Magic Ink

by Steve Cole

  The thought didn’t exactly comfort me as I plummeted.

  Perhaps if poor Gwen had broken her drop as I did – by plunging into a humungous pile of dragon poo – her story would have had a happier (if whiffier) ending.

  “OOOOF-URPHHHH!” I spluttered as I splattered through the stinky stuff. I have no idea what dragons ate in the sixth century and I don’t want to know, but at that precise moment I sent a silent thank you to every one of its pre-digested victims for the soft landing.

  A jagged circle of white sky hung high above us like a moon, but its light barely reached the dismal depths of the bottom of the pit.

  “Ugh!” moaned Posho from somewhere in the mound beside me. “Have you ever heard the expression, ‘happy as a pig in poo-poo’? Well, this is one pig who is definitely not amused. Oink! This pit is the pits!”

  “I guess we should’ve expected it, Power Pig.” I pushed my way out through the spongy, slimy mound. “We knew the dragon was sitting on this pit. Where else was its dung going to go?”

  “I’m not surprised those skeletons were keen to get out.” Posho hopped down from the muck pile to join me. “Mind you, they looked surprisingly clean once they’d climbed out, didn’t they?”

  “Shhh,” I hissed. “I can hear running water. Which must mean. . .”

  “The skeletons took showers before they attacked us?” Posho suggested.

  I frowned. “Or that the ‘wretchedly evil siren’ Merlin talked about is close by. The warning said something about a forbidden door though. . .”

  As I spoke, a ghostly white light flared into life.

  “Just so we don’t confuse it with a nice, safe, unforbidden door,” said Posho quietly. “Oink! How thoughtful. Sounds as though the water is running somewhere behind it.”

  “Sirens hang out in water,” I reminded him. Then, in the glow of the sign, I saw a glimmer of light reflected back by something on the filthy floor – the utility bin bags Posho had dropped down here before falling. I picked them up triumphantly. “Ta-daa!”

  Posho came over to check them out. “More good fortune – they had a soft landing too. The stuff inside hasn’t even broken!”

  “But what’s happened to Merlin?” I’d started the trip as a musclebound, powered-up Stupendous Man, and now – judging by the way my smelly costume was hanging off me – I’d gone back to being an ordinary boy.

  Helpless. Hopeless.

  I remembered Granddad telling me once that you can still be a hero when you’re afraid; people who do brave things wouldn’t be brave at all if they weren’t scared to begin with.

  But they were just words. Granddad hadn’t been brave, he’d run away. What had I been thinking – that I could redeem all Granddad had lost in his life by sacrificing my own?

  Well, I’d made my weird, freaky bed. . . and unfortunately, there was no hiding under it.

  “Look!” I said, licking my dry lips. “ Little handholds and footholds in the rock. The skeletons must’ve used them to climb out. But we’ve got to stay down here and get to Merlin. We’ve just got to.”

  “Remarkable.” Posho smiled up at me. “It goes to show, heroism isn’t just about powers and strength. Oink! It comes from within, from strength of purpose —”

  “— and from the small but vital detail that if Merlin dies, we’re stuck here for the rest of our lives,” I broke in, before Posho could get too schmaltzy. “Forget Magic, Inc., forget being a famous illustrator. If we ever get out of this, I’ll settle for being me. And flip knows, there won’t be a whole lot of me left when that dragon I’ve turned into a lemon-saurus wakes up and comes sniffing around for revenge.”

  “It can’t claw and poison us anymore,” said Posho brightly. “And it won’t find it as easy to eat us.”

  “Really? We’re in the bottom of its toilet pit! Who’s got the advantage?” I reminded him – as an ominous dragon roar sounded from high above us. “I reckon this is gonna become a very unhealthy place to be any moment now.”

  “Then we’ve got nothing much to lose by going through the forbidden door,” said Posho. Cautiously, he tried the handle. “Locked! How can we get in?”

  “Hmm. . .” I spotted something dull white by the door and scooped it up from the ground. “Would you believe a skeleton key?” It was a fingerbone, covered in soapy mixture; must’ve fallen during my earlier trampling spree. I slipped it into the lock, and sure enough, it turned. The door opened at once and spilled sea-green light over us. . .

