Differently Morphous

by Yahtzee Croshaw

  “Yes.” That didn’t feel like enough. “I’ve got an eidetic memory.”

  Jessica frowned. “That’s a magic power?”

  “Yes. Definitely.”

  “Oh. Well, it’s better than mine. I just sweat a lot.”

  Alison blinked. “What?”

  “That’s my power. I sweat a lot. Like, a lot.” She indicated the towel on her backrest. “Like, enough that it becomes weird. I can turn it on and off now, though.”

  “Jessica,” said Alison, as the girl’s gaze returned permanently to the objects on the screen and she resumed typing, all danger of recapture forgotten. “Can you tell me where Aaron is now? It’s important.”

  Jessica’s eyes and mouth were smiling as she saw something she liked on the computer screen, but her voice, directed at Alison, was in a monotone. “He’s downstairs.”

  Alison thought of the bloodstained room, and swallowed. “We—I mean, I didn’t see him there.”

  “No, that’s his power,” said Jessica, finally looking at her again. “He does things to other people’s minds so they see things that aren’t really there. He said he was going to set up a trap or something. I didn’t really pay attention.”

  Alison was already pulling the bedroom door closed, her stomach gripped with foreboding. She raced back to the top of the stairs, preparing to yell a warning.

  From here, she could see Diablerie, still crouched towards the door, his vocalizations currently going through the bloam bloam bloam stage. And she could see part of the floor of the bloody living room. It was still red, but the redness was wavering and indistinct. It seemed to extrude from the background, like an afterimage.

  The mysterious girl came back into view directly below Alison, approaching Diablerie from the kitchen. But the illusion of her appearance was starting to waver, too. Alison found that if she focused her gaze on Diablerie and looked at the girl through the corner of her vision, then her image flickered back and forth between the blond girl and a much taller, more masculine figure with a mass of shaggy black hair.

  Aaron Weatherby was either getting tired or having trouble keeping Alison’s mind clouded now that he didn’t know where she was. His form warped and shimmered more and more as he stalked towards the unwitting Diablerie, raising a hand as if to slap him on the back.

  For one all-important moment, Alison saw something in his hand as his image shifted to his true form. Something shiny, and shaped like a kitchen knife.

  Adrenaline took over. Alison vaulted over the banister and dropped onto the shifting figure, which would have been a much more dramatic gesture if they had been in a larger house. She only had to drop two or three feet, but it was enough to knock Weatherby over and pull him to the floor with her.

  For a few moments, Alison’s world was a disorganized mess of scuffling sounds and extreme close-ups of clothing and body parts, before she found herself pinning precisely nothing to the floor.

  She hesitated and glanced away, prompting the nothing to make its counterattack. The carpet below her surged upwards, flipping her onto her back. Two skinny hands clamped around her throat.

  “Not going back,” hissed Aaron Weatherby. His nasally teenage voice seemed to be overlaid with something deeper, more booming, and considerably less human. “not going back!”

  Alison struggled to breathe as the stranglehold tightened. As the possibility of death loomed large, time seemed to slow down.

  All she could see was Aaron’s face, now that he had dropped all of his illusions, filling her clouding vision from edge to edge. Unlike Jessica, he had undergone some changes since his school photo had been taken. A clump of hair on his left temple had fallen out, revealing a swollen cluster of round lumps that transitioned from raw red at the base to sickly green in the center. His left eye, closest to the mutation, had turned a uniform cloudy yellow.

  Alison’s head felt like it had been inflated with hot air, and all she could do was stare at Aaron’s hideous boils and wonder if they were painful.

  Then, like a trickle of gasoline towards the spark, that thought led her to grope with her hand and tighten around the toilet brush she still had with her.

  She drove the brush into the side of Aaron’s head with full force. The bristles dug into his sensitive scarring with a hundred sharp points of contact. He emitted an animalistic roar and fell to the side, releasing his grip and letting the oxygen flood luxuriously back into Alison’s brain.

