This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
No part of this work may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher.
Published by Kindle Press, Seattle, 2016
A Kindle Scout selection
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CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER ONE
It started like any other birthday—well, only in the sense that it was a thing that happened on a certain day. Other than that, though, this birthday was completely different from any other I’d had. For one, the celebration was at three in the morning. Two, I was fast asleep at the start of it. Three, it wasn’t actually my birthday at all. And four, there was a lot more blood than I tend to like in my celebrations.
“HAPPY BIRTHDAY, PETER!” Randy shouted about three inches from my face, judging by his volume. I sat up quickly and smacked my best friend right in the nose with my forehead.
“Aghh!” Randy exclaimed, clamping his bleeding nose with his hand.
“What the—” I responded.
“Oh crap!” my girlfriend, Jenny, added, grabbing her wand from the nightstand to her left to mend Randy’s nose.
“May I come in?” Bob asked from the ledge outside my window.
With all of these different words flying around (not to mention the pretty steady stream of blood flowing from Randy’s nose), I didn’t immediately notice that my bedroom wasn’t quite as I’d left it just a few hours before. As Jenny and Randy headed to the bathroom down the hall to mop up his face, I looked around for the first time. The heap of clothes near the foot of the bed was gone, and I could see them all neatly hanging in my closet, the door to which was slightly ajar. Of course the clothes had been dirty, and they’d been Jenny’s, but I still thought it was a nice gesture.
Randy was clearly responsible. My 41-year-old, ex–boy wizard turned detective best friend not only was one of the most talented spell-casters I knew, he was also one of the tidiest people in Fiction. Well, perhaps aside from Mary Poppins, who, let’s face it, just seems to be showing off. Randy’s handiwork was evidenced all over the room. There was a vase with yellow flowers on my desk just to the right of the window; in front of them was a giant, three-tiered cake with the words “Mazel Tov, Joey!” in blue cursive frosting on top, and just next to this, a basket of sweets—snozzberries, Wonka bars, Everlasting Gobstoppers, chocolate birds, and I think I even saw an elusive jelly beanstalk candy in there, which I’d have to be careful with. He must have had a field day at the chocolate factory.
“Ahem,” Bob kindly reminded me from the other side of my windowsill. I’d been so distracted with description, I’d nearly forgotten about Bob. I hopped up to help my friend over the ledge and into my room.
“Thank you,” he said, swiveling his pot from right to left, making his way farther into the room.
Oh yeah, he’s a ficus tree.
“Happy birthday!” Randy said again as he and Jenny walked back in from the hallway. His face was completely clear of blood, his nose slightly straighter than I’d seen it in years, and a bright-pink and glittery party hat was sitting atop his brown, slightly graying, and always neatly parted hair. Jenny still looked half-asleep—her light brown hair mussed and her green eyes rimmed with red—but she too wore a party hat. She muttered something that sounded like “Good tidings.”
“Randy, thanks. But it’s not my birthday,” I said, feeling both a little sad to let him down and a little peeved that my best friend and girlfriend seemed to have no idea when my birthday was.
“Of course it’s not your annual birthday, Peter. Today’s much more important than that!”
As though that settled things, he walked over to my desk, pulled a large knife from his waistband—the very same knife, I noticed, that he’d used to cut a pie the first day we met over a year ago—and began dividing up the top tier of the cake. He turned to me with a fat piece—thick white-chocolate icing on gooey white cake—that said “Joey.”
“Mazel tov!”
I took a big bite of cake so that the piece just said “oey.” Even though Bob didn’t have eyes, or a mouth, or a nose, or a face at all really, he seemed to be watching forlornly as I stuffed my face with the delicious cake. Or maybe it was disgust. Either way, photosynthesis can’t be much fun.
“What’re you talking about, Randy?” I asked, spitting a fleck of icing right onto Bob. Jenny reached over and wiped it off with her finger.
Once everyone was settled with their cake—Jenny sitting on the bed beside me, Randy still standing in front of the desk, and Bob blending in quite well with the room’s decor, Randy cleared his throat. This was clearly an Important Moment. I put my plate down on the bed. And then I picked it back up again and resumed eating, because the cake was really good, and dammit, it was my party.
“For a boy wizard, annual birthdays come along each year—”
“Actually, I think that’s pretty standard for birthdays. Or annual anythings, really.” Randy gave me a Look and continued.
“But the most important day of a boy wizard’s life happens not on a regular birthday, but on his nineteenth-and-a-half birthday, and Peter, exactly nineteen and a half years ago at three in the morning, you were born. Seven pounds, fourteen ounces. Twelve inches long. And my, how you were crying!”
I thought it was a little weird that Randy knew all of this, and apparently I wasn’t the only one.
“What, were you at the hospital?” Jenny asked. She got up and made her way to the basket of sweets on the desk, which she grabbed and plunked on the bed before sitting back down and digging in. She gestured toward the basket, inviting me to help myself to my own candy.
“No, no, I wasn’t at the hospital. It’s all in the backstory, which is probably why you don’t remember it all that well, Peter.”
