Spellbent (21 page)

“I really do have to take a nap,” I said as I unrolled the sleeping bag atop the inflated mattress and tossed the pillow onto the cot. “Everything aches.”

I took two ibuprofen tablets with a swig of warm Gatorade, then stuck the bottle in the fridge. I plugged in the little electric alarm clock.

“You have any idea what time it is?” I asked.

“I’m afraid not,” he replied.

“Oh well. I’ll take a wild guess and set the time to eight PM, and set the alarm to go off around midnight. And then, potions, with a quick break to go dump my anathema again! And then, we’re off to see the Warlock, and hopefully Lion will get his courage and Tin Man will get his heart and I will get my Cooper.”

I went into the bathroom to avail myself of the toilet. The shower stall was caked with soap scum and mildew, and the sink was furry with shaving leavings and something that was possibly chewing tobacco. The floor was covered in dust and curly black hairs, and the toilet looked like it hadn’t been cleaned since the Truman administration. Fortunately, Boomer had left behind a roll of clean toilet paper in the cabinet under the sink, and having had to contend with Greyhound station restrooms at a tender age, I was well practiced in squat-and-hover.

“I realize it’s probably karmic payback for not bothering to clean the apartment before I left it today, but
damn
that’s a nasty bathroom,” I said to Pal as I emerged. “You said you know a good cleaning spell . . ?“

“I never said that, actually, but in fact I do know a very good cleaning spell.”

“Does it take long?”

“Probably half an hour to learn, a quarter hour to perform.”

“Naptime first, then cleaning. Then potion.” I shucked off my sneakers, crawled into the sleeping bag, and was soon fast asleep.

In the Wake of the Dream

I Walked barefoot across cool green moss growing along a forested stream bank. I had both my eyes and both my arms, and the spring sun felt wonderful on my skin. A few yards away, Cooper knelt bare-chested on a flat shale rock, washing a white T-shirt in the clear water of the stream. The morning sunlight shone on the wiry muscles of his back and shoulders.

Smiling, I walked up beside him. “Whatcha doing?”

“I can’t remember where this came from, but it won’t come out,” he said, lifting the shirt from the water. Dark red blood stained the white cotton. “I’ve been scrubbing this for hours, but it won’t come out.”

The breeze shifted, strengthened. I thought I heard the tinkling of bells or a music box in the distance. It took me a moment to recognize the tune as “The Twelve Days of Christmas.”

Somewhere in the distance, a baby began to scream.

The sun fled the sky, and the wind blew cold. Sleet stung my face. I looked down at Cooper; he was shivering on the rock, the stream completely frozen over, his hands covered in fresh blood steaming in the icy air.

“I didn’t want to do it,” Cooper whispered. “God help me, I didn’t want to do it.”

He cried out, convulsing in pain. His body stiffened and turned gray, a statue of ash that began to flake apart in the wind.

“Cooper!” I tried to grab him to shield him from the wind, but his body came apart in my embrace, blowing away on the freezing wind. A fist-sized lump of molten iron glowed where his heart had been, and the burning metal dripped out of his crumbling chest cavity, searing my left hand horribly, and suddenly I, too, was turning to ash and I couldn’t stop it— I came awake in the darkness, my clothes and the sleeping bag drenched in sweat. My eye socket and arm hurt worse than ever. I sat up, doubled over on the cot, cradled the stump of my arm, and vainly willed the pain away.

It was absolutely no comfort to realize that finally I was starting to remember the nightmares after I’d awakened.

Pal hopped up on the cot. “Are you all right?”

“No,” I said, and began to sob from the pain in my body and in my soul and from the sheer injustice of everything that had happened oh God Cooper was gone and how would I ever get him back with the entire Universe wanting him gone and dead and what had he done and what was I going to do...

“Jessie, shh, Jessie, please, it’ll be okay,” said Pal.

“I can’t do this,” I wept. “I can’t. It h-hurts too much.”

“I know you’ve been through a lot, too much for any one person to be expected to handle, but you’ve got to pull yourself together,” Pal said.

