The Evil Wizard Smallbone (8 page)

Miss Rachel threw her hands in the air and wheeled herself out of the church.

They discussed it a while longer, but in the end, they decided to do what Ham had suggested. Nothing.

On the first day it wasn’t actually snowing, Dinah put on long johns and a parka and boots and set out on the path that led to the Stream to investigate.

The Stream wasn’t flowing. It was covered with snow.

That never happened. In Smallbone Cove, “As long as the Stream flows” was the same thing as saying “Forever.” Dinah knew she should run back and tell everyone. But Dinah was a scientist down to her bones, and no scientist worth her microscope would theorize in the absence of hard data. She wasn’t going anywhere until she knew whether the ice was just on the surface or went all the way down, in case that made a difference to whether the Stream was completely broken or only kind of broken, like a car that wouldn’t start when it was raining.

Poking at the ice with a stick told her nothing, dropping a stone on it very little more. Dinah stepped onto the snowy ice, her heart racing. The Stream wasn’t all that wide. Ten good steps, and she’d be outside the Town Limits.

There were all kinds of schoolyard theories about what happened to Smallbone Covers who tried to cross the Town Limits. You’d explode or go up in flames. You’d turn into a frog or a fish or a snapping turtle or a tree or a rock. Older kids dared one another to wade to the middle of the Stream or climb the Wall or cross the Stone Bridge that connected Smallbone Cove to the county road. Some of the bolder ones even took the dare. But nobody ever came anywhere near succeeding. First they’d get dizzy, and then their skin would start to twitch and prickle. If they kept going, they’d fall over like they were having a fit, and somebody would have to pull them back.

It was the sort of thing nobody tried twice.

Dinah had never tried at all. She was curious, not stupid.

But now, in the interest of science, she shuffled slowly over the frozen Stream, testing each step for creaking or cracking. She was almost halfway across when her foot hit something that felt horribly like a dead animal. She squeaked and jumped back — because she was all wound up, not because she was grossed out by dead animals. Scientists did not get grossed out. Last summer, she’d recorded the gradual decomposition of a dead skunk from flies through maggots to bones.

Dinah brushed the snow away, revealing an untidy bundle of fur, stiff with ice but not completely frozen. Poking it with a stick told her there wasn’t an actual animal inside it.

This was even better than the skunk. Carefully, she spread out the crackly pelt. It was perfectly preserved, head and legs and tail still attached, no tears or holes or ragged edges. It was a pretty color, too, cream and sand and black all mixed, with a long fluffy black tail. She’d take it home, maybe put it in her bedroom for a rug. She’d have to get the smell out, though. Even in the cold, she was aware of it. Not bad, exactly, but pungent, like the smell of seaweed at low tide.

She threw it over her shoulders.

What happened next was not something Dinah was ever able to remember clearly. One minute, she was gagging and trying to throw off the horrible thing. The next, an icy agony was stabbing into her forefeet, forcing her to dance backward, yipping with pain, until she was back on the shore she’d just left.

Whimpering, the young coyote licked her paws until they stopped tingling, then got up and lifted her nose to the air.

The world was full of sounds and smells: water running under thick ice, the scratching of a small animal in the undergrowth, the distant scent of goats and chickens and smoke.

She licked her chops and yawned. She was hungry.

Following her nose, she trotted toward the goats until she ran into a barrier that set her fur on end. Ice stabbed through her veins, and she tumbled backward, then picked herself up and fled, yelping. After a while, she stopped, shook herself, and sniffed again. Fish, salt, smoke, prey. And stronger than all of these, warm and beckoning, the smell of her pack, of her mother and father, of safety, of home.

Shortly afterward, the coyote that was Dinah Smallbone bounded out of the woods onto a hard surface that smelled of oil. Her nose told her she’d found her pack, but all she could see was two-legged animals far bigger than she running around like prey and making loud noises that hurt her ears. Panicked, she tucked her tail between her legs and made a mad dash for her den.

She hit another barrier and sat down with a surprised yip. Caught between the terrifying noises behind her and the smell of home before her, she scratched desperately at the barrier, whining and howling until she was hoarse and spent. She curled up against the barrier and went to sleep.

She woke up in a dark place that smelled of stone and salt and meat and water. And there she stayed for what seemed to her like a long, long time.

N
ick hated winter. Winter was chilblains and freezing feet, cold food and not enough of it. Winter was school and being bored out of his mind and fights at recess and having to go down to the principal’s office and listen to lectures about the importance of anger management and impulse control.

Winter was when Nick’s mother had died.

One day, she’d been laughing and cooking pot-au-feu and reading fantasy books to him at bedtime. The next, it seemed like, she’d been coughing and skinny and pale. Uncle Gabe said it was only a cold, but a lady who worked at the cleaning service said colds didn’t last three months and talked her into going to the hospital.

She never came home.

That winter was when Uncle Gabe went from crabby to mean, from a guy who liked a couple of beers when he got home to a guy who got drunk at work. That winter was when he lost his job at Beaton Garage. He was a genius mechanic, so the Sunoco station took him on, and he got into a fight with a customer and had to move on to Joe’s Motor and Body Shop.

Winter was the pits and lasted way too long. If Nick had a choice, he would have skipped it entirely.

This winter was a little different. Nick was warm and dry and had plenty to eat. He didn’t have to go to school with dimwits who made fun of his clothes and called him names and jumped him at recess. He had Mutt and Jeff and Tom to keep him company, more science fiction than he could read in a year, and he was learning magic. All in all, this winter was better than most, or it would have been if it hadn’t been for Smallbone.

