“Well, Boston is a couple of hours away. Springfield is maybe forty minutes.”
“Boston? Really? How remarkable.”
“What do you mean?”
“You said it’s the second door on the right?”
“Yep.”
“I’ll tell you about it when I get back. You won’t believe what that woman has done to me!” Edward said with fake exasperation.
In fact, the idea that he was on the vicinity of Boston was as big a shock as anything he’d been through. He really was in America then. It boggled the mind.
Edward walked down her hallway, past a painting of a lion, and opened the second door on the right. It was not the bathroom. Instead, it was what had used to be a bedroom. The bed was still there, covered with plastic bags. The main feature of the room was about twenty small cages. Most of them appeared to have rabbits in them.
The smell was overwhelming. Edward stepped back. He opened the door opposite and found the bathroom. He went inside and shut the door behind him.
The wallpaper was orange. The bathroom was surprisingly clean. Edward leaned into the sink and splashed some cold water over his face. Then he soaked a face cloth in hot water and used that to properly wash his face. He immediately felt a lot better.
The young magician realized that the red crystal he had pulled out of Walls’s brain was in his palm. He didn’t remember taking it out, but once he thought about it, he realized that he had been holding it at least as long as he had been in the house. He had washed his hands while holding it, as if there was nothing unusual at all about doing such a thing.
He set the gem down on the counter and considered it.
Was it a ruby? He didn’t know enough about jewelry to know for sure. Were there other red crystals besides rubies? It certainly didn’t look like quartz to him.
Edward snatched the red crystal up and deposited it into his shirt pocket.
He selected one of Mia’s brushes and ran it quickly through his hair, then he went back out.
Mia was waiting on the other side of the door. Past her, he could see the door he had left open. One of the rabbits was hopping out of the room full of cages.
“So, now you know my secret,” she said darkly.
“It’s really none of my business,” Edward replied, quite astonished by how dark she had suddenly gotten.
“Who sent you?”
“I’m sorry?” Edward walked past her, back towards the living room, he was almost laughing at the ridiculousness of their situation.
“Are you with the town?”
“The town? Look, woman, I don’t care about your bunny rabbits! The way you go on, you’d think they were filled with secret plans!”
She nodded gravely, and followed him back out into the main room. “And who would you spill my secret to?”
Edward smiled awkwardly. He was attempting to smile as warmly as he could in a nervous situation. “Who would want to know?”
She pulled out a gun.
Edward’s eyes went wide. Half of him wanted to laugh. The other half took the gun very seriously. “This is simply ridiculous. I don’t care if you have rhinoceroses in the basement!”
She cocked the chamber.
Edward held out his arms and closed his eyes.
He imagined an inverted pyramid. He imagined a grey sun. He pictured a black dog. He remembered the shape Mandelesian had made with his fingers. He thought about the sound of running water pulling a rock away from the shore. And then…. He pictured Walls Carpenter lying helpless with his brain exposed.
Mia Dorian, holding her pistol, turned to hard grey stone.
Sensibly, Edward stepped aside, in case despite appearances there was any chance the weapon could still fire. He walked up to the girl and pressed his finger against her cheek.
She was stone.
He grasped her hand. It was stone.
“I... didn’t mean to do this,” Edward said to her as the thought finally dawned on him that she could be dead. Trees and people were different things.
He made sure that he was behind her, where she wasn’t pointing the gun. With great concern he cast the spell backwards.
Mia turned to flesh and blood and clothes. She fell forward in surprise. As she did so, Edward watched the gun go off and a blast of red explode from her ankle.
He cast the spell again.
She was not only stone, but even the splash of blood that erupted from her ankle was petrified. Several drops of blood had turned to pebbles and littered the carpet. Her face was petrified mid-scream. She was still holding the gun.
One of the rabbits bounced over to her and sniffed at her foot. There was no sign, momentarily, of any of the others. The sound of the gunshot had apparently frightened them into hiding.
Her shoes, unexpectedly, had not changed. Edward wondered what material they might be made of that was not living matter.
Edward knew that he could restore her whenever he wanted. But he wasn’t going to do so until he had a doctor present. He began to wonder if he should leave her the way she was for a bit. As long as no one came around looking for her, maybe he could hide in her house for a day or two? It was so hard to know where might be safe from the Plutonians.
The first thing that Edward did was to wander room to room through the house and close the curtains on all of the windows that actually had curtains. He made a mental note of the rooms which did not and resolved to stay out of them. He had no idea if the aliens had technology which let them see through fabric, but he pulled the curtains shut anyway.
The last room was the one opposite the bathroom, the room which had caused so much trouble. As he went in it was clear that the bunnies were afraid of him. He pulled the curtain and then paused for a moment to think about what he was going to do with the animals. How long was he going to leave their owner frozen? He didn’t want them to starve.
Edward then found himself spending a good forty-five minutes feeding all of the rabbits in the bedroom and then the ones loose in the house. There were bowls on the floor in the kitchen, just like most people have for dogs and cats. As he put the bag of food away in the rabbits’ bedroom, he noticed a book tucked behind one of the cages. It looked like it was leather-bound.
