Wing feather, bat leather, hollow bone,
Gift of Icarus and Oberon,
Dream of the earthbound—Spin and Flow
Fledge and Flutter and Fan and GO!
There was a tiny tingle, a twinge, and that was all. When Harry opened his eyes and looked back over his shoulder, nothing was there. No huge white arching wings, nothing at all, except—except one big white feather, drifting very slowly down to the floor.
It was with an awful feeling of sorrow and loss, that Harry took down the shoe box that held his most important keepsakes. Just as his happiness and pride in his wings had always seemed too big for one person, the sadness he felt as he put away the bottle and feather seemed to be more than just his. He was putting the shoe box back on the highest closet shelf, when suddenly he had an idea. He took the feather out and looked at it again.
It was long and cloudy white; soft, and yet strangely strong. There was something about it so pure and perfect, you knew without a doubt, that it came from the wing of something entirely out of the ordinary. Instead of putting the feather away again with the silver bottle, Harry put it inside his shirt. Then he went over to make a social call on the Furdells.
It was just barely past dark, so the Furdells weren’t surprised to see him. Besides, Harry, and other people, too, were beginning to call on the Furdells a lot, since—well—since Olive started being different. Harry sat around and chatted long enough to make it look natural, and when he left he knew where both the Furdells were and what they were doing. He knew, for instance, that they wouldn’t be likely to look out the back windows for the next few minutes. As soon as he was outside, he headed for the carriage house roof.
Sure enough, the little table was still sitting against the railing at the corner of the roof. The candle was in a little lantern now, so the wind wouldn’t blow it out when it was lit, and there were fresh flowers in the vase. Harry ran his hand over the softly gleaming feather for the last time. Then he tucked the end of it under the lantern so it would be sure not to blow away. After all, he had other things to remember by.
For only a moment Harry looked up into the endless open sky before he turned and hurried down the stairs and home. Back at Marco’s, Mom was ironing in the kitchen and Hal was drinking coffee at the table. Harry sat down too, and it wasn’t long before they were having a great conversation, all about the farm and trips they could take on Hal’s vacation and things like that. After a while, Hal went upstairs to get some snapshots he wanted to show them, and Harry had a chance to ask a question that had been on his mind lately.
“Mom,” he said, “do you remember the prophecy that old fortuneteller made when I was little?”
“Of course,” Mom said. “I’m sure I’ll never forget it. Your father talked about it so often.”
“Didn’t he say that I had a rare gift and I’d have a special kind of magic?”
Mom nodded.
“What do you think he meant by that?”
“I don’t know, Harry. Not really. But I’ve always had a theory of my own about it. Of course, your father was sure it meant that you would grow up to be a very famous magician, but I . . . well, I always thought it might be referring to something else.”
“What?” Harry asked. “What did you think it meant?”
Mom stopped ironing and sat down at the table with her chin on her hand. She thought a while before she said, “I don’t know if I can explain it very well, but it’s something like this. It seems to me we all have a little magic. It’s as if life makes a magic circle around each of us, but its size is entirely up to you. If you try to make your circle closed and exclusively yours, it never grows very much. There are even people who try to make their magic so private and tight that eventually it almost strangles them. Only a circle that has lots of room for anybody who needs it, has enough spare space to hold any real magic. Does that make any sense to you?”
“I think so,” Harry said. “But I don’t really see what it has to do with me and the prophecy.”
“Well, it’s just that you’ve been crowding people into your circle ever since you were a tiny boy. That seems like a rare gift to me. I’ve always thought there was going to be room in your life for all sorts of people—and all kinds of magic, too.”
Mom went back to her ironing then and Harry thought about what she had said. He wasn’t too sure just what she’d been trying to say, but, at least, he was glad to hear that she didn’t think the prophecy meant that he ought to try to grow up to be a great stage magician. Because he had always been pretty sure he’d much rather not.
It was the next morning, the day before Labor Day, that Mike Wong came back from his summer in the Sierras. He had just two days to spend with his grandparents before school started. Of course, he came over to see Harry right away. They sat on the front steps and talked, and Mike had lots to tell about his summer in the mountains. Harry had very little to say because nothing much had happened on Kerry Street—not that he could talk about, anyway.
