It was then that a solution came to him. It wasn’t, admittedly, a perfect plan. Too many things could go wrong. On the other hand, it offered at least some hope that when the sun rose, Peter wouldn’t be standing in exactly this spot, waiting for the golf course’s keepers to throw him out.
Biting his lower lip, Peter walked to the nearby grove of orange trees and, in the darkness, searched the grass beneath them. When he couldn’t find what he needed, he reached up and broke a small branch from the shortest of the trees. Then he hurried back to the mushroom, its location made obvious by the bone.
Using the branch as a shovel, Peter began to dig.
He didn’t know how long a mushroom’s roots were, so he dug a circle perhaps eight inches in diameter and another five inches deep. The hardest part was digging under the mushroom. If he’d had a spade, Peter could have just slipped it beneath the roots and pushed the ball of dirt from the ground. Since all he had was a stick, he had to slide it back and forth and back again, cutting through dirt clods and grass roots and who knew what else. He tried not to think about worms wriggling helplessly as he sliced them in half.
When the ground finally seemed loose enough, he stuck both his hands down into the earth, spread his fingers wide, and pulled. At first the dirt resisted him. But just as he was about to ease out his hands and pick up his stick once again, something in the ground released. Just like that, the mushroom was in his grasp, unbelievably still intact, and in the middle of the once-perfect green was a raggedy hole.
He took off his shirt and wrapped the mess of dirt and roots and grass and mushroom in it. As an afterthought, he added the bone. Then he started for home.
Chapter Five
Peter woke to Izzy’s small face, inches from his own. Her gaze was panicked. “Peter! Peter!” she said. “Oh, please wake up, Peter!”
“What is it?” he asked, but he already knew.
“The Dog is gone!”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve looked all over,” she said. “I can’t find him anywhere!”
Peter glanced at his clock. It was 5:17, which meant he’d been asleep for only two hours. Then he checked the mattress next to him and breathed a sigh of relief. Last night, when he had crept back in through his window, he’d almost yelped at the sight of himself and The Dog sleeping peacefully in his bed—in the hours he’d spent on the golf course, he’d forgotten about The Dog’s illusion. Not knowing what else to do, he’d hidden the mushroom in a shoe box in his closet, then pushed the pillows aside and climbed right onto the image of his sleeping self, which thankfully had no more substance than the flickering light from a movie projector. If the illusion was still there in the morning, he’d thought, he’d deal with it then.
But perhaps moving the pillows had disrupted The Dog’s magic, or perhaps the illusion had just disappeared as The Dog had warned: either way, the image was now gone.
“Do you know where he is?” asked Izzy. “Should I wake up Mommy and Celia?”
“He was in the room when I went to sleep,” said Peter. (This was true, strictly speaking, if you counted being in the closet as being in the room.)
Izzy brightened. “He must be hiding, then. You and I can look for him!”
“Umm . . . I guess . . .”
“Let’s start with the living room!”
Peter and Izzy spent the next thirty minutes searching the house, Peter feeling guiltier with every passing moment. They peered behind furniture, inside cabinets, beneath rugs—Peter agreed to anything Izzy suggested, no matter how unlikely. All the while, he was thinking furiously, replaying the events of the previous evening. In his head, he kept hearing The Dog’s voice asking what he wanted. Last night, he had thought that what he wanted most was to fly. But now, as he and Izzy tiptoed around their house, he realized that wasn’t what he really wanted. What he really wanted was to bring his father home.
Today was Sunday. On Sunday mornings, Peter’s father always made pancakes—daddycakes, Izzy called them. The smell of hot oil and warm maple syrup would fill the house as Peter and his sisters stood around the stove, calling out suggestions. A rose with a long stem. A stick-figure girl in a dress. A space shuttle about to take flight. Whatever the request, Peter’s father would carefully ladle batter into the pan as though it were paint being brushed onto a canvas. Then Peter, Celia, and Izzy would giggle as his delicate lines ballooned in the skillet, the girl’s head growing puffy and enormous, the rose transformed into a blob of oversized petals.
