Magic, Madness, and Mischief

by Kelly McCullough

  I selected a couple of two-by-fours, some screws, a battery-powered drill with a screw bit, and a battery-powered jigsaw—the reciprocating saw was probably a better tool for what I wanted, but it scared me. Picking up the saw and the drill, I headed back to the house. This was going to take a couple of trips.

  “You know how to use all that stuff?” Sparx sounded amazed. “I thought you were more of a book nerd.”

  “Free School. For graduation we have to prove we can do stuff in a bunch of areas, like life skills. We need to take at least one life skills class every semester. I’ve taken shop, sewing, intro to metalworking, cooking … At first some of it’s scary, especially the stuff with power tools, but in the end it’s all applied thinking”—my shop teacher’s phrase. “Sure, it takes some coordination, but a lot less than you’d think going in. If you carefully work through the idea first, it all becomes a lot easier.”

  An hour later, I was sweating, and I had a giant black bruise growing under my thumbnail from where I’d slipped with the screw bit on the drill, but I had also turned the loose planks into something that looked a whole lot more like a trapdoor, and I’d done it without triggering the spell. I’d also discovered that I was going to need some more rope, a pulley, and a ring bolt … no, two. Oh, and time I didn’t have, because my mom would be home not too long from now.

  So, I finished setting things up—I found the bolts and some yellow nylon line in the garage along with a rusty old pulley. Then I put all the tools away on their little pegboard racks and closed everything, even rolling the rug out over the well cover and sliding the plywood back into place.

  As long as no one went into the crawlspace and looked really closely, I’d be fine. Actually getting into the basement was going to have to wait a bit, which was super frustrating. Especially since I didn’t even know if my idea would work. What if the planks were attached from the underside somehow? What if I wasn’t big enough or heavy enough to pull the thing up? What if? What if? What if?

  I only barely made it in time, too. The back door opened as I was crawling out of the closet for the last time.

  “Kalvan, are you home?”

  “Yeah, Mom, I’m in the dining room.” I quietly closed the closet behind me.

  A moment later, she came through from the kitchen. “Oh my, Kalvan, you’re as filthy as if you’d just dug your way out of your own grave!”

  “Huh?” I looked down and realized I was covered in dust and cobwebs, and the knees of my jeans were ragged from crawling across the concrete. “Oh, uh…” I glanced guiltily at the line of footprints leading back and forth from the closet. “I…”

  “Take those shoes off before you move another step! Then, into the shower. You can throw your sneakers into the washing machine with the rest and start it running when you get out. In the meantime, I need to get this cleaned up before Oscar gets home.” She turned her eyes on Sparx. “You too. You’re covered in filth.”

  Sparx rocked back onto his haunches. “I’m kind of allergic to showers, actually.”

  “Then go flare it all off. But NOT in my house—I abhor the smell of burning dust. Move, both of you!”

  “It still doesn’t strike you as the least bit odd that he’s a rabbit that talks?” I asked.

  Sparx rolled his eyes. “Hare.”

  My mother shook her head. “Why would it? He’s very articulate—and much more polite than the vacuum cleaner is going to be about this mess. Now, scat.”

  As I stuffed my dirty clothes into the washer—our laundry closet opened into the downstairs bathroom—I turned to look at Sparx. “Do you think our vacuum can talk?” I was pretty sure I knew the answer, but maybe I was wrong.

  “With the right enchantment it’s not impossible, I suppose. But … well, where do you keep it?”

  “It’s in the closet off Mom’s office.”

  “Not in that basement?”

  I shook my head. “No, definitely not.”

  Sparx sighed and looked more than a little sad. “Then, no, your vacuum doesn’t talk. There is nothing in your house this side of those wards that bears an enchantment of that magnitude. I’d feel it.” He paused for several heartbeats before going on. “I’m sorry. I know that you worry about her and…”

  I felt a bit like someone had punched me in the chest. “It’s not your fault. She’s always been that way. I … no, forget it.” I didn’t want to talk to anyone about how protective I felt of my mom, not even Sparx. “Look, you’d better get cleaned up, too.” I leaned over the counter and cranked the window open a few inches so he could get in and out, then climbed into the shower and turned it as high and hot as it would go.

