Most people, Maria knew this, were never able to open the gateways between worlds on their own, of at least most students weren’t. They took the gateways they used on faith, just like, in their regular world, they took computers and automobiles on faith, without the slightest idea how they worked.
But Maria had long since figured out how to open those gateways. It had been more of an idle quest for a world she would fit in. She hadn’t found one, but she’d seen a great variety of worlds, from worlds where technology had never existed and Earth was ruled by magical priest-kings to worlds where her kind was sniffed out and hunted down on first appearing.
Because of that last kind of world, she’d stopped traveling between them. But now, she could sense that Michael was in one of these worlds. And not of his own free will.
She stepped over the circle of candles and to the door of her room, which she locked. All she needed was for her parents to find the bedroom empty and give the alarm and start interference by the school’s teachers. They hadn’t been able to find Michael. What good would they be at finding her?
Getting her school backpack, she picked out of her magics case – for the elementary magic class – such elements as amplified her natural powers. She could tell from the faintness of her sensations that Michael was a long way off – as such things went.
She sprinkled dragon’s blood powder on the candles, and lit an incense stick scented with Jasmin from the suspended gardens of Babylon – harvested from a world in which they still flourished. Then she sat down and concentrated on the signal coming from Michael, and on homing in on it.
For a long time nothing happened. Then there was a whoosh, as though a doorway had opened and she was being sucked into a long, long dark tunnel.
This had never happened before. This shouldn’t happen at all. When you opened a gateway somewhere, there should be no space or time in between. You stepped in, and there you were. But she’d neither moved nor stepped anywhere, and yet...
Dark, cold wind blew, pulling at her clothes, whipping her hair into a red tangle. She tried to scream, but the wind blew hard against her mouth and seemed to rob her of breath.
I’m going to die she thought.
And then she was dropped, head first, into a grey, indefinite landscape.
She fell sprawling onto something that felt like centuries of accumulated cobwebs. And rolled to face upwards, and to see Michael staring down at her.
He was much paler than in his missing posters, and he looked cold and scared. Very scared. “What are you doing here?” he asked. “Are you a prisoner too?”
From somewhere, more felt than heard, came the sensation of a door clicking shut with a definitive, irrevocable sound.
***
“Why would you want to come to me in this prison?” Michael asked. He waved his hand around at the surroundings, which were not a proper world at all. Just the same cobwebby stuff everywhere. “I asked you to get me out.” He set his lips very tight, looking upset, as if she’d disappointed him on purpose.
“Well, pardon me,” Maria said, getting up and dusting the grey stuff from her clothes and hair. “I didn’t know where you were, and I didn’t know what else to do. Besides, I can get us right out of here and back home.”
“You can?” he asked. Then with a small frown and a look of fear. “But... they won’t let us.”
“They?” Maria asked.
He waved his hand again, and bit his lip. “The guardians.”
“What guardians?”
“The people keeping me here.”
She frowned at him. Was there really anyone there? Any type of guardians? But why would they be? “I didn’t see anyone coming in,” she said, stubbornly.
And before the compounds she’d burned to get here could lose their effect, she applied her power to the effort of getting them back home. Closing her eyes, she concentrated on the picture of her bedroom in her mind.
For a brief moment, cold and dark enveloped them, the wind tore at her face, her hair. She heard Michael say “Oh.” in a tone of great despair. And then there was nothing but the two of them, sitting alone in the grey cobweb world.
“Who is holding you prisoner?” she asked. “And why?”
***
“It started because I couldn’t do magic,” Michael said. He’d sat down, in a corner, half-leaning on the grey cobweb stuff and looking entirely too much like he’d become comfortable with it and it didn’t disturb him anymore. He was wearing jeans and a black t-shirt that looked as if he’d slept in them, which she supposed he had. There was a hole in the knee of his jeans.
“What, not at all?” she asked, startled. She’d thought it was impossible to be at Invisible High if you couldn’t do any magic. After all, what would the point be? Even if your parents were magicians, what could they think was achieved by sending their non-magical offspring to a school where people learned to control magic?
He shook his head. “Not at all. My parents said they never detected any, you know, not even when I was very little.” He picked at a frayed portion of his jeans, on the knee. “They did the regular checks, to make sure I wasn’t getting in trouble.” He shrugged. “If it weren’t for the fact that dad is one of the great sorcerers in the country, I’d never have thought magic really existed before I entered the school.”
“But then why send you to Invisible High?” Maria asked, baffled. “What did they expect you to learn?”
Michael squirmed a little against the grey cobwebby stuff. “Well... you see... My father runs Astounding Effects, the–”
“Special effects company for movies,” Maria said.
“Exactly. And you see, he uses magic for most of it, and he expects me to inherit. He hoped it was just that I didn’t believe in magic, and that seeing it at work would eventually... free my latent energies. They said, mom and dad, that no son of theirs could be completely devoid of magical power.”
