Spellbinders Collection

by Molly Cochran

  "I want to see it."

  "That's out of the question. My work . . ."

  "You could take a vacation, Em. You've never had one. We could go to England."

  "And what about school?"

  "We could go in the summer when school's out."

  "There isn't enough money."

  "Yes, there is. I saw your bank balance on the computer—"

  "Stop arguing with me!" she screamed. Her cheeks were a vibrant red. She took off her oversized glasses and brought a trembling hand to her forehead. "I don't want to discuss this," she said quietly.

  But she held on to the letter, reading it again and again.

  "Emily?" Arthur asked at last.

  She looked up, as if startled to hear his voice.

  "Why haven't you ever told me about my mother before?"

  "It just never came up, I suppose," she snapped. "I never . . . never . . ."

  Suddenly, inexplicably, two tears dropped onto the letter in rapid succession. Then Emily crumpled the letter into a ball and threw it across the room. "Keep it if you want," she said. "It's your property, not mine."

  "Aunt Emily . . ."

  "I've got work to do." She pushed him away with one of her narrow, shaking hands, put on her glasses, and turned back to the computer.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Since Emily had steadfastly refused to discuss Arthur's inheritance, the letter from Sir Bradford Welles Abbott's law firm remained unanswered through the winter and spring. Nevertheless, news about the boy's "castle" spread slowly through the apartment building and eventually into the pages of the Riverside Shopper, from which it was picked up by the Chicago Tribune.

  The Tribune photographer took Arthur's picture in front of his All-State Spelling Bee trophy. It appeared in the Saturday edition, next to an article about cooking with pine nuts.

  Five days later, Arthur and Emily Blessing were running for their lives.

  It was the cup, of course. Arthur had known there was something unusual about the thing from the moment he first held it in his hands on that cold January day after he’d picked it out of the gutter. But Emily didn't give it a thought until the Day of the Bacteria, as they came to call it.

  It was evening. Emily was reading one of the Katzenbaum physicists' treatises on the behavior of neutrinos in radioactive suspensions. Arthur was playing with the microscope Emily had bought him for Christmas. He prepared slides of everything he could think of: a scraping of broccoli from dinner, a drop of melted snow, oil from his own nose, a pink smear of Emily's lipstick, a hair from his head. Then he watched them under the lens, marveling at the life inside these innocuous substances, the motile one-celled organisms that lived invisibly at his own fingertips.

  Beneath the microscope they seemed almost to dance, their movements quick and jerky, like Mexican jumping beans on a hot stove.

  All except one. On that slide, the bacteria had lined up end to end in precise parallel rows, and moved slowly back and forth in a display of absolutely tranquil motion.

  "Holy crow!" he shrieked. "You have to see this, Emily."

  His aunt got up with a sigh. "What is it?"

  He stepped aside from the microscope and she peered into the eyepiece.

  "Good God," she whispered.

  "Score!" Arthur said, imitating some of the cool boys at school.

  "What is this?"

  "Tap water." Arthur giggled.

  "What was its environment?"

  He blinked.

  "The container," she said impatiently. "Did you have it in a clean container?"

  Arthur held up the metal ball. Its hollowed center was half-filled with water. "I used this."

  Emily rolled her eyes.

  "But I washed it out first."

  She took an eye dropper, rinsed it in the sink, then filled it with tap water. Expertly she prepared a new slide and placed it under the microscope.

  She looked through the eyepiece and then nodded. "There," she said. "The water's perfectly normal."

  Arthur looked. The bacteria was doing what bacteria were supposed to do—jumping and dancing around the slide in purely random motions.

  "I know," Arthur said. "But what about the other slide? Have you ever seen anything like that?"

  "No," she said honestly. She tapped the ball disdainfully with the back of her fingernails. "This thing must be filthy."

  "I used Pine Sol," Arthur said. "And I boiled it, too."

  One of Emily's eyebrows shot up. "How did you dry it?"

  "I let it air-dry. I used the same method for all of the containers."

