Magic Dude

by Lee Hayton

  Tyler let his hand be shaken. He stared around at the faces of the men, newly living, in the room.

  “Who are they?”

  “Character actors, mainly. I empower them with a few extra skills for the occasion, then they stand in for your relatives or any ungodly creatures I need on short notice. They’re paid well for the time they actually have to spend working.” A frown crossed Albert’s face. “Unlike some of us who aren’t paid at all.”

  “So, Julius isn’t my cousin.” As Tyler pointed to the offending party, Julius’s face changed into that of a younger man, his expression full of eagerness to please.

  “Julius is your cousin,” Albert said. “He’s currently in California, planning up another scheme to wrest the stone out of your control.”

  He pointed to the young man standing near. “That, however, is Walton. He does a fine Julius and can stand in as Alejandro in a pinch.”

  “I didn’t kill my father?”

  “You haven’t killed anybody.” Knight Albert clapped Tyler on the shoulder. “And I must say, well done. You, however,” he pointed his finger at Wilma. “Naughty, naughty. A girl with a temper as hot as yours shouldn’t have such good aim.”

  “And this is the instruction manual?” Tyler waved the small book in the air.

  “Yup. That’s it.”

  “I can use this to work out how to transform Wilma and Gary back to normal?”

  Albert snapped his fingers next to Tyler’s ear, and he flinched away. Albert’s smile grew as he talked slowly, enunciating every word.

  “Just checking you’re all there, mate. Yes. You can use that to teach you how to do anything that the stone can do.” Albert waved his arm in a grandiose gesture. “In conjunction with the magic rock, it’s the world’s most valuable resource.”

  “Can’t you just tell me how to fix them?” Tyler flipped through the book warily. The typeface seemed very small and had a lot of squiggles that he wasn’t used to. To read through the whole thing looked like it would take a lot of effort.

  “I mean,” Tyler hastened to add. “I’ll definitely, for sure, read this.” He held up the book. “All of it. Just as soon as I get home. But my friends…”

  “Fair enough,” Albert said. He waved the character actors away, and they trickled out of the room. When only Wilma and Gary were left, Albert beckoned the group closer together.

  He grabbed Tyler’s hand with the stone and held out his other to wave between Wilma and Gary. “I wish that you two would return to your previous bodies.”

  Nothing happened. Albert frowned and tried again, speaking louder this time around.

  “What is it?” Tyler placed his free hand atop Albert’s, forming a sandwich. “What’s going on this time?”

  “Well, balls.” Albert dropped Tyler’s hand and stared at the stone in confusion. “I just added that touch into my script as a laugh, but it seems you’ve really broken it.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The small group, three stunned and uncertain, and one overflowing with confidence walked out of the underground chambers. As Tyler, Wilma, and Gary headed for the stairs, Albert beckoned them back.

  “There’s an elevator here.”

  Wilma gave the man the dirtiest look that Tyler had ever seen her lay on someone. “Three of us carried Tyler up hundreds of flights of stairs, and there’s been an elevator here all along?”

  “Yeah.” Albert tapped the side of his nose cheerfully. “We keep that on the down low. No use calling them the trials if they're a piece of cake to complete.”

  “Why are we even in his trials?” Wilma demanded. “We’re not anything to do with the stupid stone.”

  Albert winced at the mild insult. “As I said, it was irregular for me to give him a Mulligan. I had to arrange a lot of things at short notice. I do have another paying job to keep on top of, as well, you know.”

  “What’s that? Tricking old ladies out of their pensions?”

  “No.” Albert pulled a business card out of his pocket. “Here you go.”

  Wilma stared down at it, then started to laugh. She handed it over to Gary while Tyler looked over his shoulder. Despite his stunned expression, the card also raised a smile from him.

  Albert looked at the two of them with a frown. “What is it?”

  “You’re a knight of the stone, but your main gig is working at a fast food restaurant?” Wilma snatched the card away from Gary to hand it back. “That’s funny, that is.”

