Billy: Messenger of Powers

by Michaelbrent Collings

  Billy felt like a three hundred pound barbell had just been placed on his shoulders. He had gone from being that kid that no one sat next to at lunch to being the center of a war in a world he still didn’t understand.

  Ivy seemed to intuit what Billy was feeling. She hugged him. “It’s okay, Billy,” she said. “We’re here. We’ll stick by you and help with whatever you need to do.” The tendrils that encircled her arms reached out to Billy as well. It felt like he was being hugged and tickled at the same time. It was a nice feeling.

  Billy squared his shoulders as well as he could. “What was it she said?” he asked.

  “‘Go to where you’re empty when you should be full, and say the words you’ve heard me say to the jumper that never quite eats,’” recited Ivy.

  They all looked at Billy. He thought. Nothing was coming to him. He thought some more. And even more nothing came to him.

  “Go to where you’re empty,” he mumbled. “Empty, full, jumper.” He rolled the words around in his mind. They felt like they should mean something.

  And then, suddenly, his head popped up. He wouldn’t have been surprised to see a giant light bulb flashing over him.

  “What is it, my boy?” asked Tempus. “You know what she was saying?”

  “Not all of it,” grinned Billy. “But I think I know where we have to go.”

  “Then, by all means, let’s go there,” said the Gray Power. “Shall we go by Wind, or travel by Fire?”

  “We can use my key,” said Vester.

  “Bah!” snorted Tempus. “Never again. No home-made Transport Keys for me. Especially not one you’ve made.”

  The two looked as though they were about to start bickering once more, but Ivy, ever the peacemaker, broke in. “Boys, boys!” she shouted. Tempus and Vester broke off long enough to look at her.

  “Don’t you think we should find out where we’re going before we decide how we’re going to get there?” she asked.

  Both Vester and Tempus looked slightly embarrassed. “Quite so,” said Tempus, and Vester nodded mute agreement.

  Ivy turned to Billy.

  “Well,” she said, “it looks as though you are to be our guide on this quest. So where are we going?”

  Billy grinned for a second, but then his grin faded. He was pretty sure where they had to go.

  But he was also pretty sure he’d prefer to stay in the pit of a Russian volcano than go there.

  CHAPTER THE FOURTEENTH

  In Which Billy sees Justice Done, and then sees Himself…

  Once Billy had told them where he thought they should go, they decided to travel by Fire, which Vester told Billy was the fastest of the Elemental traveling methods. Though Tempus insisted that Wind was much more comfortable, even he agreed that speed probably counted more than anything in this case.

  Billy was nervous, though. Holding hands with Vester, perched at the edge of a slim outcropping that was all that stood between him and a volcano’s simmering stomach, he couldn’t help but wonder what would happen if Vester’s spell went wrong.

  “Don’t worry,” murmured Vester. “As long as we’re all holding hands, I can extend my protection to all of you. For a little while, at least.”

  Billy asked what “a little while” meant, but his words were not heard by the others, because at that moment Vester jumped, pulling Billy, Tempus, and Ivy with him in a human daisy chain, and Billy’s words were lost far above them.

  Down they plunged, down to the abyss of fire that had already nearly claimed Billy for its own today.

  And here I go, jumping in on purpose this time, thought Billy.

  He closed his eyes involuntarily. Vester had assured him it would be all right, and Billy believed his friend intellectually, but it was hard for his body to believe it wasn’t about to be burned to a crisp. Billy felt his muscles clench involuntarily, and he bit his lip. He almost jerked his hand out of Vester’s in mid-flight, but realized at the same instant how disastrous that would be, so instead he held the young fireman’s hand even harder.

  Billy and his friends hit, not with a splash, but with a thick wet burble. This, Billy had been told, was to be expected: after all, they were not jumping into a swimming pool, they were jumping into lava. But he was still surprised when he sank slowly into the lava, as though he was in quicksand, or had somehow fallen into the world’s biggest pudding cup. It was hot, but not as hot as it should have been, more like standing under the sun on a summer day.

  The four friends, still holding tightly to one another, slowly sank below the lava. And Billy, being shortest, was the first to go under.