  Slowly Emily's fingers wrapped around the spheroid cup. A distinct sensation of well-being spread through her body.

  "It's warm," she said. "When did you boil it?"

  “Two hours ago,” Arthur said.

  She inserted Arthur's original slide into the microscope carrier again, stared at it for a long while, then shook her head. "I don't understand it," she said. "Living bacteria, but in uniform motion."

  She reached past the microscope to a pencil box on the boy's desk and extracted a steel compass. "Do you mind?"

  "Guess not," Arthur said begrudgingly.

  With the point of the compass, she scraped on the bottom of the object.

  It did not make a scratch.

  Arthur touched the point of the compass. The metal of the ball had blunted it.

  "Wow," he whispered.

  Emily dumped the contents of the ball into the kitchen sink, refilled it with tap water, made a new slide, and put it back into the microscope.

  She inhaled sharply as she saw the bacteria again lined up in perfectly uniform rows.

  She stood up and held the sphere in her hand like a living thing. "Remarkable," she said. "Where did you get this?"

  "I found it on the street."

  "I want to have it analyzed."

  "No," Arthur said, snatching it away. "They'll keep it."

  "It might be some sort of experimental alloy. It might have very unusual properties."

  "I don't care! The Institute's not going to have it."

  There was a long silence before she spoke. "What if I do the analysis myself?" she offered. "I can go in early. I'll bring it home tomorrow."

  "And you won't tell anyone?"

  Emily hesitated. "It may be something of importance . . ."

  "It's mine. That's the deal."

  He had her, and Arthur knew it. Emily's curiosity was such that she would have to analyze the metal cup, even if it meant stealing it from her nephew; but she wouldn't lie. She didn't know how.

  "All right," she said finally. "I won't tell anyone."

  "Or show them."

  "Or show them."

  When Arthur got home from school the next day, Emily was not at her computer. She was sitting at the dining table, holding the sphere in one hand and writing furiously with the other. A strand of dark hair had escaped the severe bun on the back of her head and hung over one eye. She didn't seem to notice. The stack of papers beside her was covered with drawings and equations.

  "It cleaves in a curve," she said immediately. "At least I think so. I was only able to get a fragment off the unit with the laser." She shook her head impatiently. "Anyway, its molecular structure is unlike anything I've seen before."

  Arthur had never seen his aunt so excited. "What's it made of?"

  "I didn't have time to run all the tests, of course. All I found out is that it doesn't contain lead, gold, silver, uranium, nickel, iron . . ." She breathed deeply. Her eyes were glassy. "It doesn't contain any known metal."

  The silence in the room was palpable.

  "Cheez-o-man," Arthur said at last.

  "Dr. Lowry at the Institute is working with properties of base metals."

  "No!" He snatched the ball away from her. "You promised!"

  "Arthur, my analysis doesn't begin to explain the activity of the bacteria—"

  "It's mine! I need it. It's my good-luck piece."

  Emily sank back
in the chair. "Oh, Arthur, really."

  "It is. It brought me my castle."

  "How can you be so stupid? Her hands clenched. "That thing might represent something totally new. An absolute scientific breakthrough. You can't just keep it as a toy."

  "It belongs to me," Arthur said stolidly.

  Emily leaped up, prepared to take it by force, but the boy wriggled out of her grasp and ran down the hall.

  "Arthur!" she called. "Come back here immediately!"

  All she heard in answer were the squeaks of his sneakers as he bounded down the stairs.

  She sighed and closed the door.

  It had been the wrong approach, she knew. In her eagerness to find out more about the strange metallic object (it cleaved in a curve!), Emily had forgotten that she was dealing with a ten-year-old boy.

  Not that she had ever known how to deal with him. Emily had never been comfortable around children. They were, to her, like Siberian tigers or polar bears—creatures known to her, but whose existence never touched her own life.

  Emily Blessing was meant to be a scholar, not a mother. She had flown through school like a rocket. Two skipped grades, a Westinghouse Science Award at fourteen, graduation at sixteen, a bachelor's from Yale at twenty, a master's at twenty-two, ready to go on for her doctorate . . .

