The Evil Wizard Smallbone

by Delia Sherman

  A palm-size shadow flew down the aisle and slid onto the table. Nick picked it up and took it over to the counter so he could see it in the light. It wasn’t really a book at all — just pages folded between thin wooden covers tied shut with black tape. It was handwritten, not printed, and the first page read:

  Nick stared. Using Smallbone’s own spells from Smallbone’s own book felt like reading his diary or using his toothbrush or — well, he didn’t know exactly what it felt like, except wrong. Still, the book had come to him and the spells would certainly work. Besides, he was curious.

  He sat at the counter and started to read.

  Some time later, he heard a noise and looked up to find a tray on the counter beside him. It held a plate with a sandwich and a cup of strong tea. Nick ate and drank and went back to reading. When the light began to fade, he lit a lamp, almost without thinking about it, and read until Hell Cat appeared and told him that if he wanted supper, he was going to have to come and get it.

  To his surprise, Smallbone was there, eating spaghetti with homemade sauce and looking as harmless as an evil wizard in an ancient black coat and a bashed-in top hat could look. Mutt had retreated to the fire with Jeff and Tom, but Hell Cat and Ollie sat across from their former master, looking wary but determined.

  Nick sat down. Ollie’s sauce was delicious.

  The grandfather clock struck midnight as Nick finally finished reading Smallbone’s book. His head was spinning with words and ideas and magic he didn’t really understand. But he knew enough to do and say what he must to give Tom and Mutt what they wanted.

  Now he just had to do it.

  Only Hell Cat and Ollie were in the kitchen when Nick came down next morning, a lot later than usual.

  “Mutt said he’d do the chores,” Hell Cat informed him. “He took Jeff and Tom with him.”

  Nick stared at her blankly. Between nerves and strange dreams, he wasn’t at his best.

  “You need breakfast,” Ollie said. It was flapjacks with wild-blueberry syrup, and when Nick had eaten and drunk a cup of coffee, he pulled on his Christmas sweater and a pair of duck boots. Smallbone’s book was back on its shelf. He knew the spell now. He could either cast it or he couldn’t. At this point, the book wouldn’t help.

  Ollie wished him good luck.

  It had rained overnight, and the barn was veiled in a damp gray mist. Mud sucked at Nick’s boots as he walked across the meadow. He knew how to clear the mist and dry the path, but he didn’t. He needed all the magic he had in him for what he was about to do.

  Out in the barn, Nick found Mutt and Jeff and Tom curled against the goat pen in a heap. Tom and Jeff were asleep, and Mutt was pretending.

  Nick swept the floor, took out his pentagram-drawing kit, and carefully inscribed a pentagram. Then he sat down inside.

  “Okay, Mutt,” he said. “I’m ready.”

  Mutt got up, lifted Tom in his arms, and put him in the pentagram, careful not to step on the lines. The little boy woke and crawled into Nick’s lap, making a soft growling noise like he was trying to purr.

  Nick lifted his hand and concentrated.

  He’d never done a spell this complicated before. Elemental Magic was basically suggesting to fire that it burn, to water that it flow, to earth that it support, to air that it move in exactly the way the elemental wizard wanted it to. Every transformation spell he’d cast had been meant to return something to its natural state. This spell went against nature, bending bone and dispersing mass, going against the natural course of biology and evolution to turn an actual human boy into an actual cat.

  I’m Nick Reynaud, he thought. I’m an evil wizard. I can do anything I want to do. And I want to do this.

  The words of the transformation spell hurt his mouth as if he’d been eating rocks and thorns. They tried to stifle him, leaving Tom a boy with a cat’s head or maybe a shapeless bag of fur and guts. But Nick spoke on, determined. And when he finished, sweating and dizzy, a little orange cat was draped across his leg, purring like a motorboat.

  Nick picked Tom up and set him outside the pentagram, careful not to smudge the lines. The little cat sneezed, bounded over to Groucho’s stall, and jumped through the rails.

  Nick took a deep breath. “Your turn, Mutt.”

  The former dog was backed up against the goat pen with his arms around Jeff’s neck, white as a sheet. “I changed my mind.”

  Relief swept through Nick even as he said, “It’s a one-time offer, Mutt. What about those two hundred and forty years?”

