t yelled or screamed—I’d have preferred it if she had. Instead she used that calm, even tone of hers to tell me how disappointed she was that I’d used my Affinity in a non-life-affirming way the previous weekend. It hadn’t been that big a deal, just a little prank, but she’d found out somehow—I was guessing my perfect cousin Ennis was behind it. Anyway, Mom decided I needed a refresher course in the Law of Return, as if she hadn’t started brainwashing me the second after the midwife slapped me on the butt, and she ended up lecturing me for fifteen solid minutes. After that I was jonesing for some serious decibels.

  See, my Affinity is for sound. I can block it in like a set of noise-canceling headphones or go the other way and amplify better than any woofer or tweeter ever made. I also collect sounds—from voices to squeaky doors to musical notes to sound effects—and then replay those sounds at any volume from subliminal to ear-shattering. This lets me play great jokes or perform immature stunts, depending on whether you laugh at fart noises.

  I like being around noise any time, but when I’m upset, nothing soothes me like a little cacophony. Hence my pleasure at arriving for my shift at the Candlepin Castle, West Sommers’s premier candlepin bowling alley. In fact, it’s West Sommers’s only candlepin bowling alley, but that’s no reason to abandon a semi-decent slogan. The pay is lousy and the hours are worse, and I don’t even particularly like bowling, but you can’t beat the noise. Balls crashing into the pins, bowlers cheering for their strikes or yelling at those last two pins to fall over even though it never works, the ball return smacking the balls together, and people talking over everything else. On weekends, you get loud music on top of that, and we host an awful lot of kids’ birthday parties. That makes it heaven to those who prefer the noise-seeking lifestyle.

  Somebody who’d never played might think the candlepin style of bowling New Englanders prefer would be quieter than ten-pin, but it’s a trade-off. The balls are smaller, only about four and a half inches in diameter, but since they don’t have finger holes, you get that satisfying thunk of solid balls. The pins are smaller, too, but the machines don’t clear them away between the balls, so that gives an extra dollop of sound. Best of all, each bowler gets three balls in a box, which means more collisions for me to savor.

  Since I’d had exams all week, I hadn’t worked since the previous Saturday, so I paused just inside the door to soak in some of the glory. Though it was early in the evening and there wasn’t much business, the Castle is a barn of a building, with creaking floors and echoes and clanking ball returns. I’d figured being a few more minutes late wouldn’t matter, but my manager Amar really gave me the stink-eye as I clocked in.

  I took a look at the schedule posted by the time clock and was glad to see that I’d be working the counter with Jake while Rayleigh and Belle had the snack bar. Rayleigh and Belle are fine, but they’ve been BFFs since kindergarten and when I work with either of them, they always seem vaguely disappointed that I don’t know all their in-jokes. Jake and I, on the other hand, have our own in-jokes.

  With Amar on duty, that was more people than we usually needed for a Thursday night, but we had a league championship scheduled.

  With one thing and another, it was probably fifteen minutes after five when I joined Jake at the front counter, where he was spraying disinfectant into rental shoes.

  “Hey. What’s up?”

  “You’re late,” he said.

  I looked around the Castle. There was one lone family foursome on lane one, and maybe half a dozen pair of shoes still needed to be sprayed. “Dude, you could handle this in a coma.”

  “That’s not the point, Elspeth!”

  “Okay, I’m sorry.” With anybody else, I’d have snapped back, but I’m usually willing to give Jake the benefit of the doubt. Werewolves get touchy at that time of the month. “Full moon coming?”

  “Stupid much? It’s just past the new moon. I’d think a witch would pay attention.”

  “Dude!” He and I were the only arcane types working at the Castle, and as far as we knew, the only ones at Cassidy College. We’d sniffed each other out during freshman orientation—literally, in Jake’s case—and had been buds ever since. Normally that friendship included not mentioning each other’s unusual abilities, but Jake seemed to have forgotten. Fortunately no other employees were close enough to hear, and the members of the foursome were squabbling too enthusiastically to hear anybody else. “If the moon isn’t calling, why are you being such a butt?”

  When he turned away from the shoes to glare at me, I felt his magic rising and could see his outlines start to blur, as if he were about to change into a wolf right in front of me. Then he took a deep breath and settled back into his usual lanky, gray-eyed, messy-haired self.

  “Sorry,” he said. “It’s been a lousy couple of days. Hell, it’s been a lousy week!”

  “What’s been going on?”

  “All manner of crap. Amar got mad at Theresa Monday night and fired her in the middle of her shift. He said she was skimming from the cash register.”

  “Was she?”

  “Maybe, but it wasn’t cool to fire her in public like that. Then some douchebag accused us of rigging the scoring system. The man can’t bowl for beans, and he blames us.”

