Duck Boy

by Bill Bunn

  “He’s not supposed to be in here, but we won’t tell Edward, will we?”

  Steve shook his head, stifling a laugh.

  Aunt Shannon turned to her bench, and from the box of clocks pulled out a single alarm clock. She pointed to the box of clocks remaining on her workbench. “Would you mind putting these out in the hallway? Otherwise the whole box might go.”

  Steve obligingly carried the box into the hallway, having no idea what Aunt Shannon had meant. He returned to her study and she handed him a pair of goggles. She was already wearing a scuba mask herself. “Stand over here and put the goggles on,” she commanded, pointing to a place a few yards away from the workbench. The scuba mask pinched her nose, making her voice sound thin and tinny. “Stand back. You never know exactly how things might turn out. You know—be ready for a surprise.”

  Steve moved to the spot that she had suggested, donning the safety goggles. He had a clear view of the workbench and Aunt Shannon as she hunched over the clock.

  She looked over towards Steve. Her scuba mask was fogging up from the inside. “Are you ready?” she asked. Steve nodded. “Are you watching?” Steve nodded again.

  “Good. Let me touch my Benu stone.” She reached towards the plastic box with the ashes of Richard Best inside. She looked towards Steve again. “You have to be touching your Benu stone. Otherwise it won’t transform,” she instructed.

  She turned and focused on the clock and placed one hand on the box of Richard’s ashes. With her other hand she grabbed the clock.

  “Clock-clock-clock-clock-clock-clock-clock-lock-lock-lock-lock-lock-lock-lock.” She spoke what sounded like chicken language to the clock and stopped. Aunt Shannon stared at the clock. Nothing happened. She let go of the clock and poked it with her hand, as if she was afraid to touch it. Steve stared at the floor and couldn’t help but smile. The whole scene was so odd. On the verge of entertaining.

  “OK,” she said. “I think the connection was a little weak. Let me give it a go again.” She turned toward him for a moment, noticing his amused look. “You’re just asking for a big, fat surprise to whack you on the noggin.” She wagged a finger at him. “Smarty pants. You’re cruisin’ for a bruisin’,” she warned, turning back to her work.

  “Clock-clock-clock-clock-clock-clock-clock-lock-lock-lock-lock-lock-lock-lock,” she clucked her chicken language to the clock again. She stared at the clock. Still nothing.

  “That did it,” she shrieked. “Look out!” She jumped clear of the workbench, as if something were about to explode.

  Aunt Shannon beamed as the clock began to shake and shiver on the bench top. Suddenly, Steve heard a giant ripping sound. A brilliant kaleidoscope of light exploded into the room from inside the clock. Loose paper flailed and flapped in a tornado around the room. And then it all stopped. The paper wafted its way to the ground and the room was filled with an earthy aroma—the smell of freshly turned soil.

  Sliding the scuba mask to her forehead, Aunt Shannon wiped a moustache of sweat from her mouth with her sleeve. “What a stubborn clock.” She looked toward Steve. “I mean you expect a clock to be stubborn, but sheesh. What a cantankerous old thing!” On the workbench sat an old padlock. It looked about as old as the alarm clock had. What was once a clock was now a lock. Steve blinked slowly. And checked again.

  What just happened? This isn’t possible.

  Steve stared at the padlock—seconds ago it had been a clock.

  “It’s all right, Steve. It really did happen. I can assure you of that.” His aunt waited a couple of minutes for Steve to absorb her words. Then she continued, “I guess I always knew that clocks were locks, and locks were clocks. I just never realized how closely related they were.” She picked up the lock from her workbench and passed it to Steve. “Unfortunately, when you turn a clock into a lock you never get a key with it.”

  Steve held the padlock in his hand. It felt quite heavy.

  “Do you want to try?”

  Steve looked up at her. He tried to mumble something, but Aunt Shannon interrupted with a laugh. “I really surprised you with that one, didn’t I? I’m so glad. Get used to being surprised.” She stepped back from the bench. “Come on over. I’ll tell you how to do it.”

