“Twice,” Mr. Smallbone said.
“What’s next?” demanded Nick’s uncle. “I ain’t got all night.”
Mr. Smallbone lit an oil lamp and led him outside. It was cold and dark, now, and the wind smelled of snow. In a pine tree near the woodpile was a nest of four fine young ravens, just fledged and ready to fly. The big man looked them over. Nick’s uncle tried to bring his face up close, but the young ravens cawed raucously and pecked at him with their strong, yellow beaks. He jerked back, cursing, and pulled his hunting knife out of his pocket.
Three of the ravens kept cawing and pecking; the fourth hopped onto the edge of the nest and spread its wings. Nick’s uncle grabbed it before it could take off.
“This one,” he said.
Nick struggled to shake off his uncle’s embrace. But when Mr. Smallbone gave a tiny sigh and said, “Thrice. He is yours,” he stopped struggling and stood quietly, his face a mask of fury.
Nick’s uncle insisted on leaving right away, refusing to stay for the baked beans. He dragged him out to his battered pick-up, threw him inside, and drove away.
The first town they came to, there was a red light. They stopped and Nick made a break for it. His uncle jerked him back inside, slammed the door, whipped out a length of rope, and tied Nick’s hands and feet. They drove on, and suddenly it began to snow.
It wasn’t an ordinary snowstorm—more like someone had dumped a bucket of snow onto the road in front of them, all at once. The truck swerved, skidded, and stopped with a crunch of metal. Cursing blue murder, Nick’s uncle got out of the cab and went around front to see what the damage was.
Quick as thinking, Nick turned himself into a fox. A fox’s paws being smaller than a boy’s hands and feet, he slipped free of the rope without trouble. He leaned on the door handle with all his weight, but the handle wouldn’t budge. Before he could think what to do next, his uncle opened the door. Nick nipped out under his arm and made off into the woods.
When Nick’s uncle saw a young fox running away from him into the trees, he didn’t waste any time wondering whether that fox was his nephew. He just grabbed his shotgun and took off after him.
It was a hectic chase through the woods in the dark and snow. If Nick had been used to being a fox, he’d have lost his uncle in no time flat. But he wasn’t really comfortable running on four legs and he wasn’t woodwise. He was just a twelve-year-old boy in a fox’s shape, scared out of his mind and running for his life.
The world looked odd from down so low and his nose told him things he didn’t understand. A real fox would have known he was running towards water. A real fox would have known the water was frozen hard enough to take his weight, but not the weight of the tall, heavy man crashing through the undergrowth behind him. A real fox would have led the man onto the pond on purpose.
Nick did it by accident.
He ran across the middle of the pond, where the ice was thin. Hearing the ice break, he skidded to a stop and turned to see his uncle disappear with a splash and a shout of fury. The big man surfaced and scrabbled at the ice, gasping and waving his shotgun. He looked mad enough to chew up steel and spit out nails.
Nick turned tail and ran. He ran until his pads were sore and bruised and he ached all over. When he slowed down, he noticed that another fox was running beside him—an older fox, a fox that smelled oddly familiar.
Nick flopped down on the ground, panting.
“Well, that was exciting,” the fox that was Mr. Smallbone said dryly.
“He was going to shoot me,” Nick said.
“Probably. That man hasn’t got the brain of a minnow, tearing off into the dark like that. Deserves whatever happened to him, if you ask me.”
Nick felt a most un-foxlike pinch of horror. “Did I kill him?”
“I doubt it,” Mr. Smallbone said. “Duck pond’s not more than a few feet deep. He might catch his death of cold, though.”
Nick felt relief, then a new terror. “Then he’ll come after me again!”
Mr. Smallbone’s foxy grin was sharp. “Nope.”
After a little pause, Nick decided not to ask Mr. Smallbone if he was sure about that. Mr. Smallbone was an Evil Wizard, after all, and Evil Wizards don’t like it if their apprentices ask too many questions.
Mr. Smallbone stood up and shook himself. “If we want to be back by sunrise, we’d best be going. That is, if you want to come back.”
