by Booth, John
"That's his car," she told me as she pointed to a black SUV with tinted windows. "It's burned into my mind."
We got out of Jenny's car and walked to the nearest block of flats. Brass plates with call buttons covered the wall. There was a video and intercom system so people in the flats could see their callers before deciding to let them in.
The flats were protected from intruders by a locked door from which corridors and stairs led off to individual flats. Jenny located Peter Williams' flat on the brass plate and was about to press the button when I grabbed her arm.
"Let’s try it my way first," I suggested.
I'd never tried to break into a house before, so this would be a novel use of my powers. Still, if I could make an ordinary ring shoot fire I should be able to spring a Yale lock.
"Open," I told it, with my hand against it. The lock buzzed as the electric circuit closed and I pushed the door open. "Coming?" I asked.
"I didn't know you could do that," Jenny whispered excitedly as we followed the arrows on the wall for flat numbers 125B to 130B. The B flats were on the first floor so we had to go up a couple of flights of stairs.
"You never know until you try," I pointed out.
"What do we do now?" Jenny asked when we stood outside the door to 127B.
"Shush, I'm thinking." I said. The truth was I didn't know. My initial idea had been to steal the pictures off Williams, but how to accomplish that was beyond me. Go to his flat and see what comes up had been my strategy to date.
I went through my repertoire of talents. Hopscotch wasn't going to prove useful. I no longer had the ring to shoot fire at the door, though that didn't seem a very sensible thing to do, even if I could. I could make anything in the vicinity lucky, but I was damned if I could see the value in that. I could also open doors and I could put people to sleep.
Jenny folded her arms in front of her and tapped a foot dangerously. I'd better come up with a plan soon or she would do something foolish like bang on the door.
"Got it!" I said triumphantly and waved my hand in front of the door. "Follow me," I told Jenny, "Try and be quiet."
I put my hand on the door handle and turned it while willing it to open. It clicked open reassuringly and we stepped into the flat.
The lights in the hall were on and the two of us crept deeper into the flat. We found Peter Williams pretty much exactly where I expected to find him. Fast asleep in front of a computer console. It looked as though he keeled over in front of it, which was also what I expected.
"I cast a sleep spell over him from the door," I explained to Jenny.
Jenny was looking at the computer screen, completely ignoring the snoring reporter.
"The bastard is writing it all up. He's put my name and address in the article," she said angrily.
"That's not important, Jenny girl. Do you know how to find the photographs on his computer?"
"Can a fish swim?" Jenny said. "But we'll have to move sleeping beauty out of the way."
Williams was not heavy. We managed to move him onto the floor without dropping or waking him.
I found Williams' camera on a shelf to the right of the computer desk.
"The memory card's been removed," I told Jenny as I flipped open a cover.
"It's in the reader," she said pointing at a gizmo next to the monitor. Monitor, keyboard and mouse are the only things I can recognize on a computer with certainty. They are much more mysterious than magic as far as I'm concerned.
"These are the files he's downloaded from the card," Jenny told me, pointing at a list on the screen.
"Open up the first one," I ordered.
I have to admit, it was a great picture of Fluffy and Jenny. The two of them looked so happy to be in each other's arms.
"What do we do now?" Jenny asked, "Delete them?"
"I want to try something else first," I told her. I put my hand on the computer screen and willed the picture to change. Jenny giggled in appreciation when she saw the results of my efforts.
"Can you save it looking like that?"
Jenny played with the computer for about a minute. She looked up at me from the computer chair with something like awe on her face.
"We need to put up the pictures one by one," I said, before I realized Jenny was way ahead of me.
It took quite a long time to change all the pictures. We searched the computer and his desk for any other soft or hard copies. When we were sure we had finished the job, the two of us lifted the unconscious Williams back onto his computer chair and Jenny returned the computer to how she found it.
"I admit this is a good joke," Jenny said with a twinkle in her eye, "But he's bound to check the photos before he shows them to his editor."
I put my hand on Williams' head and concentrated for a few moments.
"I've tried to put a spell on him so he'll see the originals whenever he looks at the photos."
Jenny pulled me over by grabbing the top of my tee shirt and she kissed me full on the lips.
"You are a mean, mean boy, Jake Morrissey, and I'm going to take you to my bed for this."
I thought about this comment for a few moments and then I kissed her back. It took real concentration on both our parts to remember to get out of the room.
"Oh look, here's a surprise," Jenny said cheerfully to me a couple of days later. I got up from the kitchen table to look over her shoulder at the latest issue of the Evening Chronicle.
In a small column at the bottom of the page, there was a notice to the papers readers.
Peter Williams has left the Chronicle due to problems with his health. We wish him well with his treatment and hope that he makes a full recovery in the very near future.
"You didn't make him ill, did you Jake?" Jenny asked me with a smirk on her face.
"I suspect that when he went to his editor with a story about real dragons in Wales and showed him those photos, he was sent straight to the nearest psychiatrist," I said grinning. "My spell on him must have worked."