Nick couldn’t figure Smallbone out. Nothing about him made sense. He was a wizard who said he knew all kinds of spells, and yet he did barn chores by hand, like an ordinary person. Nick’s dirty clothes disappeared and clean ones appeared to replace them, but all the meals had to be prepared and cooked. The stove ran by magic, but the kitchen fireplace had to be fed with wood that had to be chopped and hauled. All the evil wizards Nick had ever read about had minions — plural — to help them spread their evil empires. Nick was Smallbone’s only minion, and as far as he knew, the evil empire consisted of some farm animals and a bookshop no customer in their right mind would ever stop at.

And there was the fact that, after forcing Nick to accept that he couldn’t leave Evil Wizard Books no matter how hard he tried, Smallbone proceeded to ignore him. He spent all day up in his tower workshop, coming down only for meals that he ate while reading a book propped against the sugar bowl. Sometimes he’d stick around afterward and tell Nick how to make some dish he liked, but mostly he didn’t speak at all. It was as if he was trying to pretend he still lived alone.

As puzzling and bizarre as the old man’s behavior was, it did leave Nick plenty of free time. Every morning, he got up to a world of swirling white and fought the wind as he followed Smallbone’s magic path to the barn, fed and watered the animals, gathered the eggs and milked the goats, then came back to make breakfast. Every night, he fell asleep to the wind rattling the windows and Tom purring on the pillow by his ear. In between, he played with the dogs and — whenever he felt reasonably sure Smallbone was safely out of the way — read
E-Z Spelz for Little Wizardz
in the nest of cushions he’d made for himself in the back of the bookshop.

He’d started with a spell for lighting a candle without a match. It was kind of like learning to ride a bicycle. At first it was hard, and then it was like something switched on inside his head and he didn’t even have to think about how he did it. Other spells were harder. They called for ingredients he couldn’t find and rituals you needed time to complete. He was always aware that Smallbone might come in and turn him into something horrible.

He didn’t want to go through anything like the spider episode again. It wasn’t so much
being
a spider that bothered him — the spider had been perfectly fine with it. But that spider hadn’t been Nick. It had just been a spider, and the Nick who remembered his mom and hated his uncle had been nowhere.

It was enough to give anybody nightmares. Nick had them anyway, mostly about Uncle Gabe, but sometimes about Smallbone, too, and they were horrible. He always woke in a rage, thrashing around and trying to yell.

One night, he lit the bedside candle, pulled
E-Z Spelz
from under his pillow, and opened it at random.

Next morning, after Smallbone had stumped up to his tower, Nick went looking for a yardstick, a handful of salt, and some iron nails. He took them up to his room, locked the door, and propped
E-Z Spelz
against the pillow.

The spell itself was dumber than dumb, like something a little kid would make up to keep the monsters under the bed from coming to get him. Following the instructions, he dribbled unbroken lines of salt (not too thick, not too thin) along the threshold and the windowsills. He stood on a desk chair and laid a nail on the door frame and one above each window. He used the yardstick to find the exact center of the room so he could stand there and turn around three times, dribbling salt in a circle with his right hand and reciting.

E-Z Spelz
didn’t explain why or even how this worked. Nick had to make up his own mind about how reciting, “Bow-Wowzer Meowzer, Bow-Wowzer Meowzer! Fly, bad spirits, fly!”— with or without throwing salt around — was going to protect him. But he had no doubt it had done something. The air felt thick and a little prickly, like just before a thunderstorm. There was that smell, too, like hot metal, that he was beginning to recognize as the smell of magic. For a moment, Nick thought he might pass out or throw up. Then there was a kind of
snap
, and everything went back to normal. Except Nick knew, absolutely and without doubt, that Smallbone couldn’t come in to spy on him or turn him into something creepy while he was asleep. Smallbone couldn’t come in at all.

Nick smiled. And then he laughed. And then he whooped out loud.

He opened the book again. Maybe he could find something that would help him get away. Maybe he could break the confusion spell on the yard or fly over it or —

Patience is a virtue! Nick couldn’t believe it. Why did everybody have to lecture him all the time and tell him what to do? He wanted to be a wizard, not a Sunday-school teacher! He slammed
E-Z Spelz
closed, threw it under the bed, and ran out of his room. Suddenly, it was too small and the house was too big and he had to get out and go somewhere or he’d burst.

He pulled on a jacket and headed for the barn, which was warm and shadowy and full of the small noises contented animals make. Nick petted Groucho, stamped at the chickens to watch them run, and threw Ollie’s ball in his water trough. Ollie got it out, splashing water everywhere, and rootled it through the straw, his tail whirling happily. Somehow, it wasn’t as funny as usual, especially since Nick didn’t know the spell to float the ball back and Smallbone would be mad if he didn’t find it in its bucket.

Nick climbed over the rails, and Ollie looked at him. His tail was still twirling, but without the fence between them, the pig looked very big — even bigger when he turned and took a step forward. Nick backpedaled, slipped on a pile of something squishy, and landed flat on his back in the muck. Panicked, he kicked out at Ollie, who was coming to investigate.

It was a solid kick, and it caught the pig on his sensitive snout. Ollie squealed like a whistle and scuttled to the back of the pen, where he stood with his hindquarters to Nick and panted anxiously.

Nick picked himself up and climbed out. He hated everybody and everything in the world, but mostly he hated the way he smelled. An unpleasant session with some straw and a quick scrub under the pump got rid of the worst of it, but he was left with a dripping jacket and a damp butt and the uncomfortable feeling that he’d been a complete jerk. He liked Ollie. Like the goats, Ollie played with Nick. Unlike the goats, he didn’t make Nick feel like a birdbrain.