Wizard for Hire

by Obert Skye

  “In front of a blind guy,” Ozzy reminded the bird.

  “Still, that’s something, and the words he used for the spell all rhymed. I think that’s impressive. Plus, he hasn’t told anyone about you.”

  “No, he’s okay. I mean, I like the guy, I’m just not sure he’s a high-level wizard. Actually, I’m not sure about wizards in general.”

  Ozzy took a big bite of his sandwich.

  “He does like breakfast for dinner.”

  “Is that really even a wizard thing, though?” Ozzy said as he chewed.

  “Sounds like it is.”

  “I’d like to know more about that Timsby guy. He’s got the name and he walked into a polar bear cage—it’s just like the tapes. And if Timsby exists, maybe we can find the other people my dad talks about.”

  “Their names were a bit more common.”

  “Still—what they did wasn’t.”

  Ozzy left the kitchen table and headed to his attic room. Clark hopped and fluttered behind him. Once they were up the stairs, Ozzy dug through the tapes and found the one he wanted. He placed it in the machine and . . . it didn’t work. The cassette player hadn’t been left in the window so it was dead.

  “I think we should get some of that electricity stuff here,” Clark tweeted. “I’d feel safer. What happens if somebody does come looking for this place?”

  “Well, I’m hoping that if they do, they search on the other side of the highway. And this is private property.”

  “How much land do you think your parents own?”

  “I don’t know. If Ed’s right, a lot.”

  “That makes me feel more important than other birds.”

  “You should already feel that way.”

  Clark smiled.

  “You know, I don’t know why you need to listen to any tapes,” Clark said. “You must have all the names your dad talked about memorized.”

  Ozzy grabbed his tablet. It was still at full power. He opened the browser and typed in the name LISA followed by INTERRUPTING STAGE PLAY and pressed enter.

  It took a few seconds, but the first link that popped up was from the New York Daily News.

  Ozzy clicked on it and read it as if it were a race to the finish. Clark sat on his shoulder doing some reading of his own.

  According to the article, Lisa was a prominent New Yorker who, thirteen years ago, had walked up onto a stage and began performing. She had no history of mental illness and she had no memory of doing it.

  “Holy nest,” Clark said with a whistle. “Think of another name.”

  Another name, another coincidence.

  “This guy was in Paris.”

  “I’ve never been,” Clark said, as if disappointed that Ozzy had never taken him there.

  “Neither have I,” Ozzy said. “Remember? But this is much more than just coincidence. We need to tell Rin.”

  “He’s probably busy eating pancakes somewhere. Besides, it’s getting dark now and I spent so much time hidden in your hoodie that my batteries are going to run down pretty soon.”

  “Well, I could go alone.”

  “Go where? Do you know where Rin lives?”

  “No. Maybe on a hill or in a cottage or in a round cottage in a hill?” Ozzy speculated.

  “Really? I imagine him in, like, a little castle.”

  “I don’t think Otter Rock has castles.”

  “It has a wizard,” Clark reminded him.

  “That’s true.”

  “I guess we’re just going to have to wait until tomorrow,” the bird reasoned, his voice beginning to slow down and deepen. “You’ve waited all these years—now it’s just a little longer because so often the more you wait the more you . . . um, I’m fading.”

  Clark closed his eyes and fell over onto the bed. The bird was out for the day. Ozzy carefully picked him up and carried him downstairs. He placed Clark in his shredded ORVG nest and then blew out the two candles that were burning in the kitchen.

  The cloaked house was dark.

  Ozzy considered sleeping. The last few days had been tiring, but sleep seemed like a foolish idea. He was uneasy now that there were people who knew the general area in which he lived. He wasn’t worried about Rin, but knowing that there were police officers who wanted to know where he was made him jittery. After all, it wasn’t like the cloaked house made him invisible. Seven years ago, five men had slipped through the trees and changed his life forever. Now, as Ozzy’s life was finally beginning to get some traction, he needed to be smart and wary of everything that could cause him further pain.

  Ozzy opened the front door and stepped down off the porch. Looking up, he saw a few stars but most of them were covered by small clouds that were lazily drifting across the dark sky.

  If life was a puzzle, then the last couple of weeks had added more pieces than Ozzy’s previous frame could fit. Each day was an expansion of the existence he once knew. Each day was bringing answers, but breeding new worries as well.

  Ozzy walked through the trees.

  It was dark, but his eyes adjusted like they always did, and the outlines and shape of everything around him became very clear.

  “Maybe I have super-sight,” he said to himself.

  Ozzy sat on a dead tree that was stretched out across the ground like a corpse in the throes of rigor mortis. He didn’t want to, but his thoughts went back to the day his parents had been taken. So many life experiences had crowded the memory out and covered up the hurt, but in a couple moments, it instantly became an intense memory again. He tried to quell that pain by imagining that his parents were somewhere safe and simply unable to get to him.

  The past was becoming more complicated—green-clad men who took people but wanted to pump their own gas, boxes sent from nowhere, someone named Timsby, Rin.

  An owl hooted from the east and Ozzy moved his thoughts from himself to Harry Potter and his owl, Hedwig. Ozzy desperately wanted to be more than he was—he wanted to be like Harry.

