Billy: Messenger of Powers

by Michaelbrent Collings

  “What saved me?” he said out loud. He did it unconsciously, not expecting any reply, just so deep into his thoughts that his mouth was operating on its own.

  But in spite of the fact that he didn’t expect one, a reply did come. Billy felt a sudden coolness at his leg. It was just like the cool tingling he had felt before, down in the Accounting Room. Vester and Tempus had just been dispatched by the zombies, and Billy had had his eyes closed and felt that strange sensation.

  Billy looked down at his foot, for now the cool feeling had traveled there. And he saw what had saved him from Wolfen.

  It was Vester’s lava Fizzle, the red snake emerging from Billy’s pants leg where it had been hiding and then laying in a small coil nearby Billy’s feet. Billy remembered Ivy telling him that Fizzles could be let loose if their makers weren’t careful. Apparently Vester had allowed this one to go free, either on purpose or because the zombie attack in the Accounting Room had not allowed him to maintain control over the magical creature.

  The lava Fizzle flicked a flaming tongue out and in, staring at Billy. Billy looked back at it. The snake’s skin, being molten rock, moved back and forth in a shifting pattern that was both beautiful and disconcerting. Its eyes were simply two spots that glowed a bright yellow, like embers about to be cast off at any moment. But even though the Fizzle had been born of lava and the Element of Fire, it didn’t burn the hardwood floor below it. Apparently it could control its heat.

  Of course, Billy thought. That’s why I didn’t feel it burning me. That’s why it felt cool, like a regular snake would have.

  Billy leaned a bit closer to the snake. “You saved me?” he asked. The Fizzle paused a moment, its tongue still flicking, then slowly dipped its head in affirmation. “Why?” asked Billy. But the Fizzle clearly couldn’t talk: it just stared at Billy and shook its head back and forth. “Well,” said Billy. “Thank you.”

  The Fizzle grinned and nodded. A clear “you’re welcome.”

  “Do you have a name?” asked Billy. The Fizzle shook its head. “Can I give you one?” Nod. Billy thought. What would he call it? Fire-monster? Snaky? No, those sounded lame, and Billy wanted something cool for the beast that had just saved his life.

  “Viper?” he tried. The Fizzle looked vaguely disgusted. “Flame?” Even more disgusted. “What about His Royal Highness Prince Snakeyton the Third?” Billy asked with a grin.

  To Billy’s surprise, the snake nodded, looking very pleased. Billy laughed. “That’s a bit long, though,” he said. “How about I just call you Prince?” The snake nodded again, as though accepting this, but it seemed slightly less thrilled over the shortened version of his new name.

  “So,” Billy said after a moment, “you can’t talk.” The snake shook its head. “But you did save me. Was that on purpose?” Nod. Billy thought. “You’re a Fizzle. Do you know who made you?” Another nod. Billy thought some more. He remembered that Imbued Objects had a piece of their maker’s essence inside them. He wondered if it was the same for Fizzles. “Since Vester made you, do you have some of Vester’s feelings?” He felt rather silly asking that question, but Prince took it in stride and simply nodded. “So…,” Billy began slowly, working it out in his mind as he spoke, “you like me, and don’t like Wolfen.” The snake nodded, but slowly, as though Billy was almost, but not quite right. “You like me, and hate Wolfen?” he tried again. This time, the nod was more vigorous, but still held something back. Billy tried again. “You love me, and hate Wolfen?”

  This time, the snake nodded enthusiastically. Billy felt warm inside. His parents loved him, he knew that. Or at least, he knew his mom loved him, and suspected it was also true of his father. But he couldn’t think of anyone else who had ever expressed that feeling. He’d never met his grandparents—all of them had died before Billy was born—and none of his schoolmates had ever shown him any particular affection. So knowing that Prince loved him, and that that meant that Vester had come to love him, even in the short period they had had to interact, meant a great deal to Billy.

  He stood quickly, suddenly resolved to fix things. He was going to find his friends. He was going to find Dark Isle, and he was going to free them.

  He looked at the anteroom door. There was no way out there: he didn’t know if Wolfen was still waiting for him, or if Cameron or Eva Black might be lurking outside the door, but he couldn’t risk that. Not until he had some way to fight them, some weapon or something that would even the odds.

