Misspelled

by Julie E. Czerneda

  Tar bottled up huge and black like an oversized ink spot.

  ‘‘Losing my marbles. How could I forget to close the door twice in one month?’’

  Rainy closed the door and dropped into her desk chair to open her Worlds of Fantasy check. The magazine editor had loved her story ‘‘Escape Claws.’’ But no check slipped out of the envelope, only a folded letter.

  Ms. Petrov: We were dismayed to learn that your story was plagiarized . . .

  Plagiarized? Impossible. ‘‘Escape Claws’’ was her best story, feverishly hammered out after the quirky character came to her in a midnight flash. Every word was hers!

  You should be ashamed.

  Rainy’s gaze was glued to the letter. Someone else had sent ‘‘Escape Claws’’ to Worlds of Fantasy under another name? Who would—or could—do that? Of course. All those times Ros Bailey kindly dropped off or picked up the mail. No wonder she grabbed for Rainy’s envelope at the post office.

  Tears of anger stung her eyes. Damnation! Rainy leaped to her feet and reached the door in three strides. And caught herself with one hand on the knob, hearing Father Ainslie’s calm voice. Turn the other cheek. There was only one thing to do.

  Bake.

  Rainy’s hands shook with anger as she pulled down her old handwritten cookbook from its shelf above the woodstove. St. Pelag’s thrift shop bazaar was tomorrow. Two old-fashioned lemon pound cakes should keep them happy, and baking would relax her. The cookbook fell open at one of gran’s old recipes that her mum had stuffed into the back pages. Peering at the faded spider-track writing, she could almost see Gran or Great-gran dipping her straight-nib pen to dash off a list of ingredients.

  ‘‘Take one right bucket of fresh nettles and one right bucket of spring water that never saw light of day nor touch of iron. Stir in two handfuls of hawthorn wood ashes burnt at the full of the moon with righteous wrath.’’

  An unbidden smile lifted Rainy’s bleak mood. Gran had written one of her silly love potions into her cookbook. She skipped to the end. ‘‘—do your will for one moon’s waxing to waning. Let you know there be no uncalling of what be called. You may command him Thornyspine.’’

  This was no love potion, it was a summoning. A pencil scribble at the end added, ‘‘Be you pure of heart, this remedie doth settle ills and visit justice on the wicked.’’

  Rainy shook her head in amusement and leafed forward to her lemon pound cake recipe. Flour, lemons, honey . . . Humming quietly, she assembled ingredients on her sanded wood table. Tar licked a paw and eyed her doubtfully.

  By the time she slid two pans into the oven, she’d shaken off her irritation with Ros. Her kettle whistled, and she rose to fill the teapot—

  And froze, staring down.

  One footprint marred her clean kitchen floor. One pointy toe print, one heel dot. Only one person on-island wore stiletto heels—sherry suede stiletto-heel boots. At her desk, the papers she’d left neatly stacked on her shredder now looked hastily jumbled together. Rainy felt sick at the thought of anyone reading her unfinished work.

  ‘‘I need to tell her this is t-t-totally wrong,’’ Rainy told Tar.

  No, she wouldn’t. She’d stutter and blush and never get past the first sentence.

  All right. Instead she’d keep her mouth shut, send in the new dragon-and-maiden spoof and the humorous warlock story she finished yesterday. With a sigh she lifted her story file from the drawer. At least the two new stories were finished—

  Rainy stared into an empty folder. Both new stories were gone. Frantically she searched the pile on the shredder, looked under the desk, combed every drawer. Nothing.

  Were they in the mail right now to Worlds of Fantasy? ‘‘Hunting the Shy Dragon,’’ by Rosamund Bailey? ‘‘Feng Shui for Phoenix,’’ by Rosamund Bailey?

  ‘‘Settle ills and visit justice on the wicked.’’ Tempting. And cheaper than a lawyer.

  Down by her moonlit well, the nettles were springing waist-high already this year, and the water bubbled up pure from a sweetwater spring. Her old cedar-bark bailing bucket held no trace of iron, and the sun had set an hour ago. And she’d just pruned the hawthorn tree shading her door.

  Rainy didn’t pause to think. She opened the stove’s fire door and thrust the stoutest hawthorn log into the heart of the flames. Then, with Tar shadowing her heels by the light of the full moon, she gathered her other ingredients.

