The Misadventures of the Magician's Dog

by Frances Sackett

  Why? Because the magician wanted to distract Peter—to keep him from noticing something. Which must mean that there was something Peter could do to end this; the magician must not be as all-powerful as he seemed.

  The plane was overhead. The rocket boomed. There was a whistle like a dragon hissing, and flame streaked through the sky.

  You can’t find the right answers unless you ask the right questions, Peter’s father always said. How had the magician known about Peter’s worst nightmare, which he was living through now? Why were all the details exactly the way Peter had imagined them when his fears took over in the night? For that matter, how did the magician know about Peter’s sisters, about the cage? Why hadn’t the magician changed himself back if he was capable of magic on this scale?

  Peter could think of only one answer: because the magician was inside his mind, reading his thoughts and using his magic. Which meant that maybe, just maybe, none of what seemed to be happening now was real.

  The explosion when the rocket hit F-16 was deafening. The echo of it was still in Peter’s ears as pieces of the plane began to rain down on the road. Peter watched jagged hunks of metal fall through the azure sky; fear seemed to slow down time, so that to Peter’s eyes, everything appeared to be drifting earthward. It all fell so slowly, Peter thought; it seemed as if a clever boy could run from spot to spot and catch each sliver of the wreckage. Through a mist of ashy snowflakes, a seat dropped almost wholly intact, its upholstery ablaze. And there. Wasn’t that his father’s helmet, tumbling through the smoky haze? In front of Peter, the men scattered, some running into houses, others climbing into a faded blue pickup truck.

  Ask the right questions. What was the first thing Peter had done when he had awoken in the rock? He had opened his eyes, he thought, though something about that moment had felt wrong. So now he would open his eyes again.

  Peter’s eyelids felt heavy, as though they were battling his intention. Still, Peter forced them to work. Close, open. Close, open. At first the carnage in the desert was all he could see. Close, open. A plane’s wing at an unnatural angle in the sand. Concentrate. Concentrate harder. Close, open. And then, a miracle. The inside of the cave, the magician staring at him, furious.

  It was not enough, though. Close, open. Close, open. Focus, Peter told himself. His sisters’ lives might depend upon it.

  He tried one more time. Close, open. And this time, when he opened his eyes, he saw them: his own hands gripping the rock. As they had been this whole time, he now understood. He had never been in the rock; he had been standing here, in the magician’s bedroom, while the magician used Peter’s senses against him, stealing Peter’s power and lodging himself like a parasite in Peter’s mind. Next to Peter, The Dog was growling and Celia was yelling angrily. From every side came the high-pitched, bloodthirsty calls of dinosaurs. Peter’s knees almost buckled as Izzy fastened herself around his legs, crying.

  He ignored it all; waking himself from the magician’s dream was only half of what he must do. The magician had used Peter’s mind, but didn’t conduits flow both ways? Peter had felt the magician’s power when he’d touched the rock before; it must be there now, literally at his fingertips. This was the knowledge the magician had been distracting him from.

  There was no need to let his anger build this time.

  Stop, dinosaurs! Peter thought, and like that, magic flooded from the rock through his body, more magic than when the magician had awakened the Tyrannosaurus or the other predators, more magic than Peter had ever felt or imagined.

  The power shot out of him, leaving what? Pain, Peter thought. Grief. Then emptiness. Peter watched his hands drop the rock; as it fell to the ground, he, too, fell, helpless to stop himself. But before he hit the dirt, Izzy’s arms on his legs loosened, her crying abruptly ceasing. Celia cheered, and even The Dog let out a howl of triumph. It must have worked, Peter thought. He had stopped the dinosaurs, but he found it hard to care. The ground was cool and welcome against his face, and he was grateful for the blackness that swallowed him.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Peter was in the soup.

  The soup was black and liquid and murky. It was neither hot nor cold; it was just soup, thick enough that even a strong boy couldn’t swim through it. And a boy like Peter—well, he didn’t stand a chance.