  Steve stepped up to the bench, goggles still on. “This is a fairly easy transformation,” Aunt Shannon explained. “So the bit of power you can get through me, as I touch my Benu stone, will let the transformation happen.” She placed her hand lovingly on top of Richard’s remains. “Now all you need to do is repeat the word lock seven times and change it into the word clock. It goes quite easily. Then the lock will transform back into a clock.” She put her hand on Steve’s shoulder. “Now you have the power. Go ahead and try.”

  “Lock. Lock. Lock. Lock,” Steve said.

  “Stop,” Aunt Shannon ordered. “Don’t put such a big space between your words. Let them run together more. They must run together.”

  “Lock-lock-lock-lock-lock-lock-lock,” Steve said the words seamlessly. He counted each repetition and then switched words without hesitation. “Clock-clock-clock-clock-clock-clock-clock.” He stared at the lock. An electrical shock numbed his shoulder where her hand was, and traveled down his arm toward Aunt Shannon’s padlock. He wanted to let go of the lock, but Aunt Shannon used her free hand to push his arm firmly against it.

  The lock began to dance under his hand. Aunt Shannon released her grip and stepped back, so he did the same. The lock seemed to flatten into a photograph of the lock. And then, with a giant tear, the photograph split in two. Light gushed through the tear as a small, powerful wind circled the workbench, whipping loose bits of organ sheet music in a circle. The light from the torn photograph brightened, making it difficult to see what was happening.

  “Close your eyes, Steve,” Aunt Shannon screamed above the din. He obeyed. Suddenly it stopped. He opened his eyes carefully. On the workbench lay the old alarm clock.

  “Ah…” was all Steve could manage in the silence that followed. A minute passed before he mustered another word. “Wow.”

  Aunt Shannon leaned over the workbench to view Steve’s face. “Hah!” she trumpeted. “Surprise two. Steve nothing.”

  “It’s amazing,” Steve whispered.

  “It’s amazing, all right,” she said, matching his whisper with her voice. “But it’s only the beginning. Something about experimenting makes me hungry,” she announced suddenly, and declared an official coffee break. The two of them headed to the kitchen to raid the fridge.

  “Steve, you saw the power—the energy level that filled the room when the clock transformed, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s a lot of power for such a simple transformation. And I know that that energy must be useful for something besides turning clocks into locks. It’s like a whole other power source.” She sighed. “You’d think after all the years I’ve been working on this, I’d be a whole lot farther along. I know you’re impressed. But honestly, it’s the only thing I know how to do. I’ve messed with many different word combinations, but I can’t find another. It seems kind of like it’s a short circuit in the language, or something. These words are so close together, and both are relatively common household objects, that the transformation seems almost certain. I mean when you say them out loud, it’s as if one word melts into the other one, right? That kind of connection between words is extremely rare, and I know because I’ve been looking for years.”

  “So you don’t know any other spells?”

  “They’re not spells. This isn’t magic. It’s more like a linguistic base to matter.”

  “Huh?”

  “There’s some kind of connection between words and matter.”

  “Oh,” Steve replied.

  “And, no, I don’t.”

  “Huh?”

  “I don’t know any other word combinations.” She paused and looked at the ceiling. “God knows I’ve tried. I’ve spent years of my life on this riddle.”

  She peered o
ver the fridge door at Steve with a sympathetic look. “Now, I know you don’t want to talk about your mom, but I think what I just showed you means you should humor me for a few minutes.” She paused and watched her grand-nephew’s face.

  “I’m listening,” Steve promised.

  She smiled. “Good. Very good.” She filled the kettle with cold water and settled into her seat. “So, alchemists have always been obsessed with transforming one object into another, mostly transforming an inexpensive object into an expensive one. To make money. I can’t do that, but I can transform one thing into another. But what if this transformation wasn’t just limited to an object? What if it were possible to transform places? You can see for yourself that there’s a huge amount of power available. I doubt the power is limited just to locks and clocks.