  By midnight, two lemon pound cakes sat cooling on her counter, and beside them seethed the horrible-looking concoction from Gran’s recipe. Might have known it wouldn’t do anything. Gran had been a good cook, but she was nutty as fruitcake. Or maybe it worked for Gran—she’d actually believed in these things—but Rainy had mixed something wrong. She retied her fuzzy blue dressing gown and eyed the fibrous brown gloop in her pottery mixing bowl.

  ‘‘Time for a walk, big boy.’’

  Tar usually frisked outside happily at night, but now he hid behind the stove, watching her from moon eyes. Rainy kicked on her gumboots, hoisted her dressing gown, and stomped out to her compost between two cedar trees. She tossed the nasty mess on her clematis cuttings and forked overtop a generous layer of last fall’s corn husks. The undergrowth nearby rustled suddenly. Raccoon. City newcomers fed the voracious pests, and they got bolder every day.

  Rainy opened the kitchen door and yelped in shock. She dropped the mixing bowl, which shattered on the fir planks. Tar screamed in raw terror and ran to cower under a chair.

  A twiggy brown manikin with fiery eyes danced on her cherry-red stovetop, lashing its crooked tail and baring its needle teeth. A strand of corn husk fell from its lumpen head and vaporized on the stovetop.

  ‘‘Thornyspine?’’

  ‘‘Dude.’’ The manikin jumped nimbly down, and the floor sizzled where it hopped from foot to foot. ‘‘Who do I smoke?’’

  Rainy almost crossed herself, but St. Pelag’s didn’t encourage such displays. ‘‘Nobody. Go away! Leave me alone. Oh, god.’’

  ‘‘Just a demon, thanks. What’s the word?’’ Its voice sounded like someone rasping slivers off rusty iron, much too loud and strident for a being smaller than a cat.

  Tar moaned unhappily and put his forepaws over his ears.

  ‘‘I can’t have some—homunculus in my house,’’ Rainy said with a feeble attempt at firmness. ‘‘Go b-b -back wherever you came from.’’

  ‘‘In thirty days—unless you want an extension. Think pizza. You order, you get.’’ Thornyspine squatted on the sizzling floor and picked its teeth with the point of its—his—tail. No fig leaf. This was definitely a male demon.

  ‘‘Get thee behind me, Satan,’’ Rainy tried desperately.

  ‘‘Don’t go calling on the boss for help, or we’re both charbroiled.’’ Thornyspine perched cross-legged on a mixing bowl shard for a few seconds, but he couldn’t sit still. He got up to stalk around her kitchen, trailing evil-smelling smoke. ‘‘Let’s deal. I can disembowel, thump, stab, slice, garrote, or impale your worst enemy. We can skip fire and flood on an island with a water shortage. Just say who.’’

  ‘‘I don’t want anyone disemboweled or stabbed!’’ Rainy wailed.

  ‘‘Chill, sister. Who’s the mark?’’

  ‘‘Nobody,’’ Rainy mumbled.

  The demon grinned wickedly. ‘‘Righteous wrath, the spell says. You drew a bead on someone, otherwise I wouldn’t be here.’’ The demon touched together his forefingers—foretwigs—and a red spark leaped between them. ‘‘Ah. Got her. Infraction eight-thirty-seven, theft of inscribed parchment, should cover computer printouts. That’s usually a flog-and-flense, but if you like I can draw and quarter her too. I’m gone. Back soonest.’’

  Thornyspine was already in the open doorway with his knobby head snuffing toward Ros Bailey’s wonderful waterfront place down in the arbutus grove. Oh, lordy. This horrible thing—she couldn’t bring herself to say demon—would be out wreaking havoc and announcing that Rainy had created it to get even with Ros. And worse
still, it would be true.

  ‘‘Hold on! Wait! Thornyspine, I command thee.’’ Quick! Think of something!

  ‘‘Yo.’’ The demon hopped on one foot, charring small cloven prints all over Rainy’s doorsill. Damn it, that was going to take scrubbing with steel wool.

  ‘‘I need to—’’ No time to hesitate. ‘‘I need to check the recipe book—I mean, spell book. I might need to add something really vicious.’’

  ‘‘You rock, girl!’’ Thornyspine sat down on the sill to groom his twigs with a flaming eye on Tar, who slunk behind the stove.

  Rainy almost dropped the old cookbook in her haste to flap pages. Back near the demon spell, she found cures for warts and itching, spells for easy childbirth, love potions, but no other demon spells.

  Living on a small island with one general store taught a person to substitute ingredients and improvise.