  When I was done, I found a very clean-looking hare by the sink, sitting atop a pile of fresh clothes. After pressing start on the washer, I got dressed. There was a plate of fruit and cheese waiting for me in the kitchen. The door to Mom’s office was cracked open, which was an invitation to stick my head in, so I picked up the plate and stepped through the door.

  Mom’s office had once been the house’s smallest bedroom. Now it had two desks and six filing cabinets crammed into it. Three computers with five monitors between them took up most of the available desk space. My mom was staring intently at a huge spreadsheet on the largest of the monitors.

  I settled in with my back against the door as I ate a piece of cheese. “How was your day?”

  “It’s very nearly there,” she replied. “The 990 isn’t tying out to the audit, mainly because FASB 116 and 117 require funds to show in the year the pledge is made, so they’re reflected on the restricted income statement but not the program income in the 990.”

  “You realize that makes no sense in English,” I observed.

  “Uh-huh. And the related costs mean the functional expenses appear overstated in management and administration, which is going to put the program expense below standard ratio.”

  I sighed, gave her a quick over-the-shoulders hug, and exited stage right. Mom was deep in the land of focus, where very little existed outside whatever problem she was working on. I didn’t understand a word of it, but the few times I’d met people she worked with, I’d been assured she was absolutely brilliant at her job. I didn’t doubt it. She might be kind of disconnected from reality, but I’d always known she was one of the smartest people I’d ever met.

  Sparx hopped up on my bedside table. “How often does she get like that?”

  “All the time. But do you know what the most frustrating part is?”

  “No idea.”

  “If I were to go back in there and tell her all about my day, it would seem like she wasn’t hearing a word I was saying right up until I accused her of not listening. Then she’d be able to recite back everything I said nearly word for word.” We’d had a couple of screaming arguments about it over the years—well, I was screaming anyway.

  “So, she is actually listening?”

  “No, I don’t think so. Not like you or I listen, anyway. I think it all goes in through her ears and straight into her memory without her even noticing it passing through. I’m pretty sure if no one called her on it, she’d never know it was there. It’s only when you ask that she hits the mental playback button. It drives me crazy.”

  “Short trip.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Like I haven’t heard that before.”

  * * *

  The fire burned without consuming. I stood in the midst of a garden of flame, with a million candlelight flowers dancing madly around me. Reds and yellows dominated, but there were also blues and greens and brilliant purples. The cavern of the Free School’s oversize theater bloomed bright and hot—Dante’s inferno in a nutshell.

  I stood center stage, the star of a play whose lines I couldn’t remember to save my soul. And that was the wager: my soul against the fires. Evelyn sat in the front row, burning brightly and mouthing the words I so desperately wanted to say. But when I tried to read her lips, I realized that she was speaking English and I knew only the language of fire.<
br />
  I started forward, hoping to see better, but the orchestra pit suddenly opened into a yawning void before my feet, a void filled with the same malice I had felt beneath the capitol. It hungered and it hated and it had me in its sights. Leaping back, I stumbled and fell, striking my head on the stage so that the fires spun and doubled and I thought I might throw up.

  Rolling to the side, I fell out of my bed and landed hard on hands and knees. When I forced myself to my feet, I felt the harsh rutching of soot under my heels and toes. Again my dreams of fire had spilled into the waking world. A tiny hiss of indrawn breath drew my attention to the big drawers in my captain’s bed. Pulling the nearer one open, I exposed the nest I had made for Sparx. In it, the hare twitched and kicked like a cat caught in a nightmare. Gently, I touched his shoulder.

  Sparx woke with a sharp jerk and whipped his head up to look at me. “Your dreams are deep and dark—a snare for the unwary familiar.”

