by Diane Duane
Kit used his transport wizardry to get home, then walked slowly down the driveway to the side door, with Ponch trotting along behind him. He was feeling rather bruised. But to a certain extent, bizarrely, part of him felt grateful. Carl’s very understated annoyance had shaken Kit a little way out of the feeling that had been creeping up on him that nothing particularly mattered. However, that was the only good thing about it. Kit felt very much as if he were in disgrace.
You look sad
, Ponch said.
“I don’t know,” Kit said. “I think I’m just tired.” Even as he said it, though, Kit wondered how true this was. Ever since he woke up from his jungle dream, he had been moving through a world that seemed oddly dulled around the edges. The daylight seemed to be reaching him through some kind of filter; sound seemed distant, and he didn’t even seem able to feel his clothes properly — they seemed to bother his skin where they rested on it. The feeling was like what he got sometimes when he was coming down with a cold. Maybe Mama was right…
He went in the back door, took off his coat and hung it up, while Ponch trotted over to his dog food bowl and started to chow down on dry food. Kit’s mama, in the kitchen in her nurse’s pinks, looked up at him from the business of making a sandwich. “How are you feeling, sweetie?”
“Maybe a little better,” Kit said, thinking that possibly this was true. “Getting out in the air was nice. Where’s Pop?”
“He’s lying down reading a book, waiting for the basketball game.”
“Okay.”
His mama gave Kit a glance as he went and flopped down on the dining room sofa. At first Kit thought she was going to bring up once more the subject of the discussion she and Kit’s pop had had with him earlier. “I meant to thank you, by the way,” his mama said as she opened a drawer to get a plastic bag to put her sandwich in. “It’s been so much quieter.”
His mama’s voice had a strange grating quality to it, which Kit couldn’t remember having heard before. Is she coming down with a cold, too? Kit thought. It wouldn’t be great if we all got sick at once
. “Sorry?”
“The little dog down the street.”
Kit was bemused. “Tinkerbell, you mean? I haven’t talked to him.”
“You haven’t?”
“Sorry, Mama, I’ve been busy.”
“Well, he got quiet again. Relatively quiet, anyway. There was some howling earlier, but it didn’t last long.”
“That’s good,” Kit said. He stretched, but far from making him feel more comfortable, it made him feel less so; he felt very out of sorts, as if his skin didn’t fit him, as if his bones weren’t fastened together correctly. “Mama, I think I might go lie down again for a while.”
That got her attention. She finished wrapping her sandwich and came over to feel his forehead.
“Do you feel hot, sweetie?” she said.
Kit shook his head. If anything, he felt chilly, though not to the point of shivers — he felt a strange kind of still numbness that left him unwilling to talk about what was bothering him. Indeed, talking about anything seemed more trouble than it was worth. When his mother took her hand away, Kit got up and went to his room. There, as he lay down on his bed, he reached out for his manual and started paging through it to find a diagnostic to run on himself. I won’t be any good to anybody if I just lie around feeling like this
But, shortly, Kit was lying on his back again, gazing at the ceiling, the manual lying open, pages down, on the bed beside him. He didn’t even hear Ponch come in and circle around once to lie on the braided rug by the bed, looking up at him with troubled eyes. And after a while Kit turned over on his side again and just stared at the wall…
The next afternoon, Nita was sitting at her desk, cutting a deck of cards. She had reached the point where what she really wanted to cut them with was a meat cleaver, but that would simply have meant that she’d have to get another deck of cards from somewhere.
Nita cut the cards again. There’s an art to this, she thought. The only problem is, it isn’t my Art.
And no matter how I do this, when I think of why I’m learning it in the first place, it feels like cheating.
She was working on her false shuffle. From what she’d been able to find out on the Web, many of the simplest card tricks depended on shuffling the cards in such a way as to make the card you wanted come up in the right place. This, in turn, involved protecting some of the cards with one of your hands while you shuffled. So far, Nita had gotten to the point where she could protect about a third of the deck, keeping the cards stacked there from being shuffled out of order. In about three hundred years
, she thought, I'll be ready to let some other human being see me do a trick. Why did I ever mention magic to Mr. Millman?
The only good thing about having to sit here doing this was that it gave Nita something to occupy her hands while she worried about Kit. She’d called him late yesterday afternoon to make sure he’d gone to see Carl, and had been very concerned about the tone of his voice. It had acquired a strange monotonous quality, one that made her think of…
A robot? she thought, unnerved. She stopped shuffling for a moment and thought about that. It occurred to Nita that the more contact they’d all had with Darryl, the better his ability to express himself had become… and the more adverse effect it seemed to be having on Kit.
If he goes in there again
, she thought, he’s going to lose it.
And he’s going to go in there again. I’m sure of it.
Nita cut the cards again, looking to see if the ace of hearts, the card she had been protecting, came up. What she got was the three of clubs. She made an annoyed face and pushed the cards away. It wasn’t just a matter of Kit’s stubbornness now — not that that couldn’t be formidable when he was in the right mood. She was also dealing with something else she was less familiar with: Darryl’s stubbornness. He had been holding off the Lone Power all by himself for a long time now, and Nita didn’t think he was going to stop for their sakes. And why should he? she thought. From his point of view, or what’s been his point of view for a long while, he’s all there is. He might as well be the only wizard alive. He may briefly realize there are more of us… but it doesn’t last.