Edward pulled the book out. It seemed to be very old. As he dusted it off, it seemed to him a shame that such an old and beautiful book was kept in such poor conditions. It was an antique. Maybe not as old as him, but he wouldn’t want to be kept somewhere like that house either.
The leather was black, and undecorated. The pages were gilt and slightly yellowed. When he opened it up, he was disappointed to see empty page after empty page. He was just about to give up and put the blank book down when he happened to flip to the last page.
There were seven little symbols. The first was a long-necked reptile. The second was a circle with a foot inside of it. The third was a fancily drawn number four. The fourth was a weird-looking flower. The fifth was a boat. The sixth was a rectangle. The seventh was a clockwise spiral.
Edward shut the book. He understood what he was looking at.
It was another spell.
6
As it got dark, Edward found himself some food in the kitchen and then picked a room on the second floor to spend the night in. He strung thread with bells on it throughout the hallway so that if anyone was in the building he would hear them. He barricaded the doors into the house. He wished that he could get Mia’s gun away from her, but he didn’t know how to reverse the spell around the gun without also restoring her, and that could be dangerous for Mia.
He collected a baseball bat from the living room and a large knife from the kitchen. On her refrigerator Edward found two small magnets. One of them had a picture of a mouse on the reverse side. The other had a rainbow. He pocketed them both. In her purse Edward found thirty dollars. He wasn’t sure if that was a lot of money or not.
As it got dark, he turned a chair towards the window. He sat there watching through a sliver between the
blind and the frame. He wanted to go to sleep. He was in a guest bedroom. The single mattress was made up for him already. But he didn’t know how he could sleep with the aliens out there looking for him.
He could hear insects singing outside. The breeze was cool and pleasant. He became aware that he smelled like a man who been exercising in a tuxedo. But he didn’t dare let his guard down enough to take a bath.
Edward didn’t turn any of the lights on. He sat in the gloom for a long time watching the stars. His eyes got heavier and heavier until, with a jerk, he realized that he was starting to fall asleep in the chair. How many days had it been since he had slept? Or how many years?
His eyes shut and he had to strain to open them again, and it was at this moment that he thought he saw a figure walking outside in the darkness. It had only been for a second and he didn’t know if he’d seen it or dreamt it.
He thought about the alien devices. He wondered how far their light could shine. Could they shoot him from across the lawn? He looked down at his hand and was surprised to discover that he had been holding the red crystal in his sleep. A little annoyed with himself, he put the crystal back in his pocket and took out one of the magnets.
It made him think about when he was a boy and his father used to tell him about hunting. He had never taken him hunting, they lived in the city. His father had apparently done a lot of it before they moved to London. It was the nineteen-seventies. Edward’s father was long gone. The only good part of that was that Edward would never have to explain everything that he’d been through to him. His father would never have understood why Edward had worked with Mandelesian. It had been a practical decision, but he never would have condoned making any deals with a devil.
And then there was movement again. Edward was sure.
He imagined an inverted pyramid. He imagined a grey sun. He pictured a black dog. He remembered the shape Mandelesian had made with his fingers. He thought about the sound of running water pulling a rock away from the shore. And then….he thought about how angry his father must be with him by that point.
Then, Edward did it again… and again. He cast the stone spell blindly into the darkness in the direction he’d seen the movement. He didn’t know if it was an alien, or the devil, or an old dog in the night. He fired four, five, six times. The wooden windowsill was grey and petrified. He heard a shriek. It was short and cut off. It sounded to him like the sound the aliens made.
He ducked down low, beneath the wooden windowsill, and expected a red light to be cast upon him. He expected the aliens to set the house on fire, or to suddenly burst into the room. Nothing happened.
He felt like his heart was beating so loudly that they would hear it in the field. He grabbed the baseball bat in one hand and a magnet in the other and he lay down on the floor, looking at the ceiling. Dim moonlight provided a little bit of light, but not much. In the darkness he began to imagine that he saw shapes, faces - almost like ghosts were forming in the blackness. But every time his eyes seemed to find a shape, it would dissolve and lose its meaning.
He lay there for what felt like three quarters of an hour until he finally found the courage to look outside of the window. The stone felt cool under his fingers. He squinted again and again, but he didn’t see anything, just stars and the vague outlines of the trees.
Maybe there hadn’t been anyone there? Did his spell even work on aliens?
He wished he had a whole bag of magnets, so he could cover his body in them. He could make a magnetic suit of armor.
He lay back down to be safe, but his eyelids were still so very heavy. It felt so good when he stretched his back out flat on the hard floor. He didn’t even realize he was falling asleep until he woke up a few hours later as the sunlight began shining in the window.
No one had found him.
Edward walked out of the room and down the stairs. The rabbits were everywhere. He walked outside and into the backyard to see what his spells had done. There were petrified and grey trees everywhere. Most of the lawn was like spiked concrete. The bushes were like rock walls. One of them had a large shiny vein of mineral deposit in its side.