I had changed all the photographs so Fluffy became a large cuddly toy dragon. I don't know how I did it, but the pictures looked better to me than anything I've ever seen Photoshopped. Every shadow and nuance in the photos was perfect. Of course, Williams would still be seeing the originals but everyone else would see Jenny cuddling a toy. The editor must have been convinced Williams had cracked up.
"You are a mean, mean boy, Jake Morrissey," Jenny said with a twinkle in her eye. "And I'm going to have to take you to my bed again for making this work."
"But it's been less than half an hour since the last time," I protested.
Chapter Seven: Dragon's Home
Sometimes things that you think of first as a disaster turn out to be the best thing that could ever happen to you. I have a beautiful girlfriend called Jenny and a pet dragon called Fluffy. Fluffy is not at all fluffy and he's more my friend than my pet. That fact is very important in all that happened to us.
It was a couple of weeks after Jenny and I saw off the reporter who discovered Fluffy. Now, if wizards are as rare as hen's teeth across the multiverse, they are still plentiful when compared with the number of dragons you can spot flying over the valleys of Wales. Since it happened I'd been keeping my head down and Fluffy well hidden in the cave he calls home.
I noticed one corner of the carpet in my bedroom was flipped over. The remarkable thing about it was that it shouldn't have been possible. I fastened down all four corners of the carpet some years ago using special hooks I screwed into the floorboards.
Below the carpet was my hopscotch court painted onto the floorboards. The court was the mechanism I used to transport myself to anywhere in the multiverse. I must have a limited imagination because that was less than a dozen worlds, though I've been hopping to them since I was six years old.
When I investigated further, I discovered the carpet corner had been torn away from the hook. A quick check at another corner showed that it had also been disconnected. I rolled back the carpet with my tummy
tingling as if a nest of butterflies had taken residence in there. The painted court was gone, not even the faintest outline remained. I felt my blood run cold. My secret had been discovered and I was trapped on Earth.
"Mum!" I shouted in my most petulant teenage voice. I have little choice but to live at home as the job opportunities for wizards in Wales are exactly zero and I have never been any good at schoolwork of any kind. I was therefore, as usual, stone cold broke.
"What is it now, Jake?" Mum called irritably up the stairs. "I'm just off to the supermarket to get something for your dad's dinner."
"Did you lift the carpet in my room?" I called down from the landing.
There was a long pause before I got my answer.
"I haven't got the time for any of your foolishness. I was giving your room a clean out while you were off gallivanting God only knows where, and having left Jenny in tears I might add, when I found your carpet was nailed down.
Fancy trying to cover up some childish graffiti like that, Jake. I'm ashamed of you. A bit of turpentine soon got rid of the drawing underneath. You must have done it when you were very young, it looked so old. Now what did you want to ask me?"
"Nothing, Mum!" I went back to my room and sat on my bed, wallowing in unhappiness. It made a real difference to my life, being able to hop to and from my room to anywhere I wanted. Now I'd have to find somewhere to draw a similar court outside. I would never be able to be sure it would be there when I wanted it, as a rain shower could wash it away. It rains a lot in Wales.
I felt miserable and out of sorts for the rest of the day. The only solution I could think of was to move into a flat of my own somewhere. However, that meant finding a job paying more than minimum wage and that wasn't easy when you have no qualifications.
I considered the possibility of hopping to Salice and asking Princess Esmeralda if there were any wizard jobs going that might earn me enough money to put the deposit on a flat back here. Despite my screw-ups, she had asked me to come and visit them again.
I realized even that plan wouldn't work. Even if she paid me in gold I would get unstuck the minute I tried to convert it into cash. These days, Homeland Security would be on me like a ton of bricks if I suddenly acquired money from nowhere. Not to mention the interest the tax man would show. I wondered how drug pushers laundered their money, but I'd never dealt with the local drug pushers and I wasn't going to start now.
I was going to meet Jenny at a coffee shop after she finished her classes. Jenny and I have recently taken our relationship to a whole new physical level. I lost my virginity with her after we sorted out the reporter. I suspected she didn't lose her virginity to me because she knew how to do a lot of things I didn't and she was a whole lot more confident.
Our new closer relationship had some unexpected side effects. One of which was to make it harder for me to visit Jenny. Both parents were getting suspicious we were doing the deed and so we took to meeting in coffee shops to put them off the scent.
"You look like something the cat has dragged in," Jenny told me after we kissed outside the shop. "Cheer up will you. The world hasn't ended."
I told her I'd explain the problem after we sat down. I queued for two lattes with blueberry muffins while Jenny found us a small table where we could sit in relative privacy.
"I don't understand?" Jenny asked when I explained about the hopscotch court. "Why do you need it?"
"To hop out to everywhere and then to help me get back," I said in exasperation.
"But you materialized outside my house without any kind of a hopscotch court," she protested.
"Well duh," I said sarcastically, "I'd never be able to go anywhere if there had to be a hopscotch court at the other end. I suppose I don't need the court to hop back, but I can't jump out without one."
"So how did you get to my house the night Fluffy came?"
"I hopped from the court in my room," I said even more sarcastically. Jenny's calm and superior tone was beginning to annoy me. She was sounding more and more like Princess Esmeralda.
