Phyllis Wong and the Waking of the Wizard

by Geoffrey McSkimming

  Also by Geoffrey McSkimming

  THE PHYLLIS WONG MYSTERIES

  Phyllis Wong and the Forgotten Secrets of Mr Okyto

  Phyllis Wong and the Return of the Conjuror

  First published by Allen & Unwin in 2015

  Copyright © Text, Geoffrey McSkimming 2015

  Copyright © Illustrations, CLOP Pty Ltd 2015

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or ten per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Email: info@allenandunwin.com

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  A Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available from the National Library of Australia

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 978 1 76011 338 4

  eISBN 978 1 92526 747 1

  Cover design by Liz Seymour

  Cover and internal illustrations by Peter Sheehan

  Author photograph by Sue-Anne Webster

  Typeset by Midland Typesetters, Australia

  For Sue-Anne, who created the rising feather

  Contents

  PART ONE

  Where’s your mother?

  Mrs Zepple is astonished

  A welcome appearance

  Who? Houdini?

  Gathering the essentials

  Derelict destination

  The smashing

  A little about Sturdy

  A vent unhinged

  On the card

  PART TWO

  A different light on things

  Picture me . . .

  Making someone disappear

  Time to move

  The magnet of Time

  Hip enough

  Beaming meaning

  Shedding more light

  Image this

  Shifting shimmer

  PART THREE

  Towards the Whimpering

  Chandeliers we are not!

  Watching from the wings

  Discovering things

  Pursued!

  The observer

  A sweeping trip

  Opening up

  Re-awakening

  Drawing him back

  Bubble, bubble . . .

  Throwing another voice

  Aurora boom-de-ay!

  Afterwards

  Endword

  ‘The wizard may appear to have gone, but he will dwell near the minds of men for another thousand years. He will always be needed. He will be closer than he seems.’

  —Certinus of Alsace, monk and scholar

  (from the Second Manuscript, c. 1380)

  ‘The Great Whimpering will come, as surely as the sun rises. But be this known: after the Great Whimpering, the sun will never hold the world as it had. And much, and many, will be lost.’

  —Hector of Monmouth, writing in the fifteenth century

  (from Annals of the Days)

  ‘A walrus was never intended to make hay while the sun shines. To encourage such activity will only lead to heartache.’

  —Wallace Wong, magician, 1898–?

  (from his journals)

  PART ONE

  With pince-nez you can be anyone

  Where’s your mother?

  ‘Great,’ said Phyllis Wong. ‘Another parent talk.’

  The young magician was reading the latest school newsletter on her webPad. Her headmaster, Dr Bermschstäter, had recently taken to sending out the newsletters electronically, even though he wasn’t very experienced in such matters.

  Phyllis read on and rolled her eyes. ‘Oh, no, please don’t let it be her.’

  Phyllis’s friend Clement came and sat on the bench beside her. ‘Don’t let it be who?’ he asked, slinging off his backpack and pulling his webPad out. (He also accidentally pulled out three textbooks, a squished-up egg-and-tuna sandwich, one of his many portable game consoles—this one with the new version of Zombie Apocalblitz—his wallet and a false beard made out of genuine human hair. All of these things spilled onto the ground.)

  ‘Listen,’ Phyllis said as Clement switched on his webPad. She read out the bit that had made her roll her eyes: ‘ “On Wednesday morning we will have our next parent talk. This will be given by one of our most popular student’s mother. At 11 a.m. in the Platzen Auditorium, Mrs Cunbrus will discuss her successful career as a high-profile advertising executive. I am sure all students at Pritherlee College will be intrigued by Mrs Cunbrus’s presentation, and many of you will no doubt begin to think of a career in this exciting, well-paid industry.” And then,’ Phyllis went on, ‘there’s a picture of a duck.’

  ‘Huh?’ Clement had his webPad on now and was scrolling down the newsletter.

  ‘I think Dr Bermschstäter got a little distracted again,’ she said. ‘He must’ve been researching ducks or something.’

