Under My Hat: Tales from the Cauldron

by Jonathan Strahan

  I was standing outside the gymnasium as the last class of the day let out, leaning against the wall on my elbows, my feet crossed at the heels, my head hanging down, my wheeled bucket and mop standing unused a good seven feet away—pretty much the picture of an industrious janitor. The kids went hurrying by in a rowdy herd, with Irwin’s tormentors being the last to leave the gym. I felt their eyes on me as they went past, but I didn’t react to them.

  Coach Vogon came out last, flicking out the banks of fluorescent lights as he went, his footsteps brisk and heavy. He came to a dead stop as he came out of the door and found me waiting for him.

  There was a long moment of silence while he sized me up. I let him. I wasn’t looking for a fight, and I had taken the deliberately relaxed and nonconfrontational stance I was in to convey that concept to him. I figured he was connected to the supernatural world, but I didn’t know how connected he might be. Hell, I didn’t even know if he was human.

  Yet.

  “Don’t you have work to do?” he demanded.

  “Doing it,” I said. “I mean, obviously.”

  I couldn’t actually hear his eyes narrow, but I was pretty sure they did. “You got a lot of nerve, buddy, talking to an instructor like that.”

  “If there weren’t all these kids around, I might have said another syllable or two,” I drawled. “Coach Vogon.”

  “You’re about to lose your job, buddy. Get to work or I’ll report you for malingering.”

  “Malingering,” I said. “Four whole syllables. You’re good.”

  He rolled another step toward me and jabbed a finger into my chest. “Buddy, you’re about to buy a lot of trouble. Who do you think you are?”

  “Harry Dresden,” I said. “Wizard.”

  And I looked at him as I opened my Sight.

  A wizard’s Sight is an extra sense, one that allows him to perceive the patterns of energy and magic that suffuse the universe—energy that includes every conceivable form of magic. It doesn’t actually open a third eye in your forehead or anything, but the brain translates the perceptions into the visual spectrum. In the circles I run in, the Sight shows you things as they truly are, cutting through every known form of veiling magic, illusion, and other mystic chicanery.

  In this case, it showed me that the thing standing in front of me wasn’t human.

  Beneath its illusion, the spindly humanoid creature stood a little more than five feet high, and it might have weighed a hundred pounds soaking wet. It was naked, and anatomically it resembled a Ken doll. Its skin was a dark gray, its eyes absolutely huge, bulbous, and midnight black. It had a rounded, high-crowned head and long, delicately pointed ears. I could still see the illusion of Coach Pete around the creature, a vague and hazy outline.

  It lowered the lids of its bulbous eyes, the gesture somehow exceptionally lazy, and then nodded slowly. It inclined its head the smallest measurable amount possible and murmured, in a melodious and surprisingly deep voice, “Wizard.”

  I blinked a few times and waved my Sight away, so that I was facing Coach Pete again. “We should talk,” I said.

  The apparent man stared at me unblinkingly, his expression as blank as a discarded puppet’s. It was probably my imagination that made his eyes look suddenly darker. “Regarding?”

  “Irwin Pounder,” I said. “I would prefer to avoid a conflict with Svartalfheim.”

  He inhaled and exhaled slowly through his nose. “You recognized me.”

  In fact, I’d been making an educated guess, but the svartalf didn’t need to know that. I knew precious little about the creatures. They were extremely gifted craftsmen, and were responsible for creating most of the really cool artifacts of Norse myth. They weren’t wicked, exactly, but they were ruthless, proud, stubborn, and greedy, which often added up to similar results. They were known to be sticklers for keeping their word, and God help you if you broke yours to them. Most important, they were a small supernatural nation unto themselves: one that protected its citizens with maniacal zeal.

  “I had a good teacher,” I said. “I want your boys to lay off Irwin Pounder.”

  “Point of order,” he said. “They are not mine. I am not their progenitor. I am a guardian only.”

  “Be that as it may,” I said, “my concern is for Irwin, not the brothers.”