  Immediately she was on him, pinning down all four of his limbs with her entire mass. He tried to disappear again, but Alison clamped her hands tightly around his skinny arms and concentrated on that, not the evidence of her other senses. His body flickered like a broken TV picture and flashed through different forms as rapidly as he could think of them. The blond girl, Diablerie, Alison herself, the prime minister, a giant mutant shark with human arms and legs that Alison was pretty sure had been a villain in an episode of Interstellar Bum Pirates, then finally back to Aaron’s true form as he stopped struggling and went limp, exhausted.

  Panting, Alison looked to Diablerie. He was in the same spot as before, but was now standing upright with his eyes closed, pointing two fingers at Alison. “I need help!” she gasped.

  He opened his eyes and scowled. “I am providing it! I have been using all my energy to transmit positive vibrations to aid your victory. A little gratitude would not go amiss.”

  Alison stared at him, then took a big, calming breath. “Could you help me pin him down?”

  Diablerie cocked an eyebrow. “Wouldn’t you like to show it some understanding first?”

  “Please,” begged Alison, frustrated tears beading in her eyes.

  “Oh, very well,” he said grudgingly, coming over. Alison tentatively relaxed her limbs, but then hopped back in surprise as Diablerie smartly slammed his foot down upon Aaron’s throat with considerable force. The teenager made distressed choking noises for a few seconds, then Diablerie relaxed the pressure slightly and followed up with a ringing thwack to the side of his head with his walking cane.

  Alison hopped again, startled. “Doctor!”

  “Hm?”

  “You don’t have to . . . hit him like that.”

  He looked down, then back to her, unconcerned. “Oh, I do apologize,” he said, witheringly sarcastic. “Perhaps Diablerie should repair to the kitchen to prepare drinks and finger food for the beast while he resumes throttling you. Your ignorance grows tiresome, girl! Diablerie’s shoe shall meet the throat of every tainted one that pollutes our realm if it will block the slithering protrusions of their hideous masters! Now, didst thou find evidence of the other’s whereabouts?”

  Alison glanced between Aaron’s wriggling form and Diablerie’s unperturbed face. She imagined Jessica Weatherby struggling to breathe under the point of a walking stick. Getting dragged back to the exercise yard as she desperately sweated excessively.

  “No,” she eventually said. “No one’s up there. I think he must have sent her off and stayed here to slow us down.”

  Diablerie’s eyes narrowed piercingly. “And how thorough a search did you conduct, girl?”

  He didn’t know. He couldn’t possibly know. It was a small house, but he’d been chanting too loudly to hear anything from upstairs. Surely. Alison squared her shoulders and swallowed. Lying to him was requiring her to fight all her usual instincts. “I looked everywhere. Jessica isn’t here.”

  An age seemed to pass, then Diablerie dropped his gaze. “Indeed, the spirits had relayed as much. Come, then. We shall return this one to the school and check in with those fools at the Ministry.” He fluttered his cloak. “Diablerie has foreseen it.”

  “Could you wait one moment, please?” said Alison, making calmly for the stairs. “I just need to . . . erm . . . put this toilet brush back.”

  Diablerie had already slung the unconscious Aaron over his shoulder, in a display of surprising strength given his slender build. “As you wish. We shall regroup at the car. Do not keep me waiting. Diablerie
and this creature lack the common ground for stimulating conversation.”

  Alison ran back upstairs, chucked the toilet brush in the vague direction of the open bathroom, and pulled Jessica’s bedroom door open with such suddenness that she managed to tear Jessica’s gaze away from her computer screen for all of one second.

  “Listen,” said Alison, hushed and breathless. “You have to get out of here. They’ve taken Aaron.”

  Jessica blinked and pursed her lips, nonplussed. “Who have?”

  “The . . . the school! The people from the school! They’ve taken him, and they’ll take you too if you stay here.”

  Fear filled Jessica’s eyes like milk into a bowl of cereal. “But . . . where do I go?”

  “Anywhere!” Alison dug her government credit card out of her pocket and slapped it onto the desktop. “You can have this. Get a train ticket. Stay with relatives. Rent a room somewhere. I don’t know.”

