A Curse, A Key, & A Corkscrew: Rhymes with Witch, #1

Chapter 1

Joan Sinclair turned the key over in her hand. She turned it over again, then tossed it into the air. As she reached to catch it, it awkwardly bounced off the side of her palm and clattered to the metal lab table in front of her. Yeah, that seemed about right. She left it where it was, staring at it as she chewed on the tip of her thumb.

It was a skeleton key — not an ornate object that you could imagine opening a pirate chest or the perfumed boudoir of a Victorian courtesan, but a prosaic one, the kind that might open the dusty drawer of an old desk found in your grandmother’s attic, tucked behind a stuffed owl and a painting of seven apron-clad carrots performing a ritual sacrifice of a beet.

The key was made of brass with an oval loop at one end, two jagged teeth at the other, and a short shaft connecting them. Its only concession to aesthetics was a single decorative groove down the barrel.

But it had called to Joan.

She had been walking past Shiny Ol’ Junk, an antique shop in the quaint downtown of her small community, enjoying the first crisp autumn day as the bracing breeze caressed her face, ruffling her shoulder-length honey-colored hair and blowing the ends of her knitted purple scarf away from her body. She had laughed with delight and glanced at her reflection in the window.

And then she had looked through the glass at a wooden bowl of vintage keys next to the register and her gaze had fallen upon one unassuming key sitting partially submerged a little to the right of the center. She had stopped short, her body going rigid, rocked by a familiar electric jolt, just like the one she’d felt that fateful day when she was six years old — twenty-nine years, seven months, and eight days ago.

Her smile had faded, and the chill air felt colder, no longer pleasantly brisk, but a harbinger of winter to come. This key was obviously cursed — as cursed as Joan herself. This might be her chance to undo the jinx before it was too late. She had rushed into the store to purchase the key.

Joan put her head down on the table, the smooth metal cool against her cheek, staring at the fallen key from the side. There was a tiny streak of tarnish just below where the teeth met the barrel, and she found herself transfixed by it, her mind hiking a well-worn path back to that terrible, unforgettable Monday afternoon.

The rain had been continually beating against the classroom windows all morning, so she and her first-grade class had been deprived of their outdoor recess. This was nothing out of the ordinary for March in Oregon, but on this morning, their teacher, Mrs. Olsen, had been suffering from an intense migraine.

Mrs. Olsen’s patience had worn thin as the day dragged on and the class grew more and more restless, their piping voices grating her nerves, her pleas for calm ignored. They had returned from pizza day in the cafeteria full of vim and rambunctiousness, squirming in their desks and shouting to each other across the room. Whatever she did, the teacher just couldn’t convince them to sit quietly and focus.

Joan was a naturally reserved child and wasn’t participating in the rowdiness. She and her best friend, Sadie, had been sitting off to the side, happily coloring and whispering together, making up a story about the fairy tale scene on the pages in front of them, crayons smearing their gritty hues over bunnies, gnomes, trees, and a castle in the distant background.

Then she had caught a whiff of an acrid, burning smell. Glancing up, Joan had stared at Mrs. Olsen’s face, at her deep brown eyes uncannily glowing, black smoke curling from her short tawny hair. She had gasped as she watched sparks emanating from those eyes, the smoke growing in volume, hovering in a cloud above the teacher’s head.

And then another girl, Beth Fiorella, a high-strung child who was prone to histrionics, had also looked up and begun a shrill banshee-like wail.

At that, Mrs. Olsen’s face had fallen into a bizarre blankness, the entirety of her eyes becoming solid black almonds, her visage slackening. She had ponderously stood from her old-fashioned desk, and the class had finally, gradually, quieted at the sight, except for Beth, who continued to scream.

Mrs. Olsen’s head had turned like a searchlight, her gaze slow and heavy, her dark stare freezing each child as it passed. When she’d gotten to Beth, the girl’s mouth had snapped shut with a final whimper. And Mrs. Olsen had spoken quietly, evenly, into the silence.

"I have your attention right now,

And I’ll keep it awhile, I vow.

In one score and ten,

I will see you again.

