Mystify the Magician

by K. A. Applegate

  I shrugged. "I don't know. Sorry, I know I'm, like, messing up your big night. Although basically, just walk out onstage looking like that and you won't have to even sing. Maybe I should go see Brigid. I'm totally lost. I am messed up. I've never been dead before. Normally it's not the kind of thing you have to actually deal with. I mean, you're dead, bye-bye, all done, troubles over, and no school tomorrow. Now it's like, I'm waiting for it to catch up with me. Like there's a time delay, you know? Like it's one of those domino things arid we're just waiting for all the dominoes to knock each other down, and then I'm the last domino."

  "Okay, listen to me, you're babbling. You're not dead. I mean, you are not dead."

  Some guy brushed by and gave me the kind of look you'd give someone who was being reassured he wasn't dead.

  "You're not dead. Maybe you are dead over there I don't know. But maybe it just means you're free. Maybe you won't have to go back. Ever. Maybe it's over for you, that's a good thing, right?"

  "What? No. I mean, yes, okay, in theory, but no. You guys are still over there, maybe getting shot right now and I'm over here all safe." I didn't mention the fact that Etain was over there and clearly had a thing for me and it wasn't like beautiful half-elf princesses were just hanging around waiting for me here in the real world.

  "Yeah, but you're missing the whole point: If you're dead and that means you're free, then maybe the quicker all of us die, the better. And by the way, I'm still up here. Up here! What is it with you? Do I have to wear a sack?"

  "Sorry. I was thinking of Etain."

  Then, all at once, every muscle in my body gave way, like I had no bones, like I was a jellyfish.

  I collapsed at April's feet and rolled over onto my side, not even aware of her spike heels or her legs, just aware of the fact that I could not move.

  "Get up," April snapped.

  I tried to speak. No sound. Tongue not moving. Lips not moving. Eyes... couldn't quite focus them, tried, couldn't... I could see her bones. Oh, gross, I could see the bones inside April's legs, she was a skeleton wrapped in bloody muscle, a pulse in the big arteries of her thighs, woosh, woosh went the blood, right through her body, through the stage floor, equipment, could see through everything, nothing real, everything like some kind of schematic drawing, roughed-in, with details in saturated color, beating hearts all around me, beating hearts floating inside ghostly bodies.

  I couldn't move. Paralyzed.

  Oh, Jesus, it was happening.

  Far-off voices yelling. Hands lifting me up, a sack of dirt, a side of beef, no feeling except very slow and far away and nothing to see but the insides of my eyelids with jumpy animated figures like those old, old Mickey Mouse cartoons, everyone jerking and then slowing, all in rhythm to the rust-red hearts.

  April was there. Two Aprils. And Etain. And Some old dude with a beard and a doctor with curly hair and nurses and bright fluorescent lights and candles. Ceiling tile. Stone arches.

  Needles, druids. Chanting.

  And a creature made out of light. Cold, hard light that shined from far, far away, Etain?

  No, I saw Etain now, more clearly, and the light was beside her, casting no shadows, a light that was felt more than seen.

  Goewynne. The elf queen. And yes, Etain, too, but her light was not so bright. And now April, but dressed in her mismatched Everworld duds.

  Damn, I really preferred the tube top. "I was almost dead," I said in a raspy, unrecognizable voice.

  "Yes," Etain said.

  "We sewed up the shrapnel holes we could see," April said wearily. "But there was internal bleeding. I... you know, I'm not exactly a doctor. And their regular doctors here are, you know...

  not exactly doctors either. You were unconscious the whole time, but then, all of a sudden your breathing got very weird. You started shaking. I didn't know what to do."

  I took a deep breath and realized I hurt in more places than I could count. "I saw Mom. You know..."

  Etain said, "Yes, my mother used her powers and the magic summoned by the druids, and together with April's knowledge, your life was saved."

  "Tell her thanks," I whispered

  "Sleep now."

  "No. No," I murmured. "I messed up the show for you, April."

  "Thats okay, Christopher."

  Etain laid a cold cloth across my forehead and held my hand. April smoothed my hair. And I thought, Well, at least this hospital has great-looking nurses.

