The Journals of Steve Book 2: The Shadow

By Cube Hunter

A fumbling, bumbling, and stumbling wizard and his not so heroic, but sometimes brave, companion Steve have fallen into the slimy grasp of a malevolent witch, Getrude.....

Gertrude is chummy with Bethelda, the gnarled and crooked lady of the woods with a special propensity for casting cruel spells, and an even

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cube Hunter
• Release date: Oct 2, 2023
• ISBN: 9798868904592

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Chapter 1: Introduction

A Preamble about Gertrude

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As you may well know, Steve and Grumbles were left in a sticky predicament before the end of the last opus. An opus here refers to the last grueling and miserable book of intrigue and failed endeavors.  In the last book, we encountered a lady. Some might call her a wickedly evil witch, the one with the grotesque red lips, and the soulful eyes – she was known as Gertrude. She was notorious in her youth. Notoriety being the opposite of fame because it means you’re popular for something bad. It could be locking a cat in a box or popping a child’s balloon on a sunny day when they are nibbling on the corner of a partially dripping ice cream. Or it could be something less mundane like robbing a train of its goods and booty, or sailing the seven seas, throwing up, and occasionally saying ‘ARGH’ to signal what a wonderful pirate you are. She was notorious in her youth for always doing things wrong. No matter how hard she tried, people would say to her, ‘Oh, Gertrude, what are we going to do with you?’. They would sigh and fret over how much work they had to do, and they would look at poor Gertrude’s trembling hands as she attempted to hide a tear which fell slowly down her cheek and to her lips where she mopped it up with one swift movement of her tongue.

It was a dreadful fate in many ways. People telling you you’re not good enough can cause miserable things to a person. It can make you feel like you can’t be loved, and that no matter what you do, you will be disliked. This was true of Gertrude. She would go home from a hard day’s toil, look at her parents disappointedly, handing over a few small shiny coins and saying that she couldn’t get anymore because she was a beastly brat who never does as she’s told. The parents would scorn her and send her to a tight corner where she slept with one single raggedy blanket like she was in a Charles Dickens novel or like she’d come upon a blob of bad luck. She had come across some bad luck and lots of it afterwards too. It was sprinkled throughout her life, and it festered.

By the time she was 16, she would look at the world and only see opportunities for wealth, deceit, and power. She needed a friend—as we all do—and yet the only friend she had was hypnotized, carted off to some random place, where there was a hope that her parents could better sell their wares. In this particular case, her wares were gourds, pumpkins, squashes, and the like. This young person, this best friend who provided her with hope in a time of need, was none other than Bethelda herself. As dark as this is, I believe you now can begin to appreciate why Gertrude does the horrible things she does. It’s not too late for her though, and I believe that deep down in her heart of hearts, she knows that too because there is a light that pulsates and writhes. It is the light of kindness. As much as her life was one of woe and tragedy, it also was one of the small joys which dropped from the sky like small balls of rain once every couple of years.

Long ago in the human world, there was a belief in a lady named Fortuna. Fortuna had locks that billowed gorgeously in the wind and fell to the bottom of her back. Fortuna, however, had the good fortune to be born a goddess and a Roman one too. There was also a Greek variety, but we shan’t go any further with that thought. Although if anybody asks you, you can tell them that she was also called Tyche. She was in charge of luck within the Universe. You might think it silly to believe that a magical lady in the sky could be responsible for the fate of men, but there really were people that once believed that to be true. She would carry around with her something known as a ‘Rota Fortunae’—a wheel of fortune in Latin. It was Fortuna’s role to spin the wheel and those upon it—us mortals—wherever we are from, would either receive good luck or bad. It must’ve been awfully sad knowing that you had the fate of others in your hands and that it was all dictated by a wheel. I wonder if she ever tampered with it and gave certain people more good luck and others more bad luck.

