“That’s not true,” said Peter, but even as he said it, he realized she was right. “Besides, you always have so many friends and stuff.”
“I still don’t like to be left out,” Celia said. “That’s just mean.”
No one had ever called Peter mean before, and he had never imagined that was how Celia saw his actions. “I’m glad you’re here now,” he said. “Really.”
“Now that we’ve got that out of the way, do you think we could get going again?” asked The Dog. If he’d had a wristwatch, thought Peter, he would have been frowning at it and tapping his paw on the carpet.
They started down the hallway once more, but the mood was different than it had been before. Now the children walked side by side, occasionally giggling when someone bumped into someone else. Once Peter found himself squeezing Celia’s hand, almost as if she were Izzy. He dropped it quickly, but not before Celia smiled.
The Dog stopped in front of one of the doors.
“This is it?” asked Celia.
“This is it,” said The Dog. He touched his nose to the door: it swung open immediately. Only darkness was visible beyond the doorway, darkness that swallowed The Dog piece by piece, nose to tail, as he stepped through. Peter took a deep breath. It was really going to happen. He was going to confront the magician.
“Izzy and Celia, I think you should wait in the hallway,” he said, trying to sound appropriately big-brotherish. “I’ll just be a minute.”
“Really?” said Celia. “Okay. If you think that’s best.”
Peter’s shoulders sagged in relief. He couldn’t believe it had been that easy.
Then Celia smiled, a slightly wicked smile that Peter knew all too well, and she disappeared through the doorway after The Dog. “Celia!” Peter shouted, but it was too late.
Izzy turned to Peter. “I don’t want to wait all by myself.”
Peter didn’t want to take Izzy with him, but he didn’t want to leave her alone in the magician’s house, either. He grasped her hand, and they stepped into the blackness together.
Chapter Thirteen
One moment they were in the hallway, the next they were standing next to Celia, whose mouth had dropped open in surprise. Peter, too, stared at the room in astonishment. “Holy cow,” he said under his breath.
Izzy edged closer to him. “What are all these monster bones?” she whispered.
“They’re not monster bones,” said Peter. He blinked, unable to fully believe what he was seeing. “They’re dinosaur fossils.”
“It’s like a museum,” breathed Celia. “Only not at all boring.”
No museum in the world had this many fossils, Peter thought; and no museum felt so, well, alive. Vines hung from the ceiling, thick-leafed and glossy; trees grew from the dirt floor, their branches curving and twining like prehistoric snakes. Unlike the carnival, which had had no ceiling or walls, this was distinctly a room, but a room like none Peter had seen before. It was as big as a stadium, he thought: it had to be, because how else could it hold so many dinosaurs?
The dinosaurs stretched beneath trees. They peered out from bushes. They hung frozen in the air, paralyzed in midflight. Everywhere Peter looked, dinosaur bones stood as though the flesh had just dropped from them, leaving behind only the whitened skeletons of the great and terrifying beasts. Peter remembered his dreams of a rocket bedroom. That was nothing compared to the magnificence of this place.
“There must be a thousand dinosaurs in here,” he whispered. There was something weighty about the silence that made it hard to speak in a normal voice. “Do you see that? The tall one? It’s an Allosaurus. That’s a Coelophysis over there—the little guy. That’s a Pteranodon . . . not strictly a dinosaur, but close enough. Those look like Microraptors, maybe?”
“That one’s definitely a Velociraptor,” said Celia, pointing to her left. “We learned about those last week in school.”
“What’s the one behind the bed?” asked Izzy.
Peter had been deliberately avoiding looking at the bed, which stood directly in front of them, positioned as if the room’s owner wanted to watch the door even in his sleep. Now Peter glanced at the bony figure towering above it. One foot was planted on either side of the headboard, as if the dinosaur were guarding what slept beneath. “See how it has only two fingers?” said Peter. “That means it’s a Tyrannosaurus rex. The king of the terrible lizards.”