“Vat has happened to my art?” Peter’s father exclaimed, in an accent that sometimes sounded Russian and sometimes French. “That ees not the way I drew it!”
They were none of them whole without his father: not Peter, not his mother, not his sisters. Their lives might look the same from the outside, but they themselves weren’t the same; and the differences were made worse because they all knew that their father’s absence might not be temporary; that he could come back hurt, or not come back at all. They had lived on air force bases all their lives. Even Izzy realized what could happen to parents who went to war.
And then The Dog had come. What The Dog had offered, Peter realized, was a way to ensure his father’s safety. And how had Peter responded? By losing his temper and turning The Dog into a mushroom.
Last night Peter had felt desperate to fix his mistake merely because it seemed the moral thing to do. If you turned someone into a mushroom, you ought to turn him back. Today . . . well, today more selfish reasons had intruded. If Peter could return The Dog to his former self, perhaps The Dog would forgive him and teach him how to use magic to bring his father home. What Peter needed now was to get back to his room and try to do magic once more. But to do that, he would have to slip away from Izzy.
“I saw his tail,” she reported after peeking under Celia’s closed door. “It swished out from under the bed, and then it went back in.”
“That must have been a sock,” whispered Peter. The last thing he needed was for Izzy to wake up Celia. Celia always made things more complicated.
“Socks don’t swish,” said Izzy.
“How could he be in Celia’s room?” Peter asked. “Celia sleeps with her door closed. He couldn’t get in.”
“He could if she got up to pee,” said Izzy. “And she almost always gets up to pee. I hear her in the middle of the night.”
Peter looked down at his sister in her pink-and-white-striped pajamas with her blond hair sticking up from her head. “Why are you awake in the middle of the night?” he asked.
Izzy stared at her toes and shrugged.
“Seriously, Izzy,” Peter said. “I know you wake up early, and that’s why you get in with me, but I didn’t know you were awake in the night, too. What’s going on?”
Izzy still refused to meet his eyes.
“Kids need sleep,” Peter said. “Are you staying up worrying? Is that what it is? Is it . . . is it because of Dad?”
“Is what because of Dad?”
Peter and Izzy had been whispering. But Celia must not have been sleeping that deeply, or else her unerring desire to be where she was least wanted had pulled her awake. Whatever the cause, when Peter—startled—turned around, there she was, leaning against the doorframe, her arms crossed over her nightshirt and her eyes narrowed and curious. One of her feathers from the day before had come loose from her hair; it now balanced precariously on her shoulder.
“Nothing,” Peter said. “Nothing is because of Dad.”
“Did The Dog come into your room in the night?” Izzy asked.
Celia glanced at the messy room behind her. “No.”
“I think I saw his tail under your bed,” Izzy said, and she darted past Celia, skipping over piles of laundry and stuffed animals and nail polishes to peer behind the purple dust ruffle that hid Celia’s mattress. Izzy’s head emerged a moment later, her expression bleak. “Oh,” she said, sinking back onto her heels and looking as though she might cry. “He’s not here, either. Where is he?”
“What’s going on?” said Celia. “The Dog is missing?”
Peter swallowed. “He disappeared in the night. Nobody’s sure where he is.” Well, Peter couldn’t be sure he was still in the shoe box in the closet, since he hadn’t checked recently, right?
Celia, whose attention had been on Izzy, froze, then turned until she was staring straight at Peter’s face. “What do you mean, he disappeared?”
Peter tried to look innocent and worried at the same time. “I mean he disappeared,” he repeated. “He was there when I went to sleep and gone when I woke up. We’ve been looking for him ever since.”
Celia studied Peter’s face for a moment longer, then shook her head disapprovingly, her brown curls bouncing. “Peter Lubinsky, you are such a liar.”
Peter could feel his fragile control over the situation slipping.
Izzy had been poking through Celia’s room haphazardly, probably checking for The Dog under the stacks of clothes, Peter thought. But now Celia had her attention. “What do you mean, Peter’s lying?” she asked.
