The Misadventures of the Magician's Dog

by Frances Sackett

  “In a house on a street,”

  the voice sang,

  “In a city that’s sleeping,

  A baby woke up, and

  A mother rocked her son.”

  The song might have been unknown to Peter, but its effect was immediate: the tugging within him became less.

  “And he cried, and she kissed him

  And the city slept around them.

  And she laughed, and he smiled,

  And she sang him this song.”

  The song ended, but the woman’s gentle voice didn’t stop. “Time to sleep now, Daniel,” she said. “I love you, sweetheart.”

  The tugging, for a moment, ceased altogether.

  In front of Peter, the magician’s face was a mask of longing and confusion. His dark eyes were wet, and he looked almost unrecognizable to Peter, as if—for at least a moment—he had become someone else. “Now,” Peter heard The Dog say, even though he was across the room and his mouth wasn’t moving.

  Suddenly Peter understood where the music had come from and what he was supposed to do. But how could he do magic when he wasn’t angry? And how could he be angry, looking at the sad face of the boy who suddenly was not the magician? Daniel, the woman’s voice had said. His mother, Peter thought.

  Trying to pull power into himself, Peter thought back once more to what The Dog had said about his father, the words that had made Peter so angry that he had made the magician human. Magic could bring him back. But it couldn’t change who he is. . . . This time, though, when Peter imagined his father’s face, it wasn’t anger he felt. In his mind’s eye, he could see his father smiling at him: from across a chessboard; in the kitchen as he made pancakes; with Izzy on his lap on the sofa. His father, who loved to fly planes. Who had been a part of the air force since before Peter was born. But who also loved Peter and his sisters. Who emailed every day, even when Peter didn’t write back. Who had awakened Peter on that last morning because he wanted time alone with him before he left.

  Peter could feel the magic building, could feel it on the surface of his skin. It was there, waiting: the magic he needed to save himself and his sisters. But how could he give power to his anger when he felt only love?

  As he watched, the magician’s shoulders started to straighten. “Now!” The Dog exclaimed from across the room. “Peter! Do it now!”

  “Peter!” screamed Izzy. Even Celia’s frozen eyes seemed to beg him to act.

  The power was present; Peter’s hands were trembling with it. But he wasn’t angry.

  The magician lifted his face.

  Peter thought.

  Chapter Eighteen

  It didn’t feel the same. The spot on his head was slightly farther up than before, and the taste in his mouth was different, sweeter somehow, more like fruit than chocolate. But still, Peter knew it was working; there was no mistaking the feeling of magic traveling through him.

  Be rock.

  Peter could see the moment the magician realized what was happening. His face twisted into a snarl, and the pain in Peter’s chest suddenly returned, more agonizing than before. That pain almost caused Peter’s magic to slip. But the look of hope on The Dog’s face helped Peter focus. Rock. Be rock.

  The magic was like nothing Peter had done before: the magician had willpower, and from the moment he felt the first tremors of the spell, he fought against it. But Peter concentrated as he had never before concentrated in his life, all his will and determination channeled toward that one crucial act of magic.

  And just like that, the magician disappeared, replaced by a rock the size of a chicken.

  Peter sank to the ground with relief as the pain in his chest abruptly vanished. But he didn’t even have time to figure out what had happened before The Dog was standing next to him. “Not yet,” barked The Dog. “You can’t stop yet.”

  “What do I have to do now?” said Peter, his voice shaking with exhaustion. He realized the answer even as he asked the question. Her face streaked with tears, Izzy held her hands out toward her brother; in them was the small, limp body. Was it too late? Peter wondered. He might be a magician, but he was pretty sure he couldn’t bring back the dead. Even a mouse.

  Izzy placed Henry in Peter’s open fingers.

  Izzy loved the mouse, and Peter loved Izzy. He had to try. Peter thought his way into that tiny body, the magic as strange and free of anger as it had been before. At first he was certain Henry was gone, but then he felt the flicker of a heartbeat. Maybe, he thought, and with his mind, he pushed air into Henry’s minuscule lungs. Again. Again. And the heartbeat grew, and the mouse came to life in his hands.

