The Wizard of Ooze

by David Farland

  “Well, if there are more humans like you, then in my mind, they must be great indeed. I’m grateful to have known you, Benjamin Ravenspell.”

  “Thank you,” Ben said, and his stomach growled. He had not eaten in a long time, and it had been growing colder all night. The fire was nearly dead. Ben looked around, wondering what there might be to eat.

  He heard a rattling sound in a stand of grass nearby, and suddenly a few oat seeds came bouncing out of the darkness to land at Ben’s feet.

  Ben peered at them in astonishment, and instantly he had two realizations. First, that Thorn must have been reading his mind in order to know that Ben was hungry. And second, that Thorn had used some sort of mystical new powers to make the seeds bounce to his feet.

  Suddenly the seeds lifted into the air, and hung there just in front of Ben’s face. Ben’s eyes widened in surprise, and he fell backward in astonishment.

  “You’re moving those with your mind!” Ben cried.

  “It’s not so hard,” Thorn said. “The mind uses energy to think, and I’m just transferring it—using my brain to lift the seeds.”

  “Levitation!” Ben realized. Now that he thought about it, he’d seen such things before—on every science fiction show he’d ever watched. That was the ultimate test of a person’s intelligence—you had to be able to move things with your mind alone.

  “Wow,” Ben said, peering at Thorn. “You really are smart!”

  “You have no idea,” Thorn said with a grin. He looked off into the darkness. “Tell the others good-bye for me,” Thorn whispered. “I hate saying good-byes.”

  “Where are you going?” Ben asked.

  “Exploring,” Thorn said. “The multiverse is full of strange places and grand adventures. If you’re lucky, maybe someday I’ll come back and take you with me.”

  And with that, Thorn stepped away from the fire and turned toward the darkness. There was a sudden flash of light, and Ben saw what looked like a tunnel open in the darkness. At the far end of the tunnel, he could see another world where three pink suns were rising above fields of purple grass, and great birds that shone like lightning hurtled across the skies.

  Thorn took a few eager hops and stopped just inside the tunnel to preen in the sunlight. As he did, the black tunnel collapsed, and Thorn was gone from view.

  Gone to a world that I can never reach, Ben realized, feeling a pang of regret.

  Chapter 26

  THE HOMECOMING

  There’s no place like home.

  —DOROTHY

  Enormous fireballs shot out of it, each of them trailing a brilliant rainbow.

  It was with a deepening sense of loss that Amber crossed the Cascade Mountains, flying high on the back of a goose. Thorn was gone, and even though Ben tried to explain to her what had happened, Amber just didn’t understand.

  Thorn had left her, and soon Ben would leave her too.

  She watched the landscape float past below, and everything seemed to be moving. The green pine trees and ponds floated down below her, and high cirrus clouds floated above. They rode over snowcapped mountain ridges, where stiff winds blew motes of ice into the air, and Amber saw a glorious rainbow cast over the land.

  Everything was moving, and only Amber seemed to be standing still, wanting the world to stay much as it was.

  “Maybe I don’t want to take over the world,” she said at long last to no one in particular.

  “Are you sure?” Bushmaster asked.

  Amber gazed down at the spindrift rising off of the mountain, almost like a long finger of ice, touching the rainbow. “It seems to me that we should just enjoy the world,” Amber said. “How can you enjoy it when you’re always afraid of it, when you’re always trying to make it do what you want? Maybe we should just learn to admire it.”

  That felt right to her. She knew now that she didn’t really want to take over the world. If she did, she’d be no better than Nightwing had been or the thunder worms.

  Amber wanted to be better than that.

  “Most of the time, enjoying the world is probably good enough,” Bushmaster said. “But once in a while, you have to do something to make it better.”

  Amber was silent for a long time after that. Bushmaster was right, too, she decided.

  She watched the Willamette Valley come into view. Ahead of her, the mountains fell away, and the deep green forests came to an end. The land was parceled out into fields—the emerald green of rye grass, and the darker purple-green of mint, and the deep blue-green of Christmas tree farms.

