Mabel's Curse

She sat among the ruins and wept. Her hands were smudged with ash, and some of it stuck to her dark hair as she shakily held her head. The smell was awful. She could still hear the faint life of fire, hissing itself to death in the dirt. She had run as fast as she could, and still she was too late. The fire had blazed fast, and incredibly hot. Her parents’ screams echoed in her mind, hauntingly certain of their fates. The smoke was stinging her eyes and setting her lungs ablaze, but she couldn’t find the strength to move. Upon this spot was where her family used to share meals and laugh about the day. And now, nothing. Not even the rug that her mother had made from her old baby clothes. The wildlife carried on as usual, birds singing their lovesong, oblivious of the horror that had taken place below them.

“Mabel! What happened?” Heavy footfalls approached, bringing with them two sturdy men, eyes wide and faces pale. The men stopped just outside the wreckage, peering in from a safe distance. Mabel sniffled in response, barely lifting her head. “Mabel?” Their tones shifted from urgency to pity as they took in the scene. They were standing on the path which led from the village, and before them was a blackened patch of dirt, bordered on each side by bricks two feet high. Ash surrounded the brick border, smoking as the remaining flames burned Mabel’s things to dust. Of the house, the locks remained, blackened on the ground. A dutch oven and a mess of spoons lay where the kitchen used to stand. A belt buckle and a frame of glasses lay on one side of the former living room, and a pile of rings lay on the other. Mabel sat between these piles, her sobbing calmed to quiet tears. A quiver of arrows was strapped to her back, and her bow lay forgotten in the ash, a streak of white among gray. “Mabel, come here.” The men did not enter the ruins. Fear crept into their voices.

Finally, Mabel looked up. She saw the two men, Frederick and Jeremy, waiting on the path. They were two of the three town constables, and must have come when they heard her shriek.

“What happened Mabel?” Jeremy tried again. He took his hat from his head and his eyes rocked back and forth from the belt buckle to the pile of rings.

“My parents” Mabel was now completely finished crying and instead gazed into the distance at nothing in particular. Her voice was low and soft, barely rising above the birdsong. Her eyes were puffy and her throat was dry from the smoke. She ran a hand through her hair and let it drop to her side. She couldn’t think of anything else to say.

“Sweet Mabel, come with us and we’ll set you right” Frederick said, still making no move to enter the ruins. There had been talk around town for years, and even in the face of tragedy, he still wasn’t willing to risk entering the house by the river. She stared back at him.

“Fire” She said dumbly. She blinked at Frederick.

“Mabel, grab your things and come. It’s not healthy to stay here.” Jeremy pleaded.

She blinked once more and then rose to her feet, stumbled, then righted herself. She picked up the bow, and the pile of rings. As she tumbled them into her pocket she stared at the belt buckle and glasses frames. She stood for a minute, deciding, and then picked up the frames, leaving the buckle. She wiped at her eyes and left a streak of ash. “Jeremy?” She walked towards them and met them on the path. “My parents…” She began to sob again.

➶➵➴

Mabel now sat in the town police station, a room separated by bars. A seldom used jail cell on one side and three desks on the other. She was wrapped in a quilt with birds embroidered into the pattern, sipping a steaming mug. The three constables sat around her, each in his uniform black shirt and hat. For a small town, they had handled the occasional robbery and vandalization with grace, swiftly finding the persons responsible and delivering a heavy bill of justice. These three constables firmly believed in an eye for an eye, and it was well known. The town troublemakers had either wisened up or been made harmless and they had had a pretty easy job up until now. They had never had a fire before.

“Mabel, I know it’s uncomfortable and overwhelming, but we need to hear the full story so we know if we need to investigate or not.” Alex, the head constable asked. He was also sturdy, and a life of chopping thieves’ fingers and whipping troublemakers had made him gray.

The mug shook in her hands. “The full story?” She looked up at Alex with wide eyes, focusing on his gray hair and not the blackened ruins engraved in her mind. He nodded sympathetically at her.

“Yes dear, while it's fresh.” He nodded towards Frederick, who held a pencil at the ready.

“Ok,” She screwed her face and then relaxed it, willing away the tears. “I left the house at noon. I went to look for some rabbits for supper. I had wound my way up the river to the top of the hill, and was about to take a shot at a rabbit when I was distracted by-” She choked on a sob. Sniffled once and continued, “I was distracted by smoke.” She took a sip from her mug. “It looked like the little rabbit was leaking smoke from his ears. Like his little brains were on fire. Already cooked before I even had him skinned. But then he shifted, and I saw it wasn’t the little rabbit. It was my house, far in the distance.” She paused then and looked at her feet. Frederick continued to scratch out his report. Hysterics, he wrote. Alex and Jeremy stared at her, unmoving. “It was on fire.” She brought her eyes up to meet their gaze. “The fire was huge. Taller than the treeline. I could see my house... in the blaze…” She trailed off.

