The “web” was the worldwide web, a vast spider web with strands that reached everywhere. The spiders could talk on it by plunking a strand, sending vibrations all around the world.
“A message from who?” Ben asked.
“A bullfrog named Rufus Flycatcher,” Cob answered. Ben knew the name. Rufus Flycatcher was a wizard famous in the animal world. He ran a magic school called S.W.A.R.M.—the Small Wizard’s Academy of Restorative Magic—out in some swamps, far, far away. “This Flycatcher fellow says, ‘You must warn Amber immediately. Danger is brewing. Prepare for war. The black lotus has bloomed!’”
Black lotus? Ben wondered. He had no idea what the message meant.
He only hoped that Lady Blackpool might understand the significance of it.
Chapter 2
SHADOW OF EVER SHADE
The shape of the future is defined by what we do today.
Our limits today are bound by what we have accomplished in the past.
For this reason, each day we should struggle to make a better tomorrow.
—LADY BLACKPOOL
Lady Blackpool climbed up on the armrest of the couch, while down below her on the cushions the mice and voles stood in a crowd, waiting for her to reveal the meaning behind Rufus Flycatcher’s vague message.
The festive mood of the evening was quite ruined. There had been talk of war, and Amber felt weary to the core of her soul. The pizza on the couch lay cooling, its cheese drying as hard as cement, while outside the window strange lights flashed as news camera crews continued to gather. Every ten seconds the telephone would ring, and Ben’s father was making a game of looking at the caller ID, demanding more money for an interview, then hanging up.
The phone rang, and Ben’s dad said, “Say, Ben, some publisher wants to know if you’ll write a book about your adventures as a mouse!”
“Oh, wow, I don’t know, Dad,” Ben said. “My cursive isn’t very good.”
“He says he’ll pay you three million dollars,” Butch said, a smile creeping across his face.
Ben’s eyes widened in surprise.
“Is that a lot?” Amber asked.
“We’d have more than enough to go to Disneyland!” Ben said.
“We’ll take the deal,” Butch cried with glee. “I’ll want half of that in our bank account in the morning.”
The person on the other end of the line began talking excitedly.
“Movie rights?” Butch said. “No, those don’t come with it!”
The person on the other end began to shout frantically.
“Call back when you’ve got a serious offer!” Butch demanded; he slammed the phone down and pulled the plug, turning to listen to what Lady Blackpool had to say.
Ben sat staring at his dad in shock. Amber could tell that Ben felt terrible about losing millions of dollars.
Lady Blackpool stood up on the arm of the sofa on her back legs, her front paws folded over her white tummy. Benjamin Ravenspell’s parents leaned near her. Earlier in the evening, Amber had cast a spell that let humans understand both her and Ben when they spoke, and so the humans knew that something was up.
Now Lady Backpool addressed the group, and she must have cast her own spell, because Benjamin Ravenspell’s parents grew very attentive.
“Once every so often,” Lady Blackpool began, “great evil arises—the kind of evil that is so monstrous, so powerful, and so malignant that all of the good folks in the world must stand together in order to resist it.”
“How often does this happen?” Amber asked. “Once a week?” Lady Blackpool’s tone had confused her. After all, Amber had been forced to save the world twice in the short time since she had broken free from her cage.
“Not once a week, or even once every hundred years,” Lady Blackpool said. “I am speaking of a great evil, an earth-shattering evil—the kind of evil that might come only once every thousand years if we are lucky.”
“Ooooh,” Meadowsweet whispered in awe.
“In ages past,” Lady Blackpool continued, “the good folk were taken by surprise. A consortium of evil sorcerers seized control and ruled the world for ten thousand years!”
“Humph!” Benjamin Ravenspell’s dad said. “I never heard of anything like that. It’s not in any history books that I know of.” Ben’s dad was a small man, very muscular. His head was bald, but he had a huge handlebar mustache. He had tattoos on his neck.