  “Typical.”

  “On Tuesday, two guys in the Seniors League got into a fight over interference, and we had to call the cops.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Neither guy would back down, even when the cops handcuffed them, but once they got outside and realized they were on their way to jail, they calmed down. Nobody pressed charges or anything.”

  “That’s good. The last thing the Castle needs is players getting arrested.”

  “It gets worse. Last night there were two more fights—one started while the cops were on the way to deal with the first one. By the time it was all settled, the cops were making noises about shutting us down.”

  “Can they do that?”

  “If they can’t, the lawsuit might.”

  “What lawsuit?”

  “A kid got his finger smashed in the ball return, and his mother is threatening to sue.”

  “That’s insane.”

  “Then this afternoon, there were two birthday parties booked, and both birthda
y kids wanted the unicorn party room. Not only were the kids screaming, but I thought their fathers were going to throw down in front of them. So yeah, everybody is in a pissy mood. If it were up to me, I’d cancel tonight’s championship, but you know Amar doesn’t care about my opinion.” His voice started to rise again. “Nobody listens to me!”

  “Jeez, Jake!” I said. What was he sniping at me for? I hadn’t even been there, so none of it was my fault. And why was everybody acting like it was such a big deal for me to be a couple of minutes late? Maybe I should just walk out and let Jake work the counter by himself. Wouldn’t it be funny if he lost it, went furry, and clawed up everybody in the place?

  That’s when I stopped myself. Not even in my most warped vengeful daydreams did I think it would be a hoot for a werewolf to attack innocent people, let alone what being found out would do to Jake and the rest of his Pack.

  At last my magic-sensing kicked in, and I realized that something was seriously wrong. Not trusting myself to speak, I walked out from behind the counter and went through the front door and into the parking lot. Everything was normal, a little too quiet for my tastes, but good for most people.

  I stepped back inside and felt myself growing agitated and angry. Out again. Calm. Inside. Bitchy.

  That settled it.

  I went back behind the counter, where Jake was spraying the last pair of shoes. Nobody was within range, but I used my Affinity to block anybody from hearing us—Jake calls it creating a cone of silence from some movie he saw. “We’ve got a problem. We’ve been cursed.”

  “Yeah, cursed by idiots,” he snarled.

  “No, I mean the Castle is under a curse.”

  “For real? Is that why we’ve had all these disasters?”

  “And why you’ve been such a jerkface.”

  “I have not been—”

  “Would you mind aiming the spray somewhere else?”

  He looked at his hand as if he’d forgotten he was still holding the can of disinfectant, and carefully put it onto a shelf. “I guess I have been kind of an asshole. So is this curse like a spell? You told me you guys don’t do spells?”

  “We don’t, but other witches can.”

  “Can you do a counterspell?”

  “No spells, remember? And I don’t think any of us Allaways have an anti-curse Affinity, even if there were any nearby.” My family lived in Salem, Massachusetts—which is both funny and appropriate—but I go to college in West Sommers, which is a three-hour drive in good traffic. “Do you know anything about cursing?”

  “According to my Pack, more than I should.”

  I resisted the urge to snipe at him for being a smart-ass, figuring my irritation was probably the curse affecting me. “I’ve never run into one before—”

  “Then how do you know it’s a curse?”

  “Go outside for a minute.”

  He looked skeptical, but he did it. Then he did it again before coming back to the counter. “Man, curses suck. So what do we do?”

  “No idea.”

  He continued to look at me expectantly.

  I sighed. “I guess I can call my aunt Hester after work. She knows a lot of things.” She was the logical one to consult, but I was hoping I’d come up with a different plan before end of shift.

  On lane one, the foursome’s quarrel came to a head. The parents started screaming at each other as the smaller boy tackled the larger one and started pummeling him.

  “On second thought,” I said, “why don’t I call Aunt Hester right now while you take care of that?”

  Castle employees aren’t supposed to make personal calls on the clock, and I didn’t want to try to explain to Amar how talking to my aunt was actually work-related, so I took my cell phone into the staff bathroom. It’s more private than the customer facilities and usually cleaner.

  “Aunt Hester? This is Elspeth.”

  “Hello, dear. I’ve been waiting for you to call.”

  Aunt Hester is actually my great-great-aunt, and she creeps me out. Her Affinity is to see the future and she tends to rub it in. I’ve always wondered if she ever exaggerates how much she sees. I mean, how would I know if she was really expecting my call?

  As if to stomp out my doubts, she said, “So you’ve got a curse. Nasty things, aren’t they?”

  I told her what was going on, and she told me as much as she was willing to. The thing about Aunt Hester is that she never tells everything she knows, which drives me nuts. It’s a game of I’ve Got a Secret that never ends.