  Billy spent a few moments looking around the room. He looked behind the pot-bellied stove, to see if perhaps there was another door leading out. He tapped the walls and the floor, listening to hear if there were perhaps hollow spaces that might hold a hidden doorway or even just something he could maybe break through to make his escape. But everything was solid and firm.

  He looked at Prince. “Do you know a way out?” Snakes didn’t have shoulders, at least as far as Billy knew, but he could swear that the Fizzle shrugged. Billy continued looking, but didn’t have much hope. It appeared as though he was going to have to go back out the way he had come in.

  At least I can wait a while here, he thought. Maybe they’ll be gone when I come out.

  Then on the heels of that he thought, Fat chance.

  A moment later, another thought popped, unbidden and most certainly unwelcome, into his head. It consisted of only two words, but those words were more than enough to send him rocketing around the room, looking—frantically this time—for a way out. The words were these: Mrs. Black.

  She was a Councilor, he realized. She probably knew the keyword for the anteroom, even if Wolfen didn’t. And he knew that she had been in the tower, because the elevator had told him so. Surely Cameron would tell his mother that Billy had been in the Accounting Room, and just as surely Mrs. Black would be able to track him down, get into the anteroom, and then turn him over to Wolfen.

  Billy’s sense of urgency increased as he thought all of this. He didn’t have hours, or perhaps even minutes. How can I get out? he thought desperately. How can I get out?

  Prince followed him around as Billy looked helplessly for some sign of an exit, but other than providing companionship he didn’t give much help.

  Billy looked at the huge glass window. The snowflakes outside had arranged suddenly into a chillingly accurate rendition of Wolfen’s face, then into an equally frightening version of Mrs. Black’s cold features. Billy ran at the glass, thinking he might be able to just smash through it himself. But it was no use. The glass—if it even was glass, and not some kind of magical substance that couldn’t be broken—resisted him easily, and once more Billy found himself bouncing to the floor like a rubber ball. His shoulder ached.

  “Ow,” he moaned. Still on the floor, he looked around again. “How do I get out?” he said. Prince hissed. “Sorry, how do we get out?”

  He looked out the window again. There had to be a way to break it. But then his attention was arrested once more by the snowflakes outside. They had made a new shape. At first Billy didn’t recognize it, but then suddenly he realized what it was: a cocoa mug. Billy watched as, slowly, in a glimmer of bright color, the snowflake mug tipped, and Billy could actually see snowflake cocoa spilling out before scattering into separate pieces in the storm.

  He couldn’t look away from the sight. Somehow, he felt, the snowflakes weren’t just making a random shape this time. It was like they had done when they had formed a large hand waving goodbye the last time he had left the anteroom. They were, not talking exactly, but communicating somehow.

  They’re trying to help me find a way out, he realized.

  “But how does a mug of cocoa get me out?” he asked.

  In answer, the snowflakes repeated their pantomime, the icy doilies whirling together to once more make the shape of a mug, which once more spilled out.

  Billy thought. He looked at Prince. The Fizzle looked thoroughly puzzled.

  Then, suddenly, Billy knew.

  He hurried to the bar. As he had
expected, there was cocoa waiting for him once more. But not just one mug. This time, the entire space beneath the bar was chock full of steaming cups of cocoa. The smell was delicious, but Billy had no intention of drinking them.

  He put a hand on the floor. “Get on,” he told Prince. The lava snake obliged, curling up on Billy’s wrist. As soon as the snake was safely in place, Billy used his other arm to sweep every single mug under the bar out onto the floor. They landed in a wet, sloppy shatter that immediately drenched everything—including Billy—in wonderful-smelling chocolate that was littered with shards of broken cups.

  A moment later, a Fizzle—the same one who had cleaned up Billy’s first spill—ran out from under the bar. It screamed a tiny, high-pitched scream when it saw the mess. A moment later, a dozen or so other Fizzles appeared, holding rags and tiny mops. They began scrubbing at the mess.

  Billy looked under the bar again. More cocoa had appeared, in answer to his silent request. He swept that onto the floor as well, the cleaner Fizzles jumping out of the way of the new torrent of spills and cocoa disaster. Billy wished more cocoa into existence and did it again. And again. A dozen more Fizzles appeared, then two dozen, then hordes of the tiny rock creatures were all around, trying in vain to keep up with Billy as he spilled cocoa as fast as he could.