  “Of course, there’s another possibility.” She got up and dropped a teabag into a grungy looking teapot, then grimaced as though the thought hurt. She sighed as the kettle began to boil and poured the hot water into the pot, seemingly stalling for time. “Your mother might have fried herself by getting in the middle of that transformation somehow.” She came to her senses suddenly and gaped at Steve. “I’m so sorry, Steve. I shouldn’t have said it so rudely.”

  Steve rubbed his temples. “It’s OK, Aunty. I’ve heard worse.”

  “But I think you would have found some of her remains, like ashes or something, you know.” She smiled briefly, and continued. “Here’s what I think happened. Your mom knew about my work, and I think that power did something that caused her disappearance, though I don’t know what happened, or where, or even when she went. Time travel is possible, too, I’d guess. I mean, why not? Who knows what that power is and what it can do?”

  “So how does the Benu stone work?”

  “Good question. In the old days, alchemists thought that you added a little bit of the stone to things and the object you added it to would transform into something else, like lead into gold. Some people thought that the Benu stone was really just another word for a person’s own life, so if a person underwent some intense situations, he would be refined to the point where he was transformed. Some thought it was a spiritual thing. These were old ideas.” Her face brightened a little. “But my own research tells me it’s not the way. It wasn’t so much research, actually, as an accident. I can’t really say how it is that it even happened. All I can say is that it worked. The Benu stone is some kind of important object in your own life, something that has a deep personal meaning. When I touch this object, I get power.”

  “How’d my mom find hers?”

  “I actually don’t know what your mother’s was because we hadn’t talked for some time. We had a bit of a spat.”

  “A what?” Steve asked.

  “A fight.”

  Aunt Shannon looked sheepish, sipping at her empty teacup. “I showed her my Benu stone and how it worked. I showed her what I showed you. We talked about it, back and forth, for a few weeks, and suddenly she found hers. Then, before we ever got together to discuss it, we got into a fight. About you, actually.”

  “Oh.”

  It was all Steve could think of to say, and Aunt Shannon seemed to clam up. After a minute he drained his cold tea, left the cup on the table, and went back to his room.

  This time when he tried his wireless he found an open network named “dlink,” and started surfing the Internet for information on alchemy. Other than historical material, he couldn’t find much about what his aunt had just showed him. He googled alchemy. Just more weird pictures, stories of strange, dead people, and a fog of contradictory ideas. Eventually he gave up on finding helpful information and played a few online games.

  A sharp knock distracted him, causing the little stick-figure man on his screen to get shot in the head and explode into a red ball of blood.

  Aunt Shannon opened the door a crack and stuck her head into the room. “Time to eat a little lunch and decorate for Christmas,” she called cheerily.

  Steve winced as he thought of what might be for lunch. But in the kitchen he found a very respectable egg-salad sandwich and a glass of milk. He sat and ate his plate clean in what seemed like seconds.

  “Guess you were hungry,” she commented.

  “Yeah, I guess,” Steve grunted, still chomping. He stood to return to his room.

  “Just a minute, Sonny. The plate and glass go in the dishwasher.”

  “Right.”

  “And who made the sandwich?”

  “Thank you for the lovely lunch, Aunt Shannon,” Steve said without enthusiasm, resorting to the script grownups sometimes forced him to use.

  “Did you like it?” Aunt Shannon asked. “It’s my special egg recipe.”

  Steve nodded his whole upper body as he gulped the last of his milk.

  “We’re going to get ready for Christmas now. This isn’t going to be easy—we haven’t decorated for Christmas here for many, many years. But since you’re staying with us, we’re going to have a bit of a party,” she said with a wink. “I’ll meet you in the living room.” She headed down into the basement, leaving Steve to flop onto a psycho-colored paisley couch.

  She was gone for a while, but from somewhere in the clogged bowels of the basement, Aunt Shannon produced a boxed Christmas tree layered with the dust of decades.

  “We haven’t used this tree since Richard left us,” she blurted, suddenly near tears. “We got one of those new-fangled pretend trees, so we wouldn’t hurt another Christmas tree.” She sniffed and buried her nose in the puffed shoulder of her dress as she gripped the box. “It was Richard’s idea. I…I don’t think I can open this box. Would you?”

