Phyllis Wong and the Waking of the Wizard

by Geoffrey McSkimming

  Phyllis watched him pick up a long, gnarly walking staff. It had a carved head of a startled-looking deer on the top, and the whole thing stood about as tall as his shoulders. ‘I bought this in the nearby village on my last trip here,’ he said. ‘It’s a little . . . rustic . . . but perfect for where we are. I like to walk with a staff, especially when the roadways are uneven.’

  ‘It’s not really you, Great-grandad. I picture you with a shiny black cane with a silver end.’

  ‘I save those for Paris,’ he told her with a wink. ‘Come.’

  He set off out the gap in the crumbling wall where a gate once would have hung, and turned right into a narrow, gravelled road little wider than a lane. This road was bordered closely by thick, waist-high hedges of holly and hawthorn.

  Phyllis hurried alongside him, and Daisy ran through her legs and started off in front of them both.

  Beyond the hedges, Phyllis could see ancient trees—huge old oaks with fat, twisted boughs. Their leaves had already turned to bright orange and deep, bold red, and the tops of the hedges were covered with layers of the fallen foliage, which had also been blown into thick clumps on the ground at the edges of the gravel.

  The air was crisp; not icy, but cold enough to make big clouds of vapour whenever Phyllis breathed heavily.

  ‘Great-grandfather?’

  ‘Yes, my dear?’

  ‘I know you haven’t laid eyes on Myrddin yet, but what do you think he looks like?’

  Wallace tapped the ground with the end of his staff as he walked beside her. ‘What do you think he might look like?’ he returned her question.

  Up ahead, Daisy was trotting along like an advance patrol, keeping a watchful eye and occasionally stopping briefly to sniff about at the underside of the hedges.

  ‘Well,’ Phyllis said, ‘in some of the cartoons I saw when I was little, he had long white hair and a long white beard, down past his waist, and he wore a cloak that covered all of him except the tips of his pointed shoes, and he had a pointed hat with a wide brim on his head.’

  Wallace Wong smirked.

  ‘But,’ Phyllis added, ‘I don’t think he’d look like that. That’s just how Hollywood sees him.’

  ‘Ah, yes, Hollywood. They see things through a strange looking-glass over in Hollywood. No, my dear, I agree with you. I don’t think he’d look like that, either. To have hair and a beard that long would be most impractical, not to mention uncomfortable.’

  ‘You’d be sitting on it all the time,’ Phyllis grinned. Her hair was currently almost down to her waist, and she didn’t intend letting it grow too much longer—it was at a perfect length for her to use in her magic performances, to misdirect her audience when she needed to, by giving a flick of her head and letting her hair billow sleekly out.

  Phyllis thought a bit longer. ‘Maybe he changes his appearance?’ she suggested. ‘Maybe he’s like a chameleon, and he changes his features depending on where he is? A wizard could do that, surely?’

  ‘An interesting conjecture, Phyllis. That hadn’t occurred to me, I must admit. Perhaps he does alter himself, like the indecisive rubber glove in the whirlwind of its own destiny.’

  She looked sideways at him.

  ‘Oh, I know what I mean. Let me tell you of the image of Myrddin that has formed in my imagination, my dear. I have this idea that Myrddin is perhaps . . . a sort of everyman . . .’

  ‘Everyman?’

  ‘The sort of man who would blend in, unnoticed, in any sort of crowd, anywhere he went. The way he did his hair, for example, or the clothing he wore, would not draw attention to himself. And he would be wise and observant enough to take note of the customs and behaviours of people in whatever era he arrived at. He would adopt the ways of the people around him . . .’

  ‘And become part of the crowd?’

  ‘And become part of the crowd. That is how I believe Myrddin has remained undetected for so very long.’ Wallace stepped around a wide, brown, gloopy puddle that took up most of the middle of the road, and Phyllis edged around the other side of the puddle. ‘He doesn’t make a splash, in the way that if we were to run through that puddle we would make a splash. He goes smoothly around, and through, the places to which he Transits.’

  Phyllis hitched the strap of her bag across her chest so it was more comfortable. ‘So, if that’s the case, we could be standing next to him in any crowd, anywhere, and have no idea we’re rubbing shoulders with him?’

  ‘Not even the iota of an inkling of an idea.’

  ‘So it’s possible that you’ve already encountered him, and you don’t even know it?’