  “He is a whetstone,” he said. “They sharpen their instincts upon him. He is good for them.”

  “They aren’t good for him,” I said. “Fix it.”

  “It is not my place to interfere with them,” Coach Pete said. “Only to offer indirect guidance and to protect them from anyone who would interfere with their growth.”

  The last phrase was as emotionless as the first, but it somehow carried an ugly ring of a threat—a polite threat, but a threat nonetheless.

  Sometimes I react badly to being threatened. I might have glared a little.

  “Hypothetically,” I said, “let’s suppose that I saw those boys giving Irwin a hard time again, and I made it my business to stop them. What would you do?”

  “Slay you,” Coach Pete said. His tone was utterly absent of any doubt.

  “Awfully sure of yourself, aren’t you.”

  He spoke as if reciting a single-digit arithmetic problem. “You are young. I am not.”

  I felt my jaw clench, and forced myself to take a slow breath, to stay calm. “They’re hurting him.”

  “Be that as it may,” he said calmly, “my concern is for the brothers, not for Irwin Pounder.”

  I ground my teeth and wished I could pick my words out of them before continuing the conversation. “We’ve both stated our positions,” I said. “How do we resolve the conflict?”

  “That also is not my concern,” he said. “I will not dissuade the brothers. I will slay you should you attempt to do so yourself. There is nothing else to discuss.”

  He shivered a little, and suddenly the illusion of Coach Pete seemed to gain a measure of life, of definition, like an empty glove abruptly filled by the flesh of a hand.

  “If you will excuse me,” he said, in Coach Pete’s annoying tone of voice, walking past me, “I have a detention over which to preside.”

  “To preside over,” I said, and snorted at his back. “Over which to preside. No one actually talks like that.”

  He turned his head and gave me a flat-eyed look. Then he rounded a corner and was gone.

  I rubbed at the spot on my forehead between my eyebrows and tried to think.

  I had a bad feeling that fighting this guy was going to be a losing proposition. In my experience, when someone gets their kids a supernatural supernanny, they don’t pick pushovers. Among wizards, I’m pretty buff—but the world is full of bigger fish than me. More to the point, even if I fought the svartalf and won, it might drag the White Council of Wizards into a violent clash with Svartalfheim. I wouldn’t want to have something like that on my conscience.

  I wanted to protect the Pounder kid, and I wasn’t going to back away from that. But how was I supposed to protect him from the Bully Brothers if they had a heavyweight on deck, ready to charge in swinging? That kind of brawl could spill over onto any nearby kids, and fast. I didn’t want this to turn into a slugfest. That wouldn’t help Irwin Pounder.

  But what could I do? What options did I have? How could I act without dragging the svartalf into a confrontation?

  I couldn’t.

  “Ah,” I said to no one, lifting a finger in the air. “Aha!”

  I grabbed my mop bucket and hurried toward the cafeteria.

  The school emptied out fast, making the same transition every school does every day, changing from a place full of life and energy, of movement and noise, into a series of echoing chambers and empty halls. Teachers and staff seemed as eager to be gone as the students. Good. It was still possible that things would get ugly, and if they did, the fewer people around, the better.

  By the time I went by the janitor’s closet to pick up the few tools I’d brought with me and went to the caf
eteria, my bucket’s squeaking wheels were the loudest sound I could hear. I turned the corner at almost exactly the same time as the Bully Brothers appeared from the opposite end of the hall. They drew up short, and I could feel the weight of their eyes as they assessed me. I ignored them and went on inside.

  Bigfoot Irwin was already inside the cafeteria, seated at a table, writing on a piece of paper. I recognized the kid’s rigid, resigned posture, and it made my wrist ache just to see it: Coach Pete had him writing a sentence repetitively, probably something about being more careful with his lunch tray. The monster.

  Coach Pete stood leaning against a wall, reading a sports magazine of some sort. Or at least, that was what he appeared to be doing. I had to wonder how much genuine interest a svartalf might have in the NBA. His eyes flicked up as I entered; I saw them go flat.

