The Evil Wizard Smallbone Read online

  Nearby, a buff-colored hen perched on a straw bale like a feathery toilet-roll cover. Smallbone said her name was Daphne. He had seven hens, plus a rooster called Apollo.

  Among the lies Nick had told Smallbone was the one about not knowing anything about animals. When he was in fourth grade, his mom had enrolled him in 4-H. He’d had four chickens, which he’d kept in the backyard until his mother died, when Uncle Gabe had sold them. Nick hadn’t minded leaving 4-H — he couldn’t stand listening to the other kids talking about their parents and their projects. He’d missed the chickens, though.

  Unlike Nick’s chickens, who had laid their eggs in the coop he’d built for them, Smallbone’s chickens nested everywhere, even in Groucho’s manger. They were a lot feistier than Nick’s chickens, too, and pecked at his fingers when he reached under them, looking for eggs. The goats, on the other hand, crowded to the front of their pen and bleated at him in a friendly way. One put its front hooves on the rail and nosed at Nick’s shirt. Nick thought it was saying hello until he felt a tug and saw his scarf disappearing into the goat’s busy mouth.

  “Harpo will eat anything,” Smallbone said. “Just give him a good shove. You got to be firm with goats or they’ll be up to shenanigans.” He scratched a slot-eyed doe between her ears. “This here’s Thalia. The other two are Aglaea and Euphrosyne.”

  Nick groaned. “I can’t remember that! I can’t even say it. Why don’t you call them something normal, like — I don’t know — Betty? Or Nanny? Nanny’s a good name for a goat.”

  “Because Nanny’s not her name, of course. Names are important, Foxkin. You know something’s right name, you know what it is. Knowing what something is gives you power over it.”

  “You don’t care about my right name!” Nick snapped.

  “Oh, I think I do, Foxkin mine. The question is, do you?”

  When the goats had been fed and watered, Smallbone took Nick to the back of the barn, where a large pinkish-white lump snored gently in the straw. “This is Ollie,” Smallbone said, hanging his lantern above the stall. “Finest Yorkshire hog on the coast.” He took an apple-size blue rubber ball out of a small bucket and shook it so a bell inside jingled invitingly. Ollie heaved himself to his trotters and squinted up at Smallbone, his saucer nose twitching eagerly.

  Smallbone pitched the ball into the straw, and Ollie plunged after it with excited grunts, his little corkscrew tail awhirl. He rooted until he found the ball, then nosed it around the floor, pushing up a wave of straw with his nose and head to the accompaniment of much jingling and grunting.

  Nick broke out laughing and glanced at Smallbone. What with the beard and the hat and the glasses, it was almost impossible to see the evil wizard’s face, but Nick thought he might be smiling.

  “Keeps him healthy,” Smallbone said cheerfully. “He’ll be good eating, come spring.” He said some words Nick didn’t understand, and the ball — streaked now with what Nick hoped was mud — sailed out from under Ollie’s nose and into the bucket with a splash.

  “Take that and rinse it off. Then you can fill the water troughs, and I’ll show you how to milk a goat.”

  It was barely light out when Smallbone banged on Nick’s door the next morning. “You want eggs for breakfast, you’ll have to gather them.”

  Groaning, Nick slid into the hick clothes and staggered down the stairs.

  Out in the barn, the chickens had hidden their eggs so well, Nick only found eight. He ate three for breakfast, black and crispy around the edges because he had the fire up too high, and a piece of charred toast. Smallbone disposed of two more, without comment, and went out to the barn to milk the goats. He didn’t remind Nick about the shop. He didn’t need to. The smell of mold and rotting leather was creeping down the passage into the kitchen. There was even a new spiderweb across the top of the connecting door.

  Nick put the eggy plates on the floor and watched Mutt and Jeff rinse them with their long pink tongues. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that cleaning the bookshop was some kind of test. Nick hated tests. In his experience, they were designed to separate the good kids, who knew the answers, from the bad kids, who didn’t. He already knew he was a bad kid. Good kids knew how to stay out of trouble. Good kids didn’t get turned into spiders and spend almost a week spinning webs and eating flies.

  Or at least that’s what tests were for in Beaton. It was anybody’s guess what an evil wizard would be testing for.

