Misspelled

by Julie E. Czerneda

  Robertson gazed at him in amazement, then removed a little book from his back pocket. Bob squinted and made out the title, Gnomic Rules of Gowf. The gnome thumbed through the pages, periodically pausing to read a passage. Meanwhile, the bogey man continued to loom overhead, and the executioner stood poised to slash Susan’s throat. All was silence, except for the occasional, ‘‘Hmmm . . .’’ from Robertson.

  ‘‘Well?’’ Bob demanded.

  The gnome looked up and quirked an eyebrow. ‘‘I cannot deny it. You’ve put the birdie back in the hole, which constitutes an additional stroke. You have caught the bogey.’’

  The shadow above shrieked and dissipated like smoke. The executioner released Susan and walked off into the fog, his head hanging glumly. The fog, too, began to lift, revealing a wide open desert sky. Susan dashed across the green—her high heels spiking into the delicate turf—and threw herself into Bob’s arms.

  ‘‘Thank you, thank you, thank you!’’ She kissed him all over his face.

  This was more like it, Bob thought, holding her body against his. Maybe they’d spend the night making those kids he wanted.

  Robertson cleared his throat.

  ‘‘What?’’ Bob snapped.

  ‘‘If you take my advice,’’ the gnome said, ‘‘you should probably lay off Granny Dunn’s spell. You’ve made the bogey man very unhappy.’’

  ‘‘That shouldn’t be a problem.’’ Bob was determined from here on out to improve his game with practice—not spells. He would rely only on his own skill to win. When he thought about it, wasn’t that the message of the bogey man chant? To catch the bogey man with skill?

  Robertson nodded. ‘‘I’m off to the clubhouse if you care to join me.’’ He touched the tip of his nose and vanished.

  ‘‘Thank God that’s over,’’ Bob said. Then he asked Susan, ‘‘Shall we go to my hotel?’’

  She pushed away from him.

  ‘‘What’s wrong?’’

  ‘‘I’m sorry, honey, but I still want a divorce.’’

  ‘‘What? But I rescued you. I thought—’’

  She looked down. ‘‘Believe me, I’m grateful, but . . . Well, there’s another man. I’m in love with someone else.’’

  The gallery booed. Bob glared at them. ‘‘Don’t you people have somewhere else you need to be?’’ When they began to straggle off, he turned back to Susan. ‘‘Another man? Who?’’

  She swallowed nervously. ‘‘Ira.’’

  ‘‘My agent? You’re in love with my agent?’’

  She nodded.

  ‘‘Oh, for godsake.’’ He walked off the green, leaving Susan standing there all alone. ‘‘My agent,’’ he muttered. A double betrayal.

  Manuel fell in beside him and they strode down the fairway together. ‘‘What now?’’

  ‘‘Well, if we can find that castle, I’m up for some scotch.’’

  Manuel grinned. ‘‘And free wings!’’

  ‘‘Albatross wings, no doubt,’’ Bob said, plucking feathers off himself.

  ‘‘Well, you stuffed your first bird,’’ Manuel replied.

  "S’pose I did. Hey, man, I didn’t know you wore a rug!’’

  ‘‘Well, you know . . .’’

  And the triumphant golfer and his loyal caddie strode down the fairway beneath the sunset sky, laughing and chatting about the day’s win.

  Narrator: There goes the great golf pro, Bob MacDuff. He might have misspelled, but he managed to escape the consequences. Would we could all be so lucky.

  KRISTEN BRITAIN is the author of the bestselling Green Rider series. She grew up in New York state next to a golf course, where she was forced to play at a tender age, despite the fact that she preferred riding horses. She was even hit by a golf ball once. Such childhood trauma naturally provided ample fodder for ‘‘Chafing the Bogey Man.’’ Actually, it may explain a lot . . . In any case, Kristen survived childhood to earn a degree in film production, with a writing minor, and served many years as a national park ranger, working in a variety of natural and historical settings, from high on the Continental Divide to three hundred feet below the surface of the earth. Currently she lives on an island in Maine, where she continues to work on the fourth book in the Green Rider series.

