Magic Makes You Strange (The Brontosaurus Pluto Society Book 1)

by Noah K Mullette-Gillman

  “I don’t know if it even works that way! And what if we find ourselves in a nest of fiends like that?” Edward shouted at her.

  She grabbed him by the wrist and pulled. He took a few steps with her, but hadn’t made his mind up. Edward looked back at the fight. The three-headed man had the giant serpent underneath him. One of the faces was biting into its underside. The little legs on the underside of the belly were scratching at his fat face, but it didn’t make him let go.

  Romana pulled him close. “If we don’t leave, Tres Horrendous is going to eat us.”

  “Tres Horrendous?” Edward wasn’t sure if he’d heard her right.

  She pulled, and he didn’t resist.

  When they got to the tear, she climbed up him, as if he were a ladder, and then put her foot in the opening. She pulled herself up and paused in the threshold. “Can you get up here after me?”

  He nodded.

  She jumped through.

  Edward watched her disappear into a haze of peach and yellow. He couldn’t see a lot of detail beyond the opening. He didn’t even know for sure if she had survived, but he thought he could see mountains in the distance. It looked like there was a place on the other side, and the monsters did have to come from somewhere.

  Edward jumped twice. On the second attempt he got his arms up into the opening. With great difficulty he pulled himself up and fell right through. The air was cool as he dropped. The wind blew the sweat from his brow. He passed through clouds of yellow and brown sand. A short while later he landed in a light pink dune.

  There was a breeze blowing.

  He couldn’t hear the fight anymore.

  Edward turned over onto his back and looked up. The clouds were pink, red, and orange. The sky behind them was yellow-tan. He didn’t see any sign of the hole he’d fallen through.

  He sat up. He could see mountains. Romana was standing nearby, holding the pitchfork. He didn’t remember her holding it when she climbed him, but he could have missed it.

  “Welcome to Venus,” she said, smiling.

  And he knew it was true. He wasn’t on Earth anymore. This was the second planet from the Sun.

  11

  “His name is Tres Horrendous,” Romana told Edward. “He’s a magician from Earth. When he was born he was as human as anyone, but his body has been twisted by using too much magic.”

  “Magic causes magicians to have three heads? Is that common, or was he involved in a sorcerer’s mishap?”

  “It’s just too much magic. When you cast a magic spell, you’re breaking the world. You’re pulling it tight and after a while reality loses its shape. You can grow horns or fish parts. You might wake up one day and find you have three heads, or your bottom half looks like a horse.”

  “A centaur? You mean that by casting spells we can end up cursing ourselves into mythological beasts?”

  “Sometimes. Sometimes it isn’t that pretty. I haven’t seen it, but my grandfather told me about magicians who transformed a little bit here and there and there and they never had any logic to the mutations. They just ended up messes. You’d be lucky to wind up a sphinx or a griffon and not something uglier.”

  “But…why? I don’t see why turning other people to stone would give me a goat’s arse.”

  Romana smiled sideways, “It’ll drive you crazy too. It can twist the mind even worse than the body. Most magicians end up paralyzed by mental illness. You might start believing you need orange juice every morning or you’ll die. Or you might think that you’re really a monkey disguised as a human and everyone is after your secret! Magic makes you strange. Magic makes you weird and crazy and ruins you for living in the real world.”

  “I want to show you something.” Edward stopped. He carefully lay his jacket down in the pink sand and lifted up the back of his shirt. He showed Romana where his skin had started changing.

  “Do you think I’m turning into one of the aliens? Their skin looked a little like this,” Edward asked.

  Romana touched her finger against the blue-silver of Edward’s back. It was smooth. It didn’t have the little hairs on it that human skin usually did. “I think you’re turning into a dolphin!”

  He stepped back and lowered his shirt again. “Funny. Well, if I stop casting the spells, will it go away?”

  She shook her head. “Probably not, but it probably won’t get any worse. Just be sure not to cast any spells or learn any more.”

  “Just the knowledge does it?”

  “Oh, geez, Edward! Look, I don’t know you. I don’t know where you got your magic, but someone really should have told you something. You want to be very careful about learning new spells. Now, be honest, how many spells do you know now?”

  “Two.”

  “Honestly?”

  “Yes, just the two,” Edward said earnestly, sounding just a touch wounded that she doubted him.

  “Try not to learn a third. Two is good.”

  “How many do you know? Honestly?” He returned the subtle accusation.

  “One. One good one.” There was pride in her voice.

  “Is that where the water came from?”

  “That’s right. And that’s enough. You don’t need to know everything.” She paused, thought about what she’d said and then added, “But I do. Tell me everything. Tell me the truth about how you learned your magic.”

  “Look, I do not appreciate your constant implications! So far as you are aware, I have never been anything but forthright and honest. It would be very kind of you to assume my best intentions until I give you reason not to!”

  “Of course I will. Now, who was your teacher?”

  “I was kidnapped in nineteen thirty-six and taken on board an alien spaceship by a group of silver men. They were vicious and single-minded. They wanted the secret to one of my master’s tricks. They assumed that I knew it, but the truth was that I did not.