  Occasionally, flickers of the outside world broke through. The pull of being dragged across a dirt floor. The discomfort of being slung across bony shoulders. And then, oddly, the cool of the desert wind rushing past his face. But these were flickers only, not enough to awaken Peter’s interest.

  The truth was, Peter liked the soup. It was quiet in the darkness, and peaceful, too, in its own way. No one asked anything of him; no one needed him to do, or be, anything. Most importantly, there were no roaring dinosaurs or terrified sisters in the soup. No magician with cruel eyes. No falling pieces of plane.

  He thought he might stay in the soup forever.

  A voice was talking. Peter’s voice.

  “Yeah, I threw up three times. I don’t feel so good.”

  A low murmur . . . could that really be his mother?

  “Uh-huh. I think I’d better stay home today. I was awake all night. . . .”

  More words, then cool lips brushing his forehead, the smell of citrus in his nose. The smell was enough to stir a flash of awareness in him; for a moment, he floated closer to the soup’s surface. Emotion tugged at him. But he didn’t want to feel, so he didn’t.

  His voice was speaking again. “Poor Izzy. And Celia, too, huh? I can’t believe we all got sick at once. Sure, I’ll keep an eye on them while you’re gone. Don’t worry, Mom—you go teach. We’ll be okay without you.”

  Then it was quiet again. With relief, Peter slipped downward once more.

  Time passed.

  “Peter . . . Peter . . . Please wake up, Peter! It’s getting late. We need to talk to you. Peter!”

  The voice was insistent, the frantic words coiling around and around Peter and dragging him upward. Leave me alone! he wanted to tell Celia, but you can’t speak when you’re in the soup. Inside his own head, he curled into a ball, humming softly, trying to drown out her voice.

  “Peter? Please, Peter? When are you going to wake up?”

  More darkness.

  This time, it wasn’t words that pulled him up. Something cold was on his knees. Something he couldn’t ignore. He knew that feeling, he thought. Izzy. Of course. Izzy’s toes. She must be curled up next to him, her feet on his legs.

  But Izzy didn’t belong in the soup. And he couldn’t be in the soup if Izzy was next to him.

  Reluctantly, he opened his eyes.

  Light came flooding in. He blinked against the brightness, and what had been blotches of color resolved into familiar sights. The water stain on his bedroom ceiling, which he’d stared at as he’d gone to sleep for the past six months. The dark-blue flannel of his pajamas (had his sisters put them on him?). The top of Izzy’s blond head. Although he could feel magic buzzing on every surface, jangling his nerves and demanding his attention, he told himself to ignore it. At least the room was silent. Maybe, he thought, he would be able to handle this.

  And then suddenly Celia’s face was inches from his own, her expression incredulous. “You’re awake!” she shouted, her voice so loud after the quiet of the soup that Peter wanted to clap his hands over his ears. “It’s about time! I didn’t think you were ever going to open your eyes. Mom’s going to be here in a couple of hours, and we’ve still got to figure out what to do about the rock, and Henry, and . . . and . . .” Out of nowhere, Celia burst into tears.

  Then Izzy sat up, and The Dog put his paws on the bed, and the three anxious faces stared down at Peter. Anxious, and expectant, too, Peter thought; he had been awake for a few seconds only, and already they wanted something from him. If only he could go back into that calm darkness!

  “I’m so happy you’re awake!” said Izzy. Her small arms wrapped around him, squeezing. “No matter wha
t we did, you wouldn’t wake up.”

  Something wet shoved itself into Peter’s elbow. “Glad to see you with your eyes open, Peter,” said The Dog.

  Peter pushed himself into a sitting position. “Why is Celia crying?” he asked, or tried to, anyway. His voice, rusty from disuse, was barely audible even to his own ears.

  “Huh?” said The Dog.

  “Why is Celia crying?” Peter repeated, and this time his words shot out more loudly than he intended, loudly enough that Celia’s tears abruptly stopped and Izzy’s smile disappeared from her face.

  “She’s crying because she was worried about you,” said The Dog. “We were all worried about you. Will you tell us what happened?”

  He couldn’t talk to them, Peter thought. Not yet. There was something he had to do first.

