Mirror Kingdoms: The Best of Peter S. Beagle

by Peter S. Beagle

  Aunt Caroline was, among other things, the sort of woman incapable of going anywhere without attempting to buy it. Her own house was jammed to the attic with sightseer souvenirs from all over the world: children’s toys from Slovenia, sculptures from Afghanistan, napkin rings from Kenya shaped like lions and giraffes, legions of brass bangles, boxes and statues of gods from India, and so many Russian matryoshka dolls fitting inside each other that she gave them away as stocking-stuffers every Christmas. She never came to the table at the Lukes without bringing some new acquisition for approval; so dinner with Aunt Caroline, in Mr. Luke’s words, was always Show and Tell time.

  Her most recent hegira had brought her back to West Africa for the third or fourth time, and provided her with the most evil-looking doll Angie had ever seen. Standing beside Aunt Caroline’s plate, it was about two feet high, with bat ears, too many fingers, and eyes like bright green marbles streaked with scarlet threads. Aunt Caroline explained rapturously that it was a fertility doll unique to a single Benin tribe, which Angie found impossible to credit. “No way!” she announced loudly. “Not for one minute am I even thinking about having babies with that thing staring at me! It doesn’t even look pregnant, the way they do. No way in the world!”

  Aunt Caroline had already had two of Mr. Luke’s margaritas, and was working on a third. She replied with some heat that not all fertility figures came equipped with cannonball breasts, globular bellies and callipygous rumps—“Some of them are remarkably slender, even by Western standards!” Aunt Caroline herself, by anyone’s standards, was built along the general lines of a chopstick.

  Angie was drawing breath for a response when she heard her father say behind her, “Well, Jesus Harrison Christ,” and then her mother’s soft gasp, “Caroline.” But Aunt Caroline was busy explaining to her niece that she knew absolutely nothing about fertility. Mrs. Luke said, considerably louder, “Caroline, shut up, your doll!”

  Aunt Caroline said, “What, what?” and then turned, along with Angie. They both screamed.

  The doll was growing all the things Aunt Caroline had been insisting it didn’t need to qualify as a fertility figure. It was carved from ebony, or from something even harder, but it was pushing out breasts and belly and hips much as Marvyn’s two garbage bags had suddenly developed arms and legs. Even its expression had changed, from hungry slyness to a downright silly grin, as though it were about to kiss someone, anyone. It took a few shaky steps forward on the table and put its foot in the salsa.

  Then the babies started coming.

  They came pattering down on the dinner table, fast and hard, like wooden rain, one after another, after another, after another… perfect little copies, miniatures, of the madly smiling doll-thing, plopping out of it—just like Milady used to drop kittens in my lap, Angie thought absurdly. One of them fell into her plate, and one bounced into the soup, and a couple rolled into Mr. Luke’s lap, making him knock his chair over trying to get out of the way. Mrs. Luke was trying to grab them all up at once, which wasn’t possible, and Aunt Caroline sat where she was and shrieked. And the doll kept grinning and having babies.

  Marvyn was standing against the wall, looking both as terrified as Aunt Caroline and as stupidly pleased as the doll-thing. Angie caught his eye and made a fierce signal, enough, quit, turn it off, but either her brother was having too good a time, or else had no idea how to undo whatever spell he had raised. One of the miniatures hit her in the head, and she had a vision of her whole family being drowned in wooden doll-babies, everyone gurgling and reaching up pathetically toward the surface before they all went under for the third time. Another baby caromed off the soup tureen into her left ear, one sharp ebony fingertip drawing blood.

  It stopped, finally—Angie never learned how Marvyn regained control—and things almost quieted down, except for Aunt Caroline. The fertility doll got the look of glazed joy off its face and went back to being a skinny, ugly, duty-free airport souvenir, while the doll-babies seemed to melt away exactly as though they had been made of ice instead of wood. Angie was quick enough to see one of them actually dissolving into nothingness directly in front of Aunt Caroline, who at this point stopped screaming and began hiccoughing and beating the table with her palms. Mr. Luke pounded her on the back, and Angie volunteered to practice her Heimlich maneuver, but was overruled. Aunt Caroline went to bed early.

