The Evil Wizard Smallbone Page 17

  “You all right?” Dinah asked breathlessly.

  Hell Cat glared. “Shut the door, you idiot!”

  Dinah looked out at the running, struggling crowd of fishermen in yellow oilcloth and Howling Coyotes in brown leather and ran to close and lock the door. Then she turned to Miss Rachel, who was staring out the window, her eyes like polished black pebbles and her mouth in a straight, grim line.

  “Coyotes,” she remarked, “are perfectly nice animals. And there are many respectable motorcyclists. These creatures are neither the one nor the other.” She paused, then added, “Poor things.”

  “Poor things nothing,” Dinah said. “They’re horrible.”

  “Fidelou is horrible,” Miss Rachel corrected her. “He gave them those wicked pelts. They can’t call their souls their own. Still, I hope Saul and his crew give them a larruping they won’t forget.”

  Dinah looked out the window.

  After Smallbone had freed her from the magic coyote pelt, Dinah read every book the library held on coyotes and seals. She’d learned that coyotes ate anything, including fish, and that they didn’t usually run in packs. She’d also read that seals, while usually peaceable animals that would rather flee than fight, had been known to attack killer whales — and beat them, too — by ganging up and tearing at them with their strong, sharp teeth.

  The fishermen of Smallbone Cove had only ordinary human teeth, but their arms were strong from hauling nets and they outnumbered the bikers almost two to one. The Howling Coyotes, on the other hand, had knives and tire irons and chains, and they’d been in a lot more fights than the fishermen had.

  Hell Cat got up and went to the other window. “Ham’s down!” she shrieked, dancing with excitement and fury. “No, he’s up again, but he’s bleeding! Doesn’t look too bad, though. Go, HAM!”

  Dinah looked out over the crowd of bodies surging and tumbling along the street. Here Cain the animal doctor and a hulking biker pummeled each other on the porch of Three Bags Full Knitting. There a leather-covered arm brandished a crowbar. At the edge of the parking lot, a fisherman in yellow oilcloth was beating a biker’s head against a wooden bar. Even through the storm windows, she could hear cracks and shouts and groans.

  “This is horrible!” she cried. “What’re we going to do?”

  “There is nothing we can do,” Miss Rachel said. “The coyotes are Smallbone’s concern. This library is mine.”

  “Well, Smallbone should know about it, then!”

  Dinah turned and fled though the kitchen and out the back door. Then she took off behind the church toward the path that led to Evil Wizard Books, running as though all the coyotes in Fidelou’s pack were howling on her heels.

  Nick was sweeping the kitchen floor after lunch, thinking about how to make the Stream rise up in monster shapes if a coyote tried to cross it.

  The shop bell jangled sharply. His bones turned to ice.

  The bell rang a second time. Jeff raced out of the kitchen, barking. Nick dropped the broom, hurried to the shop, and peered through the window. It was Dinah, the girl who had been a coyote. She looked furious.

  Nick grabbed Jeff by the scruff of his neck and opened the door.

  Dinah was red faced from running, and her mottled hair stuck up around her head. “I want to talk to the evil wizard,” she said. “It’s real important.”

  “He’s working on the Sentries,” Nick said. “Anything I can do?”

  Dinah clenched her fists. “I have to talk to Smallbone. The coyotes are back and everybody’s fighting.” Her voice trembled a little. “They tore up the library.”

  “The library?”

  Dinah made a frustrated noise. “Are you going to get Smallbone or not?”

  “I’ll get him,” Nick said. “You want to come in?”

  The seal-dark eyes moved to Jeff, who was growling gently. “What about the dog?”

  “Oh, Jeff doesn’t bite.” He couldn’t resist adding, “Not hard, anyway.”

  Leaving her to work things out with Jeff, Nick took off up the stairs two at a time.

  Over the past weeks, Nick had noticed that the tower door moved, depending on Smallbone’s mood — or maybe its mood — Nick wasn’t sure. Today it was at the end of the hall his bedroom was on, with the door wide open. He stood at the bottom of the steps and shouted, “Smallbone? The bikers are back, and they’re tearing up the Cove!”

  Nick heard Smallbone roar “Land o’ Goshen!” then the clatter of rings as he swept back the curtain. “You interrupt me again, Foxkin, I’ll turn you into a mackerel and fry you. What if I’d been in the middle of a spell?”