Nick gave him a puzzled look.
“You won your freedom,” Mr. Smallbone said. “You might want to use it to live with somebody ordinary, learning an ordinary trade.”
Nick stood up and stretched his sore legs. “Nope,” he said. “Can we have oatmeal and maple syrup for breakfast?”
“If you cook it,” said Mr. Smallbone.
There’s an Evil Wizard living in Dahoe, Maine. It says so on the sign hanging outside his shop. Sometimes tourists stop by, looking for a book on the occult or a cheap thrill.
In the kitchen, two men bend over a table strewn with books, bunches of twigs and bowls of powder. The younger one has tangled black hair and bright black eyes. He is tall and very skinny, like he’s had a recent growth-spurt. The older man is old enough to be his father, but not his grandfather. He is clean-shaven and his head is bald.
The doorbell clangs. The younger man glances at the older.
“Don’t look at me,” says the older man. “I was the Evil Wizard last time. And my rheumatism is bothering me. You go.”
“What you mean,” says Nick, “is that you’re half-way through a new spell and don’t want to be interrupted.”
“If you won’t respect my authority, apprentice, I’m going to have to turn you into a cockroach.”
The bell clangs again. Mr. Smallbone the older bends over his book, his hand already reaching for a pile of black dust. Nick grabs a top hat with a white wig attached to it and crams it over his black curls. He hooks a bushy beard over his ears and perches a pair of steel-rimmed glasses on his nose. Throwing on a rusty black coat, he rushes to the front room, where he hunches his shoulders and begins to shuffle. By the time he reaches the door, he looks about a hundred years old.
The door flies open with the creak of unoiled hinges.
“What do you want?” the Evil Wizard Smallbone snaps.
Jeffrey Ford is the author of several novels, including The Physiognomy, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, The Girl in the Glass, and The Shadow Year. He is a prolific author of short fiction, whose work has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, SCI FICTION, and in numerous anthologies, including my own The Living Dead. Three collections of his short work have been published: The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant and Other Stories, The Empire of Ice Cream, and The Drowned Life. He is a six-time winner of the World Fantasy Award, and has also won the Nebula and Edgar awards.
Not even the most powerful wizards can shoulder life’s burdens alone, which is why most of them find it expedient to employ some good help. First of all, you’ll need someone with a strong back. (Wizards are typically far too busy contemplating the numinous to spend much time at the gym.) After all, someone’s got to do all that stomping about under the full moon yanking up mandrake root, or digging up all those graves to supply bits and pieces for necromantic recipes, or lugging that cauldron up to the top of the tower.
It also really helps to have some sort of animal servant—a cat, a bat, a snake, whatever suits your style. It’s just a fact that everyone looks more dashing with an owl perched on one shoulder, and animals are always good for doing a little spying, or passing along messages, or offering wry advice.
So, just procure yourself an animal and an assistant with a strong back, like the wizard in our next story, and you’ll be good to go. Just be sure to treat them well. In the wizarding world, disgruntled employees can be a real nightmare.
The Sorcerer Minus
Jeffrey Ford
Minus was considered the most evil of all sorcerers because his sorcery was backwards. He didn’t enchant
. He beckoned no wretches from the dead. He commanded no shadow people, slipping along the corridors of night. His work was to seize the day by the hair, pull back its head and slit its throat to let the last glistening drop of magic pulse out and reveal the grisly carcass of reality. He then read those stark remains of the day as a soothsayer might the entrails of a chicken and offered shrewd advice to the rudely awakened about what was left.
Sorcerers feared him, knowing he could sap their art and leave them mere men and women. Wealthy families hired him to cause a conversion in a patriarch gone grandiose with the family fortune.
“He’s lost touch,” they’d say to Minus.
“Do you want him to see reality or your reality?” the sorcerer always asked.
“Anything you could do would be fine,” they usually said and then Minus went to work with the diligence of a crooked banker. There was no detail too small to obscure.
