The crystal itself was oblong. It was cut into ten facets along the body and ended in two sharp points. It was only as long as the two joints of his thumb. Again, as if an audience were watching, young Edward palmed the crystal in his right hand and appeared to pass it to his left, then put it in his jacket pocket. In fact, it found a temporary home in a small hidden pocket inside the right sleeve of his shirt. This was only temporary, to Edward’s shame and glory.
He left Walls where he lay and re-entered the long curved hallway. He walked down it a good distance before trying another door. It opened at the prodding of his small magnet, the same as the others had.
That room contained their most important prisoner: Nevil Dever.
Now, it was a miraculous coincidence that Edward would have first walked into Walls’s room, and then gone on to walk past so many other rooms only to go directly to the one where his master was being kept. It didn’t occur to him that it was so at the time, but he would spend years puzzling over the fact.
Dashing and strong Dever was held aloft against the wall. There were no visible straps or strings, or any device which might have held him in place. Instead, there seemed to be a blue haze about him. As Edward stepped into the dim room he got a better look. There seemed to be a liquid surrounding his teacher; one great globule, slightly larger than his master’s entire body. It was a strange electric blue color, not at all like water, but more akin to the bright fabric of a garden flower. This liquid did not drip to the floor below. In fact, the young man bent down and felt the floor with his hand and it was just as dry as bone.
His first concern, naturally, was whether or not the kindly performer was still alive or not. But he did indeed see small bubbles blowing from out the sleeper’s nostrils. A few of them floated up to the top of the globule and gathered there. A strange defiant few practiced the same behavior against the bottom of the enveloping fluid.
Hoping to rescue his ally, Edward reached out and touched the surface of the bubble. Indeed the wall of it was solid. It felt more like a gelatin and less like a puddle. His touch rippled all along the surface in a great circle, as if he had tossed a pebble into a pool.
Nevil Dever’s dark eyes opened.
Thick and thin layers of the blue atmosphere moved over him. Sometimes the fluid was almost clear. At some points, Edward could not see through the heavy blue dye at all. Of course, it is very difficult for anyone to talk with their mouth filled with water. Fortunately, the magician had already taught his apprentice how to read lips.
“Stay away from the Plutonians,” Dever mouthed. Then a congealing of blue wandering over his face concealed the next few words. “Venusians,” Edward was sure he saw the lips form. As the magician’s instructions went on, some words were visible and other obscured:
“Stay away from the Plutonians…Venusians…trust…hide in...magic will...you strange. Be careful!... these…inverted pyramid, bron… be quick!”
He hadn’t seen the lips say it, but in Dever’s eyes, the command to run was clear. As Edward tarried a moment more, imploring eyes tightened and the boy understood that his master meant him to run and escape at once. Torn - he still wanted to rescue the man - Edward Whistman stood there several long seconds earning his master’s anger.
“You don’t know where to go, do you?” There was another voice in the room.
In the dim chamber, Edward finally noticed the second prisoner.
He lay on his back, on a bed just like the ones Edward and Walls had been kept on. The figure appeared to be no taller than a child, an imp really. Being in the line of work that he was, Edward had attended a few circus sideshows, and his first thought was that the man lying on the white slab must be some sort of malformed carnival dwarf. As he approached and got a better look, it became clear that there was more wrong with the man than simply his size.
His pallor recalled the natives of the Americas. Even in the blue light of that room, his skin was closer to red than pink. Initially, he thought the strange man wore a pair of thick woolen trousers and a hat. Neither was so.
Edward, good soul that he was, physically recoiled as his mind processed the sight in front of him. What appeared to be nothing less than a devil lay immobilized upon the table! The “woolen trousers” were in fact thickly thatched legs. He did not wear a hat, but his head was instead decorated by a pair of pointy horns.
“Jesus protect me!” Edward gasped.
“Oh God…” The devil said derisively, “We don’t have time for this. Look, you’ve taken a look around on this ship. I don’t know what you’ve seen, but I’m sure it was horrible. I’m the enemy of your enemy. I can help you.”
Edward was too frightened to reply, or to run, or to move in even any small way.
“Do you know where we are? Those aliens want to take you and me to their home. Do you know what medical experiments are? Well, that’s what they’re planning for us. I want to save you from that.”
“At...what price?” Edward barely managed to ask.
“What? No…nothing. I don’t want your soul…. or any other imaginary possession you’ve got. Without you, I’m stuck. Without me, you’re only going to be running around on this saucer a few more minutes before they get you. Use your head.”
“The devil lies,” Edward whispered.
“The human doesn’t think for himself, does he?” The devil mocked him. “Don’t believe all of those stories… geez… Okay, I’m going to need you to grow up in the next five seconds or so, okay? Remember when you were told that all Frenchmen were scoundrels? Surprise! They’re just people. Remember when you were told that Father Christmas brought you toys on Christmas morning? These are lies.”
Edward still wasn’t moving or speaking, so the devil went on, “You’ve been lied to a thousand times to make you think the world is a certain way, the world is a certain shape. But none of that matters now. If you leave me here, they’ll come back and get us both. If you let me go…maybe I won’t eat you?”