  I set my mop and bucket aside and started sweeping the floors with a large dust broom. My janitorial form was perfect. I saw Coach Pete’s jaw clench a couple of times, and then he walked over to me.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Sweeping the floor,” I replied, guileless as a newborn.

  “This is not a matter for levity,” he said. “No amount of it will save your life.”

  “You grossly underestimate the power of laughter,” I said. “But if there’s some kind of violent altercation between students, any janitor in the world would find it his honor-bound duty to report it to the administration.”

  Coach Pete made a growling sound.

  “Go ahead,” I said. “Let your kids loose on him. I saw how they behaved in their classrooms. They’re problem cases. Irwin’s obviously a brilliant student and a good kid. When the administration finds out the three of them were involved in a fight, what do you think happens to the Troublemaker Twins? This is a private school. Out they go. Irwin is protected—and I won’t have to lift a finger to interfere.”

  Coach Pete rolled up the magazine and tapped it against his leg a couple of times. Then he relaxed, and a small smile appeared upon his lips. “You are correct, of course, except for one thing.”

  “Yeah? What’s that?”

  “They will not be exiled. Their parents donate more funds to the school than any ten other families—and a great deal more than Irwin’s mother could ever afford.” He gave me a very small, very Gallic shrug. “This is a private school. The boys’ parents paid for the cafeteria within which we stand.”

  I found myself gritting my teeth. “First of all, you have got to get over this fetish for grammatically correct prepositions. It makes you sound like a prissy twit. And second of all, money isn’t everything.”

  “Money is power,” he replied.

  “Power isn’t everything.”

  “No,” he said, and his smile became smug. “It is the only thing.”

  I looked back out into the hallway through the open glass wall separating it from the cafeteria. The Bully Brothers were standing in the hall, staring at Irwin the way hungry lions stare at gazelles.

  Coach Pete nodded pleasantly to me and returned to his original place by the wall, unrolling his magazine and opening it again.

  “Dammit,” I whispered. The svartalf might well be right. At an upper-class institution such as this, money and politics would have a ridiculous amount of influence. Whether aristocracies were hereditary or economic, they’d been successfully buying their children out of trouble for centuries. The Bully Brothers might well come out of this squeaky clean, and they’d be able to continue to persecute Bigfoot Irwin.

  Maybe this would turn out to be a slugfest after all.

  I swept my way over to Irwin’s table and came to a stop. Then I sat down across from him.

  He looked up from his page of scrawled sentences, and his face was pale. He wouldn’t meet my eyes.

  “How you doing, kid?” I asked him. When I spoke, he actually flinched a little.

  “Fine,” he mumbled.

  Hell’s bells. He was afraid of me. “Irwin,” I said, keeping my voice gentle, “relax. I’m not going to hurt you.”

  “Okay,” he said, without relaxing a bit.

  “They’ve been doing this for a while now, haven’t they?” I asked him.

  “Um,” he said.

  “The Bully Brothers. The ones staring at you right now.”

  Irwin shivered and glanced aside without actually turning his head toward the window. “It’s not a big deal.”

  “It kind of is,” I said. “They’ve been giving you grief for a long time, haven’t they? Only lately it’s been getting worse. They’ve been scarier. More violent. Bothering you more and more often.”

  He said nothing, but something in his lack of reaction told me that I’d hit the nail on the head.

  I sighed. “Irwin, my name is Harry Dresden. Your father sent me to help you.”

  That made his eyes snap up to me, and his mouth opened. “M-my … my dad?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “He can’t be here to help you. So he asked me to do it for him.”

  “My dad,” Irwin said, and I heard the ache in his voice, so poignant that my own chest tightened in empathy. I’d never known my mother, and my father died before I started going to school. I knew what it was like to have holes in my life in the shape of people who should have been there.

  His eyes flicked toward the Bully Brothers again, though he didn’t turn his head. “Sometimes,” he said quietly, “if I ignore them, they go away.” He stared down at his paper. “My dad … I mean, I never … you met him?”