Sorcerers usually control spirits of the dead; instead Minus had two living creatures in his employ. One was a tall, gaunt man, in a black hat and raincoat, named Bill Mug. The other was Axis, an ingenious rat, whose loyalty was perfect to the cheese in the sorcerer’s hand. When Mug took the job, Minus put certain spells on him to slowly leach away all but one single drop of his self-delusion. As for Axis, Minus knew he could never rival the rat’s dedication to reality. He spent a mountain of cheese to learn the rodent’s secrets.
What the sorcerer prized most about Bill Mug was his slowness, not physically—rumor was he could rapidly punch a man in the face for a solid hour without stopping—but mentally. Mug liked to mull things over, scratching his chin, forgetting what it was he’d been thinking. His conclusions, when they came, were like smoke becoming nothing. It was a constant reminder to Minus that illusion begets speed because illusion begets need. The pointless maunderings of Bill Mug were a tonic to the quicksilver of private Dreamlands. When Minus needed assistance, though, he always called first for the rat.
Given but a single name at birth, Minus found himself making a concession to the times in which he lived and attached a first name to his title so that he could move easily among the magically unendowed. A popular moniker of the day was Skip. Movie stars, singers, athletes had that name, and so he became Skip Minus. He drove a fast yellow car, wore sunglasses, and was known as an easy going guy. He could mix a drink and play a hand of Whist; he could cut a rug. He could shovel snow, smoke a pipe, or recite in its entirety “The Hall of the Mountain Springs” by Miss Stattle Dees.
Underneath all of this, though, at his very core, he was an evil sorcerer. It was whispered that a fair number of his human “patients,” for whom he was paid to rub their noses in harsh reality, didn’t survive the treatment. Of those that perished in pursuit of stark enlightenment, ninety percent committed suicide and one curious case could have been construed as murder. The victim was a Martin Aswidth.
Aswidth was found in a garbage dump, his face caved in, beaten to a shattered, bloody pulp. The last to have seen him alive was his maid who happened upon her employer and Minus and a drab, long fellow in a hat and raincoat. It was in Aswidth’s bedchamber, amid the purple curtains. Skip Minus stood at his bedside, frantically gesticulating and rhythmically grunting. The prostrate Aswidth shivered and cried, “No, no, no . . . ” like a child from a nightmare. The sorcerer called over his shoulder, “Bill, come and see if you can work your magic with Mr. Aswidth. He’s a stubborn fellow.”
Then Minus noticed the maid, a witness to it all, and he commanded her to leave. When Aswidth’s body was discovered, she did come forward to tell the police what she’d seen and heard, but she only told them once. Two days later she disappeared from her locked bedroom in the middle of the afternoon on a clear day and was never seen or heard from again.
It’s surmised that after she’d left the room that night, ordered out by Minus, Bill Mug went to work, beating the enchantment out of Aswidth’s brain. The hardest punch is one thrown by a wiry man with thick wrists. Aswidth, for his part, was besotted with delusion like a fruit cake soaked in rum. He was, after all, a writer of genre stories.
At the trial, Minus told the jury that it was Axis who’d engineered the disappearance of the maid. “For a block of cheese,” confessed the sorcerer, “he brought me a mercenary army of his brethren. They took her out through a mouse hole.” The jury was aghast. “Those rats could be right now in the walls of this courthouse, laying dynamite charges,” he said. He waited for a small panic to brew throughout the court, and then added, “But I wouldn’t let that happen, of course.”
Bill Mug was then called to the stand. The prosecutor asked, “How many times did you strike Mr. Aswidth on the night in question?” Mug mulled it over for two hours which gave Minus time to work a spell. He let it out slowly into the courtroom, a barely discernible gray miasma that spread and wafted over everything. Eventually, Mug answered, “I didn’t strike him on the night in question, I struck him in the face. I lost count at three hundred.” Both defendants were convicted and sentenced to the death penalty.
That’s when Skip Minus rose, combed his hair, and bellowed for everyone to sit down and be quiet. The commotion that had been sparked by the reading of the verdict instantly ceased. Minus looked around. “I’ve had enough of this. I’m leaving and you won’t want to stop me. If anyone raises a finger, I’ll steal the magic from your children. I already have your self-confidence; perhaps I’ll return it someday if I learn to forgive you. Come, Mug,” said Minus and the two of them strode out of the courthouse, got in the yellow sports car, and sped away.