  A Perfect Circle

  Kent Pollard

  Narrator: Worlds within worlds. Many of us willingly imagine another reality. But would we dare change our own?

  Thorn’s eyes filled with a wild intensity as he neared completion of the carefully sketched pentagram that filled his casting room to the edges. He coughed from the dust of his chalk, then muttered, ‘‘With a perfect circle, I could do anything.’’ He eyed his latest marks critically before leaning forward to add some final touches. His life’s work, drawn and redrawn hundreds, maybe thousands of times in his career, he completed the design without ever once glancing at walls that he knew without looking were only inches behind him. He paused again, scanning over his final line carefully, then lifted his hand and jerked his arm back to shake aside the weight of the thick, burgundy velvet that hung at his wrist and threatened to erase his careful work. As he leaned forward and made the final sketch marks to smooth out the circle, his every move reflected the confidence and precision that came with decades of practice. When at last he stood, it was with a groan that betrayed the time he had spent at the task.

  He stretched and twisted a couple of times to ease the stiffness in his aging muscles, then stepped back into the corner to eye his work critically. Every tiny variation in the work glared like a searchlight to his practiced eyes. There, the barest hint of a curve in one of the straight lines, here a stroke a hair thicker than the one beside it. There were a handful of minute imperfections that a lesser man would have brushed off had he been capable of noticing them. But Thorn wasn’t a lesser man; he was the best, the best in the world, and the left side of his mouth twisted upward with irritation. He made a sound that could only be called a growl, then leaned against the wall and folded his arms across his chest. He grunted once. ‘‘Hmph!’’

  He took a moment to let his abused body relax before stepping once more into the pentagram to correct those final imperfections. Careful not to let the heavy robes mar the design, he again cursed inwardly at their weight and encumbrance. He switched colors of chalk; then some precise brushing with his finger removed the outside of the curve that didn’t belong. That accomplished, he gently made a new stroke to the inside of the line to straighten it. His voice was hoarse with strain as he whispered to himself. ‘‘Perfect. Must be perfect. Absolutely flawless.’’ Retouches complete, he again stepped back into the corner to study his work.

  His eyes narrowed and a vein throbbed at his temple as he studied the circle intently. Without thinking, he brought his left hand up and gently brushed the knuckle of his index finger against his upper lip several times; then he turned his thumb sideways and began to scrape an incisor over the end of his thumbnail. The grating of tooth on nail sent a soothing vibration through his skull that helped him focus on the pattern. After a moment of silent thought, he dropped his hands to clasp them behind his back, then began pacing around the edge of the circle. His eyes remained narrow and tightly focused on the perimeter, watching for something, something that he hoped wouldn’t, but knew would, appear at any second.

  There, he froze. A tiny distortion had appeared suddenly in the perimeter circle. He rocked back half a step, and it was gone again. Forward and it reappeared. Without thinking, he brought his left hand up and began working on the thumbnail again as he considered the problem. The flaw was not there, and then it was there. He knew from experience that if he moved forward, it would go away, but another would appear elsewhere. The twitch in his left eye finally brought him out of his contemplation. For a second, he felt like crying with frustration. It was as though Hell were toying with him, always keeping his ultimate success just beyond his reach.

  He shook his head and opened his eyes fully. ‘‘Crying? ’’ he said to the
empty room. ‘‘What in the names of the Nine Princesses of Hell is wrong with me today?’’ He gestured angrily at the flaw in the circle, and a globe of energy screamed out of his hand to burst against the stone. Oddly enough, when the flame and smoke cleared, the flaw was gone. He squinted angrily at the spot then rocked back, still no flaw. Forward again. ‘‘Satan’s Spawn!’’ he screamed as the flaw reappeared.

  He stormed around the circle now, blasting each flaw, as it appeared, grunting in satisfaction as the circle smoothed with each blast. When he got back to the beginning, the first flaw appeared, exactly where it always did. Thorn stood, dumbfounded for a moment, then with a strangled gurgle of rage, he let loose all of his offensive spells in one surge, determined to bring the castle down around himself so he could start again from the beginning.

  A technician jerked back from the screen with an astonished look. ‘‘Shit! I think Thorn just tried to commit suicide.’’

  ‘‘What?’’

