The Timeless Tale of Peter Able

by Natalie Grigson

  And most of the corridor too.

  “?” I asked, pulling off the papers and bits of the ceiling that had fallen onto my head. I saw no sign of him, but then again, my view was kind of obstructed by the thick cloud of dust. It looked like a bomb had gone off. With my one free arm—the one that had been holding my wand, which was now somewhere in the rubble—I reached into my pocket just to make sure . . . yes, it was still there. Everything was okay.

  “Peter, this is NOT okay!” a voice shouted. I could see several figures moving around in the dust, as it settled, I saw that one was Mattie, the other was Long John Silver, and the other—

  “RANDY!”

  I’d never been happier to see my best friend and never more unable to express said happiness, as I seemed to be pinned awkwardly in between the remains of one wall and another, my right arm sticking out at a strange angle. As the dust settled and my adrenaline wore off, I felt that, yes, my arm was most definitely broken.

  “Peter, are you all right?” Randy and Long John were pulling away pieces of plaster near me, Long John with his hands and Randy with his wand. It seemed Mattie meanwhile was making sure the whole hallway didn’t just collapse around us. Behind her, Bateman had arrived, along with his two nemeses, to make sure no curious students wandered down this end of the hallway to check it out.

  Finally, Randy and Long John managed to pull me from the rubble. I noticed that Mattie was holding my wand in her hand. I held out my left hand to get it back (the other arm was still bent dangerously and throbbing), but she shook her head and stuck it in her pants above her right hip.

  “No way, Peter. Not until you explain this.” She gestured around the, admittedly, rather messy corridor.

  Randy, Long John, and Bateman had all converged around me as well, looking at me expectantly.

  “It was?!” I shouted, to some general confusion. Randy got it, of course, but it took a while to explain to everyone else.

  “You don’t mean the superhero in my class was the? from your conflict, do you?” Bateman asked, barely containing his excitement. “That’s great, Peter!” He clapped me on the shoulder, and I let out a rather girlish squeal. Randy quickly stepped forward and mended my arm. It still hurt quite a lot, but I could tell it wasn’t broken anymore.

  “Why, exactly, is that so great?” I asked, rubbing my shoulder.

  “Well, because it means you’re getting somewhere with your conflict, Peter! You can’t very well have a Person vs. Person conflict with two people who never come face to face. I suppose you could, but what fun would that be?”

  I didn’t want to tell him that this wasn’t exactly fun for all parties, so I just asked Mattie if I could have my wand back.

  “You can have it back, Peter, but we need to figure out a way to control your magic a little better. While all of this is terribly impressive”—again, she gestured at the crumbling hallway—“it’s just not safe.”

  Randy and Long John nodded in agreement; Bateman seemed to be flexing his muscles for a crowd of onlooking students.

  Finally I realized the question I should have been asking this whole time.

  “Is the bathroom still okay?”

  Hey, I’d had to pee for about an hour.

  But then, when I returned from the perfectly intact bathroom at the opposite end of the hallway, I asked another, equally pertinent question.

  “Is he gone? Did I kill him?”

  Randy and Mattie glanced quickly at each other and then Randy shook his head.

  “It doesn’t look like it, Peter. When I was running over here after hearing the blast, I passed a floating pile of details—a few sketched lines of a six-pack, a sharp jawline, a dimpled chin, half-colored-in green leggings . . . I didn’t think much of it, because, you know, Intro to Comics is in this building, but now that I know what happened . . .”

  “Yeah?”

  “Oh, sorry, I thought the ‘ . . . ’ would suffice. Now that I know what happened, I do think it was?.

  “It seems he can change from one form to another at will. If he was an unnamed tree in one person’s backstory, he can be a tree. If he was a roughly sketched comic book character, he can be that too. And if he was—”

  “Some unnamed kid I got into a fight with . . .”

  “Go on?” Bateman said, now paying attention.

  “Uh, he can be that too.”

  “Ah.”