  ‘Quack, quack,’ said Clement.

  ‘Oh, I feel underwhelmed,’ moaned Phyllis, turning off her webPad.

  ‘It’s only a duck. At least he didn’t put in all those pictures of George Clooney like he did last week. Man, there were six pages of ’em! I didn’t even know who George Clooney was until—’

  ‘No, not by the duck, Clem. By the thought of Leizel Cunbrus’s mother talking to us about advertising. Why do we have to have these parent talks anyway? It’s years before we have to grow up and start earning a living.’

  ‘I’m not going to grow up,’ Clement said. ‘That’s a vastly overrated concept, if you ask me.’

  Phyllis smiled. Even though Clem was only a year and ten days younger than her, he sometimes seemed like he’d never get any older.

  ‘Anyway,’ he said, turning off his webPad and stashing it and all his other belongings in his backpack, ‘we don’t have to worry about careers. We have better things to keep us occupied. Things that we can’t tell anyone about, haven’t we?’ He looked over the top of his glasses and gave Phyllis an exaggerated wink.

  ‘Clem!’ she warned.

  He shrugged his shoulders quickly. ‘What?’

  ‘You are not to mention anything. You know that.’

  ‘Who’s mentioning?’ he asked innocently.

  She gave him a look, which he knew meant don’t push me, I’m not in the mood.

  ‘Ah, well,’ he sighed. ‘C’mon, let’s go. If I’m late home again, Mum’ll kill me.’

  Phyllis stood and slung her bag over her shoulder. ‘Of all the mothers to come and speak to us,’ she said. ‘Anyone else’s I could cope with, but not Leizel Cunbrus’s. That girl’s always trying to rattle me. Every time I do a magic trick she tries to expose it. Every time she sees me she always has something snide to say. She’s nothing but a—’

  ‘But a what?’ came a sharp voice from behind them.

  They turned to see Leizel Cunbrus and three of her friends hovering near the school gates.

  ‘Gee, you’re good at sneaking up quietly,’ Clement said.

  ‘I don’t sneak,’ Leizel said, flicking her hair back from her shoulders. ‘Do I, girls?’

  Her friends said nothing; instead, they stared at Phyllis and Clement
as though they were repugnant smells that had hung around for too long.

  ‘So, Phyllis Wong,’ Leizel said, coming closer, ‘just what have you got against my mother?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Phyllis replied.

  ‘You said you couldn’t cope with her.’

  ‘Ah, forget it, Leizel,’ Clement said. ‘C’mon, Phyll.’

  ‘Why can’t you cope with her, Phyllis Wong?’ Leizel advanced towards Phyllis, her three similarly dressed friends close behind her.

  ‘Forget it, Leizel,’ said Phyllis. ‘I’ve gotta go.’

  She went to move around Leizel and her friends, but Leizel put her arm out and blocked her.

  ‘My mum freaks you out, is that it?’

  ‘Drop it,’ said Clement.

  ‘Shut it, Limpy,’ Leizel retaliated.

  Clement just shook his head at her—no one ever mentioned the fact that he had a slight limp, which had come from an accident he’d had in an alley a while back. No one but Leizel Cunbrus.

  ‘Your mother doesn’t freak me out,’ Phyllis said, her voice low and calm. ‘And don’t be so rude. Clement’s my friend.’

  ‘He’s a loser,’ said Leizel. ‘A game-playing little loser who can’t even walk in a straight line without banging into something or falling over.’

  ‘Hey!’ Clement pushed his glasses further up his nose. ‘I’m just distracted sometimes.’

  ‘You should write a book,’ Leizel sneered. ‘Great Lamp Posts I Have Met. Or, A Year of Fabulous Trips.’

  The three Cunbrus clones, with their perfectly straight hair and their abundance of pearly-white teeth and their expensive jackets and jeans, sniggered loudly.

  ‘Leave him alone,’ Phyllis warned Leizel.

