Magic Ink

by Steve Cole

  What was up with this ink? It hadn’t rubbed off on anything else. How could it still be wet after all this time?

  Then – DING! An idea.

  If I could find the ink bottle, maybe there would be washing instructions on the label or something. I figured it was worth a shot.

  So I took my torch and crept upstairs. I didn’t want to get in any more trouble. If I got ink smudges all over the duvet or the wallpaper or something, Mum would explode (making even more mess).

  The house was silent. The night was cloudy. The stairs were creaky. The landing was cold.

  The door to the attic stood ajar.

  I flitted inside like a ninja shadow and trained my torch on the drawing board. If the brush had been left there, surely the bottle would be somewhere close by. . .

  “Is this what you’re looking for?” came a low, well-spoken voice.

  I swear my heart turned into a snowball. My breath caught in my throat and I felt I might puke with fear.

  As I swung the torchbeam towards the voice, my legs turned to mush. Otherwise I would’ve run downstairs yelling and shouting for my mum and dad, before hiding under the bed and staying there for approximately forever.

  Because there, in my torchlight, was the pig. The pig with the face-fuzz, the cape and the top hat. Only this time he was standing on his hind legs and holding something in one trotter.

  A bottle of ink.

  I stared in dread and wonder at the apparition before me. “P-P-P-Posho Pig?”

  “In the living pork-and-bacon flesh,” said Posho Pig. “Oink!”

  This must be a dream, I thought. Yeah. It’s bound to be a dream.

  Obviously, it wasn’t.

  “Oink!” the intruder went on. “My dear chap, you won’t believe how long we’ve been waiting for you.”

  I gulped. “We? Who’s we?”

  “The Big Man and I. But, first things first, Stewart Penders.” The impossible pig smiled. “You and I have a lot to talk about. An awful lot. Oink! Emphasis on the awful, I’m afraid.”

  With a snort and a snuffle, Posho walked slowly towards me. . .

  SPOOKY FATEFUL STUFF

  (WITH ADDED PIG)

  Looking back, I guess you could say it was a moment of destiny. Know what I mean? One of those rare, fantastic times when you don’t react in the way you ought to – you know, dribbling, screaming and generally losing your mind – because on some cosmic level you understand what’s happening. Some inner purpose you never knew about is soon to be realised. . . and it always had to be this way.

  (This kind of thing happens in Superhero Land a lot. The ordinary and the exotic crash together time after time, and lives are changed FOREVER.)

  “That ink stain on your fingers,” said Posho, pausing in his advance, “proves that you are marked out for greatness.”

  It’s not every night a pig tells you something like that.

  “Greatness?” I whispered. “Me?”

  “You, old chum,” Posho agreed, putting down the inkpot with one of his trademark winks. “Oink! Would I tell you porky pies?”

  It was so strange – in the light of my torch Posho might have been a real pig standing on his hind legs. Yet there was something more than ordinarily piggy about him – it was as if a larger-than-life animatronic character had just jumped out from some crazy movie. He held himself with confident control. The clothes he wore fitted perfectly – just as in the comic strip. His lips moved improbably when he talked, wiggling his moustache as they did so. And his voice sounded sort of upper class, very human.

  Something told me that this particular pig would come way higher than sixth in one of those weird animal smartness tests. . .

  Feeling extremely un-smart, I couldn’t think of anything to say. So I just stood there, staring.

  And what happened next was like something straight out of the pages of The Belly-Larf!. . .

  “Am I going crazy?” I added. But as I wrestled Posho for the bucket, I was close enough to brush against his warm, bristly skin, to feel the hot little breaths puff from his snout, to smell his not-really-very-pleasant piggy perfume. And, all at once, it hit home hard enough to hurt:

  “You’re really real,” I murmured.

  “Yes,” sighed Posho. “Real enough to feel rather lonesome after two decades locked up by myself. Oink! I mean, it’s hard to be a clever, joke-playing pig when you’ve got no one to trick or talk to.” He gave me a lofty look. “And when finally you do meet someone, all they can do is babble at you. Oink! Oink! Well, I suppose we should get the explanations out of the way.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I think so.”

