For another, we were now bashing into each other, in my case into Cooper, with whom I butted heads somewhat painfully. We both sat back on our heels, rubbing respective temples and looking quite accidentally into each other’s eyes. His, as I might have mentioned, were beautiful; green and soulful and sad. When I looked at him in that moment, they were something else as well. They were mischievous. Laughing. Even, I could have sworn, kind of delighted, probably at the absurdity of the situation. I did a sort of mental double-take.
It was like I was looking at a completely different person from the oily olive one I knew, at the cheerful lime-green person who had to be in there. And a very weird thing: I was starting to like that person. In spite of the constant insults.
Suddenly it was dead quiet, the last book, apparently, having flown off the shelves. The door opened and Evelina stomped in, outraged. “What is going on in here?” And then, as she took the situation in. “Why are you all under the table?”
Julia scrambled out, assuming her presidential duties. “Uh… we had a little, um, telekinetic incident.”
What had I just heard? The head Ozone Ranger has just revealed the deepest secret on campus to a faculty member?
Crawling out, my eyes on Evelina’s face, I saw the corners of her mouth turn up. “New members I see. Well.” She looked at the chaos around her. “You people must be getting good. Is everyone all right?”
“Um, great,” said Julia. “Wonderful.”
“Just be careful, will you, or they’ll close you down. I’ll make up something for the librarian.” And, to my complete amazement, she left without another word.
Carlos and I spoke as one: “What was that?”
Julia shrugged. “You can’t get a room without a faculty sponsor.”
“Huh?” said Carlos. “You and your psychic friends just…”
“No, we didn’t just anything. We rode the ozone first.”
“Oh.”
“And we found Evelina would be the most receptive faculty member. As it happens, she comes from a long line of Mayan shamans.”
“What?” The Mayan Connection again. Something about all this was seeming less than coincidental.
Julia either didn’t hear or didn’t care. “Listen, is everybody okay? I kind of fudged that one.”
“Just fine,” Sonya said, “’Cept Kara’s missing. And Jag.”
“Well, I’d be missing too if I were Kara, but omigod, Jag! He sounded really hurt.” She glanced at me to see how I was taking it. Everybody knew the Beast and I hung together.
“Oh, he’s fine. I wouldn’t worry about Jag. He’s probably the one who took out Abuela’s mugger.”
Everybody looked at me kind of sidewise, like ‘how mean can she be,’ but I wasn’t wasting sympathy on the Beast, who’d after all given me an assignment and then deserted. Too bad then, they’d have to learn about him another night.
“Why don’t we see if we can get these books back on the shelves?” I said, and then, hearing the odd way I’d phrased it, ran with it. “Wait a minute. Maybe we can do what Kara does. Maybe we could just float them up there. Anyone want to try?”
Of course everyone did.
So we grounded again and tried it, picking a tattered copy of Catcher in the Rye to focus on. Since I’d had the idea, I was leading the meditation. We had our eyes open and we were looking at it. “All right now, on the count of three, let’s move it an inch along the floor. Just an inch, that’s all.” But before I could even start counting, the book began to slide.
“Who’s doing that?” Sonya blurted. But we ignored her and kept moving the book, which had now travelled a good three inches, only stopping when it hit Pride and Prejudice.
“Let’s make it levitate. One… two… three… LIFT!”
The book lifted. And not just a little bit. It came a good five inches off the floor, plenty for Carlos to pass his hand underneath it, and the rest of us to still see air between it and the book. No doubt that made us lose focus because suddenly it plummeted, causing Carlos to say something rude in Spanish, but the rest of us didn’t miss a beat, just jumped up and started yelling and high-fiving again, like we had when we made Cooper human for five seconds.
My head was spinning like the kid’s in that old demon movie. I really could not believe what we’d just done.
Julia, who’d jumped up in the general hilarity, sat down with a plop. “We’re actually getting good at this stuff. Imagine if we’d had Kara here!”
“Kara!” Sonya said. “Better go.”
