The Big Book of Modern Fantasy

by The Big Book of Modern Fantasy (retail) (epub)

  The Willing Warlock turned his eyes sideways to look at Towser’s great pink tongue draped over Towser’s large white fangs. “I’ll stop at the first place we see,” he said obligingly. He began turning over schemes for giving both of them—not to speak of the car—the slip the moment they allowed him to stop. If he made himself invisible, so that the dog could not find him—”

  He seemed to be in luck. Just then a large blue notice that said HARBURY SERVICES came into view, with a picture of a knife and fork underneath. The Willing Warlock turned into it with a squeal of tyres. “You are wasting petrol,” the car protested. The Willing Warlock took no notice. He stopped with a jolt among a lot of other cars, turned himself invisible and tried to jump out. But he had forgotten the seatbelt. It held him in place long enough for Towser to fix his fangs in the sleeve of his coat, and that seemed to be enough to make Towser turn invisible too. “You have forgotten to set the handbrake,” said the car.

  “Doh!” snarled the Willing Warlock miserably, and put the handbrake on. It was not easy, with Towser’s invisible fangs grating his arm.

  “You’re to fetch me lots and lots,” Jemima Jane said. It did not seem to trouble her that both of them had vanished. “Towser, make sure he brings me an ice-cream.”

  The Willing Warlock climbed out of the car, lugging the invisible Towser. He tried some more cunning. “Come with me and show me which ice-cream you want,” he called back. Several people in the car park looked round to see where the invisible voice was coming from.

  “I want to stay in the car. I’m tired,” whined Jemima Jane.

  The invisible teeth fastened in the Willing Warlock’s sleeve rumbled a little. Invisible dribble ran on his hand. “Oh all right,” he said, and set off for the restaurant, accompanied by four invisible heavy paws.

  Maybe it was a good thing they were both invisible. There was a big sign on the door: NO DOGS. And the Willing Warlock still had no money. He went to the long counter and picked up pies and scones with the hand Towser left him free. He stuffed them into his pocket so that they would become invisible too. Someone pointed to the Danish pastry he picked up next and screamed, “Look! A ghost!” Then there were screams further down the counter. The Willing Warlock looked. A very large chocolate gateau with a snout-shaped piece missing from it, was trotting at chest-level across the dining area. Towser was helping himself too. People backed away, yelling. The gateau broke into a gallop and barged out through the glass doors with a splat. At the same moment, someone grabbed the Danish pasty from the Willing Warlock’s hand.

  It was the girl behind the cash-desk, who was not afraid of ghosts. “You’re the Invisible Man or something,” she said. “Give that back.”

  The Willing Warlock panicked again and ran after the gateau. He meant to go on running, as fast as he could, in the opposite direction to the nice car. But as soon as he barged through the door, he found the gateau waiting for him, lying on the ground. A warning growl and hot breath on his hand suggested that he pick the gateau up and come along. Teeth in his trouser-leg backed up this suggestion. Dismally, the Willing Warlock obeyed.

  “Where’s my ice-cream?” Jemima Jane asked ungratefully.

  “There wasn’t any,” said the Willing Warlock as Towser herded him into the car. He threw the gateau, the scones and a pork pie on to the back seat. “Be thankful for what you’ve got.”

  “Why?” asked Jemima Jane.

  The Willing Warlock gave up. He turned himself visible again and sat in the driving seat to eat the other pork pie. He could feel Towser snuffing him from time to time to make sure he stayed there. In between, he could hear Towser eating. Towser made such a noise that the Willing Warlock was glad he was invisible. He looked to make sure. And there was Towser, visible again in all his hugeness, sitting in the back seat licking his vast chops. As for Jemima Jane—the Willing Warlock had to look away quickly. She was chocolate all over. There was a river of chocolate down her front and more plastered into her red curls like mud.

  “Why aren’t you going on driving for?” Jemima Jane demanded. Towser at once surged to his huge feet to back up the demand.

  “I am, I am!” the Willing Warlock said, hastily starting the engine.

  “You have forgotten to fasten your seatbelt,” the car reminded him priggishly. And as the car moved forward, it added, “It is now lighting-up time. You require headlights.”