  “I need a minute alone,” he said.

  “But, Peter—” said Celia.

  “I want to get dressed!” Peter said. At least his pajamas gave him an excuse.

  “Oh,” said Izzy, and she obediently moved toward the door. Celia, too, followed, but her still-wet eyes lingered on Peter’s face, questioning.

  The Dog, on the other hand, was staring at Peter’s closet. “Peter, we should explain—”

  “Please?” said Peter, his voice cracking. “I just . . . I want a minute alone. To change.”

  The Dog looked at Peter, looked back at the closet, then stood up. “Okay. If that’s what you want.”

  The door swung closed; Peter was by himself. He hurried to his desk and turned on his computer; while it powered up, he grabbed the first pair of shorts he could find in his drawer. As he pulled them on, the background image on his desktop came into focus: his father, dressed in his air force uniform, smiling back at him. Peter clicked on his email icon. And waited.

  The first message to load was from a friend from New Jersey. The second was an update from a NASA kids’ site. And then it was there. The message Peter’s father sent each evening; the one that, because of the time difference, showed up on Peter’s computer in the morning. Peter clicked it open, skimming the words about a storm in the desert; a card game his father had planned for later that night. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to know that his father had been alive to send it, that the images he had seen of his father’s death had been the magician’s creation and nothing else.

  It had seemed so real. So very, very real. He could still see his father’s helmet falling from the sky.

  “Are you dressed yet?” Celia called from outside Peter’s door.

  Peter fought an urge to use the magic he could feel vibrating around him to think himself invisible. His sisters and The Dog would find the room empty; they would hurry off to look for him while he went back to sleep. Instead, he shut his computer down, then sprang to his feet. “Just a second,” he said. Yanking open his closet, he reached for a shirt.

  And froze. From within the closet, the mouse who was also a waiter stared back at him, unblinking.

  The mouse-waiter made no immediate move. So Peter didn’t move, either. Instead, he just stood there, trying to make sense of what he was seeing. The waiter didn’t seem aggressive; in fact, he mostly looked scared. “Umm, Dog?” Peter said after a moment or two had passed. “Could you, um, come here? “

  The Dog, Celia, and Izzy flew into the room. Izzy spoke first. “You found Henry!”

  “Why is the waiter in my closet?”

  The Dog shook his nose exasperatedly. “Don’t blame me. This one is all on your sisters. After the dinosaurs froze, we dragged you into the hallway. We were stuck there, discussing what to do next, when the waiter—”

  “Henry,” Izzy interrupted. “He didn’t have a name, so I gave him one. And he says he likes it.”

  The Dog sighed. “When Henry came along. Apparently you’d left him walking the hallway looking for the magician’s open door. Did you know he would keep going until someone told him otherwise? I think he was pretty relieved to stumble on us.”

  “He asked if he could help,” said Izzy, “and I told him we needed a ride home, so he picked you up and carried you on his shoulders to this ginormous garage, and then he drove us home. And, Peter, you should have seen the car he drove us in. It’s little and yellow, and it doesn’t have a roof. And Henry drives it very fast, and he swerves around a lot. He’s really fun. I think he should live in your closet forever.”

  The story made sense of what Peter remembered from being in the soup. It also explained how they had gotten home, which he probably should have wondered about but hadn’t; he had been too worried about his father. Still . . . “Why is he in my closet? I mean, why doesn’t he come out?”

  “He likes it in there,” said Celia. “He says he likes places that are quiet and dark.”

  The waiter, who still hadn’t spoken, nodded.

  “And the magician?” Peter asked. “What did you do with the rock? Did you just leave it there?”

  “Oh, no,” said Celia. “We brought it with us. It’s in the backyard. I put it under the birdbath.”

  “It’s here?”

  Celia’s smile faded. “I was trying to help. I thought that this way you wouldn’t have to go back to the magician’s house to make him human again. And I was careful not to touch it after I saw what it did to you. I carried it wrapped in my shirt.”

  “I’m not trying to make him human again,” snapped Peter.