  “Yeah.”

  His voice was very small. “Is … is he nice?”

  “Seems to be,” I said gently.

  “And … and he knows about me?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “He wants to be here for you. But he can’t.”

  “Why not?” Irwin asked.

  “It’s complicated.”

  Irwin nodded and looked down. “Every Christmas there’s a present from him. But I think maybe Mom is just writing his name on the tag.”

  “Maybe not,” I said quietly. “He sent me. And I’m way more expensive than a present.”

  Irwin frowned at that and said, “What are you going to do?”

  “That isn’t the question you should be asking,” I said.

  “What is, then?”

  I put my elbows on the table and leaned toward him. “The question, Irwin, is what are you going to do?”

  “Get beat up, probably,” he said.

  “You can’t keep hoping they’ll just go away, kid,” I said. “There are people out there who enjoy hurting and scaring others. They’re going to keep doing it until you make them stop.”

  “I’m not going to fight anyone,” Irwin all but whispered.

  “I’m not going to hurt anyone. I … I can’t. And besides, if they’re picking on me, they’re not picking on anyone else.”

  I leaned back and took a deep breath, studying his hunched shoulders, his bowed head. The kid was frightened, the kind of fear that is planted and nurtured and which grows over the course of months and years. But there was also a kind of gentle, immovable resolve in the boy’s skinny body. He wasn’t afraid of facing the Bully Brothers. He just dreaded going through the pain that the encounter would bring.

  Courage, like fear, comes in multiple varieties.

  “Damn,” I said quietly. “You got some heart, kiddo.”

  “Can you stay with me?” he asked. “If … if you’re here, maybe they’ll leave me alone.”

  “Today,” I said quietly. “What about tomorrow?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Are you going away?”

  “Can’t stay here forever,” I replied. “Sooner or later you’re going to be on your own.”

  “I won’t fight,” he said. A droplet of water fell from his bowed head to smear part of a sentence on his paper. “I won’t be like them.”

  “Irwin,” I said. “Look at me.”

  He lifted his eyes. They were full. He was blinking to keep more tears
from falling.

  “Fighting isn’t always a bad thing.”

  “That’s not what the school says.”

  I smiled briefly. “The school has liability to worry about. I only have to worry about you.”

  He frowned, his expression intent, pensive. “When isn’t it a bad thing?”

  “When you’re protecting yourself, or someone else, from harm,” I said. “When someone wants to hurt you or someone who can’t defend themselves—and when the rightful authority can’t or won’t protect you.”

  “But you have to hurt people to win a fight. And that isn’t right.”

  “No,” I said. “It isn’t. But sometimes it is necessary.”

  “It isn’t necessary right now,” he said. “I’ll be fine. It’ll hurt, but I’ll be fine.”

  “Maybe you will,” I said. “But what about when they’re done with you? What happens when they decide that it was so much fun to hurt you, they go pick on someone else, too?”

  “Do you think they’ll do that?”

  “Yes,” I said. “That’s how bullies work. They keep hurting people until someone makes them stop.”

  He fiddled with the pencil in his fingers. “I don’t like fighting. I don’t even like playing Street Fighter.”

  “This isn’t really about fighting,” I said. “It’s about communication.”

  He frowned. “Huh?”

  “They’re doing something wrong,” I said. “You need to communicate with them. Tell them that what they’re doing isn’t acceptable, and that they need to stop doing it.”

  “I’ve said that,” he said. “I tried that a long time ago. It didn’t work.”

  “You talked to them,” I said. “It didn’t get through. You need to find another way to get your message through. You have to show them.”

  “You mean hurt them.”

  “Not necessarily,” I said quietly. “But guys like those two jokers only respect strength. If you show them that you have it, they’ll get the idea.”

  Irwin frowned harder. “No one ever talked to me about it like that before.”

  “I guess not,” I said.

  “I’m … I’m scared of doing that.”