  “Henry!” cried Izzy. She took the mouse from Peter and cradled him against her cheek.

  “Impressive,” said The Dog. “Can you unfreeze Celia?” He glanced at Peter, slumped on the floor. “Actually, let me try.” A moment later, Celia stretched her arms toward the ceiling.

  She looked at Henry, now crouched on Izzy’s shoulder, then down at the rock. “Wow. You did it, Peter. Everything’s fixed!”

  Peter didn’t say anything. Neither did The Dog.

  “What?” demanded Celia. “Why aren’t we celebrating? Peter turned the evil magician back into a rock, Henry’s okay, The Dog isn’t shooting through the galaxy somewhere. Why isn’t everyone happier?”

  Celia’s right, of course, Peter thought. He glanced down at the rock. The magician would have eagerly destroyed them all. It was a good thing he was a rock again. Wasn’t it? But it didn’t feel like a good thing. Inside that rock was a boy whose mother had sung him lullabies, a boy who had lived in a white house with roses in the yard.

  A boy whom The Dog loved. A boy whom The Dog had manipulated today with the sound of his mother’s voice. The Dog knew Daniel perfectly, Peter thought—knew him so well that he had predicted how he would react to that song.

  “Can I ask you something?” Peter said to The Dog.

  “Yes.”

  Peter chose his next words carefully. “When the magician heard that coyote howling and turned himself into a rock, that wasn’t an accident, was it?”

  The Dog abruptly turned toward Peter. Then his legs buckled and he sank to the floor. “How did you know?”

  Peter didn’t answer.

  The Dog stared at the carpet as though he couldn’t bear to look Peter in the eye. “I couldn’t do anything to stop him,” he said. “He was becoming worse and worse. And one day I decided it had gone far enough. All I did was make that sound, a coyote howling, when he was deep asleep. Of course his spell couldn’t work; there wasn’t a real coyote there for it to work on.”

  “Then why did you bring me into it? Why did you to try to convince me to make him human again?” Peter asked. “I’m probably going to end up evil, and then turn into a rock myself. And it’s all for nothing. So that you could make the magician human after you made him turn himself into a rock!” For a moment, Peter felt anger building within him. But then tears suddenly stung his eyes, and the anger was gone. “I thought . . . I thought you were my friend.”

  “It was the magic water bowl,” said The Dog slowly. “That’s no excuse, of course. After the magician turned into the rock, I knew I’d done the right thing, but I still felt horrible. He was my best friend, after all. So one day I asked my magic water bowl what it would take to make him himself again—not himself the magician, but himself the boy. And the answer I got was you.”

  “Because Peter’s stronger than the magician,” said Izzy.

  “You keep saying that,” said Peter, “but I’m really not. You just think that because you’re my little sister.”

  Izzy looked at Peter as if he were being particularly slow. “You turned the magician into a rock, didn’t you?”

  “Well, yes, but that was just luck.”

  “How did you do that, Peter?” asked The Dog. “I’ve been wondering. I was sure we were all goners.”

  Peter thought back to that moment. “I don’t know, honestly. I was going to ask you. I could
n’t make myself angry, but the magic worked anyway.”

  “What?”

  “I tried to make myself angry by thinking about my dad, but it didn’t work.” Peter shifted his weight from one foot to the other. It felt a little embarrassing to say it aloud, but he remembered clearly what he’d felt at that moment. “I was thinking about my dad. About how much . . . well, how much I love him.”

  “You did magic through love?”

  Had he? Peter thought back to the way the power had flowed through him. “I guess I did.”

  The Dog’s mouth hung open, exposing his incisors and long pink tongue. “Peter, don’t you see what you’re saying?” he asked. “How do you feel now? Are you angry?”

  “I . . . I feel fine,” said Peter. How could he not have noticed before? “Not angry at all.”

  The Dog dropped to his haunches, lifted his nose, and howled to the stars that twinkled through the ceiling.

