Under My Hat: Tales from the Cauldron

by Jonathan Strahan

  “She thinks she’s dreaming,” said the kid.

  Rose rolled her eyes and muttered, “God, just once give me a little originality.”

  “No,” I said. “I have dreamed this dream before. Lots of times, and I always wake up.”

  “Not this time,” said Rose impatiently. “Can we skip this part? It is unbelievably tedious how difficult adults find it to believe in anything but death and income tax. How about you pretend to believe this is not a dream for a bit, so I can get on with the introductory lecture. But before that, the child has to be returned to the plane.”

  “I want to stay with her,” said the kid.

  “You might survive,” Rose told her. “Not everyone will die.”

  “I don’t care,” said the kid mutinously. “I don’t want to go back.”

  “I’m afraid it is not up to you,” said the old woman repressively. She held out a hand to the dog. “Jasper?” He padded closer and she laid a hand on the back of his head. Then she let out a tch and looked annoyed. “Land sakes, I am so rattled by all of this that I am forgetting myself.” She held out her hand to me. “Take my hand. Since you brought her here, I need to be in contact to send her back.”

  “No,” I said. The kid and the woman and the dog stared at me. I would have stared at myself if I could have. I had not meant to speak the word aloud. But now that it was spoken, I felt stubborn. “No,” I said again.

  “You cannot proceed with this child,” said Rose.

  “Proceed where?” I asked.

  “With the testing,” Rose snapped. She gave a huffy sigh. “Look, you have been brought here to be tested because you have a certain untapped potential and your life is about to end. A quest has been assigned you, which will reveal if you are able to make use of your abilities. If you are, you will become one of us.

  If you fail, you will be returned to the plane. There is no place in any of this for a child.”

  “If this is real, then sending her back means she will die,” I said, more for the sake of argument than because I was able to believe what I was saying.

  “People die every day. Children die every day. Now, if you’d had the sense to bring an animal with you, it would have been a whole different thing. You could have taken it as your familiar. But there is no place for a child here.”

  “A familiar?” I said.

  “As in a witch’s familiar,” said Rose brusquely. “A cat is traditional, but owls, snakes, and dogs are also common choices. Even a goat or the odd frog has been used. Your choice.”

  “All right, I choose the kid as my familiar,” I said, thinking, Did she say witch?

  For the first time Rose looked taken aback. “You cannot take a child as a familiar!” She sounded shocked. “A familiar is a resource to be drawn on to increase and focus power, and sometimes to be sacrificed. Would you use a child so?”

  “Better than putting her back in a plane that is about to crash,” I said.

  “I want to stay with her,” said the kid.

  I looked at her and felt a moment of unease, but then sanity reasserted itself. This whole thing was a dream, and soon I would wake up from it. Insisting on not putting the kid back in the plane was just pigheadedness because I hated being told what to do.

  “It is wrong,” Rose insisted, an edge of worry creeping into her voice. “If you take this child as your familiar, there is a very high chance that you will fail your test, and if you do so, you will face a horrible death in the plane.”

  “Don’t hold back,” I said.

  “This is no time for jokes,” Rose told me severely.

  “I’ll take my chances,” I said flippantly. I was getting thirsty again.

  “You leave me no choice,” Rose said very coldly. “I am afraid you will regret this. Both of you will regret it. The Desolation is no place for a child.”

  “The Desolation?” I echoed.

  She spread her free hand in a gesture that made the mist swirl, and I noticed the tips of her fingers were stained green. “This is the Desolation, where you will undergo your test.”

  Rose drew herself up and again rested a hand on Jasper’s head. The Doberman fixed me with its hot brown ravenous eyes as she announced in sepulchral tones, “Your quest is to wrest the amethyst egg from the demon king, Chagrin.”

  “You have to be kidding me!” I said. It sounded like the description of a bad role-playing game.

  Rose gave me a reproving look. “Your levity is inappropriate. The amethyst egg was stolen from one of us long ago by the demon king. It has great power, and Chagrin will not easily give it up. Take the child’s hands if you are truly resolved to bind her to you as your familiar.”