  We’d been in dialogue for a while now, so I decided it was probably a good time to head home. Randy and I said our good-byes after I assured Bateman, Mattie, and Long John that I was okay about nine hundred times. We left Mattie to clean up the damage while Bateman and his two “nemeses” (who really seemed to be more like old friends) continued to keep students from walking down the hall.

  Long John caught up to Randy and me, his baseball bat leg making a quick beat against the stone floor.

  “Peter,” he wheezed, his salty breath hitting me like something solid and dead in the face. “Sometime when you have a minute, I want you to come by my office. You’re not in trouble,” he added at my look, “I just want to have a chat about your conflicts . . . As you know, I’m something of an expert in the field.”

  I did know. Last year Long John had not only been my Basic Conflict teacher but also regaled Randy and me with the story of how he lost his leg. It was a dark and stormy night out at sea, and his one true love, Pollyanna, had been fed up with years of—

  “Peter, there’s no time,” Randy said, glancing at his watch. So I told Long John I’d come by his office in the morning, and Randy and I made our way home, with him filling me in on what he’d been up to in the Black Market.

  It had taken them nearly two days just to find the market again—they’d had it penned down, but even as they were driving toward the coordinates their undercover agents had given them, it, along with the agents, had moved slightly south. As it was, Randy and the ten other minor characters from Detective and Cop Drama found the market sitting right on the border of Self-Help and Theology. Needless to say, it was an emotional and yet enlightening drive.

  Once again, Randy navigated the labyrinthine streets of the market, until eventually he came upon the same little stand selling night vision goggles. Goggles on, he and his team moved stealthily down the alleyway and into the Black Market, until stealthy became a hindrance, as they all kept rolling into one another and one man was poked in the eye by a finger gun, so they just walked the rest of the way. Quietly, though.

  They’d all been prepped to cover their faces and were wearing an array of masks, scarves, and, for one forgetful sergeant, a paper bag with holes poked into it, but even so, the group was attracting a lot of attention. On both sides of the street, vendors were dodging out of sight when they walked past or quickly hiding certain merchandise.

  Illegal toilet plungers from the Real World were not their target, however, so they moved faster and faster down the street toward the door to Narnia, ignoring the whispers and glares surrounding them.

  “Cerberus, we need to get through. Official police business.”

  “Randy, is that you?” the dog’s middle head asked, craning toward Randy’s scarf and goggle-covered face to give it a sniff. “It is you. Good to see you again.”

  “Don’t let them through,” another of his heads snapped. The third watched the scene happily, his tongue lolling from his mouth.

  “I’m afraid you’ll have to let me in, Cerberus.” With that, Randy presented him a warrant and three dog biscuits. After a quick debate, the three heads were all nodding in agreement. Cerberus moved away from the door.

  “You tell them down at the precinct what a good boy I was. You tell my probation officer, okay, Randy?” said the middle head, as the officers filed into the building. Randy waved a hand in acknowledgement behind him and then guided the rest of his team through the large book room.

  “’Scuse me, pardon me. Coming through.” Randy was as polite as he could have been, winding his way through the panicked crowds. All
around him, men, women, and children were shoveling books into large crates, tearing down signs reading “Real World Books” or “Original Fairy Tales,” and many of them were just abandoning their products and running pell-mell for the exits.

  “Every man for himself!” a man, who was inexplicably on fire, shouted as he tossed a small child out of his way.

  “Sorry, but this isn’t a bust,” Randy tried to explain loudly, as he pushed his way through the crowd. “This is really getting out of hand. We just wanted to get to the bathroom, is all—”

  A lanky-haired, sallow-skinned woman who looked like she hadn’t seen sunlight in years stopped in front of him and screamed for a solid ten seconds, before picking up her crate of Jane Eyre originals and moving along.