  “Don’t matter. That was the scariest thing I ever did see. I’d sooner get used to thinking than go through that. Besides, Jeff don’t care, do you, boy?”

  Jeff lifted his muzzle and licked Mutt’s neck and ear.

  With the energy of a boy who suddenly discovers he’s not going to have to walk over hot coals a second time, Nick rubbed out the pentagram, extracted Tom from Groucho’s manger, and went back to the house with Mutt and Jeff.

  Mutt still looked spooked, but he perked right up when Ollie handed him a bowl that smelled richly of butter and the sea. “There was salt fish,” Ollie said to Nick. “So I made chowder. I hope you don’t mind.”

  The chowder was the best Nick had ever eaten — even better than Eb’s. By the time Nick had finished it, he knew what to do with Ollie, and maybe Mutt and Hell Cat as well.

  The apprentices, when he told them, were not enthusiastic.

  “Take us to Smallbone Cove?” Hell Cat sneered. “Are you crazy? Those fellers hate us.”

  “No, they don’t,” Nick argued, hoping this was true. “Why should they?”

  “I dunno,” Mutt said. “Smallbone never had much good to say about the Cove Smallbones. Said they’re a bunch of lazy cusses.”

  “He said the same about you,” Nick said, disgusted.

  He went upstairs, went to bed, and slept the rest of the day and all night. When he woke up, a little orange cat was curled on his chest and the delicious smell of sausages was perfuming the air.

  Downstairs, Mutt was sucking his fingers and Hell Cat was licking her plate. She stopped when she saw Nick. Mutt didn’t.

  “We’ve decided,” she announced. “We’ll go to Smallbone Cove. If we hate it, we can always run away.”

  They couldn’t leave immediately, though Nick wanted them to. Hell Cat said, rather snottily, that nobody was going to hire anybody who looked and smelled as bad as Ollie and Mutt, so there was a fight over that, and then Ollie and Mutt had to wash.

  While they were getting ready, Smallbone took Jeff up to the tower with him.

  “He should be with me,” Mutt said almost tearfully when he came out of the bathroom and found Jeff gone. “We belong together. Mutt and Jeff.”

  “I’ll bring him to visit,” Nick promised. “Tom, too.”

  The apprentices exchanged a look. Mutt knelt down and scratched Tom behind the ears, then marched out the back door and toward the path to Smallbone Cove without looking back. The rest of them had to run to catch up.

  Nick was surprised that the apprentices knew the way as well as he did, and said so.

  “It ain’t changed all that much,” Mutt said.

  “Where’re we going?” Ollie wanted to know. “Nate’s?”

  “Nate’s?”

  “Clam shack down by the wharf. Best fried clams I ever ate.”

  “Well, it’s Eb’s now,” Nick said. “The chowder’s good, but not as good as yours. I’m taking you to Smallbone Cove Mercantile, so you can meet Lily.”

  “Who’s Lily?” Hell Cat asked.

  “You’ll see.”

  When they reached the porch of the Mercantile, Hell Cat made a small unhappy noise, almost like a mew. To Nick’s astonishment, Mutt and Ollie took her hands. She let them.

  Nick opened the door and they all went in.

  It was warm inside and smelled of sugar and chocolate. Lily looked up from laying out a batch of chocolate-chip cookies in the bakery case. “Well, hello, Foxkin. Who are your f
riends?”

  This was it. Nick put on his brightest smile. “They’re old apprentices of Smallbone’s. They were under a spell, but I released them. I thought you — not you personally, but Smallbone Cove generally — could take them in.”

  Lily turned a deep, angry red. “You’ve got a nerve, Foxkin, waltzing in here with things in the state they’re in! If Smallbone wants his spare apprentices housed and fed, he’ll have to come and ask himself.”

  Nick thought quickly. “It’s not a favor for Smallbone. He just wants to get rid of them. Come on, Lily. They hate him even more than you do. That’s got to count for something. Besides, they don’t have anywhere else to go.”

  Mutt took a shy step forward. “Pleased to meet you, ma’am. I’m Mutt. I used to be a dog.”

  Lily’s lips twitched. “Lily Smallbone,” she said.

  Ollie stuck out a large pale hand. “My name’s Ollie. I was a pig.”