  And then a siren began to wail. Not the devious, dangerous woman-wraith type siren, but something like a police siren. I jammed my mucky hands over my ears, and Posho pulled his hat down even further over his head as we pushed inside.

  We found ourselves in a green-lit cave, its ceiling spiked with stalactites, a large pool of water with a cascading fountain in its centre. On the other side of the cave was an enormous round boulder – the last thing that stood between Posho and me and Merlin’s prison. From the looks of things, just as we’d feared, even Stupendous Man would’ve struggled to shift it.

  I looked around for the source of the wailing noise. It seemed to be coming from a small candle spinning round in a holder in the wall.

  “Oink!” Posho frowned. “This isn’t the siren I expected.”

  Suddenly the noise cut off – as a hefty, pale-green woman clothed in seaweed and shells burst up from the pool. “Oooh!” she boomed, shaking her spiky blonde hair. “I was just having a good dream! About fish. I was catching hundreds of fish and arranging them in order of size and width of their dorsal fins. It was dead good. . . Why’d you have to wake me up. Eh? Eh?”

  I spoke to Posho from the corner of my mouth. “This isn’t the siren I expected either.”

  “We didn’t wake you, madam,” said Posho smoothly. “That siren was responsible.”

  “I’m the siren,” she snapped.

  “No, I mean the noisy thing,” I tried.

  The siren looked affronted. “Noisy? A lovely singer like me? What a cheek!”

  “No, I mean the other siren!” I pointed to the spinning candle. “That siren.”

  “Fat siren? Who are you calling a fat siren?” The watery woman put her clawed hands on her big green hips. “You come crashing in here, calling me names, wanting a bath like those silly skeletons I suppose, and then you—”

  “We’ll skip the bath, thanks, we’re kind of in a hurry,” I said – as a huge, bone-shaking roar from up above reminded me that the lemony dragon could come hunting down here at any moment. That was good as far as our masterplan went, but bad in just about every other way possible. We had to be ready!

  “So. . .” I gave the siren my most winning smile. “D’you think you could let us pass?”

  “That would be splendid.” Posho beamed too. “See, we really need to reach the Big Man tucked away behind the even bigger stone there, and—”

  “What?” The siren scowled. “No one gets in there. Especially not dirty troublemakers like you who don’t even want a bath.” A nasty smile hooked at her features. “I think it’s time I sang you my song of doom! How sweet and sad it is. . . How quickly you will fall under my spell – and under my water. How quickly you will forget that trying to breathe in that water is a foolish thing to do. How—”

  “—long before you shut up,” I cried, pulling a portable, battery-operated CD player from the bin bag. As the siren opened her mouth to protest – or possibly to sing, how should I know – I pressed play, and track one from Best Dubstep Anthems In the House, Volume Seven began blaring at top volume. Not my own personal choice of music, but the first CD we’d grabbed from Harvest Boy’s hole in the ground.

  The siren’s eyes widened in outrage and she started shouting at us to switch it off.

  “Sorry,” I yelled, “can’t hear you!” And with a wink at Posho, I ran over to the boulder with the other bin bag in my hand, trying not to trip over in my now-oversized boots.

  Posho examined the gigantic rock. “Oink! It really is li
mestone. We’re in luck.”

  “Course we are,” I yelled over the boom and thud of the beatbox. “We’re being deafened by dance music in the underground cave of an angry overweight siren in the bottom of a dung chute with a killer dragon-monster due to burst in any moment—”

  I was drowned out – even J-Lo and Pitbull were drowned out – by a terrifying roar. The dragon was close – peering down into the pit, its yellow, bestial head brushing against the forbidden doorway.

  “Company!” I quivered, flattening myself against the boulder. “Right. Good. Perfect.”

  “Now you’re for it!” shrieked the siren, splashing her tail happily in the water.

  “Of course!” Posho cried. “That first siren wasn’t only the real siren’s wake-up call – Oink! – it was a signal to the other guardians that the Big Man’s prison had almost been breached, to bring them running back here in case they’d been lured somewhere else.”