  And then a note beneath the hanged body of her sister.

  Dear Emily,

  Please take care of my baby. You are all he has now.

  Love,

  Dilys

  Love, Dilys. Dilys, with her flaming red hair so much like her son's. Dilys, the beautiful one, whose laughter always filled the room. She had come home only to die.

  The police had cut her down. And after the questioning, after the funeral with its pitifully small group of mourners, after the item in the hometown newspaper saying only that Dilys Blessing, 19, of East Monroe township, had committed suicide at her sister's Connecticut apartment, there was nothing left of Dilys except for her infant boy.

  She hadn't even given him a name. Emily named him Arthur, after their own father who had died while Dilys was living in London.

  She had tried to raise the boy as best she could. She left the secure, mind-stretching atmosphere of the university, shelved her plans to get her doctorate, and took a researcher's job in Chicago with the Katzenbaum Institute. She had arranged her hours so that she would be home for Arthur as much as possible. Through the years, she maintained a frugal lifestyle in order to send him to the best private school in the area. On weekends, she took him to Kumon, a Japanese mathematics workshop. During the summers, she enrolled him in computer courses at Northwestern University. Because of her efforts, she acknowledged with some pride, Arthur showed every sign of developing a first-rate mind.

  But he never confided in her, or shared a joke with her, or came to her for comfort. They had spent the past ten years like two trees in a forest, near one another without ever touching.

  That was her fault, she supposed. Emily had never been close to anyone. That was Dilys's province. She had always been wildly in love with someone or other. Passion had been the hallmark of her life. And her death, as well.

  Still, Arthur would not have run away from Dilys.

  Emily began to walk over to her computer, realized that she couldn't pull her thoughts together, and changed direction. She ambled instead into Arthur's room.

  She had never paid attention to it before. There was a poster of Bart Simpson taped to the inside of the door, and a smaller picture of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle shouting "Cowabunga!" in a white cartoon bubble over his head. TV characters for a kid without a TV. Above his desk was Rudyard Kipling's poem "If," painstakingly printed in Arthur's own hand. Next to it was a Gary Larson cartoon depicting a cave man using a dachshund to paint on a wall, with the legend "Wiener Dog Art" beneath. There was a scuffed baseball in the corner of the desk, probably a memento from the summer Arthur spent at camp.

  He'd liked that, Emily remembered, but there was no time for camp and Northwestern's computer program too.

  On the shelf above the desk stood the All-State Spelling Bee trophy, thick with dust, and a red plastic lunch box.

  Where had he gotten this? she wondered, opening the box. It was filled with junk. Sparkling rocks. A piece of snakeskin. A magnet. A miniature magnifying glass. The discarded carapace of a summer cicada. The letter from Sir Bradford Welles Abbott's solicitors. All of Arthur Blessing's worldly treasures.

  Tears filled Emily's eyes. Where had she been when he'd found the cicada, or hit the baseball? Had he told her? Had she listened, at least for a moment?

  The doorbell rang. She closed the red lunch box hurriedly, as if she'd been caught snooping, then composed herself to answer the door.

  Two men in good suits were waiting for her. They had curious, identical eyes.

  "Emily Blessing?"

  Her first reaction was panic. Police, she thought. Arthur ran into the street, he's been hurt, they've come to tell me . . .

  "Yes," she answered quietly.

  One of them reached into his jacket.

  Police I.D. Oh, God, not this, not this . . .

  The man pulled out a gun with a silencer. Then, before Emily could even sort out the intense, divergent thoughts that were screaming in her brain, two bullets slammed into her chest.

  She fell back, tasting the blood that flooded into her mouth. The men stepped over her, one of them pushing her legs aside to close the door. Then, systematically, they ransacked the apartment.

  Blinking to ward off the fog that was enveloping her, still unable to comprehend the outrage that had been committed against her body, Emily gasped for breath. Then a thought formed in her mind.

  Arthur's not here.

  The muscles in her neck relaxed. She closed her eyes and allowed the blackness to seal them. Her bladder released. She was dying.

