You have read the lists by now. Most of them say the same seventeen things.
And you found yourself in a lot of them, which is why you are still looking.
My name is Ren Kagetsuki. I spent fifteen years on the side that sends these things, so I know which of the seventeen were ever under anyone’s control.
Eleven of them tell me how deep it has got. Six tell me whether it was sent.
I need both. But only the six decide whether there is anything for me to do.
The seventeen signs of a curse
- Illness or pain that every test comes back clear on
- A run of misfortune that has gone past coincidence
- Nightmares, or the same dream returning
- Waking at the same hour every night
- Exhaustion that sleep does not touch
- A weight across the shoulders and the back of the neck
- The sense of being watched
- Moods and thoughts that do not feel like yours
- Relationships souring all at once
- Money that arrives and will not stay
- Glass and mirrors breaking
- Lights and appliances failing in one room
- Animals refusing a room, or refusing you
- Dead animals turning up where you walk
- A smell in the house with no source
- Plants dying on one side of the house
- Somebody told you they would do this to you
Every one of those is worth writing down. None of them is silly.
What the eleven are for
The body, the house, the moods, the animals. These are the ones people describe first, and the ones they are most afraid of being laughed at for.
They are real, and I use them every time.
What they tell me is depth. How long it has been there, how settled it is, whether it has reached the house or only the person.
What they cannot tell me is where it came from.
A house holds many things. Grief leaves a weight on a person. So does something sent on purpose, and from the outside the two look identical.
That is why I never work from the symptoms alone, and why nobody should.
A woman once gave me eight of the eleven in the first message. Every one of them turned out to belong to the flat, not to her.
She had been the fourth tenant in three years.
The six signs of a curse I actually look for
These are the ones that leave a fingerprint, because a person had to do something for them to be there.
1. It was said to your face
That you would regret it. That you would never be happy. That they would make sure of it.
People discount this because it was said in anger. Anger is the condition this is made in.
Of everything on the page, this is the one I weigh heaviest.
2. The timing aims
Trouble that lands on the days that mattered and thins out everywhere else.
Ordinary misfortune has no interest in your calendar. It scatters.
3. There is a week it started
Not a slow decline. A line you can point at.
And in the weeks before that line, something usually happened. A promotion. An ending. A death in a family that involved money.
4. It moves when you repair it
You settle the debt and a diagnosis arrives. You recover and a relationship ends.
Work that is tied to a person rather than to one part of their life behaves exactly like this. I know, because that is how it was built.
5. Something arrived
An object you did not buy. A gift from someone who had no reason to give you one. Something found at your door, or pushed into the soil by it.
Almost no list carries this one, and it is the most physical evidence there is.
It is not one of my twelve questions either. It cannot be answered yes or no, and it needs a conversation.
If the run began within a month of something entering your home, tell me what it was.
6. It has happened before, to your line
The same failure in a parent or a grandparent. The same age, the same illness, the same collapse of money or marriage.
If this one is true, work done on you alone will not hold.
Two things the lists leave out
Neither of these appears in the seventeen, and I ask about both before almost anything else.
Whether it follows you
Are you worse at home and better away, or is it the same wherever you sleep?
That single answer separates a place from a person, and the two are treated completely differently.
A week somewhere else will tell you. Most people already know without having to test it.
Whether anyone else in the house has it
Sleep, temper, small illnesses, children waking.
Something aimed at one person tends to stay on that person. When a whole household is affected, the target is usually the house or the family line rather than you.
People rarely mention this because they came to ask about themselves. It is often the thing that decides the case.
Finding the week it started
Sign three is the one people cannot answer off the top of their head, and it is the most useful of the six. Do this tonight and it takes about twenty minutes.
- Decide the rough month it began. If you cannot, take the month you first said out loud that something was wrong.
- Open the things that keep dates for you. Photographs, messages, your bank, your calendar, your appointments.
- Scroll backwards through that month and write down the first entry that looks wrong. The first cancelled plan, the first unexplained cost, the first night you did not sleep, the first message you did not answer.
- That date is your marker. Now go back three weeks from it and write down everything that happened in those three weeks, including the things that went well.
- Read that three week list and mark anything that involved another person losing, wanting, or being refused something. A promotion, a separation, a property, a decision that went your way.
Most aimed workings are placed within three weeks of an event that made somebody decide, and the event is usually still sitting in your own records.
An empty three weeks is an answer too. It moves the case towards a place or a family line rather than a person.
How I put the two halves together
I do not count. I look for the shape.
One of the six, with several of the eleven underneath it, is enough for me to take a case seriously.
Three of the six together is a shape I recognise, and I have never once seen those three arrive by accident.
The eleven then tell me how much work it is going to be, and whether the house has to be done as well as the person.
If what you are carrying was laid by a practitioner rather than by an ordinary furious person, the shape differs again: cursed or hexed, and why the difference matters.
What to do tonight, whatever the list says
You do not have to finish deciding before you take the weight off. Clearing is the second stage of the work and it is the stage you can perform yourself.
- Coarse salt, the cheap kitchen kind. Not table salt.
- A good handful into a hot bath, fifteen to twenty minutes, then rinsed off with clean water from the head down. The rinse is not optional and it always goes downward.
- No bath is not a problem, and most of the world does not have one. Salt in a bowl of hot water over the shoulders, or worked in wet palms over the neck, throat and wrists, then rinsed downward in the shower.
- In the morning, dry-fry coarse salt in a pan, no oil, about five minutes, until it stops crackling. Cooled, in two small cones on saucers, one each side of the door you use. Where nothing can stand in a shared corridor, put them inside the door instead.
- Change them each morning. Old salt into a bag and out with the rubbish, not down the sink.
Three nights of this answers a question the seventeen signs cannot. Does it lift and stay lifted, or does it lift and come back.
Lifts and stays, and what you had was residue, and you are finished. Lifts and returns, and the clearing worked while something is still attached, which is the answer most people get and the reason the list alone was never going to settle it.
Make your own list
On paper, in this order.
Roughly when it started. What happened in the weeks before. Anything anyone said. Anything that came into the house.
Then everything from the seventeen that is true for you, without editing it down because a line sounds strange.
The strange ones are frequently the useful ones. Nobody invents a smell.
Send it to me and I will tell you which half of the page your answers fall on, and whether it is something I can take off you: the twelve questions I ask before I take a case.
You have been reading lists on your own for long enough. Send me yours.