  Posho sat down on Granddad’s stool. It was kind of weird to see a pig sit like a person. But things were about to get weirder.

  “Simply told, your grandfather created me, old chap,” said Posho. “One night he drew me with magic ink on this very special piece of parchment you see on his drawing board, and—” he jabbed a trotter up at the skylight – “Oink! When moonlight touched that illustrious illustration, I sprang to majestic, pig-tastic life!”

  “Whoa, whoa, rewind,” I said. “Magic ink? Special piece of parchment?”

  “Oink! Yes, yes, the ink, a particular piece of blank parchment to write on, the ancient comics – they were all buried in the garden out there, centuries ago so that one day your grandfather would find them.”

  I stared at Posho, incredulous. “How?”

  “By digging them up with a spade, I suppose.”

  “No, I mean, who could possibly have known back then that Granddad would end up living here?”

  “It was foretold.” Posho smiled. “Anyway, you asked me what I was doing in the house last night. Oink! I’m terribly sorry, I only came downstairs to get this bucket and some pie ingredients and that strawberry sauce. You see, I’ve never been able to play my pranks properly before. . .”

  Suddenly I saw a box of rice crispies lying overturned behind him. “That’s where the cereal went! Mum almost had a breakdown looking for that packet!”

  “I put them in the pie-mix. Economy brand, that’s all they’re good for – my dear boy, how do you cope?” Posho shook his head disapprovingly. “Oink! Anyway! You can’t blame me for wanting to check on who’d moved in. I’m used to having the run of the place – I come and go as I please, in and out through the window there and up and down the ivy.”

  “A pig who climbs walls. . . ” My head was starting to spin.

  Perhaps Posho noticed my pained expression. “It’s all right, old bean,” he said gently, “you’re not the only one who finds recent developments hard to believe. I’ve been waiting for twenty years for your granddad to unlock that attic door and come inside and do what he was supposed to.” The pig hung his head. “Now he’s dead and gone. My creator, no more! And did anyone think to invite me to the funeral? No! They didn’t even ask me to go along to the buffet afterwards. Outrageous rudeness. . . !”

  Posho was getting himself in a state. I wondered if my parents might hear and come upstairs, and realised I didn’t want them to. Whatever madness was going on up here in the attic, I somehow knew it was important madness.

  “No one even knew you were up here,” I broke in quickly. “So how could they invite you?”

  Posho stared at me. “Hmm. . . I suppose you may have a point.” He fiddled with his top hat. “But you can’t blame me for being sensitive. My creator ran off as soon as he clapped eyes on me and locked me away so I couldn’t complete my task. That wasn’t supposed to happen.”

  “What task?” I hissed, trying to stay patient. “What was supposed to happen? And what’s it got to do with me and this ink-stain?”

  Posho looked me straight in the eye. “Your grandfather turned chicken, old boy. You must not. I can provide help and support, but it’s YOU the Big Man will have to rely on in the struggles ahead, Stewart – a descendant of the chosen one. Someone who believes in heroes, someone who has the drive and the passion to create characters who are larg
er than life. . . because the Big Man’s life is at stake.”

  I was boggling so hard I thought my brain might blow a fuse. “What do I have to do? Who is the Big Man?”

  “Oink! Why, the same fellow who made the magic ink and buried it back in the 6th Century,” said Posho. “Merlin!”

  I paused. “Merlin? Merlin. . . as in, Merlin?”

  “Oink! Yes, as in, Merlin, the wizard Merlin.”

  “The wizard. . . Merlin. King Arthur’s mate?”

  “That’s him. Most famous wizard ever.”

  “. . . Merlin?”

  “Yes! Oink! How many more times!”

  I didn’t know the answer to that question. I must’ve looked like a goldfish, opening and closing my mouth. And I felt like one too, suddenly unable to hold a thought in my head for more than a second. Finally, I was jolted back to normal by the creak of a door opening downstairs. I heard Dad come out onto the landing, and call, in his hoarse whisper, “Stew? Are you up there?”