  “If I’m just me, then what’s the value of any of this?”

  Only the wind answered, and it didn’t say a single intelligent thing.

  Ozzy walked a wide circle around the house and listened for any intruders or disturbance, but eventually he grew tired and returned to the cabin.

  He stepped in and locked the door behind him. Then, moving carefully, he tiptoed around boxes and through the kitchen.

  His tiptoeing was pointless for two reasons. First, Clark couldn’t hear anything when he was powered off, and second, Clark wasn’t even there.

  Ozzy looked around frantically. It was dark and the nest was empty.

  “Clark! C!”

  The metal bird had never woken up without sunlight. He usually faded and then had to be taken outside the next morning and put in the light. Candles could bring him to life as well, but there wasn’t a single one burning.

  “Clark!”

  Ozzy ran through the house, looking around boxes and furniture. He climbed the starry stairs and checked his room.

  “Clark!”

  Just like the wind, the insides of the cloaked house didn’t say a single intelligent thing.

  The cloaked house felt empty. It was as if there were no boxes, no furniture, no rugs or cabinets—just a wooden shell with no feeling or warmth. A static hull void of any emotion or substance.

  Apparently, the absence of one small metal bird made a big difference.

  Ozzy couldn’t figure out what had happened. His first thought had been that someone had come in and taken Clark. But there was nothing else disturbed and only the window in his attic bedroom had been open. His second thought was that Rin had come for Clark. The wizard liked the bird and he was a bit mad, so . . . it wasn’t unreasonable to believe such a thing. It was possible that some animal had climbed through the open window and snatched Clark, but the
bird was made of metal and had no scent of food or fowl. Any animal sneaking in would have been just as wise to have taken a dish towel or a book or the remains of Ozzy’s pepperoni sandwich.

  “Clark!” Still no answer.

  Ozzy knew daylight would help. So he climbed the starry stairs and retired to his room, where he slept fitfully and with a large stick by his bed—just in case.

  When the sun finally began to rise, Ozzy got up and searched the house more thoroughly. There was still no sign of Clark. He checked outside for strange footprints or animal tracks, but there weren’t any.

  Clark, it seemed, had just disappeared.

  Ozzy cleaned himself up and changed into a blue T-shirt and black jeans.

  He walked in circles around the cloaked house listening and searching for any sign of his bird. But by the time he left to go and meet Rin at Jack-in-the-Box, there was still not a single sign of Clark. Ozzy was beside himself.

  “Dumb bird,” he muttered anxiously as he walked. “You better be okay.”

  The walk to town seemed particularly long. The car ride yesterday had spoiled Ozzy. Walking was much less exciting than speeding along the road going eighty miles an hour.

  “I need a car—or to learn how to fly!” he shouted to the universe.

  Squirrels in the trees around him scattered, but the universe remained stingy and continued to pin Ozzy to the ground.

  The Jack-in-the-Box was on the opposite side of town from the school and Main Street. It sat next to a pet store called Ma and Paws and a gas station that sold homemade beef jerky. Ozzy could see through the large front windows of the restaurant that Rin was already inside. He moved out of the trees and walked up the sidewalk to the front door.

  Rin saw him through the window and motioned for him to hurry.

  There was nobody else in the restaurant besides the workers behind the counter.

  “Sit down, quick,” Rin whispered fiercely while keeping his eyes on the window.

  Ozzy sat across from Rin as the wizard worked over a plate of waffles.

  “Have you seen Clark?” Ozzy asked.

  “No,” Rin answered with concern. “Is he missing?”

  “Yes, he disappeared last night.”

  “Not good.”

  “What do you mean, ‘not good’?”

  “Well, things are getting a little stickier,” Rin reported, syrup dripping off his fork. “Sheriff Wills had me come to the station for questioning last night. I guess Doyle went blabbing to him about us stopping there and acting strange. Then the sheriff said they were looking for a high school kid that fit your description. Now he’s suspicious of me.”

  “Should I just turn myself in?” Ozzy said nervously.

  “For what? And no—not yet. After talking to the police, I spent the night looking into this Timsby fellow. I even checked his genealogy. It turns out his father’s name was Tim and his mother’s name was Mairsby.”

  “Mairsby?”

  “I know—it’s awful. But there are a few connections to New York and possibly your father.” Rin took a bite of his waffles.

  “I think I found some of those connections as well,” Ozzy informed him.

  “I found mine with magic, how did you?”

  “The internet.”

  “That’s what I mean—that thing is magic. Anyhow, I don’t know if we should, but we could make a trip to Portland, maybe talk to Timsby.” Syrup dripped from his beard as Rin spoke. “It’s not that far, and my sister lives there.”

  “You have a sister?” Ozzy asked. “Is she a witch?”

  “No, her name’s Ann and she’s a fact-checker for a parenting magazine. But that’s not saying she can’t still be a real witch somedays.” Rin looked pleased with himself about what he had just said. “That’s right, I said it.” He put his hand out so that Ozzy could give him knuckles.

  Ozzy kept his hand to himself. “I don’t know your sister.”

