The Teen, the Witch and the Thief

by Ben Jeapes

  Especial thanks to Bishop Richard Poore, who founded the present city of Salisbury in 1220 AD and began work on the cathedral in the same year; to the cathedral guide who approximately 760 years later explained the thinking behind the carvings at the top of the tower, which kicked the whole thing off; and to Dave Clements (Anticipation, Montreal, 2009) for the Charles Dickens joke, nicked with gratitude.

  Ted will return in: The Comeback of the King.

  The Comeback of the King: Chapter 1

  Saturday started crap and got worse.

  Fresh from the bathroom, Ted peered through his bedroom curtains at a grey December morning. He pulled a face and the shoulders of his reflection sagged. The streetlights were still on and they turned the drifting cold drizzle into an orange mist. Eventually he would have to cycle out in that to get to work, and just knowing he still had another half hour of centrally heated warm and dry didn’t make him look forward to it any more.

  He lifted his eyes a little towards Stephen’s house the other side of the street, dark and lifeless. His shoulders sagged a bit more. No, don’t do that.

  He looked back at himself and his reflection cocked an eyebrow, encouraging him to look on the bright side. When he rubbed his chin, his fingers felt resistance: he was pretty certain he was actually growing something that would be worth shaving at last, once it had got past the spots. He angled his head from side to side to study his hair, still tousled from towelling. At the end of the summer he had decided to stop gelling it and just let it grow. The extra length meant he was learning things about it he had never known before. There were darker streaks in there, lurking in the blond-brown depths, which he was sure added an element of maturity and worldliness. It looked suspiciously like it might go curly if he let it grow too long, so he would have to keep an eye out for that. But it was bulking out nicely – just the right length for a girl to run her fingers through.

  If he could find a girl prepared to defy the UN global embargo on going out with Ted Gorse.

  “Arse,” he muttered: a general statement of his inner feelings towards wet mornings in December, and girls, Stephen, and the lack of both in his life thereof, and everything else that did or might weigh heavy upon him that day.

  The door opened behind him and a brother’s instincts told him who it was without turning round. It would be a girl who was very much in his life, six years younger than him, wrapped snugly in her dressing gown. His little sister.

  “I had a weird dream last night,” said Sarah.

  “Gee,” said Ted as he turned back to the room. “If only there was some way of, you know, standing outside a door and communicating that you’d like to come in but you need to check that it’s okay with whoever’s in there and they’re not naked or asleep or anything – I mean, if only you could do something like phone or text or book an appointment or send telepathic messages or – hey, here’s a good one! Or sort of clench your fist, like this, and then lightly rap the knuckles against the wood. We could invent a word for it. We could call it, I dunno, ‘knocking’.”

  Sarah looked blankly at him for half a second more than the time it took his words to flow effortlessly over her head.

  “Yeah. I had this dream and you were in it too.”

  “I’m warning you, I’m getting dressed now.” Ted was already wearing his shorts and a shirt that hung unbuttoned – so, he was perfectly decent for his own sister but there was always the hope that she would shriek, “Ugh! Gross!” and flee.

  No such luck.

  “And so was Robs and so was Zoe.”

  “Uh-huh–” Suddenly she had his attention, but he wasn’t going to let her see it. He picked his jeans up off the floor.

  “And so was a zebra.”

  “Right.” False alarm. He relaxed and tugged his jeans up round his waist.

  “But that went away and it was just us outside the cathedral. And there was this other guy–”

  Arse! Ted suddenly found he had forgotten how to button up a shirt. His fingers fumbled as he tried to act normal.

  “... only it was your friend Stephen, you know, before he died, and I was fighting him, and I was flying, and so was he and ... and–” She screwed her face up, trying to remember more. “The zebra might have come back. But,” she added, pleased with herself as if she had just remembered a key point, “it was definitely, I mean, I knew it was the night Robs got better and we found him in the car outside the cathedral, didn’t we?”

  Ted tried very hard to keep his face stony cold, but he obviously failed because he saw the triumph flash onto her face.

  “It was, wasn’t it! I’m remembering what happened! What happened?”

  “I thought you said you were remembering it.”

  “Te-e-d! Tell me!”

  “Well, you were right about the zebra. In fact there were lots of them. Zebras as far as the eye could see. All around the cathedral.” His fingers worked their way down his shirt front. “Making zebra noises.”

  Sarah seethed.

  “What noises do zebras make?” asked a freshly broken boy’s voice. And there was Robert, standing behind Sarah. Ted’s brother was nearly fourteen and his voice was cracking into adulthood, but he looked at you with the tilted head and blank innocence of a small child. For four years, Robert had been catatonic in a hospice, his mind totally absent from his body. Now his mind was back but he was a nine year old in the body of a young teenager. He had special schooling to help him catch up with his age group, and boy did he know how to milk it.

  “They sort of go ‘zebra, zebra, zebra’,” said Ted, “very quietly. That’s how they get their name.”

  Robert giggled. Sarah wasn’t going to be distracted.

  “Ted, tell me about my dream!”

  “Who am I? Joseph and his techno-multicolour coat thingy? I can’t interpret dreams.”

  “Sarah! Robert!” That was their mum calling. “One of you should be in the bathroom by now.”

  “Ted’s being mean to me,” Sarah called back.

  “Ted! Stop distracting your sister.”

  “I am not distracting her!” Ted strode to the door and shouted down the hallway. “I’m trying to get dressed and she wants me to tell her what her dreams mean!”