“Can’t you see how guilty he looks?” Celia said. “He’s got to be lying. What did you do, Peter? Did you let him run away? Why didn’t you just tell Mom you didn’t want a dog?”
“Peter let The Dog run away?” Izzy asked in a small voice. “Peter wouldn’t do that.”
Celia looked at Izzy as though she were being particularly obtuse, even for a six-year-old. “Peter’s scared of The Dog. And he did something to him, I can just tell.”
It was too much. For two nights now, Peter had hardly slept; he’d spent the last thirty-six hours worried and afraid. And now his sisters were staring at him, contempt visible in Celia’s eyes, and Izzy . . . oh, the expression on Izzy’s face was so much worse than anything Peter had ever seen. His baby sister was looking at him as though he just might be a monster.
And maybe he was.
“I turned him into a mushroom,” Peter whispered. “That’s where The Dog is. He’s in a box in my closet, and he’s a mushroom.”
Chapter Six
Celia rolled her eyes. “You did not.”
“I did too,” Peter said, nettled.
“That’s ridiculous.”
“It’s still true.”
“How did you turn him into a mushroom?” asked Izzy. She appeared more confused than anything else.
“It was an accident,” said Peter. “He was teaching me magic, and I lost my temper.”
“Oh,” said Izzy. She thought for a minute, then said, “Will you turn him back again, please? I like him.”
Peter sighed. “I wish I could. I was trying all night, but I can’t figure out how.”
“Oh, stop it, already,” said Celia. “He’s not telling the truth, Izzy. You know that, right?”
“I’m not lying,” said Peter. “I’ll show you. The mushroom’s in my closet.”
“I don’t know what seeing a mushroom will prove,” Celia muttered, but she followed Peter and Izzy to his room anyway.
Peter closed the door behind them (in case his mother woke up), then opened his closet. His hands were shaking as he took down the shoe box. “I put him here last night,” he said. “I think he’ll still be here. I mean, unless the magic wore off and he’s a dog again.” In which case he was probably long gone, Peter thought but didn’t say: why would The Dog return to a boy whose only magical act so far had been malicious? The thought worried him enough that he held his breath as he lifted the box’s lid.
But there it was, the mushroom with the plumy tail, and next to it the big white bone. The mushroom leaned sideways in its pile of dirt, and a fine dusting of soil covered its top, but as far as Peter could tell, it was still alive.
“Oh . . . ,” said Izzy.
“That’s it?” asked Celia, and Peter could tell she was halfway to being convinced. Never before had a mushroom had such a, well, canine look to it. “That’s The Dog?”
“Yes.”
Peter told them the whole story, starting with dinner on the night before his birthday, when he had announced he wanted a dog when he didn’t really want any such thing. He told them about seeing The Dog turn into a dragon and about sneaking off to the golf course when he was supposed to be in bed. Then he explained what The Dog had told him about magic.
“But why did you make him a mushroom?” Izzy asked.
“I shouldn’t have,” Peter muttered sheepishly. “I meant to wish I could fly. But he said something, and it . . . well, it made me mad. And before I knew it, he was a mushroom. I would’ve changed him back, but I couldn’t make the magic work again. I really tried.”
“Have you tried today?” Celia asked. “Maybe you were too tired last night. Or maybe you only get one wish a day—it works like that sometimes in books.”
“I haven’t tried yet this morning,” Peter said. “I haven’t had a chance.”
“I think you should,” Celia said.
So Peter tried again. He stared at the mushroom, attempting to remember exactly how his thoughts had gone last night. Change, he thought, as strongly as he could. Change back into The Dog. Do it now.
Nothing happened.
He turned to his sisters helplessly. “See? “
Celia picked up the shoe box and studied the mushroom. Peter was surprised to realize that he was glad to have Celia there. She might be kind of a pain sometimes, but she was still good in times of crisis—the best of them when there was a problem to solve, Peter’s father had once said. At this moment, at least, it felt as if she was on his side.
