The Curse of the Underwhelming Treasure

The Curse of the Underwhelming Treasure

Lydia Jameson stared at the object on the table, an expression of faint puzzlement on her face.

'Is this valuable?'

'Yep,' said James Horton, the homeowner. He sat on a sofa and idly flicked through TV channels, singularly unimpressed by the three criminals robbing his house.

'Really?' said Lydia, gesturing to the object. It was a small, irregularly shaped gemstone the colour of raw sewage and gave off a faint odour of decomposing leaves. She and her gang had stolen quite a few clunkers in their time, but this could well have been the worst by a wide margin.

Horton nodded absently. Lydia's partners, Titus Howlett and Cereza Jiangshi, shuffled awkwardly from their position behind him. This wasn't going the way they thought it would.

Lydia turned to Titus. 'Find anything else?'

Titus shook his head. 'Nothin'. Well, almost nothin'. Found some milk maids.'

'Milk maids.'

'Yep. A few hundred. Made of real porcelain, too.'

Lydia considered this information. 'Valuable?'

'Maybe. They're kinda weird looking though.'

'Yeah?' said Cereza, suddenly taking an interest in the conversation. 'How so?'

Titus, somewhat embarrassed, whispered what he had found in Cereza's ear. Her eyes lit up as they always did when she discovered something that would be a headache to the group later.

'Can we bring them with us? Even if we can't sell 'em?'

Lydia nodded. It was quicker than entering an argument that Cereza would inevitably win through sheer attrition. As Cereza hurried off in the direction Titus indicated, Lydia lifted the gem and gave it a critical look.

'What do you think?' she said to Titus. 'Can we hawk this?'

'No, don't' said Horton, sounding like he was reading from a well worn script. 'You know not what you do.'

'Maybe,' Titus said. 'You'd be surprised how many people are willing to buy crap.'

'Eh, fair enough,' said Lydia, pocketing the gem. 'I hate leaving empty handed.'

'You fools,' Horton yawned, shifting his body into a more comfortable position. 'That gem is the Eye of Chaos, and a terrible curse will befall any who remove it from its sacred resting place.'

'A run down bedsit in the suburbs is sacred?' said Titus.

Horton glared at him, his face finally betraying some genuine emotion. 'There are varying degrees of sacred, sonny.' He sighed and pointed at a bookcase. 'See that orange book over there?'

'Um...yeah,' said Lydia, walking over to the bookcase and picking up the book in question. The title read Curses and You: All You Ever Wanted to Know About The Powers Beyond the Veil But Couldn't Be Arsed to Ask.

'Now, are you three finished?' Horton asked.

'I-I guess so,' said Lydia, feeling strangely sheepish.

'Excellent. You know the way out.'

*****

Two hours later, Lydia and Titus sat in the kitchen of their hideout, the Eye of Chaos sitting on their table. Cereza was in the hallway, on the phone with what she said was a potential buyer. Lydia had her doubts that was what she was actually doing, but considering that the last time she listened in on Cereza's calls resulted in two weeks of nightmares, she decided to give her the benefit of the doubt.

'You know,' said Titus, picking up the Eye and holding it up to the light, 'maybe this heist won't be such a waste after all.'

'A lump of rock and a metric ton of porcelain does not a successful caper make, Ti.'

'Think about it, though,' Titus said. 'A "magical" stone with an ominous name and a curse attached to it? Cereza's bound to find someone stupid enough to buy into that kind of crap.'

'And indeed I have!' said Cereza with more than a hint of smug triumph.

Lydia was dumbfounded. 'Seriously?'

'Mm-hmm,' Cereza replied, snagging a bottle of water from the fridge. 'I've sold it to "Doctor Incandescent, Lord of Time and Space and Master of all that Lives.'

Titus and Lydia looked blank.

'The bum that lives in the dumpster two blocks from here. You know, the one that keeps trying to exorcise ourvan?'

'Oh yeah,' said Titus. 'He seems nice enough.'

'Wait a second,' said Lydia. 'What's he going to give us for it? And how is he going to pay?'

'He's offered twenty gold bars for it.'

Once again, Lydia was stunned. 'What...how...'

'Oh yeah, he's got loads of them. Says it keeps the G-Men from finding him and disrupting his plans.'

'Good God,' Lydia said, placing the Eye in a safe. 'Well, so long as he can pay, I guess.'

*****

It took awhile for Lydia to realise something was wrong.

Sharing a hideout with Cereza meant accepting that said hideout was never going to be completely quiet. A thousand different sounds tended to emerge from her room in the dead of night and no amount of cajoling or threatening could get her to keep it down. Lydia had eventually managed to get used to the ruckus, turning what was once an annoyance into a mundane occurrence.

She was understandably surprised to discover that the noise was coming from Titus' room rather than Cereza's, given the former's quieter nature.

She sat up in bed and listened for a second, trying to figure out what Titus was doing. Whatever was happening, it was extremely energetic.

Lydia got up and put on her gown and slippers, vaguely aware that they felt a little off. She made her way to Titus' room, pausing at the door to listen.