  “But the bikers —”

  “Confusticate the bikers!” Smallbone said. “What’s your source for this choice piece of scuttlebutt?”

  “Dinah Smallbone. She’s downstairs, and she wants to talk to you.”

  “Land o’ Goshen!”

  Nick stepped out of the way just in time to avoid being knocked over by the evil wizard, who marched down the hall, muttering.

  In the bookshop, Dinah was pacing back and forth in front of the shelves, while Jeff sat watchfully by the door. Smallbone thundered down the steps and confronted her, his hair crackling under the bent pipe of his black top hat, the skirts of his black coat flapping and flaring like vulture wings. “Well?”

  His voice was low and hoarse and menacing. Nick had to admire Dinah’s moxie. She paled, but her voice was firm as she announced, all in one breath, “The Howling Coyotes are tearing things up and the fishermen are fighting them and they’ve got knives, and you have to help!”

  Smallbone’s glasses flashed irritably. “What makes you think that?”

  Dinah’s fists clenched. “We Walked the Bounds and did the ritual — we even figured it out all by ourselves. We fixed the Wall, too. We did our part. Now you have to do yours.”

  “I’m doing my part,” he snapped. “Or I would be, if I wasn’t talking to you. Foxkin, take this seal back to town, look around, see what’s going on.”

  Nick came down from the landing and stood by Dinah. “Okay,” he said. “But what should I do if they’re still fighting?”

  “Blast ’em with a fireball,” Smallbone said, clutching his hat with both hands as if it were about to fly off. “Call up a wind and blow the whole boiling of ’em to Halifax. You got the strength for it. And when you’ve sent Fidelou’s coyotes packing, you can go to the library and see how Miss Rachel’s doing. Maybe you can look around, see if there’s anything good to read. You know what I mean.”

  He scowled at Nick through his glasses with awful intensity. Nick grinned at him, suddenly filled with certainty. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I got this.”

  Dinah grabbed Nick’s arm. “Come on!” she said. “We have to run!”

  He opened the door and they ran.

  If Smallbone Cove had a fault, it was that it looked just a little too much like the perfect Maine Seaside Town. The houses were charmingly old, with tiny-paned windows, weathered gray shingles, and white picket fences in front of three of the shops. Commercial Street was paved with cobblestones. The windows were always shiny, the shingles in good repair, the trim picket fences nicely painted, and the cobbles smooth and tightly fitted.

  It didn’t look like that now.

  When Nick and Dinah arrived at the edge of town, red faced and out of breath, they could see right away that the fight was over. Commercial Street was empty — if you didn’t count a couple of cars with slashed tires and broken windshields — but it was the emptiness of a field after a battle. Even from the end of the street, Nick could see that the wooden shutters that covered the shop windows in the off-season had been splintered, and broken glass sparkled among the cobblestones. Half the tiny panes in the Klam Shak’s front window were smashed, and the door was open and hanging off its hinges. As they got nearer, Nick saw a familiar figure sweeping what looked like the shattered remains of several chairs out into the street.

  “Ollie!” he called. “What’s been go
ing on?”

  Ollie leaned on his broom. “Big fight,” he said. “Howling Coyotes and the fishermen. Worse than Saturday night at my uncle’s tavern, and that’s saying something.”

  “Who won?” Dinah asked.

  “We did. The fishermen started it, though pretty much everybody took a hand in the end. I hit a biker with a cast-iron pan.” Ollie grinned. “A hot one. Anyway, they ran off ’bout fifteen minutes ago with their tails between their legs.” He nodded toward the parking lot. “Some of them left their motorcycles behind.”

  “Anybody hurt?”

  “Saul’s got a slash on his arm. Pete and Goliath got goose eggs on their heads. Other folks got cut up and bruised. I didn’t hear about everybody.”

  “And my mom and dad?” Dinah asked.

  Ollie shrugged.

  Dinah turned her frightened eyes to Nick. “I gotta go home,” she said. “Tell Miss Rachel. And good luck finding whatever it was Smallbone was being so cagey about.”

  “Thanks,” Nick said, surprised, and, as she went racing away down to the Mercantile, added, “I hope your folks are okay!”

