Midnight Snack and Other Fairy Tales (19 page)

“Uh,” Brianna said, “okay…”

She went out sadly.
And it was all looking so promising until now,
Brianna thought.
I don’t have time to work all this out from scratch. If I just did a miniature one… But that would be lame.
Especially after what she’d had in mind for the magic sword: the real thing, full size. This would just be too much of a comedown, and once again her rep would suffer.

Outside the Home Ec lab door she paused, looking up and down the hall and wondering where to go with this next. More research, she thought.
It’ll have to wait until the afternoon: I’ve got Spell Construction next. Or else just dump the whole idea and go see if the magic sword thing is still alive…

She sighed, and strolled, and thought: and then off to the left, as she passed the organic parachem lab, something caught Brianna’s eye.

She paused.
What the heck is that?
Brianna thought. On the lab table nearest the door to the hall stood a perfectly clear construction, like glass, spiraling up three feet or so from some kind of pedestal. At first Brianna thought it was some kind of strange lab glassware she’d never seen before—something left over from one of those rainy-day situations where Mr. Donswitz the parachem instructor started hauling out his alembic collection. But no, there was just this twisted column of glassy stuff, sparkling slightly around the edges with the greenish-white sizzle of the remnants of spell artifact: and standing there, watching it, a guy in jeans and a T-shirt and a jeans jacket, his arms folded, looking vague.

Brianna stood still and tried to remember who he was, but she couldn’t find a name to pin to the face. It was a nice enough face, under shaggy, not-quite-stylish hair. A Salem student, yes, but not one Brianna had ever spoken to. “He’s in a different circle,” was the way Brianna’s crowd at Salem would usually put it—meaning a different social circle as well as a different magical one. On the surface, the saying might just indicate a preference for a particular kind of witchcraft. But normally, truly, it meant somebody was too dumb, too plain, too angry, too weird, too… different.

He looked up at her now, and Brianna was startled by the intensity of the gaze: blue, like almost everything else about him, but not the worn blue of the denims. A paler blue, like early sky or cold water: uncertain. Or if there was certainty, it was the kind that was thinking,
This is going to go wrong too, isn’t it.

Brianna blinked, and then pushed the lab door open. “Uh,” she said, “hi.”

“Hi,” the guy said, looking slightly shocked.

“You looking for Mr. Donswitz?” Brianna said, going over to the table and looking at the strange twisted thing. “I think he’s out this week.”

“Oh. Yeah. Uh,” the guy said, “no. I just wanted to get this done before class started.”

“What is that?” Brianna said. And then she laughed. “Sorry. I’m Brianna.”

“Dirk,” he said. “Dirk Willis. Yeah, I know.” He looked up at the glass thing. “It’s called a barley-sugar twist.”

“A what?’

“Barley sugar. It’s a kind of candy they used to make in Europe. Sometimes they would make sticks of it that were twisted like this. But it’s also an architectural form: they named this style of pillar out of the candy—”

“Barley sugar,” Brianna said, staring at it. “Is this actually
sugar
??”

Dirk laughed, looking embarrassed. “Uh, yeah. It’s a pun: I did it to win a bet. Someone in my physics class bet me that nobody could actually make a weight-bearing one out of sugar. Dumb bet.” He said this with satisfaction, but no malice. “See the way this twists, three times in twice the twist’s width– “ He pointed at one section of the pillar. “It’s incredibly strong. DNA has the almost same twist: the main difference is that the interior bracing in DNA is more obvious. It’s another echo of the helical shape that keeps turning up in nature…”

Brianna stood there nodding and looking at the column. Inside, though, she was seeing once again that image from the storybook on the shelf over her bed. Not just the gingerbread house, itself, but the detail. The candy slates on the roof, the sugar-glass panes in the windows, the porch.
With pillars that looked like this—

Brianna looked at Dirk, who had his head a little on one side, and was eyeing his creation while he talked like someone already wondering whether there wasn’t something wrong with it and whether it could be improved. “…not really about sugar, though, but they were always giving it weird names. They also called it the Salomonic column, but it didn’t actually have anything to do with King Solomon. It was just that in the Vatican there are these two big columns, and they were supposed to be the original front columns from the great Temple in Jerusalem, their names were Boaz and Jachin, and they—“

“Dirk?”