  “On the spaceship, I managed to incapacitate one of the blighters. I took the opportunity to explore the vessel. My master was there, imprisoned in a single out-sized bubble of water. I could not set him free. Trussed up next to him I found a devil named Mandelesian. Mandelesian and I decided to work together to return to Earth.

  “At length, we stole away aboard a space-life-raft of sorts. It took us back to Earth. In order to defend myself, Mandelesian taught me my first spell and then left me to my own devices.”

  “You’re joking!” Romana said, incredulously.

  His expression made it clear that he was not.

  “And the second?”

  “It was in that house. Right, now you - who taught you all about magic?”

  She looked like she didn’t actually want to answer. Edward could read from her expression that she was going to give him an incomplete answer at best. He decided that he would take whatever she offered, for now. She would share the rest once she had learned to trust him.

  “My grandfather passed the spell on to me before the devils came and took him away.”

  “The same devils who captured you?”

  “No. They were different. They chased me a long time before they got me. You’re lucky that I found you. I can help you to stay safe,” she said seriously.

  “You can protect me?” Edward scoffed.

  “I can. I’m a lot smarter than you.”

  “Are you?” Edward laughed.

  “If you were just a little brighter, you’d recognize my genius! Still, I can’t blame you for it. You are what God made you!” she teased.

  They started walking the alien world together. For the first hour they traveled through the pink desert. The sands gathered in tall dunes, just like in the deserts on Earth. The pink sand made Edward think of Bermuda. He had always heard that the sand was pink in Bermuda.

  The Venusian desert was cool. A refreshing breeze blew through their hair. Romana’s long hair made a great show about her head, dancing in the wind like a whirling dervish. Most women would have tied it down so that they could see better. She didn’t seem concer
ned. As they walked, she rarely even paused to brush it away from her eyes.

  “I wouldn’t have thought we’d be able to breathe,” Edward said after they had walked for a while. “I wouldn’t have thought humans could live and breathe on another planet.”

  “Oh, but this isn’t just any planet. This is Venus. How could the atmosphere possibly be unbreathable on Venus?” Romana answered without even looking back at him.

  “And yet, this is where the devils come from?”

  “Have you ever heard of Lucifer Morningstar?”

  “Naturally.”

  “Venus is the morning star. And why do you think Adam and Eve were forced to leave Eden?”

  “I’m given to understand they ate an apple?”

  This time she did pause, turn and look at him. She laced the fingers of her left hand through her hair and lifted it away from her face, as if she were pulling back a veil. “They tasted forbidden fruit.” She nodded as she spelled it out for him, “That means sex, you know.”

  “Oh. I just thought it was an apple,” Edward said, feeling foolish.

  They walked on.

  The story started playing in his head again. As Edward walked across Venus, he was haunted over and over by the story of the great god Zeus. Well, they didn’t call him that though. It was almost like Jupiter – Zeuspater. In the story Zeus wanted a divorce from his wife, Hera. As soon as he announced that they were separated, she just ceased to exist. Then he started searching through the forest to find himself new wives. Edward still managed to keep walking. He was aware enough of his surroundings to function, but it was like rubbing his stomach and patting his head at the same time. A full half of his consciousness was following the adventures of the God of lightning.

  It was a good thing that he had Romana with him, or Edward would have probably just walked in circles forever, barely aware of his surroundings.

  * ** *** ** *

  Romana couldn’t believe that she was on the planet Venus. Her grandfather had claimed to have been there, but she honestly hadn’t believed him. The wind, the sand, the sky, the delicate sound of the dunes moving against each other… Venus was more beautiful than any place she had ever seen on Earth - and that made sense to her. She thought of Medusa. Medusa had dared to say that she was more beautiful than the Goddess Venus, and that’s why she had been transformed into a monster.

  Of course, maybe Edward was a little like Medusa. He turned people to stone, and he was slowly turning into a monster. That blue skin on his back had been so strange. It was almost like plastic. She wondered what he would look like when it engulfed the rest of his body. Would he lose all of the hair on his head? Would his whole body end up shiny and plastic? Maybe he’d grow gills?

  Perhaps she’d have to leave him on the planet Venus and he could find a new sea there to swim in and spend his life turning fish to stone?

  It was all almost enough to get her to forget about seeing Tres Horrendous again, almost. She was more afraid of him than the devils, more afraid of him than of casting too many spells and her body changing. So far, she’d been lucky with that. She’d found a few stray feathers growing in among her arm hairs, but only a few. They’d been a pretty tropical green, but all the same she’d plucked them out right away. She didn’t want to be a monster either. She hoped that bringing the water today wouldn’t make things worse. She used the spell so rarely.

  They came upon a skeleton in the pink sands. It was white and clean and brittle. Edward seemed to barely notice. He was lost in his thoughts. Romana spared a few moments with the bones and decided it had once been a creature like the ones Edward summoned. The ones he called “caterpillars.” They weren’t caterpillars.

  The ground beneath their feet started getting more solid, and here and there she could see little plants growing. Some were green and some were violently red. A few moments later they came upon a great thick bush. The leaves were red on the top, green on the bottom, and it displayed massive blue flowers. The blossoms were at least seven different shades of blue. Romana thought about picking one, but they were just too big. In any case, the stem was so thick. She wasn’t positive that she could snap it if she tried. Asking Edward would have been pointless. He wasn’t really there.