  “This is ridiculous,” Randy grumbled as he and his team continued to push through to the bathroom. Without pausing to think, Randy reached for his wand and raised it above his head. He swiped it in a large arc and then thrust it into the air in front of him and a burst of blue electricity shot from its end. The crowd before them parted immediately and stood silently as he and his team jogged toward the bathroom.

  “Thank you!” Randy called over his shoulder, and then he disappeared into the men’s room.

  “What’s an eight-letter word for red?” Alan the Lion asked as soon as they’d entered the room. He didn’t look up from his newspaper but merely held up one large paw as if to say “I’ll be with you in a moment.”

  “Oh! Is this like a riddle to cross the threshold?” one of the younger, newer detectives asked.

  “No, I’m just doing the Sunday crossword puzzle. Oh, hello again,” Alan said happily, noticing Randy. “I see you’ve brought some friends with you. I must say, though, I can only let two through the wardrobe at a time. Narnia policy.”

  “That’s fine,” Randy said. He hadn’t been planning on going through the wardrobe at all; he just wanted to make sure nobody else did. But now that he mentioned it . . . it couldn’t hurt to do a little investigating, could it? After all, they’d come all this way.

  “So, two at a time, you say?”

  “Yep, just two. There are already two people in there, though, so you’ll have to wait your turn.”

  “What?! Who’s in there?” Randy snapped. When Alan didn’t answer, Randy weighed his options and came clean. “Look, Alan. We’re here on official police business.” He pulled his badge from his front pocket and showed the lion. “I didn’t want it to come to this, but—you tell me who’s in there or I squirt lead.”

  “Pardon?”

  “I make this room red. I book you. I pump iron. I—”

  “Actually, I don’t think that last one worked,” the rookie said, stepping out of the crowd long enough to gain a short description (he had a poorly filled-in mustache) and then disappeared again into the throng of nameless officers.

  “What I mean is, you have to tell us who went through the doorway or I’ll have to arrest you on charges of obstructing justice.”

  “Oh. Well, why didn’t you just say so?” Alan glanced morosely back at the opened newspaper one last time, perhaps knowing this little inquiry would take a while.

  “Nobody went through the doorway. I said two people were already in there—people. Not characters.”

  “You don’t mean . . . People from Out There?”

  Alan nodded.

  “How do you . . .”

  “Well, if someone from the other side goes in, one of the beavers comes over and gives me a heads-up so I don’t send anyone from over here who might not fit in. You wouldn’t want someone from the Real World going back and reporting a bunch of cyborgs in Narnia, would you?”

  “No, I don’t suppose you would,” Randy said thoughtfully. The only thing for it was to wait.

  So they did. They waited for hours—they waited through this crossword puzzle (the answer had been “burgundy”) and five more. After eight hours of sitting in the cramped bathroom—which, luckily, had plenty of toilets—Randy decided that they weren’t going to get anywhere this way. He’d station ten men to keep guard of the doorway so nothing could get in or come out, and just have to come back another time if he fancied a look around Narnia. It didn’t actually have anything to do with the case—he’d just always wanted to see it.

  “So that’s it? You just left ten of your men with a giant lion and got pretty much no information?” I asked incredulously. At this point, we were home, sipping hot chocolates while cinnamon biscuits baked in the oven. It was only late September, but the air outside was already chilly, and the whole scene was really cozy.

  “Well, not exactly. I had to sort of . . . blackmail Alan. I hated to do it, but you know, we really needed him to be on our side.”

  “What’d you do?” I asked, gulping my hot chocolate down too fast.

  “You have my backstory?! I didn’t even know I had a backstory—I’m just a spin-off,” Alan said, a hint of a roar in his usually polite voice.

  “I hate to do it, Alan, but we really need you on our side.”

  “You mentioned that.”

  “Right.”

  With the ammunition of his backstory, retrieved by none other than Terrill and Ivor on a special recon mission, Alan grudgingly agreed to help the police. He’d continue guarding the door as ever but alert the policemen posted nearby when a suspected Bad Guy arrived. They’d then storm into the bathroom, arrest the villain, and solve this crime!

