She heard the sounds of large creatures lumbering through the brush, as if to give chase to the owl, and silently she thanked the good bird for the diversion. Then she moved forward warily, gripping her spear, keeping under heavy cover—hop, stop, and look.
* * *
Dawn stole slowly through the sky that morning, golden light creeping over the earth, creating a glow that outlined the opening to the cave.
The monsters that lived in Nightwing’s shadow had been up all night, celebrating as each new eagle and snake was mushed into one. And so now the cave grew quiet, except for the snores of sleeping creatures.
Ben had been clinging to the fur on Nightwing’s belly. Now he peered around, looking for signs of danger.
Most of the monsters lay on their backs or sides, breathing deeply, perhaps emitting a small growl as they dreamed or scratched wildly at fleas. But it wasn’t possible to tell if all of the monsters were asleep. The lightning spiders had let their lights burn low, but their faceted eyes gleamed in the darkness, and Ben imagined that if he even touched one of their shiny webs, the spiders would come darting out to meet him. And there were snakes and other monsters that had no eyelids, so that if they slept, Ben had no way of knowing.
He looked about, then leaped down from Nightwing. It would have been a mighty leap if he were a human, for Nightwing was clinging to the ceiling, and when Ben jumped, he dropped hundreds of times his own height.
He landed on a rock, his eight legs catching his weight nicely.
Then he began to scurry for the exit.
Monsters guarded the way: possum-lizards with sharp teeth and evil smiles, porcupine-weasels that could run faster than the wind, scorpion-skunks that smelled almost as deadly as their stings.
And all of them were so much larger than Ben. He had to creep among them, his eight tiny feet clattering over the stone.
At first, he was afraid that they might wake and see him. But then he realized that if one of the monsters even just rolled over on top of him, it could be disastrous.
So he sneaked past the creatures until he reached a pool of steaming water.
He jumped in and began to swim as best he could, his eight legs in a tangle. He prayed as he swam, “Don’t let there be any fish in these pools. Not even a guppy. Please.”
He swam for what seemed a long hour, until, exhausted, he reached the far end of the pool.
By now, the sun had risen, and the golden glow that had encircled the front of the cave was strong and silver. Ben could smell pine trees outside and the salty scent of the ocean.
He scrambled over a long expanse of rock into the sunlight, afraid that at any moment, some lizard guard would rush up and gobble him down.
He was at the mouth of the cave, looking down over the wild woods, the twisted trees and cruel vines. Then he heard a deep voice, a growl, at his back. “What are you doing out here? Trying to run away?”
Ben turned, and his heart sank. There, just behind him at the mouth of the cave, slithered a creature half eagle, half rattlesnake. Ben peered up at the cruel beak and golden eyes of the Conqueror Worm.
Chapter 19
A SONG FOR A FRIEND
Being a good friend to another can be a challenging and ennobling undertaking.
—BUSHMASTER
The snake-eagle rose high in the air, searching, searching . . .
AMBER WAS RACING through the brush, hop, stop, and look. She didn’t know much about plants, but these ones looked sickly. The trees and bushes had mouths that gaped, and in some of them, she even thought that she saw teeth. Indeed, every one of them looked like some kind of animal—a dog, a mink—that had been caught racing from the cave and was then transformed into a plant, so that an animal’s body formed the trunk of a tree or prickly bush, while branches and limbs sprouted from its head and back.
Knotholes were mouths and eyes. Twisted roots became feet, binding the creatures to the ground.
Amber hopped forward, peering around a bush. She spotted a rabbit nibbling on some brush, but saw that it was a strange rabbit with short ears and fangs.
It lifted its head and tasted the air for a scent, then went hopping over her head in a great rush. She was just about to move again when she spotted a vine wriggling. It looked like a bit of blackberry vine, complete with leaves, but slithered along a limb, its cruel thorns rasping. It lifted a tiny head, a single green leaf, and Amber spotted little nubs upon it—unblinking eyes. Then the vine monster wriggled up a tree, as if seeking a place to sun itself.