  “Right.” Rin pulled his hand back. “Anyway, what do you think? If you want, I can go alone. But I just have no idea where that will lead to. Maybe your parents are in Portland?”

  “Is there some sort of wizard thing you can do to see if they are? A spell, a trick? Can you look into your soda and glimpse their whereabouts?”

  Rin shook his head sadly. “Oh, Oz, just when I think you’re getting close to understanding wizard ways, you take a step back by asking something like that. Wizards are complicated and wise people. Quarfelt holds so many secrets and we are required to act in a way that benefits all mankind. I look in my soda now and who’s to say the ­ripple effect doesn’t destroy the life of another human somewhere? It’s a precarious power and I choose only to use it when the time is right.”

  “Well, I can’t go to Portland without first finding . . .”

  Something smacked up against the window next to their table and scared the wizard out of them both.

  “What the . . . ?!” Rin held his hand to his heart.

  A bird slid down the glass and Ozzy could see that it was Clark.

  “Hang on!”

  Ozzy ran outside and picked up his friend. He quickly stepped around the corner of the restaurant so that he could examine him privately.

  “Are you okay, Clark?”

  The bird was dazed but otherwise fine.

  “I hate glass,” he said. “What a sadistic thing for people to use.”

  “Forget the glass—where were you?”

  “I don’t want to say.”

  “Why not? I was worried sick. I thought someone took you.”

  “No, I had more juice in me than you thought. In fact, I was fully charged when I faked sleeping.”

  “Why?”

  “Can’t we just be glad that I’m here?”

  “Were you in the forest?”

  Clark cleared his beak but didn’t speak.

  “Did you go into town? I mean why would you . . . Oh. You went to see the trash can.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Well, did you?”

  Clark put his head down. “Maybe.”

  Ozzy laughed. “I don’t care if you go see a trash can . . . I just care that you’re okay.”

  “I guess I’m okay, but it didn’t go well.”

  “Rejected by a bin?”

  “She just sat there staring at me until my batteries died. When I woke up this morning, people were throwing things away in her.”

  Rin had finished his waffles and grown curious. He made his way outside to see what was going on.

  “Everything’s fine,” Ozzy reported. “Clark just wanted some alone time with a trash can.”

  “And it doesn’t matter now, because it’s over,” Clark insisted.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” the wizard said. “But since you’re back we can all travel to Portland. Sure, we can hope to find out more here, but as long as the police are looking for you, it could be difficult.”

  “A trip would be nice,” Clark chirped. “It might help clear my head.”

  “All right. Let’s go to Portland,” Ozzy said. “But I need to get a few things from home first.”

  “Of course,” the wizard said. “And I need my yellow traveling robe. I’ll drive you to the train tracks, then I’ll stop over at my place and be back to pick you up around three. But before we do that, we should go back inside and get something else to eat.” Rin patted his stomach. “Those waffles weren’t that filling.”

  “Actually,” Ozzy said, “if it’s okay with you, I’ve always wanted to try going through a drive-thru.”

  “Say no more,” Rin replied happily. “Hop in the car and we’ll hit the thru. To the car!”

  Clark flew up on top of Ozzy’s head and began to knead his hair.

  “I’m glad you’re okay.”

  “Well, I’m not a
hundred percent,” Clark revealed. “But in time I’ll love again.”

  Ozzy shook his head.

  Clark held on with one foot and continued to work Ozzy’s hair with the other.

  The drive-thru was everything Ozzy dreamed it would be. He got a breakfast sandwich and French toast sticks. Rin got a waffle and egg sandwich and two orders of hash browns. Clark got a side order of onions because he had heard good things about the texture.

  Rin dropped Ozzy and Clark off at the train tracks and Ozzy jogged home as fast as he could. He gathered a change of clothes and then went to the secret compartment in the stairs and stocked up on money.

  He closed up the cabin with Clark on his head and started back to the tracks . . . where they waited for twenty minutes before Rin arrived.

  “Sorry I’m late,” Rin said as they drove off. “My ex-wife wasn’t sure she wanted me to use the car. So I had to wait for her to leave and sneak the keys.”

  “Oh.”

  “It’s kind of a game we play—I borrow the car, I use her workshop, I take what I want from her garden, I . . . well, it’s not much of a game. It’s just me borrowing things.”

  The drive to Portland was a little over an hour long and the scenery and feeling of freedom was so exhilarating to Ozzy that it seemed to go much too fast.

  Before he knew it, they were approaching the city, and buildings bigger than he had seen since he was a child in New York began to pop up all over like bulky beacons welcoming him to true civilization. There were more roads and cars than Ozzy thought existed in the whole world.

  Rin wasn’t the greatest driver on deserted roads and he was even worse in the city. Cars and trucks many sizes larger than the white wizard-mobile whizzed by them on all sides—honking and almost clipping them.

  “Is this safe?” Ozzy yelled.

  “Not really.”

  A large semi truck passed by on the left and the wake of wind it created caused the car to almost lift off the ground.

  “This is insane!” Clark hollered, standing on the dashboard, his copper-tipped talons digging in.

  The vehicle drove up over a tall bridge that spanned a wide river.

  “That’s the Willamette River,” Rin yelled.