  ‘Or what? What’ll you do, conjuror-girl? Whip out your magic wand and turn me into a toad?’

  ‘Why try to improve on nature?’ said Clement, and Phyllis smirked.

  ‘Oh, you’re too funny,’ Leizel snapped.

  ‘C’mon, Clem, let’s go somewhere where the world is more worthwhile.’

  Again she went to go around Leizel, but Leizel moved quickly, blocking her path once more. ‘I know why you’re freaked out.’

  ‘Let me pass,’ said Phyllis, her dark eyes steady.

  ‘You’re freaked out because I have a mother. And you don’t.’

  The words felt like a knife slicing into Phyllis’s skin. But only for a moment. She shut her eyes and wished the pain away, and away it went. Phyllis knew how to keep this pain at bay.

  She opened her eyes again and looked directly at Leizel. ‘I have a life,’ she responded. ‘And that’s something you could never hope to understand.’

  Leizel Cunbrus fell silent. There was something intense in the way Phyllis had spoken to her—a way that Leizel had never heard before.

  Phyllis pushed past her, jostling against her arm, and headed out the school gates. Clement walked briskly alongside her.

  ‘What would you know about life?’ Leizel called after them. ‘You’re both living in dream worlds! Losers!’

  On their walk home, Phyllis was quiet.

  Clement, sensing that she wasn’t her usual self, tried to cheer her up. He stopped for a moment, reached into his backpack and took out a pair of pince-nez—little round spectacles without arms, the sort that people wore, perched on the ends of their noses, in old-fashioned movies and books. He whipped off his normal glasses and shoved the pince-nez onto his nose.

  ‘Ist zere anyzing I can do to alleviate your troubles?’ he asked, trying to sound like a doctor (but the pince-nez pinched his nostrils tightly, and he sounded more like a squeaky balloon when the air squeals out of the opening).

  Phyllis saw his new look. She smiled. ‘Have they got real glass in them?’ she asked.

  ‘Nah, just perspex. They’re the latest addition to my disguise collection.’

  ‘You’ll break your neck if you try walking home with them on.’

  He smiled back. ‘Hm. I hadn’t thought of that.’ He pulled off the pince-nez and quickly replaced them with his normal glasses.

  Phyllis kept walking. ‘Where’d you get them?’

  ‘Have a guess,’ he said, hurrying to keep up with her—she was a fast walker.

  ‘Have you been back to Thundermallow’s?’ she asked, squinting at him.

  ‘Last week. Did you get the latest catalogue?’

  ‘Of course I did. I’ve been getting catalogues from Thundermallow’s for longer than you have. It was me who introduced you to the place, remember?’

  Thundermallow’s was Phyllis’s favourite magic shop—an old, dark, crammed-to-the-ceiling establishment on the other side of the river. It had been there for over a hundred years, and Phyllis’s great-grandfather—the famous magician Wallace Wong, Conjuror of Wonder!—had bought many of his tricks and illusions from the original owner before Wallace had mysteriously disappeared in the middle of his magic act on stage in Venezuela in 1936. Phyllis had taken Clement to Thundermallow’s once when she had been buying a trick, and Clement had stumbled upon the Disguises section of the shop. It had been a life-changing moment for him. Now, disguises were almost as important to him as gaming against the zombie realms, and he returned to Thundermallow’s often, building up his disguises collection.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you may have noticed in the latest catalogue that they just got in a whole lot of new items of concealment. Like these pince-nez.’

  ‘Ah. So, is Miss Hipwinkle still working there?’

  Clement blushed. ‘She is. Why shouldn’t she be?’

  ‘What’s her first name again?’ wondered Phyllis, knowing full well what it was.

  ‘Evangeline,’ Clement replied. ‘But only certain people can call her that.’

  ‘And you’re a certain person?’ She was enjoying this.

  ‘Um . . . well, not yet. But I have a feeling I soon will be. I’m such a regular customer at the disguises counter that it’s only a matter of time.’