To silence and darkness you’ll bow."

Mrs. Olsen had paused. Then her voice had risen, building a pyramid of sound. And so I curse you — and I curse you — I curse you — curse you! Each phrase a higher level, ending with a brief wordless scream to rival Beth’s.

As the shriek left her throat, each child in the room felt a stabbing bolt of electricity from head to toe, just like the one Joan was to experience years later, upon catching sight of the skeleton key.

Beth and two others had fainted dead away and a few more had wet themselves. All of the class found themselves unable to speak at all or with diminished voices and most found themselves blind as well. Joan herself had lost her voice for the rest of the day, her throat dry and her vision fracturing like an old deteriorated film.

The teacher had taken in a deep breath and then sat down with a THUNK. All around the room, frightened children sat in silence, too terrified to move.

Through a haze, Joan saw Mrs. Olsen’s body sway and collapse, her head falling onto her desk. She fell into a deep sleep, snores drifting through the otherwise silent room, as the class desperately struggled to make any sound.

The children trembled in their desks. Those who had been away from their seats groped and stumbled into any empty ones they could find. They sat, numb and dazed, for what felt like hours. Joan later learned it had only been a few minutes before another teacher came in to investigate the shouting.

He had entered the room, found it full of traumatized students and a sleeping teacher, and taken immediate action. Other adults were brought in. The school nurse took one look and insisted on calling in a doctor. Those who had had accidents were cleaned up and the fainted revived. Parents were called and most took their progeny straight to the hospital, where the staff were stumped.

Many unsuccessful attempts were made to wake up Mrs. Olsen and finally an ambulance was summoned to take her away. She had remained in a coma for about a year and then disappeared from her long-term care facility. As the kids got older, some of them had tried to find her to demand answers, but there was no trace.

Over the course of the next few days, everyone gradually regained their sight and voices and were released from the hospital and cleared to return to school. The principal assigned the class a substitute teacher and a therapist, who asked gentle questions and administered extensive psychiatric tests. She never did figure out what had happened, dismissing their tales of a curse and a teacher on fire as a mass hallucination.

Most of the students eventually lost interest, their trauma fading as time passed. But a few, Joan included, just couldn’t get past it. Through the years, even as some transferred to other schools, even past graduation, even though they didn’t always get along, they kept in touch. These few class members became obsessed with the curse, devoting their lives to lifting it, finding careers in curse-related fields or jobs that required little time and energy, allowing them to focus on research and experiments.

And as time went on, the urgency grew. One score and ten was thirty years. What would happen in thirty years?

Chapter 2

As she lifted her head and picked up the key again, running her fingers over it, memorizing the smoothness of the shaft and the ins and outs of the teeth, Joan knew she needed to tell the others. Their thirty-year timeline had diminished to five months, and this was their first real lead. She was in over her head.

But first — wine.

She left her physics lab, striding through her backyard and into the kitchen, and pulled a bottle of red wine from the rack on the countertop. She rummaged in a drawer for a corkscrew. Her fingers found one right away, but it was that crappy one that Brandon had left behind once after a disastrous picnic situation.

It was the kind of corkscrew where you stab the cork and then twist it in, and then you push down the wings on the sides, and supposedly, they would move the cork up and out, but really it usually moves it about a centimeter and then you have to wiggle and wiggle and wiggle it for a zillion years until half of it comes out in your hand and the other half falls into the wine. Joan was in no kind of mental state to deal with that bullshit.

She opened up the drawer all the way, peering into its deepest corners, searching for her preferred corkscrew, the one that looked like a Swiss Army knife, where you just twisted it into the cork and then levered the side doohickey, little by little, up the bottleneck. That one always worked. Plus it had a nifty little blade for cutting the foil and a tab that you could use to make citrus twists for your cocktails. Joan wasn’t ruling out the possibility that she would be moving on to cocktails later.

She pulled the drawer out entirely, setting it on the counter and shoving aside a cacophony of chopsticks and spatulas, a potato masher and a vegetable peeler, nested spoons and measuring cups. She poked herself on a corn-on-the-cob holder she hadn’t used in years and snatched her hand back,