The Dog nodded. “The dinosaurs were the magician’s big project,” he explained. “He used magic to pull fossils from the earth, piece by fragmented piece. Each of these dinosaurs took days of his time, which is a lot for a magician. I think the intensity with which he worked on them is probably what allowed him to stay himself as long as he did. Assembling the dinosaurs wasn’t an angry or hateful task, and it required intense concentration.”
Something had been tugging at Peter’s consciousness since they’d walked into the room. “They’re all carnivores.”
The Dog laughed, a short, dry bark. “Yes, they’re all carnivores.”
Peter sighed. It was no use delaying any longer. His eyes went back to the Tyrannosaurus, and then to the even more terrifying sight resting, as Peter had known it would, between the dinosaur’s feet. “It’s the rock on the bed, right?”
“Yes,” said The Dog, “it’s the rock on the bed.”
Peter spent the next twenty minutes trying to turn a rock the size of a chicken into a magician. At first, his sisters stood nearby, watching anxiously, but after a minute or two, Peter asked them if they would wait someplace else in the room. “It’s hard to do this while you’re staring at me,” he told them, but that wasn’t the real reason. If, by some miracle, he managed to make the rock human again, he wanted Celia and Izzy as far away as possible.
But the longer Peter studied the rock, the less likely it seemed that his sisters had anything to worry about. Sitting on the edge of the bed, Peter felt as though he were once more back on the golf course—except that then he had struggled to summon anything like power, and now he could easily sense the electric current that crackled along every surface in the room. He could feel the power, he could taste it—but he couldn’t quite figure out how to use it.
When he stared at the rock, it was just a rock. Once Celia had made him angry, Peter had found it easy enough to change the mushroom back into The Dog, because he had been able to feel The Dog inside the mushroom all along. The rock, though, offered Peter nothing; he peered at its uneven gray surface until he had every curve and dent memorized, and yet he could find no hint of the magician underneath. He might, Peter thought, be able to change the rock into some random man, but into the magician? How could he, when he had no idea who the magician was? Peter tried to imagine the sort of person who would create a room like this, but all he could see in his mind’s eye was the top-hatted entertainer who had performed card tricks at Celia’s eighth birthday party. It wasn’t much to go on.
Frustration eventually brought Angry Peter to the surface again. “You’re asking me to do something impossible,” Peter complained to The Dog, who waited, curled up in a fern near the foot of the bed.
“What do you mean?” said The Dog.
“Are you setting me up?” asked Peter. “What’s going to happen when I try to turn him back? Will the spell bounce back on me like it did on him? Is that why you won’t change him back yourself?”
The Dog stood up, bringing his face closer to Peter’s. “I told you. I tried, and it didn’t work. I’m not powerful enough.”
“So you keep saying,” snapped Peter, “but how do I know that’s true?”
“Let’s focus on the problem at hand,” said The Dog. “Why is it impossible for you to make the magician human again?”
“Because I don’t know who he is!” shouted Peter. “How can I change him when I don’t know who I’m supposed to be changing him into?”
“Oh,” said The Dog, “I should have thought of that. If that’s all . . .” He stood up and stretched, then, tail wagging,
trotted toward what Peter thought was a Coelophysis. Stopping in front of it, The Dog performed a strange pantomime: he bent his head, grabbed an invisible something with his teeth, then pulled. His head then ducked down again, and when it bobbed up, he had a picture frame clasped in his jaw. He carried this to Peter.
“How did you . . . ?”
“Invisible dresser,” The Dog said. “The magician didn’t like the way furniture looked in the jungle.”
Peter took the frame, which appeared ordinary enough. Then he turned it over and saw the photograph.
It was a picture of a boy and a dog on the lawn in front of a house. The house had white stucco walls and windows framed in robin’s-egg blue. The lawn appeared well cared for, and yellow and pink roses bloomed near the front steps. The boy wore a baseball cap and looked about Peter’s age; he had his arm around the dog, as if he was trying to hold the dog still for the photo. It was a nice picture, but nothing exciting.