  She looked at her monitor the way a puppy looks to their new owner as they leave for work for the first time. “Can I buy a new computer?”

  “Yes, whatever you like! Just don’t be here if you don’t want to get taken back to the school!” From the front of the house, Diablerie impatiently sounded the car horn, which played the first few notes of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. “I’m sorry, this is all the help I can give. I have to go.”

  “All right,” said Jessica to Alison’s retreating back. “I-I’ll go as soon as this show’s downloaded.”

  13

  jess: back

  jess: going afk for a while now tho

  xxreaverxx: Ohhh am I going to have to say I told you so?

  jess: no

  jess: just have to go hide somewhere else

  xxreaverxx: So by “no,” what you meant was “yes.”

  xxreaverxx: Where will you go now?

  jess: uhhhh dunno

  jess: probly towards london

  jess: i stayed in a travelodge with mum and dad once ill probably do that

  xxreaverxx: I thought you didn’t have any money?

  xxreaverxx: I thought you said that was why you had to hide in your own house.

  xxreaverxx: After I pointed out what a stupid idea that was.

  jess: got a credit card

  xxreaverxx: ...since when?

  jess: just now

  xxreaverxx: You just now “got” a credit card?

  xxreaverxx: You know what, I’m thinking back to all the things you told me about going to a special school and having magic powers

  xxreaverxx: And it’s just occurred to me that I probably shouldn’t have believed it all so quickly.

  jess: :(

  jess: im not a liar

  xxreaverxx: So you just magicked up a credit card, did you?

  jess: no someone gave me it

  xxreaverxx: Riiiiight.

  jess has sent an image

  jess: there I sent a picture of it

  xxreaverxx: Oh come on, I can hardly see that

  xxreaverxx: Can’t even make out the numbers

  jess has sent an image

  jess: you can read the numbers in this one

  xxreaverxx: Could have gotten that off image search

  xxreaverxx: I’d believe you if you could show me the back of the card as well.

  jess has sent an image

  xxreaverxx: Huh, well that security code certainly looks real

  jess: yeah

  jess: ye of little faith :P

  xxreaverxx: How could I have ever underestimated you.

  xxreaverxx: Wait. I still disbelieve you a tiny bit.

  xxreaverxx: What was the expiry date again?

  14

  Elizabeth Lawrence was usually the first member of the Ministry’s offsite staff to arrive each morning; even the monks who lived onsite were mostly asleep when she came in. She found it useful to have an hour or two of meditative silence and solitude before having to take the weight of the day’s responsibilities.

  So she was slightly chagrined when she arrived at the Hand of Merlin’s antechamber and found Alison Arkin already there, sitting on the guest’s chair in front of the desk and clinging to the seat as if she was afraid it could rocket into the sky at any moment.

  Elizabeth paused at the sight of her, then slowly made her way across the wide floor, walking stick clacking with a businesslike rhythm, before settling smoothly into her chair. Even then she didn’t look directly at Alison but stared at her blank monitor, resting her chin on one hand.

  She only spoke after she had counted to thirty. “Good morning, Ms. Arkin. What can I do for you?”

  “Ms. Lawrence, I’m really sorry,” said Alison, barely putting the spaces between the words. “I don’t want you to think that I’m the kind of person who just gives up on things . . .”

  “In brief, you do not wish to be Diablerie’s assistant,” said Elizabeth.

  “I’m really sorry,” repeated Alison, not quite getting as far as yes. “The thing is—”

  “Very well. You can be mine instead. Come back at the official start of the workday, and I’ll have some errands for you to run.” She finally looked Alison in the eye. “Was there anything else?”

  “I—ub—um,” said Alison, stumbling as she mentally dismantled the lengthy explanation on which she had spent most of the night working.

  Elizabeth sighed. “Very well. Why don’t you want to be Diablerie’s assistant?”

  “I think he might be insane.”

  “Yes, you’re not alone in that.” Elizabeth turned on her monitor, and it immediately displayed a document she had loaded up the previous evening. “ ‘Possibly mad,’ ” she read aloud. “ ‘Constantly claims to possess arcane powers and knowledge that are absolutely not in evidence. Demonstrated incompetence that very nearly resulted in our deaths.’ This was the report that Diablerie’s last assistant submitted after his first day, along with a transfer request. Frankly, I’m surprised it took you as long as it did.”