  Nick crossed the street, climbed the steps to the Smallbone Cove Public Library, and went in.

  Miss Rachel was in her chair by the window. “You’re Smallbone’s apprentice, aren’t you? I saw you at the Town Meeting. What did he call you again?”

  Hell Cat’s head popped up from behind the circulation desk. “Foxkin!” She glowered at Nick. “What are you doing here?”

  Nick took in the scattered books, the broken sofa, the pale scar on the circulation desk where something had smashed into it, the mess of broken wood, crockery, and paper beside the wheelchair, and he started to get mad. “I want to help,” he said.

  “Are you going to help us clean?” Hell Cat asked.

  “That’s not his job, dear.” Miss Rachel held up a clump of boards and rumpled paper that had once been a book. “Can you fix this?”

  As a boy whose best friend was currently a bookshop, Nick was horrified. “Maybe,” he said. “I don’t know. If you trust me with it, I’ll take it home and see what I can do. What I meant was, I want to help get the Sentries fixed, so this won’t happen again. I’m looking for charts. Old, thick, kind of stiff. They’d have lines all over them, and numbers. Some words. It’s hard to describe,” he finished lamely.

  “Sounds it.” Miss Rachel waved a plump hand at the stacks of cardboard boxes piled against the stairs. “As you can see, we’re a little behind on the cataloging. You’re welcome to look, though.”

  Nick’s heart sank to his toes. Going through all those boxes would take days, months, maybe years. By the time he found the missing charts — or, more likely, didn’t find them — Fidelou would be the Evil Wizard of Smallbone Cove and he himself would probably be eating flies in the pond, if a coyote hadn’t eaten him first.

  Hell Cat tipped her head. Nick could almost see her ears prick up. “What do you need charts for?”

  Nick hesitated. Smallbone wouldn’t tell them — he was sure of that. He’d just threaten Miss Rachel into finding them herself, with a one-day deadline, probably. Nick couldn’t do that. He could lie, but it would be easier just to tell the truth.

  Besides, he found he didn’t want to lie to Miss Rachel.

  “They’re charts for the Sentries,” he said. “Fixing them is real complicated, and it would be a lot faster if he had the charts to help him. I was hoping you might know something about them.”

  Miss Rachel shook her head. “I don’t think —” she began.

  Hell Cat was looking thoughtful. “There’s that box we found under the sofa,” she said. “That’s old.”

  “But it’s full of mold!” Miss Rachel exclaimed.

  “He’s a wizard,” Hell Cat argued. “Maybe he knows a spell to make mold disappear.”

  Nick followed Hell Cat into the kitchen, where the metal box sat where the girls had left it, looking the worse for wear. “We WD-40’d the hinges,” Hell Cat said. “It’ll open easy. But it smells pretty bad.”

  Nick opened the lid, releasing a stink of rotten mushrooms and stagnant water that reminded him of Uncle Gabe’s cellar. He put his hand in and felt a familiar tingle as his fingers closed around something soft and slimy. “Yuck!”

  “I told you,” Hell Cat said.

  There was something magic in there. He just hoped it wasn’t completely rotted. He thought for a moment, then closed his eyes and felt the water diffused throughout the box. If he just gathered it up, like that, and made it into a bubble, like that, and floated it out of the box and over to the kitchen sink . . .

  “Golly!” Hell Cat said. “I didn’t know you could do that!”

  This broke Nick’s concentration, as well as the bubble, which splashed all over the floor. But it didn’t matter. The box was dry inside, and so was whatever he’d felt. He sneezed as the dry mold flew into his face and he pulled out a package wrapped in oilcloth.

  It was a chart, all right. For the Stream, appropriately enough. Whatever else was in the box, however, had crumbled and mixed with the mold. He hoped it hadn’t been another chart.

  Hell Cat leaned over his shoulder. “It looks like spaghetti,” she said. “Are you sure this is magic?”

  Nick refolded the chart and put it in his pocket. “Yep.”

  “Can you read it?” Hell Cat wanted to know.

  “Like print,” Nick said, which was only a stretcher, not a downright lie. “We’ll have the Stream back online in no time.”

  The fog was rolling in when Nick left the library. It hid the Cove and the point and lay on the wharf like thin gray wool, muffling all sound except the hollow, mournful honk of the foghorn.