  The Willing Warlock started the wipers, rolled down windows, played music, and finally managed to turn on the lights. He drove back on to the big road, hating all three of them. And drove. Jemima Jane stood up on the back seat behind him. The gateau had made her distressingly lively. She wanted to talk. She grabbed one of the Willing Warlock’s ears in a sticky chocolate hand for balance, and breathed gateau-fumes and questions into his other ear.

  “Why did you take our car for? What are all those prickles on your chin for? Why don’t you like me holding your nose for? Why don’t you smell nice? Where are we going to? Shall we drive in the car all night?” and many more such questions.

  The Willing Warlock was forced to answer all these questions in the right way. If he did not answer, Jemima Jane dragged at his hair, or twisted his ear, or took hold of his nose. If the answer he gave did not please Jemima Jane, Towser rose up growling, and the Willing Warlock had quickly to think of a better answer. It was not long before he was as plastered with chocolate as Jemima Jane was. He thought that it was not possible for a person to be more unhappy.

  He was wrong. Towser suddenly stood up and staggered about the back seat, making odd noises.

  “Towser’s going to go sick,” Jemima Jane said.

  The Willing Warlock squealed to a halt on the hard shoulder and threw all four doors open wide. Towser would have to get out, he thought. Then he could drive straight off again and leave Towser by the roadside.

  As he thought that, Towser landed heavily on top of him. Sitting on the Willing Warlock, he got rid of the gateau on to the edge of the motorway. It took him some time. Meanwhile, the Willing Warlock wondered if Towser was actually as heavy as a cow, or whether he only felt that way.

  “Now go on, go on driving,” Jemima Jane said, when Towser at last had finished.

  The Willing Warlock obeyed. He drove on. Then it was the car’s turn. It flashed a red light at him. “You are running out of petrol,” it remarked.

  “Good,” said the Willing Warlock feelingly.

  “Go on driving,” said Jemima Jane, and Towser, as usual, backed her up.

  The Willing Warlock drove on through the night. A new and unpleasant smell now filled the car. It did not mix well with chocolate. The Willing Warlock supposed it must be Towser. He drove, and the car boringly repeated its remark about petrol, until, as they passed a sign saying BENTWELL SERVICES, the car suddenly changed its tune and said, “You have started on the reserve tank.” Then it became quite talkative and added, “You have petrol for ten more miles only. You are running out of petrol…”

  “I heard you,” said the Willing Warlock. “I shall have to stop,” he told Jemima Jane and Towser, with great relief. Then, to stop Jemima Jane telling him to drive on, and because the new smell was mixing with the chocolate worse than ever, he said, “And what is this smell in here?”

  “Me,” Jemima Jane said, rather defiantly. “I went in my pants. It’s your fault. You didn’t take me to the Ladies.”

  At which Towser at once sprang up, growling, and the car added, “You are running out of petrol.”

  The Willing Warlock groaned aloud and went squealing into BENTWELL SERVICES. The car told him reproachfully that he was wasting petrol and then added that he was running out of it, but the Willing Warlock was too far gone to attend to it. He sprang out of the car and once more tried to run away. Towser sprang out after him and fastened his teeth in the Willing Warlock’s now tattered trouser-leg. And Jemima Jane scrambled out after Towser.<
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  “Take me to the Ladies,” she said. “You have to change my knickers. My clean ones are in the bag in the back.”

  “I can’t take you to the Ladies!” the Willing Warlock said. He had no idea what to do. What did one do? You have one grown-up male Warlock, one female child, and one dog fastened to the Warlock’s trouser-leg that might be male or female. Did you go to the Gents or the Ladies? The Willing Warlock just did not know. He had to settle for doing it publicly in the car park. It made him ill. It was the last straw. Jemima Jane gave him loud directions in a ringing bossy voice. Towser growled steadily. As he struggled with the gruesome task, the Willing Warlock heard people gathering round, sniggering. He hardly cared. He was a broken Warlock by then. When he looked up to find himself in a ring of policemen, and the small man in the pin-striped suit standing just beside him, he felt nothing but extreme relief. “I’ll come quietly,” he said.

  “Hello, Daddy!” Jemima Jane shouted. She suddenly looked enchanting, in spite of the chocolate. And Towser changed character too and fawned and gamboled round the small man, squeaking like a puppy.