Because he keeps making himself alone again every time
Nita thought about what that must cost him. Such loneliness would have crippled her a long time ago. But he bears up under it, she thought.
He just keeps fighting.
That stubbornness had found a resonance in Kit. He and Darryl had become linked in more ways than one.
His promises to Carl aside, Nita had a feeling that Kit was going to find himself in Darryl’s mind again shortly. At which time, Nita thought, I’d better be ready.
She picked up the deck again, took a couple of minutes to find the ace of hearts, repositioned it, and reshuffled, carefully protecting the back third of the deck. Then she put the deck down, cut it twice so that she had three piles, reached out to the leftmost pile, and turned the top card over. It was the four of diamonds.
I hate this, Nita thought. She stood up from her desk and went across the hall to Dairine’s room.
Her sister was sitting at her own desk, which was still completely covered by the papier-mache version of Olympus Mons. It was no longer gray-white; Dairine had done a fairly credible job with her wizardly airbrush. Now the mountain lay there nicely colored in shades of red and pink, its huge crater looking entirely ready to spill out lava. Spot was sitting up on one of the bookshelves, peering down at the volcano with his little stalky eyes.
“Dair?”
Dairine looked up at Nita with a weary expression.
“I think I’m going to need some help,” Nita said.
“As long as it doesn’t involve me painting anything,” Dairine said, “you’re on.”
Nita came in and sat down on Dairine’s bed. It creaked.
Dairine looked at her.
“Don’t start,” Nita said
. “You know what’s on my mind.”
“Darryl,” Dairine said. “Or the ace of hearts.”
“Please,” Nita said. “Dair, I need to ask you a favor.”
Her sister gave her a slightly suspicious look.
“He’s going to go in there again,” Nita said.
“Kit?” Dairine put her eyebrows up. “I thought he promised Carl he wouldn’t.”
“Dairine, I don’t think he’s entirely in control of what’s going on with him. Darryl is very, uh, single-minded. And that single-mindedness strikes me as really likely to affect Kit. I think we need to be ready for that.”
“‘We’?” Dairine said.
“Dairine, he’s sure not listening to me right now—”
“I guess you know what he felt like with you over the past month, then,” Dairine said.
Nita grimaced at that, taking the point. “So we’ve got to arrange some kind of connection, ideally with an integrated power feed, from you to me — for when he goes in again. Think of it as a lifeline. I need to make sure that there’s somebody on the outside who can yank us both out of there if we get stuck too deep.”
Dairine, sitting there with her hands in her lap, looked up at Nita. It was an unusual position for Dairine; usually, even when she was talking her hands were doing something. But now she sat quite still, looking at Nita steadily, but a little bleakly. “Are you sure you want my help?” Dairine said.
Nita looked at her strangely. “Are you crazy?” she said. “Of course I do.”
“I just wasn’t sure,” Dairine said, and looked at the floor. There was nothing overtly guilty or upset about her face, but all the same, Nita saw there was trouble underneath the expression. “I warned you, Neets. Right now I’m paying the price for a big showy start, just as Tom said I would not so long ago. I can do basic wizardries well enough, but as for anything really high-powered—”
She shook her head. “I don’t know if you want to be depending on me right now.”
“I will depend on you any time,” Nita said.
The look Dairine gave Nita had a certain amount of good-natured scorn about it. She opened her mouth. “Do I have to say it in the Speech?” Nita said.
“Nita,” Dairine said then, very softly, “Mom couldn’t depend on me.”
Nita shook her head. “If you mean you couldn’t just make a wish and save her life,” Nita said, “then you’re right. If you really thought that it was going to be that way, then, yeah, you made a mistake. But that hardly means that she couldn’t depend on you. Or that I won’t.”
“You may be the one making the mistake, depending on my power right now,” Dairine said.
Nita rolled her eyes. “I don’t know if I’m exactly a model of stability right now myself,” she said, “but I can’t afford to just stand around wondering. Will you help, or am I going to have to do this without a net? Because more depends on this than just me or Kit. Darryl is apparently…”
Nita trailed off. She was uncertain exactly how much she wanted to tell Dairine about why Darryl was special.
“Something unusual,” Dairine said. “A lot of power… or something else. He would have to be unusual, to have attracted so much attention from Tom and Carl.“
Dairine sat quietly for a few seconds, then nodded. “I’ll work something out for you,” she said.
Nita nodded. “Thanks,” she said. She turned away.
“It kills you, doesn’t it?” Dairine said. “Asking me for help.”
Nita gave her sister a very slight smile. “Better it should kill me than Kit,” she said.
Then she went back into her room to start yet another futile search for the ace of hearts.
We have to go.