  Lily shook the hand. “Hello, Ollie.” She turned to Hell Cat, who was hanging back, scowling. “And what were you, honey?”

  Hell Cat folded her arms across her skinny chest. “My name’s not Honey. It’s Hell Cat.”

  “Hell Cat. I see.” Lily examined them with a business-

  like air. “So, what can you fellers do?”

  “I can cook,” Ollie offered.

  “Ollie’s real good,” Nick put in helpfully. “Best fish chowder I ever ate. Magical, really. And Mutt here can get along with anybody.”

  Mutt gave Lily a brilliant and slightly goofy smile. She blinked. “That’s nice. What’s your work experience?”

  In the next ten minutes, Nick learned a great deal about the apprentices. Ollie and Mutt were orphans and had run away and ended up somehow at Smallbone’s, just like Nick. Mutt had worked for a greengrocer and Ollie had worked in his uncle’s tavern. Mutt was the oldest, having worked for Smallbone in 1781. Ollie had worked for him in 1916. Hell Cat had been separated from her family when they hit the road after the bank took her father’s Massachusetts farm in 1931.

  “And what do you do?” Lily asked her. “Besides raising hell?”

  Hell Cat glowered. “Pa taught me to shoot a rifle. I used to get rabbits and woodchucks for the pot. And I can take care of myself, if that counts.”

  “It does. Well,” Lily said, looking around at the three anxious faces, “there’s quite a collection of talents here. Ollie, Eb can always use a good cook at the Klam Shak, especially when tourist season starts. Hell Cat, there’s not much call around here for a sharpshooter, but Miss Rachel at the library could use some help.”

  Hell Cat looked panicky. “I ain’t a big reader.”

  “Miss Rachel doesn’t need you to read. She’s not as young as she used to be and she’s in a wheelchair. Truth is, she could use some help around the house, and she might even accept it if she knew she was doing you a favor.”

  “Let Mutt do it,” Hell Cat said. “He’s good at taking care of folks.”

  “You’ll learn,” Lily said firmly. “Mutt, you can work here. Room and board to start with, salary to be determined when I see what you can do. Everybody happy?”

  Her tone suggested that they better be. The three apprentices nodded. “Good. Nick, take them to Eb’s and wait for me.”

  Outside, apprentices past and present exchanged dazed looks. “What just happened?” Mutt asked.

  “You got Lilied,” Nick said.

  “I don’t like her,” Hell Cat announced, glowering. “She’s bossy.”

  Nick shrugged. “Good thing you won’t be working for her, then. Come on. I want to get back to Evil Wizard Books before Smallbone comes looking for me.”

  In the days following the Equinox, half the town went to look at the mended Wall and the glowing Lantern and agreed that there might be something in this ritual thing after all, and wasn’t it just like Smallbone to leave all the hard work to them while he hid in his tower. And what about those kids who’d showed up in town? Old apprentices of Smallbone’s, Lily said, but they seemed ordinary enough, even if they had been animals for all those years.

  Dinah wasn’t so sure about that. She’d been a coyote for only a few weeks, and she sometimes still dreamed about it. As soon as she had the chance, she headed right over to the library to see how Miss Rachel was getting on with the girl from Evil Wizard Books.

  What did a cat know about the Dewey decimal system, anyway?

  Hell Cat had turned out to be strange but fascinating. She didn’t seem to think that having spent the last eighty-some years as a cat made her peculiar or weird. She had a mind of her own and she didn’t care who knew it. She hissed when she was mad and told stories about Smallbone that almost curled Dinah’s hair. And she was a demon for work. In the week she’d been with Miss Rachel, she’d done more to clean up the library than Dinah had managed in a year.

  She couldn’t read a word, but Miss Rachel had taught her how to alphabetize.

  When Dinah got to the library the next Saturday morning, Miss Rachel was by her window as usual, a steaming mug of tea on her desk, looking somewhat exercised. The floor had been cleared and its boards still glistened with water from the first scrubbing they’d had since Dinah could remember.

  “As you can see,” Miss Rachel said in the tone of a woman who has been tried to the limit, “we’re in the middle of spring cleaning here. I only hope I can find my books again when it’s done.”

  Hell Cat popped out of the kitchen like a jack-in-the-box. Her hair was tied up in a bandanna and her middle in a big flowered apron. “Miss Rachel’s mad because I want to move the sofa.”

