Magic Ink

by Steve Cole

“Well, if you have to turn Granddad’s old office into a girly princess parlour, what about his drawing board? Can I have it in my bedroom?”

  Dad shook his head. “There’s not enough room for it in there.”

  “I’ll make room,” I promised. “Please? If I—”

  “No, Stew. We need to sell it.” Mum was back to staring vacantly into space. “With all the classic characters Granddad drew there over the years, it’s a collector’s item. And selling it should make enough money to pay for the new attic furniture. . .”

  Now I really felt sick. Merlin had said Granddad’s drawing board was a vital part of the magical process.

  Without the board, I would never be able to pull off what Merlin needed.

  “I don’t know what you had to drink last night that’s turned you so weird this morning,” I said, “but you could at least let me keep the drawing board till you find someone to buy it. Please?”

  “We’ve already found someone.” Dad swapped a knowing smile with Mum. “Turns out Mike across the street has a friend who buys and sells special collectors’ items – he wants to come round this evening and take a look at the drawing board—”

  “No!” I shouted. “This is totally unfair. Totally!”

  Leaving my toast uneaten, I stomped upstairs as hard as I could, all the way up to my room. I took my torch, then slammed the door.

  But I had slammed it from the outside, and now I went creeping up to the attic as fast as my twitching toes would carry me – while I still could.

  I had to find Posho and work out what the hecking flip to do next!

  INK-REDIBLE SUPERHEROES

  (as drawn by me. . .)

  It was a lot darker in the attic now the windows were covered up. I ventured into the gloom, shining my torch about. “Posho?” I hissed. “Are you there?” And as I did so, a sneaky thought struck me – this might be my last chance to peek under the floorboard at his secret stash of stuff he’d saved from my granddad’s destructive spree of ‘this-never-happened-la-la-la’-ness.

  I put down the torch and went to work. The length of wood came out easily. The rolls of brown and blackened parchment inside soon followed. First, I found the comic-strip convos I’d been having with Merlin and the big picture of Posho that Granddad had drawn, tucked away for safekeeping. Underneath that I found some partly-burned paper with instructions in fancy handwriting, stating that:

  I nodded to myself, guessing that while the astral Merlin might be able to deliver something small like a pen to me in person, a stack of parchment and comics and a bottle of magic ink would be a bit much for his ghostly form to carry. He must’ve had a mystical tip-off, or a tiny peep into the future, and like a good Dark Ages boy scout he had been prepared, burying the stuff for Granddad to find all those centuries later. . .

  My head was starting to throb.

  What else had Posho salvaged from Granddad’s fire and hidden here? I sifted through instructions showing how to use the different types of parchment, then found a busy comic strip on a page underneath.

  Prickles went down, along and right through my spine.

  It was clearly the fateful first and last conversation between my granddad and the Big Man himself. In the first panel Merlin had drawn himself desperate, eyes wide and pleading.

  Granddad had drawn a stick man in response – a stick man broken in half.

  Merlin had then launched straight into his sales pitch, of course:

  The Big Man went on for four more panels, begging Granddad to draw the mighty defenders required for the job.

  But there was no picture back from my granddad. Just a hasty scrawl across the final two panels on the page, which got harder to read the more it went on – in every sense.

  The harsh swipe of a quickly drawn arrow underlined the words, pointing off the page. I lowered the parchment, my eyes prickling with the promise of tears. I knew what that arrow had once pointed to.

  What else? The picture of Posho Pig on the drawing board. My granddad’s bitter joke.

  But that wasn’t the end of my discoveries. There was another sheet of talking parchment beneath. And my heart did a funny little jump.

  A pretty hopeless drawing of a pig in a top hat sat in the first panel.

  It could only have been drawn by Posho himself, trying to start the comic-strip conversation with Merlin, just as I had.

  He sounded so hopeful and determined. But in the next panel, there was Merlin, clutching his head in despair. The entire third panel was a speech bubble :

  I couldn’t help feeling that Merlin was the ’artless swine in all this – as the next panel saw the return of the badly-drawn pig; this time on his knees as if praying.