  Later, in Marvyn’s room, he kept his own bed between himself and Angie, indignantly demanding, “What? You said not scary—what’s scary about a doll having babies? I thought it was cute.”

  “Cute,” Angie said. “Uh-huh.” She was wondering, in a distant sort of way, how much prison time she might get if she actually murdered her brother. Ten years? Five, with good behavior and a lot of psychiatrists? I could manage it. “And what did I tell you about not embarrassing Aunt Caroline?”

  “How did I embarrass her?” Marvyn’s visible eye was wide with outraged innocence. “She shouldn’t drink so much, that’s her problem. She embarrassed me.”

  “They’re going to figure it out, you know,” Angie warned him. “Maybe not Aunt Caroline, but Mom for sure. She’s a witch herself that way. Your cover is blown, buddy.”

  But to her own astonishment, not a word was ever said about the episode, the next day or any other—not by her observant mother, not by her dryly perceptive father, nor even by Aunt Caroline, who might reasonably have been expected at least to comment at breakfast. A baffled Angie remarked to Milady, drowsing on her pillow, “I guess if a thing’s weird enough, somehow nobody saw it.” This explanation didn’t satisfy her, not by a long shot, but lacking anything better she was stuck with it. The old cat blinked in squeezy-eyed agreement, wriggled herself into a more comfortable position, and fell asleep still purring.

  Angie kept Marvyn more closely under her eye after that than she had done since he was quite small, and first showing a penchant for playing in traffic. Whether this observation was the cause or not, he did remain more or less on his best behavior, barring the time he turned the air in the bicycle tires of a boy who had stolen his superhero comic book to cement. There was also the affair of the enchanted soccer ball, which kept rolling back to him as though it couldn’t bear to be with anyone else. And Angie learned to be extremely careful when making herself a sandwich, because if she lost track of her brother for too long, the sandwich was liable to acquire an extra ingredient. Paprika was one, tabasco another; and Scotch Bonnet peppers were a special favorite. But there were others less hot and even more objectionable. As she snarled to a sympathetic Melissa Feldman, who had two brothers of her own, “They ought to be able to jail kids just for being eight and a half.”

  Then there was the matter of Marvyn’s attitude toward Angie’s attitude about Jake Petrakis.

  Jake Petrakis was a year ahead of Angie at school. He was half-Greek and half-Irish, and his blue eyes and thick poppy-colored hair contrasted so richly with his olive skin that she had not been able to look directly at him since the fourth grade. He was on the swim team, and he was the president of the Chess Club, and he went with Ashleigh Sutton, queen of the junior class, rechristened “Ghastly Ashleigh” by the loyal Melissa. But he spoke kindly and cheerfully to Angie without fail, always saying Hey, Angie, and How’s it going, Angie? and See you in the fall, Angie, have a good summer. She clutched such things to herself, every one of them, and at the same time could not bear them.

  Marvyn was as merciless as a mosquito when it came to Jake Petrakis. He made swooning, kissing noises whenever he spied Angie looking at Jake’s picture in her yearbook, and drove her wild by holding invented conversations between them, just loudly enough for her to hear. His increasing ability at witchcraft meant that scented, decorated, and misspelled love notes were likely to flutter down onto her bed at any moment, as were long-stemmed roses, imitation jewelry (Marvyn had limited experience and poor taste), and small, smudgy photos of Jake and Ashleigh together. Mr. Luke had to invoke Angie’s oath more than once, and to sweeten it with a pro
mise of a new bicycle if Marvyn made it through the year undamaged. Angie held out for a mountain bike, and her father sighed. “That was always a myth, about the gypsies stealing children,” he said, rather wistfully. “It was surely the other way around. Deal.”