  And I woke up in a real hospital where the real nurses didn't look anywhere near as beautiful.

  I woke up in the real world again, happy, healthy, hungry, and a huge frustration to the doctors who had found nothing wrong with me at all — aside from the fact that I'd almost died.

  Chapter

  XVIII

  My real-world body was fine. My Everworld body was not so good. Goewynne and the blue druids did what they could, but I wasn't the only wounded person. A series of rooms had been outfitted with cots and turned into a sort of hospital. A weird-ass hospital run jointly by Dr. April, Goewynne, the druids, and the lovely Etain.

  April ran around insisting that everyone boil instruments and clean the sheets and wash the floors and stop picking their noses while working on open wounds. At the end of each rotten day she would grab a couple of hours sleep and, once across, would take her most recent questions to the university medical library for answers. I was pretty sure she'd be doing heart transplants before long.

  Etain was the chief nurse. She held hands and read poems and wrote letters and telegrams for the wounded men and fairies. She changed bandages and gave sponge baths. She gave me a sponge bath and it was a pretty clear indication of how badly I was messed up that I didn't even leer, let alone make any kind of a move.

  Goewynne worked with the druids, coming in to do some chanting and laying on of hands and some signing and some stuff involving candles and various stones, herbs, weeds, flowers, and stuff you don't want to think about.

  Their big thing was "purging." They were very big on purging, which at first I took to be some kind of harmless mumbo jumbo. Guess again. Let me just say this: When the druids give you a laxative, they aren't kidding around. Phillips Milk of What? Forget that, man, try the Nasty Blue-gray Druid Shake.

  Somehow this melding of primitive herbal medicine and primitive real medicine and mumbo jumbo deedly-deedly-

  deedly psycho wand-waving medicine all worked together.

  After a week I was able to get up and totter around the hallways leaning on Etain's arm. I was eating bread and soup pretty well. And I was starting to think that beer was in my future in a few more days. .

  But things weren't going well overall. There were thirty-one people in the hospital. Now there were even women who had been attacked and savaged by Senna's army, which now occupied the town and had the castle entirely surrounded and cut off.

  The good guys had taken out a lot of her people, but she seemed to be restocking with men and ammo. Our spies thought she might have thirty guys now. They hadn't figured out how to get over the castle walls yet, but it was just a matter of time. They'd tried to climb over using ladders, but their guns were not as big an advantage in that situation. Hard to shoot through a rock slit while you're hanging on to a ladder with one hand.

  David and Jalil's Double-F army — Fairies and Fianna —repelled the attempt and did it in such a way as to discourage another attempt. Jalil had figured out how to brew up some seriously awful sulphuric acid. He was now a god to the druids.

  Since then it had settled down to a siege. Senna's creeps had the town pretty well under their control. They had enslaved the town's people. The townspeople were used to perform hard labor, building bunkers to create machine-gun nests covering the main roads. They were robbed of everything they had. They were used for target practice.

  The hospital was not a happy place.

  David and Jalil came to see me. David was weary, bruised, bandaged. Jalil was no better.

  "Hey, Christopher. How you doing?" />
  "Except for Etain's and April's constant sexual demands on me, I'm fine," I said.

  David managed a fleeting smile.

  "How's the war going, General?"

  "One of the people in the town, a woman, got loose and made it to the gate. We got her in, just barely. She had information. She heard Senna and Keith and a couple of the others, some guy called Graber, talking. Senna's trying to get some of her people back in the real world to line up some heavy hardware: mortars at least, maybe cannon. Keith and Graber want her to send them back across to the real world.

  Senna says no. She says the guys on the other side, the real-world guys, have a line on some heavy stuff. I don't need to tell you that if they bring in even one mortar it's pretty much all over.

  Let alone hard-core artillery pieces."

  "Why do Keith and this other guy want to go back?" I wondered.

  "They figure whoever comes up with the heat to take us is going to be the big man among the Sennites," Jalil explained.

  "Sennites? They have a name now?"

