Scorched Earth

by Randall Pine

  Simon looked back down at Abby, who was moving her lips and trembling fitfully as she swam in and out of consciousness. “You think she drew the poison out of Llewyn…and then the poison came back out of her to go back into Llewyn?”

  “I don’t know,” Virgil said, shaking his head. “But we’ve got a frozen wizard, an unconscious empath with black-magic stains on her hands, and a mysterious message written on the wall in what I can only assume is some dead animal’s blood.”

  “It’s not blood; it’s too bright,” Simon pointed out. He shrugged out of his jacket and set it on the floor, then he carefully laid Abby down, out of his lap, so that her head rested on the jacket. He stood up and inspected the letters on the wall. “Summon Morgaine,” he read aloud, murmuring the words. “How are we supposed to summon Morgaine when we don’t know who Morgaine is?”

  “Or what Morgaine is,” Virgil added. “Could be a demon. Or some…I don’t know…weapon or something.”

  Simon sighed. “Great.” He peered up at Llewyn’s eye through the thick wall of ice. “So what do we do?”

  “We could plug in a hair dryer and thaw him out,” Virgil suggested.

  But Simon shook his head. “If he really froze himself to stop the poison, that would just restart it. It would probably kill him. But maybe there’s something about a Morgaine in one of his books? We could start there.”

  Virgil groaned. He had seen Llewyn’s library a few times. He knew how many books covered the shelves there, and how much work it would be to start going through them. “Or, I’ll Google it.” He pulled out his phone and tapped the screen. “Aw, come on,” he whined. He held up the phone and showed it to Simon. “No service.” He shook his phone angrily and said, “Work!”

  “Yeah, that’ll help,” Simon said sarcastically.

  “Well, we’re supposed to be magical, aren’t we?” Virgil demanded. He shook his phone harder and commanded, “Magically work!”

  “I think phone companies only work in black magic,” Simon said. “Just go check the library, okay? I’ll be in to help in a second.” He crouched down and began to tend to Abby.

  Virgil sighed. “Yeah, okay. Fine.” He turned and trudged down the hall, toward the library.

  Meanwhile, Abby’s eyes were fluttering open again, and Simon helped her sit up. She leaned back against the wall, her chest rising and falling with the struggle of breathing. “Simon,” she whispered, her voice as dry and brittle as dead leaves.

  “I’m here,” he said, squeezing her hand. “Are you okay? I have to get you to a hospital.”

  But she shook her head. “No,” she rasped, “I’ll be fine. Just…sick. But I’ll be fine.” She glanced up at the frozen form of Llewyn and at the words scrawled on the wall behind his head. “We have to find Morgaine.”

  “We will. Virgil’s in the library. We’ll figure it out.”

  Abby moved her lips, but Simon couldn’t make out the words she was whispering. He leaned in closer and motioned for her to say it again. “Virgil hates books,” she said.

  Simon couldn’t stifle a laugh. “Yeah, he does,” he agreed.

  Just then, Virgil reemerged from the library, empty-handed. He had a strange look on his face, as if he didn’t know quite how to word what he wanted to say. “Hey, Simon,” he stammered, figuring out the delivery as he went along, “I have some good news, and some bad news.”

  Simon sighed. “The way the last couple days are going, I guess I should be grateful for some good news,” he said. “Let’s have that one first.”

  “Before he froze himself, it looks like Llewyn was doing some of his own research, and I think he figured out what’s causing the lightning storms. There’s a book in there with the page open to a diagram of something called the Refracticore. Most of the words are in some language that looks like squares and picnic tables, but there’s a drawing that shows a beam of light going down into a big purple rock thing from the top, then shooting back out from the sides in a bunch of smaller lights. I think someone’s using this Refracticore thing to attack the teenagers.”

  Simon realized his mouth was hanging open. He closed it again so he could speak. “Virgil! That’s amazingly good news! That’s everything! If Llewyn found what’s causing it, we can use that information to stop it! Why aren’t you sounding more excited?” The question struck him as extremely important, and his own excitement turned suddenly to dread. “Virgil…why aren’t you sounding more excited?” he asked again, more cautiously.

