Young Witches & Warlocks

by Asimov, Isaac

  YOUNG WITCHES & WARLOCKS

  EDITED BY ISAAC ASIMOV, MARTIN H. GREENBERG, & CHARLES G. WAUGH

  HARPER & ROW, PUBLISHERS

  Young Witches & Warlocks Copyright ® 1987 by Nightfall, Inc., Martin H. Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. Printed in the United States of America. For information address Harper & Row Junior Books, 10 East 53rd Street, New York, N.Y. 10022. Published simultaneously in Canada by Fitzhenry & Whiteside Limited, Toronto.

  10 987654321

  First Edition

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Young witches & warlocks.

  Summary: Ten short stories by a variety of authors about young practitioners of witchcraft.

  1. Witchcraft—Fiction. 2. Short stories, American.

  3. Short stories, English. [1. Witchcraft—Fiction.

  2. Short stories] I. Asimov, Isaac, 1920

  II. Greenberg, Martin Harry. HI. Waugh, Charles G.

  IV. Title: Young witches and warlocks.

  PZ5.Y853 1987 [Fic] 85-45849

  ISBN 0-06-020183-5

  ISBN 0-06-020184-3 (lib. bdg.)

  Acknowledgments

  “The April Witch” by Ray Bradbury. Copyright 1952 by the Curtis Publishing Co.; renewed © 1980 by Ray Bradbury. Reprinted by permission of Don Congdon Associates, Inc. Copyright 1953 by Story Parade, Inc.

  “Witch Girl” by Elizabeth Coatsworth. Reprinted by permission of the author. All rights reserved.

  “The Wonderful Day” by Robert Arthur. Copyright 1940; renewed © 1968 by Robert Arthur. Reprinted by permission of the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Inc., 845 Third Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10022.

  “With Four Lean Hounds” by Pat Murphy. Copyright © 1984 by Pat Murphy. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Mistress Sary” by William Tenn. Copyright 1947; renewed © 1975 by Phil Klass; reprinted by permission of the author and his agent Virginia Kidd.

  “Teragram” by Evelyn E. Smith. Copyright © 1955 by King-Size Publications, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Henry Morrison, Inc.

  “Stevie and The Dark” by Zenna Henderson. Copyright 1952 by Zenna Henderson. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.

  “A Message from Charity” by William M. Lee. Copyright © 1967 by Mercury Press, Inc. From The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Reprinted by permission of the agents for the author’s Estate, the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Inc., 845 Third Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10022.

  “The Entrance Exam” by Mary Carey. Copyright ©1976 by Rand McNally and Company, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Macmillan Publishing Company.

  How Exciting!

  Isaac Asimov

  We can do a great many marvelous things these days. If we want to travel very quickly, all we have to do is get into a plane and it will speed us through the air at hundreds of miles an hour. A rocket ship will take us to the moon at thousands of miles an hour.

  If there is a marriage ceremony in London we want to watch, we just turn on our television and there it is right on the screen before our eyes.

  We can walk toward a door, and it will open for us even before we reach it. We don’t need to do any climbing if we want to get to the top of a tall building. We just step into an elevator and it will whisk us upward. It will take us down again, too.

  We can press a button and a whole room lights up. We can press another and cool air will begin to circulate in summer (or warm air in winter). We turn a faucet and have all the cold water—or hot water— that we want. A microwave oven will heat our dinner in minutes.

  We can sit at a word processor (as I am doing right now) and press certain typewriter keys, and paragraphs of writing appear on the screen. Press a few other keys and the writing will be automatically printed onto paper.

  Yet none of this is particularly exciting. We know how it’s done, or if we don’t, we know that someone else knows how it’s done. We also know that it will always work. If we want to turn on the light, we flick a switch. The lights will turn on no matter who flicks it. A baby can flick it and get light.

  We also know that it’s done by the use of energy. The lights burn because there is electricity coming into the house. The energy of electricity also runs the television set. The energy of burning gasoline drives automobiles and airplanes.

