Until this year the high point of his calendar had been Fool’s Day, which he might easily have renamed Fun Day. Not this year. The Latin spell for reconstituting the hundred torn out, sold off, used up pages from The 101 Damnations required Nathan to give each of the spell victims a portion of the final page. In order to achieve this, he had to identify who’d been cursed in the first place. Nathan had to retrace his original customers and interview them closely regarding their cursive intentions. Some were coy, some reluctant to say, some off sick from school, some wagging. It was a logistical nightmare, but he had to do it – and do it right – to save himself from Mother. Nathan had hoped a few people hadn’t yet used up the damnation pages, that he might get the pages back whole and untarnished, but he might as well have hoped the sun wouldn’t rise on Fool’s Day. Everybody had activated their curses, setting the controls for that one day of maximum foolishness and folly. Everybody reported the same thing when they named their victim and laid down their curse: the damnation page curled up in their hand and theatrically vanished in a natty puff of thick, grey smoke.
