Bad Magic

by Pseudonymous Bosch

  Clay found Buzz standing by the fire pit under the dome, talking to the other Worms. Or rather, talking to the Worms, since Clay was no longer one of them. When Buzz saw Clay, he gave him the one-minute sign and kept lecturing as if he were teaching in an outdoor classroom.

  One minute turned to ten as Buzz talked about lava and lava safety. While Clay waited impatiently, Buzz told the Worms about how lava is formed, how it erupts, and how it solidifies. He also told them how to walk around it (when you could) and over it (when you had to).

  “Walk over lava? No prob,” joked Kwan. “I played ‘hot lava’ all the time when I was little.”

  “Me too,” said Jonah. “But back then the lava was cracks in the sidewalk. Here the lava is… lava.”

  “Lava is never just lava,” said Buzz. “It’s molten rock, yes, but it’s also liquid fire. It’s the blood of our planet.”

  “That’s deep, man,” said Pablo.

  “I don’t think it’s the blood,” said Kwan. “I think it’s the pus. It’s like volcanoes are zits, and when you squeeze them, lava comes out.”

  “Nice image,” said Jonah. “Thanks for putting it in my mind.”

  That night at sundown, the entire camp would be taking a lava walk together, Buzz told them. “Well, not all of you,” he said with a glance in Clay’s direction, that felt to Clay like a slap.

  “It’s an annual tradition—a rite of passage for the newer campers, and a way of honoring this place for the older campers,” said Buzz. “It’s also the kickoff for your volcano overnight, which, as you know, starts first thing the next morning. Again, for most of you.”

  Clay gritted his teeth. Why did Buzz have to keep harping on the fact that he was no longer part of the group?

  “So no lava safety test?” Pablo asked.

  “Think of the lava walk as your safety test—an unconventional one.” Buzz smiled. “You know those hot lava games you played when you were kids? Those aren’t just games. They build your imagination, your agility, your leadership ability, your trust in your peers. The same is true for a lava walk now. You will have to be mindful at all times tonight; otherwise you’ll burn your feet or worse.… Now scoot, all of you—

  “So what can I do for you, Clay?” he asked formally, after the others had left.

  “I found the book—it fell down behind my bunk,” Clay said. Which for all he knew was true. He held up the journal, but Buzz didn’t take it. “I know I messed up big-time, but is there any way—I mean, could you give me a second chance?”

  Buzz looked him up and down, as if assessing his sincerity. Clay held his breath as he waited for the verdict.

  “I’m glad you’re taking responsibility for your actions, but let’s take one thing at a time,” said Buzz neutrally. “First, go give the book back. The plane’s not leaving until the afternoon, anyway.”

  “You want me to take it to the library?” said Clay, surprised. “That’s past the Wall of Trust!”

  “You can cross any wall you like—you’re not a camper anymore,” Buzz reminded him. “But take Como with you. He needs a walk.”

  With no need for subterfuge, Clay was free to take the most direct route, and he and Como made their way up the hill to the ruins in record time.

  As they came in view of the library, however, Clay began to get nervous.

  “What’s Uncle Ben going to do if he discovers that the journal no es Price’s?” he asked aloud, half to Como, half to himself. “Sí, sí, I’ll play dumb, like I don’t know what’s supposed to be written inside, but let’s face it: There’s a pretty good chance he won’t believe me anyway. And that guy has serious anger issues.”

  Ignoring his human companion, Como continued walking toward the library. Clay rushed to catch up.

  When they got there, the library looked more shut down and unassailable than ever. Clay looked upward, hoping to see Mira, but all the windows were dark. Clay didn’t want to aggravate the situation by breaking in for a second time, so he tried knocking on the front doors. Alas, nobody answered.

  Next he tried the side door. But as soon as he started turning the dial on the lock, he could tell that the combination had been changed. It wasn’t PROSPERO any longer. It didn’t even start with P. The custodian had made sure that Clay wouldn’t be able to enter ever again.

  “What are we supposed to do, leave the journal on the doorstep?” he muttered to the llama. “It could be days before he picks it up.”