  How dull!

  There was a time, though, when people didn’t know the power of electricity or burning gasoline. They didn’t even know what energy was, or the way in which it had to be used in order to make things work. They didn’t know that the universe was run by energy undergoing changes in accordance with what we call “the laws of nature,” and that these laws of nature couldn’t be changed.

  In older times, people had no idea how the universe worked. They thought that it must be under the control of invisible and very powerful entities called gods or demons or any of many other names.

  After all, we can water our gardens with sprinkling cans, for instance, so when it rained, wasn’t that just some huge invisible rain-god watering the whole earth with an enormous sprinkling can? We can puff with our lungs and blow a feather through the air. When a huge storm wind came and blew down houses and trees, was that not some enormous storm-god blowing far more powerfully than we can? We light a fire on the hearth to warm the house. Was not the sun a huge fire lit by a sun-god in order to warm the whole earth?

  If that were so,- and if gods or demons controlled the universe, then human beings might, in their turn, control the universe by dealing with those gods or demons. Human beings might pray and beg the gods and demons to do something kind and useful—make it rain, for instance, when rain was needed. Or they could threaten the gods and demons somehow, or learn how to force them into human service.

  It was easy to imagine that some very wise human beings would learn special ways of forcing the gods and demons into service. There might be certain words and phrases that would do it, or certain motions of the hands, or certain magical objects.

  However it was done, the people who knew these secrets could then use divine or demonic power to do amazing things. They could fly through the air, they could see things at a distance, they could foretell the future, they could change a prince into a frog or vice versa. . . .

  Now that’s exciting.

  For one thing, it’s secret. Only a few people would know how it was done and be able to do it. They were called witches or warlocks, depending on whether they were women or men. They were considered powerful and frightening, because if they were displeased they could use their magic against you and do you harm.

  Secondly, you could never tell when you might accidentally come across something that would give you powers of magic or enchantment. You might find the tip of a unicorn’s horn, or an old lamp, or a ring, or a walnut shell, or almost anything, and discover that it could be used to tap the power of the invisible beings that control the universe.

  Now that is exciting!

  Suppose you walked into a room, pushed a switch, and the lights went on. So what! Anyone could push a switch. But suppose, on the other hand, you had a little piece of mysterious glass the size of a Ping-Pong ball, and suppose you pulled it out of your pocket and whispered to it the magic words “Fiat lux,” and the glass began to glow until it lit the whole room. And suppose that you were the only one who owned such a piece of glass and you were the only one who knew how to make it glow. Wouldn’t that be worth a million electric lights?

  Or suppose you wanted to know what was going on in Nairobi, Kenya. Wouldn’t it be much better to hav
e a crystal ball, and to make magic passes over it, than to just turn on a television set?

  Wouldn’t it be more fun to fly through the air on the back of a demon than inside an airplane?

  Sure it would. Energy and electricity and machinery are all boring. No matter how many scientific marvels we can create, what we really want is magic. We don’t want a door to open because we interrupt a beam of light as we walk, or because we step on a hidden pressure device. We want it to open because we say “Open sesame,” and we want to be the only one who knows the secret of the phrase.

  That is why even in modern times, when we know that magic doesn’t work and that energy does, we want to read stories about magic. We still thrill to it and get excited. Even while we read the story by the light of an electric lamp with the air conditioner going, we sigh for the ability to say to a demon, “Light this room and make it cool.”

  And when the demon says, “Master, I hear and obey,” how much more exciting that is than to push a switch or two.

  So here we have ten stories of witchcraft, warlockry, and magic for you, ten stories in which young people either have or discover unusual powers, and they will please you even in this world of science in which we live.

  The April Witch

  Ray Bradbury

  Did you ever do something and then wonder why? Maybe this is the answer.