  "I guess so. Is that water? You mind?" David reached for my pitcher.

  "Help yourself. So the next question is, why doesn't Senna send them back across the divide to get whatever she needs?"

  David shrugged. "I don't know. Jalil has some theories."

  I gave Jalil a sour look. "He always does."

  Jalil said, "Look, this name came up: Mr. Trent. He may be the guy on the other side who is going to help Senna get the heavy ordnance. That's your guy, right? The one at the copy shop?"

  "My guy? I don't think he's exactly my guy. I tried to put Keith in jail because Keith was threatening me. And why?

  Because Trent told him to, that's why." I peered at David and then groaned. "Oh, man, you're kidding, right? He'd shoot me on sight if he could."

  David nodded. "Maybe. Maybe not. Thing is, April can't do it — she's a girl and they don't trust girls. Me, I'm a Jew; Jalil's black. He's not going to let either of us get close. Besides, the other you, real-world Christopher has already agreed to go along with the plan."

  "Yeah, well, real-world Christopher is an idiot if he's agreed to go up and talk to Trent again. What am I supposed to do?

  Just ask him whether he's got any tanks for Everworld?"

  "No, actually, you're going to shoot Jalil."

  "Excuse me?"

  "With blanks. Better be with blanks," Jalil said darkly. "When you get back across, you double check that you've pried the slugs out."

  "I'm not shooting anyone."

  "With your dad's gun," David said. "Trent sees you shooting a black guy. He figures he owns you after that."

  "My dad doesn't let me borrow his gun to kill people. He's very strict about that."

  "That's the same thing real-world you said. I mean, to the word," Jalil marveled.

  "April will supply fake blood, you know, theater blood,"

  David said. "She'll do some screaming and all. You do the shooting and throw in some well-chosen words..." He gave me a significant look.

  "N-word," Jalil supplied. "It'll be like old times for you, Christopher."

  "You just need to pry the slugs out of the bullets and jam cardboard in," David said.

  "I want to emphasize that part and make sure we're real damn clear: Take out the slug," Jalil said "Take out all the slugs."

  David nodded. "That would be the main thing not to forget."

  “Take out the slugs," Jalil repeated.

  "You guys are crazy."

  "Yes, we are," Jalil said. "We're desperate. Mortar shells will sail right over the big walls out there and all the chanting druids in the world aren't going to stop them from blowing everything in here apart. They have Senna's magic stalemated for now, but they aren't real good at stopping bullets."

  "When am I supposed to do this?" I asked. "And why are you bothering me if you already have real-world Christopher all lined up?"

  David put the water cup back. "April needs to give you the fake exploding blood sacks and we can't find real-world you."

  "He's probably running for Wisconsin about now," I said.

  "Tell real-world you to call April at her home, first thing," Jalil said. "Yeah. And fast. Let me put it this way: Go to sleep, Christopher. April?!" He yelled her name and she appeared, harassed, hurrying, eyes rimmed red from lack of sleep.

  "Here. Goewynne made it. She says it will put you right to sleep." She handed me a tin cup full of something that smelled like old-lady perfume mixed with fertilizer.

  I glared but what could I do? I was useless here, still too weak to move. I had to do what I could, right? I drank the drug down in one gulp and tried not to shudder at the taste.

  "So you're saying real bullets?" I said.

  "Pry out the slugs," Jalil said.

  "Extra big slugs, got it."

  "Screw you, too."

  And then I was across.

  Chapter

  XIX

  Real-world me was not running for Wisconsin. Real-world me's phone was accidentally off the hook. Real-world me was having a jumpy fit waiting around while it got dark outside and no one contacted me.

  I hung up the phone and eight seconds later April called.

  "Where the hell have you been?"

  "You've been looking for me to give me some blood sacks,"

  I said. "I'm psychic."

  "Do you have the thing?"

  The thing was in my pocket. I had already pried the slugs out and stuck wads of chewed-up cardboard in to replace them. Then I'd checked the whole thing over about six times.

  "Oh yeah, baby, I have the thing you need. Uh-huh."

  "Are you actually standing there leering and rotating your pelvis like some kind of arthritic Elvis impersonator?"