  “What are you howling about?” Peter asked. “Are you upset?”

  The Dog looked at him, and there were tears in his eyes. A dog crying, Peter thought. Not the strangest part of this day, but strange enough.

  “Not upset,” said The Dog. “I’m howling because I’m happy. You wouldn’t understand. It’s a dog thing.”

  “Did you know people could do magic through love? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I didn’t know,” said The Dog. “Or I would’ve told you. But I sometimes wondered if maybe you would be able to find a different way to do things than he had. That’s why I didn’t tell you that you had to be angry that night at the golf course. It’s also why I made you hear Izzy’s voice when you were flying, and why I brought your sisters to the magician’s house. You care a lot about your family, and I thought that might keep the anger from taking you over. But I didn’t know it was the key to everything.”

  “Does that mean Peter won’t become evil like the magician?” Celia asked. She and Izzy were listening as intently as Peter.

  “I don’t think he will,” said The Dog. “He’s not angry now, and he just did an enormous amount of magic.”

  He wouldn’t become evil. Peter looked down at his dusty hands; he had never before felt so grateful just to be himself. “Will I still turn into a rock? I mean, will a spell backfire on me eventually, like it did with your magician?”

  “That I don’t know,” said The Dog. “It seems possible. But then, in legends there are often good magicians, aren’t there? Like Merlin, for instance—he lived to be an old man. Perhaps there’s some basis of truth in those stories.”

  “Are you trying to say you think I could become like Merlin?” The idea struck Peter as preposterous.

  But The Dog seemed to take the question seriously. “It seems more likely to me that you’ll end up like him than that you’ll end up a rock.”

  “Yay!” Izzy cheered. Celia smiled, too, but she had a calculating gleam in her eyes: Peter could tell she was already assessing how they could put his magic to use. Aside from the relief that he might not end up a rock, Peter himself felt mostly a profound disquiet. To be a magician like Merlin? Nothing about that seemed right.

  He didn’t want to think about it, so he looked down at the rock again instead. “None of this changes the fact that the magician is more powerful than I am. I could barely turn him into a rock. If I tried to make him into the boy he used to be, he might end up human, but still evil.”

  “So we just need you to be more powerful,” said The Dog.

  “ ‘Just’?”

  “I don’t understand,” Celia interrupted. “Why do we want to figure out how to change the magician back? He wanted to steal our souls, and he tried to kill Henry. Why should we risk ourselves trying to help him?”

  “He wasn’t always evil,” said The Dog. “He used to be a wonderful kid. That’s the person I want back.”

  “That’s what you keep saying,” said Celia, her chin jutting out. “But he must’ve been at least a little bit evil before, or he would’ve learned to do magic through love, like Peter. He’s a rock, and he’s not going to hurt anyone else. Let’s leave him like that.”

  “If that’s what you want,” said The Dog. But he looked at Peter as he said it.

  “No!” Peter said in a loud voice, surprising himself.

  “But why, Peter?” Celia asked.

  “Because . . .” Peter tried to think of the answer to this question. “Because he’s not perfect. But people aren’t perfect. They’re just . . . they’re people.” He looked at The Dog, and he could tell that The Dog understood what he was saying, even though Peter wasn’t getting the words right. “It doesn’t mean he deserves to be a rock.”

  “He used to throw the Frisbee for me for hours,” said The Dog. “I would watch for him when he came home from school. He would walk in the door and give me a treat, before he did anything else. At night I slept at the foot of his bed, and he didn’t care if I snored.”

  “We have to change him back,” said Peter. The depth of his certainty surprised him. “And we have to do it tonight.”

  “I wish you could use his power,” said Izzy, “the way you did when you were touching the rock.”

  “I don’t think that will work,” said Peter. “He’s too strong for me to control.”

  The Dog’s ears suddenly perked up. “But I think I know whose power you can use.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  “Absolutely not,” said Peter flatly, looking at Celia and Izzy. “It would be dangerous. You could get hurt.”

