by Jack Heckel
I was thinking about the fact that my altered physical state might be why so few people in my class recognized me when I realized we were coming near the edge of campus. I decided to cut through the community gardens, a sort of open common where students could tend their own little plot of land. Mostly druids hung out here. They smoked their herbs and asked deep and portentous questions like: “Who put the alphabet in alphabetical order?” or “Why is it called a building if it’s already built?” or “Do you remember what I was going to say?” Things like that.
“Oh, fresh vegetables!” Ariella, who was pacing me quite easily, exclaimed. “That’s a plus. Strange they didn’t mention it during orientation. Are those cabbages?” She pointed at something green to our left. I didn’t bother to look, because I wouldn’t have had any way of answering the question, and my eyesight was beginning to blur from exhaustion. “I love cabbages,” she said eagerly. “You can make so many things out of them! There’s cabbage soup and boiled cabbage and . . .” She trailed off. “Actually, I think that’s about it . . .”
We had just plunged into a plot planted with rows of something bright green that had grown to about head-high and had yellow tasseled pods sprouting from it when someone stabbed me in the ribs. At least, that is what it felt like. I grimaced and ground to a halt, clutching my side. “This . . . this is a good place to take a little break,” I groaned. Somewhere far to the rear I could hear Sam wheezing and gasping. “Besides, we need to let . . . to let . . . Sam . . . catch up.”
Ariella, who had not even begun to perspire, shrugged. “Sure.”
Yet another aggravating elven trait is the fact that they apparently never get tired. I had begun to seriously wonder what the hidden flaw in their species was, because from an evolutionary standpoint they should have wiped the floor with the rest of us long ago. I did have a working theory. It is my belief that insufferability must be toxic to its host at high enough levels.
While I tried to keep from fainting, Ariella wandered about plucking at the tasseled pods. She came back about a minute later. “You are taking us back to Trelari, aren’t you?”
Still bent over with my hands on my knees, I nodded.
“Why?”
“We’ve got to . . . get out of this place . . . if it’s . . . if it’s the last thing . . . we ever do.”
“You keep saying that, but why?”
I finally caught my breath enough to say, “Because the Administration wants you.”
“And?” Ariella said, and I swear it was so annoyingly superior she might as well have been Eldrin. She even smelled like him.
I took one last deep breath. “And . . . that’s not a good thing.”
“What do they want? We haven’t done anything wrong.”
Sam arrived on the scene, with a great huffing and puffing. It turns out that he was even more out of shape than I was, which was saying something. I would blame it on the freshman fifteen, but he’d only been in school about fifteen minutes, so I can hardly credit it.
“They say that there’s something wrong with your tuition payment . . .”
“We paid in full!” coughed Sam. “After the Dark Queen . . . was defeated . . . we had piles of . . . of . . .”
He bent over trying to catch his breath and Ariella finished for him. “Gold and platinum and copper and electrum. Say, does Mysterium take electrum? We haven’t found a use for it yet.”
“And you won’t,” I said with a shake of my head. “No one accepts it. It’s the bitcoin of precious metals.” This reference confused them long enough that I was able to recover. “Time to move!”
As I ran off, Sam, still doubled over, raised a finger. “But . . .”
Ariella caught up and continued her interrogation. It was at times like this that I remembered she was also a rules lawyer. I ignored her questions and focused on my breathing and on trying to figure out if I was doing the right thing. I didn’t want to panic them, but maybe I should tell them who was chasing us. Maybe they deserved to know there was a large faction within the Mysterium that didn’t like me and really didn’t like the fact of Trelari’s existence. But I couldn’t. I had this urge to protect both of them from the harsh realities of Mysterium bigotry.
While I was still debating what I should say, we rounded a corner and there was my bench marking the trailhead to Trelari. Even from here I could see that the wooden slats that formed its back had been recently repainted. I wondered if beneath the fresh paint was my slogan. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a lot of time to contemplate the question, because seated on the bench was a Mysterium security guard. He was not one of Moregoth’s men. He had a rod of detention on his belt, not a wand of variable lethality, and was wearing a traditional guard’s cloak that hung off his tall, skinny body like a purple tent.
I considered trying to bluff our way past him, but he looked up. “Avery? Avery Stewart?”
Sam came panting around the corner, clutching his side, as I yelled, “Run!”
He whimpered, “Seriously?”
Ariella and I each grabbed one of his arms and dove into the trees along the side of the path.
“Avery!” the guard called out.
We ran deeper into the woods, and the shouts quickly died away. I was puzzling over why the guard had given up so soon when I realized why he had recognized me—it was John Ulm. We’d taken several classes together. He’d lived across the hall from Eldrin and me for a year. Maybe he had only wanted to catch up. John always had been a bit of a gossip, and one of the less prickish of my dormmates.
I signaled for Ariella to stop running and we dropped Sam to the ground. He was bright red and coated in a sheen of sweat. “Up in the sky,” he panted, “what’s that flashing?”