“You have to set him free,” Edward pointed at Nevil Dever.
“I can’t do that… they have him inside a droplet of plutonian water. I can’t break that.”
“That’s my price. We all three escape or none.”
“You be certain because that’s how it will be. Either the two of us will escape together, or all three of us are done for. Your loyalty is admirable, but freeing him is beyond my power.”
“You have to swear.”
“What?”
“Swear, by Jesus and Satan that if I let you free you will never cause or allow any harm to come to me.”
“That’s a pretty big promise.”
“Swear it.”
“I can’t stop you from getting old.”
“As far as is in your power.”
“Okay,” the devil promised, “I swear that if you set me free, I will never hurt you.”
“The whole thing, or I’ll leave you there, Satan!”
“My name’s not Satan, it’s Mandelesian. Okay. I swear by Jesus and Satan and Tiamat that if you set me free I will never cause any harm to you, and I will do everything in my power to protect you from harm.”
“Alright, now how do I get you down?”
Mandelesian smirked at him. “The same way you’ve thwarted the rest of their technology. Use your magnet.”
Edward held the stone against the red man’s hand, and his arm came free. When it didn’t reach for his throat, Edward released the second clawed hand, then the head, the chest, and so on.
The fiend rose, rubbing his arms, as if they were sore. He smiled an obscene smile of demonic joy. “You’ve made a good decision, master magician.”
Edward looked over at Dever. A cloud of deep blue was settled over his face. He could not see what reaction, if any, the magician had.
“Enough talk. How do we escape?
Behind him, the wall opened. Two silver men entered, inhuman. Edward felt like Death personified had just entered the room.
3
Mandelesian rushed forward like a barking dog and bit one of the aliens in the arm. The silver man dropped a round metallic disc, like the ones Edward had seen them using in the theatre. No blood spilled, but something like ice crystals or tin confetti burst forth where the devil bit the alien. The pieces drifted in the air.
The second silver man advanced on the young magician. His eyes were the cruelest and coldest that Edward had ever seen, and Edward had not lived an easy life. Even in the hardest of men, there had always been a vulnerability, a softness. There had always been a bond between them and their victims. Edward understood this as he saw the absence.
And then that absence grabbed him with claws that felt like cactus flesh.
Fire burst forth from Mandelesian’s mouth and climbed up his opponent’s arm. The alien squealed. It was a sharp sound that sounded like a wounded squirrel. A silver hand pressed against Mandelesian’s side and Edward could see a cloud of yellow smoke rising from the devil’s body. He could smell it. The devil was bleeding sulfur.
Mandelesian opened his mouth and climbed up onto the silver alien. He knocked the space-man to the ground and began vomiting red and orange flame over his face.
The alien holding onto Edward reached unexpectedly underneath his shirt and ran his hand over Edward’s naked skin. With horror he realized that the creature was reaching for his heart! Edward panicked. He began punching and kicking at the alien. It made a dim huffing sound that seemed a little like laughter.
The silver face turned blue. Edward began to feel drowsy. The devil grabbed him and pulled him away from the alien, as the silver man dropped limp to the floor. Mandelesian held their sleeping device. Only a little light had shined on the magician, but he felt as if he hadn’t slept in days.
The sight of the burned alien was shocking. The silver man lying on the floor no longer resembled a person. Where the devil’s flame had cut the body open, a vast pile of the metallic chips lay accumulated like miniature sand dunes. The skin, the muscle, had been completely melted from his face. Bone jutted out from piles of shining powder.
“We have to go now. Many more of them are coming. Now they will really get cruel if they get the chance to experiment on us!” Mandelesian hissed. There was fever and blood-lust in the infernal voice now.
The irony of a devil complaining about “cruelty” wasn’t lost on Edward, even then.
The magician’s apprentice and the devil left the room. Edward looked back only briefly at his teacher. The blue “Plutonian water” was cloudier than ever. He couldn’t see the details of Dever’s face at all beneath the clouds.
“You know that they’ll be looking for you for the rest of your life now?” The devil said.
“I’ll hide.”
“You’d better hide well. If we do get out of here I guess I’ll have to show you a trick. That ought to make us straight.”
The two of them walked along the curved hallway, along the white opaque material of the spaceship. The devil still smelled of sulfur. Edward noticed reflective chips of alien blood caught in his unholy ally’s black body hair. He walked with goat legs that bent backwards. The hair on his chest, his arms, and his legs was as thick as an animal’s. He was sweating from the battle. He passed gas once, loudly, as they walked. Young Edward reflected that the devil and the alien couldn’t have been more different. Not that he suspected either was good or noble; they just seemed to be opposite travesties.
The abomination by his side seemed to know where they were going. He led him along the hallway past a number of openings and then down a separate passage which noticeably sloped down beneath the level they had been walking on.
“Are the silver men a different kind of devil?” Edward asked.
“Not if you mean the word literally. They come from the planet Pluto. They’re as unrelated to us as you are.”
“Don’t we all have the same maker?”
The devil shrugged. “I don’t know. I never decided if I believed in gods.”
