The Way of the Wizard

by John Joseph Adams

  “Yes,” Angie said. “Yes. He’s doing magic for me—he’s getting something I need—and I don’t know where he is, but I know he’s in trouble, and I want him back!” She did not cry or break down—Marvyn would never be able to say that she cried over him—but it was a near thing.

  El Viejo pushed the dark glasses up on his forehead, and Angie saw that he was younger than she had first thought—certainly younger than Lidia—and that there were thick white half-circles under his eyes. She never knew whether they were somehow natural, or the result of heavy makeup; what she did see was that they made his eyes look bigger and brighter—all pupil, nothing more. They should have made him look at least slightly comical, like a reverse-image raccoon, but they didn’t.

  “I know you brother,” El Viejo said. Angie fought to hold herself still as he came closer, smiling at her with the tips of his teeth. “A brujito—little, little witch, we know. Mama and me, we been watching.” He nodded toward the old woman in the chair, who hadn’t moved an inch or said a word since Angie’s arrival. Angie smelled a damp, musty aroma, like potatoes going bad.

  “Tell me where he is. Lidia said you could help.” Close to, she could see blue highlights in El Viejo’s skin, and a kind of V-shaped scar on each cheek. He was wearing a narrow black tie, which she had not noticed at first; for some reason, the vision of him tying it in the morning, in front of a mirror, was more chilling to her than anything else about him. He grinned fully at her now, showing teeth that she had expected to be yellow and stinking, but which were all white and square and a little too large. He said, “Tu hermano está perdido. Lost in Thursday.”

  “Thursday?” It took her a dazed moment to comprehend, and longer to get the words out. “Oh, God, he went back! Like with Milady—he went back to before I . . . when the letter was still in my backpack. The little showoff—he said forward was hard, coming forward—he wanted to show me he could do it. And he got stuck. Idiot, idiot, idiot!” El Viejo chuckled softly, nodding, saying nothing.

  “You have to go find him, get him out of there, right now—I’ve got money.” She began digging frantically in her coat pockets.

  “No, no money.” El Viejo waved her offering aside, studying her out of eyes the color of almost-ripened plums. The white markings under them looked real; the eyes didn’t. He said, “I take you. We find you brother together.”

  Angie’s legs were trembling so much that they hurt. She wanted to assent, but it was simply not possible. “No. I can’t. I can’t. You go back there and get him.”

  El Viejo laughed then: an enormous, astonishing Santa Claus ho-ho-HO, so rich and reassuring that it made Angie smile even as he was snatching her up and stuffing her under one arm. By the time she had recovered from her bewilderment enough to start kicking and fighting, he was walking away with her down the long hall he had come out of a moment before. Angie screamed until her voice splintered in her throat, but she could not hear herself: from the moment El Viejo stepped back into the darkness of the hallway, all sound had ended. She could hear neither his footsteps nor his laughter—though she could feel him laughing against her—and certainly not her own panicky racket. They could be in outer space. They could be anywhere.

  Dazed and disoriented as she was, the hallway seemed to go soundlessly on and on, until wherever they truly were, it could never have been the tiny Santeria shop she had entered only—when?—minutes before. It was a cold place, smelling like an old basement; and for all its darkness, Angie had a sense of things happening far too fast on all sides, just out of range of her smothered vision. She could distinguish none of them clearly, but there was a sparkle to them all the same.

  And then she was in Marvyn’s room.

  And it was unquestionably Marvyn’s room: there were the bearded and beaded occultists on the walls; there were the flannel winter sheets that he slept on all year because they had pictures of the New York Mets ballplayers; there was the complete set of Star Trek action figures that Angie had given him at Christmas, posed just so on his bookcase. And there, sitting on the edge of his bed, was Marvyn, looking lonelier than anyone Angie had ever seen in her life.

  He didn’t move or look up until El Viejo abruptly dumped her down in front of him and stood back, grinning like a beartrap. Then he jumped to his feet, burst into tears and started frenziedly climbing her, snuffling, “Angie, Angie, Angie,” all the way up. Angie held him, trying somehow to preserve her neck and hair and back all at once, while mumbling, “It’s all right, it’s okay, I’m here. It’s okay, Marvyn.”