  ‘Yes,’ answered Wallace. ‘That is entirely possible.’ His eyes were less green now, and throbbing only slightly.

  ‘Whillickers,’ said Phyllis. ‘This is some search. No wonder it’s taking you so long.’

  ‘Ah, I have all the Time in the world,’ Wallace said breezily. ‘One of the wonderful things about Transiting is that we do not age throughout our Transits. I have always liked that side of things. To keep one’s youthful appearance is a valuable thing, especially if I decide to return to the stage at some point in the future.’

  He tapped the earth with the end of his staff as he strode along, and took in great lungfuls of air. ‘Smell that,’ he said. ‘The clean, crisp, country atmosphere. How invigorating it is, how—yergh!’

  Phyllis saw that he had stepped into a large steaming pile of something that would probably leave a dreadful stain on his patent leather shoe, along with the kind of smell he would never be able to get out.

  ‘We’re in the country, all right,’ she said.

  ‘Yergh,’ Wallace said again.

  Up ahead, the road separated into two narrower lanes, one leading to the left and the other to the right. Daisy stopped and looked in both directions. Then she turned her snout back towards Phyllis and Wallace, and her large brown eyes had a which way now and do hurry up, won’t you? expression.

  ‘Which way, W.W.?’ Phyllis asked.

  ‘Mm?’ He was carefully wiping his shoe on the soft thick grass by the hedges. ‘Oh, left. Yes, not far down the track to the left.’

  Phyllis pointed left to Daisy, and Daisy gave a quick yap and trotted off in that direction.

  Phyllis waited while Wallace cleaned his shoe.

  All at once a ferocious barking came from around the corner.

  ‘It’s Daisy!’ Phyllis said. ‘She’s found something!’ She ran to the end of the roadway and made a quick left turn.

  Wallace forgot about his splattered shoe; he rushed after her, his staff spearing the way ahead in bold, swinging arcs.

  Phyllis found Daisy a few hundred feet down the lane, crouching low and barking furiously at the thick bushes on the roadside. Her snout twitched with apprehension.

  ‘Arf! Arf! Arf! Arf! Arf! Arf! Arf! Arf!’

  Her barking ripped through the stillness, a harsh warning to whatever she had detected on the other side of the bushes.

  ‘What is it, Daisy?’ Phyllis squatted down next to the dog.

  Daisy kept barking at the bushes, paying little heed to Phyllis. The fur on her spine was raised and hackling, and her ears were pointed forward.

  ‘Arf! Arf! Arf! Arf! Arf! Arf! Arf! Arf!’

  Phyllis peered into the bushes. The twigs and holly leaves were so closely entwined she couldn’t see through them—she was looking into an almost solid wall of foliage. She rose and looked over the top.

  Wallace rushed up. He, too, looked over the hedge.

  There was nothing on the other side except an empty green field.

  ‘Arf! Arf! Arf! Arf! Arf! Arf! Arf! Arf!’

  Phyllis picked up Daisy. She stroked her snout and held her close, and the dog stopped barking, her alarm subsiding into a series of low growls that sounded as though she was gargling marbles in the back of her throat.

  ‘It’s okay,’ Phyllis whispered. ‘Did you find a mouse or a squirrel or something? You brave little hunter—’

  ‘Listen!�
� hissed Wallace, his voice a whisper also. ‘Be still, my dear! Hark at that!’

  Phyllis listened. Daisy stopped her growling and listened too.

  From somewhere at the far end of the field came the unmistakable sound of footsteps.

  Running footsteps, thudding on the earth.

  Wallace looked at Phyllis, and she at him. Daisy sniffed the air suspiciously.

  ‘Moving away from us,’ said Wallace.

  Phyllis nodded.

  The sound of the footfalls died away.

  ‘Do you think we were being spied on?’ Phyllis asked.

  ‘Who knows? Maybe. Why would somebody run away if they hadn’t been snooping on us?’

  ‘Obviously they were close,’ Phyllis said. ‘Daisy had them baled up, all right. She only ever barks and bristles like that when she’s found an intruder or something unexpected.’

  ‘Ah well,’ said the Conjuror of Wonder, ‘whoever it was has gone. And so must we, for our destination lies a mere hop-skip-and-jump over yonder rise.’ He gave her a wiggle of his moustache and headed off up the gently rising laneway.

