by Sam Fisher
The shape limped closer, and Morton realized that whatever was approaching was not a Snarf — at least, not fully. The figure appeared to be about seven feet tall, with immense rounded shoulders, like a giant hunchback. It was wearing an old, torn raincoat that was at least two sizes too small, and its hands were wrapped in bandages. Finally the creature came to a stop beneath the only streetlight in the area so that all could clearly see its face. Nobody spoke, though Morton heard several sharp intakes of breath. The face, despite its pallid silver shade, clearly belonged to none other than Brad Evans.
“Brad!” Robbie said, failing to mask a hint of hatred in his voice.
Brad raised his massive hand and brought a large green bottle to his lips. In the glint of the streetlight directly above, Morton saw that the bottle had a yellow label with a picture of a black cat, and above that the words Colby’s CAT.
And just like that, Morton realized exactly what had been happening in Dimvale. Suddenly the whole bizarre mystery of the back-page toys made perfect sense.
The voice, which echoed in the now empty streets around them, was not at all what Morton had expected. He’d expected a deep, bellowing ferocity to match the intimidating form towering in their path, but Brad’s voice was small and cracked, more like an injured animal than an angry one.
“I won’t eat you if you promise to help me,” he said.
Morton’s fear drained away to be replaced by an unpleasant combination of guilt and pity. As cruel as Brad had been, even he did not deserve this horrific fate, and it was an unavoidable fact that they were at least partially to blame.
“We are trying to help you,” James said. “We’re trying to undo all the magic.”
“But, but …” Brad started to pant heavily through his nose and tensed his bandaged fists. His whole body rippled and Morton could tell that much of what he was hiding beneath that oversize jacket was not human. “What do you mean ‘trying’? You did this to me! You can make it go away! You have to make it go away!”
“It’s not that simple,” Morton said in a pleading voice. “We didn’t intend to do magic. We got mixed up in something that happened between John King and Mr. Brown.”
“Brown! I thought he might have something to do with it,” Brad hissed. “But he’s vanished.”
“Actually, he’s dead,” Melissa said flatly.
Brad’s monstrous green eyes grew wide. “Did you … ?”
“No!” Morton exclaimed. “It was … an accident.”
The rhythm of Brad’s breathing increased to an even more frantic pace and he turned to his left and right and began muttering, as if he were trying to digest what had just been revealed to him.
“Look, I need more Colby’s Cat,” he growled, holding up the green bottle that Morton now saw was only a quarter full. “Do you have any or not?”
“Colby’s Cat?” James said, confusion clearly audible in his voice. “What are you talking about?”
Brad growled again. “You don’t know? How can you not know? You’re … you’re a Snarf like me, aren’t you?”
“I … I was, but I’m not now,” James said, almost apologetically. “What is Colby’s Cat?”
“Colby’s Cure-All Tincture,” Morton said. “It’s a spicy drink you can buy from the back pages that’s supposed to cure everything from acne to baldness. It was really just aniseed-flavored sugar water.”
“So does it work now?” Melissa said.
At that Brad held his face up and pointed to the purple-tinged pupils of his large green eyes. “Does it look like it works?” he said angrily.
Melissa backed away. “I’m sorry,” she said under her breath.
There was a long pause in which Morton imagined everyone was feeling as guilty and helpless as he was.
In the end it was James who spoke up.
“Look, what happened was an accident, and we promise we’ll do everything we can to make you normal again, but you’ll have to help us to help you.”
Brad growled again and turned his demonic eyes on James. “Help? How? I don’t know anything about magic.”
“But you must know something,” James said in a calming voice. “I mean, we know Nolan was mixing the potion to help turn you back into a human. Why didn’t that work? And where is he now?”
Brad paced back and forth and started mumbling to himself again, as if he couldn’t think without speaking aloud. “I might know something,” he said, and then sniffed at the air. “But we can’t talk here. The rats will come back soon. Follow me. I know a safe place.” Then he turned and lumbered back down the middle of the street, hunched over and hobbling awkwardly like some strange two-legged camel.
At first nobody moved.
“Are we sure we can trust a Snarf?” Melissa whispered, leaning in close to James.
“He’s not a Snarf,” James said. “He’s still part human.”
“Part Brad,” Robbie murmured. “Not much better.”
James shot Robbie a disapproving look. “It doesn’t matter. We have to help him.”
“But what if he ate Nolan?” Robbie hissed under his breath.
Brad, who was several yards away, stopped suddenly and turned to face Robbie. “I didn’t eat Nolan,” he said.
Robbie turned abruptly, clearly surprised that Brad had heard him from so far away, but his face remained hard. “Then where is he?” he said.
Brad looked around at the dark streets again. “Like I said, we can’t talk about it here; the rats will be back any minute.” And he began hobbling along the street again.
“Robbie may have a point,” Melissa said, whispering now to evade Brad’s obviously heightened sense of hearing. “I mean, following a Snarf down a dark alley in the middle of the night is probably a teeny bit more dangerous than, say, playing with matches or skateboarding without a helmet.”
“I know. But we don’t have much choice,” James said. “It’s either follow Brad or face the rats.”
