The Evil Wizard Smallbone (2 page)

After a while, he saw a double-wide trailer set up on cinder blocks a little ways back from the road. There was a light shining through the curtains. He was saved.

He banged on the metal door. It opened a crack, releasing a puff of warm, cigarette-scented air.

“Sorry to bother you,” Nick said. “I’m lost. If you’ll give me a hot meal and a warm place to sleep, I’ll do anything you need done. I can fix things . . .”

The door slammed shut.

Nick yelled one of Uncle Gabe’s favorite words and gave the trailer door a farewell kick. His feet were so cold, he couldn’t even feel it.

He hit the road again.

It began to snow. Fat, heavy, wet flakes clung to Nick’s hair, clogged his boots, and slid icy fingers down between his neck and his jacket collar. The wind picked up, needling his already stinging cheeks. He balled his fists in his pockets, bent his head, and forced his legs to keep going.

White swirled around him until he was walking blind, surrounded by snow and cold and the insistent whine of the wind. Time passed, unmeasurable, and still he walked, his nose dripping and his eyes streaming with frosty tears. He couldn’t feel his fingers or his toes. For a while, he thought he felt a heaving under his feet, as if the ground were bearing him forward on a snowy wave. Must have been his imagination.

Some time later, the snow let up. Behind the clouds, the moon was high. He could just see a snowy road stretched out in front of him, with trees growing thick on each side. He was so tired, he could hardly stagger. There was some reason he shouldn’t stop and rest, but he couldn’t quite remember what it was.

Then the howling started.

It was far off at first, spooky, like the sound track of a horror movie, sliding up the scale and holding, long and hollow, before breaking off and starting again. Nick picked up his pace a little.

A rabbit galloped past him and dove into the underbrush. A deer leaped across the road, wheeled, wide-eyed, and took off in another direction.

The howling sounded again, louder and much closer.

Nick broke into a stumbling run. The road narrowed, curved, morphed into a path through the woods. The howling was still behind him and the going increasingly rough and clogged with undergrowth. Doggedly, he floundered on.

The path ended at a frozen stream.

It wasn’t a friendly-looking stream. Rocks stuck out of it like gravestones, and the snowy ice between them looked jagged and sharp. He couldn’t cross here. He clambered along the bank until he saw a pine tree lying across the stream. It wasn’t exactly easy to walk on, but he managed it, clinging to the brittle snowy branches with numb hands. At the far end, his foot caught in a tangle of roots and he fell facedown in the snow. He was too tired to move.

But when the howling swelled, closer than ever, Nick was on his feet and running through the woods. It took him a minute to realize that he was running on a path, and another to see that the path was straight and dry and padded with pine needles. There was a light ahead of him, glowing through the branches like a yellow moon. It promised shelter and food and warmth, and Nick followed.

The path ended. Nick leaned against a pine, panting cloudily and staring across a good-sized clearing at the house the light came from. It was almost too big to be real, with roofs that blocked out half the sky. It had dozens of windows and a forest of chimneys. A deep wraparound porch ended in an octagonal tower with a pointy roof and round windows from which light poured like honey over the mounded snow. He’d never seen anything remotely like it, not even on TV. A house like that could only belong to rich people. And while he didn’t know any rich people personally, they probably would hate some random stray banging on their door even more than the trailer person had. They’d take one look at his uncombed black hair and his broken tooth and his ratacious jacket and call the police, who’d probably send him back to Uncle Gabe, who might not actually kill him but would absolutely make him wish he was dead.

Which was exactly what he would be if he stayed out here in the cold with the wolves.

The howling behind him rose to a furious crescendo, and Nick launched himself into a shambling run that carried him across the clearing and up onto the front porch. Half sobbing, he pounded on the big oak door. It flew open with a tooth-wrenching shriek of hinges. A narrow beam of yellow light blinded him, and a bony hand grabbed his arm.

“Let go!” Nick gasped.

The light pulled back, and a pair of rimless round glasses floated into view. Nick blinked. A beard like an extra-large dust bunny came into focus under the glasses.

The beard opened. “What do you think you’re doing,” said a gruff, creaky voice, “banging on the door this time of night?”

“I’m lost,” Nick said. “And there are wolves after me!”

“A likely story.” The old man gave Nick a shake. “Can you read?”

“
Read?
Are you nuts? Why?”

“Answer the question.”

As a general rule, Nick was against answering questions truthfully. In his experience, any truth you gave away was likely to be used against you. “No,” he said sullenly. “I got a condition or something — the letters don’t make sense. Can I come in before I freeze to death?”

The old man set the light on a nearby surface and rummaged one handed in the pockets of his long coat, muttering “Durn house,” and “Jeezly mess,” and “This better be good.” Finally, he pulled out a small white rectangle and thrust it under Nick’s nose. “What does this say?”

Nick squinted at it. “It’s a white card with black writing.”

The card disappeared. “Can’t be too careful. Don’t need some jeezly boy reading things that don’t concern him.”

As he pulled Nick inside, the door swung shut with a solid
thunk
. Two large black dogs stalked out of the gloom and snuffled busily at Nick’s knees. Nick stiffened. He wasn’t used to dogs.

The old man released his arm. “That’s Mutt and Jeff,” he said. “They don’t bite.” He chuckled. “Not hard, anyways.”

Nick didn’t believe a word the old man said. Because Nick could read perfectly well, and this is what he’d read on the card the old man had shown him:

A little while later, Nick was sitting in a kitchen. His feet were in a bowl of warm water, his shoulders were draped in a striped Hudson’s Bay blanket, and his hands were wrapped around a mug of hot milk. The kitchen was tidy and oddly cozy, with red-checked curtains over the windows, an old-fashioned iron stove in one corner, and a stone fireplace with a rocking chair beside it. There was an orange cat in the rocker and a second cat, black, curled up on a braided rug. A picture calendar with the days crossed off in blue pencil hung over the sink.