  Despite the gumboots and ink-stained fingers, the look on her face was so solemn that it gave me pause. I had to remind myself that Rose the witch and her familiar, Jasper the Doberman, had been jerry-built by my subconscious.

  “Go for it,” I told Rose, holding my other hand out to the kid. She took it, looking nervous but determined.

  The witch pursed her lips and lifted her free hand. I was about to make some crack about a wand and a puff of purple smoke, but to my astonishment I saw that greenish gas was seeping from the green tips of her fingers. Maybe not ink-stained after all, I thought, trying for inward humor. I reminded myself that this was a dream, and in dreams all manner of weird stuff could happen. The trouble was, the longer the dream went on, the less it felt like a dream.

  I watched the green gas detach itself from Rose’s fingers and wind together in a sort of gauzy cord that snaked down to weave the sign of infinity around our clasped hands. I felt it as a cold wind around my wrist, and the kid, whose pointy little face was lit by a greenish glow that made her look sick, had her eyes fixed on the luminous bond.

  “Will you bind this child to you?” Rose asked.

  I could barely hear her over the sudden howling of a wind impossibly blowing up from the ground through the circle formed by our bodies and clasped hands, but I said I would and just like that the wind died. The fog about us billowed slowly, untouched by the freakish wind from the earth. The silence that followed felt hollow and portentous. I released the kid’s hands and looked at the old woman.

  “Until death do you part,” she said grimly. Beside her, Jasper suddenly yawned hugely, giving me a gruesome view of his ivory fangs and red throat. Rose went on. “You had better get moving. The demon’s keep is not far, but it will take you time to find the amethyst egg and deal with him. Here, you will need this.” She held something out to me, and automatically I stretched out my hand. She put an eyeball into it. The eyeball stared at me. “It will enable us to keep an eye on your progress, excuse the pun. You have until the Dreadful Dawn. If you have not got the amethyst egg by then, you will be deemed to have failed.”

  “What’s so dreadful about the dawn?” I asked, still staring down at the eyeball. It felt warm in my palm, and the thought of putting it into my pocket made me feel nauseous.

  “I imagine it is because those who fail know they have done so when the sun rises over the Desolation. Or maybe it’s because of the harpies that will come seeking meat when day dawns. You can’t die here, of course, though you can suffer excruciating pain. Your familiar, however, can suffer pain and die, in which event you may request another. Now get moving.”

  Rose added brusquely, “My advice is not to waste time trying to decide if this is real or not. If you must do that, do it and walk at the same time. Try to learn how to draw on the energy of your familiar as you go.”

  “How do I know where to go?” I asked.

  “Use your familiar,” Rose said. “I linked her to the amethyst egg when I bound her to you.” With that, Rose turned and marched away, Jasper at her heel.

  “Hey!” I protested, but she neither turned nor responded. “Wonderful,” I muttered after the murk had swallowed her and the dog up. “Welcome to the Twilight Zone.”

  “The amethyst egg is that way,” said the kid, pointing with one hand and liftin
g the other to her heart as if she was making an oath. She set off eagerly, veering left from the direction taken by Rose and Jasper, and I followed her lead, trying to decide if I was really starting to believe in what was happening and what this might mean in terms of my mental health. The only other alternative was that there had been a plane crash and I was in a coma, trapped in a new variation of a recurring dream, in which case it probably didn’t matter much what I did. Just the same, I wished I had asked a few more questions about how I was to find the amethyst egg in the Demon’s Keep, whatever a keep was, and steal it. Rose hadn’t mentioned stealing, but they never call it that in those dumb fat fantasies geeks read, either, where a kitchen boy is sent to get a magic cup or sword from some wizard.

  “I’m thirsty,” said the kid. “Can you magic me an orange juice?”

  I stared at her. “Are you nuts? I’m not a witch, and this is a dream.”

  “You could do what she did with the dog,” the kid went on. “It must have been her familiar.” She touched her shoulder.