  It was the first time he’d used that word, though I recognized it from a hundred fantasy novels. “Is that what you are now? The familiar to my boy witch?”

  “Half a familiar, at any rate, to go with being half summoned.”

  “So, you saw my dreams. Did you see this as well?” I raised a foot to show him the soot that covered the sole.

  The hare blinked several times, then reached up and touched a paw to my big toe. “Now, isn’t that interesting … Makes me wonder.”

  “Wonder what?”

  “Whether you are walking in dreams or they are stalking you in our world.” He sniffed at his paw and then flipped his ears backward and forward in a sort of shrug. “No answers here. Nothing of dreams, and little of magic.” He rolled onto his back feet. “Hey, now that everyone’s asleep, what do you say we take another crack at that basement?”

  I thought about it for a while. “All right.”

  I’d taken to leaving a towel tucked into the dead space between Sparx’s drawer and the head of the bed. It was a good place to hide things and surprisingly roomy—I used to crawl in there myself and pull the drawer in behind me when I was five or six and wanted to get away from the world—I’ve always needed a lot of time alone. I like people, but when my brain gets to spinning, I need to get away from everyone and everything and distract myself. Now I used the already sooty towel to clean my feet.

  Dressing quickly, I brought the towel along as we slipped into the crawlspace under the house. We’d already cleared much of the filth out with our earlier comings and goings, and I used the towel to finish up the job now.

  It took about ten minutes to get the plywood out of the way quietly and the ropes and pulley in place, and then it was time to—SKREEEEEEEECH! I dropped the rope like it had turned into a snake in my hands.

  “Sparx, run up the stairs and listen for Oscar and Mom, quick! Warn me if you hear them coming.” The hare bolted for the trapdoor while I yanked the pulley off the ring bolt I’d put in for it.

  That went on top of the ductwork, and then I dropped down into the well to roll the carpet back over the hatch. I didn’t know if my attempt to lift it had woken up my mom and Oscar, but I had a hard time imagining a world where anyone with a pulse could have missed it. Heck, I had a hard time imagining a world where that wouldn’t wake up a few folks of the pulseless variety. Fortunately, the nearest graveyard was a couple of blocks away, so I wouldn’t have troubling the dead on my conscience.

  A fire flower bloomed in the air above me, and Sparx’s voice spoke out of it. “There’s someone moving around up here, you need to get OUT.”

  10

  Long Day’s Bunny into Night

  I CLIMBED OUT of the well so fast I skinned my palm on the rope, and then I had to pause while I shoved the rope on top of the duct with the pulley. After that I scrambled like mad back to the closet, scuffing my injured palm painfully in the process. As I climbed out of the crawlspace, I heard heavy footsteps on the stairs overhead.

  With my heart clawing its way up into my throat, I closed the trapdoor as quietly as possible and practically teleported from there to the front of the closet. But it was too late. By the time I got out into the dining room, I could already hear the doorknob between the stairs and the living room starting to turn. That’s it, I was dead.

  I froze, trying to decide if it would be better to pretend I was on my way back from the bathroom in jeans and a T-shirt, or if I should just sprint for my bed and hope Oscar didn’t hear or see me. Dead. The knob finished turning … and the door clunked but didn’t open. My heart started beating again.

  Thank God for converted duplexes! Someone had locked the inner door—as sometimes happened. From the other side I heard Oscar curse. I didn’t know if he had his keys with him or would need to go back up or around, and I didn’t care. I was going to live! Tiptoeing frantically, I crossed the three yards to my bedroom door, slipped through, and then skinned out of my clothes before slipping into my bed.

  The door to the living room rattled again, and then I heard Oscar stomp back up the front stairs. He crossed above the dining room like a grumpy elephant and then came down the back stairs. A minute or so later, he poked his head into my room. I held perfectly still and concentrated on breathing slowly and deeply while I ignored the pain in my hand.

  After a little while, the door to my bedroom closed. Other doors opened and shut, including the living room, and I had plenty of time to pray that Oscar wouldn’t look into the crawlspace and notice the plywood out of place. Then, Oscar clomped back to bed without even opening the closet.