“I can’t. I just want to sleep, and how can I sleep if I keep having nightmares... ?“

Somebody knocked on the door.

“G.G., you okay in there?” Kai asked.

“Yeah,” I replied weakly. “Do you have any Vicodin or Percocets or anything like that?”

“I got some Robaxacets we got up in Toronto. .

“My arm is killing me.. . can I bum one?” I asked.

“Uh, okay. . . I gotta find the foils, though.” I heard him head back down the stairs. I leaned against the door frame, wishing the Brick Fairy would descend and smite me across the head and make the pain go away.

Finally, Kai returned and I unlatched the door. “I’ll pay you back for this,” I said, taking the thick white pill from his hand.

“Hey, no worries. . . I hope you feel better,” he replied.

I thanked him again, latched the door, downed the pill with a swig of Gatorade from the fridge, and collapsed back on the cot.

I slept fitfully at best, and did not feel the least bit better when Pal poked me awake with his sharp snout. Sunlight streamed through the window.

“Ugh, what time is it?” I asked, feeling queasy and feverish.

“Nearly noon,” Pal replied. “It’s only four hours until your anathema counter-spell starts to wear off.”

“Four hours? Can’t I sleep a little bit longer? I’m so tired

“No, you’ve
got
to get up. If you go back to sleep you might never wake up again,” Pal replied. “You’re burning up; unless my nose deceives me, you’ve got a nasty staph infection, and we need to take care of that before you get any worse.”

“Infection?” I wriggled my throbbing arm out of the sling; my elbow was so swollen I could barely flex it. The bandages covering my stump were soaked with greenish yellow pus. “Aw, hell.”

I threw off the sleeping bag and lurched up from the cot, my vision swimming, and stumbled to the bathroom to relieve my aching bladder. I switched the light on, and the sight of the forgotten filth suddenly made me absolutely furious.

“Can’t any of the fraternity rejects around here learn to use a goddamn
sponge?”
I yelled into the tiny bathroom. “Damn this place to the nine hells, what kind of inbred dirt pig can
live
in this crap? Is it too much to ask for a clean fucking bathroom—”

I gasped, the muscles in my feverish body seizing up, my spine going rigid, and instead of my profane rant, old, old words spilled from my lips and a whirlwind rose in the cramped, moldy bathroom and then a bang and sunburst of light that blinded me and sent me to my knees.

“My goodness.” Pal hopped over to me and nudged my thigh. “Are you all right?”

“Buh.” I blinked several times to clear the spots in my vision. The bathroom floor in front of me shone bright and white and clean. The tub and sink and toilet looked like they were brand new. “Holy cats, did I do that?”

“Well, I certainly couldn’t,” Pal replied. “I suppose you don’t know how you managed that, do you?”

“Uh-uh.” Shaking, I got to my feet and went into the bathroom to use the toilet.

“You Babblers and your unreliable bursts of magical inspiration,” Pal sighed.

I stared down at the white tiles as I peed. The grout lines seemed to be undulating back and forth. “I think I’m starting to hallucinate.”

“I can’t say I’m surprised. We need to get that infection taken care of. Our best option is wood ash and moldy cheese, as Mother Karen suggested.”

“Well, if these guys have cheese, it’s almost guaranteed to be moldy,” I replied as I finished up. “So we should be safe there. If not, I’ll go door-to-door and pretend I’m a member of the Cheese Scouts or something.”

Pal and I left my room and made our way downstairs. I was starting to notice flittering
things
lurking in dark corners that scuttled out of sight when I tried to look at them directly.

Oh,
good, now I’m seeing little flitty things in the dark places—I’m hallucinating those, right?
I wondered to Pal.

“Actually, probably not,” he replied from his perch on my shoulder. “The world is full of fey creatures that normally even strong Talents don’t see. Best to pretend you don’t notice them, because to observe them is to affect them, and they don’t like that.”

Oh. I prudently stared down at my feet on the stairs, which was just as well because my balance as well as my depth perception were totally shot and I felt like I might trip at any moment.

