Ravenspell Book 3: Freaky Fly Day Read Online Free

brick. The only people who ever get fooled into eating them are very young children who take one bite and then spit the rest of the fruitcake into their napkins if they are polite—or just discharge it onto the floor if they are not.
    Yet each year for a thousand years, people have given fruitcakes away at Christmas. Only heaven knows why anyone would give such a thing. Some of the loathsome cakes are obviously foisted off as this one was meant to be—as pretend gifts.
    The young wife was too frightened of her mother-in-law to tell the old nag that she wished her dead, and so she made an abominable cake instead.
    But fruitcakes are seldom eaten. Most of these indigestible lumps of moldering mash are simply regifted. A person gets one, doesn’t know what to do with it, thinks it’s too valuable to throw away or fools herself into thinking that “someone must like them,” and so hands it off to an unfortunate soul that she neither cares about nor respects, usually with a little handwritten message that says, “I baked this cake using my grandmother’s favorite recipe. Merry Christmas!”
    And in fact, that miserable young wife in Hartlepoole wrote just such a note: “I made this for ye in mine grand dame’s favourite manner. May ye be of goode cheere upon this, the Holiest of Days!”
    So she wrote the note, set the fruitcake into a cloth bag to cool, and then went out on her back porch to watch the sunset. She had only just taken her seat when her neighbor’s black cat came loping across the lawn with a nice fat mouse in its jaws. The mouse was obviously still alive, for its little feet were kicking, and it squeaked in terror. The woman knew that the cat liked to torment mice before it killed them, and so she decided to take action.
    “Naughty cat!” the woman scolded, reaching over and grabbing the cat’s tail. “Spew ye that mouse out! Spew it, or the devil’ll have ye!”
    Just then, an elderly monk happened to be walking down the lane, herding a little lost lamb with his shepherd’s crook. He spotted the woman talking to the cat, heard her mention the devil, and immediately raised a mob and had the poor young wife put on trial for witchcraft—for in those days, it was believed that only a witch would talk to a black cat.
    In the course of the trial, the woman was tied to a stone and was to be thrown into the ocean. If she sank, it was a sign that she was innocent and could be properly mourned. If she floated, it was a sign that she was a witch and would then be suitably hanged.
    So the city’s executioner (really just the butcher doing double duty, looking very grim and medieval in his black hood), tied a millstone about her neck and prepared to shove her off the city docks, into the ocean.
    “Ye are all idiots,” the housewife shouted, “and someday the world will know it!”
    The townsfolk all “oohed” and “aahed” at the pronouncement, for it sounded like a witch’s curse. Then the housewife fainted, and the executioner shoved her and the millstone into the water.
    She sank, of course, and the townsfolk were left to mourn.
    But little did they realize that this woman did indeed have magical powers, and it was in that very same village that the curse took effect. It was many years later when it happened. In 1798, the French madman Napoleon was on the march, trying to take over the world, when a huge storm arose and crashed one of his warships onto the rocks near Hartlepoole.
    The sole survivor of that horrible wreck was an ape that had been captured in Africa and had been taken as a pet by the captain. The ape swam to shore, and the townsfolk caught it.
    No one in the village had ever seen a Frenchman, so they mistook the poor ape as a French spy, and the townsfolk put it on trial. The ape refused to answer any questions. When put on the witness stand, it would do nothing but make rude noises. Then it snatched away the judge’s white powdered wig and raced around the courtroom, terrifying the