  Behind her, El Viejo chuckled, “Crybaby witch—little, little brujito crybaby.” Angie hefted her blubbering baby brother like a shopping bag, holding him on her hip as she had done when he was little, and turned to face the old man. She said, “Thank you. You can take us home now.”

  El Viejo smiled—not a grin this time, but a long, slow shutmouth smile like a paper cut. He said, “Maybe we let him do it, yes?” and then he turned and walked away and was gone, as though he had simply slipped between the molecules of the air. Angie stood with Marvyn in her arms, trying to peel him off like a Band-Aid, while he clung to her with his chin digging hard into the top of her head. She finally managed to dump him down on the bed and stood over him, demanding, “What happened? What were you thinking?” Marvyn was still crying too hard to answer her. Angie said, “You just had to do it this way, didn’t you? No silly little beginner spells—you’re playing with the big guys now, right, O Mighty One? So what happened? How come you couldn’t get back?”

  “I don’t know!” Marvyn’s face was red and puffy with tears, and the tears kept coming while Angie tried to straighten his eyepatch. It was impossible for him to get much out without breaking down again, but he kept wailing, “I don’t know what went wrong! I did everything you’re supposed to, but I couldn’t make it work! I don’t know . . . maybe I forgot . . . ” He could not finish.

  “Herbs,” Angie said, as gently and calmly as she could. “You left your magic herbs back—” she had been going to say “back home,” but she stopped, because they were back home, sitting on Marvyn’s bed in Marvyn’s room, and the confusion was too much for her to deal with just then. She said, “Just tell me. You left the stupid herbs.”

  Marvyn shook his head until the tears flew, protesting, “No, I didn’t, I didn’t—look!” He pointed to a handful of grubby dried weeds scattered on the bed—Lidia would have thrown them out in a minute. Marvyn gulped and wiped his nose and tried to stop crying. He said, “They’re really hard to find, maybe they’re not fresh anymore, I don’t know—they’ve always looked like that. But now they don’t work,” and he was wailing afresh. Angie told him that Dr. John Dee and Willow would both have been ashamed of him, but it didn’t help.

  But she also sat with him and put her arm around him, and smoothed his messy hair, and said, “Come on, let’s think this out. Maybe it’s the herbs losing their juice, maybe it’s something else. You did everything the way you did the other time, with Milady?”

  “I thought I did.” Marvyn’s voice was small and shy, not his usual deep croak. “But I don’t know anymore, Angie—the more I think about it, the more I don’t know. It’s all messed up, I can’t remember anything now.”

  “Okay,” Angie said. “Okay. So how about we just run through it all again? We’ll do it together. You try everything you do remember about—you know—moving around in time, and I’ll copy you. I’ll do whatever you say.”

  Marvyn wiped his nose again and nodded. They sat down cross-legged on the floor, and Marvyn produced the grimy book of paper matches that he always carried with him, in case of firecrackers. Following his directions Angie placed all the crumbly herbs into Milady’s dish, and her brother lit them. Or tried to: they didn’t blaze up, but smoked and smoldered and smelled like old dust, setting both Angie and Marvyn sneezing almost immediately. Angie coughed and asked, “Did that happen the other time?” Marvyn did not answer.

  There was a moment when she thought the
charm might actually be going to work. The room around them grew blurry—slightly blurry, granted—and Angie heard indistinct faraway sounds that might have been themselves hurtling forward to sheltering Sunday. But when the fumes of Marvyn’s herbs cleared away, they were still sitting in Thursday—they both knew it without saying a word. Angie said, “Okay, so much for that. What about all that special concentration you were telling me about? You think maybe your mind wandered? You pronounce any spells the wrong way? Think, Marvyn!”

  “I am thinking! I told you forward was hard!” Marvyn looked ready to start crying again, but he didn’t. He said slowly, “Something’s wrong, but it’s not me. I don’t think it’s me. Something’s pushing . . . ” He brightened suddenly. “Maybe we should hold hands or something. Because of there being two of us this time. We could try that.”