  I froze. "No. Of course not. How did you know?"

  "I'm on a cell phone. I just drove up, for which I'll be grounded, by the way, since it isn't exactly my car. I'm right outside on the sidewalk."

  I looked through the window. She was under a dim streetlight. I hung up and went outside. Went back inside to grab a jacket. Back out.

  "You know this is a total screwup in the making, right? You know we're the Titanic Twins and there's a big-ass iceberg out there waiting for us," I said.

  April sighed, but in agreement not exasperation. "Come on, let's get going. No, let's walk. I'm not getting a bullet hole in my dad's Mercedes. Besides, there's never any parking."

  "Any acting tips for me?"

  "Don't act. Be in the moment," she said, then laughed.

  "That's why you get the blood sacks. Jalil will have his own to pop and look like a bullet wound. But we figured you should have some blood spattered all over you. The blood will do the acting for you."

  She handed me a sort of little pellet, a tiny water balloon.

  "Hold it in your left hand, right? No, like this. Gun in your right hand. Bang, bang, bang. Squeeze the blood — it'll spray back on your shirt and face."

  "You know, when you talk all Hollywood like this, it so totally gets me hot."

  She didn't laugh. "Christopher, I think Etain may actually like you. No one can imagine why, but she does. So why are you going all lizard with me?"

  This was cool news. My heart actually skipped a few beats.

  That happens fairly frequently, but it's always been from terror before.

  "What, I can't have different girls in different universes?"

  "Focus on this, okay?" she said. "We don't get to retake the scene."

  "I'm trying not to focus," I grumbled. It was another five blocks to downtown where we were supposed to enact our little idiot play. My palms were already sweating.

  I looked in the bright windows of the houses we passed.

  Way too many framed posters of old French advertisements, way too much Pottery Barn. Nice, nice TV light. The comforting blue glow. Oh, man, I would so like to be watching TV.

  Downtown was quiet; it usually is. I was in that forcing-myself-to-breathe thing you get into wh
en the dread is trying to choke you to sleep before you do something stupid. Not looking forward to this.

  "Okay, I have to split off," April said. "You okay?"

  "Sure. You okay?"

  "No," she said. "It's different when it's here. This is the real world. It's not right. This crap should all be over there, not here."

  Then she walked away.

  The plan was simple enough. Trent parked his car in a back alley a block away from his shop. We were supposed to wait for him to lock up the shop and head toward his car.

  David would be watching and call me on April's cell phone, which she had loaned me. Then Jalil and I would go into our act. Mr. Trent would happen along in time to witness our little play. I'd be all freaked out and beg him to help me escape.

  April would wander by and do some screaming. Trent would figure now that he had seen me do the Big Crime he would have me cold. I'd be welcomed into the warm arms of the psycho-freak fraternity.

  And that's pretty much how it worked out.

  Pretty much.

  Jalil and I waited two hours, shivering in a dark alley, avoiding the dubious looks of students taking the alley shortcut to campus.

  At last April's Nokia rang. "Yeah?"

  "He's on the move."

  I put the phone back on my hip and wished my heart would slow down. "Okay, man, we're on," I said.

  "You took out the slugs, right?" Jalil asked me for roughly the two-hundredth time.

  "Okay. Count to ten. One. Two. Three. Screw it. Here goes."

  I started yelling at Jalil, and Jalil started yelling at me, the two of us going at it like Pat Buchanan and Louis Farrakhan on The Jerry Springer Show. I was up in his face, he was up in mine.

  A slight noise. Someone entering the alley.

  I drew my gun, shaky, shaky, and Jalil jumped back and yelled something unpleasant.

  "Stop it! Stop it!" a woman's voice cried.

  What?

  A middle-aged woman wearing a peasant dress. "What are you doing?" she cried.

  And then, right behind her, Mr. Trent.

  "Do it!" Jalil hissed.

  BANG. Pause. BANG.

  I fired. Jalil staggered back. The woman screamed. April, coming out of nowhere, screamed. I totally forgot the blood pellet. Too much screaming.