Everything is alive here, she warned herself. Even the bushes have eyes. Even things that should be dead are alive.
Her heart hammering in her throat, Amber hopped a few paces. She hid in the shadow of a wild cucumber vine, its pale purple flowers open to the daylight, and watched the path ahead.
A creature—the fanged rabbit—went barreling through the brush.
Amber waited, heart pounding, until it left the trail, and then she went scampering forward, only to find that her foot was tangled.
She turned and gasped. The wild cucumber had snagged her rear ankle with a tender green shoot, and as she tried to pull free, its leaves hissed at her.
Amber spun and stabbed with her little spear, piercing the vine.
Suddenly the tiny trumpet-shaped flowers all constricted and began to emit shrill whistles.
A warning call!
There was nothing that she could do now but run.
She pulled herself free of the vine and went hopping down the trail. She heard a thump as something huge came crashing through the brush ahead, and she jumped aside just in time. A hairy creature with black stripes on its back went thundering past, bounding on long legs.
A chipmunk-toad, Amber realized.
She was drawing near the cave now, she knew. She could hear the tinkle of water as it flowed over small stones.
She raced up to a poor misshapen bush and stood hiding in the canopy of its leaves, looking for the opening of the cave. And there she saw a sight that nearly stopped her heart.
An insect stood in the golden sunlight, just at the mouth of the cave. Above it, a monstrous snake spread gold-and-white wings and rose up, like a cobra, to peer down upon the insect.
Ben!
Amber heard movement in the brush. The cucumber vine was still blowing its shrill whistles, and Amber could see now that there were monsters coming for her, dark shapes all around, converging through the brush.
She had no hope of escape.
She could think of only one thing to do.
Sing.
* * *
“What are you doing out here?” the snake-eagle demanded of Ben.
Ben looked up, and he was so frightened that all eight of his legs were quivering and threatening to collapse.
“I just, I just came out for some sun,” Ben said.
“Ticks don’t crave sunlight,” the monster said. “Ticks crave only warm blood.”
Ben didn’t know what to answer, and so he just stood there, trembling, afraid to move.
And then he heard singing—a familiar voice—in the woods behind him.
The trail is long and lonely,
And soon I’ll reach the end,
In sunlight or in shadow,
I’ll come to you, my friend.
Ben whirled and peered into the brush. It wasn’t just a song, it was a song of warning and comfort.
Amber had come to save him!
The snake-eagle hissed and peered outside, then flapped its mighty wings. Ben was bowled over by the backwash as the air currents fanned him against the wall. Yet he scrabbled to his feet, peered out into the bright sunlight, and searched for Amber.
The snake-eagle rose high in the air, searching, searching, then let out a piercing cry and dove toward a bush. Ben saw Amber there, and he cried out in his small, tick’s voice, “Amber, watch out!”
But as the snake-eagle dove, Amber ran out along a limb, hoisted her needle, and boldly waited. As the snake-eagle was a
bout to hit her, she hurled her weapon with all of her might.
Ben couldn’t tell exactly what happened, but he saw the needle whip through the air, a flash of silver blurring like a bullet, and then the snake-eagle screamed a mighty death cry that shook the very leaves of the trees and crashed into the smoking pool.
But in the brush all around Amber, Ben could see movement, strange creatures bowling through the underbrush. Horrible vines slithering in her direction. There was no way that she could hope to escape.
And so Ben stood there at the mouth of cave, in the full sunlight, and began to sing his loudest.
When death is at your doorway,
And there’s no one to defend
In day or utter darkness,
I’ll stand with you, my friend.
The shaking and slithering in the forest came to a halt as Amber’s hunters became confused. Then Ben saw them reorient, and the monsters began racing through the Weird Wood toward him!
