Magic Makes You Strange (The Brontosaurus Pluto Society Book 1)
Page 17
He then walked over to the mirror and pried loose the last reflective shard. He wanted to keep it. Edward walked out into the house and shut Jenny’s door behind him. Henri sat there on a chair, waiting for him.
“Are you done now? Can you move on?” The old man asked.
“You married her?” Edward asked, his voice frothing with anger. “You promised to take care of her, but you let them do that to her?
Henri shrugged. “I tried to make her happy, but who can make Jenny happy?”
And so, Edward turned him to stone.
He wandered through their home until he found a small office. It had their books and their paperwork. He was looking for their phonebook. He found it.
Werner Howling was listed under “H.”
* ** *** ** *
“What spells do you know?” Romana asked the devil.
He replied by snarling at her feebly.
“We need to know. We need to know what we can all do. I can summon a river.”
“I’m a combat mage,” Mr. Grell said, with pride.
Septimus thought for a moment, and then started to answer. “Obviously, I know the shelter spell. I assume we all know that.”
“What are you talking about?” Romana asked.
“You know, the spell in the dome. The one in big letters? You can’t have missed it.”
“Edward and I looked away. We didn’t know what would happen if we saw it.”
Septimus smirked. “It was the spell they used to hide the dome. That’s why it was the last building still standing in the city. The Plutonian bombs couldn’t find it.”
“That could be useful,” Mr. Grell said the obvious.
“What else?” Romana asked.
They could see that he didn’t want to answer, but he did anyway: “I can see things, things that are nearby, but not near enough to see normally.”
“How far away? Could you find Edward?” Mr. Grell asked.
“Not unless he’s only twenty or thirty feet away. It doesn’t go very far.”
“How do you decide what you’re going to see?” Romana asked.
“It just knows. If I have an intention when I use the spell, then it looks for it. If I don’t, then it just finds something interesting.”
“What else can you do?” Mr. Grell pushed him.
“That’s it.”
“I say you’re a liar!”
“Alright, alright. I have three spells.”
“What’s the third one?” Mr. Grell asked.
“I can summon insects.”
“What do you mean?” Romana asked, clearly repulsed.
“When I cast the spell, they just come. All the insects all around. I don’t know how far. It’s farther than the seeing spell. When I cast it, I run away. They all show up pretty quickly where I was standing. They’re usually very hungry.”
“Eww!” Romana turned her nose up.
“Let me see if he’s nearby.” Septimus closed his eyes and concentrated.
A minute or two later, he opened his eyes. “No, he’s not.”
“Obviously,” Mr. Grell grunted. “We need to leave,” He said to Romana. He spoke like an adult explaining a hard fact to a child.
“No. We have to find Edward. And here’s how we’ll do it.”
* ** *** ** *
A cold and clear voice answered the phone. There may have been a slight German accent behind it, but it was not pronounced. “Yes?”
“I want to speak to Howling,” Edward said.
“Who is this?”
“My name is Edward Whistman.”
“This is Werner. Should I know you?”
Edward felt an urge to smash the phone. He resisted. “I want to talk to you about what you did to Jennifer Wraithbone.”
There was a pause. “I suppose that must be Jenny’s maiden name? You are calling from her home. Have you killed her?”
The question was asked without concern.
“I didn’t kill her…”
“But she is dead?”
“She died of shame because of what you turned her into. What kind of monster would do that to a beautiful girl?” Edward’s hand was shaking.
“Do I know you? Who do you work for?”
“You will. I am going to kill you,” Edward promised.
“Are you… are you Dever’s Eddie? Oh, wonderful! You must be! He’s told me all about you. Well, of course, Jenny has as well, but he gave a more favorable review than she did.”
“You knew Nevil Dever?” Edward didn’t believe him.
“Your master works for me. We protect the Earth from invaders.”
“You expect me to believe you’re virtuous?”
Werner Howling laughed. “Virtuous? Oh, no! But I was born on Earth and I fight the aliens and the devils. The same aliens who took you away from earth all of those years ago. Where have you been? This is remarkable! You must be eighty? Ninety years old by now? Where have you been?”
“Don’t worry about where I’ve been, worry about where you’ll see me next.”
Werner Howling sighed, “Edward, your Jenny sacrificed a great deal to fund our efforts. She believed in me. Nevil Dever is sitting in the next room, not thirty feet away from me, waiting for his next mission. Is it that hard to believe that if they could believe in me, you might as well?”
“Mr. Howling, I don’t understand much of what I’ve seen in the last week. I don’t know why it’s 2007. I don’t know why there are devils. I don’t know why I keep seeing images of Zeus and Neptune every time I close my eyes… but I understand you. You and I will never be allies.” The hatred dripped from Edward’s voice.
Werner Howling sighed again. “I regret that. Remember, you’ve brought all of this on yourself. Even after you murdered Jenny, I offered you friendship.”
“I didn’t…” Edward’s throat tightened up as he denied the charge. He couldn’t believe what he was being accused of, but she wouldn’t have died that day if he hadn’t come to visit.