  They all looked at the sofa. Once, it had been the pride of some nineteenth-century Smallbone’s front room, carved with cavorting seals and upholstered in ocean-blue plush. The seals were cracked and the plush was faded and worn bald in patches, and the sofa itself was very much in the way, but Miss Rachel considered it a part of the library’s quaint charm. Tourists sometimes had their pictures taken sitting on it.

  “That sofa can stay right where it is,” Miss Rachel said. “It’s been there since my grandma was a girl, and likely long before.”

  Hell Cat looked sly. “Can’t we at least get that box out from under it so I can clean? There could be something really historical in it.” Her sapphire eyes gleamed. “Treasure, even.”

  “She’s right,” Dinah said. “We might find something you could use for your book on Smallbone Cove.”

  Miss Rachel looked thoughtful. “Go ahead, then. But be careful!”

  The box was made of metal, welded by age and damp to the floor below. Hell Cat fetched a hammer and a screwdriver, and finally, with Dinah pulling and Hell Cat pushing, they worked the box free of the sofa, which promptly cracked and collapsed in the middle.

  “My sofa!” Miss Rachel bleated.

  Dinah pulled cautiously at the box’s old-fashioned iron latch. “Drat. It’s rusted shut.”

  “I think there’s some WD-40 in the kitchen drawer,” Hell Cat said, and ran to get it, coming back a moment later with the oil.

  It took some doing, but they got the latch open at last and lifted the lid, releasing a sour smell and a puff of what looked like soot.

  Miss Rachel put her hand over her nose. “Mold! Get that thing out of here, right away, before it infects everything.”

  Dinah helped Hell Cat wrestle the box into the kitchen. They were debating whether to leave it there or take it out back when Miss Rachel gave an amazingly seal-like bark of alarm.

  The two girls raced into the reading room. The library door was open, and two Howling Coyotes were surveying the room with the air of tourists at a county fair. They both had brown Howling Coyote jackets zipped to their throats like armor. One of them, not much more than a kid, wore a red baseball cap over his sandy hair. They smelled of rot, gasoline, and wet dog.

  Dinah knew that smell. It was the smell of the pelt she’d found in the Stream. It made her nose sting and filled her with terror and confusion. She shrank back against the bookshe
lves.

  Red Baseball Cap Guy narrowed his eyes at Hell Cat, who was bristling like a porcupine. “You got a problem, little girl?”

  “I sure do,” Hell Cat hissed. “I —”

  “Wanted to tell you how easy it is to get a temporary library card,” Miss Rachel boomed. “We usually only issue them in the summer, but we’re willing to make an exception for dedicated readers.”

  Red Baseball Cap sneered. “That right, little girl?”

  Dinah glanced at Hell Cat, who looked like she was ready to explode.

  Miss Rachel cleared her throat warningly.

  “Yeah,” Hell Cat said finally. “I wanted to give you a library card.” Dinah allowed herself a small sigh of relief. “You know how to read?”

  Red Baseball Cap’s face twisted.

  Dinah looked around for something she could use for a weapon. The hammer was too far away, but Hell Cat’s broom was right over . . .

  “Aw, leave it alone, Jerry,” Red Baseball Cap’s companion said. ‘There’s no fun in beating up old women and babies.”

  “Baby?” Hell Cat yowled. “I’ll show you baby!”

  The next few minutes were crowded. Hell Cat jumped on the biker called Jerry, scratching and kicking. His friend plucked her off and threw her against the shelves. Miss Rachel roared, Dinah caught up the broom, and Jerry laughed and jerked it out of her hands. He used it to sweep out shelf after shelf of books, which thumped down on Hell Cat like papery bricks.

  A chorus of yammering and yipping and roaring broke out in the street, accompanied by the sound of breaking glass.

  “Let’s go, Jerry!” his companion said, and ran out the door. Jerry threw one last book at Dinah and followed, taking a moment to knock over Miss Rachel’s desk, tea and all, before dashing out the door and plunging into the hullabaloo in the street.

  Dinah ran over to Hell Cat, who was sitting in a pile of books, rubbing her head and using the kind of language that would have earned Dinah a good old-fashioned talking-to if she’d ever been dumb enough to use it.