  “It’s a job I take very seriously. I’m a manager there.”

  “You’re an assistant manager,” Gary corrected him.

  “That’s at management level,” Albert argued. “It’s got manager in the name.”

  Wilma snickered again, and Tyler smiled. She was in the best mood she’d been since the disturbing revelations in the concrete room. “Here we are.” Albert stepped out of the lift and walked over to the counter. He slammed his hand down when the desk clerk kept his gaze fixed on the small screen.

  “I need a room.”

  “You got a reservation?” the desk clerk asked without looking. “We’re full up if you don’t have a reservation.”

  “No, you’re not.” Wilma stepped forward. “You asked us this morning if we wanted a room.” She looked confused, glancing at the calendar behind his desk. “Or maybe it was yesterday.

  “Lot’s changed since this morning.” The desk clerk waved his hand in the air. “A group came over a while ago and booked up every room. Actors or something.”

  They retreated to the bar, Wilma once again protesting that she shouldn’t be in there. Gary spent the last of his cash on a bag of chips for her to enjoy just so they’d have a minute’s peace.

  “There’s a section in here,” Albert said, flipping through the pages of the instruction manual. “If I remember correctly, it’ll show you what happened at any point in time that you’ve had control of the stone.”

  “Like CCTV?” Gary asked, his face creasing in concern. “They should have a warning on that.”

  “They do,” Albert said. “It’s right here.”

  He pointed on the page, then flicked to another before any of them had a chance to read it.

  “Here we go.” Albert pushed the book into the center of the table. A small screen was embedded in the middle of the old hand-written text. Despite the anomaly, it weirdly didn’t look out of place.

  “What night was it that the stone stopped working?”

  “The first night,” Tyler said. “These two wished for stuff to happen and then a moment later it broke.”

  Albert glared in accusation at Wilma and Gary.

  “What?” Wilma demanded. “You think me being transformed into a child inconvenienced that thing so much it broke?”

  “Of course not,” Albert said, his body broadcasting the opposite. “Let’s have a look.”

  “After that,” Tyler said, watching himself throw the stone away. “A few minutes later.”

  Albert fast forwarded until Gary changed before their eyes, then pressed play.

  “No more wishes,” Tyler commanded on the tiny screen.

  All sets of eyes turned to him in unison.

  “Well,” he said, shrugging, “how was I to know how it worked?”

  They walked back to the car in silence. Albert excused himself to go back to work, an exchange that brought Wilma to the point of hysterics. Instead of arguing his case further, Albert just walked away.

  “You know,” Gary said. “I rather liked being a warthog. There weren’t all the expectations on me that there usually are.”

  “What expectations?” Wilma said, lighting up a cigarette. “That you’ll say something that makes you look like a dork?”

  “I went naked for two days, and nobody noticed,” Gary said.

  After Wilma stopped retching, they continued the journey to the car.

  The protection spell had worked well. Its gleaming lines were unsullied by any criminal hands. Tyler went to slip into the driver’
s seat out of habit and earned himself the full ferocity of Wilma’s glare.

  He held his hands up. “Sorry, forgot.”

  “By the way, dude. If you ever ‘forget’ again and try to ruffle my hair, I’m biting your hand off. Just a friendly warning.”

  “No problem.” Tyler leaned back in the passenger seat, closing his eyes. “How long till we’re back home?”

  There was a long pause. When Tyler opened his eyes again, Wilma was staring at him thoughtfully.

  “What?”

  “You know how you made this thing”—Wilma tapped the dashboard twice—“look brand new, how do you feel about an upgrade?”

  Tyler smiled and settled back in his seat. “I feel pretty good about it. Wake me up when we reach the open road, and we’ll see what the old girl can do.”

  It turned out, the old girl could do a lot.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  “Look at him,” Wilma said, pointing at Gary as though there was some other him that she could have been referring to. Although her tone was one of utter disgust, Tyler knew her well enough now to recognize that it was her fond disgust, rather than actual revulsion.