  The small man picked up Jemima Jane, chocolate and all, and looked forbiddingly at the Willing Warlock. “If you’ve harmed Prudence, or the dog either,” he said, “you’re for it, you know.”

  “Harmed!” the Willing Warlock said hysterically. “That child’s the biggest bully in the world—bar that car or that dog! And the dog’s a thief too! I’m the one that’s harmed! Anyway, she said her name, was Jemima Jane.”

  “That just a jingle I taught her, to prevent people trying name-magic,” the small man said, laughing rather. “The dog has a secret name anyway. All Kathayack Demon Dogs do. Do you know who I am, Warlock?”

  “No,” said the Willing Warlock, trying not to look respectfully at the fawning Towser. He had heard of Demon Dogs. The beast probably had more magic than he did.

  “Kathusa,” said the man. “Financial wizard. I’m Chrestomanci’s agent in this world. That crook Jean-Pierre keeps sending people here and they all get into trouble. It’s my job to pick them up. I was coming into the bank to help you, Warlock, and you go and pinch my car.”

  “Oh,” said the Willing Warlock. The policemen coughed and began to close in. He resigned himself to a long time in prison.

  But Kathusa held up a hand to stop the policemen. “See here, Warlock,” he said, “you have a choice. I need a man to look after my cars and exercise Towser. You can do that and go straight, or you can go to prison. Which is it to be?”

  It was a terrible choice. Towser met the Willing Warlock’s eye and licked his lips. The Willing Warlock decided he preferred prison. But Jemima Jane—or rather Prudence—turned to the policemen, beaming. “He’s going to look after me and Towser,” she announced. “He likes his nose being pulled.”

  The Willing Warlock tried not to groan.

  Stephen King (1947– ) is an American writer who has published stories in such venues as Startling Mystery Stories, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and The New Yorker. He is the author of more than fifty novels, including The Eyes of the Dragon (1984) and the Gunslinger series. His stories have been collected in such books as Night Shift (1978), Skeleton Crew (1985), Four Past Midnight (1990), Nightmares & Dreamscapes (1993), Everything’s Eventual (2002), and The Bazaar of Bad Dreams (2015). He has written the nonfiction books Danse Macabre and On Writing, and he has been a guest editor of Best American Short Stories. His numerous awards include thirteen Bram Stoker Awards, seven British Fantasy Awards, three World Fantasy Awards, two Shirley Jackson Awards, a Hugo Award, an International Horror Guild Award, an Edgar Award, an O. Henry Award, a World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement, the National Book Foundation Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters (2003), and the National Medal of Arts (2014). Many of his works have been adapted for film and TV, some more successfully than others. “Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut” was first published in Redbook in 1984 and included in Skeleton Crew.

  MRS. TODD’S SHORTCUT

  Stephen King

  “THERE GOES THE TODD WOMAN,” I said.

  Homer Buckland watched the little Jaguar go by and nodded. The woman raised her hand to Homer. Homer nodded his big, shaggy head to her but didn’t raise his own hand in return. The Todd family had a big summer home on Castle Lake, and Homer had been their caretaker since time out of mind. I had an idea that he disliked Worth Todd’s second wife every bit as much as he’d liked ’Phelia Todd, the first one.

  This was just about two years ago and we were sitting on a bench in front of Bell’s Market, me with an orange soda-pop, Homer with a glass of mineral water. It was October, which is a peaceful time in Castle Rock. Lots of the lake places still get used on the weekends, but the aggressive, boozy summer socializing is over by then and the hunters with their big guns and their expensive nonresident permits pinned to their orange caps haven’t started to come into town yet. Crops have been mostly laid by. Nights are cool, good for sleeping, and old joints like mine haven’t yet started to complain. In October the sky over the lake is passing fair, with those big white clouds that move so slow; I like how they seem so flat on the bottoms, and how they are a little gray there, like with a shadow of sundown foretold, and I can watch the sun sparkle on the water and not be bored for some space of minutes. It’s in October, sitting on the bench in front of Bell’s and watching the lake from afar off, that I still wish I was a smoking man.