  When I’d gotten all I was going to get, I said, “Thanks for the info. I’ll call later to let you know how things turn out.”

  “I already know, dear. You better go now. Your friend is quite upset.”

  That was when Rayleigh from the snack bar burst into the bathroom, bawling like crazy.

  I should have checked to see what her deal was, but crying is one noise I can do without. Besides, I figured that whatever she was crying about, it was likely another example of the curse at work, so it would be better to get back to Jake to make sure he was holding on to both his temper and his human form.

  The fighting foursome had left, I was glad to see, so I didn’t bother with the cone of silence. Jake was growling about some shoes that had been placed in the wrong slots, though not much more than usual. I exerted just a bit of my Affinity to conjure a creeper hiss from the game Minecraft right behind him, which usually gets a snicker. Today, he just looked impatient.

  “Well?” he demanded.

  “Aunt Hester said that it sounds like a Perturbatio curse, which messes with our emotions. It doesn’t create meanness, but it does intensify any bit of nastiness you’ve already got. So instead of being a little irritated when somebody is late, you get uber huffy.”

  “Come on, Elspeth! I’m under a curse. You can’t hold what I do under a curse against me.”

  “You’re right. The curse is just making me bitchy.” He looked suspicious, so I kept going. “At least we don’t have to worry about the roof falling in or the ball return throwing balls at our customers.”

  “What about the kid who got his finger caught?”

  “Kids do that all the time. Maybe the curse intensified his tendency to stick his finger where it doesn’t belong, or his mother’s being sick of watching him every second. Besides, from what you said, it wasn’t the finger that was the problem. It was the reaction that was way out of whack.”

  “You got that right. The woman was so mad I thought she was going to have a stroke. So how do we stop a curse?”

  “If we’re lucky, there’s a cursed item hidden somewhere in the Castle.”

  “You’ve got a strange idea of lucky.”

  “If it’s an amulet or something, all we have to do is find it and either destroy it or put it someplace where it won’t bother anybody until the magic wears off.” Aunt Hester had used that as an excuse for the day’s second lecture on the Law of Return. As if I’d been seriously planning to put a cursed item under the bed of an ex-roommate who’d regularly eaten all my Cheerios and borrowed my clothes without asking.

  “What if we’re not lucky?” Jake asked.

  “She said, and I quote, ‘Oh, I can’t break a curse, dear. If it were me, I’d just wait it out.’”

  “That’s it?”

  “Pretty much.” Okay, she had said some other stuff, but nothing that Jake needed to know. Still, I was glad it was witches who could smell lies and not werewolves, so he wouldn’t notice that I’d left a detail or two out.

  “Then let’s hope we’re lucky. How do we find the amulet or whatever it is?”

  “That’s where you come in, bloodhound boy.” Even in human form, other than when lies were involved, Jake’s sense of smell had mine beat by a mile.

  “Man, I spend half my time trying not to inhale in this place. You have no idea how ran
k those rental shoes smell to me, and the nachos in the snack bar aren’t much better.”

  “Sorry. I can’t try to sense it because the whole building is affected. I could wander around and see where I’m most pissed off, but—”

  “Never mind. What does it smell like?”

  “Corruption and evil.”

  He gave me a look.

  “That’s what Aunt Hester said! Just see if you can smell anything more disgusting than the shoes.”

  Under the pretense of emptying trash cans, Jake spent the next half an hour wandering around the Castle, but he was shaking his head when he came back.

  “Nada.”

  “Did you check everywhere? The party rooms? The bathrooms? The trophy case?”

  “I even sniffed our balls.”

  “Don’t all werewolves do that?” I really shouldn’t have said that to a guy under a curse, especially when I’d forgotten to put the cone of silence back up, but it just came out.

  Fortunately, he laughed and unlike crying, laughter is a sound I like. I thought I felt the curse lift a little, just for a second, but it sprang back like a mystical rubber band.

  That’s probably why the other Castle employees looked at us as if we were crazy before going back to their curse-caused crankiness.

  Jake said, “That means the building itself is cursed, right?”

  “Which means we get to wait for it to wear off.”

  “How long will that take?”

  “Aunt Hester says it depends on the experience of the practitioner, the strength of the motive for the curse, the phase of the moon . . .”

  “She doesn’t know?”

  If she did, she wasn’t telling, but I didn’t tell Jake that. Nor did I tell him that he’d wasted half an hour sniffing when Aunt Hester must have known there was no cursed item. Getting him mad would only give the curse more ammunition to work with. “She did say that curses start out weak, grow stronger until they reach a peak, and then fade at that same rate.” Extra casually, I said, “Didn’t you say that things started to go bad on Monday?”