A shiver of fear went down my back as I recalled that those were the exact words he’d used right before we were swept up in a funnel cloud and taken to face Vivian during the troubles on Trelari. I looked up, expecting to see a maelstrom of storm clouds and red, blue, and yellow lightning, but there was nothing. The sky was a perfect blue without even a spot of cloud. I looked at Ariella and shrugged. She held the back of her hand to his forehead and frowned. “Probably delirious from exhaustion.”
Harold half flapped, half waddled over to Sam’s side to perform his own examination. This entailed him poking at Sam with a stick. The imp intoned grimly, “If he were a horse . . .”
“Which he isn’t!” I pulled Harold away.
Sam looked pale and pained. He made small choking noises. Ariella rummaged through a pouch and retrieved a cloth bag. She filled it with a handful of colorful herbs, and placed it over Sam’s eyes.
“Do you think he’s going to be okay?” I asked.
She shrugged, and the little silver bells in her hair gave a merry tinkle. “I don’t think he expected school to be so physical. He’s spent every moment since we got our acceptance letters with his nose in a book. I’m not sure he moved except to go from his bed to the kitchen to his desk and back again.”
I nodded my head in sympathy. If you added watching TV and a run to the coffee shop now and then, that was a fair description of my life.
“Now what?” asked Ariella.
Sam moaned weakly, “No more running . . .”
“No more running, Sam,” I assured him.
He was right, and not only because if we ran much more there was a good chance he was going to die, but also because I was no longer sure what I was running from. I don’t mean I’d forgotten about Moregoth; but I had been in such a panic I hadn’t considered that not all of Mysterium was trying to hunt us down. In fact, it might only be Moregoth. This meant that we might be able to go back to the gateway path and talk our way past John. But what if Moregoth had come to the same realization I had come to and was on his way there? The gateway was well known, as evidenced by the graffitied bench. I paced about as I considered our options. Maybe I should abscond with them to New York where we could all hide out together. I shuddered as I thought about the logistics of five p
eople living in that tiny apartment, and sharing a single bathroom.
“I take it we aren’t going back to Trelari, then?” Ariella asked.
I shook my head as Harold clambered onto my shoulder and pointed his stick off to the right where the underbrush grew thicker. I shooed the stick away.
Maybe I should go to the administration building and clear things up. Sam said they paid in full . . .
Harold interrupted this thought by yanking on my hair and pointing again. I slapped his hand away.
Ariella lost her patience. “Well, where, then?”
“I think . . .” I began, but got no further as Harold whacked me on the head. “Ouch!” I yelled, and made a grab for the stick.
The imp had other ideas. He scrambled off my back, leapt to the ground, and dashed off through the trees.
“Dammit, Harold! Come back here,” I shouted, and raced after him with Ariella at my heels.
“Are we running again?” Sam shouted as he staggered to his feet. “You promised no more running!”
We were in a park that bordered the edge of campus. It was basically a forest with a couple of trails, and was mostly used by students for clandestine meetings involving hookups, illegal spell ingredients, and other illicit activity. We met no one, which wasn’t surprising given that Harold seemed intent on avoiding anything resembling a path. Instead, the imp flapped and leapt from ground to limb to trunk to bush at top speed, while we struggled and crashed our way through the underbrush after him.
I wasn’t chasing him because I was worried for his safety; I was worried what his running away meant about our current situation. He never ran. Indeed, I hadn’t thought it possible for him to run. Normally he was loath even to walk from his perch to my arm, and when he did he wheezed so badly I thought he might blow a gasket. That he was not only running, but doing a fair impression of animated Yoda in the Star Wars prequels, made my blood run cold. Then again, anything that reminds me of those movies makes my blood run cold.
Ariella, being an elf, was, of course, able to glide untouched between the same bushes and limbs that kept slapping me in the face and grasping at my clothes. For once I didn’t resent her glowing specialness, because without her we would have lost the imp entirely.
After five minutes of running pell-mell through the woods, we emerged at its edge in time to see Harold sprinting across a narrow grass field toward a line of three-story townhomes, tucked into a gentle crescent of a lane running along one side of the park. The neighborhood would not have looked out of place in London. Well, it wouldn’t have looked out of place if you ignored the battlements and odd tower rooms jutting from the top floors of the homes. This was Mysterium after all.
We paused long enough to make sure there was no security about, and then took off across the field after him. He made for one of the townhomes at the edge of the line that appeared unoccupied, or at least only recently occupied. The kitchen garden was filled with weeds, and through the bare windows we could see cardboard boxes piled in untidy stacks.
“Do you know this place?” Ariella asked.
“No clue,” I panted, and then shouted, “Harold! Stop!”
He ignored my call and dashed up the short flight of steps fronting the house. I had assumed this would mark the end of our chase, but as he neared the door it flew open, and he bolted through. The three of us followed him in. The door slammed shut behind us, and I spun to see who had let us in. The entryway was empty, and from the musty, stale smell of the house, no one had been in here for some time.
Harold was nowhere to be seen. I called out for him. “Harold?”
“How did you do it?” Sam asked between breaths.
“Do what?”
“Open the door,” Sam gasped. “I didn’t see anything: no gestures, no words, no wand, nothing.”
“No clue,” I said as I made my way toward the back of the house.
Sam and Ariella followed. He asked, “So, was it your imp? Can imps do magic?”