The old man whose card said he was an evil wizard was hunched over the stove, frying sausages in a cast-iron pan with his long black coat skirt flapping around his boot tops. He was also wearing a hat like a bashed-in stovepipe. He hadn’t taken either of them off, though the kitchen was perfectly warm.

Nick didn’t believe in wizards, evil or otherwise. Not in the real world, and certainly not in Maine. Even when he was a little kid, Nick had known that fairies and wishes and heroes who overcame dragons and evil wizards were all just make-believe and daydreaming. However, if there
was
such a thing as an evil wizard, Nick thought he’d have a coat just like Zachariah Smallbone’s. He might even have two black dogs, although they probably wouldn’t sit with their tongues hanging out, begging for bites of sausage. They probably wouldn’t be called Mutt and Jeff, either.

Nick wasn’t sure about the cats.

Smallbone plunked a plate of sausages and baked beans on the table, and Nick attacked them with the eagerness of a boy who hadn’t seen food for a while. As he scraped up the last bite, the dogs heaved twin sighs of disappointment and curled up on the rug. The black cat leaped onto the rocker, hustled the orange tiger out of its nest, tucked its paws under its chest, and closed its pale-blue eyes.

Smallbone forked another sausage onto Nick’s plate. “What’s your name, boy?”

Despite the sausages and the cozy kitchen, Nick didn’t even consider telling him the truth. Wizards might be made-up, but evil was real. “Jerry Reynaud.”

Smallbone’s beard bobbed thoughtfully. “Hmph. You don’t look like a Jerry. You don’t feel like a Jerry. You don’t smell like a Jerry or act like a Jerry or sound like a Jerry. I’ll call you Foxkin. Where you from, Foxkin?”

Nick took a deep pull of milk, then launched into the story he’d invented to explain what he was doing wandering through the woods on a snowy evening.

He was proud of that story. It was artistic and, he thought, convincing. It involved a bike and an errand to an imaginary cousin living down the road and the snow and the front wheel frame breaking and Nick’s taking a wrong turn and getting lost. While Nick talked, Smallbone tipped the black cat out of the rocking chair, sat down, and lit a long white pipe.

“Very good,” he said when Nick was done. “Very good indeed. You’re an inspired liar, Foxkin. You don’t embroider unnecessarily, you give just the right details, and you know when to stop.”

Nick put on his best innocent look. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Fox by name, fox by nature.” Smallbone stared at him through curls of foul-smelling smoke. “You can’t fool me, you know. So you’d better not try. Now,” he went on, “it just so happens that I could use an apprentice. You’re scrawny as a plucked chicken and numb as a haddock, but you’re here, so you’ll have to do. It’ll be the usual arrangement: room and board and whatever I feel like teaching you in return for seeing to the animals, cooking, keeping the place clean, and generally doing as you’re told.”

The sausages and beans curdled in Nick’s stomach. “Apprentice? I don’t want a job. I mean, I’ll work to pay off dinner and all, but I need to go home soon as the snow stops. My uncle — I mean, my father — is — will be worried.”

Smallbone gave a low, dry, evil-sounding chuckle. “You ain’t going nowhere. From the look of you, I doubt this uncle of yours — I mean father — cares whether you live or die. If he even exists. You’re a waif and a stray, my Foxkin. You knocked on the door and you asked for shelter. Well, you got it. And now Evil Wizard Books has got you.”

He rose to his feet, and the dogs jumped up like they’d been stung and ran into the front room, their tails tucked between their legs. The cats hissed and streaked after them. The old man lifted his arms, and his round glasses shone like silver coins and his white hair and bony fingers crackled with energy.

“I am the Evil Wizard Smallbone.” His voice swelled and clanged like iron bells. “I know spells of binding and release, transformation and stasis, finding and losing. I learned them by experiment and example and luck. But most of all, I learned them from books. And you’ll never learn a single thing I don’t choose to teach you, because
you can’t read
!”

Nick stared, openmouthed. The evil wizard lowered his arms and straightened his hat. “Well,” he said mildly, “now we’re all clear where we stand, you can take a bath.”

“What?”

Smallbone’s beard bobbed impatiently. “How old are you, boy?”

Nick was too disoriented to lie. “Twelve.”

“Plenty old enough to know what a bath is. You’re rank, Foxkin. In plain English, you stink. And you look like you been drug through a knothole backwards. Bathroom’s through that door over there. Don’t spare the soap.”

S
omething was tickling Nick’s nose. He groaned and buried his face in his pillow. He knew he was dreaming because it smelled of lavender instead of motor oil.

The tickling moved to his ear, along with the sound of breathing and something wet and . . .

“Yow!” Nick rolled out of bed with a bone-shaking thump, whacking his elbow so hard he saw stars.

Since his mattress at Uncle Gabe’s was on the floor, he knew he must be somewhere else. Which meant he’d succeeded in running away from Beaton. And now he was — oh, yes — in a big house in the middle of nowhere owned by a crazy old dude who claimed to be an evil wizard.

Nick sat up, rubbing his elbow. The room was just exactly the kind of bedroom his mom would have loved, from its blue-checked curtains to the desk by the window to the painted wooden bed, where a small orange cat was peering at him out of the folds of a bright quilt. It mewed, jumped down, and butted against his leg. Nick scratched its ears and tried to remember what had happened last night.