“But surely your own existence proves…”
The devil interrupted, “No more or less than yours does. Look, it’s all stories. You should get it. Just because the lies are old doesn’t make them truths. I’ve never met an angel…. Well, I should say I’ve never met one when I wasn’t drunk...” The devil paused to smile a naughty smile. “When I’m drunk, they’re all angels!”
The devil indicated when they had gotten to the right door. Edward used his magnet to force the wall to open. The room inside was much larger than any other room he’d seen inside the ship. It was round and filled with about a half dozen smooth white discs, each about the size of a carriage – which is what Edward assumed they essentially were.
As they entered the room, a figure stepped out from behind the carriage farthest from them. It was another silver man. This one, however, was remarkable because he wore a child’s blue suit, grey shirt, and a red tie. His shoes were brown and well tended. Naturally, he looked angry.
It reached into its pocket and took out another of the metal discs Edward had seen used to cause sleep, and burned a hole in the stage. He expected his companion to start running towards the alien, as far apart as they were. He was concerned that there was no way he could possibly close the distance in time.
Instead Mandelesian stopped, closed his eyes, and appeared to be mouthing words that Edward couldn’t make out. After a few seconds – magic happened.
A sword appeared, only a short distance from the alien. It floated right there in mid-air, immune to the demands of gravity. Then it began to move towards the silver man, swinging for him as if an invisible pirate or man-at-arms were wielding the weapon.
The alien was forced to use his machine on the sword rather than on Edward or his devil. He lifted his thin arm and pointed the disc at the blade. There was a red light, nothing more dramatic to see than a colored lantern. The metal quickly began to smolder. The wooden handle burst into flames. It looked like the metal was bending.
The sword wounded the alien. It hit the outstretched arm and there was a burst of silver as the Plutonian version of blood burst forth in a haze. The disc fell from his hand, bounced off his brown shoes and landed on the ground. All the same, the red light had had its effect. The sword disintegrated before another swing was possible.
The aliens had enormous eyes, and until that moment, Edward had never seen one of them blink. But the silver man closed his eyelids, in a very similar fashion to how Mandelesian had. The alien lifted his hands and began to tickle the air, just as Edward had teased the great Nevil Dever for doing in his act.
Lightning was born from pale fingertips. It lashed out and stretched the distance from the alien to the devil. It burned into and left black marks on his skin and on his face. The devil roared. As the lightning subsided, Mandelesian bent forward and began hacking in a terrible smoker’s cough. It sounded raw. It sounded bloody.
The alien advanced. His fingers still tickled the air. He held his hand as if ready to use it.
“Avoid the devil. Human, submit.”
“I don’t know – I haven’t…” Edward stalled. He held up his hands to show that he meant no harm.
The alien stood over the devil. His mouth tried to do something nasty like smiling.
Edward waited until he was sure the devil had his full attention before he took the disc out of his sleeve. No one had noticed that he had picked it up when Mandelesian dropped it. Nevil Dever would have been proud.
He palmed the disc and held his hand up towards the silver man. Although the alien’s head was averted, it turned when the device was caught upon its skin.
Edward didn’t know how to fire it.
He turned a dial on the side.
He squeezed. He pushed against the back.
He rubbed against the edge…
And a deep green light shone against the strange being’s body. The silver took on the new color. The massive eyes seemed to widen to shock for just a moment, and then the alien was lifted up off of the grou
nd, thrown through the air, and launched into the wall with terrific force!
The space-man’s head lolled to the side and he fell limp.
“Good job,” the devil rasped.
As young Edward watched, the infernal man spat on the ground. The fluid was black and green and smelled.
“Leave the device,” Mandelesian ordered Edward.
“Why? It could be useful.”
“If you’re carrying that, they’ll have no problem finding you.”
Edward carefully and regretfully placed the disc on the floor.
“We’re going to have to use one of these escape pods,” the devil explained.
“The pods? Alright, how do we open them?” Edward asked, but even as he asked he was waving the magnet against them. It took a moment, but that worked just fine. Even though there was no visible seam it opened cleanly.
The devil and the magician climbed inside.
* ** *** ** *
The craft was small. The ceiling was low and sloped. Edward had to crawl. The devil had to hunch as he clopped forward on his hoofed feet. When the two of them were inside, the portal seemed to know it was time to close and did so in a single smooth motion.
“How does this work? Are we going to fly in the air, or is this craft going to fall and somehow cushion our landing?” Edward asked sincerely.
Mandelesian could have laughed or insulted the simple human, but they had very little time. He moved to the front of the craft and grabbed the controls. It had been a long time since his people had had a ship like this, but he understood the general principles to launch it.
As eight more silver men rushed into the room, the pod slid through the floor, as if the hard material had transformed momentarily into air. For several long seconds they dropped through the vacuum of space in freefall. The devil moved more switches and dials. Edward tried to watch, but couldn’t fathom what his companion was doing. Then, with a pull, their little ship began to move forward. Only moments later, Edward saw a blue, white, and green orb in the distance.
Magic Makes You Strange (The Brontosaurus Pluto Society Book 1) Page 3