  * * *

  Into the air, over the valleys, under the stars, above a river, a pond, a road, flew Cecy. Invisible as new spring winds, fresh as the breath of clover rising from twilight fields, she flew. She soared in doves as soft as white ermine, stopped in trees and lived in blossoms, showering away in petals when the breeze blew. She perched in a lime-green frog, cool as mint by a shining pool. She trotted in a brambly dog and barked to hear echoes from the sides of distant barns. She lived in new April grasses, in sweet clear liquids rising from the musky earth.

  It’s spring, thought Cecy. I’ll be in every living thing in the world tonight.

  Now she inhabited neat crickets on the tar-pool roads, now prickled in dew on an iron gate. Hers was an adaptably quick mind flowing unseen upon Illinois winds on this one evening of her life when she was just seventeen.

  “I want to be in love,” she said.

  She had said it at supper. And her parents had widened their eyes and stiffened back in their chairs. “Patience,” had been their advice. “Remember, you’re remarkable. Our whole family is odd and remarkable. We can’t mix or marry with ordinary folk. We’d lose our magical powers if we did. You wouldn’t want to lose your ability to ‘travel’ by magic, would you? Then be careful. Be careful!”

  But in her high bedroom, Cecy had touched perfume to her throat and stretched out, trembling and apprehensive, on her four-poster, as a moon the color of milk rose over Illinois country, turning rivers to cream and roads to platinum.

  “Yes,” she sighed. “I’m one of an odd family. We sleep days and fly nights like black kites on the wind. If we want, we can sleep in moles through the winter, in the warm earth. I can live in anything at all—a pebble, a crocus, or a praying mantis. I can leave my plain, bony body behind and send my mind far out for adventure. Now!”

  The wind whipped her away over fields and meadows.

  She saw the warm spring lights of cottages and farms glowing with twilight colors.

  If I can’t be in love, myself, because I’m plain and odd, then I’ll be in love through someone else, she thought.

  Outside a farmhouse in the spring night a dark-haired girl, no more than nineteen, drew up water from a deep stone well. She was singing.

  Cecy fell—a green leaf—into the well. She lay in the tender moss of the well, gazing up through dark coolness. Now she quickened in a fluttering, invisible amoeba. Now in a water droplet! At last, within a cold cup, she felt herself lifted to the girl’s warm lips. There was a soft night sound of drinking.

  Cecy looked out from the girl’s eyes.

  She entered into the dark head and gazed from the shining eyes at the hands pulling the rough rope. She listened through the shell ears to this girl’s world. She smelled a particular universe through these delicate nostrils, felt this special heart beating, beating. Felt this strange tongue move with singing.

  Does she know I’m here? thought Cecy.

  The girl gasped. She stared into the night meadows.

  "Who’s there?”

  No answer.

  "Only the wind,” whispered Cecy.

  "Only the wind.” The girl laughed at herself, but shivered.

  It was a good body, this girl’s body. It held bones of finest slender ivory hidden and roundly fleshed. This brain was like a pink tea rose, hung in darkness, and there was cider-wine in this mouth. The lips lay firm on the white, white teeth and the brows arched neatly at the world, and the hair blew soft and fine on her milky neck. The pores knit small and close. The nose tilted at the moon and the cheeks glowed like small fires. The body drifted with feather-balances from one motion to another and seemed always singing to itself. Being in this body, this head, was like basking in a hearth fire, living in the purr of a sleeping cat, stirring in warm creek waters that flowed by night to the sea.

  I’ll like it here, thought Cecy.

  “What?” asked the girl, as if she’d heard a voice.

  “What’s your name?” asked Cecy carefully.

  “Ann Leary.” The girl twitched. “Now why should I say that out loud?”

  “Ann, Ann,” whispered Cecy. “Ann, you’re going to be in love.”

  As if to answer this, a great roar sprang from the road, a clatter and a ring of wheels on gravel. A tall man drove up in a rig, holding the reins high with his monstrous arms, his smile glowing across the yard.

  “Ann!”

  “Is that you, Tom?”