  So they tried the spell that way, and then they tried working it inside a pentagram they made with masking tape on the floor, as Angie had seen such things done on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, even though Marvyn said that didn’t really mean anything, and they tried the herbs again, in a special order that Marvyn thought he remembered. They even tried it with Angie saying the spell, after Marvyn had coached her, just on the chance that his voice itself might have been throwing off the pitch or the pronunciation. Nothing helped.

  Marvyn gave up before Angie did. Suddenly, while she was trying the spell over herself, one more time—some of the words seemed to heat up in her mouth as she spoke them—he collapsed into a wretched ball of desolation on the floor, moaning over and over, “We’re finished, it’s finished, we’ll never get out of Thursday!” Angie understood that he was only a terrified little boy, but she was frightened too, and it would have relieved her to slap him and scream at him. Instead, she tried as best she could to reassure him, saying, “He’ll come back for us. He has to.”

  Her brother sat up, knuckles to his eyes. “No, he doesn’t have to! Don’t you understand? He knows I’m a witch like him, and he’s just going to leave me here, out of his way. I’m sorry, Angie, I’m really sorry!” Angie had almost never heard that word from Marvyn, and never twice in the same sentence.

  “Later for all that,” she said. “I was just wondering—do you think we could get Mom and Dad’s attention when they get home? You think they’d realize what’s happened to us?”

  Marvyn shook his head. “You haven’t seen me all the time I’ve been gone. I saw you, and I screamed and hollered and everything, but you never knew. They won’t either. We’re not really in our house—we’re just here. We’ll always be here.”

  Angie meant to laugh confidently, to give them both courage, but it came out more of a hiccupy snort. “Oh, no. No way. There is no way I’m spending the rest of my life trapped in your stupid bedroom. We’re going to try this useless mess one more time, and then . . . then I’ll do something else.” Marvyn seemed about to ask her what else she could try, but he checked himself, which was good.

  They attempted the spell more than one more time. They tried it in every style they could think of except standing on their heads and reciting the words backward, and they might just as well have done that, for all the effect it had. Whether Marvyn’s herbs had truly lost all potency, or whether Marvyn had simply forgotten some vital phrase, they could not even recapture the fragile awareness of something almost happening that they had both felt on the first trial. Again and again they opened their eyes to last Thursday.

  “Okay,” Angie said at last. She stood up, to stretch cramped legs, and began to wander around the room, twisting a couple of the useless herbs between her fingers. “Okay,” she said again, coming to a halt midway between the bedroom door and the window, facing Marvyn’s small bureau. A leg of his red Dr. Seuss pajamas was hanging out of one of the drawers.

  “Okay,” she said a third time. “Let’s go home.”

  Marvyn had fallen into a kind of fetal position, sitting up but with his arms tight around his knees and his head down hard on them. He did not look up at her words. Angie raised her voice. “Let’s go, Marvyn. That hallway—tunnel-thing, whatever it is—it comes out right about where I’m standing. That’s where El Viejo brought me, and that’s the way he left when he . . . left. That’s the way back to Sunday.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Marvyn whimpered. “El Viejo . . . he’s him! He’s him!”

  Angie promptly lost what little remained of her patience. She stalked over to Marvyn and shook him to his feet, dragging him to a spot in the air as though she were pointing out a painting in a gallery. “And you’re Marvyn Luke, and you’re the big bad new witch in town! You said it yourself—if you weren’t, he’d never have bothered sticking you away here. Not even nine, and you can eat his lunch, and he knows it! Straighten your patch and take us home, bro.” She nudged him playfully. “Oh, forgive me—I meant to say, O Mighty One.”

  “You don’t have to call me that anymore.” Marvyn’s legs could barely hold him up, and he sagged against her, a dead weight of despair. “I can’t, Angie. I can’t get us home. I’m sorry . . . ”

  The good thing—and Angie knew it then—would have been to turn and comfort him: to take his cold, wet face between her hands and tell him that all would yet be well, that they would soon be eating popcorn with far too much butter on it in his real room in their real house. But she was near her own limit, and pretending calm courage for his sake was prodding her, in spite of herself, closer to the edge. Without looking at Marvyn, she snapped, “Well, I’m not about to die in last Thursday! I’m walking out of here the same way he did, and you can come with me or not, that’s up to you. But I’ll tell you one thing, Ex-Lax—I won’t be looking back.”