  The McKenzie River shone like a silver ribbon in its midst, and here and there were the bright dots of houses—white and yellow, pink and blue.

  Every few moments, Amber would peer at Ben from the corner of her eye.

  He stared down at the Willamette Valley ahead, with its spring-green fields shining in the sun, and there was a longing in his eyes that she’d never seen before. He was eager to be home.

  But as they neared Dallas, Ben suddenly cried out, “Oh, no!” and his jaw fell open in dismay.

  Amber looked down. She could see lots of vehicles below, blue trucks with silver circles on them, parked along the road, but she wasn’t sure what she was looking at.

  “Those are like military trucks!” Ben said. He mouthed the words, “APE—Americans Protecting Earth.” He pointed to a silver tower that Amber thought looked a lot like some type of long mushroom. “And that’s a missile!” Ben shouted, “like the one that almost blew us up. It’s pointed toward my house!”

  Amber could see lots of people down below her on the road. There were crowds of soldiers all dressed in camouflage, but there were other people too.

  “Down there!” Ben said. “Let’s go down there and find out what’s happening.”

  Amber ordered her goose to drop in a nearby field, and for the next hour the mice made their way through a riot of tall green grass, until they reached the road.

  By then, the sun was going down, and in the gloom, the humans began to turn up lights.

  Up ahead of them was the missile aimed at an angle, and a nearby van had a satellite dish on top. There were bright lights everywhere, and a woman in a red dress stood talking to some man who had a machine in front of him.

  “Over there,” Ben said, indicating the woman. “That’s a camera crew for the six o’clock news. Let’s see what’s going on.”

  The mice hopped up to the edge of the road in the darkness, and Amber saw a television monitor that showed pictures of mice, great herds of mice, making their way down an empty road, all of them marching through town, toward Ben’s house.

  The human woman was talking. A fat man stood beside her wearing the same camouflage green as the soldiers, and Amber suddenly found herself wishing that she could understand human speech.

  The woman had golden hair and wore a dark-blue skirt and blazer. She smiled at the camera. “I’m Tracy Jones, of Channel 3 News, here with General Ira Crawley of APE, Americans Protecting Earth,” the reporter said. “General Crawley, you have television monitors in the streets of Dallas, Oregon. Can you describe for us what we’re seeing?”

  The general nodded toward the monitors, where herds of ragged mice were trundling into the woods. The camera moved upward to focus on a vole sitting on a fencepost, holding a spear made from a needle. Amber recognized the vole.

  It was Meadowsweet. She stood above the mice, squeaking. “Come join us,” Meadowsweet was shouting. “Everyone is welcome. Queen Amber welcomes you. Come to peace and safety. Come to a land where you can live without fear. Come make your homes with us. We welcome you all!”

  General Crawley began to give his own version. “What we’re seeing, Tracy,” General Crawley said, “is an alien invasion. Mice—alien mice—have landed on our planet and are arming our native mice.”

  “Do you think there’s a danger to humans?” Tracy asked.

  “From these nutcase vermin?” Crawley said. “Not much. We’re gonna bomb their hairy tail ends back into t
he Stone Age. They won’t even know what hit ’em.”

  “And what kind of weapons will you use?”

  The general smiled. “A one-hundred-megaton nuclear bomb. The president himself has authorized its use.”

  The reporter looked up worriedly. “Uh, aren’t we kind of close to the proposed blast site? I mean, don’t we need to be at least ten miles away?”

  “Yeah,” General Crawley said. “It ought to look real pretty from here.”

  “But aren’t you afraid of the nuclear fallout?” the reporter asked, her voice going shrill.

  “Woman,” General Crawley said with a superior sneer. “I’m the Big APE, and I’m a Texan. I ain’t afraid of nothing.”

  “But, but, what about the houses in Dallas?” the reporter asked. “What about the people?”