  Tyler looked across to where a puppy was playing with a group of children. They were chasing it, ducking and diving with chubby hands set for grab mode. It barked when they got too enthusiastic but spent most of the time wagging its stubby tail.

  “Gary needs to watch out for that sort of thing,” Wilma said. “Imagine if the CPS dropped by. Shapeshifting into a puppy to lure children would get him locked up for life.”

  “He’s not shapeshifting to lure children.” Tyler took refuge from the rising sun by squatting down in the shade. “Gary’s just playing with them. What does it matter, since everybody’s happy?”

  “It’s weird.”

  “Newsflash—Gary’s weird. What of it? He’s not hurting anyone.”

  On their return from the trek to Vegas, Gary had pulled Tyler aside to work out a medium ground between warthog and human. The stone granted his wish of being able to shift into animal form at will, something Gary took advantage of every day.

  “That sort of behavior will lead us all into trouble.”

  Tyler glanced up at Wilma, shading his eyes from the sun with one hand. He had to look up a long way—she now stood five foot eleven tall. From this angle, her slender legs traveled on forever before curving into her thin waist. Tyler stared back down at the ground in front of him. He couldn’t look at his landlady for long without strange urges rushing through his body.

  If he wanted that kind of trouble, there were easier places to find it.

  The children were called back to their trailers for lunch. Grateful parents dropped a pat or two on the puppy’s head for keeping their kids occupied for the best part of an hour. Gary watched and waited until they were out of sight before he changed back. Sweat from his exuberant display beaded on his forehead and made his hair cling together in lank tangles.

  “What’s the plan for today?” he asked, walking over. Wilma ducked inside and handed him a cold beer from the fridge in her office.

  Tyler tried to ignore the pangs of craving as Gary twisted off the top and took a long swallow. “I’ve got nothing on.”

  “Yeah, you do,” Wilma contradicted him. “There’s a trailer up in the back got done over a few nights ago. It needs fixing before I can rent it out again.”

  Instead of the dilapidated despair that they’d lived in a few short weeks ago, the trailer park now boasted some of the best accommodation of its type in all of Mariah County. Number one of two might not matter a lot to others, but to Wilma, it meant the world.

  Long-sided trailers gleamed like the first day they’d driven off a lot. Welcoming foliage bloomed around the grounds, as good as those landscaped by professionals. A swimming pool was the new meeting hub for the community. It sat tucked in behind Wilma’s office so that when she felt hot, she could take a leisurely dip. Whenever she walked out to the pool in her skimpy bathing costume, the heat among the observers definitely rose.

  “I wish you could just put a spell on them to keep them protected.”

  Tyler stood back up, his thighs giving him grief about the strain. “You know that won’t work. It’s bad enough with the car since your driving’s gone to hell.”

  Longer legs took some getting used to, apparently. Wilma had a series of suspicious eyes on her vehicle after several fender benders with curiously one-sided damage. Although no one had laid a complaint, the trio didn’t need that kind of attention.

  “Neither are you putting Gary into a show,” Tyler said, cutting off an idea that Wilma had expressed the day before. “If we get too many people coming by asking questions, it’s going to lead to trouble.”

  Gary nodded at Tyler’s hand. “We can always count on that to get us out of trouble.”

  “No, you can’t.” Tyler stuck it into his pocket, despite the heat of the day. “If I start altering records to get you off so much as a parking fine, there’ll be people crowding their noses into our business.”

  “Whatever.” Gary finished off his bottle and ducked inside Wilma’s office for another. “It was just an idea. I’m allowed to have those.”

  Tyler wasn’t concentrating. He stared down at the ground between his feet, shuffling a shoe through the dried dirt.

  “What’s the matter?” Wilma gave him a poke in the shoulder. “What have you got to be upset about?”

  Tyler glanced at Gary’s beer before he could help himself, earning a bark of laughter in return. He shook his head and shrugged.