  Soon the room was awash in hot chocolate and panicky Fizzles. Some of them were actually crying in frustration, grinding little sobs with dust-tears that ran down their faces.

  “I’m not stopping,” said Billy, sending another round of cocoa clattering to the floor. “I’m going to do this forever, until I drop.”

  The cleaners all gasped in horror. They all stopped moving, clearly paralyzed by such a callous, psychopathic disregard for neatness.

  Then, one of the Fizzles nearby raised its tiny mop. It shouted a high-pitched scream that sounded amazingly like a bugle calling to arms. “Attack,” it seemed to say.

  And that’s just what the rock Fizzles did. Billy saw instantly that the Fizzles’ didn’t just twirl rags with the skill of a martial artist, they actually knew some kind of magical karate. All of them dropped into what Billy could only assume were fighting stances. Then, with a synchronized “Key-yah!” the Fizzles attacked. The room was instantly filled with Fizzles that jump-kicked; with Fizzles that ran at Billy while carving intricate and dangerous-looking, though tiny, figure eights with their mops; and with Fizzles that did cartwheels and flips as though they had seen one too many kung fu movies.

  They swarmed at Billy, and soon there were dozens if not hundreds of the rock janitors punching and kicking at Billy’s feet, pushing him bodily away from the bar. Billy’s feet slipped on several of the creatures as he stepped backward, and he went down—for the third time—to the ground. This time, however, it wasn’t only floor he fell on. It was Fizzles. They grabbed him tightly, holding his arms, holding his feet, holding his pants and his shirt, even holding his hair.

  Billy struggled for a moment, but it was no use. The Fizzles had him held fast. The first Fizzle, who Billy had come to think of as something of a leader, crawled onto Billy’s chest and looked at him. Billy could feel the triumph in the Fizzle’s stance.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Billy said. “You can’t hold me here forever, and as soon as you let me up, I’m going to go back at it again.” The Fizzles all gasped once more, and Billy added the coup-de-grace. “As long as I’m in this room,” he said as belligerently as he could, “I will make…a…mess.”

  Another gasp. The leader Fizzle jumped down off Billy’s chest, and he could hear a buzzing sound as the Fizzles around him conferred. Then, suddenly, he was hoisted bodily in the air, hundreds of Fizzles moving under him to support his weight, like ants lifting a grasshopper.

  At the same time, Billy heard something. The door to the anteroom! It was out of sight on the other side of the bar, but Billy could hear it opening. It was Mrs. Black, or even worse, Wolfen, it had to be!

  But the Fizzles paid no heed to the sound. They simply continued marching him toward the bar, still holding him firm. They walked with him right under the shelf.

  “Where are you, Mr. Jones?” came the voice of Mrs. Black.

  But Billy had no chance to answer, because at that moment, the Fizzles holding him all gave a shiver, and with a small “pop” Billy suddenly found himself somewhere else.

  CHAPTER THE EIGHTEENTH

  In Which Billy is Unexpected, and meets Someone New…

  Billy let out his breath. Holding it whenever Transporting was quickly becoming second nature to him. He managed to look at his wrist, and verified that Prince was still coiled coolly around it before the Fizzles holding his hair yanked on it so that Billy’s head snapped back and all he could see was a ceiling.

  And what a ceiling! It was white, and that was all. That may not have sounded like much to anyone not actually there, but Billy had never in his life seen anything quite so white. It would have made a super-model ashamed of the color of her artificially brightened teeth, and a polar bear would have looked black if standing in front of it. It was so clean and spotless that it actually glowed, reflecting every bit of light in the room as brightly and perfectly as a mirror.

  Below him, the Fizzles that Billy now thought of as the Kung Fu Cleaners were holding a whispered conference of some kind. Apparently they decided that in this place Billy was no longer a threat to the world’s cleanliness, and so they dumped him unceremoniously on the ground before skittering away. The leader of the Kung Fu Cleaners, the Fizzle who had berated Billy for spilling his cocoa in the first place, cast a last threatening look at Billy, then ran off as well.