“No, wait,” I said. “We’ve got to talk about her; and put these books back. We’re meeting tomorrow, right?”
“I think we should meet every night,” said Carlos. “I can’t get enough of this.” He got up, as we all did, and began shelving books— the old-fashioned way.
“Also, we’ve got some really important stuff to do. You guys don’t know the half of it.”
“Oh, yeah,” Cooper said. “Like what, Miss Allaboutreeno?”
“I think tomorrow’s soon enough for that. When Jag can be here.”
“Poor cat’s prob’ly lyin’ wounded in a ditch,” Sonya said. “How can you be so mean about him?”
“Trust me, he’s no poor cat.” I shoved The Origin of Species onto a shelf and Breaking Dawn right beside it. Funny, I thought, a book about evolution next to a book about a girl who wants to be a vampire. “Okay, about Kara. I think something awful’s happened to her. There’s a reason she can’t get on with her life. Anybody else?”
Yep, Everybody else.
“Well. What now?”
Nobody knew.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN—THE UNLEASHING
I had a history essay due, and I decided to do it on the Spanish Conquest— that way I could kill two birds with one stone. Boy, did I have stuff for A.B. by the time I got out of the library. Once again, we met during the afternoon parade around the courtyard.
“I’ve got one word for you, pussypaws: Cozumel.”
“Go on,” said His Fuzziness. He was in Cat Position Three, Beachfuzz, lying on his back in the sun with his feet all stretched out, looking for all the world like a dead cat— or at least an innocent cat. His famous tail was still for once.
“Are you quite comfortable?” I said.
“It’s no wonder so many cultures have worshiped the sun,” he said. “You simply cannot beat it for thoroughgoing delight.”
Me, I was hot; and so were the hundred or so kids I’d sentenced to this afternoon ritual, most of whom would have been calling me names if they were allowed to. “Speak for yourself, kittybumpass. I could worship a soft drink right about now.”
I went back to the Spaniards. “You’ve heard of Torquemada, right?” The famous torturer who gave the Spaniards such a bad name in human rights circles.
He got up, stretched out his front paws in Yoga Kitty, and plopped back down. “I see you’ve been boning up on the Spanish Inquisition.”
“That’s why they burned all the books; destroyed all those New World cultures. Because they were such ‘good Christians.’ See why I’m not such a fan of God?”
“Not a fan of the sun?”
“Huh? The sun?”
“Have you been listening, Soldier? Plenty of cultures thought it was God.”
“Well, not the Spaniards. They went with the old guy with the beard. And if you weren’t with them on that, you might get burned along with the books. Oh, but the Mayans and the Aztecs— guess who they thought was God?”
“Enlighten me.”
“Cortes! The explorer. No, really, they did. They had this god called Quetzalcoatl, who was light, and predicted to appear in the year Cortes came to Cozumel. The Plumed Serpent, they called him. Cortes must have been blond, huh? And maybe he wore a feather in his helmet. I don’t know about the serpent part, but he did turn out to be a snake— they mistook him for a god, and he cleaned ’em out.”
“You did good work last night, Soldier.”
“You keep getting off t
he subject. Whatever happened to focus?”
“I’m not off the subject.” He was in Cat Position Five now, The Sphinx, and making about as much sense as the one with the riddle. “Do you know what you did in there?”
I didn’t want to think about it. “Freaked Kara out so bad she turned into Carrie.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“It’s a movie, peachfuzz. About a really, really unhappy girl who happens to be telekinetic. Anyhow, she didn’t even sleep in the room last night. She hates me. I feel really bad about it.”
“I wouldn’t if I were you,” he said, and his kitty-voice had a dry sound to it, like an old-time British actor— David Niven, maybe. “You really don’t know what you did in there, do you?”
He started grooming himself. How he could lick fuzz and talk at the same time I really had no idea. I thought about it. “Uh-uh,” I said finally. “Enlighten me.”
“You changed the energy in that room.”
“Are you kidding? I changed the weather in there. ‘Cloudy, with a chance of bookfall’.”