  She looked towards Steve, holding the box suddenly like a swaddled baby. Dust caked on the front of her dress. Steve took the box from her carefully, as though he were lifting a newborn from her arms.

  He gently placed the box on the floor and unfolded the cardboard flaps, flinging a garden of dust into the air. Within he found what looked like a box of giant green toilet brushes.

  It took quite a while to insert each branch into the centre post of the tree. The finished product looked very much like a brush that would have been used to clean the toilet of a three-story giant.

  Merry stinking Christmas.

  “That does look like it always did,” Aunt Shannon sighed sweetly, tears streaking through the dust on her cheeks. “Oh, Richard, I miss you.”

  Steve began stringing the old-fashioned Christmas lights around the tree, and after another moment of reverie, his aunt seemed to wake up.

  “Now we need some ornaments.” She disappeared again, returning with a box of jumbled kiddie crafts. “These are things that Richard made for our tree over the years.”

  There were rock-hard, marshmallow-and-toothpick snowflakes. Yellowed paper snowflakes that looked like they were cut by someone recently introduced to scissors. Strings of popcorn garland, looking very, very old. Glued noodle angels. Aunt Shannon pulled each item tenderly from the box and laid on the cushions of the couch with great care.

  Steve took a few items at random, placed them on the tree.

  “Oh no, dear, not there,” Aunt Shannon exclaimed as he hung a crayon-colored popsicle-stick star from a thick arm of the toilet-brush tree. She pulled the decoration from his hands and set it down lower. “He could only reach about there, then.”

  Steve sighed quietly to himself, lifting another piece off the couch. It looked a little more sophisticated than the last ornament so, he figured, it would probably go higher on the tree. He took a wild guess and stuck the kiddie craft on the branch about chest height.

  “Yes,” she approved absently. “That’s about right.”

  Pleased, he persevered. An angel made out of bent brass wire, he thought, seemed fairly advanced as a craft, so he placed it a little over head-height on the tree.

  “Oh no, dear,” Aunt Shannon said with a chuckle. “I helped him with that one. In fact, I did most of it myself.” Her smile soured. She pointed to where he had
hung the ornament. “He never did make it quite that high on the tree. He was shorter than you are.”

  Giving up, Steve relinquished the task of decorating the tree to his aunt, who talked to herself as she placed each thing on the branches. He couldn’t hear most of what she was saying as she worked, but since TV wasn’t possible, she was the most entertaining thing around.

  “Time for tinsel,” Aunt Shannon announced. “Start at the bottom, and please don’t put any tinsel above the top ornament.” The tree was heavily decorated, but the top foot and a half of the tree was bare, green toilet-brush.

  “Steve, can you put on the star?” The crowning touch was offered to him. “This was my great-grandmother’s once.” She held a blown-glass star carefully in her hands. “It’s nearly two hundred years old.”

  Steve set up a chair, and nervously mounted the star on the top toilet brush. A beautiful crown for an ugly tree.

  When the tree was done, Aunt Shannon took a seat on the couch, a little winded. “Edward, come take a look,” she shouted into the kitchen. The legs of a chair squawked as Uncle Edward got up to join them in the living room.

  “Oh, oh, oh. Shannon, my dear, what have you done?” He looked at the tree in astonishment, looking years younger than he had seconds earlier. “Oh, it’s a glorious thing. Wondrous.” The glow lasted for another second or two. He looked as though he might shed a tear, too, but before he did, he dove into his book again and the emotion on his face evaporated. His age returned. “But he’s dead now, so I wish you wouldn’t remind me of him.” Like a bad Christmas-light bulb, the joy that had just been there disappeared, replaced by darkness. He turned from the room and headed to the kitchen.

  “Did you bring any gifts for Christmas?” Aunt Shannon asked. “Ones we can put under the tree?”

  “Ahhh. Ummm. No,” Steve admitted. “I completely forgot.”

  “Well, then, we shall go to the mall. We can’t afford anything extravagant, of course, but I think we need a little something for one another under the tree. Let’s go,” she commanded, heading off to her room to get ready.