“Did you see anyone who could have started the fire?” Alex asked, stroking his beard.

She shook her head meekly. “No… Once I saw it was my house I ran as fast as I could back through the woods, and I couldn’t see anything from in there.”

Alex sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Did your parents have anything…” he waved his arms around in front of him, trying to find the right words. “... going on?” He raised an eyebrow and looked at her skeptically.

“What do you mean?” Mabel asked.

“Any new, um, recipes? Spells?” His face turned red. The talk around town had been that the family in the house by the river were magic folk, and everyone had assumed certain things about them, including that they must have had a cauldron and must have spent their time fiddling with new and dangerous ways to desecrate the natural order of things.

Her brows furrowed. “I’m not sure I know what you mean.” She gazed at them sternly. “They didn’t have any enemies if that’s what you’re asking.” A silence covered them like a cloud.

“Oh, um, of course not, Mabel. Of course not.” Alex stroked his beard thoughtfully. Frederick continued to write. Arson not suspected, cause unknown, he wrote. “Just a few more questions and then we’ll set you up with a place to stay while you get yourself put together and decide what you’d like to do.”

“What I’d like to do?” Mabel squeaked.

“Well yes, you can’t just run around with no parents in town. You will either need to find a family to take you on or move to the city. Those are the rules. You’re 18, you’re plenty old enough to pay taxes, and if a citizen can’t pay taxes then they put the community at risk, and we can’t have that.”

Mabel’s face fell. Her heart and mind were too focused on her parents to think about paying taxes. Situations such as these need to be given some grace, she thought. Or at least some tact.

“Ok, next question. Did anybody know that you would be out of your parents house this afternoon?”

“No. It was a spur of the moment thing.” Mabel sipped her tea again. The connection had not occurred to her, that if somebody had done this on purpose that she may still be in danger.

“Alright. Last question, and this one may be hard. Did anything seem out of place when you were viewing the house after the fire?” Frederick continued to scribble. She considered this question briefly, thinking of the things she had lost forever. Her father’s books about the sea and the monsters within it. His charts of the world. Her mother’s handmade quilts. Her mother’s grimoire, a book of secrets, lovely little tidbits of nature that had been passed down for generations. These secrets would never be hers. The things she had lost had made her small town seem so large. Large enough for the three of them at least.

“No. Nothing was out of place at all.”

➶➵➴

She hadn’t exactly lied. But she hadn’t exactly told the truth. There had been some things out of place. When she had run towards the house she had seen boot prints in the mud by the back door. Nobody had used the back door for anything at all while she had lived in that house. It had seemed like more of a permanent art fixture to her as a child. But nevertheless the prints had been there, covered for the most part in ash, but there. She had also seen something that had baffled her. On the front stoop of the house, made of ancient brick, she had seen a dark smudge. Now, it had occurred to her that the entirety of the ruins had been covered in dark smudges, but this had been different. It was not just ash laid atop a brick, but ash laid within the brick, in a groove that hadn’t been there this morning. The smudge and the boot print circled her mind like a petal on a puddle. But what really set her on edge was not either of these out of place things but something very normal, for her at least. When she had approached the ruins of her home, a single question burned within her, and she screamed it to the sky. “Who did this?” She had been angry and clenching her fists, and when she had looked down, between the belt buckle and the pile of rings, she had seen an answer. A single stone rune, one of her mother’s, face-up. Mannaz.

ᛗ

Man. She had collapsed then, and while her hands moved the rune to her pocket, a very clear thought had taken hold of her mind. Somebody had done this, and she couldn’t trust this realization with anybody.

➶➵➴

It had been late when her interview finished at the station, and instead of waking the townspeople with a burdensome question, Constable Alex had taken her to his home, and his wife had set up a bed on the floor for her. She had fed Mabel a rabbit stew, which sat in Mabel’s mind ironically, as this was the meal she intended to make for her parents this evening. The floor was warm and wooden, and her exhaustion made it more comfortable than it was.

She lay awake that night, staring at the ceiling, and made a series of goals for herself. She would make a new grimoire. It had plagued her when she first realized it had perished in the fire. The women of her family had added to it for several generations now, and it had notes in it of medicinal plants that she had never seen before, that she could only assume were in other countries, other lands across seas even. It had other knowledge too, little wives tales of protection spells and how to make your husband do something. Mabel guessed it could be considered magic. Thinking of the knowledge lost with one fire troubled her, so once she was certain of this goal she moved on to the next. She considered Constable Alex’s explanation of taxes. He had been right, but in the moment she had not wanted to hear it. If a citizen could not pay taxes, then the country would see fit to send soldiers to their town and scrounge it up. She would not let herself be unclaimed in times like these. The second goal crystallized in her mind: find a home. Easier said than done, she lamented. The third goal had taken little thought. It had been her goal since she discovered the rune on the floor where her house had stood. She would find who did this. She would find them and find out why. And when she knew, she would kill them.