An almighty ruckus was occurring on the other side of the door. Not entirely sure she wanted any part of what was happening, she hesitated for a moment before flinging the door open.

One of the few quirks that Titus possessed was a love of stuffed animals. A wide variety of specimens decorated his room, from birds of all kinds to several large predators caught in mid-leap.

All of them had spontaneously taken a break from their busy schedule of being dead to attack Titus en masse.

Lydia could just about make out Titus underneath an angry panther and several flying squirrels. She was about to dash forward when an eagle swooped into her face and made a spirited attempt to gouge her eyes out.

'Lydia!' Titus yelled, his voice strained by the effort to keep the panther off. 'Help!'

'Just a second!' Lydia replied with as she forced the eagle off her face. She quickly threw it at the panther, causing the former to attack the latter and giving Titus the opening he needed to throw the squirrels and follow Lydia out of the room. He slammed the door on the monstrosities and locked it, just before it bowed under the impact of the charging bodies.

Lydia and Titus stood staring at the door for a moment, marshalling their thoughts.

'What the hell are you wearing?' said Titus, staring at Lydia's robe and slippers.

Lydia looked down at her attire. Her robe was an ever shifting mass of gray slime, tendrils forming and collapsing at random. The slippers winked seductively from the numerous eyes that had sprouted in the jelly like mass. For a moment it seemed that everything had come to a screeching halt, Lydia's face perfectly blank as she considered her transformed attire.

Titus never really saw Lydia throwing the living clothes off. One moment she was standing there transfixed, the next her robe and slippers were impacting the far wall at high speed and she was standing there shivering.

It took Lydia a minute to recover from her unpleasant surprise. 'I...I'm thinking that there may be something to this curse thing after all.'

'Agreed,' said Titus. 'We should probably...'

Lydia looked up at Titus. He seemed to be straining to hear something. 'What? What is it?'

Titus frowned. 'It's way too quiet all of a sudden.'

The reason for the unusual quiet occurred to them both at the same time. 'Cereza!'

Although neither of them would ever openly admit it, if Lydia and Titus had taken a second to think about what they were doing they might well have hesitated before breaking down her door. As it was, they barrelled into her room and were almost floored by the narcotic fumes continuously wafting from numerous censers and the bizarre artwork dotting the room.

The worst of it all lay in front of them. The porcelain milk maids had come to life and grown to twice their normal size. They had formed a pile from their bodies, at the bottom of which was a lifeless arm.

The stunned silence that had descended was broken by Titus. 'Call me crazy,' he said, in a distracted, musing tone, 'but I always kinda figured she'd go out like this.'

Cereza's head poked out of the pile, looking alive, well and annoying chipper. 'I ain't dead!'

*****

Fifteen minutes later, Lydia was sat at the kitchen table, frantically flipping through the book they had taken from Horton's house. She and Titus had managed to extricate the struggling Cereza from her situation and had arrived downstairs just in time to see the now animated safe make a lunge for the book. Titus now stood over the mangled remains of the safe, sledgehammer in one hand and the Eye of Chaos in the other. Cereza stood next to one of the windows in a sulk, occasionally glancing outside where someone screaming gibberish could be heard.

'Okay, let's see,' said Lydia as she came across what she needed. She was fighting a losing battle to ignore the commotion outside. 'It says here we need to take the Eye, bathe it in alcohol and...and...'

Lydia slammed her hands on the tabletop in frustration. 'What the hell is going on outside?!'

'Doctor Incandescent is trying to exorcise our van again,' said Cereza.

'I...what?'

'Yeah, looks like he's just started. Hasn't even gotten out the rock salt yet...' Cereza's voice trailed off, her expression going from puzzled to surprised and finally to amused in the space of a few seconds. 'Oh, wow. You guys have got to see this.'

Lydia and Titus walked over to the window to see a morbidly obese man wearing a dirty white robe and a dented metal cap being chased around by a self driving van that had sprouted a fang filled mouth.

'And here I thought this night couldn't get any weirder,' said Titus.

'How long do you suppose he can last?' Cereza asked. A sickening crunch brought her attention back outside. 'Oh. Never mind.'

'Where are you going?' Titus said to Lydia, who was walking to the front door.

'I'm going to get his body.'

'What?' said Titus. 'Why?'

'Read the book.'

Perplexed, Titus found the passage Lydia had been reading and scanned it. His face went white.

'Oh for God's sake. Really?'

*****

James Horton walked down the quiet street in the early morning, his eyes searching for the right house. The one with a van flipped onto its side and adorned with a toothy mouth on its front lawn was what he looking for.

He mounted the front steps, knocked on the door and waited. A few seconds later a bleary eyed Lydia opened the door. Her eyes narrowed hatefully as she realised who was standing there. Horton could see her accomplices lying semi-conscious on the floor, surrounding a dead man strapped to a chair. He was dressed in a ruby red robe, his face painted with ornate symbols and his right eye had been replaced with the Eye of Chaos. Everything was exactly as Horton expected.