  There was a metal slot next to the front doors that Clay hadn’t noticed before. BOOK RETURN, it said, just like at a real public library, though most likely the slot had never been used. Clay held the journal in his hand for a second longer, feeling oddly reluctant to let go, then deposited it in the slot. He could hear it thud on the other side.

  He was about to retrace his steps and return to camp, when Como abruptly turned in the other direction—the direction of the old barn. The llama stood still, his ears pointing straight ahead. Clay knew by now that forward ears meant the llama was listening to something he deemed unusual or dangerous.

  A second later, Clay heard it: barking.

  And then: banging.

  Clay was almost as scared of facing the barking dog as he was of facing the custodian. Even so, he decided to investigate.

  “I know, it sounds muy peligroso,” he said to Como. “But maybe the custodian is in there. Or maybe even Mira.”

  The barking and banging got louder as they made their way through the bushes toward the barn. Cautiously, Clay pushed forward and peeked his head out of the bushes. The barn door was opening and closing over and over again in the wind. Inside, the dog barked madly in time to the banging door.

  Suddenly, the wind stopped and the door stopped, and the barking stopped, too.

  “Come on, let’s go see what’s going on,” said Clay, more confidently than he felt. “¡Ándale! ¡Vámonos!” He tugged on the llama’s leash, but the llama wouldn’t move.

  Now his ears were flat back on his head, which roughly translated as You’re crazy if you think I’m going into that scary old barn, and if you keep pulling me, I’ll spit on you. Or however you say that in Spanish.

  “Fine, you wait here,” said Clay, figuring it was best to keep the llama away from the other four-legged animal inside. He looped the llama’s leash around a tree branch and then, feeling very uneasy, he forced himself to walk over to the barn.

  The door was barely hanging on to the old rusty hinges. It swung open with a touch.

  Grrrr.

  Before Clay could step inside, the dog jumped in front of him, growling. Clay jumped back. The dog stood barely a foot away, straining on his leash. Clay had no doubt that the dog would sink his teeth in Clay’s leg if he took another step.

  “Hi there, nice doggy…”

  It was a bulldog. Clay was almost certain he recognized the dog as Skipper’s drooling copilot. What was that dog’s name? Tattoo? No, that was the other one. Gillian? No, Gilligan. That was it. Of course, Skipper had jeered at him for thinking all dogs looked alike. Maybe he couldn’t trust his own judgment on the subject. Besides, why would the pilot have left his dog here in the barn, so far from camp?

  Still, it couldn’t help to try saying his name.

  “Hey, Gilligan,” said Clay. “How’s it going?”

  The dog continued to regard him suspiciously, but he stopped growling. Encouraged, Clay stepped forward. “Okay, I’m going to scratch your ear now. You like that, right?”

  Slowly, he reached his hand toward the dog’s head. So far so good. He reached farther and proceeded to scratch, just the way Skipper had suggested weeks ago. Soon the dog was sitting down and wagging his tail contentedly. A long string of drool connected him to Clay’s arm.

  It was Gilligan; it had to be. How and why the pilot had left him there, Clay couldn’t guess.

  Inside, the barn was not a barn, or it wasn’t being used as a barn, anyway. Sometime, long, long ago, it had been converted into an office. There were desks and
bookshelves and file cabinets—most decayed nearly to the point of being unrecognizable, and all of them covered with dirt and leaves and animal droppings. It looked as though nobody had stepped inside for years.

  In the center of the room, illuminated by a dusty shaft of light, was a large, hulking dark object. Made of iron, it had a table-style base and stood about six feet high. A heavy disk attached to a long lever was suspended above the table surface, ready to squash anything unlucky enough to lie below it.

  In his nervous state, Clay mistook this mysterious machine for some kind of medieval torture device. But when he looked underneath the big disk, he didn’t find a place to bind a prisoner’s hands or head; he found a rack full of wooden blocks, each bearing a raised letter.

  Clay looked at the blocks with curiosity. They were similar to a baby’s alphabet blocks, but smaller; and rather than being multicolored, the letters were covered with black ink.*

  It wasn’t a torture device; it was a printing press.