  ‘‘I’m not kidding, he just blew the top off his castle. There’s definitely a problem with the new Artificial Intelligence routines.’’

  ‘‘Well reset him quick, there’s a group of player characters headed his way.’’

  ‘‘I still think we should take the new software offline for more testing’’

  ‘‘And I still think you’re nuts. The big expansion won’t work without them, and if the expansion isn’t online before the shareholders meeting tomorrow, we might as well be looking for work now. Just reset him. We need things running smoothly for the demo at the party tonight.’’

  ‘‘I’ll reset him, but I’m not sure it’s going to help in the end; the software is still flaky.’’

  ‘‘It’ll be fine. But speaking of flaky, how’s the rumor working out?’’

  ‘‘That’s the one thing that is working. Half the Web is on fire with news that Thorn has the key to the new expansion area. We only leaked it this morning and there’s already about a hundred groups heading for his castle. Everyone wants to be the first to get into the new area.’’

  ‘‘Just make sure Thorn is working when they get there.’’

  Thorn walked into his summoning room after a good night’s rest, then stopped dead. Night’s rest? That wasn’t right. He looked around in astonishment. He’d expected to reanimate in the middle of ruins where he could clear the rubble and conjure a new castle that would better fit his current needs. Instead he found himself in the exact same room, with no sign of any of the damage he’d just done.

  When he saw the imperfect summoning pentagram he’d just destroyed, he almost choked with rage. He turned red and prepared to try something more extreme, when, through one of the many narrow slit windows in the room, he noticed a group of people climbing the path up his mountain. ‘‘Bloody peasants! Can’t the wretched thieves and criminals leave me alone for one minute?’’

  He pursed his lips in frustration at the flawed circle. ‘‘Blasted flaws! Still no greater daemon. Nothing that might escape the imperfect pentagram.’’ He sized up the trespassers from a distance, letting the magic flow through them and back to him to tell how strong they would be. ‘‘Fine then, something from the Eighth Circle. Yes, Draxonerring should be perfect.’’ He moved about the circle, setting a bloodred candle just inside each of the star’s five points. A second walk and he placed a purple-black candle at the very tip of each point, where it intersected the circle. Now he stood with arms raised above his head and gathered the power to him. With a flick of his wrists, ten sparks burst from his hands and raced to light each of the ten candles simultaneously. That done, he walked the circle three more times, sealing it with chants and sprinkles of a powder made of herbs and organs that he had dried for twenty-seven days and then crushed until it was fine as dust. As he passed each pair of candles, he tossed an extra handful of the powder into the red one, and a puff of flame yielded a vile smelling cloud of purple smoke. By the end of his third walk, the room smelled like a cross between a slaughterhouse and a burning latrine, but Thorn was smiling as he felt the level of power rising around him. ‘‘Try to take what’s mine, will you?’’ he mumbled. ‘‘Oh, do I have a surprise for you.’’

  He stood in one corner and raised his hands before him, then began to chant.

  ‘‘Loathsome smoke of darkest night,

  Bring me powers of ancient might.

  From the abyss a servant bring,

  By name I call it Darxenerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrroverseer Ibim 5666.’’

  Thorn’s face betrayed his shock at the gibberish that had stuttered from his own mouth. Nevertheless, with the requisite, and irritating, flash of smoke, the daemon appeared. Thorn waved the stinking cloud away from his face until it had cleared sufficiently to see what manner of daemon he had summoned. It was short, very short for a powerful daemon, and it appeared unlike any daemon he’d summoned before. There were no horns, no eyes, no mouth, no apparent head at all that he could see. No torso either or limbs. In fact, it appeared to be nothing more than a block of metal.

  A perfectly formed gray box, less than two feet high, perhaps as wide, but barely half a foot thick, with color markings in a few spots and some glyph tattoos on the front. An interesting block, true, but a block of metal nevertheless. The only thing that broke the shape was its tail, or rather a number of small tails in assorted colors and thicknesses coming out of the back. But rather than ending in wicked-looking spikes or barbed hooks, they all seemed to melt away into transparency a few inches from the body, as though they still extended back into the abyss whence the daemon had come.