  Obviously that had never happened; now I learned precisely why.

  But Posho wasn’t taking it lying down. He took it standing up with trotters on hips.

  “Spoken like a true superhero,” I murmured.

  But Merlin had obviously been less impressed. Nothing had ever been drawn in reply.

  Poor Posho.

  So much fell into place at that moment – how Posho had come to know about Merlin’s predicament. . . Why he’d seemed so jealous of my drawing talents. . . Why the great Garry Penders had stopped drawing super-types walloping each other in order to focus on beating himself up. . .

  And why Merlin had got so mad with Posho the other night. From the Big Man’s point of view I could kind of see it – he’d gambled a whole chunk of his magical might in bringing my granddad’s work to life, and in place of the hero he desired, he’d got a prank-playing pig. A prank-playing pig who wanted to be so much more. . .

  The whole crazy situation seemed suddenly kinda tragic.

  And, as I looked down at the floorboards, I saw there was something else lurking beyond the broken cobwebs of the cavity. Gingerly I reached in and felt the cold crackle of a plastic bag. Something soft was inside. Almost too afraid to look, I reached in. . .

  And snatched my hand away at the sound of a scuffling behind me. I jumped, turned – and found Posho in the doorway.

  “Hello, old boy. I’ve had to climb in through the landing window! Someone’s put wood over. . .” The pig saw me crouched over the floorboard and gasped. “Why, you. . . Oink! How dare you peek at my secret things! Put them back at once!”

  “I’m sorry, Posho,” I protested, stuffing the papers back into the hole. “I didn’t mean to go through your stuff.”

  “Oink! You did!”

  He had me there. “Well, yeah, all right, I did.” I shrugged helplessly. “I just really wanted to know everything about this Merlin thing.”

  “Well. . .” Posho looked down at the floor, crestfallen. “Now, I suppose you do.”

  I nodded. “And what I know most is – you’re amazing. The Big Man treated you so meanly, but you’re still so loyal to him.”

  “Yes, well. . .” Posho sighed heartily and sank down on his haunches. “Oink! Merlin’s magic brought me to life, so he must’ve placed the desire to help in my head.” He held his head theatrically. “If only I could draw, I’d have got the Big Man out long ago! If only there was the faintest whiff of greatness or talent about me, I could’ve saved him with a clever plan. . .”

  “Which reminds me why I came here – to a boarded-up attic.” I looked at Posho and sighed. “Your clever plan with the bottles last night has kind of backfired. After meeting the neighbours, I think my mum and dad have gone crazy. . .”

  I told Posho all about it. He did not take the news well.

  “This is unthinkable!” He clapped a trotter to his forehead in theatrical despair. “Turning Posho’s penthouse pad into some chintzy boudoir? Selling off my creator’s belongings? Oink! It can’t be true.”

  “It is,” I said sullenly. “Mum and Dad are going to start clearing the place out today. So what are we going to do? How can we stop them?”

  The pig considered. “We could arrange a little accident – you know, break your parents’ arms or something?”


  “What?” I frowned. “Are you crazy? We can’t do that!”

  “Oink!” Posho shrugged. “Very well. How about we only break their fingers? That’d still stop their vile decorating schemes.”

  “Back off from my parents!” I could hardly believe what I was hearing. “Anyway, how would that stop the guy who’s coming to buy Granddad’s drawing board?”

  “We could clobber him on the back of the head with a sock full of coins,” Posho suggested. “That’d sort him out.”

  “What are you, today, Psycho Pig?” I tutted. “No. What we need right now is for somebody to come to the rescue.” I looked across to the drawing board. “A superhero or two we can ask for help.”

  “Or four,” Posho agreed. “I’ll fetch you the last of the parchment.” He gave me a hard look. “Unless, of course, you’ve already found it?”

  “Uh, no.” I shrugged. “And I didn’t look in your plastic bag, either.”