  As the gooey stuff hit his chin, he looked at Vester with sudden panic. “Do I hold my breath?” he asked. He didn’t want to be a mummy. Or did you become a burnt mummy if you didn’t hold your breath while traveling by fire—Cresting, as Vester had called it?

  Vester smiled. “You can if you want to, but it’s not a requirement.”

  “So I won’t become a—blurble,” said Billy. He said “blurble” because before he could finish his sentence, he sunk below the surface of the lava.

  Afterward, if Billy had had to describe what happened to him, the best he could have done would be to say that he kept hearing the color red, and kept seeing what marshmallows smelled like when being toasted in a campfire. His insides turned out and his outsides turned in. He felt as though he was suddenly everywhere and nowhere at once, just as he imagined an enormous fire would feel: so huge it could devour a forest, yet at the same time so ghostly it couldn’t be touched.

  Billy felt himself become thin, thinner, thinner. So thin that soon he was only a single chain of atoms long enough to wrap around the world twice. But at the same time he was still aware of who he was, and that Vester was holding his hand.

  The red sound grew louder, and suddenly Billy could see a blue pinpoint of light. The blue light grew, then multiplied into several lights, then those several blue lights became even more. They looked somehow familiar to Billy. But before he could figure out what they were, he suddenly found himself standing on solid ground again.

  He was in a dark place. What little light there was came from the machine behind him. Billy could hear it whispering its ever-present drone in the background. It was a gas heater. The blue lights that Billy had seen were the brightly burning gas jets that heated the air that would warm the huge building they were in.

  Vester, Ivy, and Tempus were there, too.

  “Wow,” said Ivy. “I’d forgotten what that was like.”

  Vester grinned at her, then smiled even wider at Billy. “How’d you like Cresting?” he asked.

  “Great,” said Billy. “It was perfect.” And he meant it. Only the ride atop the Unicorn had even come close to what he’d just felt.

  “Well,” said Tempus, “I would hold off on calling it perfect until you have ridden the Winds. Cresting magma and then being thinned out like taffy and delivered through a gas jet is not my idea of ‘perfect,’ and that’s a fact.”

  “Everyone likes different things,” said Ivy, obviously trying to forestall another argument between the Red Power and the Gray.

  Billy looked around. He didn’t recognize where they were. He looked at Vester. “I thought you said you could get us there,” he said.

  “I did,” replied the fireman. He stepped to a nearby door and opened it. “But I had to take us through a fire source, and the best one was in the gas jets in the heater in the main heating and air conditioning room.”

  Billy followed him through the door and quickly saw that Vester had been as good as his word. They were exactly where Billy thought they needed to go.

  They were at Preston Hills High School.

  He looked up and down the halls. No one was visible.

  “Follow me,” he hissed, and ran as fast as he could down the hall.

  “Why are we here?” asked Ivy.

  “I think this is what Mrs. Russet meant,” said Billy, huffing with the effort of his run. “She said to go wh
ere I’m empty when I should be full. When all this started, when Mrs. Russet first took me to Powers Island, it was from here. It was right after lunch. I didn’t eat much. Someone knocked over my lunch tray.” He deliberately didn’t mention that he had been the one to knock over the tray in a crazy attempt to call attention to the bullying Cameron Black had been involved in. That wasn’t something he wanted to get into with these people who had somehow been deluded into thinking he was worth spending time with.

  “So we’re going to the cafeteria?” asked Ivy.

  “Do they have those delicious ice cream sandwiches?” asked Tempus. “Or maybe even,” he managed to lick his lips as he ran, “some yummy Salisbury steak?”

  “No,” said Billy.

  “No Salisbury steak?” moaned Tempus.

  “They have Salisbury steak here some days,” Billy reassured his friend. “But we’re not going to the cafeteria.”

  “Then where?” asked Vester.

  Before Billy could answer, he stopped running as suddenly as if he’d slammed headfirst into a concrete wall. Just around the corner, he could see Harold Crane and Sarah Brookham, Cameron’s assistants in the Torture Brigade. It wasn’t that Billy was afraid they were going to stick him in a locker—he thought that was highly unlikely, given his present company. But they would see who he was with.