“It happened long ago,” Lady Blackpool explained, “before there were such things as history books. These sorcerers were animals mostly, led by an evil human, the Ever Shade, he was called.
“He was human in form, but his soul was void of the wisdom and kindness that humans should possess. He ruled in a land across the sea, and he kept the whole world in ignorance. Those who could not read or write could not pass on the lore of the Ever Shade, so none of your human books tell of him.
“But surely he haunts the dreams of mankind still. Look into your mind, into your nightmares, and you will see his face—a man dressed in black robes, with a hood pulled deep. No flesh covers the bone-white horror of his visage, so that when you see him, you will see only a grinning skull. That is the Ever Shade.”
Amber felt a chill rise up her spine. She had seen dead zombie mice in the lair of the evil worm Sebaceous Ooze. The mice had slaved for him even though they lived no more. This Ever Shade sounded like a zombie, too.
“Are you saying that the Ever Shade will be coming back?” Ben’s mother asked.
“Yes,” Lady Blackpool replied, “we must watch for him. Though his body died long ago, his magic was as deep as his malice, and many times he has sought to return. What form he will take—animal or human—I cannot know. Nor do we know exactly when he will come.
“But long ago, the good wizards of the world planted a flower deep in the swamps, a flower that is guarded to this very day by fearsome alligators. It is the black lotus, and it blooms only when our nemesis is about to take bodily form.”
“So this black lotus,” Butch asked, “is like some kind of meter, one that tells us how much evil is in the world?”
“You could put it that way,” Lady Blackpool said.
“So the Ever Shade is here?” Ben said. “He’s alive already?”
“Not yet, but soon,” Lady Blackpool said. “Somewhere soon he will be born.”
“Where?” Amber asked, casting her eyes about fearfully.
“He could arise anywhere—” Lady Blackpool said, “on a far continent or across the street or upstairs beneath your bed . . .”
The threat sent a chill through Amber as she imagined what might be hiding beneath Ben’s bed.
Lady Blackpool hesitated for a moment and then added, “If history is any indicator, our enemy does not yet pose a great threat. He will bide his time and gather his supporters—lesser sorcerers that grant him aid.”
“After he’s born, he’ll need time to grow,” Ben said hopefully. “It could be years before he’s grown.”
“Humans take years to grow,” Lady Blackpool objected, “but most animals reach maturity in only a few weeks. Some mature in a matter of hours. What form the Ever Shade will choose this time, we cannot know.”
“I’ll be ready for him,” Amber said.
“You’re not even close to being ready,” Lady Blackpool said. “Together you and Ben have great power, but you don’t know how to use it. You must go to S.W.A.R.M., the Small Wizard’s Academy of Restorative Magic. We can only hope that there you can gain the wisdom and skills that you need to defeat the Ever Shade.”
“But . . . I’m not going to S.W.A.R.M,” Ben objected. “Amber promised to turn me back into a human. I have my own school. I have things that I want to do with my life!”
Amber grew nervous at that. She liked Ben a lot. He was strong and brave and handsome. She had promised to turn him back into a human, though.
But suddenly she wondered if that was a good idea.
Maybe I should keep him, Amber thought, as a pet.
<
br /> It only seemed like the natural thing to do. Humans had been keeping mice as pets for thousands of years.
Why shouldn’t I be able to keep him? Amber wondered.
“What would you do with your life, Benjamin Ravenspell?” Lady Blackpool asked. “What great thing would you accomplish? The world needs you to go to S.W.A.R.M. Would you rather spend your days watching television and playing video games?
“How sad! People talk as if their lives have great value, but then they waste them minute by minute, spending their hours and days in frivolous pursuits.”
Amber peered hard at Ben. He was a handsome mouse, the handsomest mouse she had ever seen. He was brave and bold and wise in ways that other mice were not, and he had a goodness to him that ran to the core of his soul.
But he wasn’t a mouse—not really. He had been born as a human, and it seemed right that he be one.
He wasn’t a mouse by nature.