  “I should hope not! Oink!” He delved into the gap beneath the floorboards and pulled out some scrolls. “A pig’s plastic bag is his castle, as the old saying. . . er, doesn’t go. Here.” He passed the parchment over. “This is all that’s left, I’m afraid. Only three sheets.”

  “Which means three chances. . .” I listened hard, but could hear no sounds from downstairs as I picked up the brush. Sparks seemed to spring through my fingers as I tightened my grip. “I’d better get going.”

  I’d spent so long staring at Merlin’s heroes the night before that I could bring them to mind easily. The brush seemed to guide my hand even more than the last time, and the ink flowed as easily as blood from a wound – the kind of wound that War Commander might make as I drew his sword, gleaming in the light of some unseen sun.

  It was such a thrill to see something I was drawing look so cool, so right; like something that belonged on the wall in this decades-old shrine to comic-book talents of times gone by.

  “It’s just a shame you’ll never be as good as Stupendous Man,” I murmured.

  “Good work, old boy,” Posho said. “Just think – all we need do is take this picture out into the moonlight and it will come to life! How I wish I could draw like that. . .”

  Don’t I know it, I thought with a pinprick of guilt.

  After finishing off War Commander’s slightly scary-looking armour, I decided to add a little flourish of my own – a big ‘WC’ on his chestplate. Yeah, I liked that, and I was sure this super-knight would get a kick out of it too.

  “Water Closet?” Posho squealed. “But. . . that’s an old fashioned word for a toilet.”

  “Shush!” I hissed. “It is not.”

  “It is!” Posho insisted, at lower volume. “Haven’t you seen a WC sign anywhere before?”

  Now the pig mentioned it, I had a suspicion I had. “Oh, great. I just invented Toilet Knight.”

  “Don’t cross it out,” Posho advised. “You’ll make a mess of his armour. Anyway, he won’t know. Oink! He’s from a time without flush lavatories.”

  That was true, I thought. Besides, if Merlin and the moonlight did their thing as planned, Toilet Knight would only be around for an hour in any case.

  With a sigh, I went straight on to have a go at Harvest Boy. His weird hairstyle. . . the eye-mask. . . his strong-but-scrawny physique and the magic sack on his back ready to receive ripe fruit and veg at a moment’s notice, all were picked out on the parchment with precision as the brush and ink helped me to do my work.

  Lantern Girl and Sonny Siege followed their fellow Magic, Inc. characters, but not quite as successfully. Was the magic beginning to fail or was I just getting tired? Whatever, I drew a still-quite-impressive Sonny Siege with his round head, crimson cape and a dead cow raised heroically over his head.

  Well, kind of heroically. It’s actually quite hard to look heroic when you’re holding a dead cow.

  Then an awful thought struck me. “If moonlight brings drawings to life, what about this dead cow? It might turn up as a zombie cow. That wouldn’t be good.”

  Posho considered. “Add some stitches so it looks like a cuddly toy cow instead. What a wizard prank to play on Sonny Siege. He’ll love it!”

  “Hmm.” I drew the suggested stitches, but now it just looked like Frankenstein’s cow. I added a goofy smile to its face and drew some cotton wool stuffing coming out of its back. After all, a battered giant toy cow adds class to any superhero gathering.

  But – uh-oh – with the problem cow taking up so much space on the parchment, I hadn’t really left enough room for Lantern Girl. Chewing my lip nervously, I found myself doing her smaller than the others to fit the space. I couldn’t get her face quite right at that scale, either. Her nose came out very big – well drawn, but verrrrry big. Still, the rest of her was about OK – and I made sure her hand was alight so she had her superpower, however rubbish it was.

  “There,” I muttered as I finished the inking job. “The not-very fantastic four.”

  “Poor Lantern Girl’s a titch,” Posho observed. “Oink! I’m sure she can still be useful, though. Perhaps she could light up the pit outside the Big Man’s prison, the better to see the killer skeletons.”

  “Who will probably kill her in, like, two seconds.” I put the finishing touches to her knee-length animal-skin boots. “There.” A wave of tiredness struck me as I put down the brush on the board. Suddenly, I could hardly stand.