  Don't come home, Arthur. The words spun in the darkness of Emily's fading consciousness like living things. Marching bacteria. Her lips moved slowly. Don't come home.

  CHAPTER TEN

  As the bullets tore through Emily's chest cavity, Arthur was downstairs in Mr. Goldberg's apartment looking at the high school photograph of Goldberg's divorced lawyer nephew who, the old man insisted, was exactly the man for Emily.

  "He don't look like that now, understand," the old man was explaining. "He's put on a little weight, lost some hair . . ."

  "That's good," Arthur said, examining the wavy Beatle cut in the photograph.

  "It was the style. Sloppy was in. You don't know how many times I said, you, get a haircut, look like a normal person for a change. But kids, they don't listen." He smiled and tousled Arthur's red hair. "Even you, am I right?"

  "I guess so." Arthur stared at the metal globe in his hand.

  "Drink your cocoa."

  Arthur cringed. Mr. Goldberg made his cocoa with one level teaspoon of Nestle's Quik and one measuring cup worth of tepid tap water in a dirty mug. He took a polite sip, then set it down.

  "How is it?"

  "Okay."

  "So, Mr. Mad-at-the-World. You fought with your Aunt Emily?"

  The boy's eyebrows knit together. "She doesn't understand anything," he said.

  "Oy, if I could have a nickel for every time a kid said such a thing about his mother—"

  "She's not my mother," Arthur said sullenly.

  "That's right. She don't got to take care of you. She don't got to wear old shoes so she can send you to that fancy school. She don't got to stay home every night just so she can be with you." He was leaning close to Arthur, jabbing a gnarled finger at the boy's face. "She does it because she loves you."

  Arthur turned away. "That's not why she stays home."

  "Oh, it's not, is it?"

  "No. She stays home so she can work. That's all she cares about. She doesn't even like it when I talk to her."

  "So who needs a lot of talk?"

  Arthur sat back in Mr. Goldberg's rump-sprung sofa and tossed the metal ball u
p in the air. "Not me. Not with her."

  Goldberg caught it. "Don't play while we're making conversation." He examined the ball. "What are you doing with an ashtray, anyway?"

  "It's not an ashtray. It's a good-luck piece."

  Goldberg snorted. "You're so lucky, how come you're sitting here telling me your troubles?"

  Arthur looked up at him. His eyes were on the verge of tears. "She wants to take it," he said.

  The old man was quiet for a moment. "You broke a window?" he ventured.

  Arthur shook his head. "I did an experiment. It's . . . it's some kind of special thing."

  Goldberg held the ball in front of his face. "This?"

  "Emily wants to give it to the Katzenbaum Institute so they can figure out what it's made of."

  "Ah," the old man said.

  "Do you understand?"

  "No. I should still be smoking, I'd put a cigar out in it."

  Arthur's lips moved in the trace of a smile.

  "So why is it so important to you?" Goldberg asked quietly.

  The boy covered his face with his hands. "I don't know!" he shouted. "But it is. As soon as I picked it up, I knew it belonged to me. Or I belonged to it, if that makes any sense." Slowly his hands came from his face, and his eyes focused on a spot outside the dirty window. "It was like I'd been looking for it for a really long time, even though I hadn't been. And I need it. That's just something I know." He wiped his nose with his knuckle. "That sounds really stupid."

  "No, no."

  Arthur stole a glance at the old man's face. Goldberg was nodding thoughtfully. "This, this is something I understand."

  "You do?"

  "Yes."

  Arthur's face screwed up. "Why should you?"

  The old man stood up and paced behind the sofa. "Do you believe in ghosts, Arthur? Spirits?"

  The boy stared at him. "No."

  "Well, they're with us, whether you believe in them or not. And every once in while, when a person really needs something—and let me tell you, that person may not even know he needs it—one of the spirits looking after him will make sure it gets it."

  "Are you serious?"

  The old man nodded gravely. "Let me tell you something. My wife Ethel died in 1978. In that chair."