James set off after Brad, and the others followed without further debate, although Robbie still seemed very unhappy about the idea. Less than three minutes later they arrived outside a semi-derelict row of houses on an abandoned street.
Robbie leaned over to Morton. “Of course,” he whispered. “It’s the old rehearsal space. I guess this is like his den, or nest, or whatever you call it.”
“It’s called a kraal,” Morton said. “At least, in the story that’s what it’s called.”
Brad approached one of the doors in the abandoned strip and glanced quickly up and down the street before fumbling with the lock and pushing it open. He then stooped low and squeezed his lumpy form through the opening. Morton peered in after him to see him descend a set of plywood stairs, which had old remnants of mismatched carpet stapled onto each tread.
“We’re going down there?” Melissa said, standing just behind Morton.
James shrugged. “Why wouldn’t we?”
“Because he’s probably going to grind our bones to make his bread.”
James gave Melissa a withering stare. “I think if he wanted to do that he would have done it already,” he said, and pushed past her.
Melissa sighed and shook her head. “Well, I think we’ve moved on from skateboarding without a helmet to juggling with dynamite,” she said, but followed James nonetheless.
The stairs smelled strongly of cats and mildew, but as Morton followed the others and wound his way around a set of narrow passages, a far more powerful odor of rotting meat took over. At last they arrived at a dingy room with holes in the plaster and ripped posters of local bands on the walls. A drum set was crammed into one corner, and a pile of torn blankets and what looked like chewed-up insulation filled the other.
“How long have you been hiding out down here?” James said, taking in the scene with a distraught look on his face.
“About a week,” Brad said. “That’s when it started to get really bad.”
“But what about your parents?” Wendy asked. “Aren’t they worried ab
out you?”
Brad made a scoffing noise. “I told them I was going on tour with the band. Anyway, they wouldn’t care even if I did turn into a Snarf, except they’d probably sell me to the circus.”
“But you did turn into a Snarf, right?” Melissa said. “I mean, that must have been you we saw behind our house.”
Brad nodded sullenly. “I’ve turned into a Snarf three times now. Nolan’s been feeding me Colby’s CAT — mixing it in with food. But it’s not much of a cure. It wears off after a few days and then you need more and it starts to work less and less.”
“So, Nolan does know about magic,” Morton said, still a little confused.
“Not really. I mean, he’s smart and everything. That’s why I went to him. I thought, if anybody could figure out what to do, it’d be him, and he’s a friend.” Brad lifted his immense shoulders in a semblance of a shrug. “Well, closest thing I’ve got to a friend anyway. Funny thing was, I was sure he’d think I was playing some kind of trick on him, you know, to get him back for throwing me out of the band, but he believed me right away. He said he already suspected something like that was happening and he was pretty sure you were mixed up in it.”
“Us?” Melissa said indignantly. “Why us?”
“Everybody knows all this weird stuff started happening when you moved to town,” Brad said.
“You should have come to us sooner,” James said.
Brad shook his head violently. “Why would I do that? I mean, all I know is, I got into a fight with you and the next thing that happens is I start turning into a monster.”
A strange look came over James’s face and he suddenly looked down at his feet. “Oh, yeah, of course,” he said.
Brad shrugged again, surprisingly no longer looking angry. “Anyway, Nolan had a plan to help me. He found the story with the Snarf cure, and he started getting the ingredients together. But he couldn’t find this parchment paper. We both knew it had to have something to do with John King because he wrote all those comics, so Nolan started looking into it and found out that King used to collect old books on witchcraft and all that spooky stuff, and he found out that some old guy who has a bookshop downtown bought all his books in an auction.”
“Sydenham Crooks,” Morton said.
“That’s him,” Brad said. “So we went to see him and asked if he had any of King’s books, but he told us he’d never even heard of John King, so Nolan knew he was lying. So that night he went back and broke into the shop, and the next morning he came back with this really old book full of spells and magic and potions and all kinds of creepy stuff. It made me shiver just looking at it, but Nolan got really excited. He’d seen the ad for Colby’s Cure-All Tincture in the back pages of Scare Scape, and even though he couldn’t find the parchment paper, he said he’d found a different spell that might help, but he wanted to check up on it first and told me to hide the book and lie low while he did a bit more research. So that’s what I did. For a little while.
“But the trouble was, I kept getting worse. Spines started growing on my back, and then I couldn’t eat normal food at all. But what really made me panic was when I started belching out yellow smoke. That’s when I … Well, I wasn’t thinking straight and I started to think Nolan had forgotten about me. I mean, he seemed to have lots of time to write new songs for his band but no time to figure out how to do the spell.”
Morton couldn’t help noticing that Brad cast a resentful glance in Robbie’s direction, but Robbie simply stared back defiantly.
“I started to get desperate,” Brad went on. “I started thinking he was just stringing me along, just playing with me. So I thought, I’ll just do the spell myself. That’s when, well, I guess I didn’t do it right.”
Brad fell into a long silence, staring down at his bandaged hands to avoid eye contact. His face became so contorted and twisted that Morton was sure he was going to burst into sobs. But instead he keeled over and belched out an immense cloud of yellow smoke. The sulfurous smell made everyone cough and choke, and Brad took another swig from his little green bottle.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“It’s okay,” James said. “I know how you feel. Just try and stay calm and tell us what happened next.”