  “But what about Dad?” asked Celia. “I thought you were going to change the magician so he would help you bring Dad back.”

  “That was before I went into the rock,” Peter said, “and saw what he was like. He’ll never help us with Dad. And even if he would, I wouldn’t make him human again. Not ever.”

  In front of him, The Dog dropped to his haunches and, to Peter and his sisters’ shock, began to yowl. The heart-wrenching sound filled Peter’s room. Then The Dog turned and stalked out the door.

  I could wish for a rocket ship, Peter thought. It would carry him into space. He could see Jupiter and Mars—and leave all this behind.

  For the rest of the afternoon, The Dog didn’t speak to anyone. He curled up on the mat by the back door and refused to move, his long, warty nose resting miserably on the carpet. After trying everything they could think of to coax him from his silence, the children held a hasty conference in the kitchen.

  “Do you think he’s sick?” asked Izzy. “Why won’t he talk to us?”

  “He’s not sick,” declared Celia. “He’s mad. At Peter. That’s why he won’t talk. Peter could help him if he wanted to.”

  The Dog was not the only one who was mad at Peter. Peter and Celia had been arguing ever since Peter’s announcement. “I can’t change the magician,” Peter repeated now, for the fourth or fifth time.

  “You can’t or you won’t?”

  “I won’t,” Peter admitted.

  Celia shook her head, her curls bobbing wildly. “No matter how evil he is, it’s still the right thing to do if it means Dad will be home.”

  “He’ll hurt you and Izzy,” said Peter.

  “I don’t care.”

  “Well, I do.”

  For a moment, they glared at each other. Then Celia’s gaze dropped to the floor. “If the magician won’t help, do you think you could become powerful enough to bring Dad home yourself?”

  Peter felt his hands clench into fists. “I’m not doing any more magic.” Only Izzy’s presence kept him from shouting.

  A tear slid down Celia’s face. “But I miss him.”

  “No.” Without another word, Peter stomped down the hallway to the living room, then turned on the TV with the volume up high to make it clear that he was done with conversation. Eventually, Celia and Izzy joined him, all three staring at a program that none of them was interested in.

  And that was where Peter’s mother found them when she arrived home from work, her arms weighed down with grocery bags. She took one look at their unhappy faces, and her lips pursed with worry. She had called several times during the day:
first Celia and then Peter had explained that everyone was feeling better; no, she didn’t need to hurry home from work; it just seemed to be a short-lived flu, really. But Peter could tell by the way she stood there, staring at them, that she knew something was wrong.

  For a moment, all thought of magic, of The Dog, even of his father slid from Peter’s mind. The only thing that mattered was reassuring his mom.

  “Let me take those,” he said, grabbing the grocery bags. “Izzy, Celia—you want to help me unload?”

  Izzy and Celia jumped up from the couch. “Mmm,” said Celia, poking around in one of the bags. “You bought stuff for chicken noodle soup.”

  “Can I help make it?” asked Izzy.

  “Yes,” said Peter’s mom, looking between them with confusion. “If you’re feeling better?”

  “Much better,” said Izzy.

  “We’re good now,” added Celia.

  Peter could see the doubt in his mother’s face, but for the rest of the evening, the children acted as though everything were fine, and Peter’s mother acted as though everything were fine, too: all in all, it would have seemed as if they were a perfectly normal family if it hadn’t been for The Dog lying motionless on the doormat. Peter thought his mother hadn’t noticed until he went to tell her good night.

  “Did you feed the dog?” she asked.

  “Yes,” said Peter. He didn’t add that The Dog hadn’t yet touched his food.

  “I don’t think I’ve seen him get up since I got home. Do you think he’s okay?”

  “I don’t know,” said Peter. “He’s been really quiet today.” This, at least, was the truth.

  Peter’s mom frowned. “Let’s see how he is tomorrow. If he’s still not acting like himself, we can call that young man—Timothy.”

  “Sounds good, Mom.”

  “I hope . . . I hope you’re feeling okay, honey.”

  “I’m fine. Thanks.”