But that could change, Amber told herself.
Chapter 3
THE FRUITCAKE AND THE FLY
No one really knows what is possible and what is not,
for the universe is far stranger than we dream.
—THORN THE MOUSE
Two thousand years ago the Greek philosopher Aristotle observed that life can come from practically nowhere. To prove his point, he placed a bit of fig in an earthenware urn for three days and then opened the lid. To the astonishment of his students, a single fruit fly was perched upon the rotting fig.
Thus Aristotle formed the theory of “spontaneous generation,” the idea that life could arise from inanimate objects.
Unfortunately, it was an idea that lost popularity. Further experiments showed that every animal and plant had to have a father and mother of some sort, and it was assumed that Aristotle’s fly must have come from an egg that had been laid by a mother fly before he placed the fig in the urn.
But of course, the know-it-all scientists were wrong, and on the night that Ben Ravenspell sat in his home listening to dire tales of the Ever Shade, Aristotle’s fly was reborn.
It happened this way: 666 years earlier, in a small coastal fishing village in England called Hartlepoole, a young woman was baking a fruitcake for her mother-in-law. The young woman detested her mother-in-law but felt obligated to give her something. It was the day before Christmas, and of course the young wife had to give her mother-in-law something, and so by age-old tradition she prepared to give her that most hated of holiday fare—a fruitcake.
Now, it is a well-known fact that no one likes fruitcake. Fruitcakes are nasty in taste, completely indigestible, lacking in sustenance, and most of them are as hard as a brick. The only people who ever get fooled into eating them are very young children who take one bite and then spit the rest of the fruitcake into their napkins if they are polite—or just discharge it onto the floor if they are not.
Yet each year for a thousand years, people have given fruitcakes away at Christmas. Only heaven knows why anyone would give such a thing. Some of the loathsome cakes are obviously foisted off as this one was meant to be—as pretend gifts.
The young wife was too frightened of her mother-in-law to tell the old nag that she wished her dead, and so she made an abominable cake instead.
But fruitcakes are seldom eaten. Most of these indigestible lumps of moldering mash are simply regifted. A person gets one, doesn’t know what to do with it, thinks it’s too valuable to throw away or fools herself into thinking that “someone must like them,” and so hands it off to an unfortunate soul that she neither cares about nor respects, usually with a little handwritten message that says, “I baked this cake using my grandmother’s favorite recipe. Merry Christmas!”
And in fact, that miserable young wife in Hartlepoole wrote just such a note: “I made this for ye in mine grand dame’s favourite manner. May ye be of goode cheere upon this, the Holiest of Days!”
So she wrote the note, set the fruitcake into a cloth bag to cool, and then went out on her back porch to watch the sunset. She had only just taken her seat when her neighbor’s black cat came loping across the lawn with a nice fat mouse in its jaws. The mouse was obviously still alive, for its little feet were kicking, and it squeaked in terror. The woman knew that the cat liked to torment mice before it killed them, and so she decided to take action.
“Naughty cat!” the woman scolded, reaching over and grabbing the cat’s tail. “Spew ye that mouse out! Spew it, or the devil’ll have ye!”
Just then, an elderly monk happened to be walking down the lane, herding a little lost lamb with his shepherd’s crook. He spotted the woman talking to the cat, heard her mention the devil, and immediately raised a mob and had the poor young wife put on trial for witchcraft—for in those days, it was believed that only a witch would talk to a black cat.
In the course of the trial, the woman was tied to a stone and was to be thrown into the ocean. If she sank, it was a sign that she was innocent and could be properly mourned. If she floated, it was a sign that she was a witch and would then be suitably hanged.
So the city’s executioner (really just the butcher doing double duty, looking very grim and medieval in his black hood), tied a millstone about her neck and prepared to shove her off the city docks, into the ocean.
“Ye are all idiots,” the housewife shouted, “and someday the world will know it!”