  “I don’t know. I feel like I should be doing something more, you know? Like, righting great wrongs or rescuing people from the hands of evil criminals.”

  Wilma returned inside to sit in her office chair. She put her legs up on the desk, offering a peek below her skirt, before Tyler turned away, cheeks flushing.

  “If you want to be Superman, go ahead. Just as long as you don’t wear some stupid costume.”

  “I don’t even know where to begin.”

  Gary gave a long burp, clearing out some room to speak. “You could join the police or something. Help stop crimes before they even happen.”

  Wilma snickered. “There’s no way they’d let you on the force.”

  “Why not?” Tyler puffed out his chest. “I got skills.”

  “Your best friend shot a cop,” Wilma said.

  Gary looked confused for a moment, then his brow darkened into a frown. “You aren’t Tyler’s b—”

  His sentence was cut off as a woman drove up toward them. She nosed her car so close to the office door that a concerned Wilma venture out.

  Gary pointed his beer bottle toward her. “She looks like someone in need. Why don’t you try her?”

  The woman behind the wheel had hair worried into a bird’s nest. It covered half her face and was knotted so much that a comb would break just on the expectation of being introduced to the mess.

  The driver’s blouse had been buttoned up wrong. Half the collar stuck into the base of her throat while the other flopped down around the top of her bra. When she stepped out of the vehicle, Tyler saw that her shoes didn’t match. Really didn’t match. A trainer and a stiletto.

  If you looked up shambles in the dictionary, this woman would have her picture in pride of place. Worse than that, Tyler thought she looked familiar.

  “You,” the woman said, pointing her finger at him. A moment later, she expanded the scope, encompassing Wilma and Gary in the statement. “You did something to me!”

  Gary snorted. “Ha. Caught you out there, son.”

  He elbowed Tyler in the ribs with amusement, but Tyler pushed him off, frowning. “Do I know you?”

  The woman stepped up in front of him, panting in the heat like the puppy that Gary had been a few minutes before. Old makeup was smeared down her face, eyeliner meeting lipstick in a brief pairing that would never work.

  “You cursed me, you bastard!”

  The woman poked
her finger at Tyler’s face. After a moment, she seemed dissatisfied and instead aimed it at his chest. She dug her fingertip in beside his nipple until Tyler pulled her whole hand away.

  “I was sitting in my motel, minding my own business, and you brought some stinking curse down on my head.”

  At those words, Tyler made the connection. The clean and neat woman who’d sold them a room in her almost-empty motel for the night. What had he done?

  Tyler searched his memory, trying to recall everything that had happened. Apart from leaving a bunch of relatives, chasing hot upon his heels, there had been nothing terrible.

  “I took pills,” the woman said. She tugged at her hand, and Tyler let go of her finger. “I had them all set up ready to go when you lot arrived.”

  The sneer at ‘you lot’ looked out of place on someone who appeared to have crawled out of a swamp. A shower hadn’t been on the woman’s list of priorities, judging by the smell.

  “I woke up and didn’t even have a headache,” she continued. “I’d drunk a half of scotch to wash them down, but I didn’t get so much as a hangover.”

  It didn’t sound like the words that should frame an accusation, but it apparently was.

  “I tried a truck next.” The woman looked from Wilma to Gary, then back to Tyler. She staggered on her uneven heels but recovered herself, holding a hand up to ward off their offers of help. “There’s a long stretch of time between vehicles out my way.”

  The trio nodded, remembering the barren feel in this woman’s neck of the woods.

  “I had to wait for three days, beside the ‘highway.' I cried with relief when I saw the truck coming along. Even though I didn’t want to step out in front of a family car or nothing, I was getting this close.”

  The motel owner held her hands up, finger and thumb pinched close together.

  “I stepped out in front of that truck at the last minute. They’re professional drivers manning those things, and it was so big, I wouldn’t be more than a tiny bump.” She pulled apart her blouse, the buttons popping off and the cotton tearing. The woman slapped herself in the center of her chest. “It hit me right here.”