  Billy rose slowly to his feet. He had been dropped on the floor in some form or other four times in the last few minutes, and his body was starting to feel the effects. He suspected that he would resemble a grape this time tomorrow, puffy and round and a beautiful shade of deep purple from head to toe.

  He looked around and took in his surroundings. It was an awesome sight. There were Kung Fu Cleaners everywhere. Not just the hundreds that had grabbed Billy, but thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands. And each one was actively cleaning something: dishes, cups, silverware. Fizzles were loading dirty clothes into what looked like a washing machine the size of a house. Fizzles were putting even more sopping wet laundry into a dryer that was equally as big.

  One Fizzle, Billy saw, was busily sorting socks into two mountainous piles, one of which had a sign that said “Left Socks Here,” while the other had a sign proclaiming “Right Socks Here.” This seemed to Billy to be not only a bit excessive, but actually ridiculous, because dozens of other Fizzles were hurriedly crawling around, on top of, and through the two piles, finding paired socks and throwing them into a bin the size of a dump truck.

  But beyond all that, beyond the sorting and the cleaning and the polishing, beyond the hundreds of thousands of Fizzles and their hundreds of thousands of tasks, the thing that was first and most noticeable was that the whole place gleamed. Everything was pure, spotlessly white. The laundry machines, the neat stacks of clean plates, the floors. The place he was in was so large and so full of cleaning appliances that Billy couldn’t see any walls, but he suspected they, too, were that same brilliant white.

  Something tapped his foot. It was another Kung Fu Cleaner, the Fizzle tapping on Billy’s sneaker with its mop as it cleaned the floor. Billy obligingly lifted his foot, and the Fizzle ran under it, mopping for all it was worth, continuing on in a perfectly straight line until it disappeared from Billy’s view.

  “Where are we?” he asked Prince. The snake hissed, and licked itself like a cat. Cleaning itself. “Well I know we’re in someplace clean,” said Billy. “That’s not much help.”

  As he spoke to Prince, a thought struck him. Fizzles, he now knew, carried something of the personality of their makers with them. So what kind of person would create Fizzles who knew karate and were concerned with cleanliness to the point of it being a psychiatric disorder?

  A mo
ment later, he had his answer as a spot of color appeared in his view. The color was brown, a brown coat worn by a bent and wizened old man who limped slowly, leaning on a cane held in each hand, into the area where Billy stood.

  “More bleach!” bellowed the old man to the Fizzles who were washing clothes. He grabbed a sock out of the sock pile. The sock, like the floor and ceiling, was so dazzlingly white it almost hurt Billy’s eyes. But the old man apparently did not agree like what he saw. “You call this clean?” he grumped, throwing the sock back into the pile with a disgusted look. “It’s like a pig wore it to a pig sock hop in a mud pool and had pig mudshakes which it spilled on its muddy socks.”

  Now, quite suddenly, the man spotted Billy. He frowned. “You,” he finally said, “are filthy.”

  Billy didn’t know quite how to respond to that. On one hand, he knew he was sweaty and drenched with hot chocolate. On the other hand, considering what he’d just been through, he thought he probably looked rather spiffy. At least, he did as long as you defined “spiffy” as “not dead.”

  The old man didn’t wait for a reply, though, and snapped his fingers imperiously. Several hundred Kung Fu Cleaners swarmed toward the man, who was clearly their master. The man pointed at Billy. “How did he get here? Who is he?”

  The assembled Fizzles looked at each other as though waiting for someone to step up and start talking first. “Well?” asked the old man, waving his cane in what Billy guessed was supposed to be a threatening motion. Unfortunately, any sense of threat was mitigated by the fact that as soon as the cane left the ground, the old man toppled to the floor.

  Billy rushed forward to help the old fellow up. “Are you okay, sir?” asked Billy.

  “Certainly I’m okay,” snapped the old man, yanking his arm out of Billy’s grip. This caused him to fall again. Billy helped him up, and this time the old man let him do it, even going so far as to pull Billy with him as he hobbled along on his inspection tour. As they walked, Billy could see that the old man wore one of the required badges—the ones that called out a person’s name and affiliation with either the Darksiders or Dawnwalkers. Unfortunately, the old man’s cloak was so voluminous that the badge was always mostly covered in folds of dark cloth, so this strange old man’s identity remained a mystery to Billy.