  “People are all evacuated, ma’am,” Crawley said. “And as for the houses, in a few minutes, there ain’t gonna be any. We have to vaporize these mice. Some of the aliens have technology, dangerous technology that we don’t understand. When we’re done here, all we’ll have left is a big ol’ crater. And when it fills up, they’re gonna call it ‘Lake Crawley.’ I expect that folks will be waterskiing on it by July.”

  The camera pulled down again to show the herds of mice.

  The mice must have heard about me, Amber realized. They heard about how I was going to take over the world, and now they’re coming to me, looking for protection.

  Suddenly, Amber saw a mouse that she recognized among the herd. It was a large mouse, old and lame, toddling along.

  “Barley Beard!” she shouted. But the old mouse just kept moving. Apparently, though she could see him on the television monitor, he could neither see nor hear her.

  “Do you know him?” Ben asked.

  “He was my teacher until the humans took him away,” Amber said, struggling to see through the tears of joy that now blinded her. “I thought that he was dead, that he’d been used as food for snakes or lizards, like everyone else I ever knew.”

  Amber choked up and began weeping for joy.

  “Maybe there are others still alive,” Ben said hopefully, “like your mom, or some of your brothers and sisters.”

  Amber had never imagined such a thing. From the moment Ben had tried to feed her to his monitor lizard, she had imagined that all of the rest of her family members had met the same fate.

  Could she dare hope that some of them were alive?

  If they were, she’d have to go find them.

  But she looked at the vast herd of mice and knew that maybe she wouldn’t have to hunt for her family at all. Maybe her mother and friends would come looking for her.

  This changes everything, Amber suddenly realized. I can’t go with Ben. Not if there is a chance that my family is still out there.

  And as she studied the herd of migrating mice, she knew that whether her brothers or sisters or mother or father were alive or not, she did have a family. It included all of the mice on the television monitor, and millions more that she couldn’t see.

  Amber was a mouse, and she no longer wished to be anything else.

  Even if it meant losing Ben.

  All of the humans were looking off to the west, where the town of Dallas lay dark and quiet beneath the falling night.

  “Amber,” Ben said. “Make it so that humans can understand me. I want to talk to them!”

  “Okay,” Amber said, and it was done.

  Ben walked up behind the crowd, and no one seemed to notice. He crawled toward the reporter, lost in a forest of humans, their tall legs rising above him like tree trunks.

  In a moment, he stood next to the reporter.

  Someone said, “Hey, there’s a mouse!” and the announcement was followed by a woman’s scream.

  Ben went leaping toward the reporter, and she shrieked and pulled away. The microphone that had been pinned to the lapel of her coat came loose and dropped to the ground. Ben rushed over to it, and peered down.

  He was nervous, and he didn’t quite know what to say, but he began talking as loudly as he could. “Amber?” he asked. “Amber can you hear me?”

  From across the road, Amber squeaked, “Yes! I hear you.”

  “Amber, can you turn that missile into fireworks?”

  “Sure,” Amber said, suddenly realizing what he was up to. But she worried about doing it. Transforming one thing into another took a lot of magical energy.

  General Crawley suddenly screamed like a madman and leapt toward Ben, shouting, “I’m gonna stomp your ugly guts right into the ground!”

  Amber whirled and looked up at the television monitor. She could see the scene better from there.

  Suddenly the general hopped into the air, and all two hundred pounds of him were falling toward Ben. In a second, the general’s boots would flatten the mouse.

  Amber had no choice. She turned the general into a worm.

  General Crawley landed on the ground with a wet splat, and lay on the cement, stunned.

  The camera focused on him, enlarging the image. Crawley was a night crawler, a big one.

  Amber felt a twinge of guilt. She had just cast another transmogrification spell, and she knew it had used a tremendous amount of magical energy. Each time she did that, it was draining her of power, making it less and less likely that she’d be able to turn Ben back into a human.

  “I’m sorry, Ben,” she said.

  But Ben just looked down at the huge, sticky night crawler, and said, “You know, I think being a worm is too good for him. Turn him into a dung beetle.”

  Amber hesitated. Doing so might drain more of her magical energy.