  Phyllis deposited Daisy back on the ground, patted her gently and let her run ahead again.

  ‘It’s a good Time,’ Wallace said over his shoulder, as Phyllis caught up with him.

  ‘Huh? A good Time for what?’

  ‘A good Time to visit the place. These are the days before thousands of tourists would descend regularly here, like locusts coming to dance the jitterbug at a jelly festival.’

  ‘Like—?’

  ‘I know what I mean,’ he said, shaking his head as if to get his thoughts into place.

  ‘Please! Great-grandfather, tell me exactly where we’re going?’

  ‘Why tell, when I can show?’ He stopped and smiled; then he placed his hands on her shoulders and turned her to the north-east. ‘Behold, my dear. Built by Myrddin himself, so we believe.’

  Phyllis’s eyes widened as she beheld the sight before her.

  There, about half a mile in the distance, on a wide green plain, lay an enormous horseshoe-shaped formation. Towering, monumental stones rose up from the earth, some of them crowned with heavy lintel slabs.

  At that moment, the sun broke through the grey clouds, sending golden, spindly rays of light down onto the stones, illuminating the whole arrangement in a strangely hesitant yellow glow.

  ‘Welcome,’ announced Wallace Wong, ‘to Stonehenge!’

  The smashing

  Phyllis had seen photos of the great monument but, now that she was here at the actual place, she realised that no picture could do it justice.

  ‘It’s . . . it’s . . . fantastic,’ she murmured, gazing at the stones that seemed to have thrust themselves up out of the ground and frozen in place.

  ‘Fantastic it is,’ agreed Wallace.

  Phyllis stood still, and let herself be totally undistracted as she viewed Stonehenge. She stopped hearing the birdsong that was drifting gently from the hedges and trees; she even became unaware of Daisy sniffing the bushes. She wanted to experience the starkness and the beauty of what lay before her—that and nothing more for the next few minutes.

  The dark, blue-grey stones appeared old and wise and majestic out there on their cleared plain. Phyllis let the sense of them fill the air around her. As the seconds passed silently by, she began feeling a sort of serene indifference to the rest of the world. You may come and go, the monuments seemed to be telling her, you may live and breathe and fight and love and the world may be plunged into calamity and nonsense . . . the earth may quake and the skies crack open . . . but we shall always be here, undisturbed by these events . . . these events that, with the great sweep of Time, will seem little in the mighty scheme of things.

  Then Daisy stopped sniffing and barked impatiently.

  ‘Come here, four-paws,’ Wallace called to her.

  She scampered back to him and he scooped her up into a gentle cuddle. ‘See?’ he whispered. ‘Phyllis is captivated.’

  Daisy looked at Phyllis, who seemed to be in another world. ‘Arf!’ she yapped loudly.

  Phyllis blinked and shook her head. She smiled at Wallace and Daisy. ‘Well, what’re we waiting for?’ she asked. ‘Let’s get down that road and into Stonehenge!’

  ‘Lead the way,’ said her great-grandfather. ‘We are at your side, like the loyal moths drawn to the flame of grandeur’s bonnet.’

  Phyllis didn’t even give him a quizzical look, so eager was she to get to the site.

  At exactly the same Time as Phyllis, Daisy and Wallace Wong were journeying into Stonehenge, but also at a Time far removed, Clement was about to enter into a state of great perplexity.

  He was sitting in his room with the lights turned low as he battled online alongside a boy named Juan who lived more than ten thousand miles away. They had been long-time compatriots in the saga known as Zombie Wars of the Seventh Parallelicon, and this afternoon things were turning particularly nasty.

  Clement and Juan had both risen to the rank of Imperial Zombie Thwarter, Third Division—a ranking of some accomplishment. They had worked side by side, and it had taken them six months to achieve this elevated status in the realm of Zombie Wars.

  Now Clement, wearing a natty false grey handlebar moustache, had uncovered the crypt headquarters of the sludge-dripping Stealth Zombies of Pynedale. The creatures were feeding from the stagnant, sewer-like underground river that flowed beneath the miserable little village of Dreggsby-on-Pyne, and this vile concoction was giving them new strength and power—the likes of which Clement and his Imperial Zombie Thwarter friend Juan had never before encountered.

  ‘Man,’ Clement whispered as he saw one especially grisly-looking specimen rising up at them, ‘diabolical!’