  “Well, that’s the bad news,” Virgil frowned, scratching the top of his head. “The book is open to that page, and it looks like there’s more about the Refracticore on the next page, but I can’t turn it. And I can’t pick up the book. And I can’t tear out the page. And I can’t take any other books off the shelves.”

  Simon furrowed his brow. “Why not?”

  “Because,” Virgil sighed, “everything is frozen solid.”

  Simon blinked. “What?”

  “Everything in the library is frozen solid. I mean, solid. I can’t move anything, and I can hardly touch anything. I think I got frostbite,” he added, frowning down at his fingers.

  “Well, thaw it out!” Simon said.

  “How?”

  “I don’t know, Virgil, breathe on it!” Simon snapped. “You’ve got a bunch of hot air, use it!”

  “But the books aren’t covered in ice!” Virgil protested. He pointed a finger at Llewyn. “They don’t look like him. There’s no ice, there’s no frost, nothing! They’re just cold, and frozen solid. There’s no ice to thaw, they just won’t move!”

  Simon shook his head, frustrated. He planted one hand against the wall for support, and for the first time since they arrived, he actually registered the feeling of the wall…and the temperature of it.

  The wall was as cold as ice.

  So was the floor. He could feel the chill through the soles of his sneakers.

  His face fell with the dawning of realization. “Everything is in cryo-stasis. Not just Llewyn…but everything. The whole mansion.”

  “The house is Llewyn,” Abby said, her voice cracking. She licked her lips and cleared her throat. “Everything here subsists on Llewyn’s magic. Llewyn freezes, the mansion freezes.”

  “Great,” Simon grumbled. “So the information about the Refracticore and how to stop it is there, but we can’t access it. Llewyn knows what it is, but we can’t unfreeze him. Our manacles are in the chest, but we probably can’t open it, because it’s probably frozen shut. Meanwhile, the woman in the cloak has been striking at least a few times a day, so that means the next batch of teenagers will be attacked…” He made a show of looking at his wrist, even though he didn’t wear a watch. “…any time now.” He ran both of his hands through his hair and fought against the urge to pull it all out. “Someone tell me, are we actually this bad at being heroes?”

  Virgil’s expression turned serious. “Ninety percent of being a hero is showing up for the fight. So far, we’ve been pretty good about not backing down. I don’t plan on changing that now. Do you?”

  Simon gritted his teeth. “No,” he said, his voice resolute. “I don’t.”

  Virgil’s lips curled up into a grin. “Good,” he said. “Me either. So let’s figure out how to Hulk-smash a Refracticore.”

  Chapter 20

  The plan wasn’t really much of a plan. It was more of a generally and unenthusiastically accepted course of action. Simon said as much.

  “That’s, like, the very definition of a plan,” Virgil pointed out.

  “Well, then, it’s a bad plan,” Simon replied sourly.

  Since the books in Llewyn’s library were pretty much useless in their frozen state, and since they didn’t get cell service in the tent (or anywhere near the East River, really), Simon and Virgil had decided to leave the tent mansion and head to a place where they could do a little resea
rch on the Refracticore. Simon had suggested the new Dark Matter office, but Virgil had refused.

  “Hard veto,” he said. “That place is depressing.”

  “It’s our office,” Simon frowned.

  “And someday maybe it’ll be a good office. Right now it’s a depressing office.”

  “But—”

  “Does it even have wi-fi?” Virgil interrupted.

  Simon considered that. “No,” he admitted. “It doesn’t get set up until Wednesday.”

  “Then forget the office. We’re going somewhere where I can focus.”

  That was how they ended up at Squeezy Cheez.

  Abby had elected to stay behind. She was still feeling shaky and feverish, and Simon didn’t like leaving her alone in there, with no one except a frozen wizard to keep an eye on her. But she had insisted that they go, saying that she would try to get to the bottom of the Morgaine mystery while they figured out the secrets of the Refracticore.

  “How are you going to do that?” Simon had asked. “Everything’s frozen.”