Mike was anxious to show Harry the new pitch he’d developed during the summer, so right after lunch they collected their baseball stuff and headed for the bus stop and Golden Gate Park.
When Harry got home from the park that night, it was almost dinner time. He stuck his head in the kitchen and yelled “Hi!” at Mom to let her know he was home, and ran upstairs. Four flights, three stairs at a step, without a stop or a stumble.
He wasn’t even out of breath when he got to his room but he threw himself down on his bed anyway. He just lay there on his back for a while, thudding his fist into his mitt and grinning to himself, while he let his mind go back over the afternoon.
There’d been that long hard run to make a scooping shoestring catch of one of Mike’s best hits. And then there was the way he’d clobbered half a dozen of Mike’s fast balls, and even a couple of his fancy new sleeper pitches. Mike had almost gotten mad for a minute, but then he’d gotten into the spirit of the thing, and he ended up being almost as tickled as Harry was himself. “Holy Toledo, Harry,” he kept on saying, “What have you been having for breakfast lately?” or “Are you sure you’re the same Harry Marco I used to know?” and other remarks like that. Finally Mike said, “Pretty sneaky, I call it. Keeping all this a secret until we got to the park. Boy, if I’d improved the way you have, I’d have been bragging before you had a chance to say hello.”
Harry just grinned and said, “Yeah, I’m the sneaky one, all right.”
But actually, it wasn’t that at all. Actually, it wasn’t until that afternoon in Golden Gate Park that Harry realized what a difference a summer of flying—and growing, too—could make.
His Black and Blue Magic was over; gone with the summer. But it wasn’t going to be nearly so hard to give it up now. It wasn’t nearly so hard now that he was saying good-bye to his everyday black and blue at the same time.
That night Harry went to bed with his mind full of great things to think about. There was moving to the country, no more worry about Mom working too hard, and how neat it would be to be one of the good athletes at his new school in Marin County. He was just at the edge of sleep, and his daydreams were getting a little mixed up with real dreams, when a face appeared in front of him. The face took shape gradually, out of a school scene Harry had been imagining. It grew plainer and clearer until it entirely blotted out the dreamed-up picture of Harry making a home run while his new classmates cheered wildly in the background.
Just about the time Harry recognized the face as Mr. Mazzeeck’s, it began to change. Mr. Mazzeeck’s chubby wrinkled cheeks faded and melted and flowed into a different face entirely—a thin keen face with high cheek bones beneath dark burning eyes.
The eyes seemed to be looking directly at Harry, and suddenly some words popped into his mind right out of nowhere. Some words that sounded vaguely familiar:
Mog will not remove a curse,
Till Better Triumphs over Worst.
Till Bad-to-Worse
Has been Reversed
And out of Error—Good has Burst.
Harry was pretty sure it was the verse that Mr. Mazzeeck said explained the cure for enchantment, but the words hadn’t made any sense to Harry then, and he was too tired to figure them out now. He certainly hadn’t realized that he’d memorized them from reading them just that one time.
That’s funny, Harry thought. He sat up and looked around expectantly, but the face was gone and everything was dark and quiet. He waited like that for quite a while, but nothing more happened, so at last Harry lay back down and finished going to sleep.
Publication Information
About Black and Blue Magic
The story of a wizard’s unwieldly gift and a hero who becomes an “angel unaware.”
You’d think that someone with a name like Harry Houdini Marco would be deft and skillful, but Harry could only occasionally catch even an easy fly ball without making some dumb error. On top of that, most of his friends’ families were moving to the suburbs. It would have been a long, dreary summer, but then a Mr. Mazeeck showed up and turned out to be more than he seemed.
This now classic book was first published by Atheneum in 1966. It was selected by Scholastic Books for inclusion in the Arrow Book Club and later republished in a Dell Yearling edition in 1988.
Copyright Notice
Especially for Douglas
Copyright © 1966 by Zilpha Keatley Snyder
All rights reserved
Library of Congress catalog card number 66-12850
Published simultaneously in Canada by McClelland & Stewart Ltd.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Printed by Halliday Lithograph Corporation,
West Hanover, Massachusetts
Bound by H. Wolff, New York
Designed by David Rogers
First Printing February 1966
eBook Version Notes
v1.0 January 2005 – Desktop & PocketPC .lit
Scan, conversion, and proofing.
Black and Blue Magic Page 14