  Yet there were intermittent peaceful moments between Marvyn and Angie, several occurring in Marvyn’s room. It was a far tidier place than Angie’s room, for all the clothes on the floor and battered board game boxes sticking out from under the bed. Marvyn had mounted National Geographic foldout maps all around the walls, lining them up so perfectly that the creases were invisible; and on one special wall were prints and photos of a lot of people with strange staring eyes. Angie recognized Rasputin, and knew a few of the other names—Aleister Crowley, for one, and a man in Renaissance dress called Dr. John Dee. There were two women, as well: the young witch Willow, from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and a daguerreotype of a black woman wearing a kind of turban folded into points. No Harry Potter, however. Marvyn had never taken to Harry Potter.

  There was also, one day after school, a very young kitten wobbling among the books littering Marvyn’s bed. A surprised Angie picked it up and held it over her face, feeling its purring between her hands. It was a dark, dusty gray, rather like Milady—indeed, Angie had never seen another cat of that exact color. She nuzzled its tummy happily, asking it, “Who are you, huh? Who could you ever be?”

  Marvyn was feeding his angelfish, and didn’t look up. He said, “She’s Milady.”

  Angie dropped the kitten on the bed. Marvyn said, “I mean, she’s Milady when she was young. I went back and got her.”

  When he did turn around, he was grinning the maddening pirate grin Angie could never stand, savoring her shock. It took her a minute to find words, and more time to make them come out. She said, “You went back. You went back in time?”

  “It was easy,” Marvyn said. “Forward’s hard—I don’t think I could ever get really forward. Maybe Dr. Dee could do it.” He picked up the kitten and handed her back to his sister. It was Milady, down to the crooked left ear and the funny short tail with the darker bit on the end. He said, “She was hurting all the time, she was so old. I thought, if she could—you know—start over, before she got the arthritis….”

  He didn’t finish. Angie said slowly, “So where’s Milady? The other one? I mean, if you brought this one… I mean, how can they be in the same world?”

  “They can’t,” Marvyn said. “The old Milady’s gone.”

  Angie’s throat closed up. Her eyes filled, and so did her nose, and she had to blow it before she could speak again. Looking at the kitten, she knew it was Milady, and made herself think about how good it would be to have her once again bouncing around the house, no longer limping grotesquely and meowing with the pain. But she had loved the old cat all her life, and never known her as a kitten, and when the new Milady started to climb into her lap, Angie pushed her away.

  “All right,” she said to Marvyn. “All right. How did you get… back, or whatever?”

  Marvyn shrugged and went back to his fish. “No big deal. You just have to concentrate the right way.”

  Angie bounced a plastic Wiffle ball off the back of his neck, and he turned around, annoyed. “Leave me alone! Okay, you want to know—there’s a spell, words you have to say over and over and over, until you’re sick of them, and there’s herbs in it too. You have to light them, and hang over them, and you shut your eyes and keep breathing them in and saying the words—”

  “I knew I’d been smelling something weird in your room lately. I thought you were sneaking takeout curry to bed with you again.”

  “And then you open your eyes, and there you are,” Marvyn said. “I told you, no big deal.”

  “There you are where? How do you know where you’ll come out? When you’ll come out? Click your heels together three times and say there’s no place like home?”

  “No, dork, you just know.” And that was all Angie could get out of him—not, as she came to realize, because he wouldn’t tell her, but because he couldn’t. Witch or no witch, he was still a small boy, with almost no real idea of what he was doing. He was winging it all, playing it all by ear.

  Arguing with Marvyn always gave her a headache, and her history homework—the rise of the English merchant class—was starting to look good in comparison. She went back to her own bedroom and read two whole chapters, and when the kitten Milady came stumbling and squeaking in, Angie let her sleep on the desk. “What the hell,” she told it, “it’s not your fault.”

  That evening, when Mr. and Mrs. Luke got home, Angie told them that Milady had died peacefully of illness and old age while they were at work, and was now buried in the back garden. (Marvyn had wanted to make it a horrible hit-and-run accident, complete with a black SUV and half-glimpsed license plate starting with the letter Q, but Angie vetoed this.) Marvyn’s contribution to her solemn explanation was to explain that he had seen the new kitten in a petshop window, “and she just looked so much like Milady, and I used my whole allowance, and I’ll take care of her, I promise!” Their mother, not being a true cat person, accepted the story easily enough, but Angie was never sure about Mr. Luke. She found him too often sitting with the kitten on his lap, the two of them staring solemnly at each other.