He should have known better.
“You’re a loser, Peter,” Celia said, her voice matter-of-fact, as though she were commenting on the weather. “You know that, don’t you? A real loser.”
“Huh?”
“How dumb do you think we are?” She was building up steam now. “ ‘See, nothing happens,’ ” she whined. “ ‘I try and I try, but I just can’t change this mushroom into a dog.’ Duh, Peter. Like we were going to believe that you could do magic. It’s easier to believe that The Dog could talk than to believe that.”
Celia had often teased Peter, but never before had she sounded so deliberately cruel. That, more than her words, caused Peter’s hands to curl into fists. “It’s just the way my brain works,” he said. “That’s how The Dog explained it, anyway.”
“Your brain doesn’t work,” said Celia. “Sometimes it’s hard to believe you’re the son of an air force captain.”
Speechless, Peter stared at Celia. Then his eye fell on the shoe box where she had placed it on the carpet in front of her. The mushroom sat there in the soil, round and gray and doglike, and it made Peter angrier still, because why hadn’t The Dog helped him more? Why had he taught Peter just enough to screw things up? All Peter wanted was to show Celia how wrong she was. Wrong about everything: about magic and about Peter too. Change, Peter thought, staring at the mushroom. He could feel the anger traveling through him, almost electric in its power. Change into that horrible annoying dog. Come on. Do it!
The electricity gathered, pulling together into a massive charge. And that charge had a center two inches behind Peter’s right temple. Do it, he thought once more, and this time he knew what would happen.
There was no smoke, no rolling thunder or crackling lightning. One moment Peter was looking at a mushroom. The next he was looking at The Dog, one foot still in the shoe box, a sprinkling of dirt on his grimy white coat and a startled expression on his long face.
That taste, the taste of power, was in Peter’s mouth again. He couldn’t help rolling his tongue along the top of his mouth, savoring it.
“Wow!” said Izzy.
“I did it!” squealed Celia. She clapped her hands together. “I can’t believe I actually did it!”
Peter turned in disbelief. “What do you mean, you did it? I was the one who changed The Dog back.”
“Yes, but I was the one who figured it out,” said Celia smugly.
“What are you talking about? Figu
red what out?”
“Ahem,” said The Dog, stepping out of the shoe box. He shook his back, scattering dirt across Peter’s floor. Then he held up a paw so that Celia could shake it. “Well done, Celia,” he said. “I appreciate the help.”
“You really can talk!” exclaimed Izzy.
“That’s so cool!” said Celia. “Will you show us how you do magic?”
“Why not?” said The Dog. “I owe you, after all.” He stared for a moment at the girls, and before Peter knew what was happening, his sisters were gone, replaced by two small birds. One was bright purple and one bright pink, just the colors of the feathers that a moment before had dangled in Celia’s hair.
For a moment, the birds just looked at each other in astonishment. Then, while Peter watched, they began to flap around the room. They circled wildly over the bookcase, under the lamp, and around and around Peter, their delight obvious as they called back and forth to each other in shrill, happy cheeps.
The unfairness made Peter’s jaw drop. “I was the one who turned you back!” In some part of his mind, Peter knew that he shouldn’t wake up his mother, but it was all he could do to keep from shouting. “Why did you make Celia into a bird? It was me! I was the one who saved you!”
The Dog made a face, and Celia and Izzy were once more standing on the floor as themselves.
“I was flying!” said Izzy.
“That was awesome!” said Celia. Her arms still hovered a few inches from her sides, as though she expected she might take off again at any moment. “Thank you, Dog!”
“Of course,” said The Dog. “Now will you explain to Peter how you rescued me?”
Celia giggled. “I’d be happy to.” She turned to Peter. “When I was listening to you tell your story, I was trying to figure out what was different the one time when you were able to do magic. Everything seemed the same, except that the one time when it worked, you were really mad. So I figured I’d try to make you mad again. And so I said the meanest things I could think of, and look! You were able to change The Dog back.”
The Misadventures of the Magician's Dog Page 4