And just past the bushes, Edward saw a statue of an alien from Pluto.
With a lot of work, he picked up the petrified alien and dragged it back into the house. He got it into the living room, just a few feet away from where Mia still stood, still perpetually reacting to having shot herself in the foot.
He decided that he had to figure out what to do with the rabbits. He wasn’t going to stay in the house, and he was afraid that he would have to leave Mia frozen for a long time. In the end, he realized that he was going to have to let them go free.
He spent a few hours, with the front door open, carrying bunny after bunny outside and letting them go. A few bounced back inside, not wanting to go out. A dozen or more gathered just outside the door and watched him as he brought the rest. They were very tame and didn’t show any fear.
When that was done he made himself a sandwich. Then he had to figure out what to do with Mia and the alien. Exploring the house, he found a basement with a dirt floor. Most of the lights down there didn’t work. Edward just about broke his back getting Mia down there. He put her in a dark corner and lay a blanket over her head.
He went back upstairs to get the alien and decided that he needed to take a break. He sat on the red couch and luxuriated in being able to rest his back. Out of the corner of his eye he saw something small, brown, and fluffy hopping around in the kitchen. He was sure there were still going to be a few more bunnies he had to let go. Maybe he’d leave one of the doors open when he left?
He decided to take some time examining the alien. It really did look like a statue. There seemed to be seams and striations in the rock. It would have been incredibly hard work, but it did appear to have imperfections. He felt like he could see marks that the carver had left behind.
The eyes were enormous. They were comical. The lips were pulled back in an expression of pure hatred. He had to wonder if he had caught the Plutonian in the first casting of the spell, or if it had dodged a couple of bursts? The face made him imagine that it had seen him turn some of the grass to stone and it was angry at him for trying to get it. Otherwise, it was just angry as it thought about coming to get him.
Maybe it hated the Earth so much that the spiteful expression was merely from having to spend time here? Despite everything Edward had ever been taught, he had to think that the alien was a worse creature than the devil. The devil had helped him escape. He’d had a sense of humor. He’d taught him how to defend himself, and then just left without trying to take his soul or anything.
There was nothing but hatred in the alien’s face, even in the way he held his hands and his body.
Edward realized that he was scratching his forehead with the red crystal. He put it back in his pocket.
He thought about taking a sledgehammer to the alien instead of ever restoring him. Of course, there was a danger if he hid the two statues together in the basement. What if the alien somehow woke up before Mia? It could eat her, or experiment on her, or do something horrible. He still didn’t know very much about how all of this worked.
“Or I could talk to you,” Edward said to the alien statue. “I could find out what you know.”
In the alien’s hand he found the stone that had once been its weapon. He took a hammer and a screwdriver and he carefully knocked two chips out of it. He tied ropes around the alien’s legs and bound its arms to the heaviest furniture. He looped one of Mia’s belts around the stone neck, and tied that to a rope, so he could choke the creature if he had to. He palmed one of his magnets in his left hand and one in his right. He wore the third around his neck, in plain sight.
He thought about the sound of running water pulling a rock away from the shore. He remembered the shape Mandelesian had made with his fingers. He pictured a black dog. He imagined an inverted pyramid. Then finally he thought about what the alien would do if it caught him.
&n
bsp; Grey transformed to silver, as if a light had suddenly been shone on a blurry figure. The hard face began to move. The long eyes blinked twice and then turned to look at him. A sterling arm lifted. The ropes kept it from going as high as it wanted. It looked like the creature was trying to use the circular device on him, but it fell awkwardly from its hand.
“Comfortable?” Edward asked, standing a safe distance away.
The alien made a sound which sounded a little like a snake and even more like a human baby. It attempted to lunge at him, but the ropes caught it and sent the silver man tumbling to the ground.
“I will kill you a thousand times! I will take your teeth! I will replace your bones! I will make you remember the worst days of your life and forget the best!” It hissed. It growled.
“You will behave in a civilized manner or I will cast my spell again,” Edward commanded calmly, as he imagined Nevil Dever would have.
The alien smiled. “You have a spell now? And where did you get that?”
“The devil Mandelesian gave it to me out of gratitude for saving his life.”
“You ought to know better than to trust a horned man. He doesn’t have feet. He has hooves.” The word “hooves” was spoken with the greatest of oozing contempt.
“You have no penis,” Edward said to the alien, dryly.
As accustomed as Edward already was to the waves of hatred which emanated from the alien, the horrified and vicious look spreading over its eyes and mouth actually caused him to take a step backwards. It frightened him.
The alien struggled its way back up to its feet.
Edward did his best to hide his reaction. “Where do you come from?”
“The stars!” The alien spat.
“The devil said you were from the planet Pluto.”
“What does it matter? Your knowledge will do you no good. I will remove your arms!”
“Stop exaggerating,” Edward said, intentionally speaking the way he would to a willful child. “And why did you take us up on your ship?”
Magic Makes You Strange (The Brontosaurus Pluto Society Book 1) Page 5