He stopped and looked at her. “What?—Oh, no, it’s nothing to do with Solomon and the genii, that was just—”

“Dirk!!”

He stopped again.

What Brianna really wanted to say was
You are a king-geek among geeks!,
but that would be seriously counterproductive at the moment. So instead she said, “I need to do—something kind of weird.”

Dirk turned that sideways-cock-of-the-head- look on her and looked, for the moment, completely like a bird. To Brianna’s utter astonishment, he also went pale. “Weird
how?”
Dirk said.

“For my parascience fair project.”

He suddenly looked very much relieved, but also puzzled. “You mean you’re not doing the sword thing with Arthur Etchison?” Dirk said.

She stared at him.
“What?”

“This morning before everybody went in, he said he’d had this great idea, and you were just the one to handle the execution and do the heavy lifting.”

Brianna went ice-cold, then flushed hot a second later.
“He’d
had—!!”
Why, that big-mouthed, stuck-up—!
“Well, no I am not,” she said, not caring for the moment that she sounded furious. “And he is just very wrong. Arthur can just go forge his own sword and stick it right—” Brianna stopped herself. “—Where magic swords are usually stuck,” she said. “As a rule, stones are involved, I believe.”

Dirk gave her a crooked smile: an odd look, but one Brianna still liked much better at the moment than Arthur’s. “Okay,” he said. “So what about the project? What were you going to do?”

“A gingerbread house,” she said. “Full size. At least, I want to. But I don’t know how. And Mrs. Baldwin wasn’t much help.” Then she laughed. “Well, yeah, she was, but only to give me a sense that you can’t just whip up a whole lot of gingerbread by magic and then stick it together, and expect it to stay up.”

Dirk sat back in his chair and tilted his head sideways again, but this time the effect was more considered and less freaked-out. “Well, no,” he said. “The stresses would be all wrong for the material. It would weigh too much. Then there’s interior and exterior bracing to think about, and—” He paused. “You know, the smartest way would be to grow it.”

Brianna stared at him.
“Grow
it? Gingerbread?”

Dirk shrugged. “Sure,” he said, “why not? That’s probably how the witch who built the original managed it. You take some of the ingredients of gingerbread—” He paused, thinking. “Well, ginger, obviously. Flour. Water. But you know—” He suddenly got a very canny look on that face: the eyes positively came alive, like those of someone who was getting ready to play a trick on the world. “You could make this really strong if you used live ginger, rather than the dry ground-up stuff. That might have been what the original witch did, too. Get the live organic material to grow up
through
the stuff that was alive at one point—the flour—after you’d complexed the water in with it. You’d get an internally braced solid structure. Like reinforced concrete, but organic.”

“Prestressed gingerbread?” Brianna said, and laughed. “Are you serious?”

“Sure. It’d come out almost like wood if you got the water mixed correctly with the flour, kept it even enough. You could even just suck the water molecules into the spell right out of the air.” He turned suddenly from her to the computer. “Let me check the school weather station, I need to see what the relative humidity is—”

Brianna was astounded. “I hadn’t thought about doing this today, wouldn’t it take more time, I mean—”

“Why would it? Once you’ve designed the basic structure, and laid whatever shape you’re imagining over the construction spell, you can collapse the spell and then re-enable it anywhere you want it.”

And suddenly he turned his back on his barley-sugar pillar and headed for one of the computers by the window: pointed at its mouse, wiggled it. The screen came up out of black, displaying a kind of wireframe diagram of the pillar. “That’s so wild,” Brianna said.

“What” The structure?”

“No,” Brianna said, and laughed. “That your two columns have names.”

“Oh, yeah,” Dirk said. “They’re even in Tarot cards, in some decks. I think they symbolize the union of opposites or something.” He snapped his fingers, and the wireframe diagram vanished. “Meanwhile, there has to be a blueprint first,” he said. “And then the spell to prestress the structure.” He sat down in the typing chair in front of the monitor and began drumming his fingers on either side of the keyboard, a thinking gesture. “We have better flour than they used to have in the old days: the protein structures are different. The old stuff, it’d have been what we would think of as a really
crude
wholegrain prestressed. Even with the crudest flour we can get, you’re going to be working with something that’s a lot better milled. And then there’s the question of the windows. First you’d have to—”

“Whoa, whoa, wait!” Brianna said. “Too much, not all at once, give me a minute!” She pulled her notebook out and started making witch-writing on the outer cover: it would sink in and slide itself onto the lined paper inside.