  “She don’t drive as fast as ’Phelia,” Homer said. “I swan I used to think what an old-fashion name she had for a woman that could put a car through its paces like she could.”

  Summer people like the Todds are nowhere near as interesting to the year-round residents of small Maine towns as they themselves believe. Year-round folk prefer their own love stories and hate stories and scandals and rumors of scandal. When that textile fellow from Amesbury shot himself, Estonia Corbridge found that after a week or so she couldn’t even get invited to lunch on her story of how she found him with the pistol still in one stiffening hand. But folks are still not done talking about Joe Camber, who got kilted by his own dog.

  Well, it don’t matter. It’s just that they are different racecourses we run on. Summer people are trotters; us others that don’t put on ties to do our week’s work are just pacers. Even so there was quite a lot of local interest when Ophelia Todd disappeared back in 1973. Ophelia was a genuinely nice woman, and she had done a lot of things in town. She worked to raise money for the Sloan Library, helped to refurbish the war memorial, and that sort of thing. But all the summer people like the idea of raising money. You mention raising money and their eyes light up and commence to gleam. You mention raising money and they can get a committee together and appoint a secretary and keep an agenda. They like that. But you mention time (beyond, that is, one big long walloper of a combined cocktail party and committee meeting) and you’re out of luck. Time seems to be what summer people mostly set a store by. They lay it by, and if they could put it up in Ball jars like preserves, why, they would. But ’Phelia Todd seemed willing to spend time—to do desk duty in the library as well as to raise money for it. When it got down to using scouring pads and elbow grease on the war memorial, ’Phelia was right out there with town women who had lost sons in three different wars, wearing an overall with her hair done up in a kerchief. And when kids needed ferrying to a summer swim program, you’d be as apt to see her as anyone headed down Landing Road with the back of Worth Todd’s big shiny pickup full of kids. A good woman. Not a town woman, but a good woman. And when she disappeared, there was concern. Not grieving, exactly, because a disappearance is not exactly like a death. It’s not like chopping something off with a cleaver; more like something running down the sink so slow you don’t know it’s all gone until long after it is.

  “ ’Twas a Mercedes she drove,” Homer said, answering the question I hadn’t asked. “Two-seater sportster. Todd got it for
her in sixty-four or sixty-five, I guess. You remember her taking the kids to the lake all those years they had Frogs and Tadpoles?”

  “Ayuh.”

  “She’d drive ’em no more than forty, mindful they was in the back. But it chafed her. That woman had lead in her foot and a ball bearing sommers in the back of her ankle.”

  It used to be that Homer never talked about his summer people. But then his wife died. Five years ago it was. She was plowing a grade and the tractor tipped over on her and Homer was taken bad off about it. He grieved for two years or so and then seemed to feel better. But he was not the same. He seemed waiting for something to happen, waiting for the next thing. You’d pass his neat little house sometimes at dusk and he would be on the porch smoking a pipe with a glass of mineral water on the porch rail and the sunset would be in his eyes and pipe smoke around his head and you’d think—I did, anyway—Homer is waiting for the next thing. This bothered me over a wider range of my mind than I liked to admit, and at last I decided it was because if it had been me, I wouldn’t have been waiting for the next thing, like a groom who has put on his morning coat and finally has his tie right and is only sitting there on a bed in the upstairs of his house and looking first at himself in the mirror and then at the clock on the mantel and waiting for it to be eleven o’clock so he can get married. If it had been me, I would not have been waiting for the next thing; I would have been waiting for the last thing.

  But in that waiting period—which ended when Homer went to Vermont a year later—he sometimes talked about those people. To me, to a few others.

  “She never even drove fast with her husband, s’far as I know. But when I drove with her, she made that Mercedes strut.”

  A fellow pulled in at the pumps and began to fill up his car. The car had a Massachusetts plate.

  “It wasn’t one of these new sports cars that run on onleaded gasoline and hitch every time you step on it; it was one of the old ones, and the speedometer was calibrated all the way up to a hundred and sixty. It was a funny color of brown and I ast her one time what you called that color and she said it was champagne. Ain’t that good, I says, and she laughs fit to split. I like a woman who will laugh when you don’t have to point her right at the joke, you know.”