The Knife Grinder's Curse

Throughout history, a razor sharp blade has always commanded fear and respect, a
tool of passive utility or a wreaker of havoc in the affairs of man. Benign, yet lethal, it fulfils simple domestic function or cleaves vulnerable flesh with cold, indifferent efficiency. For millennia, the essential alchemy has always been the skill of the metal forger and the savvy of the sharpener; without both the sorcery is blunted.

You never knew when the knife grinder would turn up; he just did, when you least expected him. He would emerge from his curious conveyance and appear at the rear of the shop bristling with expectation. The grinder was otherworldly, a mystic arrival from an alien land.

Inside his dull, grey van sat a large pedal driven grinding wheel with a stool alongside it on which the sorcerer would perch, his gnarled fingers working at such speed that what you witnessed was a pyrotechnic circus performance; a firework display in a van. In thirty minutes, every knife in the shop would be ruthlessly honed to frightening perfection. Workaday familiarity transformed into the scimitars and sabres of the assassin.

Titch, Billy's assistant for many years, clearly knew the grinder from way back, and would lean against the van door trading mumbled snippets of gossip as the grinder worked his magic. Body language and familiarity made it easy to assume that the two had history; history with a faint hint of conspiracy. Money and meaty-handled blades would eventually change hands and the grey van would resume its mystical quest, leaving behind it a faint whiff of foreboding.

Inside the shop, sides of beef would be butchered with renewed vigour, surgically serious blades slicing through the toughest sinews. Chain link gloves were employed as insurance against careless haste, as carcases were jointed, boned and rolled. Slowly and skilfully, the shop window would be transformed into a display of the finest charcuterie the town had to offer.

Billy was rotund, red faced and stout-hearted and had run his butchers shop in the town for many years. Titch, five feet tall and resilient, had worked for Billy since leaving school, slowly and guilefully burrowing his way into the very essence of the business. When Billy was away bidding at the beast market , Titch ran the shop and when Billy was in the shop, Titch was usually out in the van, delivering a mobile service to the wider community.

Talk of the knife grinder was rare as Billy and Titch went about their daily business, but when it did take place, more was left unsaid than was ever said. The only fact I ever gleaned was that Billy made a point of keeping well out of the way whenever the knife grinder called and I never ever found out why.

It was during the school holidays when I spent most of my time working there that something quite unexpected happened. It was a glorious July afternoon when the grinder appeared, wraith like, at the rear entrance. Knives were gathered and the usual magic began inside the van, but this time Titch's body language by the rear door slowly transformed from casual to hostile. From the rear shop doorway I could hear angry words climbing above the din of the grinding steel and the van suddenly lurched as Titch leapt inside, disappearing from view. For some seconds the vehicle rocked violently, testimony to physical struggle, before he leapt out and stormed past me into the shop with a look on his face that would frighten goblins.

For some minutes all was quiet, but then the grinding wheel began its relentless revolutions once more and normality seemed restored. Eventually, the wheel stopped and the grinder stepped out, but instead of coming across to the shop for payment, he slowly and deliberately laid out the knives on top of the wall beside the van, climbed into the driver's seat and calmly reversed out into the street. I walked across the yard and stared down at the knives sitting side by side on the wall. They sat there glinting in the afternoon sunshine, lethal, unnerving and malevolent. I gathered them with extreme caution and took them inside.

The afternoon progressed inside the shop with business as usual, Billy serving a steady trickle of customers whilst Titch, now bristling with attitude, boned a side of bacon. What happened next was something I will never forget, because it was so totally unexpected, traumatic and completely inexplicable. Two of Titch's newly sharpened knives nearly killed him.

I say this because that's what it looked like as the bizarre incident unfolded in what seemed like slow motion. There was a sudden yelp as Titch lurched forward across the bench, flopping across the side of bacon he was working on. He then slowly raised himself upright and turned towards us with a look of horror on his face. The blade of his favourite boning knife had penetrated his apron and his trousers, burying itself up to the hilt into his thigh.

As we stood transfixed, the blood gradually drained from his face and emerged from the bottom of his trouser leg onto the tiled floor, forming a small viscous lake around his feet. As if this weren't enough, his right hand with which he gripped the thigh was also bleeding profusely, adding to the horror unfolding in front of us. He slowly closed his eyes and slid down the heavy work block onto the floor, his legs splaying out like windscreen wipers across the blood pool.

As Billy rushed across to assist, he lost his footing on the liquid floor and his considerable weight crashed onto the tiles alongside his now motionless assistant. I stood transfixed by the whole bizarre tableau, a thirteen year old delivery boy witnessing the unimaginable. As he tried to regain his composure, Billy screamed at me to ring for an ambulance and I was more than happy to do so, fleeing the scene to the sanctuary of the back office and the old Bakelite telephone. It was the one and only time in my life that I have ever dialled 999.

Shocked by the whole experience, I fled the scene on the delivery bike and pedalled away my anxiety with the day's local deliveries. It was mid afternoon that I plucked up the courage to return, just in time to see an ambulance pulling away from the shop. I parked the shop bike in the usual place in the rear yard and grabbed the handle on the rear door. To my surprise, it was locked, so I walked round to the front to find the window blind at half mast and the shop door also locked. I shuddered as the seriousness of what had happened hit me, so I had no alternative but to set off for home on foot. As I looked across the road, I was surprised to see the knife grinder's van reversed into the lane at the side of the shops opposite. A shadowy figure sat silent and motionless in the driver's seat staring straight across the road at the scene of the afternoon's terrible events. As I set off up the road the van passed me as it headed into town, a trail of black smoke following it like a faithful acolyte.

It was the following week before I returned and learned the full story. Billy had his left arm in a sling, broken in two places he said, by the impact of his fall. Titch was still in hospital recovering from his near death experience, his femoral artery having been severed by his boning knife and his right hand sliced open when he fell forward onto his razor sharp scimitar. From his hospital bed, Titch apparently couldn't recall how it had happened. He said that it was just as if things were beyond his control for a second or two, a bizarre and utterly unique event that he couldn't explain. He'd worked as a butcher since leaving school with never so much as a cut finger.

I spent the afternoon making sausages on the old Hobart machine and couldn't get the whole scary incident out of my mind. When I'd hungup the last batch on the hook in the shop window, I told Billy how I'd heard Titch arguing with the grinder and how the knives had been just left on the wall. I told him how I'd seen the grinder's van parked opposite when I got back that afternoon and how the grinder had just been sitting there watching. The knives must have been cursed, I said, jokingly, it's the only possible explanation. Billy sliced through the string on the joint he'd just tied and looked across at me with an expression on his face I'd never seen before. He was about to say something to me, but he forced back the words and looked away. At that moment a customer walked in and Billy clicked into customer friendly auto pilot.

A few weeks later Titch returned to work and the strange incident of the knives was never mentioned again. An electric sharpening machine appeared one afternoon and took possession of a space next to the Hobart in the back room. The knife grinder never returned.