If you knew a thing or two about Fortuna, then at this point you might say angrily, ‘She can’t decide who wins and who loses because she is blind!’ I would say this and this alone, maybe the heart has an eye that can’t be seen and yet can see clearly who is in desperate need and who is not. Who knows? But what we do know is that when Gertrude was 18, she met a strange lady with wispy grey hair. The lady was pleasant enough. She invited Gertrude into her home, offered her tea, bread, and a place by a fire to sit down and cozy up. She told her, ‘The heart has an eye, and it is used many times throughout life, and it will secure your passage’. She said this with a lilt, her voice rising and falling to produce something quite melodious. Gertrude thought about that phrase over and over again throughout her life and wondered about what it could possibly mean. She never did truly come to a conclusion. The thought left her brain and went on its merry way to wherever thoughts go when they finish. It was only when she met a stumbling, bumbling, fumbling, and jumbled old man with wizardly attire and a small courageous boy, that the thought came back to her mind.

Chapter 2: Gertrude’s Encounter with A Jumbled Old Man and His Companion

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Gertrude was on strict orders from a mysterious figure that she didn’t ever truly know or recognize to do whatever she could to disrupt the plans of our two heroes, Grumbles and Steve. She roughly knew what they looked like. She knew one had a bluish top on and dark blue trousers. And the other one, she didn’t know where to begin with, but she did have a vague idea in her mind that the mysterious figure had told her he was a wizard. Much like herself then, she supposed.

Except for this special occasion, he didn’t go to the School of Maleficent Arcana, but rather the School of Arcana, which is a plain and simple school that teaches how to do good rather than evil. It teaches how to accrue the wealth of happiness and friendship rather than that of wealth and power—plus you got to learn about all manner of weird and wonderful charms and potions which made people think they were letterboxes, frogs, trees, and the like. There was even one tale of a man that was so convinced that he was the tail of a dog that he would wag from side to side all day and all night. It is sad to say magic does have its casualties, but the best thing about it is that sometimes it can be raucously funny.

Gertrude was merely pondering a cunning scheme that she was attempting to rob the locals of their cash. Her plan starts with by giving them a faulty potion that would initially boost good fortune, later turning them frogs. She was disturbed in the middle of her thoughts when a scraggly old chap with a wizened look on his face and a charming small adolescent boy came pootling by. She winced and then knew what she had to do. In a blink of an eye, she had them guzzling on a potion with the powers of hypnosis. Her subjects were now suggestible vegetables, her favorite type of person. They were initially trapped away in a cobwebbed basement with damp corners and a leaky roof, then went plip plop underneath her shop, ‘Oh Curious Things’.

Gertrude’s villainy did not stop there as she soon had them employed, maybe foolishly as she soon would learn, as staff members. They were brightly and cheerily serving customers left, right and center, and the monstrous masses of a relatively mediocre town would not unsettle them, for they were without minds and as if in a dream. When Gertrude retired to her room at night after a day’s work well done, she thought to herself that she couldn’t keep up with this business of evil-doing and mischief for her entire life. Do villains ever have retirements? She hoped so for an awful lot. She knew what it meant to be a bold woman who sold haunting wares and curious witchy paraphernalia; but on the inside, she still felt a small voice that chirped every so often about the better things.

Chapter 3: Steve and Grumbles, The Hypnotized Couplet

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Steve and Grumbles, the hypnotized couplet, were under the control of Gertrude. It was as if they were in a long dream and not a terrible one either. She treated them reasonably well, and they would watch out for her shop. They would see off any villainous characters if they stopped by to perform an act of thievery; they were especially good at that. Cunning folk who perpetrated crimes that were all about smoke, mirrors, and deception never had the slightest chance of outwitting the utmost vigilance and detection skills of our two protagonists. Even though they were in a vegetative state which was partly animated, admittedly, they had an uncanny air of agency about them, as if at any moment they would wake up and suddenly seize hold of an opportunity to assert themselves once more.

While all of this was happening, a most curious incident occurred where Steve and Grumbles found themselves walking around town in search of vegetables. They happened upon an old friend of Grumbles, and she was awe-struck with how peculiar they were behaving. She took a glance at