  But she saw very little evidence of Marvyn fooling any further with time. Nor, for that matter, was he showing the interest she would have expected in turning himself into the world’s best second-grade soccer player, ratcheting up his test scores high enough to be in college by the age of eleven, or simply getting even with people (since Marvyn forgot nothing and had a hit list going back to day-care). She could almost always tell when he’d been making his bed by magic, or making the window plants grow too fast, but he seemed content to remain on that level. Angie let it go.

  Once she did catch him crawling on the ceiling, like Spider-Man, but she yelled at him and he fell on the bed and threw up. And there was, of course, the time—two times, actually—when, with Mrs. Luke away, Marvyn organized all the shoes in her closet into a chorus line, and had them tapping and kicking together like the Rockettes. It was fun for Angie to watch, but she made him stop because they were her mother’s shoes. What if her clothes joined in? The notion was more than she wanted to deal with.

  As it was, there was already plenty to deal with just then. Besides her schoolwork, there was band practice, and Melissa’s problems with her boyfriend; not to mention the endless hours spent at the dentist, correcting a slight overbite. Melissa insisted that it made her look sexy, but the suggestion had the wrong effect on Angie’s mother. In any case, as far as Angie could see, all Marvyn was doing was playing with a new box of toys, like an elaborate electric train layout, or a top-of-the-line Erector set. She was even able to imagine him getting bored with magic itself after a while. Marvyn had a low threshold for boredom.

  Angie was in the orchestra, as well as the band, because of a chronic shortage of woodwinds, but she liked the marching band better. You were out of doors, performing at parades and football games, part of the joyful noise, and it was always more exciting than standing up in a dark, hushed auditorium playing for people you could hardly see. “Besides,” as she confided to her mother, “in marching band nobody really notices how you sound. They just want you to keep in step.”

  On a bright spring afternoon, rehearsing “The Washington Post March” with the full band, Angie’s clarinet abruptly went mad. No “licorice stick” now, but a stick of rapturous dynamite, it took off on flights of rowdy improvisation, doing outrageous somersaults, backflips, and cartwheels with the melody—things that Angie knew she could never have conceived of, even if her skill had been equal to the inspiration. Her bandmates, up and down the line, were turning to stare at her, and she wanted urgently to wail, “Hey, I’m not the one, it’s my stupid brother, you know I can’t play like that.” But the music kept spilling out, excessive, absurd, unstoppable—unlike the march, which finally lurched to a disorderly halt. Angi
e had never been so embarrassed in her life.

  Mr. Bishow, the bandmaster, came bumbling through the milling musicians to tell her, “Angie, that was fantastic—that was dazzling! I never knew you had such spirit, such freedom, such wit in your music!” He patted her—hugged her even, quickly and cautiously—then stepped back almost immediately and said, “Don’t ever do it again.”

  “Like I’d have a choice,” Angie mumbled, but Mr. Bishow was already shepherding the band back into formation for “Semper Fidelis” and “High Society,” which Angie fumbled her way through as always, two bars behind the rest of the woodwinds. She was slouching disconsolately off the field when Jake Petrakis, his dark-gold hair still glinting damply from swimming practice, ran over to her to say, “Hey, Angie, cool,” then punched her on the shoulder, as he would have done another boy, and dashed off again to meet one of his relay-team partners. And Angie went on home, and waited for Marvyn behind the door of his room.

  She seized him by the hair the moment he walked in, and he squalled, “All right, let go, all right! I thought you’d like it!”

  “Like it?” Angie shook him, hard. “Like it? You evil little ogre, you almost got me kicked out of the band! What else are you lining up for me that you think I’ll like?”

  “Nothing, I swear!” But he was giggling even while she was shaking him. “Okay, I was going to make you so beautiful, even Mom and Dad wouldn’t recognize you, but I quit on that. Too much work.” Angie grabbed for his hair again, but Marvyn ducked. “So what I thought, maybe I really could get Jake what’s-his-face to go crazy about you. There’s all kinds of spells and things for that—”