“Actually,” Bob said, reminding me once again that he was not merely a part of the background. He tended to do that sometimes. “I hear that people in the Real World don’t remember the time of their own birth either. They don’t really start developing memories until several years later, and they don’t even have backstories to fill them in. Though of course here in Fiction, we don’t have access to our own backstories. That would imply a bridge between the Real World and ours. It would be ludicrous! Just think of the mayhem that would cause.”
As Bob spoke, Randy’s face underwent a really impressive change, from its usual ruddy hue to something more similar to snozzcumber juice—gray and sort of sick-looking. He turned and put his plate down on the desk, then reached into his pants pocket for his thin-rimmed glasses, which he placed on his nose. As he did, though, a small, crumpled piece of notebook paper fell from his pocket to the floor. From where I sat, I could see that it was covered in small writing, which I couldn’t read, but even from where I was sitting I could tel
l there was something off about it. It looked sort of hyperreal . . . almost too paperlike. Randy didn’t seem to have noticed that it fell.
“Yes, ludicrous! Insane! What a conundrum! Let’s have tea. Or—Monopoly? Jumanji? Make things really wild on your nineteenth-and-a-half birthday? HA HA HA!”
“Randy, you seem to have dropped a piece of backstory here on the floor,” Bob said, leaning over the paper.
With that, Randy bent down, picked up the alien piece of paper, and jumped out the window.
“Randy, will you come back in yet?” I called after five minutes. He’d been sitting on the small ledge outside of my window with Dach-shund, the little dog who roams Fiction cleaning up any inappropriate expletives. There’d been a string of them when Randy had banged his knee on the windowsill.
Finally, he poked his hand into view and stepped back into the room, favoring his left leg. Dach hopped in behind him, probably rightly expecting more choice words.
“Sorry, Peter. I just . . . I wanted this to be a surprise. I mean, it’s your nineteenth-and-a-half birthday! I thought it would be really good, but maybe it was a bad gift idea.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out several more sheets of paper, all covered in writing and what looked like diagrams and some pictures—all of them as painfully real as the first. “Oh well, guess the cat’s out of the bag now anyway.” Dach-shund looked around expectantly. Things in Fiction can get quite literal. “Happy birthday,” Randy said, handing me the wad of papers.
I took them hesitantly, tenderly, as though they were living, breathing things. Which in a way, they kind of were. In Fiction, getting ahold of someone’s backstory has the potential to change everything. One smudged letter and I could be less a boy wizard with brown hair, blue eyes, and freckles and more a boy wizard with brown hair, blue eyes, who was . . . freckled. Scary, right?
“Why do they feel so . . . real?” I asked the room at large. The pages, in no way, felt right in my hands. It was weird, but something in me felt their sheer papery essence, as though I was sensing them with something more than just touch and sight. I gave them a sniff. Smelled like . . . paper. And something else too, though. Something I’d never smelled before. I began reading.
Born: February 26. 27? 26. 3 a.m. Born to Margaret and Walter Able—a happy couple, newly married. Hospital in small town on East Coast.
Sure enough, the page, in its fine, tiny lettering, went on to detail my birth in the hospital room, with my mother alternately shouting at my dad and telling him how much she loved him. The detail my author went into in the backstory—her sweat-matted light brown hair clinging around her temples and pushed up in the back from the soaked pillow. Her red face, eyes red too, from crying. My dad’s hand holding hers so tight it hurt but not nearly tight enough.
And then there I was. Like Randy said, seven pounds, fourteen ounces. My real birth.
When most people in Fictional stories think of their “birth,” we think of when our authors thought us up, when our books began. For me, that was over six years ago, when I was thirteen and started at Payne Academy.
There I was at a new school, newly born at thirteen, surrounded by delinquents who treated bullying as a hobby, and I had no family or friends to turn to. So what did I do? Well, as such stories tend to go, I discovered my ability with magic!
I’d tell you all about how, over the course of the first book, I used my newfound powers to teach those bullies a lesson; how, in Book Two, I met a girl named Maggie and we became fast friends; and how, by the end of Book Three, I was the one who learned a lesson (about the magic of friendship). But you can read all about that in the series. It’s called Peter Able: Boy Wizard.
What, I’m not allowed to use my own quotes from the last book? It’s relevant stuff. Besides, we’ve got more pertinent things to talk about.
“Uh, Peter,” Randy said, drawing me back into the room. “You haven’t said anything for about three minutes. Are you okay?”
I nodded absently as I flicked through the rest of the pages. More than once I caught words like “death,” “suicide,” and, toward the end, “murdered.” As you can see, my backstory wasn’t exactly a bright one—and for that matter, neither was my first series of books. The Peter Able: Boy Wizard books were, yes, filled with magic and adventures, but they also involved my little sister, Beth, being killed in the end. Which would explain the “murdered.”
When I looked up again, the room had grown a few degrees darker, as though someone was standing in front of the light. Okay, Randy was standing in front of the light. But he looked somber, Jenny looked worried, and Bob, well, you know.