“It’s okay,” Dirk said. “Don’t get stressed, this will all transfer to my laptop, and it can share it with your notebook.” He started typing, and the beginnings of a blueprint began assembling itself on the screen. “Basic stuff first?” he said. “Just the physical design. You tell me how you see it.”

“Yeah. Then, if it’s going to be a grown thing, we’ll need a couple of contagion and sympathetic magic routines to hold the growth in…”

Dirk nodded, typed, occasionally stopped to use the mouse. A basic floor plan started to appear on the screen, with space for the spell fragments to be inserted and locked into the design. Dirk was really good with the CAD: if his thought processes made him seem scary-smart, maybe that was a good thing here.
And who knows what he thinks of my thought processes,
Brianna thought.
Probably finds them a bit lame.
But that wouldn’t matter if she pulled this off.

“If
we
pull this off,” Dirk said.

The blood ran right out of Brianna’s face: she could feel it leaving her white and cold.
“What did you say?”

“Sorry,” Dirk said, sounding completely unconcerned. “I have the underhearing gift sometimes, when work’s involved.” He said it as if he was discussing the weather, and boring weather at that. “I don’t pay any attention to it, mostly. It’s usually things that people’ll say out loud, sooner or later. Sometimes they even think they
did
say it. No big deal.”

Brianna gulped. His voice was the voice of someone who was completely used to no one paying any serious attention to him. But the pain the concept caused her was apparently either invisible or unimportant to him: he went right on with what he was doing at the computer. “There,” Dirk said, “just the basic walls-windows-and-roof stuff. Interior design can wait—”

And outside the lab, a bell rang: the bell for the end of first period. “Oh no!” Brianna said.

“What’s the matter?” Dirk said. “Plenty of time later. If you’re not too busy—”

“Me?” Brianna said. “Oh, no. No! We can meet after school—”

“If you don’t mind,” Dirk said.

“Mind? You’re only saving my life,” Brianna said. “Not to mention helping me stick it to Arthur.”

Dirk’s look was amused. “What time?” he said.

“One forty-five?” Brianna said. “Is that too early? I don’t officially have a last period, today.”

“Sounds fine,” Dirk said.

Behind them, the barley-sugar column was levitating up off the lab table as Dirk stood up. “Here, let me get that for you,” Brianna said, and pointed at the door, whispering the basic portal spell: the door swung inward for them. “Dirk—”

“Don’t thank me,” he said: and just for a moment he gave her a look that was less than strictly blue-on-blue. “If. it works, then yeah. And isn’t that Arthur down at the end of the hall? Looks like he’s looking for somebody.”

“So it is,” Brianna said. “Later!” And she swept on down that way to instruct Arthur as to the potential placement of potential magic swords.

When Brianna walked in her front door with Dirk after school, she was praying that her brother wasn’t there to start teasing her. But there was no sign of him, Relaxing a little, Brianna headed for the living room to see if there was anyone around. If there was, she wanted to get the necessary introductions over with; then she and Dirk could get out in back of the house and get to work. “Mom?” she said as she turned the corner from the front hall.

Instead of her mom, she found her dad there, sitting crosslegged in the middle of the living room floor, surrounded by a number of piles of perfectly hovering levitating paperwork, and sorting through one pile that he was holding in his lap. As they came in, he glanced up and gave Brianna and Dirk a l somewhat surprised look. “Hi, sweetie. Are you running early? Or am I running late?”

“I’m early, Daddy. I had a last period study hall I didn’t need. Got more important things to do. Daddy, this is Dirk.”

“Dirk Willis,” he said. “Hi, Mr. Wilkes.”

“Hi, Dirk.” Brianna’s dad took the pile of papers in his lap, boosted them into the air and left them hanging there; then plucked a neighboring pile down into his lap and started riffling through them. Brand’s dad ran an accountancy firm in Salem. If all his clients on both sides of the metaphysical divide described his skill with figures as magical, he just smiled and said that all his clients deserved the very best he could do. “You kids don’t need to be working in here, do you?” he said. “This place is going to turn into a paperwork blizzard if these piles get bumped into.”