  “Easy, old chap.” Posho stuck out a porky arm to support me. “You’ve done well. Very well. Let’s hope we have moonlight tonight. . .”

  I surveyed the scene on the parchment. For a first go, it was pretty good, I decided. This was only a test-out, after all.

  But how long did we have the drawing board for, before it was flogged to the collector?

  “I should draw Merlin’s mob again, before the decorating kicks off in here,” I told Posho, peeling off the masking tape so I could pull the parchment from the table. “I really need to draw them better, so we’ll have another set of superheroes in reserve if Mum and Dad really sell the drawing board tonight.”

  “That may be wise,” Posho agreed, taking the parchment from me and passing me another sheet. “The Big Man said the heroes must be trained to fight as a team. Oink! I suppose that every time the moonlight re-creates these heroes, they will remember what happened to them the last time they were conjured into being, and learn from it.”

  “I. . . I’d better get straight on.” I taped the fresh sheet to the board, but then had to close my eyes. I felt weirdly woozy all of a sudden.

  “I think you should take a rest first, old bean,” said Posho. “Oink! Your family will have finished their breakfast by now. Any one of them could come looking for you – and find all this.”

  He had a point. “OK.” I pointed to my drawing. “Take that picture and hide it, yeah? And hide yourself too! Hopefully Mum and Dad won’t start in here till after lunch. I’ll be back up as soon as I can.”

  Posho nodded solemnly.

  I left the attic and tried to tiptoe down the steps, but it came out as more of a flat-footed stagger. I was too tired to care. I lay down on my bed and almost instantly fell fast asleep.

  I’d learned that drawing too much with magic ink takes it out of you.

  But I hadn’t yet learned quite how much it took. . .

  A SHEDLOAD OF TROUBLE

  It’s like the old saying goes, “The best laid plans of mice, men and Stew often go awry.” Because there I was, sleeping peacefully, when Mum suddenly burst into my room and announced she was taking me to town to get my new school uniform and to find a new leotard for Lib, who had somehow managed to lose her own.

  Looking at my watch I saw I’d dozed for a couple of hours, but I still felt wiped out. “I. . . I thought you were vandalising the attic today?”

  “Decorating, yes.” She seemed much more her old self; I wasn’t sure if that was good or not. “After lunch.”

  “And what about that guy who wants to buy Granddad’s drawing board?”


  “He’s dropping by after dinner. Now, come on.” Mum pinched the bridge of her nose and shut her eyes. “Dear me, I’ve got such a headache!”

  Well! She really WAS back to normal!

  So out we went to the local boring shops, where I had to try on scratchy trousers and shirts, and tie an unfamiliar tie in a totally uncool way that Mum wouldn’t moan about. I saw other boys my age out and about, and wondered if they went to my new school. I imagined trying to make friends with them, talking about normal, ordinary things in a normal, ordinary way. How could life ever feel normal again after this? I saw myself in the changing room mirror – and the boy in school uniform I saw there didn’t feel like the real me at all.

  Secret identities again.

  Once we found stuff that fitted, I had to trail about with Lib while we found just the right shade of pukey pink for her new dance gear. I supposed it would go nicely with the attic’s new paint job.

  But it was my own paint job I was worrying about. I had the feeling that Disaster was looming. . .

  Back home, after lunch, just as threatened, Mum and Dad got started on redecorating. I couldn’t understand why they were so determined to start today, when surely it made sense to wait until the collector guy had taken away the drawing board?

  As it was, I had to help Dad shift it (along with the rest of the furniture) over towards the boarded-up windows before we hid the whole lot under dustsheets. Then Mum and Lib took down all the posters, pictures and certificates hanging on the walls and stacked them in my room.

  Why weren’t they going to show all that stuff to the collector? Surely he’d pay top dollar for them? It didn’t seem to make sense – but I wasn’t about to point that out to them. As you know, grown-ups are often weird and a bit stupid.