Maria snorted. It seemed like a crazy thing to her. While magic mostly bred true, it couldn’t be a straight genetic thing. Some people were magicians whose parents had never had any power at all and others couldn’t light a mage-light whose parents were both sorcerers.
Her snort, surprisingly, brought a hint of a smile to Michael’s face. The first she’d seen since arriving. “Yeah,” he said. And shrugged. “So they sent me to the Invisible Elementary and Middle School first. And then when time came for me to be accepted for Invisible High...” He shrugged. “You know how there are people who sell things... In the world of Invisible High.”
Maria nodded. “The shops.” She said. Though the school had, presumably, been the first human presence in that world, it had, since then, attracted a conglomerate of shops that sold magical implements and other things needed for the school. There was a whole village, down a narrow path from the school.
Michael shook his head. “Not the shops. People who approach you, when you’re out walking, outside the grounds, or on your way to the shops... and sell you things.”
“Like drugs?” Maria asked blinking. No one had ever approached her, but then she didn’t usually go out of the school grounds or the beaten path to the village that the school had established there – and that last, the few times she’d done it, she’d been accompanied by one of the teachers.
He shook his head, then shrugged. “Well, not really, though they sell dreaming powder, that makes you... never mind...” He shrugged again, as if to a question she hadn’t asked. “I was desperate, okay? I knew it wouldn’t be a good idea. Most of these people aren’t exactly people... They make you think of all the bad legends, of the poisoned apple and Snow White. But I was desperate. My father was so sure I could do it, I could do magic, if I just tried... He was so disappointed and kept insisting I was lazy or didn’t try...
“So I bought...”
He looked up, and for a moment their eyes met. His were unfathomably dark. A black so deep it was hard to tell his pupil from his iris. And yet, if you looked really close, there seemed to
be dark blue specs caught in all that black, shimmering in the light. They made his eyes look like a deep, dark summer night with stars.
“I bought paint.”
Whatever Maria might have thought of, paint had never crossed her mind. Nor would it ever. She blinked. “Paint?”
“One of the people... She said she could sell me paint that would make my paintings magical. That would make them alive – make them entrances to other universes. Capture life in them. And you, know, I thought...” He shrugged. “So I bought it. And I started using it. And the school decided I had magic for giving life to inanimate creations. Just the sort of thing my father wanted me to have. So I kept buying it...”
“But...” she said. “That must have been very expensive.”
“It was,” he said. He picked at the hole in his jeans some more. “You see, every time I bought another bit of paint – and mostly I bought gold to mix in the other paints and give them magic – they took a bit of my soul in return. Until they had all of it. And then my body followed, and they captured me here.”
***
There were many things Maria wanted to say, starting with “How could you be so stupid?” and possibly ending with “Your soul?”
But she didn’t say anything. It seemed to her like a bad bargain and a crazy one at that. Why would he want to pay with his soul to be allowed to go to a school he was thoroughly unsuited for?
Instead, she stared at Michael. He looked up. “I’m sorry to have got you into this. You should see if you can port out alone. They’re never going to let me go.”
But Maria was thinking. If Michael was truly who he thought he was – just a kid and devoid of magic – why would any magical being want to steal his soul? And why would anyone want to keep him here, prisoner.
“Why would they want you?” she asked. “I mean...”
“I don’t know.” He frowned. “Perhaps they eat you? Or your soul?”
“It can’t be right,” she said. “If they ate your soul, they would have done so when they took it away a bit at a time. They wouldn’t just let you sit here, and not do anything to you.”
He shrugged. “What does it matter? I’m a prisoner. You’re not. You can go back alone.” And then, earnestly, he added, “Come on, we barely know each other. I mean... I’ve seen you in the hallways...”
She started to shake her, head, but why be so noble? He was right. She barely knew him. And besides – and besides – if she left here, she would have a much better chance of freeing him.
All of her heart wanted to tell him she’d be back. But her mind told her she didn’t know who might be listening.
She turned her back on him – looking forlorn and curiously small sitting against the wall of the space that had to be some form of cell between the worlds – and she thought of her room. Now, now that she wasn’t trying to take him with her, there wasn’t even the cold wind, or the sensation of fighting against the current. Instead, there was a soft plop, as if of a lid opening. And suddenly she was in her room. And she had a lot to do.
***
“Laurel residence,” the male voice said, with a strain of tension in it.
“This is Maria Malcom,” she said, using her talking-to-stuck-up-adults voice. “I’m one of Michael’s classmates.”
“Classmates?” the man asked. Their phone number was in one of the most expensive neighborhoods in one of the most expensive areas of town.
“Invisible High,” Maria said.
“Oh,” the man said.
“Has anyone called, demanding a ransom?”
“No.”
Well, that eliminated the small possibility that they’d simply kidnaped Michael for a ransom. That meant that Michael must have some sort of power and if he did... it would be in his paintings. Had to be. After all that was the only place that anyone had detected magic. But what could it be? And what could it mean, if these creatures would kidnap him for it.