"The same court your mother removed while you were away?" Jenny asked.
My mouth dropped open as I contemplated that particular fact. I never rolled up the carpet before hopping out because I know exactly where the court is under the carpet.
"You told me the wizard you fought in Salice hopped out without using a court," Jenny further reminded me. I'd told Jenny an edited version of what happened in Salice, removing certain kissing done by Esmeralda on my person. Well, it would only upset Jenny if I told her, and they were never going to meet so it seemed like a reasonable white lie to me.
"That was different," I protested. I was wracking my brains to try and remember what a wise-man told me when I was eleven.
"I've told you about wise-men, haven't I?" Jenny nodded.
"I met one when I was eleven on the side of a mountain. It was a pretty frightening place because I arrived on a narrow path running across a cliff face. I never went back to that planet because I was scared I'd fall off the next time. I walked down the path trying to find somewhere wide enough to draw a hopscotch court, and that was when I met this wise-man.
He spoke English though he spoke with a strange accent, a bit like Polish, now I come to think of it."
"There were very few Poles in Wales when you were eleven," Jenny pointed out. "You can't move for them now."
"He watched me draw the court and told me it was an invention of the Druids. According to him, all the important Druids left our world when the Romans invaded Britain and it was clear they were going to win."
"The Druids left Earth using hopscotch courts and the Roman commanders tried to get their troops to follow after them by hopping and skipping on the same courts. They never did manage to follow the Druids, but the hopscotch court became a training exercise for Roman soldiers in Britain and they took the practice all over Europe with them."
"He said that a full wizard like me didn't need one. It just helped my mind prepare for a special kind of step…, hop, skip and teleport. He told me I was using the court as a crutch."
"He sounds very wise," Jenny threw in, "What else did he say?"
My face turned red with embarrassment as I remembered the rest of the conversation.
"Well?" Jenny asked when I remained silent.
"I was eleven and he used the word crutch," I explained. Jenny raised her eyebrows and continued to stare at me.
"Crutch, crotch," I muttered in a whisper. "I started laughing because a grown-up had used a naughty word. He got annoyed when I wouldn't stop laughing, and he left."
"God, you are sad," Jenny said in total disbelief.
"I was an eleven years old. I'm not very bright, I'm afraid."
"Don't ever say that," Jenny said angrily and punched me on the shoulder. "Now if you said uneducated, I'd have to agree with that."
"Okay," I responded, but Jenny was no longer looking at me. She was looking in horror at something behind me.
I turned around and spotted what had upset Jenny. A man was reading a newspaper and held it so we could read the headlines.
He was holding the most popular tabloid in England and Wales and it had a picture of Fluffy in full flight on the front page.
'GOT THE NUMBER OF THE BEAST?' the headline read.
"Shit," was the best response I could think of.
"What have you got to say about this?" I shouted angrily at Fluffy, waving the newspaper in my dragon's face.
Fluffy raised his front legs off the ground taking up an almost human pose as he took the paper out of my hands. Fluffy's front legs are very like arms and his clawed feet are capable of delicate actions just like human hands. He lifted the paper into a reading position and looked at his picture.
"Meep, meep, meep," he replied and Jenny giggled.
"I don't care if it is a good picture of you," I said angrily. "You were supposed to be hiding in the cave."
"Meep, meep."
"He has a point," Jenny agreed irritatingly.
"You can't expect him to stay cooped up in here forever, just on the off chance someone might snap a picture of him."
"It's been two weeks!" I shouted at Jenny. "Two weeks since Williams took photographs of the two of you. Is two weeks too long a time to expect Fluffy to lay low?"
"Meep," Fluffy replied simply, the plainest 'yes' I've ever heard him utter.
I sat down and put my head in my hands. In the quiet of the cave, I could hear the sound of microlights combing the valley beyond. At the very least, I could do something to protect the cave entrance from discovery.
I walked to the hole in the cliff face and extended the spell covering it. From now on, it would be invisible from outside. The side of the cliff would look whole and unblemished no matter what angle it was observed from.
"Bolting the stable door?" Jenny asked.
"Closing it off to outsiders. I don't want anybody interrupting us while we try and figure this out."
"Meep, meep, meep," Fluffy suggested as he finished reading the article. I taught him to read English when he was four. His comment upset Jenny who ran to him to put an arm on his neck.
"We are certainly not going to turn you in for the reward," she said.
The newspaper offered a million pounds reward for Fluffy. A lucky reader could get a hundred thousand pounds for his body if capturing him alive proved too difficult. The hills were already swarming with bounty hunters. Even reaching the cave unseen proved difficult, there were so many people walking about.
"We'll have to move Fluffy from here," I said resignedly. "If he flies out during the night we should be able to avoid the hunters."
"And take him where?"
"The Highlands of Scotland. There are plenty of places up there with nobody around. Not to mention there are plenty of sheep and deer. He could live up there for years without being spotted."
"You're running away from this, Jake," Jenny said angrily. "This is Fluffy's home."
"Do you have a better idea?" I replied equally angrily.