“Some, but no, I don’t think he used magic to open the door,” I said in a distracted sort of way as I stalked through the house looking for the little bastard.
At last I found him in the kitchen, sitting atop a stack of boxes, looking as downtrodden and lethargic as ever. I was about to grab him and give him a piece of my mind when I saw that there was a label on the side of the box he’d chosen as his chair. I stopped in my tracks.
“Do doors simply open for people in Mysterium?” Sam asked.
“No,” I answered, and even to my ears the single words sounded empty and dreadful.
Ariella put a hand on my arm. “Avery? What’s wrong?”
I pointed to the label on the box. It read: property of professor avery stewart. fragile! DO NOT SMASH WITH HAMMER!
My legs gave out from under me and I found myself sitting on the floor. “Doors only open for the owner.”
Chapter 6
My Other House Is a Very, Very, Very . . . Wait, What Other House?
That the townhome was mine may come as a shock to some of you. It certainly did to me. As you’ve already made it through Chapter Two of this book, you know I have been living in New York, in a tiny apartment that is entirely unsuitable for a Mysterium professor. Although maybe you skipped the early chapters to get straight to the action. Or you could be reading this book back to front, which is cheating. Unless you’re Merlin or Benjamin Button or Rachel Weintraub or Kes from Star Trek Voyager or Mork from Ork or Lion-O in the classic Thundercats episode “Time Switch.” The point is there are a lot of people that live backward and might want to read books that way also. Who am I to judge? Anyway, however you got here, there we were standing . . . okay, I was sitting and Sam and Ariella were standing . . . and Harold, he was also sitting . . .
I’m babbling, aren’t I?
I am. I know it. Well, I had received a very nasty shock, so please forgive me for being a little incoherent. The thing is, it would have been different had the townhome been a complete mystery to me. My initial reaction would have been to assume it was either a paperwork mistake (which is more likely than one would imagine given Mysterium University has compounded bureaucracy with magic), or a practical joke (which all my readers will recognize as a distinct possibility if not probability given what passes for a “sense of humor” for many of my fellow Mysterium mages). However, as soon as I saw the label I knew for a fact that, not only was the townhome mine, but I had packed those boxes and written those words. It was a feeling very reminiscent of the one I’d had when I first saw a copy of The Dark Lord in a bookstore. It was almost as though I had been expecting the book to be there even though I had no memory of the book itself. In other words, a form of amnesia where full, or at least partial, memories came flooding back when I was exposed to something I’d forgotten.
For example, I knew with certainty that the box Sam was peering at with the puzzled expression contained a copy of my Gold Key Star Trek issue number 56, “No Time Like the Past.” This was disorienting in and of itself, but more troublesome was that when I had these rushes of memory I would get a brief glimpse of what was going to happen next. So when Sam remarked, “Hey! The words on this box keep changing.” I had a ready answer. “It’s written in magic marker.”
“Neat!”
While normally his enthusiasm would be infectious, right now I needed quiet to figure out what was happening. I tried to forestall further questions by preanswering what I knew was coming next. “The label is trying to guess what you might want from inside the box,” I explained. “If you keep staring at it, it will eventually list all its contents.”
“That’s so cool!” he said. “Hey, this one says it has ‘Star Trek cosplay costumes’ and ‘adult fan-fiction.’ What’s that?”
A number of rather embarrassing memories raced through my mind. My face flushed and I stammered, “That’s, um, background material for a class I’m putting together on . . . on Earth culture.”
He kept reading. “What’s a fanboy?”
<
br /> I slapped my hand over the labels. “These boxes are old, Sam. The magic is getting a bit unpredictable. The best thing to do is ignore them.”
He studied the label suspiciously for a moment, and then wandered off to examine the oven.
As I was congratulating myself for avoiding one set of mortifying questions, Ariella raised an eyebrow. “You ‘haven’t a clue’ who lives here?”
I considered confessing, but I was not ready to reveal the full nature of how messed up my mind was. The last thing I needed was for Sam and Ariella to think they’d fallen in league with a madman, although I wasn’t sure they hadn’t. Instead, with my typical cool under pressure, I gave her three different, and equally ridiculous, explanations in rapid succession.
“I didn’t recognize the place. I have never approached it from the park. I only moved in recently.”
This last excuse earned me another exquisitely derisive eyebrow. She ran a finger across one of the boxes, and examined the thick layer of gray dust at its tip. “When did you move in?”
If I were being perfectly honest, which I wasn’t, I would have had to say I didn’t know, but I had a feeling it was shortly after I returned from Trelari. I can recall a late night, a bottle of wine, and unloading the contents of my folded space. How had I forgotten? When had I forgotten?
“I . . . I . . . I can’t remember the exact date.”
“Well,” she drawled with a roll of her eyes, “I like what you’ve not done with the place.”
I wanted to say, Forget about the place—what have I been doing with my life the last few months? Instead, I picked absentmindedly at the weathered tape on the top of a box sitting next to me, and murmured, “I’ve had a lot going on.”
Of course, that isn’t why I hadn’t moved in. The problem is, if I did have a reason for not moving in, I could not for the life of me recall what it was.