  Thorn would have liked to ponder the nature of this creature for a time, but he was not so reckless as to leave a half-bound daemon waiting. ‘‘By the fire that burns and flesh that cooks, tell me your name that I may command you.’’

  ‘‘I am Overseer Ibim 5666.’’

  ‘‘From what realm of Hell do you come, Overseer Ibim?’’

  ‘‘I am not from Hell. I am a Supervisor Avatar. I exist to monitor player and nonplayer characters for problems, resetting routines that pass outside of accepted parameters.’’

  Thorn got a blank look on his face as he tried, unsuccessfully, to assimilate the daemon’s mix of human speech and infernal tongue. After a moment, he reached a decision. He gestured out the window at the people climbing the hill and said, ‘‘It matters not what manner of daemon you are or what language you speak, so long as you can understand me. Overseer Ibim 5666, you are mine to command. I need you to protect me from the people outside. They are after my property, and I want you to stop them.’’

  ‘‘Interacting with player characters who are following the rules is not within my operating parameters.’’

  Thorn turned red with anger. ‘‘Overseer Ibim 5666, I order you to eliminate the trespassers outside my castle.’’

  ‘‘At your command.’’

  Thorn waited for the avatar to begin acting, but shortly it became clear the daemon wasn’t going anywhere. ‘‘Well?’’

  ‘‘The trespassers are gone, Thorn.’’

  The mage turned to look out the slit window. Sure enough, the adventurers were no longer climbing his mountain. He turned back to the daemon with a confused look. ‘‘That was—fast. What did you do to them?’’

  ‘‘I sent them back to their starting point in Caer Llynn Dhu, the city of heroes.’’

  ‘‘Just like that? But you cast no spell. You did nothing.’’

  ‘‘I reset them to their chosen start point.’’

  Thorn struggled to understand the daemon’s speech. ‘‘Do you mean they’re not dead?’’

  ‘‘That is correct, Thorn’’

  ‘‘Well what in the hell good is that?’’

  ‘‘I don’t understand your reference. Please restate.’’

  ‘‘What?’’

  ‘‘Yes, what?’’

  Thorn closed his eyes and breathed in deeply, once, twice, a third time. He felt more relaxed when he opened his eyes again. ‘‘Overseer. If yo
u simply send the trespassers away, they’ll just come back again. I need you to kill them, to obliterate them. To destroy them so finally that they will never return.’’

  ‘‘I’m not able to kill player characters, Thorn. The most direct control I can exert over them is to reset them to their designated resurrection point if required. The only other thing I could do is generate a message to tech support to investigate a ban of the PC for suspicion of cheating. If it will more correctly satisfy your order, I can do so, although I see no evidence of that.’’

  Thorn seemed completely bewildered. ‘‘Tech support? Is it the gods of Hell you speak of? You have the ability to communicate directly with the gods?’’

  ‘‘There are no gods within the confines of the game, Thorn. Whether there really are gods or not in general remains a mystery, even to those who created us. Though the actions of the support technicians may appear to you as though they are gods, they are simply glorified phone answerers, with well cross-indexed lists of responses and remedies.’’

  Thorn was holding his head and rocking back and forth now. ‘‘Gibberish, it’s all gibberish. You don’t understand, Overseer. I am the most powerful evil magic user in the world. I can’t simply send trespassers away when I catch them. They’ll think I’m getting soft, and they’ll be back in droves. I’ll be overrun with every peasant and cutpurse on the planet out to make a name for themselves. And they’ll all be walking out of the castle with the treasure I’ve spent a lifetime accumulating. I need to deal with interlopers swiftly and mercilessly. That’s how I got where I am, and that’s how I’ll stay here. I need you to kill them. What kind of daemon are you, that you can’t even kill a few people for your evil master?’’

  ‘‘Well, for now that’s not really a problem. Until the rest of the expansion pack is brought online in about twenty hours, no one is allowed to kill you anyway, since one of the magic items in your treasure room is the key to entering the new game continent. Which, by the way, is common speculation on the net, so in a couple of days, it won’t matter how ruthless you are about killing people, there will be player characters all over this castle looking to wipe you out to get at your treasure room.