  “I seriously almost died,” said Alison, dropping the bomb. “He stood there watching Aaron Weatherby strangling me. After I saved him from getting stabbed.”

  Elizabeth’s eyes widened a little, showed the merest ounce of sympathy, then returned to normal. “There’s something you should know about Doctor Diablerie. He has spent a longer time as a Sword agent than anyone else in the entire history of the Ministry. No one else has ever stayed in the job that long. It’s a dangerous position that most agents see as a brief, unpleasant steppingstone to a safer role in intelligence or administration.”

  “I can see why,” said Alison, her voice quavering slightly.

  “Not only has Diablerie survived more assignments than anyone else, he has a one hundred percent success rate. He himself has never been injured in the field. He has had a number of assistants, none of whom have been seriously hurt, but have requested transfers after traumatic incidents that left them with superficial bumps and bruises.”

  Unconsciously, Alison touched the red marks on her throat. They were already fading. “Right . . .”

  Elizabeth dug a thick stack of file folders out of her lowest drawer and dropped them onto the desk as if she were shaking something nasty off her palm. “Every single one of those assistants, every single one of Diablerie’s own reports, paint a picture of a dangerous, possibly delusional incompetent, whose victories come only as a result of sheer dumb luck.”

  Alison didn’t reply but ran her finger down the stack of files. There were an awful lot of them.

  “I no longer believe in dumb luck,” said Elizabeth, leaning forward and clasping her hands. “Not after this much miraculous success. There is no doubt in my mind that Diablerie is hiding something.”

  “Are you sure?”

  In response, Elizabeth produced an exercise book from the same drawer the reports had come from. Silently, she pushed it across the desk.

  Alison opened it to the first page and saw that it was filled with
tiny block capitals, scrawled with a shaking hand, lifting and curving from the line and going into weird spiral patterns that covered all the available space. She caught the phrase the rats in my mind they crawl up the walls, and that summarized the overall tone of the work.

  “One of the assistants I gave to Diablerie was a telepath, under orders to secretly read his mind and determine his intentions.” She nodded to the book. “That is the report he submitted.”

  Fascinated, Alison fluttered through to the back cover. Every single page was covered in the writing. “He wrote all this?”

  “No, that’s book one.” Elizabeth sighed. “I gather that book thirty will be completed as soon as he sneaks another crayon past the orderlies. Diablerie seems to have a very effective psychic defense mechanism. That is what leads me to believe that he is hiding something. Along with his constant attempts to frighten off the assistants I provide.”

  Alison let the weathered cover of the exercise book flop back down. “So it’s all an act?” She hurriedly continued as Elizabeth’s eyebrow rose. “Okay, obviously it’s an act. But . . . I could understand wanting the enemy to think you’re stupid or insane, but why the people you work for as well?”

  Elizabeth leaned back, folding her arms. “Why, indeed. We may not be the only people he works for. We don’t know of any specific groups working against us, but that’s no reason to assume that none exist. Some organized magical terrorist organization, perhaps, with objections to some of the Ministry’s methods.”

  “Like the secondary school,” said Alison, not privately enough. She flinched a little as Elizabeth’s piercing gaze zeroed in on her like a drone targeting system.

  “Alison,” she said, in a soft voice that didn’t match her look. “I can’t force you to stay with Diablerie. But you, and that special gift of yours, may be my last hope of determining his true agenda. I know that we can do this, Alison. Together.”

  Alison had been reliving the events of the previous day, trying to analyze Diablerie’s actions. The sound of his foot plunging into Aaron Weatherby’s neck was still vivid and almost tangible. But all her thoughts disappeared under Elizabeth’s words like cockroaches scattering from a spotlight. For the first time, she noticed that the older woman was not as old as she had first appeared. The lines of her face had deepened prematurely, but she couldn’t have been older than forty. “You really think so?” said Alison, eyes glimmering.