  Billy glanced at his friends. Vester looked more or less normal. But Tempus, ablaze in the full-blown vomitous glory of his moving Hawaiian shirt and his pink too-short shorts, was sure to draw attention. Not to mention the young/old Ivy, with her wreathe of writhing plant life serving as her primary clothing. And it wasn’t even that they were going to draw attention. But Billy had enough trouble in his life without having it get around that he was part of some strange carnival sideshow.

  He backpedaled and motioned for the others to follow him, hoping that he could find an alternate route around the two bullies. Then his stomach lurched as he heard Harold’s voice.

  “Hey, nimwad.” Billy wasn’t facing him, but he knew that Harold was addressing him. Slowly, Billy turned back. Sure enough, Harold and Sarah were both looking at him and his friends. Both appeared on the verge of hysterical laughter; the two Torture Brigaders had clearly determined in an instant that these were grown-ups of a sort that they could get away with treating like they treated other kids: meanly.

  “Finally running away to join the circus, eh?” asked Harold.

  “Yeah,” said Sarah. “Finally running away, huh?”

  “I can see it now, Bumbling Billy and…uh….” Harold’s voice drifted off. The bully clearly couldn’t think of a good insult. This was no surprise, since Cameron had always been the brains of the group. And Sarah made Harold look like a NASA scientist in comparison. In fact, Billy was pretty sure that if the two pooled their brain cells, they would have almost mind power to win a tic-tac-toe match against a carrot. Almost.

  Having thought of no way to finish his insult, Harold just sneered at Billy’s friends. “So doofuses of a feather flock with each other, huh?”

  “Yeah,” said Sarah. Her jaws were, as always, engaged in an intense battle with a stick of chewing gum.

  Billy didn’t know how to get around this situation. But matters were taken out of his hands by Tempus, who stepped forward and stuck out his hand. “Friends of Billy’s, I presume,” he said with a smile.

  Billy’s eyes rolled in their sockets. Wonderful. As he had suspected, there was always a little farther down to go in the social pit that he was constantly digging for himself.

  Harold looked at Tempus’s hand like it was a crab’s claw covered in snot. Then he laughed. “Dooooofuses!” he said in a sing-song voice. Sarah laughed too, her beady little eyes perspiring with the effort of keeping up with Harold’s comparatively witty banter.

  “Doofus?” asked Tempus. “I must have been on Powers Island too long this time,” he murmured. He looked at Billy. “Is doofus a good thing?”

  “No,” muttered Billy. “It’s not.”

  Vester was gritting his teeth. The fireman started to move forward, but before he could, Tempus held out a hand and stopped him. “No, my friend, I think I can deal with this.” He looked back at Harold. “I take it, since there are no other students in the hall, that class is now in session.”

  Harold took a moment to process that. “Yeah,” he said. “What about it?”

  “Well, why aren’t you in class?” asked Tempus.

  “Hah!” Sarah Brookham said. She almost lost her gum in the explosion of breath that passed for her laughter.

  “I see,” replied Tempus gravely, as though she had just quoted a lengthy scene from one of Shakespeare’s more difficult plays. “I used to know some people like you two,” he said. “Didn’t like to learn, didn’t want other people to be happy. No brains at all, just like you two.”

  “Hey!” said both Harold and Sarah at once. “Who says we got no brains?” continued Harold.

  “Well, perhaps you do,” conceded Tempus. “But you don’t deserve them. So you know what I’m going to do?” He leaned in close to Harold and Sarah, and suddenly a strong wind whipped through the hall. “Since you don’t deserve your brains, I think I’m going to blow your brains out.”

  And with that, he clapped his hands. A miniature storm erupted right over Harold and Sarah, complete with thunderclouds and rain. A fierce wind flung the two delinquents into the nearest wall, where they were pinned there by the mini-hurricane Tempus had conjured up, while Billy and his friends stood dry and happy only five feet away.

  Within seconds, Harold and Sarah were wetter than any student they had ever dunked in a toilet. Both of them were crying, pleading, begging Tempus to stop whatever it was he was doing.