  “Or stamped into bits by a superhero,” I added. With trembling hands I reached into the last bin bag, pulled out a large bottle of malt vinegar and emptied it all over the limestone.

  See, I learned in school once that the acetic acid in the vinegar dissolves the calcium carbonate in limestone. . .

  However, my assault on the stone did nothing but make it smell like chips. The siren laughed. The dragon roared and began to squeeze its lemony head inside the cave.

  “Yes, O Guardian of the Pit!” howled the siren. “Come! Destroy the intruders!”

  “Power Pig,” I shouted. “The plan was that Stupendous Man would absorb the vinegar-power and stream it into the boulder—”

  “So that a well-targeted trotter could crack the limestone like an egg,” Posho agreed. “Hmm, I wonder. . .” He weighed up his own bottle – and suddenly chucked it at the siren! It cracked her right on the forehead, and with an off-key hoot of anger, she fell back into the water – and stayed there.

  “Oink!” Posho squealed with delight. “The vinegar’s useless, but the bottle was well worth bringing along!”

  “Nice throw, Power Pig.” I hugged him and gladly switched off the music. But with no competing soundtrack, the dragon’s growls seemed louder, deeper, even scarier.

  Posho gulped. “Let’s hope that Plan DD will add more power to our chemical plans!”

  Plan DD stood for ‘Dragon Drool’. Anticipating that Merlin’s powers might be on the wane by the time we breached the siren’s cave, we’d decided to make the dragon lemony so that its spit became citric acid – like the vinegar, another good dissolver of limestone.

  That’s why I didn’t turn the dragon into bin bags or plastic or something! They would be lousy for breaking big rocks.

  Now we could only hope that the citric element was somehow amplified by the dragon’s gigantic size and nastiness, because if it wasn’t. . .

  Finally, the dragon succeeded in forcing its head inside. It roared with renewed anger at the sight of the socked-out siren, then spat a fierce, sticky stream of super-concentrated lemon juice right at us.

  I dived aside but – “UGHHH!” I spluttered and spat as a few stray splashes caught my face – and burned there like fire. I floundered forward and threw myself into the siren’s pool, desperately trying to wash the stuff off.

  But Posho was proving a harder target. I’d seen him bounce nimbly around the attic before, but now, crouched in the pool for cover, I watched him leap and somersault back and forward in front of the boulder, drawing the dragon’s fire – or rather, its lemon juice.

  The dragon spat and wheezed and yowled. Its neck had to be at full-stretch, it couldn’t squeeze any more of itself inside. That fact seemed to be making it more and more frustrated.

  “Come on, old chap, splash me if you can!” Power Pig was maintaining positively Spider-Mannish levels of off-putting banter with his foe. “Oink! Most pigs prefer an apple stuffed in their mouths before serving, but I like something with a little more bite – Oink! – which is not to draw attention to your poor squashy lemon-rind teeth, but really – they are rubbish, aren’t they?”

  Again and again the dragon spat sizzling citric acid at the limestone as it tried to hit Posho. The boulder smoked. Plan DD might just work, I thought excitedly. We might just be able to break through the boulder and force our way inside. . .

  But then – “Aieeeeeeee!” – Posho’s luck finally ran out (or the dragon’s luck finally ran in, depending on where you were standing) and he took a citric blast right to the chest. It broke over him like a fruity tsunami and smashed him back against the boulder, mask askew and leotard steaming.

  “Power Pig!” I yelled helplessly. “Are you all right? Get up! Please!”

  But that bravest of pigs lay prone, and still.

  “Forget your little swine of a friend,” came a fishwife shout in my ear. “Worry about yourself!”

  I spun round to find the siren had recovered, raising a restraining hand to the dragon to calm its lemon-fuelled frenzy. As the beast bowed its head and stopped growling at her command, she smiled at me nastily; there was a lump on her head and she looked ready to dish out a few of her own.

  “Now, my little troublemaker,” she hissed, “I shall sing you such a song. . . a melody so exquisitely deadly, it could charm even the strongest soul into a deep but deathless sleep. . . A sleep from which you will never awake!”