  Posho and I stared at each other in agonised silence. Then the mystery pig waved, scampered to the window, lifted the latch soundlessly and dived outside. A stealthy rustle of ivy was my only clue that he was climbing down out of sight.

  Like a boy in a dream I switched off the torch, walked from the attic and pulled the door shut behind me. I heard Dad call again, quietly, “Stew? Come down!”

  “Sorry, Dad,” I whispered, padding down the steps. “I. . . thought I heard something in the attic again. But nothing was there.”

  “Of course it wasn’t.” Dad tried to be gruff, but I could tell he was relieved. “Now, just stay in bed, OK? If you think you hear anything, come to me. Your mum and I thought we had burglars for a minute there.”

  Not burglars, I thought. A talking pig. Who knows Merlin!

  Suddenly I understood why Granddad had locked up the attic and never gone back. And now, too late, I wished that Dad had never broken inside, that I had never touched that stupid brush, that I had. . .

  But, as all us superheroes know, you can’t fight fate.

  I jumped at a tapping on my bedroom window. There was Posho Pig clinging on outside, waving and giving me a big trottery thumbs-up.

  I had the sinking feeling that whatever Granddad had begun, I would be expected to finish.

  BUT. . .

  What if it finished me first?

  WILL THE REAL MERLIN PLEASE STAND UP

  (OR LEVITATE OR DO A COOL TRICK OR SOMETHING?)

  When I woke up the next morning, I did my best to pretend nothing had happened.

  It worked really well for at least two-and-a- half seconds.

  By then I’d risked a peek at my thumb and seen the ink stain was still there. A queasy feeling built up quickly in my stomach – a seasick mixture of night-before-Christmas excitement and eve-of-an-exam panic.

  Magic, I thought. It’s real.

  Yeah. Real freaky.

  And it felt like it was wiping its real magicky, freaky butt all over me.

  “Stew, breakfast!” Mum called, making me jump.

  I opened my bedroom door warily and stepped outside.

  “I hope she’s not planning to give you more of that rotten economy cereal,” came a familiar voice from the top of the stairs.

  I jumped at the sight of Posho, bright-eyed and peering down at me from under the brim of his top hat. But this time I only jumped about two metres into the air, not three.

  Yeah, I was getting used to weirdness.

  “Oink!” Posho went on. “We need to finish our little talk, old chap. Don’t you think?”

  “Is this really all about Merlin?” I asked suddenly.

  Posho smiled a little sadly and nodded.

  “But, he must’ve been alive. . . like, thousands of years ago.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous!” Posho chuckled. “Oink! It was only one-and-a-half thousand years ago.”

  I swallowed hard. Well, the pig’s story was kind of hard to swallow, you must admit.

  “Uh, OK,” I said. “I’ll be back later.”

  And I ran downstairs.

  As I came into the kitchen it felt like the most normal place in the world. So normal, it felt almost suspicious. Lib was slurping cereal with a pink furry unicorn on her lap, Mum was looking tired beside the toaster, Dad was letting his tea cool as he read the newspaper. . . It was like everyone had been taking normal lessons from Mr Norman Normal of Normal Street, Normalville in the United States of Normality.

  And suddenly I felt like such a freak. Like I didn’t belong here in this normal world. Not with a magic pig waiting for me upstairs.

  But then a possibility occurred to me. Maybe Posho the prankster pig was putting me on – or simply mistaken? Maybe the Big Man was just someone calling himself Merlin. That would mean Posho had been brought to life with ink from just some random scary magical person instead of the original scary magical person.

  Hooray!

  Yeah, big whoop.

  But exactly who was this original scary magical person? In case it really was Merlin, I needed to know more. . .

  That afternoon, I found Dad setting up his computer downstairs. Mum had spent most of the morning on the phone trying to get our Internet connection sorted out and – inevitably – had given herself a headache. So I kindly offered to test our online status straight away. . .

  By typing ‘Merlin’ into the search engine.