  But then Ben looked up at her, and she realized by the solemn look in his eyes that he didn’t really care. He must have known that she didn’t really want to be a human.

  And maybe he had realized that he wasn’t really a mouse, at least not on the inside. His shape didn’t really matter. He had more courage than any mouse Amber had ever seen. More courage, probably, than most humans possessed.

  Amber pointed a finger, and General Crawley turned into a dung beetle. He instantly began wandering on the highway looking for dung.

  The cameras caught it all. Maybe every human in the world saw what Amber had just done.

  Amber’s tail suddenly felt heavy and lethargic, as if it were made of rubber. She was nearly out of magical energy.

  Now Ben peered up into the camera, and in a tiny voice said, “My name is Benjamin Ravenspell. I used to be a human, but I’m a mouse now, and we mice just want you to leave us alone. So there’s a new law. From now on, ‘Be nice to mice!’”

  For just a moment, Ben stared up at the camera. “Mom, Dad,” he said, “I miss you. I’ll be home soon. I’ve been able to save people’s lives and stuff—mice lives, anyway. And I think that’s important. I think they want to live just as much as people do. So I’m going to stay with them for a little bit more. I’ll come home someday soon, but not right now.

  “As for the rest of you people, we’re not aliens. But I’m going to teach mice how to use spears and stuff, so they can protect themselves. There are a lot of mice in pet shops all over the world. They’re being fed to snakes and lizards and stuff, and so me and the other mice are going to come and set them free. If you don’t like that—tough.

  “You know, you could just save us all some trouble. Free the mice in your pet shops. Free the mice, now!”

  There was a cry from the crowd of a humans. A woman shouted, “Ben? Ben? It’s me, your mom!”

  She came running from the crowd wearing a green dress. Mona Ravenspell had her hair curled and was wearing fresh lipstick.

  Ben’s mouth dropped. “Mom,” he said. “What happened? I hardly recognized you!”

  Mona came and knelt down in front of Ben. “Please forgive me!” she begged. “I’m sorry I sucked you up in the vacuum cleaner. Can you ever forgive me? Just come home. I don’t care if you’re a mouse. You can bring your friends to live with us. I just want you home.”
/>   Ben stared up at his mother and fought back a tear. He wiped it away with the back of a paw.

  Now is the time, Amber thought. Now I should turn him back into a human.

  But suddenly the ground shook all around Ben, and then the pavement on the road buckled upward as an enormous worm poked his head from the ground.

  He reared up above Ben like a cobra, his purple skin pitted and burned.

  “Not so fast,” Fluke Gutcrawler growled.

  Then he burst into song.

  Moonlight shines upon the meadow

  And upon the garden green—

  Amber knew what he was trying to do. She slapped her paws over her ears and began to scream so she couldn’t hear him.

  But everywhere, all across the land, the television monitors showed the image of mice turning toward Fluke Gutcrawler, their eyes filled with tears of hope, their mouths going slack, mindlessly following the sound of his song.

  Come, sweet mice, and taste the harvest,

  Come to the garden of your dreams.

  Nectar pools in silver flowers,

  Sweeter than a winding stream.

  Drink and thirst no more forever,

  In the wellspring of your dreams.

  Mona Ravenspell saw Ben’s head turn up, saw all of the light and intelligence drain from his eyes as he gazed upon the worm, mesmerized.

  For his part, the great worm was not content to be there on the ground. He looked as if he wanted to be up high, some place where he could lord it over the rest of the world.

  And so he raised his snout to the heavens, stretching up and up, until he found himself twisting around the shaft of the huge missile, coiling around it like a snake, then climbing quickly until he stood at its top.

  Weary is the way before you.

  Nothing’s as easy as it seems.

  Give me your life, your love, your labor.

  Abandon now your hopes, your dreams.

  Fluke Gutcrawler peered down at the humans and mice that were huddled before him. “Bow to me!” he shouted. “Bow to me, and I shall be your leader. I will free you from the yoke of bondage, free you from the evil Alaskan bull worms!”