  And she stepped forward, walking briskly toward the dangling Dr. Seuss pajamas . . .

  . . . and into a thick, sweet-smelling grayness that instantly filled her eyes and mouth, her nose and her ears, disorienting her so completely that she flailed her arms madly, all sense of direction lost, with no idea of which way she might be headed; drowning in syrup like a trapped bee or butterfly. Once she thought she heard Marvyn’s voice, and called out for him—“I’m here, I’m here!” But she did not hear him again.

  Then, between one lunge for air and another, the grayness was gone, leaving not so much as a dampness on her skin, nor even a sickly aftertaste of sugar in her mouth. She was back in the time-tunnel, as she had come to think of it, recognizing the uniquely dank odor: a little like the ashes of a long-dead fire, and a little like what she imagined moonlight might smell like, if it had a smell. The image was an ironic one, for she could see no more than she had when El Viejo was lugging her the other way under his arm. She could not even distinguish the ground under her feet; she knew only that it felt more like slippery stone than anything else, and she was careful to keep her footing as she plodded steadily forward.

  The darkness was absolute—strange solace, in a way, since she could imagine Marvyn walking close behind her, even though he never answered her, no matter how often or how frantically she called his name. She moved along slowly, forcing her way through the clinging murk, vaguely conscious, as before, of a distant, flickering sense of sound and motion on every side of her. If there were walls to the time-tunnel, she could not touch them; if it had a roof, no air currents betrayed it; if there were any living creature in it besides herself, she felt no sign. And if time actually passed there, Angie could never have said. She moved along, her eyes closed, her mind empty, except for the formless fear that she was not moving at all, but merely raising and setting down her feet in the same place, endlessly. She wondered if she was hungry.

  Not until she opened her eyes in a different darkness to the crowing of a rooster and a familiar heavy aroma did she realize that she was walking down the hallway leading from the Santeria shop to . . . wherever she had really been—and where Marvyn still must be, for he plainly had not followed her. She promptly turned and started back toward last Thursday, but halted at the deep, slightly grating chuckle behind her. She did n
ot turn again, but stood very still.

  El Viejo walked a slow full circle around her before he faced her, grinning down at her like the man in the moon. The dark glasses were off, and the twin scars on his cheeks were blazing up as though they had been slashed into him a moment before. He said, “I know. Before even I see you, I know.”

  Angie hit him in the stomach as hard as she could. It was like punching a frozen slab of beef, and she gasped in pain, instantly certain that she had broken her hand. But she hit him again, and again, screaming at the top of her voice, “Bring my brother back! If you don’t bring him right back here, right now, I’ll kill you! I will!”

  El Viejo caught her hands, surprisingly gently, still laughing to himself. “Little girl, listen, listen now. Niñita, nobody else—nobody—ever do what you do. You understand? Nobody but me ever walk that road back from where I leave you, understand?” The big white half-circles under his eyes were stretching and curling like live things.

  Angie pulled away from him with all her strength, as she had hit him. She said, “No. That’s Marvyn. Marvyn’s the witch, the brujo—don’t go telling people it’s me. Marvyn’s the one with the power.”

  “Him?” Angie had never heard such monumental scorn packed into one syllable. El Viejo said, “Your brother nothing, nobody, we no bother with him. Forget him—you the one got the regalo, you just don’t know.” The big white teeth filled her vision; she saw nothing else. “I show you—me, El Viejo. I show you what you are.”

  It was beyond praise, beyond flattery. For all her dread and dislike of El Viejo, to have someone of his wicked wisdom tell her that she was like him in some awful, splendid way made Angie shiver in her heart. She wanted to turn away more than she had ever wanted anything—even Jake Petrakis—but the long walk home to Sunday was easier than breaking the clench of the white-haired man’s malevolent presence would have been. Having often felt (and almost as often dismissed the notion) that Marvyn was special in the family by virtue of being the baby, and a boy—and now a potent witch—she let herself revel in the thought that the real gift was hers, not his, and that if she chose she had only to stretch out her hand to have her command settle home in it. It was at once the most frightening and the most purely, completely gratifying feeling she had ever known.