  Billy thought it was, quite possibly, the most wonderfully delicious thing he had ever experienced in his entire life.

  Tempus just smiled. He clapped his hands again, and the rain clouds disappeared. Now, a stinging Arctic wind blew against the two bullies. Billy could see them grow cold and blue, their clothing drying instantly in the gale winds. Billy thought he could see tiny icicles form in the bullies’ clothes, and a few small ones hanging out of Harold’s nose.

  Another clap of Tempus’s hands, and the wind stopped. Billy had a moment to notice—and relish—the fact that Tempus’s wind had somehow dried Harold and Sarah completely, with one exception: both of them had large wet spots on their legs that made it look an awful lot like they had just wet their pants.

  The two kids, no longer pinned to the wall by Tempus’s magic, stared at the old man in horror. Finally, Tempus whispered, “Well, get to class.”

  Harold and Sarah bolted like rabbits with Taser guns attached to their tails, disappearing around the corner in an instant.

  Tempus turned to Billy, a broad smile etched across his weathered old face. “I was never very popular in school,” he said, as though in explanation.

  Ivy sighed. “You should grow up, Tempus.”

  “I will when I’m a hundred,” he said.

  Vester was trying hard not to smile, clearly wanting to be a good role model. He looked at Billy. “Where exactly are we going?” he asked.

  Billy pointed. The room was just down the hall, not twenty feet away. “Mrs. Russet’s class,” he said.

  When they entered the classroom, it was empty, as Billy had expected. Mrs. Russet had brought him to Powers Island a long time ago, it seemed, but as before, no time had passed while they were on the island. They had been in the Russian volcano for a bit more than half an hour, though, and that meant that Preston Hills High School was still in the middle of its after-lunch class period. And that, Billy knew, was Mrs. Russet’s free period, so there was no one in the room.

  Not even her, thought Billy. The thought worried him. Where is Mrs. Russet now? he wondered.

  He shook himself free of that thought as best he could. It didn’t go anywhere good. And he was doing the best they could to help her by being here right now.

  At least, he
thought to himself, I hope this is where we’re supposed to be. He swallowed hard, trying to gulp down his worry.

  Vester appeared to share Billy’s concern. The fireman was looking all around, not seeing anything of interest. “Now what?” he asked.

  Billy hurried to Mrs. Russet’s desk. He pulled open a drawer. Nothing. Just pens and pencils, a stapler, some tape. He pulled open another drawer. More of the same.

  “It’s got to be here,” he muttered.

  “What does?” asked Tempus. He eyed the papers in Mrs. Russet’s desk drawers. “You think she left a note or something?”

  “She wouldn’t do that,” said Ivy. “She wouldn’t go to the trouble of leaving a coded message that lead to a note right out in the open.” Then she eyed Billy uncertainly. “Would she?”

  Billy opened the last drawer. “Ah-ha!” he whisper-shouted triumphantly. He held up his prize to show everyone. “The jumper that never quite eats!” he exclaimed proudly.

  Tempus eyed Billy with a decidedly nervous eye. “It’s sad when the brain starts to go in one so young,” he whispered loudly to Ivy.

  “Look, I know it must seem crazy,” said Billy, “but this is what she was talking about, I just know it.” He put down what he was holding, laying it carefully on Mrs. Russet’s desk for everyone to stare at.

  It was the ceramic frog. That cute little play-thing that had come alive and seemed to wink at Billy on that very first day, the day when Mrs. Russet had given him and the rest of the class a pop-quiz. The day she had first suspected he might be a Power.

  As before, the ceramic figurine held a half-eaten bug in its mouth. “It never quite eats,” said Billy, pointing to the insect form.

  “Sad, like I said,” whispered Tempus again.

  “Shush, Tempus,” hissed Ivy. She looked at the frog. “I think Billy’s right. I can feel something.” She closed her eyes. A few of her leafy vines snaked out to touch the frog. “Something familiar about this.” Then the vines snaked back to join the rest of the writhing greenery she wore. Her eyes opened. “But I can’t figure out what.”