Wednesday's Words on a Friday

The original Words for Wednesday was begun by Delores and eventually taken over by a moveable feast of participants when Delores had computer troubles.
Delores has now retired from blogging :(

The aim of the words is to encourage us to write. A story, a poem, whatever comes to mind.

If you are posting an entry on your own blog, please let us know so we can come along and read it.

This month the prompts are supplied by EC and can be found here: http://myjustsostory.blogspot.com.au.

This week's words/prompts are:

1. curse
2. petrified
3. pogo stick
4. little
5. Paris
6. assistant

and/or:

1. rooster
2. happiness
3. immortal
4. dark
5. stormy
6. knights

Here is my story:


The letterhead read only DSK, but I saw Patrick’s face blanch at the sight of it. What on earth could DSK mean, I wondered. I opened my mouth to ask, just as he rose from his chair and raced out the door. Damn! Now I might never know. I’d never heard of any business or organization with the initials DSK. 


A week later, Patrick came back to work, paler than usual and definitely tense. I made him a cup of tea and placed it on his desk. “Thanks, Katie, you’re a good assistant,” he said. “Where did you rush off to so suddenly last Monday?” I asked. “I had to put all the paperwork on hold for the new costume shop and several other things as well. The electrician and plumber weren’t at all happy, they’d been scheduled for Thursday and I had to ask them to reschedule.”


“I had to fly to Paris,” said Patrick. “I didn’t want you to know any of this and I was hoping it wouldn’t come up, but here it is. Way back in my college days, I hung around with a few mates who were definitely into the dark underworld type of lifestyle.” 
“You mean like witches and vampires?” I interrupted him. 
“Yes, exactly that, and here’s the part you’re not going to believe. We once met with an actual witch. We didn’t believe she was real at the time, but when we laughed at her, she took a rooster out of her sack and beheaded it right there in front of us. She caught a handful of its blood and flung it over us, cursing us to forever be immortal if we didn’t do as she said. I was petrified! I didn’t want to be immortal as I thought that meant being a vampire.”


“It sounds scary,” I said. “What was it she said you had to do?” 


“To ensure our future happiness and wealth, we had to dress up as knights each year for Halloween for the rest of our lives, even if we lived in the far corners of the earth from each other, we still had to do it. But not knights in shining armour, we had to be black knights, so for a few years we went along with it, dressing as darkly as we could in matte black armour with scowls on our faces and we called ourselves the Dark Stormy Knights. None of that seemed too bad, except we each had to carry a little pogo stick instead of a sword.”


“A pogo stick?” I was astonished. 


“Yep, a pogo stick. So anyway, one year, Dermot decided he was going to carry a sword instead, and a week later his family’s fortunes were suddenly wiped out. That scared the rest of us and we’ve been carrying the pogo sticks ever since. But then I got that letter last week. Simon and Sean both had decided this Halloween stuff had been going on long enough and they weren’t going to dress up anymore. The letter was from Sean, Simon had suddenly died and the doctors assumed it was just old age, we are all nearly seventy, but I flew to Paris to see Sean and we decided to keep on with the tradition.”


“Do you need me to find you a suit of armour and a pogo stick?” I asked. 

“No, I still have the originals,” said Patrick. “But I’d like you to do a little research, I know the internet has just about everything these days, see if you can find out anything about witches from the nineteen fifties and in particular one who called herself Queen Odessa. She was young at the time, maybe she is still around. Sean thinks we should try to get in touch with her if we can and get the curse lifted.”