I’m going to die, he thought. But Ben felt good, proud. Vervane the vole had once asked him to sing his song, and an octopus had asked him to do so too. At the time, Ben had told them that he had no song.
But now he had found one.
Chapter 20
THE MOUSE THAT ROARED
The fierce wind that carves a mighty mountain can also polish a diamond and thus reveal its inner light.
—RUFUS FLYCATCHER
Nightwing came whistling toward Amber, his voice sounding like fingernails on a chalkboard.
UNSURE WHAT TO DO, Ben stood with quivering legs until he heard a voice from the back of the cave.
“How quaint,” Nightwing said. “My little blood-sucking parasite has a friend.”
Ben whirled just as Nightwing came swooping out of the darkness and grabbed Ben with his gnarled feet.
Nightwing swept over the Weird Wood, swooping between bushes like an ace pilot, diving between the fork of two branches in a twisted pine, bursting through the leaves of a low-hanging vine.
Ben should have realized how good he was. A bat that can fly through a hailstorm without getting hit wouldn’t think twice about flying through this twisted jungle. “I knew that she’d come back,” Nightwing said, as if to a confidante. “She couldn’t resist. Without you as her familiar, she’s just another vermin.”
Nightwing came whistling toward Amber, screeching in the daylight, his voice sounding like fingernails on a chalkboard.
Ben saw Amber on the ground, running for all she was worth. She’d lost her only weapon, and now she was darting blindly along a low trail.
She peered over her shoulder, saw Nightwing swooping above her, and dove sideways into some brush.
Nightwing overshot her position and swooped up into the air, doing a barrel roll as he hurtled back toward her.
“What do you think?” the bat said. “Shall I mush her with a dirt clod and turn her into a little statue that will only last until the next rain? Or shall we make a more permanent sculpture of her—a monument to her stupidity?”
“She’s not stupid,” Ben groused. “She just doesn’t know anything.”
Ben turned and began to climb through Nightwing’s thick fur, all eight legs trembling.
“What are you doing?” Nightwing demanded.
“I’m hungry,” Ben said. “Your blood. I smell it in your veins, Master. It calls to me.”
Nightwing gave a simpering laugh as he soared over the brush pile where Amber had taken refuge. “Come to take your rightful place at last?”
Ben only grunted in midstride. But it wasn’t his rightful place that he was after. He needed to distract the bat, and he could think of only one way to fight back. He would plunge his little needlelike mouth deep into the bat’s flesh and sever his “juggler” vein!
But suddenly Amber was out in the open, trying to run from beneath the brush, and Nightwing hissed a curse. “You cannot fight me. I am the immortal, the mystical, Edgar. Allen. Poe!”
Amber was leaping over a large round stone, looking up over her shoulder toward Ben and Nightwing, when she began to scream.
Suddenly the stone beneath her feet began to melt, like butter, and Amber was melting with it, mushing into a creature half-mouse, half-stone.
She cried out in a wail of grief, and with all of his heart, Ben wished that he were still Amber’s familiar, that his magic power might flow to her.
* * *
Amber glanced up as Nightwing’s shadow passed overhead. He seemed huge for a bat, as big as all of the sky.
She was all out of magic. She’d felt the last of it drain from her when she killed the snake-eagle, hurling her needle into its eye.
And now, she knew that she would die. There were monsters everywhere in the Weird Wood. She could see them running from the mouth of the cave, could hear them converging on her from every direction.
Her only hope was to run madly, race through the brush, and hope that it was thick enough to slow her attackers.
She rushed through a patch of sunlight. There was a sandy brown stone beneath her, and as the bat hissed, Amber felt her feet giving way beneath her, sinking into the sediment, becoming one with the stone.
She tried to pull her knees up, to free herself, but she could feel her legs frozen, immovable. She was turning into rock! She could hear it, a sound like stones cracking and grating against one another, and she could feel it—the rock rising up above her knees, to her waist, climbing toward her chest.