  What was the last thing printed on the press? Clay wondered. A poster? A page from a book? Like everything else in the barn, the typographic blocks were covered with a thick layer of dust, and it was very difficult to read them—all the more so because the letters, each about an inch long, were backward, as if he were looking in a mirror. It took Clay a moment to figure out why: The letters had to be backward in order to print forward.

  As he examined the press, the dog started barking again and the door started banging again. The wind had picked back up. A breeze made its way into the barn, disturbing the dust on the letters, and—bang!—the disk slammed down on the plate below. Clay jumped, startled.

  When Clay lifted the disk again, three blocks in the center of the plate were left totally dust-free, as if they had been deliberately cleaned and placed there just moments earlier. For a second, Clay didn’t recognize the letters. They looked like designs or symbols of some sort: two squiggles on either side of a circle. But when he read the letters backward, they resolved themselves into that familiar distress signal:

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-FOUR

  THE LAVA WALK

  Clay half ran, half walked all the way back to camp, to the annoyance of Como, who sometimes preferred to pick his steps carefully on a downhill slope.

  He couldn’t make sense of what he’d seen. Although, he had to admit, there was something almost supernatural-seeming about the way the sudden wind had revealed the SOS, his rational mind told him that the wind’s appearance was an accident of timing. Very likely, he would have discovered the SOS, wind or no wind. On the other hand, the placement of those three letters in the exact center of the rack—that could hardly be an accident, could it? He felt sure that somebody had left him a message.

  “But who? Quién?” he asked Como. “Mira, right? There’s nobody else around here except for Uncle Ben, and, I mean, can you imagine him leaving an SOS? No, amigo, you cannot.” He laughed at the thought of the angry old bear of a man asking for help.

  “What? You think Mira is really a ghost and she was in there with us? Very funny,” Clay continued. “But seriously, do you think Mira is in trouble? Does she want our help? What are we supposed to do? I can’t even get into the library anymore. And she’s stuck inside with her creepy uncle! Remember how scared of him she was?”

  Distraught, he decided that all he could do was return to camp, find Buzz, and beg to stay. If Mira truly needed Clay’s help, he would be of no use to her at home.

  As it turned out, Clay didn’t have to beg.

  When Clay found him, Buzz was assembling campers and staff around the dome in preparation for the lava walk. Before Clay could say anything, Buzz pointed him toward where he was supposed to be.

  “Over there, Worm. And make sure you have your flashlight.”

  Clay felt a surge of relief at being called Worm once more. “Okay, cool,” he said.

  He scurried over to join his cabinmates and happily accepted their fist bumps and high fives. And yet he couldn’t help thinking that his counselor had let him back in pretty fast, considering he’d made such a point of ostracizing Clay earlier. Had it all been for show? Had Buzz never really planned on sending him home?

  It was yet another unanswerable question to add to the list.

  Grouped loosely by cabin, the campers proceeded up a trail that took off from the west side of the lake. Their destination: the island’s westernmost lava field, Plume Canyon.

  It was only a two-mile hike, but it was slow going on the jungle trail, and by the time they reached Plume Canyon, it was getting dark. There were just a few glowing streaks of red left in the sky, uncannily mirrored by the glowing trickles of lava on the ground. Illuminated by the lava, smoke and steam rose out of fissures in the rocks, some places in steady streams or “plumes,” some places in intermittent puffs.* In the background, Mount Forge loomed, dark and menacing.

  As Clay and his Worm-mates settled on a spot where they could all stand without fear of stepping in hot lava, they saw Flint emerging from the jungle. He was shirtless and smeared with mud. On his back, he carried the bloody carcass of a large hairy animal; he held one leg in each of his hands, while the head rested gruesomely on his shoulder. Beside Flint was Adriana, the counselor for the Pond, also covered with mud and blood, and holding a long spear in her hand.

  Clay stared at the wild boar hanging down Flint’s back. “One of those guys almost killed me my first day on the island.”