  Quickly he typed a message to his co-IZT, Juan: Have you got much power in your flamebazooka? I’m down until the next level.

  Seconds later, Juan’s message appeared in the top corner of Clement’s screen: Abt 50 rounds, IZT Clem. I told you you shouldn’t waste so much fire on that giraffe.

  Clement fired back: Yeah, IZT Juan, but we weren’t to know it wasn’t infected!!!! It’d be just like this game to have a zombie giraffe. How fast could they gallop, and they could sludge you from on high with those long necks—

  IZT Clem!!!!!! Watch it!!!!!!

  Clement had been too busy typing about the zombie giraffe to see the single, shrivelled, mouth-gaping zombie woman with a hairdo that would have been ghastly even when she’d been alive. She was rising up from the toxic underground river, and she had Clem and Juan directly in her vacant, empty-socketed sights!

  Clem typed as if his fingers were aflame: Take command! Take her out! No firepower here! Blast 20 rounds!!!!!!!!

  He held his breath as Juan took control. The viewfinder of their joint artillery came into focus; the scope on the front of the flamebazooka followed the zombie with the bad hairdo as she lurched across the screen, disappearing and re-emerging from behind a shattered tree stump. If she sludged Juan and Clem, it was disaster—they’d drop back three levels and lose their IZT rankings.

  That would be unbearable.

  The scope homed in on the zombie’s face . . . her mouth was gaping wide, her sockets glowing, ready to attack, ready to sludge her vile, purple vomitacious mess directly at Clem and Juan!

  Clement’s heart almost stopped as he watched what happened next.

  The zombie hurtled forward, rushing at the screen . . .

  Juan’s scope focussed directly at her chasm of a face . . .

  Clem heard the CLICK of the flamebazooka . . .

  and . . .

  . . . the screen went blank!

  ‘Whaaaaaa?’ Clement jabbed at the return key frantically, stabbingly, bang bang bang bang bang, but nothing happened.

  All he had before him was a blank screen.

  Desperately he turned the computer off. It powered down normally. Then he switched it on again. It came to life as it usually did.

  But there was no inter
net. Every window he tried to open on his browser presented him with the same sort of message: ‘Internet access unavailable’, ‘Gateway denied’, ‘Source unknown’, ‘ERROR’.

  He tried his email accounts. The same messages greeted him.

  He grabbed his phone and punched in Phyllis’s number. It rang and rang, but she didn’t answer.

  He tried another friend, a kid who, like himself, was forced by his parents to learn how to play the xylophone. Clement asked him if he had access to the net. After a moment the boy replied that he didn’t.

  ‘Oh, man!’ Clement moaned, ripping off his handlebar moustache and hurling it across his bedroom. ‘This is really . . . really . . . uuuuggggghhhhhh!’

  As Phyllis, Daisy and Wallace came nearer to Stonehenge, they were passed on the access road by some horse-drawn carts going the other way. In the carts, sitting on benches along the sides, sat rows of well-dressed people—the women in wide dresses with bustles, and some of the men wearing smart homburg hats or derbys.

  ‘Tourists,’ Wallace informed Phyllis. ‘This is how people come to see the place in 1898. A bit different to your day, my dear, when hundreds of huge buses come and park at the visitor centre, which is far off from being built.’

  ‘They all look so dressed-up,’ Phyllis observed.

  ‘The fashion of the day.’ A third cart trundled past them, also heading away from Stonehenge, the big horses huffing out steam from their wide, hairy nostrils. W.W. glanced up at the sun, which was moving ever-slowly towards the horizon. ‘The afternoon is drawing to a close. A good time for us to have our visit . . . we shouldn’t be disturbed by the chatter and the distractions of tourists.’

  Phyllis was glad about that; she wanted the place all to themselves.

  ‘Let me tell you a little about this wonderful place,’ Wallace said as they walked along. ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote, in his History of the Kings of Britain, that Myrddin built Stonehenge using huge stones which he brought over from Ireland. It came about because Myrddin was giving Ambrosius, the conqueror of the Saxons, advice about how to make an everlasting tomb to honour the dead, which Ambrosius wanted to build. Myrddin told Ambrosius that he should get the stones from the Circle of Giants on the mountain of Cillara in Ireland. He should bring the stones here and arrange them in a circle, and they would last forever.