  There was lots of stuff about the wizard on TV and in films. But what about the real Merlin?

  Guess what – there didn’t seem to be one!

  All the websites agreed that Merlin never really existed. It seemed that his character was partly based on some Welsh loony from the 4th Century who ran around naked while predicting the future, and partly based on some old royal soldier type.

  Neither of these guys was anything to do with King Arthur. It wasn’t until the Middle Ages that the two were put together, and Merlin was rebooted and reinvented for new stories for new audiences. . .

  Holy tights and long underwear, I thought with a tingling thrill of excitement. That makes him just like a comic book character!

  Take Spider-Man, for instance. There’s the regular mainstream Spidey, but there’s also Spider-Man Marvel Adventures, Spider-Man: Chapter One, the old Spider-Man movies, the latest Spider-Man movies, loads of Spidey cartoons. . . All different takes on the same hero.

  I guess maybe Merlin was a similar thing, one of the first superheroes of his day. Different people had different ideas of who he was and what he did, changing the details to appeal to different audiences. And suddenly one day he was this wise old guy who protected King Arthur and cast spells and advised him and foretold the future. . .

  I pieced together what I’d learned about Merlin from the famous old stories:

  That was as much as I could work out from all the conflicting accounts, as Merlin’s franchise was rebooted time and time again. How much of it would be true? None of it, surely. . .

  Or ALL of it?

  INKY REVELATIONS

  With a head stuffed full of Arthurian legends, I mooched upstairs to my room and shut the door, troubled. Real or otherwise, why (and how) the hecking flip would Merlin have come to my granddad for help, centuries and centuries ahead in his future?

  With a tingling sensation of doom, I looked down, and saw my blighted copy of Thor #143 still lying on the floor.

  With a jolt I found I could no longer read the words at the bottom of the cover where the ink had smudged. Somehow, bizarrely, where it used to proclaim: ‘Balder the Brave! The Stunning Sif! This is IT!’, it now said: ‘Blah-de-blah-blah’ in the same unreadable old-style writing as on those Magic, Inc. comics in the attic.

  And, suddenly, I had one of those lightbulb-over-the-head moments. An idea!

  This idea of mine that seemed clever but proved not to be in the long term (as you will find out) was to try wiping my weird inky fingers on the words in the old parchment comics upstairs. After all, if the ink turned normal words into
gibberish, maybe they’d turn gibberish into normal words.

  In a world that no longer made sense, it seemed the only sensible thing to try. So, with my heart scampering about my chest like a deranged hamster, I crept upstairs. . .

  The attic was empty. It seemed a little brighter than it had before. I saw the bucket of soapy water that Posho had almost hurled over me now stood empty, and I realised that the skylight had been washed clean, transformed into a rectangle of pale evening sky. There was no sign of the pig but I saw the old comics were stacked in a neat pile on the coffee table.

  I picked up the yellow parchment in my right hand and wiped my dirty finger over the title of DUX BELLORUM.

  Like magic, the words reformed to spell: WAR COMMANDER.

  I almost dropped the comic book. The power of this stuff – it was scary.

  Freaked out and yet encouraged at the same time, I turned to the panel I’d been admiring before (on p.42, remember?) and smeared my thumb over the words. In a blur, I could read them! With shivers shimmying along my spine, I turned my attention (and thumb) to the splash page. That’s the big, cool image you normally get at the front of a comic, designed to entice you in – in this case, a knight galloping along on horseback.

  Breath held, I wiped my indigo stain over the caption boxes at the bottom of the page. They turned out to be the credits, showing the team responsible for that particular comic book.

  And as the letters merged and melted, the talent behind War Commander was revealed. . .

  Script by MERLIN. Drawn by MERLIN. Inked by MERLIN. Lettered by MERLIN. A Magic, Inc. Production (Magic, Inc. owned by MERLIN)

  I stared down at the paper, shaking my head, chills rifling through my bones. “The great wizard Merlin,” I murmured. “Sorcerer, magician, advisor to King Arthur and. . . frustrated comic book artist?”