  Kwan nodded. “They’re all over the island. Descended from Price’s pigs.”**

  “How do you know?” asked Jonah. “You hunted one?”

  “Sure, tons of times,” Kwan boasted.

  “Don’t believe him,” said Pablo.

  “I saw one when I was walking to camp,” said Clay. “Those guys are fast.”

  “And mean,” said Kwan.

  “And ugly,” said Pablo.

  Flint lifted the boar high in the air, then dropped the boar to the ground. The older boys from Flint’s cabin cheered and beat their chests. “The hunters return!” “Meat!” “Meat!” “Meat!”

  Shushing them, Adriana pulled a big bundle of banana leaves out of her rucksack. Together, she and Flint wrapped the boar with the leaves until only its tusks and tail were visible. Somebody handed Flint a shovel, and he started digging into a nearby lava pool. He dumped shovelfuls of molten lava on top of the boar until it was covered by a mound of lava sludge. Almost immediately, the lava started to blacken and harden.

  Clay winced, unable to stop picturing himself in the pig’s place.

  Buzz stood in front of the smoking mound. “Thank you, Adriana, Flint.”

  Adriana made a small bow. Flint saluted with a finger.

  Buzz turned to the rest of the camp, assembled in front of him. “Before commencing, can we observe five minutes of silence? Starting now—”

  The silence that ensued was absolute. There was no wind, no bird or animal cry, no stifled laughter or coughing.

  As the red faded from the sky, the pools of lava glowed brighter, and the lava seemed magically to absorb the light of the dying sunset. Stars appeared in the blackness above, and Clay had the feeling that he was floating through space, standing on top of a burning comet.

  After their five minutes of silence, Buzz and Flint and the other counselors began to arrange the campers strategically around the lava field, creating a human trail that wound around the glowing lava hot spots. When everybody was in place, the counselors began to hum. The sound came from low in their throats, like a yoga om. Soon the entire camp was humming, infusing the lava field with an unexpected sense of electricity.

  One by one, campers were asked to close their eyes. They walked the lava trail, navigating by sound alone. Whenever somebody came dangerously close to a steam vent or a pool of lava, the nearest person started humming louder in warning.

  As Clay walked blind through the lava field, his emotional state kept changing: from disorientation to terror to resignation to giddiness. Maybe
in some ways it was similar to the imaginary lava walks of childhood, but the fact that it was real made all the difference. One false step and you knew your foot would be incinerated. And yet you couldn’t be too cautious, or you’d never move. There was no choice but to let go of your fear.

  After the campers finished, it was the counselors’ turn. Flint went last, but he didn’t follow the course everyone else took. He threw off his shoes and socks, uttered a strange word Clay had never heard, and then calmly walked across a snaking stream of lava—just like a swami walking across hot coals in an old circus sideshow. When he reached dry land, he turned and raised his arms in victory.

  Clay rubbed his eyes while people applauded. He was getting used to seeing Flint perform astonishing magic tricks, but walking barefoot on molten rock was something else altogether. The other Worms, Clay noted, were staring, slack-jawed, at the teen magician. At last, Flint had done something that shocked them, too.

  “Awesome,” said Pablo.

  “You’ll never catch me doing that,” said Kwan.

  A moment later, Buzz and Flint stood over the roasting boar. The lava mound was now completely black, a rock shell.

  “Thank you, mighty beast, for the gift of your life,” said Buzz solemnly.

  He turned to the volcano behind them. “And thank you, mighty mountain, for the gift of your lava. May you protect these young men and women as they journey forth tomorrow into your fiery domain.”

  Flint raised a hammer in the air—and brought it down on the smoking lava shell. The shell cracked open, revealing the roasted boar. The banana leaves had turned to soot, and the boar’s skin was black and crispy.

  Buzz started slicing off chunks of the lava-cooked pork and offering them around. This was the first meat Clay had encountered since he had arrived on the island, and his mouth watered at the smell. There were no plates or utensils; Clay ate with his hands, like everyone else. Ravenous, he tore into the pork with his teeth, the juices dripping everywhere, eating and eating until the combination of acrid smoke and gamey meat started to sicken him.