  “Who else?” Leaping from the rig, he tied the reins to the fence.

  "I’m not speaking to you!” Ann whirled, the bucket in her hands slopping.

  "No!” cried Cecy.

  Ann froze. She looked at the hills and the first spring stars. She stared at the man named Tom. Cecy made her drop the bucket.

  "Look what you’ve done!”

  Tom ran up.

  "Look what you made me do!”

  He wiped her shoes with a kerchief, laughing.

  "Get away!” She kicked at his hands, but he laughed again, and gazing down on him from miles away, Cecy saw the turn of his head, the size of his skull, the flare of his nose, the shine of his eye, the girth of his shoulder, and the hard strength of his hands doing this delicate thing with the handkerchief. Peering down from the secret attic of this lovely head, Cecy yanked a hidden copper ventriloquist’s wire and the pretty mouth popped wide: "Thank you!”

  "Oh, so you have manners?” The smell of leather on his hands, the smell of the horse rose from his clothes into the tender nostrils, and Cecy, far, far away over night meadows and flowered fields, stirred as with some dream in her bed.

  "Not for you, no!” said Ann.

  "Hush, speak gently,” said Cecy. She moved Ann’s fingers out toward Tom’s head. Ann snatched them back.

  “I’ve gone mad!”

  “You have.” He nodded, smiling but bewildered. “Were you going to touch me then?”

  “I don’t know. Oh, go away!” Her cheeks glowed with pink charcoals.

  “Why don’t you run? I’m not stopping you.” Tom got up. “Have you changed your mind? Will you go to the dance with me tonight? It’s special. Tell you why later.”

  “No,” said Ann.

  “Yes!” cried Cecy. “I’ve never danced. I want to dance. I’ve never worn a long gown, all rustly. I want that. I want to dance all night. I’ve never known what it’s like to be in a woman, dancing; Father and Mother would never permit it. Dogs, cats, locusts, leaves, everything else in the world at one time or another I’ve known, but never a woman in the spring, never on a night like this. Oh, please—we must go to that dance!”

  She spread her thought like the
fingers of a hand within a new glove.

  “Yes,” said Ann Leary, “I’ll go. I don’t know why, but I’ll go to the dance with you tonight, Tom.”

  “Now inside, quick!” cried Cecy. “You must wash, tell your folks, get your gown ready, out with the iron, into your room!”

  “Mother,” said Ann, “I’ve changed my mind!”

  * * *

  The rig was galloping off down the pike, the rooms of the farmhouse jumped to life, water was boiling for a bath, the coal stove was heating an iron to press the gown, the mother was rushing about with a fringe of hairpins in her mouth. “What’s come over you, Ann? You don’t like Tom!”

  “That’s true.” Ann stopped amidst the great fever.

  But it’s spring! thought Cecy.

  “It’s spring,” said Ann.

  And it’s a fine night for dancing, thought Cecy.

  “. . . for dancing,” murmured Ann Leary.

  Then she was in the tub and the soap creaming on her white seal shoulders, small nests of soap beneath her arms, and the flesh of her warm breasts moving in her hands and Cecy moving the mouth, making the smile, keeping the actions going. There must be no pause, no hesitation, or the entire pantomime might fall in ruins! Ann Leary must be kept moving, doing, acting, wash here, soap there, now out! Rub with a towel! Now perfume and powder!

  “You!” Ann caught herself in the mirror, all whiteness and pinkness like lilies and carnations. "Who are you tonight?”

  “I’m a girl seventeen.” Cecy gazed from her violet eyes. “You can’t see me. Do you know I’m here?”

  Ann Leary shook her head. “I’ve rented my body to an April witch, for sure.”

  “Close, very close!” laughed Cecy. “Now, on with your dressing.

  The luxury of feeling good clothes move over an ample body! And then the halloo outside.

  “Ann, Tom’s back!”

  “Tell him to wait.” Ann sat down suddenly. “Tell him I’m not going to that dance.”