“You almost did magic. Very elementary magic, of course. Only a precursor, really. But it’s a beginning. Yes indeed. A very, very small beginning.”
“What in the name of Quetzalcoatl are you talking about?” But even as I was speaking, I got it. “Oh, wait. Change! That’s it, isn’t it? You said I changed something.”
“Well not exactly a light bulb, but you’re getting there. Look, Soldier, what’s the Simple Secret of Magic?”
He couldn’t trip me on that one. “ ‘As above, so below’. How dumb do you think I am?”
“Well?”
“Well what?”
His ugly eyes turned into nasty slits. “Do I really have to spell everything out for you? Look, you changed. You actually did something different. That would be the ‘below,’ correct?”
“Why not the ‘above’?”
“Focus, Novice! If you’re the ‘below,’ then the ‘above’ is…”
“Kara?” I ventured, thinking that made about as much sense as worshipping Cortes.
“The energy, Novice. The energy! You unleashed something.”
“Well yeah. Ojai’s first bookstorm. How could that be good?”
“Chew on it.”
Work with available materials, he’d said. My life? I thought again. It was too weird for words. But just when I thought I was getting it, he was over it.
“Very well. The library report. What, exactly, happened in Cozumel?”
“It’s one place Cortes landed. It was well past the Classic Mayan period, though— I don’t even know if they had any books then.”
“They did.”
“Okay, but you’ve got to remember that every Mayan site was really a city-state. We have no way of knowing that’s where the codex would be— the one we want, I mean.”
“Are you always this negative? I had the impression you were a burglar.”
“I am,” I said, my dignity ruffled.
“Well, how can you know there’s something valuable inside when you go into a house?”
“I take my chances. Okay, I see where you’re going with that. Cozumel is where the Spanish were, so if we’re going to try to get the codex from them, we might want to go there. It’s in the Yucatan, quite a bit east of here.”
“Yes, drat the luck. It’ll make for a bumpier ride.”
“Beg pardon?”
“One of the vagaries of time travel is that it gets more difficult if you have to go to a place other than the one where you start out.”
“Oh. Well. I don’t know if I’m into that right now.”
“Hold the focus on Cozumel. And one other thing. You know that thing you did last night— that unleashing thing?”
“Uh-huh.” I preened.
“It’s only magic if you intend to do it.”
***
Well, I did what he said— I chewed on it. And right after the afternoon hike, I skinked into another dorm, one that wasn’t in the remedial unit, and fingertoned an iPhone. Easy-peazy— people are so trusting. Some guy had just left one lying on his bureau, along with his charger and headset. Hmmm. Very nice. Maybe I’d keep it.
Okay, first on the agenda: Manny Diaz. Oh, man, this was great. I just searched the Internet until I had him— hey, look at that, he was a sportscaster in L.A. now! Unbelievable. Sometimes it seemed like the worse people acted, the more they got rewarded. But for me, this was beautiful. All I had to do was call the TV station where he worked.
Okay, then. No time like the present: “Mr. Diaz, please.”
“May I tell him who’s calling?”
Good question. I had an answer, all right, but it could easily be the wrong one. “Mr. Allingham’s office,” I said.
“Just a moment, please.”
About half a moment, actually. And then a staccato, furious, slightly-accented voice thundered in my ear: “What the f— do you want, life-trasher?”
“This isn’t Bertrand Allingham,” I said. “I’m calling for Mr. Cooper Allingham.” Significant pause. “Bertrand’s son.”
The voice that came back was entirely different. Alert; deeply interested. “Oh, yeah? How’s the life-trasher’s son doing?” There was a lot of malice in that voice. “Lemme talk to him, why don’t you?”
“Mr. Diaz, you of all people know I can’t do that. Cooper can’t say what he means— and what he does say you wouldn’t want to hear. And you know exactly why.”
He yelped. And then: “Outstanding! You mean the goddam thing worked?”