Edward composed himself. “Delirium. You confuse and trick people.”
“The Delirium Guild is the only protection the Earth has.”
“I’ll… I’ll protect the world from you.”
Werner Howling laughed, “You’ll what?”
“You heard me. I’ll start my own organization. We’ll get rid of the aliens and the devils, and you.”
Howling was still laughing, “You’re like the man who wants to protect the garden from the gardeners!”
“And we’ll call ourselves… The Brontosaurus Pluto Society!”
“Edward, Edward…. Don’t you understand? The magic doesn’t just warp your body. It damages your mind. You aren’t thinking clearly. You should come to me. I will teach you everything you need to know, and we will work together.”
“She had mice growing out of her. You knew that. You knew that and didn’t care. You still made her create your gold.” Edward wasn’t yelling. His voice was filled with sadness as he hung up the phone.
“Grandma’s dead,” Rose stated flatly.
Edward looked up and saw the pretty girl standing there. She looked more like the Jenny he knew than the monster he’d found had.
“She got so upset… I think she had a heart attack.”
“And you turned my grandfather to stone?”
“He…he let her keep casting spells even after he saw what it did to her.”
Rose thought for a moment before replying, “So, now what? Am I supposed to be the one who makes the gold?”
“No! God, no! You’ve got a fortune in there. Take it, and move to a quiet island somewhere. Never think about money again. Never think about magic again…” As he spoke, Edward was begging her, with his eyes, to listen.
“And, what happens when I run out of money?” Rose asked.
“How could you? Have you seen how much she has in there?”
Rose stuck out her bottom lip, pouting, “Do you have any idea the way I’ve gotten used to living my life? Anyway, I f
igured you’d take half of it. You’ll need it to hide from Howling.”
“I don’t want to hide from him. I’m going after him.”
“Are you?” Despite her tears, Rose couldn’t help laughing at him.
“I’m going to kill him.”
She giggled. “Anyway, Brontosaurus Pluto? What’s up with that?”
“Your grandmother told me that Pluto wasn’t a planet anymore, the brontosaurus isn’t a dinosaur anymore… No, that’s not right. She told me that someone decided that now they never were. It isn’t just that they stopped being what they were one day, someone was so afraid of the planet and the thunder lizard that they decided they couldn’t even admit they had ever been.”
“Interesting. Thanks for that. I’ll remember it when you’re gone.”
Edward nodded.
Rose closed her eyes. She imagined an inverted pyramid, then a hand which was missing two fingers. She pictured a winged horse eating a pig, then a stylized maze which she had memorized. She fired off the spell by thinking about her grandfather.
The needles appeared in mid air and fired into Edward’s body. Each was more than three feet long. Two plunged into the muscles of his left thigh. One missed the flesh, but pinned the cloth of his pants leg against the wall. Another one entered him through the stomach. It protruded out of his back, but didn’t leave him. A lot of blood poured through the hole that one made.
Two needles pinned his right arm back, but missed his flesh, catching only his jacket. The last one went into his right breast. It hit the bone and didn’t go in very far, but that one caused serious damage.
Rose opened her eyes and looked at the bloody pulp in a tuxedo. She opened her mouth furiously. “Now, reverse your spell on my grandfather!”
Edward’s body jerked. An agonized grunt burst from his lips and fluid began to drop from his mouth. He tried to imagine the spell he needed to turn the girl to stone, but he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t even remember the first symbol he needed to summon his monster. He took a deep breath. It hurt incredibly. But he knew what Dever would tell him. No matter how bad things got, he just needed to stay calm and to cool his mind. His thoughts would become solid again soon…
Rose stepped forward. She grabbed the needle in his breast and bent it. Edward screamed in agony. Dark fluid sprayed from his mouth and into the air. His teeth were red with blood.
His vision went black.
When he could see again, the statue was right in front of him, the old man with the reptile hands and the bathrobe, Jenny’s husband.
“Turn him back to life,” Rose commanded him.
Edward did what she asked. He fired off the spell by thinking about Jenny, as she lay dead, a mass of half-grown rodent bodies.
He could hear Rose talking on the telephone. “Alright, but if he dies on his own, that’s not my fault. He has a lot of blades in him… and Papa deserves his own couple pounds of flesh.”
She hung up.
A dragon’s hand wrapped around Edward’s chin and lifted his face up. The old man stared into his eyes. His cracked and bloodless lips were pursed. He had done a bad job of shaving himself and there were a few long wispy hairs standing erect from his cheeks. The eyes were a sick color, a yellow like rotted food.
“Edward.”
“Hi, Henry.”
“Henri,” Jenny’s husband corrected him. “I heard about you on the second night I met our Jenny. You know, you’re the reason she became a mage? You’re the reason she started working. First, the Plutonians played a game with her. They made her think they were humans helping her to fight them. She only found out later on that they were the silver men in disguise. They ran her in circles, just looking for you…”
“What game did you play with her?” Edward accused. “She bought you a good life didn’t she? She traded her humanity for your -”
Edward was going to say something like “comfort” or “wealth.” At that moment, Henri’s robe fell open and Edward saw the green, blue, yellow, and red alligator scales covered most of his body. They picked up the light, as if they were wet or metallic.