“Jeez, talk about taking a dive in atmosphere!” I said, trying to hide my discomfort. But no, the little word buzzed about my head like a gnat, as words tend to do—especially when you really don’t want them to—here in Fiction. Going through puberty was a nightmare.
“Peter, I’m sorry. I can hold on to it for you, if you’d like. Keep it safe,” Randy said, holding out his hand for the backstory.
“No, that’s okay.” I got up and stuffed the pages into my top desk drawer. I felt immediately more comfortable when they were out of sight, yet I kind of . . . missed them. Is that weird? Yes, it’s weird.
“I want to know. I mean, I know that my mom died and my dad killed himself in my backstory—they mentioned it enough in my series. But I want to know why. And I want to know more about . . . Beth.”
Jenny made to hold my hand but ended up just punching me in the shoulder awkwardly. Her unease was apparent—
Awkward awkward awkward awkward awkward
Cake?
I batted away the words. I hardly ever talked about my sister, and I could see that I was really bringing down the mood on what was supposed to be a joyous occasion. So I cut Jenny another piece of cake, put on my best fake smile, and decided to dwell on my morbid backstory later. I felt torn between gratitude for the chance to know more about myself, sadness that I was only now getting the chance, and a dangerous curiosity. If I had my backstory, could I change the outcome of my story? Could I rewrite my—
“Peter, just don’t do anything stupid,” Randy interrupted. Damn, I thought I had my internal monologue under control! I would have to be more covert, more secretive about any plan . . .
“Peter, seriously. We can all hear you,” Jenny said. Bob made a movement that looked like a nod.
“Altering your backstory, Peter,” he said in that charming, professor-like voice that seemed to just emanate from somewhere around his leaves, “might just be the stupidest thing that you could possibly do.”
Well.
“If you so much as change the punctuation on that paper, you could go from asking your mother for a meal to having your mother for a meal. And I know—” He continued when I began to explain my stance. “I know you only want what is best for your family. But, Peter, did you ever think that all of that had to happen for a reason?”
“No.”
“Well, it did. If things hadn’t happened the way they did in your backstory, they wouldn’t have happened the way they did in your series, and if your series didn’t happen the way it did, you might not be sitting here right now at all.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, guys. Let’s not get into Philosophy territory here,” Randy said. Nonfiction always made him a little uncomfortable. Me, I loved it—give me a good memoir or dictionary entry and I’ll be all set! But not Randy. Even as he spoke, his face took on that gray, sludgy snozzcumber goop color. (And seriously, if you ever have a chance to eat snozzcumbers—don’t. And if you don’t know what they are, just look it up on the Internets. Yeah, I know about Internets. I read Nonfiction.)
“Let’s just focus on today,” Randy continued, as though his face weren’t rapidly losing its color. “Let’s just focus on Peter’s nineteenth-and-a-half birthday! Now Peter, the reason the nineteenth-and-a-half birthday is so important, as I’m sure you’ve all been wondering . . .” At this Randy did that weird thing he does sometimes as though l
ooking out at an audience from a stage. Jenny, Bob, and I looked at one another uncomfortably waiting for him to go on. “. . . is that when the first-ever written-about boy wizard turned nineteen and a half, he stumbled upon something outstanding! Now I am sure you’re all wondering what this was . . .” He spoke loudly, seeming to look out at an audience we couldn’t see.
“Hold on there, Randy,” Bob interrupted before he could go into full-on monologue mode. “I want to back up a minute. Earlier you’d told Peter not to do anything stupid with his backstory, and I agree. Peter should in no way change his backstory, as it might lead to all sorts of changes in the here and now. But when I said this, you got all uncomfortable and looked as though you might be sick—ah yes, there you’re doing it again.” Bob pointed this out unnecessarily, as Randy was attempting to step discreetly out the window.
“Which leads me to believe—”
“You’re HIDING something!” I shouted triumphantly.
Randy had this tendency to get gray in the face and attempt to jump from windows (or moving vehicles, doors, ledges, desks—whatever was handy, really) when he was trying to cover something up. Honestly, I don’t know how he’d recently been promoted to Lead Detective at work.
“Okay, okay,” Randy said, pulling his leg back into the room. He didn’t bother coming much farther inside though, perhaps in case he needed to make another subtle escape. “The truth is, Peter, we’re having something of an issue down in Detective with some, ah, disappearances . . .”
I nodded impatiently. We’d been reading about the disappearances of characters throughout Fiction for weeks. First there was Bill the Banana Tree, then there were three fairies who worked in admissions at Fiction Academy, and most recently, and most startlingly, there was Gorndalf. Never heard of him? Yeah, well, that’s why.
“We know all about the disappearances, Randy,” Jenny said.
“Yes, but maybe they didn’t,” he said with a nod toward my ceiling. “There have been more than the papers are letting on, actually. There was recently a couple from Romance who were out for a leisurely stroll. One minute they were holding hands; the next, they were both gone. Witnesses say they didn’t disappear or anything—it was as though they’d never been there.”
The Timeless Tale of Peter Able Page 1