  Nick gathered up the plates and put them in the sink. Then he lugged a ladder out of the mudroom, trying not to trip over Mutt and Jeff, who were bouncing around him in the mistaken belief that this was some sort of new game. He propped the ladder against the wall next to the new cobweb, then climbed up and examined it.

  Spiderwebs, as Nick now had good reason to know, are designed to trap things. A network of smooth threads allows the spider to navigate his web without sticking, but most of the threads are gluey, clingy trap threads. Sticky as they looked, the threads of this web felt like smooth cotton thread, and smelled sharp, like a thunderstorm. Also, a just-built web would have a spider lurking on it somewhere. This one didn’t. In fact, it wasn’t a real web at all. And neither, he suspected, were the others. But the fake ones just might stick to a real one.

  All Nick had to do was find the one he’d spun.

  He peered out over the rows of grimy bookshelves marching into the darkness. For all he knew, they just extended back forever into another dimension, in which case he might as well give up. Or maybe that web in the next aisle back, the one that wasn’t all dusty and drapey and movie-like, was the one he was looking for, his web that he’d spun himself.

  Nick descended the ladder and dragged it into the gloom, wishing Smallbone had left him a lantern. Back among the shelves, he heard something rustle. It was like a bad horror movie, he thought — the old house, the old man, the eyeballs in the freezer, the shadows, the mysterious noises. The prickly, uncomfortable feeling that someone was always watching him, someone with crazy eyes and possibly a knife, watching and waiting until just the right moment . . .

  No. He wasn’t going there. Sure, Smallbone was nuts, but it wasn’t an ordinary, knife-in-the-dark kind of nuts. The noises were probably just the cats, hunting mice in the dark. And the airless feeling was just from breathing all that dust.

  It was the right web. Once he climbed up and looked at it, he recognized it at once. A little lopsided, and the stay threads were kind of clunky, but for a spider new to the work, he thought he’d done a pretty good job. He pulled it down, wrapped it around his broom handle, and swirled it through the fake webs. They stuck to it like, well, magic. Before long, the broom handle was surrounded by a big silky cocoon of magic fake cobwebs. Nick gave it a tug and slid it off, leaving his web clinging to the broom handle. Encouraged, he swirled his way row by row right to the back of the shop — which was not so far after all, though very dark and stuffy — until all the cobwebs lay on the shop counter in fluffy gray rolls.

  Tom, who’d been asleep by the cash register, woke up and patted a roll with a curious paw. It skidded a few inches, leaving a dust-free streak behind it, just like a miracle cleaning cloth in a TV ad.

  Soon, Nick had not only cleaned the counter but polished it to a golden glow. He gave it a final, triumphant rub and grinned. One job done. That left only six extremely grimy windows and about a million dusty, rotting books to go.

  Nick reviewed his options. He’d already tried running away. Hiding probably wouldn’t accomplish much beyond making Smallbone mad enough to turn him into something even worse than a spider.

  That left him with getting to work.

  Nick slid a relatively clean roll of magic cobweb onto the broom handle and started dusting the first row of books. Close up, they weren’t as smelly as he expected, and a lot more interesting. Random titles caught his eye: Lunatics and Lycanthropes, Hexes Through the Ages, Haruspicy! Or: The Future Through Sheep Guts, 100 Uses for a Dead Man’s Hand. He took the last title down and ha
d just opened it when the dogs jumped up, barking happily.

  “It’s a sorry world,” Smallbone said from the stairs, “where an evil wizard has to wait on his apprentice’s convenience for his meals. It’s past noon.”

  With the nonchalance of a practiced shoplifter, Nick ran his cobweb duster over Dead Man’s Hand, closed it, and put it back on the shelf. “How am I supposed to know what time it is? I can’t see. Aren’t there any lights in here?”

  “Don’t want no flames around all this paper,” Smallbone said. “And I don’t hold with electricity. Chancy, newfangled stuff. You’ve got half an hour to get lunch on the table, or I’ll turn your nose blue.” And he went back up the stairs, the dogs at his heels.

  Nick went to the kitchen, looked thoughtfully at the ordinary-looking lights and appliances, and spent a few minutes searching for switches and electrical outlets. He didn’t find any. The fridge didn’t even have a cord.