  “We have a whole plan,” Randy said, taking the tray out of the oven with two yellow hot pads that looked like bumblebees. “Obviously we can’t just shut down the doorway—there are lots of characters who live in Narnia and work in Fiction, and vice versa. Plus, there may just be a day one of us needs to get into the Real World in an emergency.”

  “I highly doubt that,” I said, cringing at the thought of walking Out There. Ugh.

  But Randy wasn’t looking at me; he was doing that weird thing where he seemed to be addressing an audience.

  “Anyway,” he said, snapping out of it, “we’re hoping that by continuing to arrest?’s cronies, he’ll have to come forward himself to try to get through to Narnia. And if he doesn’t, after today, at least we know he’s still coming after you!”

  I failed to see how this was good news, but Randy explained, still smiling, that essentially I was acting as live bait. He bit into a still steaming biscuit. “So you see, it’s good news all around. No more backstories can be taken from Narnia, and if he really wants to keep altering them, he’ll ultimately either have to show up at the Black Market himself or, eventually, come looking for your backstory again! It’s brilliant.” A few flecks of biscuit spattered my nose.

  I couldn’t help but wonder just how long this “eventually” would be—and if I couldn’t do something to speed things up.

  The next several days passed without incident. There were no more disappearances or reports of strange behavior (that could be linked to an altered backstory, anyway). Alan did not call in anyone suspicious trying to get into, or out of, the doorway to Narnia, and I continued to ignore the fact that seeing Jenny and her new boyfriend, particularly as they sat together at the table over from mine in Bio, was slowly but surely ripping an irreparable giant hole right in my heart. The only thing that really changed was an odd feeling of certainty, which at first I attributed to me merely making a decision to change the backstory and take my fate into my own hands . . . but there were the memories too. New memories kept popping into my head, most of which involved my dad—just short little flashbacks from the beginning of my first book.

  Finally, I decided to reread the first book of the Peter Able: Boy Wizard series (something that I abhorred doing, just like you might prefer to skip over those photo albums from the year you wore the pony T-shirt every day). Much to my surprise, I found a few slight differences.

  Of course my dad was never a character in my story—he’d already died before the series began, when I was only thirteen. But he was mentioned throughout, particularly
in the beginning, to create context. Things like “It was largely because of Peter’s father that Peter ever went to Payne Academy” (true) or “. . . but this was before Peter’s father had killed himself, abandoning his two children for the rest of their lives.” (True, and also, really?! In a children’s book?)

  This time there was more. In the past, it had always been a bit unclear what my dad had been up to before he died, you know, aside from “being a generally sad and confused person.” I’d never known what he did.

  But here, very clearly in chapter two, it said he was an engineer. No questions about it, that’s what he did. This wasn’t mentioned again, as, like I said, he wasn’t an active character in my old series, but there were a few other changes. Where I’d remembered before having mixed feelings in a situation—like the scene where I decide to talk to Maggie for the first time at Payne Academy—in this read of my book, I just walked up to her and started chatting. No nerves, no questions; I just did it. And then again, where before I remembered feeling incredibly indecisive about whether or not to try to visit Beth after my first year at Payne, in this version I decided quite quickly that yes, of course I’d go home, no matter what it took.

  And the oddest bit of this was I actually suddenly remembered it that way. I had the old memory—me being indecisive but ultimately going—and the new memory of me just going.

  The only thing I could come up with was that somehow, my changing a simple bit of punctuation had changed something about my dad’s decisiveness—and therefore, something about my own. In fact, yes, I decided, that had to be it.

  So by the weekend, when nothing else had seemed to change in my life, except for an apparent boost in my self-confidence, I decided that it might be worth it to make another small change to my backstory—just to see what would happen. I scanned the first page again. It was all about my birth, my parents’ relationship, and how they met. I decided that these things were probably a bit too big to tamper with. If they hadn’t met, after all, I wouldn’t be here.