Time seemed to stop. The bat was there above her, Ben desperately plunging his proboscis into the monster, as if it were a spear.
Nightwing was so sure of himself, so confident, that he flew with his eyes closed while his huge ears were swept forward.
No, Amber realized in a rush of insight. He’s not confident. He’s flying by sound.
The stone had risen to her chest by now and would soon be at her neck.
Amber did the only thing that she could think to do. With one last desperate hope, she roared, “Leave us alone!”
The sound that came out was louder than the whistle of a freight train. It blasted the brush and shook leaves from the trees. It bounced off the mountainside and hit the clouds, reverberating like a bell.
And it struck Nightwing like a cannonball.
The big-eared bat, navigating solely by sound, veered sharply and slammed into a tree, a tree whose branches looked like grasping arms, a tree whose trunk had knotholes that looked like eyes and another that looked like a gaping mouth, and whose leafless limbs looked like arms flailing uselessly at the sky.
There was the sound of snapping bones, and the bat flopped down in a broken heap, landing amid a wild cucumber bush whose trumpet-shaped flowers made little satisfied smacking sounds as vines and tendrils grabbed the bat and gently began tugging it down into the dirt at its roots.
A mist began to rise from under the bush, a black shadow of smoke that lengthened and grew, like an enormous dragon. And then the wind began to whisper through it, and the shadow was borne, like a captive, out to sea.
Chapter 21
THE MOST BEAUTIFUL MOUSE IN THE WORLD
To be defeated, you must first give up.
—BUSHMASTER
“We really did change the world.”
BEN FELL TO THE GROUND and stood in a daze for a moment, his ears still ringing from Amber’s sonic blast.
He peered about and saw monsters racing toward Amber.
But she just stood there, a creature made of stone, unmoving, uncaring. She had become a statue.
The monsters gathered around Amber, glaring at the little stone statue. There was the eelipede and Fanglorious, a skunk-leech and a scorpion-rat. From every direction, the monsters began to appear.
None of them spoke or growled.
With Nightwing gone, they seemed lost.
Ben scampered up to the stone statue.
Amber’s head was twisted up, just in the way that it had been when she’d roared. Her mouth was open, and there was a frantic look in her
eyes.
Ben climbed up on the statue, and tears came to his eyes.
“Now what’s going to happen to me?” he said bitterly. “You can’t just leave me here. Amber? Can you hear me?”
But Amber didn’t move. She just stared up toward the morning sunlight, her stone eyes unblinking.
“I’m sorry,” Ben said. “I’m sorry that I put you through so much. I’m sorry that I tried to feed you to the lizard. I’m sorry that I tried to leave you. Come back, Amber. Come back, and I’ll stay with you. I’ll help you free the mice of the world.”
Amber remained still, unmoving.
Fanglorious growled, “She’s dead, lad. They’re all dead—them folks that got turned into rocks and trees. They’re no more alive than . . . Nightwing.”
Ben whirled on the snake. Here in the sunlight, the strange snake with vibrant colors painted along its side seemed obviously destined to be the new leader of SADIST.
“Do you know any magic?” Ben said. “Can you turn her back into a mouse? I could be your familiar.”
But Fanglorious shook his head. “Aside from my strange coloration, there isn’t anything magical about me.”
Ben looked out over the other monsters. There was nothing special about any of them, he decided. They were just unfortunate critters who got caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Turning away, Ben began the long trek home. It was miles and miles to Dallas, Oregon. And he suspected that he’d never make it alive. He was already so hungry and tired that he didn’t even think he could make it to the nearest freeway.
Still, there’s a chance, he thought. I could go to the freeway and wait by the side of the road for some mountain biker to come along. Then all I have to do is hop on, get a drink, and hope that he takes me in the right direction.
But then what? Even if Ben made it home alive, what would he do? Crawl into his mother’s messy house and live among the ants and the cockroaches until he grew old and died?
Of Mice and Magic Page 17