  ‘‘Come over here,’’ she ordered. She filled her remaining unbroken mixing bowl with tap water and set it on the counter beside her lemon pound cakes. If this was some kind of fire demon, she should be able to extinguish it.

  The demon leaped up onto the counter and eyed the bowl cautiously.

  ‘‘A tincture to intensify fear,’’ Rainy improvised. ‘‘Jump in.’’

  "Dunno, boss. Looks like H2O to me. Could be messy.’’

  ‘‘Thornyspine, I command thee.’’

  All hell broke loose, part of it anyway, when the demon jumped into the mixing bowl. Steam exploded outward and droplets of hot water shot in every direction. Tar yowled and streaked for the other room. The superheated dry bowl shattered—too bad, it was a present from John—and bowl fragments flew across the room to embed themselves in the cupboard doors and wall.

  Thornyspine sat in ruined lemon pound cake, shaking his rough head. A few soggy twigs fell on the burst cake top. ‘‘Whoa. I don’t feel so great, boss.’’

  ‘‘I was never much good at spells.’’

  ‘‘No kidding. But we’re cool. I do lessons.’’

  ‘‘One more try. Wait here, Thornyspine.’’

  Rainy flew out the door, now studded with lethal-looking pottery shards, and grabbed her clam shovel from the woodshed. She dug a bucket-sized hole in the red forest loam near the cedars, enlarged it for good measure, and dropped the shovel in the salal bush. John would have been horrified. He’d be even more horrified if he knew why. Never mind. This was a crisis.

  ‘‘Come on out,’’ she called. ‘‘Maybe this one will work.’’

  ‘‘Yo. Do your worst.’’

  Tar flinched when the demon leaped right over him in a shower of sparks.

  ‘‘Check out this root, Thornyspine. Does that look like mandrake to you?’’ Rainy pointed into the hole.

  ‘‘Smart, boss! That’s the stuff.’’ The demon jumped into the hole.

  Rainy quickly shoveled two big shovelfuls of earth onto him.

  ‘‘Hey! Boss! I can’t see!’’ a muffled voice protested.

  The soil tamped down nicely under her red-soled gumboot, and then she dropped a rock on top of the mound. Now she needed to keep him down there. But how? Maybe a crucifix. ’Scuse me, Father, I just need to borrow the altar cross for a while. There’s this demon I need to exorcise . . . Maybe not. Oaken stake? Hawthorn flowers? Silver bullet?

  Rainy waited a few minutes, but there was no motion from the fresh pile of dirt. Feeling only slightly remorseful, she leaned the shovel in the woodshed and headed for her cottage. Time to get some sleep.

  A weirdly elongated head popped up between the parsley and sage outside her kitchen door. A cutworm wriggled on his forehead—so that was why the sage was dying—and molten tears guttered down from his flaming eyes. Thornyspine stretched until he squirted right out of the soil, then adjusted back to his normal dimensions.

  Normal. Rainy had started to think a demon in her parsley was normal.

  Thornyspine staggered to the smoldering welcome mat and sat head in hands, quivering and dripping twigs. ‘‘You called me,’’ he said plaintively. ‘‘Now you try to off me like those other dudes. Angels. Demi-gods. I was like totally bored and wanted to help so bad and hey, I finally got the call . . .’’ The small demon snuffled, then broke down completely in heart-broken sobs. From under a salal, Tar moaned in harmony, and a raccoon in her compost heap gave a startled growl and fled.

  Rainy felt terrible for causing such grief. But how do you comfort a fire demon? She reached to pat the small miserable creature on the shoulder as he sat steaming and hissing on her stoop, but Thornyspine’s intense heat drove off her good intentions. Damnation. If Sparr Island’s gossip mill got wind of this, her parishioners would wear a groove down Church Road tattling to the priest. Then she’d get a delegation from the local coven inviting her to join their rites . . . Damnation.

  ‘‘Thornyspine, can you change shape?’’

  ‘‘Can an iPod shuffle?’’ The demon wiped lavalike tears from his bright eyes—he was actually kind of cute—and oozed down the step in a flaming rubbery sheet, then turned into a garden hose and humped across the ground to Rainy. Thornyspine popped to his usual shape with a carnivorous grin, and she backed up quickly. If she made this demon mad, he could do serious damage. As if he hadn’t done enough now.

  ‘‘Can you turn yourself into a sheet of letter-sized paper?’’

  ‘‘No worries.’’ He formed a sheet of black paper with grinning demon letterhead and marched back and forth across the doormat.

  ‘‘Right. Let’s go to my desk.’’