  Abby had looked at him pointedly and said, “Books aren’t the only things that tell secrets.”

  Simon hadn’t understood what she meant, exactly. But in the end, he lost the argument, and they left her alone with the frozen wizard in the tent to learn what she could learn about the cryptic red message on the wall.

  “I’m Skee-Balling,” Virgil announced as they walked through the doors of the Squeezy Cheez.

  Simon frowned. “I thought we were researching,” he said.

  “We are researching. Skee-Ball clears my head.”

  “You don’t need a clear head, you need to Google ‘Refracticore,’” Simon insisted.

  “No, you Google ‘Refracticore,’ and I, with my extremely clear head, will let you know if you’ve done a good job.” He trotted off toward the Skee-Ball machines, leaving Simon shaking his head. Virgil glanced at the Nerf gun hanging on the wall above the counter. He felt it leering down at him, taunting him. “Not much longer,” he said to the Nerf gun through gritted teeth.

  He plunked some tokens into his lucky Skee-Ball machine. His shoulders relaxed, and a smile crossed his face as he heard the familiar rumble-rumble-rumble-plump! of the machine releasing its store of wooden balls down the chute.

  “There’s something seriously wrong with you,” Simon called out across the restaurant.

  Virgil pretended not to hear.

  Simon plopped down at their usual table. Squeezy Cheez was pretty empty, though that wasn’t terribly surprising, since it was Sunday evening. Parents didn’t usually bring their kids there after 6:00 on school nights. There was one rowdy table of teenagers in the other room, hooting and laughing and throwing French fries at the animatronic band. One of the diners, a bulky guy in a letterman jacket, hurled a small paper cup full of ketchup at Suzie Kablooie. It splattered against her guitar. The jock pumped both fists in the air and howled with glee before serving up a round of high-fives across the table.

  Simon sighed. Maybe it wasn’t the worst thing in the world for someone to be taking high schoolers down a peg, he thought.

  He immediately blushed with guilt for having allowed himself such a cruel thought. “I’m sorry,” he murmured quietly in the teenagers’ direction. He wiped his hands down his face. The strain of the last couple of days had made him exhausted. He didn’t need to take it out on some teenagers blowing off steam.

  “Hey. Are you Simon?”

  Simon looked up and blinked at the owner of the slow, bored voice. It was the long-haired, pimple-chinned assistant manager named Toby. Simon had seen him at the restaurant a lot, and Abby had told them a few stories about Toby’s more unsavory habits, like how he prodded his zits until they bled, or how he picked lint from beneath his toenails with the little pocket knives you could win with 250 tickets. But Toby was usually hunkered down in the back room, avoiding responsibility and leaving his employees to handle all the customers. This was the first time he and Simon had actually spoken.

  “Uh…yeah?” he said, caught off guard.

  Toby held a small brown package between his hands. He leaned down and set it on the table. “This is for you,” he said. He turned to go back to the storeroom.

  “Wait,” Simon said, and Toby stopped. Simon inspected the package. It was a box wrapped in plain brown paper, with no markings. “Who’s it from?”

  Toby shrugged. Simon had never seen someone look so uninterested in anything before. “Dunno. They just said it’s for Simon Dark. They said you’d be in.”

  “But…no one knew I would be in,” Simon frowned. Even he hadn’t known that he would be in...not until they were already on their way.

  “Dunno,” Toby said again. He looked exhausted from so much social interaction. He hurried back around the counter, pushed his way into the storeroom, and closed the door behind him.

  Simon turned the box over in his hands. It was about the size of a shoebox, but not quite as wide, and was wrapped like a Christmas present, with neatly tucked sides and a crisp paper edge down the length of the box. The package weighed only a couple of pounds at most. He lifted it up to his ear and listened for ticking or rattling or hissing or anything that would give him a clue as to the contents.

  But the box was silent.

  He shook it carefully between his hands, and something slid back and forth against the sides.

  “Hey, Virgil,” he called out, but Virgil was intensely focused on his throwing form.