The townsfolk all “oohed” and “aahed” at the pronouncement, for it sounded like a witch’s curse. Then the housewife fainted, and the executioner shoved her and the millstone into the water.
She sank, of course, and the townsfolk were left to mourn.
But little did they realize that this woman did indeed have magical powers, and it was in that very same village that the curse took effect. It was many years later when it happened. In 1798, the French madman Napoleon was on the march, trying to take over the world, when a huge storm arose and crashed one of his warships onto the rocks near Hartlepoole.
The sole survivor of that horrible wreck was an ape that had been captured in Africa and had been taken as a pet by the captain. The ape swam to shore, and the townsfolk caught it.
No one in the village had ever seen a Frenchman, so they mistook the poor ape as a French spy, and the townsfolk put it on trial. The ape refused to answer any questions. When put on the witness stand, it would do nothing but make rude noises. Then it snatched away the judge’s white powdered wig and raced around the courtroom, terrifying the public.
So the ape was hanged, and the village of Hartlepoole gained such a reputation for its stupidity that for the next two hundred years it became home to the world-renowned International Village Idiots’ Convention, a place where morons and imbeciles of all ilk could meet, frolic, exchange dumb ideas, and perhaps find some like-minded halfwit to marry.
But as for the fruitcake—well, when the young wife was hanged, her grieving husband came home that night and found it with the note, so he gave it to his mother.
She wisely refused to eat it, and regifted it—along with the handwritten note—to a friend, who placed it in her cupboard as a deterrent to rats.
The following Christmas, the friend bestowed it upon a neighbor, who sent it to the far side of England to a sister who didn’t want it either.
In fact, it was just that fruitcake’s good fortune that for 666 years it got palmed off from one unloved neighbor to the next, until at the very last it was given to a young movie producer in Hollywood, along with the yellowed parchment note that said, “I made this for ye in mine grand dame’s favourite manner. May ye be of goode cheere upon this, the Holiest of Days!”
The movie producer, who prided himself on always recognizing a piece of dreck when he saw it, took one whiff of the mummified fruitcake and said, “This stinks!” and hurled it into his wastebasket.
The fruitcake made it to a landfill, where not a fly dared land upon it.
And yet, upon that very night, a miracle occurred in the fruitcake. You see, it had a bit of dried fig in it,
and a few days earlier the fig had spontaneously formed a young maggot, just as in Aristotle’s day . . .
The maggot had grown enormous and bloated, and eventually a shell hardened around it as it reached the pupa phase of its existence.
That night, while Benjamin Ravenspell dared dream of fame and sat with his mouse friends scarfing down pizza, the hardened crust of the pupa shattered.
That night, while reporters gathered around Ben’s house, something odd emerged—a fly as large as a crow.
It crept out of its shell and spent long moments just shivering, silently regarding the cold stars above and the lights of jet planes that roared overhead.
It climbed to the top of a junk pile, making its way over a patch of dried roses and through the remains of a broken television. As it dragged itself up the pile, it stopped to collect odd items along the way: a tube of used lipstick, some old enamel paint, a bit of eyeliner, and a child’s charm bracelet.
At last its bloated body came to rest upon the ruins of an old fishing boat, one that seemed now to be sailing upon a sea of rubbish.
There the fly sat, quivering, and shaking its wings as they began to harden.
She was a huge fly, and in the cool starlight she cast a terrifying spell. She took all of her youth and bestowed it upon the bracelet, so that she could always keep it with her.
The bracelet was white, with odd little things—plastic four-leafed clovers, sailing ships, and bears’ teeth—dangling from it. She put the bracelet around her neck, the elastic pulled tight.
Afterward, she used a bit of burnished chrome as a mirror and began to apply the make-up.
The great fly was a bright iridescent green in color, and its faceted red eyes shone like rubies.
A little eyeliner helped bring out the color of those eyes, making them as red as blood.
The sensory hairs around her mandibles stood up like horns. She used mascara to thicken these.
Freaky Fly Day Page 2