  ‘‘Demonize a letter? Cool, boss. You got potential.’’

  Rainy sat at her desk, heart thumping, and reached down to flip a switch. The demon was getting into this performance. ‘‘Stand right here in this groove.’’

  ‘‘What kinda printer you got here anyway? Eeeeeee . . . !’’ The demon’s shriek followed him all the way down into the paper shredder.

  Crosscuts each page into half-centimeter by one-centimeter pieces, the brochure promised. A demon cut into twelve hundred pieces couldn’t do much harm.

  Rainy finally allowed herself a sigh and headed for the kitchen to make tea. Might as well sample her ruined lemon pound cake . . .

  ‘‘Yii!’’ Rainy shrieked despite herself at the huge yellow-eyed black demon staring at her from the top of the fridge. Spooked. Jumping at shadows. It was just her old friend Tar. ‘‘You scared me to pieces— what are you doing up there?’’

  Tar paid her no attention. He was busy tracking dozens, scores, hundreds of black caterpillars or beetles that crawled across the floor and up the walls and across the ceiling, dangled from curtains and light fixtures, inched over the table and counters.

  Rainy shrieked again in earnest. She’d learned to live with black widow spiders, ticks, cactus, mud wasps, centipedes, all the Gulf Islands’ small surprises, but this was a horrible new infestation. Black wrigglers ran up her boots, fell in, grabbed the hem of her fuzzy blue bathrobe and swarmed on up. One beetle found its way to the tip of her nose.

  Not a beetle. A centimeter-tall demon.

  Twelve hundred tiny raucous voices spoke in unison. ‘‘Hey boss, too cool! We’ll just roll on down to the big house and the deed is done.’’

  ‘‘Down!’’ Rainy fumbled to a kitchen chair and sank into it gratefully, and Tar crept onto her lap for refuge as the wrigglers streamed down to mill around her feet. What on earth could she try next? ‘‘Thornyspine. Thornyspines?’’

  ‘‘Yo, boss,’’ twelve hundred gravelly small voices answered. Twelve hundred minced, minuscule demons recombined into the original Thornyspine and levitated onto her kitchen table. Not too surprisingly, he looked dapper but a little sulky.

  Now that was interesting. ‘‘Can you divide and reform anytime?’’

  ‘‘We can now,’’ the demon said, hopping from smoldering foot to foot, ready to raise hell. ‘‘Thanks for the shred.’’

  You’re welcome wasn’t the response that came to mind. ‘‘Thorny, I have a
plan.’’

  At sunny midmorning, a few hours later, Rainy sipped comfrey tea in her garden and jotted in her notebook. She’d already outlined the new story, ‘‘Iced Demonade,’’ and Thorny had offered to be her expert reader. A dry golden arbutus leaf drifted across her bare feet as she started to write.

  ‘‘Highway to Hell’’ was her new cell phone ring tone. Rainy answered, but had to hold the receiver away from her ear to pick words out of the screech.

  ‘‘Hi, Ros. How are you this beautiful morning?’’

  Another extended screech.

  ‘‘Beetles? Better call in a pest exterminator from Vancouver. Too bad about your files. And your backups. ’’ Rainy smiled to herself. Thornyspine was on the job.

  As she hung up, a battalion of microdemons marched across her garden, up the porch steps, and through her kitchen door, each one staggering under a load of paper scraps. ‘‘Thornyspines, I command thee to reassemble anything from Ros’ house that bears my name.’’ If her luck held, that would produce her missing stories and maybe even a letter from Worlds of Fantasy.

  Back in the kitchen, Rainy sipped comfrey tea and stroked Tar as she watched ranks of demons at work with glue and paper. Then the original Thornyspine reconstituted and leaped to her elbow with an armload of folded papers. Rainy didn’t even wince at the smoking table, and Tar barely twitched an inky ear. Demons turned out to be no scarier than nosy neighbors and more helpful. She smoothed the papers on the tabletop, letting out an involuntary sigh of disappointment.

  This wasn’t one of her short stories, not ‘‘Escape Claws’’ or ‘‘Hunting the Shy Dragon’’ or even ‘‘Feng Shui for Phoenix.’’ She’d turned Thornyspine loose on an innocent friend after all. How could she make amends? Her eyes blurred with guilty tears as she struggled to read the top paper’s fine print.

  ‘‘Last will and testament of John Edward . . .’’ And underneath the will lay her three missing stories and an eviction order signed R. T. Bailey.