  The bushes became more and more common, and larger and larger. They were little islands of color in-between the pink sand of the desert floor.

  The sky became more and more yellow as the day went on. The clouds varied from banana to bumblebee. The sky behind them was all the strangest shades. It was like no sky would ever be. She and Edward didn’t seem to look any different in the Venusian light. Their skin was the same. Their clothes were the same. The white of his shirt was as white as it had been.

  “Hey, what planet are you on?” she asked him at last.

  He didn’t answer.

  “Hello? Venus to Edward? This is ground control?”

  He finally seemed to notice her. “I’m sorry, I – I’m a little over…. The world is upside-down. I’m sideways.”

  “Are you okay?” she asked with real concern. “How many people have you turned to stone?”

  “Four people, two devils, and one alien,” he answered, not even considering that he had wanted to keep that secret.

  “I wouldn’t have thought that would be enough to make you go crazy. Did you summon the caterpillar a lot?”

  “Three. I think three times?”

  “That’s cool. That’s not so much. What are you thinking about?”

  “Zeus, and Neptune, and a tree spirit named Golgee. They all went into Hell together to find the God of Death…”

  “Do you think this is Hell?” she asked.

  “It is pretty. If the devils come from here, I would be inclined to suppose it must be. In appearance, it is far more like Heaven.”

  “That’s what I was thinking. Groovy. Well, maybe we’ll get to come back here when we die?”

  “Perhaps we’re already dead?”

  “Don’t be like that…”

  “This isn’t the sort of adventure that living people have. This is more like the journey of the soul.” Edward had a lost look on his face.

  “Tell me about the tree spirit.”

  “He’s just a little one. He went and warned Zeus when Jesus was building up armies to fight him.”

  “I - I’ve never heard that story.”

  “I hadn’t either. But now, sometimes, it’s all I can think of. It just repeats over and over in my head. Sometimes all the way through, sometimes just little parts.”

  “Edward, you sound like you’re losing your mind.”

  “It’s true. But you know, I lost forty years of my life. I lost my job, my home, my parents, my girlfriend… my country. Now I’m changing into a fish or some nonsense. I’m casting spells… and I don’t think any of them are white magic. Turning people to stone? Calling down monsters? These are the spells that the villain uses against the hero, aren’t they?”

  “In the stories.”

  “That’s right. In all the stories. I’ll tell you what we need to do. We need to find someone who knows about magic. Who understands it, someone who doesn’t want to eat us or kidnap or do something horrible to us, someone with just one head.”

  “You said you had a master? Were you a slave?”

  “No… no no no. I was apprenticed as a magician. The great Nevil Dever taught me everything I know.”

  “Cool.”

  “Well, he taught me everything I knew. I’d say I’ve doubled that in the last few days.”

  “Why did you want to be a magician?” she asked.

  “Why? Why?” His face lit up. She hadn’t seen him smile like that before. She liked it. “Oh, there’s nothing like magic. I like taking the walls off of life. Levitation? Of course. Talking with the dead? Child’s play. Telepathy? Telekinesis? Omniscience? Instantaneous transportation? Oh, magic says that we get it all.”

  “Then you must love being on the planet Venus?”

  He looked thoughtful
. “I might… if I were in control. The magician is the master of the stage. Lately I feel the victim of powerful forces I can’t understand in the least. No, in many ways this is the opposite of the creative art we practiced. Dever wouldn’t recognize his art.”

  They walked on. Romana began to notice the bushes were filled with lizards, just tiny ones, maybe an inch or two in length. Some were red and some were green. They were well fitted for the plants they lived in. The farther they walked, the more lizards she saw. She decided that it was a good sign that they were headed out of the desert. But she didn’t know much about life on the planet Venus. Could they be dangerous? They were so small. On Earth she wouldn’t give them a second thought. What if a swarm came at her at once? She chose the widest paths between the bushes, where the sand was thicker. She also began to wonder if there could be any other animals hiding in the brush?

  An hour or more passed. The ground became thicker. Long fibrous roots began to cover the sands. It wasn’t clear which of the islands any given root belonged to. It was a complicated system. The bushes grew larger. Some were too tall to be seen over easily. Houses could have been hidden inside. While most of them looked more or less the same, with the green and red leaves and the massive blue flowers, there did seem to be some amount of variety. In some of the hedges, the plants were thorned. In some they were smooth. Some of the flowers were more of an aquamarine color than blue. A few of the bushes had no flowers at all.

  The ground became rockier. Some of the rocks almost looked like bricks. Then more and more of them did, until it was obvious that that was exactly what they were; ancient and weather eroded pink bricks.

  What had been broken bricks became the desolated shells of buildings. Some of the walls were still standing. A lot of the foundations were there. Very few of the roofs were intact. They were all made of pink sandstone and pink bricks. There had, at one time, been a lot of artwork on the stones, but it was all eroded away by the wind and the sand. They could see marks, but the glyphs were too vague to interpret.