“The curse you put on him, you mean? He’s just a kid, Mr. Diaz. A really nice boy whose life you systematically wrecked. He’s not Bertrand Allingham; he’s somebody who never even knew about you, much less hurt you.”
“Well, how the f— do you know that?”
“I figured it out.”
“What the f— you talkin’?” He sure was large on the “f” word. (though not on the air, I suspected.)
“I’m one of a group of psychics working to help Cooper.” I was trying my best to sound grown up. “We’ve ascertained that he’s under psychic attack and that the attack came from you. The safest method is to remove the curse yourself. If you fail to do that, we cannot be responsible for the consequences.”
I was making this up as I went along, but so far Manny seemed to be listening, at least. “Consequences to the kid? What do I care about somebody else’s kid? Know what that kid’s old man did to my kid? He saw his father disrespected by everybody, you get that? The whole world, you understand?”
“No. I don’t mean consequences to Cooper; I mean to you.”
“What the f— you talkin’?” he said again.
“What goes around comes around, Mr. Diaz.”
“Well, it ain’t coming to me. I don’t do no spells. I hired the best babalawo in Los Angeles County for that shit. He can worry about it his own goddam self.”
He hung up. Okay, Plan B then. Whatever that was. But I had the beginnings of an idea, spawned by my completely empty threat. But what was a babalawo?
Back to the Internet. Damn, it was good to be connected again! I really, really wanted to keep that phone. But even more, I wanted to make Level Three and I was gaining on it. If I was caught with contraband, I’d probably get busted back to Square One.
Reluctantly, I skinked back into the dorm I got it from and returned it.
***
A.B. had certainly picked the right word. I’d unleashed stuff I hadn’t counted on, in my own mind, at least. Up till now I’d been afraid to ask about Haley, but now I was actually feeling kind of hopeful. I thought there was something we could do.
If we could just do it in time.
Mom would think I was crazy and jerk me out of school if I told her what I thought, so I wrote to Dad at work.
***
“Dad, how is Haley? Listen, you were right about this school. I’m learning stuff here they don’t teach you at Santa Barbara High. I can’t say too much now
, but I think Haley’s under psychic attack. Do you know what that is? I had a dream about you and Mom that makes me think there’s a curse on the family. LISTEN, DAD, I AM NOT CRAZY! Can you consult a babalawo? Do you know what that is? Well, yeah, I guess so, considering your field. I know for a fact that babalawos can curse people (don’t ask me how I know), so maybe they can remove curses too. Dad, anything’s worth a try, right?
“While I’m here, how is Curly? I sure miss her a lot. Every night I sleep with that great Curly dog you and Jamie got for me.” (That and a big fat dangerous hairball— but I didn’t mention that.)
“Hey, am I getting any letters from Jace and Morgan? I really miss them, and I sure wish I could know what they’re up to these days. If you ever get to the point that you think you can send their letters on, I wish you would. Just so you know, I’m up to Level Two again— I guess you heard about that unfortunate incident with the principal— it was a misunderstanding, that’s all. But I’m doing great now. I’ve got a lot of points towards Level Three.”
***
I wrote to my mom too. “Hey, Mom, I really like this school. I’m doing great but I can’t wait to come home.” Stuff like that. I also did what A.B. told me to— I kept my focus on Cozumel.
Here’s what I found out about it: There were four surviving codices— the Dresden, the Madrid, the Paris, and the Grolier, which was found in a cave in Chiapas a few years ago. The first three are thought to come from Chichen Itza. So it looked like A.B.’s idea was right. There ought to have been plenty more before Bishop Landa lit his bonfire. Because here’s what happened— most of the Mayan books were destroyed, not by the “Spanish” as such, but by one man, Father Diego de Landa, a Franciscan who actually wrote down quite a bit about what we now know about Mayan life, but who destroyed most of their books in a giant fire in front of his monastery.
I reported to A.B. right before the meeting. He was curled up on Kara’s unkempt bed, Kara having pretty much stayed away since the Affair of the Flying Books.
“So why didn’t he burn them all?” A.B. asked.
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