Nonetheless, I got downstairs safely and wobbled through the living room into the kitchen. Mikey was on the couch drinking beer and watching two sweaty guys in tight shorts pummel each other in a cage fighting match; he didn’t so much as grunt at me as I passed. Something that looked like a fleshy daisy with octopus tentacles instead of roots clung to the bottom of his beer. Its twin dozed on one of his hairy feet.

Shoals of indistinct fey creatures fled my feet as I entered the kitchen. I made a beeline for the old May- tag refrigerator, opened it, and ignored the weird mantis-like creatures lurking behind the pickle jar and a Taco Bell bag. A spiky little fey that looked like a cross between a mushroom and a puffer fish flopped away from the light as I pulled open the vegetable crisper. Bingo. Beside some flaccid carrots was a Ziploc bag of shredded cheddar; a full two- thirds of the cheese was mottled with green-gray
Penicillium
mold.

I grabbed the cheese and found a discarded Popsicle stick and disposable lighter in the huge pile of dirty dishes and debris on the kitchen counter.

“Better get a bowl, too. Some garlic wouldn’t hurt, either,” Pal said.

I found a relatively clean glass mixing bowl in one of the cabinets and some garlic powder.

All right, let’s get this done,
I thought to Pal.
I’d very much like to not be seeing the fey anymore. It’s kind of hard not to stare at them. What would they do if I bothered them?

“I’m surely not an expert, since I’ve never been able to see them myself,” Pal admitted. “They share our plane but are not fully part of it. We’re furniture to them, but nobody really knows how they perceive the world we interact with. Still, I’ve heard that in their perception, sentient attention is the equivalent of a strong spotlight shining down on them. They tolerate that sort of thing for a little while, but then they’ll look for ways to make the light go away.”

Lovely.
I left the kitchen and went back into the living room.

Mikey glanced over at me, then belched and set his empty beer down on the coffee table. The tentacle
daisy leaped off the bottle at the last second and
scuttled away to hide somewhere on the underside of the table.

“Y’know, if your face wasn’t all fucked up, and if you wore some makeup and did something with your hair; you might be kinda hot,” Mikey said, sounding bored.

I felt a sudden surge of anger rise through the haze of my fever. “And I might be vaguely attracted to you, if you weren’t such a
dick.”

I said that last part with a lot more force and venom than I’d intended.. . and it didn’t come Out in English.

“Oh,
Jessie,”
Pal sighed.

I’d turned Mikey into a giant, saggy, sweaty smelling uncircumcised penis lolling on the couch. His hairy feet, looking ridiculous and tiny, stuck out where the testicles should have been. The tentacle daisy still clung to his toes, unperturbed.

Huh. This magical kick I’m getting from the fever is kind of handy,
I thought to Pal.

“Your increased power is simply a temporary survival mechanism,” he replied. “You’re probably just a few hours from incapacitating delirium and coma.”

Oh, goody.

Kai came down the stairs; he stopped dead on the landing when he got a clear view of the couch.

“Dude . . . that’s just
wrong,”
he croaked. “Is—is that Mikey?”

I nodded calmly. “He seems to be. . . in his element.”

“Why did you do that?” Kai sounded close to panic.

I decided I felt too sick and tired to apologize
for anything I had done or was going to do that day.
“That’s what he gets for being a prick to me.”

“But. . . but he ain’t got no mouth! Or nose! How can he breathe like that?”

I hadn’t considered the respiratory consequences of turning somebody into giant genitalia.

How
is
he able to breathe like that?
I asked Pal.

“He’s able to breathe just
fine,”
Pal assured me. “You didn’t really turn him into a penis.”

I didn’t? He sure looks like a gargantuan wang to me.

“I believe you just put a perceptual charm on him. Anybody who looks at him thinks he’s been transformed. He thinks it, too, or at least he thinks he can’t speak or get off the couch. No harm done unless he needs to urinate or defecate while he’s lying there, and honestly given the state of the couch I doubt anybody else living here will much notice if he does.”