It took Peter a moment to notice it: those were the same rabbitlike ears, the same long and pointed snout, the same plumy tail.
“It’s you,” said Peter.
“Well, duh.”
“You seem so . . . you look really happy.”
“You’re paying attention to the wrong thing,” said The Dog. “Don’t look at me. Look at the boy.”
Peter did as he was told. “Why am I looking at him?” he asked after a moment of studying the boy’s friendly, open face, his laughing eyes, the fringe of dark hair that stuck out from the edge of his cap. Perhaps, Peter thought, this was the magician’s son.
For a moment, The Dog just stared at him. Then he said, “You’re looking at him because he’s the magician, of course.”
“He’s what?”
“He’s the magician.”
Peter turned back to the photo, shaken. This was the magician, the enslaver of plants, the wrecker of marriages? The obliterator? Peter had wondered what sort of man the magician was. But the magician wasn’t a man at all. He was a boy.
Peter’s shock must have been visible on his face, because the next thing he knew, his sisters were at his side.
“What’s wrong?” said Celia. “Are you okay?”
“Nothing. Just . . . nothing. I, uh . . .”
“Did something scary happen?” asked Izzy. Her gaze flickered toward the rock, then back to Peter.
Even if Peter had wanted to, he wasn’t sure he could have explained what he was feeling. So the magician was a boy. The Dog had told him that it was easier to do magic when you were young. He had also told Peter that magicians didn’t last long. Peter should have seen this coming.
But he hadn’t. He had envisioned someone who had learned magic when he was young, then spent years constructing this house, these servants, and this life. Peter had imagined the transformation from terrific kid to evil magician as a gradual, decades-long process.
But the magician was Peter’s age—younger, maybe.
Mutely, he handed the photo to his sisters. Then he turned back to The Dog. “That was taken before he learned to do magic?”
“The week before, actually,” said The Dog.
“How old is he in the picture?”
“Twelve and a half.”
Peter cleared his throat, which seemed unaccountably tight. “How old was he when he turned himself into a rock?”
“Thirteen. And three months.”
Peter glanced back at the rock. Inside that rock was a boy, a boy just like him. How did it feel to be a rock? The Dog had made it sound as if he had been himself even when he was mushroom: he’d been tired, he’d said; he’d wished he could lie down and go to sleep. Was that how the magician felt? Peter tried to remind himself that the boy captured within that gray rock was the same person who had destroyed someone’s home merely because the kids were loud in the pool. But what he saw, looking at the rock, was a fringe of dark hair with laughing eyes peeking out from underneath. A slim arm wrapped around a dog, a body paused in the middle of playing. A boy, nothing but a boy, and now he was a rock, and somewhere, in a house with roses in the yard, his parents must be missing him terribly.
From the moment he had entered this house, Peter had been frightened of what the magician would do to him. But now, for the first time, he pitied the magician, and moved by that pity, he reached out his hand to run it along the rock.
The moment his fingers brushed its surface, he knew he had made a horrible mistake.
Chapter Fourteen
The rock was alive with magic. It zinged through Peter’s fingertips and up his arm, making him gasp with pain. From his arm, it raced up his neck before concentrating itself in that particular spot in his head two inches behind his right temple. He felt as if his head had been plugged into an electrical outlet.
And then, though Peter could swear he had done nothing, had thought nothing, the power shot out of him. He sucked in air, realizing only as he did so that it was the first time he’d breathed since he’d touched the rock.
An earth-shattering roar filled the room, followed by screaming.
Next to Peter, The Dog muttered the sort of word that Peter’s mother did not allow him to say. The Dog’s long face scrunched up as if he was about to do magic.
Peter, although aware of everything around him, felt strange. It was as if he were wrapped in a thick blanket that muffled all sound, all sight, even all emotion, and the only thing that remained clear was the rock that he now clasped between his hands (though he couldn’t remember picking it up—when had he done that?). The rock was beautiful, he realized in surprise, as another terrible roar filled the room. How could he have mistaken it for ordinary? Its surface was covered with white and silver speckles that glinted and glimmered, catching every stray bit of light. Its bumps and divots held waves of motion, like an ocean turned to stone. It was perhaps the most beautiful thing Peter had ever seen.
