The Curse

It is a quiet morning at Whit's End, and Lucy Cunningham-Schultz is the first customer of the day. She has come to return the tape recorder John Whittaker loaned her the week before, hoping she would use it to make news reports for Kids' Radio. Nothing has come of it, and Lucy is ready to give up and stick to newspapers. Connie Kendall, meanwhile, is bursting with curiosity about whatever Whit and Eugene Meltsner have been working on all week. The answer soon comes out: a radio station in Connellsville wants to broadcast some of the Kids' Radio programs, and Whit has bought a microwave dish that will beam the shows to a translator on Forest Mountain. Before heading up the mountain himself, Whit urges Lucy to keep trying, saying he would love the first Connellsville broadcast to include one of her reports.

Moments after Whit and Eugene leave, a strange visitor walks through the front door in feathers, war paint, and moccasins. He introduces himself as a medicine man and asks who owns the building. Then, to Connie and Lucy's alarm, he begins chanting a ritual to awaken an old curse on the owner. He explains that long ago the land belonged to his people, who were pushed out by settlers bringing "bad medicine" - worst of all, a magic that made voices travel through wire and air. He declares that four signs will appear: flying horses made of rock; from a pit that can swallow a man, a pit that a man can swallow; water that is not water traveling up; and a forest coming to the building. After the signs, when the owner makes his voice fly through the air, the owner will fall through the air and die. Lucy captures every word on the tape recorder, and Connie firmly shows the man the door.

Connie insists she does not believe a word of it, but the signs start arriving with spooky speed. The music tape sitting on the counter is by a group called Pegasus - a flying horse - and the album is made of rock. Eugene, back from his errand and munching cherries, scoffs that curses are balderdash, then promptly chokes on a cherry pit: a pit that a man can swallow, from a tree whose roots could leave a pit big enough to swallow a man. Then Eugene realizes the new microwave dish, at that very moment being hoisted onto the roof, is made by Aqueous Technologies. Aqueous means water-like - water that is not water, and it is definitely traveling up. Shaken, Eugene and Lucy rush to the county college library to dig into the history of the property. What they find is chilling. In 1850, Higgum McAlister had Odyssey's first telegraph installed in the church that stood on the land, and on the day it was to start working, his body was found at the bottom of a cliff on Forest Mountain. In 1910, Allman McAlister put the first telephone switchboard in the building, and the day it was switched on, he fell to his death from a flagpole. Both owners fell on the very days Odyssey's voices first traveled through wire. As for voices traveling through air - that would be Kids' Radio, and the curse would strike when the owner threw the switch.

Back at Whit's End, a man Connie has never met introduces himself as the radio station manager from Connellsville: Nathan Forrest. Forrest has come to the building - the fourth sign. Whit has already returned and is up on the roof, about to hook up the dish. Everyone races upstairs shouting for him to stop, and in the scramble Eugene hurls himself at Whit to save him and sails right over the ledge. Thanks to the awning below and a rope, Whit, Connie, and Nathan haul a dangling Eugene back to safety.

Downstairs, the whole tale spills out, and Nathan recognizes the voice on Lucy's tape at once. The "medicine man" is David Timic, known as Timic the Mimic, a clever performer from his own station who is brilliant with accents and characters. Seeing the Odyssey programs as competition, Timic invented the curse to scare Whit out of turning on the dish, making up the signs as he went from things he saw around the shop. Whit declines to press the matter legally and leaves it in Nathan's hands, but he does think his friends should feel a little embarrassed. None of them noticed that he does not even own the land, only the building, or thought to check whether the tribe existed at all. Most of all, he reminds them that only God can truly curse anything, and that Jesus took away the power of any other curse when he died on the cross. Connie admits the simplest things are sometimes the easiest to forget, everyone apologizes, and Whit gets the last laugh - pretending to topple over at the very idea that he is cursed to fall, then grinning, "Gotcha!"