  I sighed. “I could try,” I said, to shut her up. I rested a hand on her shoulder and visualized an orange juice. Nothing happened. I felt like an idiot.

  “Maybe you have to chant what you want,” suggested the kid after a minute. “Say some Words of Power.” I swear there were capitals in her tone.

  “I don’t know any words of power, unless you mean swear words, and I don’t say those aloud,” I said through gritted teeth. I took a deep breath and intoned, “We want some fresh-squeezed cold orange juice!” Just for good measure, I visualized the last glass of orange juice I had got from the juice bar in the food court near my apartment.

  A tray appeared on the ground at the kid’s feet, exactly as I had imagined, with a glass jug of orange juice cold enough to cause beads of water to form on the outside of the jug, and two glasses with the little curly crest of Juice Bar.

  “Oh boy,” said the kid.

  I drew a long breath and then bent down and poured until both glasses were full to the brim. I stood up and handed one to the kid, my mouth watering in anticipation of my own juice. Then I saw she was white to the lips, her eyes wide and dark.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  “I … it hurt,” she whispered in a thready voice. I noticed she was pressing her free hand to her heart again.

  I set my own glass down and guided the glass of juice the kid held to her lips. I made her drink the lot and then I poured the contents of my glass into hers and handed it back to her. I watched her drink and was relieved to see that some of the color had come back into her cheeks.

  “You didn’t have any,” she said, pointing to the empty jug.

  “I don’t like orange juice,” I lied. I was not sure what to do with the tray and the jug and glasses. It felt wrong just leaving them there, but it would be idiotic to carry them with us. I might have tried wishing them away, but I was uneasy at the thought of what that might do to the kid. Clearly summoning the juice had drained her, and it made me remember uneasily what Rose had said about her not being a good choice as a familiar. I had insisted because I had not liked the thought of consigning her to a crashing plane, even if it was just a dream, but now it struck me that Rose might have been telling the truth when she said the Desolation was no place for a kid.

  “That way,” she said, pointing. It seemed to me she was pointing in a different direction than before, and I said so. “I can feel it,” she said wanly, and again her hand went to her chest.

  “Okay,” I said uneasily.

  She set off and I followed, the feeling of unease beginning to edge into actual fear. What the hell had I got myself into? Was this really real?

  The kid looked over her shoulder at me. “I can feel it when you have doubts,” she said. “It makes it hard for me to feel where to go. It’s like the buzzing on a radio when you can’t get the station.” She went on without waiting for me to respond.

  That was downright creepy, I thought, but I forced myself to follow and tried not to think about anything, to avoid sending her white noise. We had walked maybe half an hour across a stony, broken terrain when the kid stopped, her eyes widening. The look on her face scared me, but I could see nothing in the thick murky fog.

  Then the kid slipped her hand into mine.

  Little by little the mist thinned, and I saw a grotesque edifice, part medieval dun, part oil refinery, surrounded by what looked for all the world like a moat. The tower had turrets and kill holes and a cupola and arched doors but also rows of round windows with metal rims and rivets and great wide metal chimneys banded in white, freckled with rust, and belching steam or blue-tinged flame. Several pipes ran flaccidly from the base of one of the towers to disgorge green sludge into the moat that surrounded the tower. The water was as black and greasy-looking as crankcase oil. There was a stone staircase that rose and arched high over the moat, but instead of going to the ground on the other side, the steps wove around and around in a coy spiral that ended in a little lookout above the castle like a crow’s nest on a pirate ship. I could not see anything holding the thing up except spars of smaller steps, which arched like flying buttresses from the main stair to doors at different levels of the keep.

  I drew my hand from the kid’s grasp. “You’d better wait here,” I said.

  “But the witch said—”

  “She said a lot of things,” I agreed. “The question is, was she telling the truth about any of them? I mean, how many stories did you ever read where the witch is the good guy? Not too many, right? And maybe there’s a reason for that. Maybe witches don’t come in good.”

