The Witch Curse Received by Don Challenor

Don Challenor’s supposed witch’s curse is a recurring bodily and psychological affliction that he associates with the Fry women and later turns into a means of influencing Zlenko. Its significance lies in the uncertain boundary between supernatural force and human suggestion: Don connects his symptoms to witchcraft, while the people around him offer explanations ranging from self-induced effects to inherited magical power. The belief is never conclusively verified, but it has practical consequences, first for Don and then for the frightened Zlenko.

Origins and Family History

Don’s account of the curse grows out of his research into witchcraft and his visits to Calensa Fry. Against his better judgement, he accepted her offer to help with that research. Calensa initially claimed to have no supernatural powers, describing her practice as psychological manipulation that sustained her reputation and business. Don understood this as a possible double bluff: her denial could invite him to dismiss what he had experienced, even though he felt he had reason not to.

The research brought him into Calensa’s account of a long-running feud between the Fry and Harkness families. She traced it to their opposing sides in the Cornish rising of 1648 and repeatedly insisted that Jack Harkness had murdered her grandson, Jory Fry, by holding him underwater in a rock pool. She gave the date as 1 August 1970, Lammas, and wanted Don to accuse Harkness in print. Don explains that such an allegation could not be fitted into an academic study of witchcraft; Calensa, he says, did not understand the limits of that kind of writing. These meetings took place in the kitchen of Tredarvas Farm, a ruin whose land the family had abandoned while remaining in the house for a time. Calensa never visited Don, and he never saw further into the house.

The pressure to make a public accusation links Calensa’s account of witchcraft to the family’s older grievance and to a specific demand of Don. His story does not establish that the curse began with that demand, but it places his later sense of vulnerability within a relationship where Calensa sought to enlist his writing in support of her conviction about Harkness and Jory’s death.

Symptoms and Don’s Explanation

Don describes the effects as recurring rather than constant. After a tussle with Calensa, he says, he would feel free of accidents, fear, and anxiety while away from Exeter. From a distance, his susceptibility seemed absurd to his rational mind; returning brought the feelings back. He also recalls being unable to use his right hand properly. The contrast between improvement while away and renewed trouble on his return becomes part of his evidence for a connection between the Fry family and his condition.

A turning point came when Don confessed to Calensa that he had tried to deceive her. He says that after admitting this, he was no longer accident-prone, and he did not believe the change was coincidence. The improvement is important, but it does not settle what caused the symptoms or their cessation. Don recognizes the rational objection even as he insists on the force of what he experienced. Calensa, meanwhile, had said that people induced their own experiences and that she was not responsible for what happened to them. Her explanation keeps psychological manipulation in view without making Don’s account simply disappear.

Don also describes Calensa as a formidable presence whose capacity to intimidate him persisted despite his resentment of it. He compares Wynsum Fry to her grandmother, saying that Wynsum had come to resemble Calensa more and more. That perceived inheritance helps explain why Don expects trouble when he is due to encounter Wynsum again, though the account does not establish a complete or demonstrable mechanism by which the supposed curse passes between them.

From Personal Experience to Leverage

Before Don returns to Cornwall, Maris Hemsley gives him a small brown paper bag as insurance against trouble from Wynsum. She passes on advice from a dewitcher she consulted after Wynsum had been affecting her: the way to break a witch’s hold was to burn something the witch had worn next to her skin at the place where she was born. The exchange provides Don with a specific ritual explanation and a proposed countermeasure. It does not establish what the bag contains, or that Don later performs the ritual.

Later, when Amos French and Zlenko discuss Wynsum as a fortune-teller, Don calls her a witch. He says the words without knowing why he has spoken, a moment that makes his own assertion seem partly involuntary. When Zlenko asks whether she was truly a witch, Don confirms it. He then claims that she cursed him when he would not do what she wanted. The story shifts here from Don’s recollection of his own symptoms to his deliberate use of that experience as a warning to another person.

Zlenko reacts with visible alarm. He crosses himself, mutters in Russian, and later says that he is burning. Don answers that he had told himself the same thing when he could not use his right hand, but that his hand still would not work. The comparison gives Don’s warning the force of personal testimony; it also shows how an account of affliction can intensify another person’s fear. The text depicts Zlenko’s response, not proof that Wynsum has placed a supernatural curse on either man.

The Proposed Remedy and Its Unresolved Meaning

Don tells Zlenko that another witch had described a way to neutralize Wynsum’s power: obtain an item of clothing she wore next to her skin, burn it at her birthplace, and then be free of her. The instructions echo the protection Maris had described before Don’s return to Cornwall. In the car, this remedy becomes part of Don’s exchange with Zlenko, who demands to know what must be done at the birthplace. Don supplies the final instruction, but the evidence ends with the proposal rather than its execution.

The curse therefore remains a state of belief and experience rather than a settled supernatural fact. Don’s recurring symptoms, his confession to Calensa, Maris’s transmitted ritual advice, and Zlenko’s fear all give the belief consequences within the story. At the same time, Calensa’s own account of psychological manipulation and Don’s acknowledgement of rational doubt preserve uncertainty. Don’s personal vulnerability becomes persuasive power: what he cannot conclusively explain in himself, he uses to shape Zlenko’s understanding of danger and possible escape.