“We all pay,” Henri sneered. “I pay with my flesh. If you believe in something, you sacrifice yourself to it. Jenny believed in Howling!”
Edward closed his eyes. He pictured a long-necked reptile. It changed into a circle with a foot inside of it. He imagined the fancily drawn number four, then the weird looking flower, then the boat. The boat shifted into a simple rectangle. Finally he imagined a clockwise spiral. To launch the spell he felt the long needles stabbed through his body.
The caterpillar came.
The pain was stunning. Edward couldn’t be sure if he had tears or sweat or blood in his eyes. It stung and he could barely see at that point. He did see the monster come through a rip above the desk. Rose launched a thick payload of the metal spears at it. Some of the weapons bounced off of his monster’s hide. Some sank in.
Henri took a moment to look at Edward, and then turned towards the Venusian caterpillar. Edward was hopeful as he saw his monster bite through the old man’s robe and wrap its mouth around his arm. He watched as Henri took his second claw and grabbed ahold of it by the back of its head. Henri opened his old, hard mouth wide, displaying pink and diseased toothless gums. He looked like he was going to bite down into the monster!
Edward closed his eyes, not to cast a spell, but to try to find his strength. The physical pain was terrible. He had lost a lot of blood. He couldn’t move his leg or his arm.
He heard a crunching sound, then Rose started laughing.
Edward managed to raise an arm enough to rub the wet from his eyes. His monster lay on the floor dead. Its little feet were spasming. A long blue tongue hung out of its mouth.
Henri was crouched above it. He turned and looked at Edward, wiping Venusian blood from his chin. “You would not have been enough of a man for her.”
And then the wall burst open.
At first, no one could see why. The paint and wood and the plaster and the bricks went flying, went smashing across the room. It was like a bomb had exploded.
Henri stood watching as the bricks came flying at him. They struck him in the head and the chest and the stomach. Flesh was splattered. His bones were crushed. His scales were torn from his muscles. A severed top-half of his body fell wetly onto the corpse of Edward’s monster.
Rose ran back into her own apartment. She was almost crushed by a flying desk, but the girl was just quick enough to get away. Even with her blades inside of him, Edward was glad.
As the dust settled, Edward began to see a shape. It was the spaceship.
It landed in the middle of the room. The back opened up. He saw Romana and Mr. Grell sitting right there.
It took them longer than they would have wished to get the blades out of him. Mr. Grell knew a lot about taking care of wounds and he patched Edward up as best he could.
“How did you find me?”
Romana smiled, “Septimus had a spell. He can see things far away.”
“Well,” Mr. Grell interrupted. “If ten feet or so is far away, but we just started driving around. He never did see you, but he saw your monster through the wall, and we knew you were here.”
Edward wanted to smile, but he was just in too much pain. They put him in the ship, lying on his back. They took what they could fit from the books and paperwork in Jenny’s office, but there wasn’t room for much.
Septimus sat there on the console, near the front. He stank of brimstone.
“You look like you’ve had it worse than me. Who got you? Was it the aliens?” Septimus asked.
“No..uh…” Edward started laughing sadly and weakly, “Ex-girlfriend’s husband…”
18
Romana and Septimus piloted the ship back to Massachusetts while Edward slept. She, Septimus, and Mr. Grell had come up with a plan. They needed a building that the devil could cast a spell on to make it hide. Romana had assumed Edward lived in the house where she had met him.
As they climbed out, Romana noticed the back yard was decorated with a circle of statues: humans, an alien, a devil. She understood what she was looking at. Edward had created them.
The front door wouldn’t open, but the back door did. The paint was cracked and falling off. As she walked in, two bunny rabbits sat there, as if they had been waiting the whole time. As it turned out, the house was still infested with dozens of them… that, at least, hadn’t changed.
One couch remained in the living room. They lay Edward down on it.
When he could, Edward asked, “Where are we?”
“Back in your house,” Romana answered him.
“It isn’t my house,” Edward argued, not getting up or looking around.
“Where’s the owner?”
“She… she’s a statue.”
“She must be one of the ones in the garden,” Mr. Grell spoke up, as he walked into the room.
“I… I wasn’t trying to steal the house or anything. She attacked me.”
“We’re gonna hide here for a while, until we understand what’s going on,” Romana explained.
Edward saw one of the rabbits hopping past. That brought a smile to his face.
“Okay,” Edward forced himself to sit up. It looked like he had been bandaged up really well. “Just so you know, we’re a secret organization called the Brontosaurus Pluto Society now. I mean, if anyone asks…”
“Okay, fearless leader,” Romana smiled as she patted his head.
Septimus took a look around. He could use the shelter spell to hide the house. They could even fix it and make it worth living in, but he worried about the humans. He’d seen all of this before. He expected that Romana and Edward would soon convince themselves they were in love. That was obvious enough. But then, they’d both get hungrier and hungrier for power. Neither of them had what it took to resist the magic.