“Peter,” said The Dog, “I think we’ve got a problem.” The anxiousness in The Dog’s voice irritated Peter because he didn’t want to listen to The Dog; he wanted to admire the rock. “I’m trying, but I don’t think my magic’s going to work against him. I need your help.”
The roar came again, followed by Celia shrieking. “We have to run. Come on, Peter. Now!”
Something tugged at Peter’s clothes. Peter looked down: Izzy was pulling at his jeans. “Peter? What should we do?”
What does she mean, what should we do? Peter wondered. The right thing to do—the only thing to do—was to look at the rock. Cradling the rock to his chest, Peter swatted Izzy’s grasping fingers away, shoving her to the ground in the process.
Celia gaped. Izzy started to cry.
“The rock!” shouted The Dog. “I didn’t realize—get his hands off the rock!”
But Peter didn’t want to let go of the rock. He had sensed the magician’s presence in it from the moment he had touched it, and the longer he held it, the stronger his awareness of the magician became. In fact, he thought he might even be able to hear the magician, like a distant echo, calling to him. If Peter could just listen hard enough . . .
He couldn’t finish the thought, because Celia tried to pull his hands off the rock. Peter easily pushed her away. She tackled him again, this time clawing at his shoulders and arms. Statue, Peter thought, and Celia froze in place, her fingers still touching his. He started to detangle his body from hers—but at that moment, something launched itself at his side, the force powerful enough that it pushed both Peter and the frozen Celia to the ground.
As Peter fell painfully to his knees, the rock went flying from his grasp. The moment he was no longer touching it, the fog that had enshrouded him lifted, and the anger he had been feeling disappeared, too. Left behind was the knowledge of what he had done. “Izzy . . . Celia . . . I’m so—”
Before he could finish his apology, another roar echoed through the room. This time, Peter looked up.
Directly above him, what had been the skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus was rapidly growing muscles and te
ndons, skin and flesh. The monster’s head was already complete, the mighty jaws opening and shutting as though they were relearning the motion they had last practiced millions of years ago. And relearning quickly. As Peter watched aghast, a coat of thick gray scales spread down the dinosaur’s short arms, then started across its belly; the ease with which they flowed across the beast’s body reminded Peter of spilling water. At least its feet were still bone, Peter reassured himself, but even as he thought it, muscles built bridges from the tibia to the metatarsals, from the metatarsals to the toes. At this rate, the dinosaur would be whole in a matter of minutes.
“What’s happening?” Peter yelled, turning to the furry shape that had knocked him to the ground.
The Dog looked at him helplessly. “I didn’t know,” he said. “The magician must have set up a protective spell that he didn’t tell me about. When you touched the rock, it woke up the Tyrannosaurus.”
“Can’t you make it stop?” Peter demanded. “You’ve got to do something!”
“I’ve tried,” said The Dog. “But nothing I’m doing is working.”
Peter gestured wildly toward the dinosaur. Its knees were now covered in skin. Peter could feel its breath on his head, even smell the stench of ancient meat rotting on its teeth. “You have to stop it!”
“No!” The Dog yelled back. “You have to stop it. Or it will kill us all.”
The dinosaur roared again.
Peter’s eyes swept desperately around the room. Celia was a statue. Izzy lay crying on the ground. There was no time to run. No time to do anything at all.
Peter turned back to the dinosaur. He had no choice.
Freeze, he thought, letting Angry Peter surface. Peter could feel the fury opening a channel in his mind, directing the magic that was present around him to the one small spot in his brain that knew what to do with it. Freeze, he thought once more, almost confidently, as he gazed straight up at the now completely resurrected Tyrannosaurus.
The Misadventures of the Magician's Dog Page 9