  With a little sigh of relief I peeled back the covers and found my pajamas—I’d have to wait until he was good and asleep to go clean up my skinned palm. I was just settling in again when Sparx returned, hopping up on the bed beside me where I could see him by the dim glow of the streetlight out front.

  “Lucky that door was locked,” I said quietly.

  “Lucky like a rabbit’s foot.” Sparx grinned, blew on the nails of a front paw, and then buffed it on the fur of his chest. “Also that it was an easy bolt. By the way, you’re welcome.”

  “Huh … oooooh. Thank you! That was too close.”

  “So, what now?”

  I shrugged. “We’ll have to wait until we can get the house to ourselves for a couple of hours. And after blowing off all my classes yesterday, I won’t be able to manage that till next week at the earliest. If I miss too much class, I’ll be in a world of hurt. Sometimes being thirteen is the absolute pits.”

  * * *

  “Hey, Kalvan, time to get up.” I felt a gentle hand on my shoulder.

  “Huh?” I blinked my eyes blearily open and found my mother leaning over me. “Wazzup?”

  “Sorry to wake you early, but I’m taking you in to school today.”

  “Okay…” I’d thought Oscar was doing that. “When?”

  “As soon as you can get dressed. I’ll probably be a little late as it is.”

  I felt a churning dread start up somewhere around my stomach. “Did something happen?”

  “There’s some problem with a big interchange Oscar helped design, and he needs to get it fixed no later than yesterday.”

  “Is he going to be gone?” That would be fantastic—the perfect opportunity to get into the basement!

  “No, it’s all design phase stuff. He said he’ll be holed up in the basement and keeping weird hours for the next two to three weeks. He actually grabbed one of the cots and a sleeping bag and hauled them down there so he wouldn’t be in any danger of waking me when he gets up to tinker with the models. Now, you’d better get dressed.”

  And then she was gone.

  Sparx poked his head out of his drawer. “That’s not good.”

  “No.” Oscar might not have caught us, but he was suspicious now. There was definitely more to him than I’d ever expected, and I doubted any of it was good.

  * * *

  School can be a gigantic pain in the butt on the adventures front. Even at the Free School there’s only so much clas
s you can safely skip, and I was deep into the danger zone. I’m really, really smart. I know it’s not modest or properly Minnesotan to come right out and say that, but it’s true, and it’s part of why I can get away with as much as I do with my teachers. They all complain about me not working up to my potential. But, because I can mostly learn the material even when I’m being a lazy jerk—and, if I’m being honest, that’s way too much of the time—they cut me a lot of slack.

  But that line was tight now, and I had to buckle down and actually work for a while to get back on the right side of my tests and assignments. I spent most of the three weeks that Oscar camped out in the basement going to all my classes and even doing some of the homework in my free periods, and at the end of it, I was almost back on top of things on the school side.

  On the magic side of things, Sparx had me practicing firetongue using the rhyme I’d saved him with and a few others. He also began to teach me the written form of the language, which was incredibly complex, as each word had its own ideogram, like Chinese, instead of constructing words from letters.

  It was slightly less boring than learning how NOT to do magic, which was the main thing he wanted me to practice. That involved a lot of sitting still and listening to my breathing and other things that gave my mind too much time and room to gnaw on itself. Okay, Kalvan, I’m going to throw this smoke ring at you, and I want you NOT to blast it with fire. Just let it wash over you. Okay, maybe it wasn’t quite that bad, but I was terrible at that part of things.

  It was all suuuuuper frustrating, and I wanted to bang my head on things and chew through the walls after a couple of weeks of it. Instead, I headed for the library after having lunch with Dave, because I had fourth period free on Tuesdays and I needed to keep on grinding. But ten minutes into my math homework, I’d had it.

  “I hate this!”

  Aleta was a couple of tables away, and she gave me a very stern look. “Kalvan, hush.”