  There probably wasn’t a hot-water heater in the cellar or a furnace or anything normal, Nick thought as he put the leftover corned beef on a plate. The whole dang house probably ran on magic. Which brought up the question of why the old loon needed an apprentice at all, especially one who couldn’t boil water, milk a goat, cast a spell, or — as far as he knew — read.

  It didn’t bear thinking about, but Nick thought about it anyway until Smallbone showed up in the kitchen at twelve thirty sharp, carrying a big leather-covered book. He read while he ate — which Nick’s mother had always said was rude. When the last bite of corned beef was gone, he shut the book with a snap. “You can fetch a lamp from the mudroom, boy. If you’re going to get that shop really clean, you’ll need to see the dirt.”

  The lamp was tin with a glass chimney, and it burned kerosene. Nick set it on the counter, where it smoked and stank and cast dancing shadows everywhere. Then he got to work.

  The magic cobwebs cleaned everything — windows, furniture, floor, books. They even took the tarnish off the big old cash register. Nick rubbed and dusted until his arms ached and his shoulders burned. When a roll got too grimy to work anymore, he put it back on the counter and picked up another. The dogs got tired of being tripped over and disappeared upstairs. When Nick cleaned the big bay window, he could see the field of snow between the house and the road, crisscrossed with holes and scuffs and skid marks and tracks like a snake’s.

  The clock on the landing struck five, extra loudly. Time to make dinner, if he could find anything he knew how to cook. He wondered if Smallbone had ever heard of SpaghettiOs. He gathered up the dirty rolls of magic cobweb, carried them into the kitchen, and threw them on the fire, just like his mom had taught him.

  A flash of multicolored light half blinded him, and a roiling billow of black and stinking smoke seized him by the eyes and throat, coated his skin, and invaded his nose with sticky, burning foulness. He rolled on the floor, choking.

  A few very long minutes passed before Smallbone arrived on the scene. He took in the oily smoke, the gasping apprentice, and the seriously put-out cats yowling under the stove, fished in his pocket for a handful of white powder, and threw it onto the fire. The flames went out with a pop, and he raked what was left of the cobwebs onto the hearth, opened a window to air the place out, and got Nick some cold water.

  “What made you think burning magic would be a good idea, eh? Danger aside, it’s a jeezly waste. And it ain’t good for the animals. Ah, what’s the use? I’ve a good mind turn you into toast and butter you.”

  Nick glared over the rim of the glass. His chest hurt, and his face and hands prickled. “You could have warned me.”

  “You could have asked.” Smallbone poked at the scorched cobwebs with a scuffed boot. “Go clean yourself up.”

  Nick marched into the bathroom and locked the door. Totally unsurprised to find that the tub was already full of gently steaming water, he shucked off his clothes, got in, and rubbed thin black curls of burned ork off his skin like peeling sunburn.

  Electricity was dangerous, huh? What about getting turned into a bug? What about getting blown up by flaming magic spiderwebs? If Nick was Smallbone’s apprentice, why hadn’t the old coot told him what to do? So he could call Nick names? So he could watch him suffer? Was turning people into things any different from laying into them with a strap? And if it was different, was it better or worse?

  Who cared? Not Nick. He was getting out of here, one way or another.

  Maybe, he thought, adding more hot to the water, he could pretend to be all scared and docile, learn how to cook, take care of the animals, do what he was told, make Smallbone think he’d gotten Nick where he wanted him. Then, when the weather broke, maybe Nick could make his escape. At least it would keep Smallbone off his case.

  Nick cleaned the grayish magic kludge out of the tub, put on his magic-spattered clothes, and returned to the kitchen. It was long past suppertime. A pan of congealing eggs and hash told him that Smallbone had fixed his own supper and left the dirty dishes for Nick to deal with. He’d also left a bucket, a shovel, and an iron rake beside the fireplace. Hell Cat was still under the stove, but Tom had moved to the draining board. Mutt and Jeff crouched in the corner farthest from the fireplace. The air smelled acrid and greasy.

  So did the hash, but Nick ate it anyway, figuring he’d breathed in enough burned magic that eating some wouldn’t make a difference. Then he heated up a bucket of water on the stove and dumped it on the floor.