Humans could complicate his life and in the gnat storm of their complications his distraction could open him to truly dangerous attacks from other sorcerers. Minus knew he had to lay low. They fled to a rented cabin in the mountains where they met Axis. The place, a hunting lodge, was enormous and well stocked with provisions. They lit a fire in the stone fireplace and hunkered down for winter.
It wasn’t long before Mug started to get on Minus’s nerves. That gray scarecrow of a form, plodding endlessly from one end of the lodge to the other, occasionally stopping by the back door to smoke a cigarette. Even through the night, he struggled around, never sleeping. They had few conversations. Once they talked about how cold the wind was, and another time, after Minus had broken into the whiskey, he tried to explain to Mug the difference between objective and subjective reality. It was like talking to slate. Mug simply walked away, returning to his pointless rounds.
Later, over a piece of cheese and more whiskey, Minus confided to Axis, “Mug’s a real pain in the ass.”
“The right weight from that wheel of Gouda you have stashed away will make Bill Mug disappear,” said the rat. “I’ll need to contract a sizeable army to bring him down.”
“No, no,” said Minus. “I mean, come on, I have to show some restraint.”
“As you wish,” said Axis, contemplating the wheel of cheese.
“I have other work for you,” whispered Minus.
The rat crawled closer across the white linen table cloth and sat on the edge of the cheese plate. He lifted an errant crumb, bit into it and said, “Tell me.”
“That town where they put us on trial. I’m going to do them a favor. You must return to that place with your mercenaries, and I want you to bite each of the human inhabitants just once. You must puncture the flesh so that the magic can drain out, and the delusion can seep into the atmosphere and become a harmless gas. I want them all to be facing cold hard reality before the first snow.”
“What will you pay?” asked Axis.
“The entire wheel of Gouda.”
“Deal,” said the rat and they shook on it, Minus using only his thumb and forefinger. Axis left that very evening to martial his forces for the raid. Also that very evening, Minus, unable to sleep for Mug’s pacing, noticed that the lights were flickering in unison with the howling of the wind. He went into a spare bedroom they weren’t using to look for an extra oil lamp should the electricity go out. He found o
ne there and also a stack of board games and a small book shelf filled with mildewed paperbacks.
Minus scanned the titles, and the last book on the bottommost shelf was a novel, Night and Day by Martin Aswidth. He laughed as he pulled it off the shelf. The cover showed two faces side by side, very simply drawn. The eyes were open on one face and closed on the other. The awake face was rendered in white on a black background and the sleeping face in black on a white background. On the back cover there was a photo of Aswidth, his arms folded, his head held high, his eyes gazing into the distance. “This ought to be good,” said Minus and slipped it into his back pocket.
He poured himself a whiskey, lit a fire in the den, and sat down with the book in hand. As he opened to the first page and started reading, a chill came into the air. A moment later, Mug passed through like a sleepwalker. His monumental lack of purpose could not be ignored. Minus closed the book, stared into the flames, and wondered how to get rid of him. The fire told him to empty his glass.
Mug lurched by three times, and on the fourth pass, Minus stopped him in his tracks by saying, “Mug, I’ve got a job for you.”
“Now we’re talking,” grumbled Mug and approached his employer.
Minus held the copy of Night and Day out to Mug and said, “I want you to read this novel in the next three hours, and then I want you to take a rifle, and whatever other provisions you think you’ll need, and strike out into the world, hunting for the very spirit of this book. When you find it, I want you to shoot it and bring it to me.”
Mug stood still, staring.
“Do you get it?” yelled Minus, and in that shout he released a spell that reached into Mug and stole back the one drop of self-delusion he’d long afforded his employee.
Mug said, “Yeah, okay.” He took the book, and paced away, opening to the first page. The sorcerer lifted his glass, and looked at the fire through the last drop of Mug’s self-delusion. The fire told him to empty his glass, so he did.
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