Kit sat up suddenly on the bed, looking around him. His glance wandered past the clock on his wall; it was around four-thirty in the afternoon. Where did the day go? part of him wondered, but that part seemed very remote. Much more important was the need to go looking for Darryl. Darryl was in trouble, he was stuck, and Kit had to get him out of there. In a world where nothing much seemed to matter, that suddenly mattered a great deal.
He could almost see that other world, here in the room with him, as if he were in two places at once. The world had changed again, or rather, he had changed it, Darryl had changed it, to put the One who was pursuing him off the scent. It always realized what had happened eventually — that Darryl had It trapped — and then Darryl had to change everything again, making a new world, a new self, in which the Pursuer would once again be confused. Each new world was better than the last, with new rules to impede the Lone One’s power and to keep him occupied longer. He wished, sometimes, that Darryl didn’t have to do it again and again. It gave him no time to find out what else wizardry might be for. If it was for anything else…
We have to go
, Kit thought, and got out of bed—
— and tripped over Ponch, who was lying on the rug, watching him. Boss! Ponch yelped. Where are you going?
“We have to go,” Kit said. The bedroom was already beginning to fade a little, like something that didn’t matter. What mattered was elsewhere. The Pursuer was coming again; all his attention now had to be given to the creation of the new illusion, at the expense of the old one.
You promised you wouldn’t
! Ponch whimpered, jumping up and down. You told Carl you’d stay here!
But it seemed now as if a different person entirely had made that promise. In fact, someone different had made it: another person, in another place… different from this, the only reality that really mattered, now reforming itself around him. The last time, he’d gotten a little careless, and the dark Other had found Its way in, and out again, too easily. This time, the place to which he found his way had to be a little more challenging. The idea had come to him that morning in the bathroom, as once again he faced what he couldn’t face in the mirror on the wall, in which he had to see, every day, human eyes with the dark Other looking out of them. This is Its weapon against you, the thought had come to him. Turn the weapon against It…
That other reality, glassy, gleaming, was becoming more and more real around Kit as he stood there. It was only a matter of moments before he would be able to step wholly into it, such was the other’s power and his need for help. Distressed, Ponch said, The leash! Boss, let me get the leash!
Wait for me—
The voice in his head seemed to Kit to come from almost too far away to matter.
Stay there, boss! Kit — stay! Stay!
The urgency of that voice was just enough to keep Kit where he was, to prevent him from taking the single step forward that would bring him into the gleaming maze now being constructed for the Other’s confusion. That was all that could be hoped for — to befuddle It, wear It down until eventually It would stop coming and just leave him alone. There was no telling whether the hope would ever be realized. But it was the only hope in the world, and hence it was worth clinging to.
The sound of paws scrabbling up the steps was as distant as everything else. Kit watched the shining unreality forming around him, watched his bedroom fade away, a backdrop without meaning. Into that backdrop burst something that shone, a line of blue light around a dark creature’s collar. The creature looked up at him, the only gaze he could stand, the only eyes that didn’t hurt him. Boss, take the leash! Take it, put it around your wrist.
Kit couldn’t see the point, but the creature’s eyes were so beseeching that he did as he was told.
As he looped the other end of the line of light around his wrist, the world in which he was standing finally became totally irrelevant. Kit took the step forward into the real world, or into the one that had become real, and the black creature beside him stepped through, too—
“Kit,” his mama’s voice said from down the hall, “I’m going out now. You call me if anything comes up here. Can I bring you anything back on my meal break?”
No reply.
“Kit? Sweetie, are you asleep?”
> No reply.
Kit’s mama came down the hall. “You know, I brought that cold medicine home, the one with the zinc in it,” she said. “I wonder if maybe you should just take some, so you can head this thing off—”
She stood in the doorway of his bedroom, looking in at the empty bed.
“Oh, no,” she whispered.
At Nita’s house, the phone rang. Her dad, sitting at the dining room table and working his way through the Sunday paper with a beer and a sandwich, got up and answered it.
“Hello? Oh, hi, Marina…No, he’s not, as far as I know. Wait a minute…”
Nita’s dad looked around the corner into the living room, where Nita was sitting on the rug, playing an extremely frustrated game of solitaire as relaxation from nearly an hour of utterly unsuccessful attempts at getting a simple “guess the card” trick to work. “Nita?” her dad said. “Is Kit here?”
Nita was surprised. “No.”
“His mom’s looking for him.”
Nita’s heart went cold inside her. “I thought he was going to be home all day today.”
“He’s not there, his mom says.”
Nita sat still for a moment. Kit?
There was no answer.
She broke out in a sweat. There was no way to be absolutely sure where he was, but she thought she could guess. And it upset her to be right so quickly. “I don’t hear him nearby,” she said. “Wait a minute, Daddy.”
She went to get her manual, paged through it to the messaging section, and said to it, “Kit, where are you? Urgent!”
“Send message?” the manual page said.
“Send it!”
“Recipient is out of ambit. Please try again later.”
Nita swallowed. She got up and went into the dining room. As she did so, she suddenly started to hear something she hadn’t been able to hear in the living room; the sound of dogs howling a few streets away, more and more of them.