  The burned magic clumped into a thick gray glop, speckled with black.

  Hell Cat slunk out from under the stove and poked at it with her paw. The glop shuddered. She pounced, claws out, and the clump popped out a foul-smelling, burned-magic fart, which sent her scuttling back to her hiding place. Nick shoveled the glop into the bucket. There was more glop underneath. He filled an iron stew pot with more water and put it on the stove.

  An hour later, the floor was shining clean and Nick had made a start on the hearth, when the back door opened. “You don’t want that magic crawling out again, you best put a board over the bucket,” a gruff voice said. “You planning on staying up all night?”

  Nick scraped up more glop. “Nope. Sleep well,” he added sarcastically.

  “Oh, I will.”

  Inland of Smallbone Cove as the coyote runs is a part of Maine tourists don’t often see. The land is rocky, scrubby, and flat. There aren’t many paved roads, and those are more frost heave than pavement. The unpaved ones are muddy in spring and autumn, dusty in summer, slippery in winter, and bumpy all year long. Both kinds of road are dotted with little clumps of houses. Each clump has a name and a general store and a gas station and maybe a small post office or a library or a church. Some are well kept and pretty, with white houses and neat lawns and gardens.

  The clump called Fidelou was the exact opposite of pretty.

  It was, however, highly unusual. There aren’t a lot of small towns in Maine — or any other state — that feature a medieval-type castle. Not the fantasy medieval-type castle, with pointy towers and lots of balconies for pretty ladies to wave from, either, but the low, solid, practical kind owned by someone who is prepared to be attacked at any moment.

  Its windows were slits in the granite walls, and its doors were narrow and reinforced with iron. A black flag blazoned with a white wolf fluttered from each squat tower. More wolves were carved above the heavy doors and on the columns of the Great Hall. Against the wall stood battle trophies: a chariot shaped like a giant frog, a bison’s head, a bright feathered cape, a pointy hat, a glowing sword. At the far end of the hall, a low platform supported a high wooden throne, a red velvet footstool, and a large and ancient wooden trunk decorated with a band of running wolves.

  In the time the castle had stood there nobody had attacked it, but the wizard who sat on the throne had lived in a castle just like it four hundred years ago in his native France and was not about to change his habits just because he had moved to the United States of America.

  The wizard’s name was Fidelou, which me
ans “Son of the Wolf” in French. He was a loup-garou, whose magic pelt changed him from wolf to man and back without need of spells or a full moon. He was evil and proud of it. His magic was all blood and destruction and greed. Back in France, he and his pack of wolf-soldiers had been feared throughout the land.

  When he moved to Maine, he had added coyotes to the pack. They were better at surviving in the modern world than wolves were.

  Fidelou did not like the modern world. It was too crowded and too hard to prey upon. His pack fell to traps and poison and men in airplanes with guns. In human form, they got put in jail. As a matter of pride, Fidelou did not go out and find new pack members; he waited for them to come to him, which didn’t happen as often as it had in the old days.

  So when a lantern-jawed teenager wearing a red Portland Sea Dogs baseball cap came into town on a rebuilt Yamaha, the were-coyote guard Hiram brought him straight to Fidelou, who was sitting in the Great Hall with his feet up.

  The wolf wizard looked down his beaky nose at the newcomer, who was clutching his cap in both hands and pretending he wasn’t scared. He smelled promising — desperate and aggressive, with a strong whiff of meanness. Fidelou liked bullies. They were so easy to intimidate.

  “So, youngling,” he growled. “You wish to join Fidelou’s pack?”

  The boy’s hands tightened on his cap. “I might,” he said, trying to sound tough. “Depends.”

  “For me, too, it depends.” Fidelou bared his pointed teeth. The boy’s eyes widened like a frightened deer’s. “What are your talents, eh? What is it you have to offer Fidelou in return for his protection?”

  “I can fight. And I can fix motorcycles.”

  The wolf wizard pricked up his ears. “Really?” Fidelou loved motorcycles. They were powerful and noisy and traveled faster than a wolf could run. They made the modern world bearable.

  “Yeah,” the boy said sullenly. “I’m the best. I can take a broke-down piece of junk and make it roar like a tiger.”