  Terrified, I tried to splash out of the pool – but water was the siren’s element. She swam up to me in a second and caught hold of my wrist.

  Then she started to sing – notes of deep and terrible beauty. They echoed radiantly through my head, stunning all other senses, suppressing all needs other than the need to listen on. . . to succumb. . . to sleep and never to wake again. How could I resist? No one could possibly resist, the siren had said so. . .

  Dimly, I heard another noise – lower, louder, more violent, shaking the air to smoke and dust around me. . .

  And then the dragon reared up and roared and the siren’s song became a squeal of alarm as—

  Brr-ka-TOOOOOM!

  That astonishing sound effect was the last thing I heard before my head exploded. Not literally – that would be messy. I mean exploded with pain, as something struck me on the temple with enough force to knock me clear out of the pool.

  I landed on my back with a thump and a gasp, ears ringing and vision blurred. But even so I guessed quickly what had hit me.

  There were little lumps of limestone scattered all around.

  Stunned, I looked up. The boulder blocking Merlin’s cave had blown apart. The way was clear, and dark and gaping.

  Instinctively, I looked over at the dragon – why had it stopped growling? Answer: it was wearing chunks of limestone as a fetching face-mask. They had thumped and pounded into his lemony flesh and left him well and truly out of the game.

  Exit the dragon.

  But the siren stood unharmed in the pool – and now recovered her voice. “So!” she snarled. “The final barrier to Merlin’s prison is undone! But the Big Man shall never escape.” She took a deep breath. “Time for my closing number!”

  Once again, she began to sing, more eerily and awfully than ever. I clasped my hands over my ears. . .

  But found there was no need. My poor lugholes were ringing so loudly I couldn’t hear the deadly details of her tune. I could resist her power. Result!

  Still in shock, my head killing me and every sense petrified, I lay still, pretending I was hypnotised – and half-wishing that I really was – as an echoing voice rang out from the darkness in the cave:

  “Stop! Stop singing. . . Stop!”

  “Ha! Now the stone is gone, you can hear me, wizard – and you too shall sleep the sleep eternal!” The siren raised her voice, belting out her song at the top of her watery lungs, every syllable dripping with evil. “Never more shall you know the world about you! Never more shall you awaken! Never— Eeeeeeep!”

  The siren’s voice caught in her throat like a fishbone, and her eyes bulged at the sight of
the figure striding out of the cave and into the light. . .

  Were my shattered senses deceiving me? This didn’t look like Merlin. Not unless being locked up all that time had really changed the Big Man. No, this was a woman, thin and pale, her cruel face framed by lank red hair, her eyes wild like a winter sea. It had to be. . . it could only be. . .

  “B-b-b-boss?” The siren did her impression of a fish yanked out of water, and it was good – hands flapping, eyes bulging, mouth jerking open and shut.

  I knew how she felt.

  Viviane!

  Here! Now!

  She took a slow step closer. . . and another. . .

  If I thought I’d been scared before, the fear I felt in that moment went right off the scale. She’s gonna kill me, I thought helplessly. She’s gonna destroy me. . . She’s gonna turn me to dust.

  “You. . . fool. . .!” Viviane’s cold blue eyes narrowed. “Now— I can’t— get your song— out of— my HEAD. . .”

  “Boss!” Looking terrified, the siren had turned a sickly shade of yellow. “I’m so sorry! Speak to me, boss! Please!”

  It was no good. Viviane’s mouth had closed as heavily as her eyes. Her fingers twitched, clutching at thin air. Slowly, as if her limbs were turning to jelly, she slipped to the ground. Just as slowly, the evidence of my eyes penetrated my daze and the facts fixed themselves onto my disbelieving senses. It wasn’t Merlin who’d been bewitched by the siren’s song, I realised with a rush of giddy excitement.

  It was Viviane herself!

  “La-la-la-la,” came a discordant boom from the cave. A stooped, broad-shouldered man came shambling out in a shabby smock, his bony fingers stuck in his ears, chanting just as he’d done in the supermarket a few days back – or rather, fifteen hundred years in the future.