  The Dog’s idea, once he explained it, was simple enough, and Celia and Izzy wanted to help. But Peter was not going to put his sisters at risk. Not again.

  “Remember when Henry jumped on the magician?” Izzy asked Peter. “He didn’t have to. But he did, even though he’s scared of magic and loud noises and especially the magician. It was because he knew it was the right thing to do, wasn’t it, Henry?”

  On Izzy’s shoulder, Henry bobbed his tiny brown head up and down. Now that he was really a mouse again, he seemed a lot less, well, mouse-ish. He hadn’t run for a dark closet yet, and unlike before, he seemed perfectly willing to answer questions.

  “Helping the magician is the right thing to do,” said Izzy. “And Celia and I want to do it.”

  “Besides that, you’re not the boss, Peter,” Celia added. “You may be the oldest, and the magician, but I’ve been telling you all along that you can’t do everything alone. You need us, and you know it.”

  She was right, Peter thought. He did need them, and they were in their own ways as much a part of this as he was. Reluctantly, he nodded at The Dog.

  In preparation, The Dog wished the picture of the magician from the magician’s house, then handed it to Peter, Celia, and Izzy to study. “The physical details aren’t important,” warned The Dog. “You’ve seen him already. What I want you to remember is how happy he looks. He hasn’t smiled like that in almost a year.”

  Peter stared down at the boy’s face, trying to memorize the ways in which it was different from the magician’s. His grin, he thought. The light in his eyes. The mischievous way he looked at the camera. After a moment or two, Celia and Izzy said they were ready, and Peter put the picture aside. Without speaking, the three children and The Dog formed a circle, holding hands and paws, with the rock in the middle.

  Peter took a deep breath. The last two times he’d fought with the magician, he’d barely survived. But this time, he told himself, he wouldn’t be alone. Everyone had magic, The Dog had reminded the children; it was just that most people’s brains weren’t capable of using it. But just as Peter had used the magician’s magic when he was touching the rock, The Dog believed that perhaps Peter could borrow his sisters’ and The Dog’s magic for a little while. If they all thought the same thing, Peter’s power might be greater than the magician’s.

  Peter checked once more the back corners of his mind: Angry Peter truly was gone. He was, he thought, the luckiest boy who had ever lived. He let that feeling o
f luck and love fill him.

  The Dog had insisted that the four of them stand exactly so, but it wasn’t until the magic started gathering in Peter’s head that he understood why. From the first time he had done magic, Peter had sensed that power vibrated over objects and in and out of people. What he didn’t realize was that even when he was thinking magic, that power was still traveling through him, only a portion of it stopping in his brain long enough for him to use it. But in the circle he, his sisters, and The Dog had formed, magic came in but didn’t go out; the circle trapped it, whipping it around and around like water in a whirlpool. Peter let the swirling power build as long as he could bear it, until his hands were shaking against his sisters’.

  Then he looked down at the rock. No, it wasn’t a rock, he reminded himself. It was Daniel, a boy.

  Daniel, Daniel, Daniel, he thought.

  The rock stayed a rock for longer than seemed possible, even as Peter focused all his power on it. Then, shaking, it began to stretch, growing bigger and bigger until it was taller than Peter. But it was still a rock. Daniel, Peter thought, but he couldn’t make the boy appear, no matter how hard he concentrated.

  His vision blurring, Peter blinked. When his eyes reopened, the rock had become the magician, snarling with anger. Peter’s stomach clenched in fear, and the magician could tell: grinning, he raised his arm, just as he had when he had tried to remove Peter’s will. Peter’s magic wavered. Celia squeezed his hand, though hers was trembling, too. On the other side, Izzy’s fingers were firm and warm in Peter’s own.

  And Peter refocused his mind and thought back once more to the laughter in the eyes of the boy in the photograph. “You aren’t real,” he said to the furious magician whose face was so close to his own. “Daniel is real.”

  Just like that, the magician was gone. Though the boy who replaced him looked the same, he wasn’t; he was someone else entirely.

  Peter let go of his sisters’ hands.