“Nolan had found two bottles of the tincture, so I tried to do the spell myself,” Brad said simply. “On Halloween night. And it did something. There was this weird blue flash, and I thought I’d got it right. But when Nolan found out what I’d done he got really angry. He said I’d done it wrong because the book said you had to draw a picture of the thing you wanted to make real on a piece of paper but I couldn’t draw, so I ripped a picture of the Colby’s CAT stuff out of the back of the comic and used that.”
Morton thought again of the comic he’d found in Nolan’s locker and how the entire double-sided page had been filled with all manner of tricks, trinkets, and creepy toys. Part of him wanted to scream at Brad for being so completely stupid, but then another part of him wondered just how he would have managed in a similar situation.
“You used the whole page, didn’t you?” Morton said.
“Yeah,” Brad said, in a pouting, guilty voice. “That’s why Nolan was mad. He said all the toys on the page would be affected, and he started calling me names and stuff, which I didn’t like. Anyway, we got into a big fight, and I just stormed off, and I got so angry I forgot all about the Colby’s CAT.
“I guess that was the first time I turned into a Snarf. I don’t really remember much of what happened. I can sort of remember eating a lot of rats. But somehow Nolan managed to put the Colby’s stuff on some food and feed it to me, and I woke up down here feeling mostly normal again. But it’s not a cure. We soon found out it doesn’t last very long. And now I’m down to my last few drops.”
Brad held up the bottle to show that his supply was indeed diminishing.
“You still haven’t told us what’s happened to Nolan,” Robbie said. “I mean, if he found out about this other spell, the one that really reverses the magic, why didn’t he just do it?”
“That’s what he tried to do next,” Brad said. “When we found out that Colby’s wasn’t going to work he started talking about the other spell. He called it a dousing spell, said it was a special kind of spell that could undo any magic. He said it would even undo all the stuff that I’d caused by doing the spell wrong.”
“That sounds exactly like the spell we need,” Melissa said, more than a hint of excitement in her voice.
“Yeah, but he never could find the special parchment paper. And when he couldn’t find any more Colby’s CAT he said things were desperate and that he’d have to risk going back to Sydenham Crooks’s bookshop to find the paper. He said Crooks had all kinds of magic books and he was fairly sure he’d have some. So he left me with this bottle and went off to Crooks’s shop alone.”
Brad stopped talking, as if he’d finished his story.
“Then what happened?” James prompted.
“Nothing. I haven’t seen him since. This morning I went looking for him, but I didn’t even get within a block of his house. There were police everywhere.”
“And you’re sure you didn’t eat him without realizing it?” Robbie said coldly.
Brad squinted angrily down at Robbie. For a moment, Morton wondered if he was going to lash out at him, but surprisingly he didn’t. He just nodded and said, “Yeah, I’m sure.”
“So, what did happen to Nolan?” James asked.
“I think Crooks has kidnapped him,” Brad said.
“Why do you think that?” Wendy said.
“Because Crooks was hiding something. He started acting weird as soon as we asked him about King’s books. You could tell he didn’t want anybody to know he bought them. And Nolan seemed to think he was dangerous. I didn’t think he was. I just thought he was creepy and weird and —”
Brad stopped talking abruptly and doubled over and growled, as if in pain. A moment later another cloud of smoke erupted from him and he grabbed at his b
ottle and put it to his mouth yet again.
“You better go easy on that stuff,” James said, daring to step closer to him.
Brad pulled himself back to a standing position. “Either way, I don’t have long,” he said. “So, now I’ve told you my story. Can you help me or not?”
“We can help each other,” James said. “We need to get to Crooks’s store and see what he’s hiding in his secret room, but with the rats on the street, we can’t get there alone. You can scare them off for us, right?”
Brad made a slow nodding motion. “We don’t have much time though,” he said. “I can only promise to help you while I’m still human. If I turn into a Snarf, then you’re on your own.”
They had no more rat sightings on the journey to Crooks’s bookshop, although Morton thought he heard distant scampering noises on several occasions.
When they arrived, the entire street was utterly dark. Neon signs and illuminated window displays were not allowed in Dimvale, which was one of the main reasons Dad had decided to move here. He had explained many times that streetlights and any other wasted light spilling up into the night sky ate away at the visible stars like a black fungus. Dad’s description had always reminded Morton of the legendary Ink Blight from the Monster Tarot, which ate away at everything it touched. Coincidentally the Ink Blight was supposed to be caused by too much magic, and Dad had often joked that light pollution was caused by too much technology. But the stars were in no danger of fading away tonight. The Milky Way flared above them like a river of light, and Morton realized that this was another thing he loved about Dimvale. In the city, there were no stars.
“How do we plan to get in?” Robbie said, peering through the window.
“Stand back!” Brad said, raising his leg and aiming his oversize foot at the door, but Wendy stopped him with a sudden shout.
“Wait! It’s already open.”
Brad lowered his foot, and Morton saw that Wendy was right.