  He stood on the steps and looked across Main Street at the parking lot where four motorcycles lay on their sides, surrounded by glass from their shattered headlights. Four Howling Coyotes had been hurt too bad to ride by themselves, then. Good.

  As he watched, a skinny figure slid out of the shadowy porch of Joshua’s Kites ’N Chimes and scuttled toward one of the bikes.

  It was wearing a red Portland Sea Dogs baseball cap.

  Nick’s heart stopped and started up again, pounding fit to bust out of his chest. His cousin Jerry had a Portland Sea Dogs cap. Uncle Gabe had gotten it for him for his fourteenth birthday, and the only times Nick had seen him without it since then were when Uncle Gabe snatched it off his head so he could whack him with it.

  There wasn’t anything special about Sea Dogs baseball caps, Nick told himself. Plenty of guys had them. And Jerry was with Uncle Gabe in Beaton, way off inland. He couldn’t be riding with Fidelou.

  The boy in the baseball cap looked up.

  It was Jerry. Even in a Howling Coyote jacket, with his hair in his face and a shiner coming on, Nick knew him.

  The mean pale eyes — or at least the one that wasn’t swollen shut — looked straight into Nick’s and widened.

  Nick dashed down the steps and ran.

  Seeing Nick on the library steps hit Jerry like a bucket of ice water.

  When his cousin ran away in December, Jerry thought he was rid of the little pest for good. Never in a million years had he thought that Nick would turn up again, much less in Smallbone Cove.

  The shock lasted only for a moment before it turned into pure hatred.

  Jerry pretty much hated everybody in the world, but Nick was special. Ever since he and Aunt Brigitte had come to live with his dad when Jerry was ten, Jerry had resented him. Jerry had wanted Aunt Brigitte to himself, baking pies and reading bedtime stories and chasing nightmares away. Her noisy, snot-nosed, clingy little brat just got in the way and spoiled things.

  Then she died, and the things about home that had already been bad got ten times worse. Jerry had given it a lot of thought, and ended up concluding that it was all Nick’s fault. He decided to make Nick’s life as hard as Nick had made his. When the little snot-nosed brat ran away, Jerry had gone out and celebrated. And now there he was, or somebody who looked
mighty like him, well fed, rosy cheeked, and cheerful until the moment his eyes met Jerry’s, when he took off down the street like the wimp he was.

  Jerry righted a motorcycle and got on, hoping it was fit to drive. He didn’t want to walk all the way to Fidelou, but he would if he had to. He had something to tell the Boss he just thought might help him win his pelt at last.

  Nick didn’t see any point in telling Smallbone about seeing Jerry in Smallbone Cove.

  It wasn’t like Jerry was going to come for him — Nick knew how much Jerry hated having him around. And Jerry wouldn’t tell Uncle Gabe, either, because if he was riding with the Howling Coyotes, chances were he’d run away from Uncle Gabe just like Nick had.

  No, it was going to be fine. All he had to do was help Smallbone get the Sentries working again, and everybody would be safe.

  Smallbone was delighted with the chart Hell Cat and Dinah had found in the library. He even smiled a reasonably non-evil smile when he unfolded it. “Looks like you’re worth your keep after all,” he said. “Two, three days to make sure we got this nailed down, and them coyotes’ll be shaking water out of their ears. Fetch me Mysteria Acquam, Foxkin. We got us some figuring to do.”

  Nick researched tides and currents and underwater springs until Smallbone sent him down to make sandwiches, then made charts of numbers until Smallbone sent him to bed. He should have been too tired to dream, but even Bow-Wowzer Meowzer couldn’t keep him from waking up in a lather, sure he was back in the cellar in Beaton, sure he’d heard Jerry’s — or worse, Uncle Gabe’s — step on the stairs. After a particularly vivid dream that featured Uncle Gabe sniffing around Evil Wizard Books like a hunting dog, Nick went out to the barn with The Hobbit. He hung his lantern on a hook, made himself comfortable on a bale of hay, and read, wondering if Gandalf’s pipe smelled as bad as Smallbone’s.

  It was still dark when Nick woke with a start to a chorus of yelling goats. Startled, he tumbled off his hay bale.