She hung up the phone without noticing, without caring what Michael’s father thought. If Michael took art as a course at school, his paintings must be at the school. And she must see them.
***
Breaking into Invisible high should have been impossible. At least, they were, each of them, repeatedly told that the only way into the school was through the gateways in their schools. But Maria knew better. She simply concentrated on making the door to her closet a gateway into the front hall of Invisible.
And arrived there as the bell rang and a throng of students milled around her.
She had a moment of panic, that she somehow had spent so much time in Michael’s prison that it was now the school day again. Then she remembered the school took students from all over the world. Even with some magical time-jumping that meant it must operate around the clock.
Good. That meant she was less likely to trigger a school alarm.
Her backpack on shoulder, she slouched towards the art room.
“Maria!” the art teacher said. He was a dark haired man of Mediterranean origin and with the sort of expression that looks like he expects you to turn into a raging bear at any minute. “What are you doing here? It’s not school time for you.”
She nodded. “I know. It’s just...” and then all the lovely excuses she had thought up crumbled. “I’d like to see Michael Laurel’s paintings, if I may.”
“Michael’s?” the man said, surprised and then, his eyes widening, as he no doubt told himself they were teenagers after all. “I see... he was... a friend of yours?”
“He’s my friend. And I’ve never seen his paintings,” Maria said, trying to strike the right chord of sadness and longing.
The teacher sighed. “He’s talented enough in art. Nothing spectacular, mind. I mean, the art itself is very good, but as for pictorial magic, he’s no Leonardo Da Vinci. He’ll never be able to change history with his paintings, or to convince people of things just by their looking at them.” He sighed. “But he’s good enough. There’s a chance that as he grows his paintings will acquire life, on their own, and then he’ll be able to work in movies or such.” He paused. “As he grew, I should say,” the man amended himself. “I am very much afraid poor Michael is no longer with us.”
Maria’s look of genuine horror must have swayed him. He must have decided their relationship was more than Maria was letting on. He led her through the class, where various students worked diligently at their notebooks and paper. Against the wall were a row of very short and wide drawers, marked with the student’s name.
He opened the one that read Michael Laurel. “Help yourself,” he said. “Just put them back neatly when you’re done.”
And with that he turned his back on her and went back to his class, walking between the rows, encouraging some students and correcting others. Maria wondered if he was doing it because he didn’t want to turn his back on his class or because he thought that Maria might get emotional. It didn’t matter.
She turned, instead, to what she’d come to do. Pulling the pictures out of the drawer, she sensed them for magic.
First she felt the obvious glamoury of the paints, but then... but then beneath them she sensed something else. Some vital energy, some strong power. Something she’d never felt before. And one thing she was sure of. It couldn’t be related to the gold.
The pictures that had gold in them – mostly pictures of fairy-like castles and one amazing landscape of Autumnal trees – felt ... like tawdry magic. The type of magic that, were it a flavor, would taste of bubble gum. But there were others with no gold at all that felt like wild, swirling, unexplained magic.
And then at the bottom, at the back of them all, there was the one picture she recognized. It was the cobweb world – all gray, indistinct mush, forming things you had to guess at. Walls, and floor and something that might be people. And suddenly she understood.
Reverently, carefully, she put the pictures back in the drawer. And then she used magic to open the lock on the supply cabinet, and to slip a case of markers and a noteboo
k into her backpack. The class, absorbed in their work, did not see her.
***
Gate-waying back to Michael was harder. The wind bit at her clothes and seemed to form icicles upon her open eyes. But when she got there... when she got there Michael got up startled. “You just left,” he said. “How could?”
“Never mind,” she said. And handed him the notebook. “Draw,” she said. “Draw a nice room, with a doorway in it. And remember, the doorway leads somewhere you know. Your house. The school.”
He stared. “What?”
“Just. Do. It.”
He gave her a you must be crazy, look, but then he sat down and drew.
She could sense the feelings rolling from him. It started with annoyance that she was forcing him to do this. But as he drew, he became more and more involved in what he was doing. And when he was done, and flung it at her with a “Now what?” the room he’d drawn was perfect and enticing.
It was a white-walled room, with wicker furniture, a quilt draped over the arm of a cushion-smothered chair. The door on the wall was oak, slightly rounded.
“Where does that lead?” she asked, pointing.
“To my room,” he said, and crossed his arms, as though daring her to do her worst.
“Right,” she said. And put him into the drawing. It was a moment of intense concentration. A moment of wishing him in the drawing.
He said a surprised “Oh.” and there was a feeling of a breeze as he disappeared and air rushed in to replace where he had been.
Slowly, Maria looked down at the paper. For a moment she thought it hadn’t worked. And then she noticed that in the drawing the door was open.
***
When she ported back to her own room, the candles had burned almost down to the carpet. She started blowing them out, and putting them away hastily.
She was doing a spell to clean the wax off the carpet – Mother would have a fit if she saw it – when the phone rang.
“Maria?” Michael’s voice, shaking slightly.
Here Be Dragons: A collection of short stories Page 14