  Simon returned his attention to the box. He turned it onto its side and gingerly slid one finger under the Scotch tape that held down the flap. He popped it off and winced, bracing for some sort of impact or explosion.

  “They’re not going to booby-trap the paper,” Simon reminded himself out loud. Whoever had sent him the package would want to make sure that he opened the box.

  He opened the other end, and then he peeled back the tape from the long edge on the underside of the package. He pushed the paper back, and it fell away, revealing a purple box with a gold-colored lid.

  He looked around, suddenly uncomfortable, feeling as if he were being watched. But Virgil was lost in his game of Skee-Ball, Toby had disappeared into his hiding place, and the jocks couldn’t have cared less about some twenty-something sitting alone near the Pop-A-Shot.

  He frowned back down at the box. It sat there innocently, waiting to be opened.

  Simon extended his palm and conjured up a small shield. It wasn’t big enough that the people in the next room might see it, just big enough to provide a barrier between himself and whatever was inside the box, in case it was rigged. He ducked behind the bright orange light of the kinesthetic armor and reached out with a careful, trembling hand. He gripped the edge of the lid and slowly, carefully, pulled it off.

  The box did not explode.

  He lowered the shield and peered nervously into the box. Inside, nestled in a bed of brown tissue paper, was a purple plastic View-Master.

  Simon lifted it out of the box and inspected it carefully. It was an old-fashioned model, like the one he’d had when he was a boy, a hand-me-down from when his father was a child—a solid red rectangular block with a black lever, two plastic view scopes protruding from the back, and a pair of tilted parallelograms for lenses to let the light in on the front. Unlike his old toy, it was purple with a gold lever.

  And despite its classic design, it looked brand new.

  There was an image reel already inside the view slot. Simon pulled it out, and it was just like the reels he remembered: a flimsy, cardboard circle with notches along the edges and tiny rectangular film panels set around the disc. He held the reel up to the light and tried to identify the pictures inside but couldn’t make out any of the colored shapes. He brought the disc back down and was about to slip it back into the View-Master when he noticed the title of the reel.

  His
heart pumped so hard, he could feel the blood pulsing in his ears.

  The words typed in the center of the reel read, Dark/Matter: Trespass and Consequence.

  “Virgil,” Simon said, but his voice caught in his throat, and it came out as a dry whisper. His entire body was suddenly filled with a cloud of dread. It billowed through him, spreading like smoke, making his limbs feel heavy, weighing him down. His shocked movements came automatically, without thought, and without being prompted. He pushed the reel back into the View-Master. He lifted the plastic toy to his eyes. He pushed down on the gold lever.

  The first image was a title card, with off-white letters printed on a grainy black background. It was outlined with a thin, cream-colored frame, and the whole thing looked like a title card from a silent film. The text in the middle of the frame read, Part I: Trespass.

  Simon clicked the gold lever again. The next image slid into place.

  Simon’s pounding heart stopped cold in his chest.

  The picture was stylized like a stained glass window, with thick black lines separating each component; the background was fractured into small, geometric panes of blues and greens and browns. Vividly-colored trees stood at attention across the mid-ground of the image. In front of the trees sat a large, brown mound of dirt, and on either side of that stood two young men, their bodies tensed in fight-or-flight positions. They looked down at the dirt pile with fear in their eyes.

  One of the young men had short, blond hair and was holding an orange shield; the other had scruffier brown hair, and he was holding a small wooden ball.

  It was a painting of Simon and Virgil facing the rising mud-ghost on the Stocks.

  The illustration began to shake in front of his eyes, and Simon realized his hands were trembling. He pushed down on the gold lever again, and the picture was whisked away to the left. It was replaced by a new illustration in the same style. In this picture, Simon was running through the trees as Virgil dove away from the downward swing of the fully-formed mud-miner ghost.

  Simon clicked the lever again, and the third image showed Virgil lying on his back with his right arm extended toward the mud-miner. Gladys hung mid-air, on a frozen path toward Simon’s waiting hands. The mud-ghost had a hole right through his middle, and his face was contorted into a sneer of anger.