  “In stories, something bad always happens when people separate,” she countered. “Besides, you need me to find the egg.” I had forgotten that. As we set off again, the kid gave me the same sympathetic look she had given me when she had asked on the plane if I was afraid. Then she added, “I can feel it, but there is something with it, too. Something slimy and full of hate. Maybe it is the demon Chagrin.”

  “Maybe,” I said, wondering why ordinary names were never good enough for the bad guys. They couldn’t be Harold or Mr. Jones, though at least Chagrin was better than Bloodsucker or Ripper. If its name defined it, then bad temper I could deal with. “So where is the egg?” I asked. “Up in the belfry or down in the dungeon?”

  The kid knitted her smooth brow and then shrugged apologetically, saying she couldn’t feel how the passages went inside the castle. “We need to get closer.”

  We went to the bottom of the steps. They were stone, solidly mortared together hundreds of years ago, but they were ancient and crumbling now and they would be on a condemned list if there were any sort of sensible authority here. They would probably crack and fall the first time anyone set foot on them. In fact, what if they had been designed to do exactly that? That would be a clever way for a demon to deal with unwanted visitors.

  “We have to go in,” said the kid.

  “Fine,” I snapped, humiliated that a perfectly reasonable response to this madness should feel like cowardice. I began to mount the steps, and the kid followed in my wake. When we passed over the moat, I saw that the gelid black liquid below was quivering and sending up hungry little wavelets. Bubbles broke the surface, and when one floated free and burst close by I heard the distinct sound of a belch.

  “I think it’s alive,” the kid said.

  I pretended not to hear, but I did not breathe again until we had cleared the moat.

  “How are we supposed to steal this thing without the demon king stopping us?” I muttered.

  “He might be asleep,” said the kid, which made me think of Jack the giant-killer creeping around the sleeping giant until the smell of an Englishman woke him. Fee-fi-fo-fum, I thought cheerlessly, wishing I were American because then I would have a .44 Magnum or a Colt or even some sort of baby pistol in a clutch bag. Instead I didn’t even have the can of pepper spray I usually had in my purse because you were not allowed to carry any sort of aerosol onto a plane.
I didn’t even have nail scissors. What I did have was a sudden wild desire to laugh hysterically.

  By the time we reached the first spar of steps leading to the keep, I was panting hard and seeing little bursts of light before my eyes. I have to get more exercise when this is over, I thought, and then winced at my idiocy. I looked back at the kid, who was not even breathing hard, and asked if she could feel where the amethyst egg was now. I had no idea what we were going to do when we found it. I kept hoping a brilliant plan would occur to me, but so far all I could imagine was racing in, grabbing the thing, and running out.

  “I think something is watching us,” the kid said. “Out of those windows.” She nodded toward a row of portholes on the level of the steps. The first spar of narrow steps ran down to a heavy-looking door of dark wood just above them. I took a quick look at the windows but saw only darkness behind dusty glass. I told myself the kid had got spooked and had imagined eyes the way kids do.

  As we approached the hinged wooden door at the end of the spar of steps, it swung open to reveal darkness so complete it looked like a solid wall. Maybe it is, I thought. I licked my lips and stepped into the darkness.

  I found myself in my own kitchen, only the furnishings and crockery sitting on the benches and in the dish drainer were those my mother had used when I had been a child. I heard a footfall and turned to find her coming toward me. It startled me how obese she was. She had a baking tray loaded with freshly baked muffins.

  “Yummy muffins for my baby,” she sang in her wheedling little-girl voice.

  “I’m not hungry,” I said. The words were out before I could stop myself, because all of a sudden I was remembering this day.

  Tears filled her eyes, and the smile, painted in shiny coral-pink lipstick to match her coral-pink fingernails, wobbled. “So Mama made these all for nothing, did she? She might as well throw them in the rubbish, then. Doesn’t matter that the ingredients cost money, does it? Mama’s little girl doesn’t have to eat them if she doesn’t want.”

  “Please, Mama, I just meant I have to go to the library now,” I said. “I can have one later.”