  ‘Ha.’

  They turned the corner and started heading up the avenue towards the Wallace Wong Building—the beautiful old Art Deco apartment block in which Phyllis lived with her father and her miniature fox terrier, Daisy. Clement lived with his parents three blocks away, above the enormous appliance store they owned—the biggest in the city.

  ‘Hey,’ said Clement. ‘What do Leizel Cunbrus and haggis have in common?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Phyllis. ‘What?’

  ‘They’re both offal.’ Clement wiggled his eyebrows in a boom-boom sort of way. ‘Get it? Offal, awf—’

  ‘Very droll, Clement,’ she said.

  Clement sniggered.

  ‘I don’t know why she keeps picking on me,’ Phyllis muttered, dodging around a smart-looking woman laden with big shiny shopping bags. ‘She always has.’

  ‘I know why.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘She has no imagination,’ Clement said.

  ‘That’s for sure.’

  ‘And she’s jealous of you because you do. And you use it. Whenever you do magic, you’re using your imagination, and you’re asking people—without asking them—to use their imaginations when they’re watching you. She can’t understand that. Or she doesn’t want to. And so I think she feels threatened that you can do something she can’t.’

  ‘Maybe you’re right.’

  ‘I reckon that’s what it is. You, Phyll, have always seen more than what’s out there . . . with your magic, and with your Transiting—’

  ‘Sh! Don’t mention that in public!’

  ‘Sorry.’ He hitched his backpack more firmly over his shoulders and darted around a mailbox before walking side by side with her again. ‘Anyway, that’s what I think. Leizel Cunbrus can only see what’s in front of her nose, and she won’t look any further. And you’re exactly the opposite . . . you think completely differently. That’s what your friend Chief Inspector Inglis says, isn’t it? That you think differently to everyone else?’

  ‘Yeah, he’
s said that.’

  ‘It’s like these pince-nez,’ Clement told her, in a let me continue, I’m on a roll sort of voice and waving the pince-nez thoughtfully in the air.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘See, I rushed in to buy these as soon as I saw them in the Thundermallow’s catalogue. They reminded me of a toy pair I had when I was little, before I started school. Someone—one of my aunties, I think—gave me a toy doctor’s bag for my birthday. It was a little plastic case and inside it there were compartments with plastic bottles and pill boxes and a pair of plastic scissors and bandages and a pretend thermometer and a stethoscope, and a pair of toy pince-nez.’

  ‘That’s weird,’ said Phyllis.

  ‘Yep. And you know what? The only thing I kept from that doctor’s bag was the pince-nez. Over time, all the other stuff got lost or broken, or I just wasn’t interested in it and it disappeared or something. Even the bag went missing. But the pince-nez . . . there was something about them. See, if I had the thermometer in my hand, it meant one thing: I was going to take somebody’s temperature. Thermometer equals taking temperature. And if I put the stethoscope around my neck, then that meant one thing: I was a doctor. Stethoscope equals doctor. But if I put the pince-nez on, it could mean lots of things. With them on, I could be anybody—a doctor or a professor or a famous writer or a mad scientist or whatever I wanted to be.’

  ‘I’m getting you, Clem. Your wavelength is appealing.’

  He spoke in his doctor’s voice again and waved the pince-nez about: ‘But of course! Do not ever forget zis. I shall have a T-shirt printed: “My vavelength iz appealink”.’

  ‘Very droll.’

  By now they’d arrived at the front of the Wallace Wong Building. Phyllis stopped by the entrance stairs sandwiched between the two ground-level shops housed in the building: Lowerblast’s Antiques & Collectables Emporium and The Délicieux Café. ‘Want to come up for some hot chocolate before you head home?’ she asked.

  ‘Can’t. It’s Thursday. Xylophone lessons, and the teacher hates it when I’m late. Matter of fact, she hates it when I’m on time, too. And she hates it when I play. She always pulls this face as if she’s about to be sick. I don’t think she likes me very much.’