  “Sarah! Leave Ted alone! He’s got work to go to!”

  “Ooh!” Sarah’s glare was like a pair of lasers beamed out through narrowed eyes. Ted swaggered back into his room and made his grin as smug as he possibly could. They both knew he had escalated this to the supreme authority and she had no choice but to back down.

  “Ha, ha! Mum owned you!” Robert laughed. Sarah switched her glare to her other brother and gave him a punitive pinch. “Ow!” His smile turned into a scowl and his hand drew back in a fist.

  “Oi, oi!” Ted was immediately between them. He grabbed Robert’s hand and guided it back down to waist level. “You–” To his still smouldering sister. “Get into the bathroom. And you–” He gave Robert a gentle shove between the shoulders, guiding him to the door. “Let’s have breakfast.”

  “I wouldn’t have hurt her,” Robert grumbled as Ted threw bowls and cereal boxes onto the table.

  “Yeah, you would. You’re thirteen now.”

  “I hate being thirteen. I want to be nine again.”

  Yeah, well, Ted thought, I hate being seven months older than the age of consent and no sign of me ever consenting, but you get used to it.

  “You know you’re probably the only thirteen year old in the world who thinks like that?” he said instead. “Anyway, it means you’re way bigger and stronger than her.”

  “I’ve always been bigger and stronger than her,” Robert pointed out logically.

  “So you shouldn’t ever hit her, should you?” Ted checked his watch: by now, he was close to running late. He slammed some bread into the toaster and spooned cereal quickly into his mouth, not bothering to sit down.

  Their stepfather, Barry, appeared briefly in the door, still in his gown. Ted was the only one who had to be
dressed early on a Saturday morning. The rest of the household took it at a more leisurely pace.

  “Ted! Be civilised!”

  But he moved on without checking Ted had obeyed the instruction, which he hadn’t. He spooned the last of the cereal down and started to butter the toast.

  “What was Sarah talking about?”

  Robert was sitting at the table, cereal barely touched, watching him eat. Ted paused, and sighed, and kept on buttering.

  “It was about the night you got me back, wasn’t it?” Robert pressed on.

  “Maybe.” Ted didn’t look at him.

  “I know it was.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Until this morning, and Sarah’s dream, Ted had been the only one to have any proper memory of that night. He fully intended it to keep it that way.

  Well, Robs, it’s like this, he might have said. Your mind got wiped by this evil magician guy, this thief, so he could get at this store of hidden knowledge about magic, see, which was kept in a kind of alternate-universe-Salisbury-thing, and he brought it back to this world, and I kind of had a part to play in that too though I didn’t realise it, and there’s this witch too who it turned out was on our side …

  Nope. Way too complicated. And that was just the précis.

  Ted crammed the toast into his mouth.

  “I’ve got to get to work,” he said. “I’ll be late.”

  Barry appeared in the door again.

  “You’d better get to work, Ted, or you’ll be late.”

  God, I’d be a wreck if I didn’t have you to manage my life, Ted said, but not out loud.

  “Can’t you teach me to drive?”

  “Can’t you be seventeen yet?”

  “Stop distracting Ted, he needs to get to work.” Ted’s mum buzzed irritably past the kitchen door. Barry opened his mouth, thought better, closed it again. Ted was about to grin when he saw, in an unguarded flash of a moment, the hurt in Barry’s eyes.

  Ah.

  Robert scowled up at Ted, oblivious to the low-key parental drama and knowing he was being fobbed off. Ted gave his brother’s head a quick ruffle before pulling his coat on.

  “Gotta go.”

  “When will you give me the anti-Talk?”

  Barry hadn’t yet moved out of earshot.

  “What’s the anti-Talk?”

  Ted stood for a moment, caught between two opposing forces. The anti-Talk, Barry, is the remedy for the Talk. It was hideously embarrassing when you gave it to me and you hadn’t got any better at it when you gave it to Robert. The number of things I need to set him straight on ...

  “Bye!” he said brightly, and ran out of the front door.

  So, that was the crap start. As for getting crappier ...

  Ted pulled his bike out of the garage, swung his leg over it – and paused.

  Why do you do this, Ted? Every freakin’ day …

  He couldn’t help it. He glanced over at Stephen’s house on the other side of the road. The sale had finally gone through; complete strangers would be moving into the house of his childhood friend after Christmas.

  God, he missed Stephen.

  He had used to wonder how anyone who believed in an afterlife could be unhappy when someone died. If they really believed that person was in a better place, what was the problem?

  Well, Ted was ambivalent on the afterlife but he knew for a fact Stephen was in another place, gone forever because his body in this world was smashed beyond hope of fixing, and it didn’t do the slightest bit of good, because one place Stephen resolutely wasn't was here.

  Okay, okay, enough with the schmaltz. He kicked himself away and coasted down the drive. His bike wobbled as he tugged the zip of his coat up and pulled the hood over his head. He ducked down to get the morning drizzle out of his eyes and set off down Henderson Close.

  His backpack felt suspiciously light ...

  “Arse!”

  Ted skidded to a halt, swung the bike round and was back inside in thirty seconds.

  “What the–?” said his mum has he barged past her on the stairs.

  “Laptop!” he shouted. He emerged from his room and tried to stuff the laptop into his bag at the same time as he took the stairs two at a time on the way back down. He stumbled and almost fell before his mum caught him.

  “Do you really need that?”

  “Yes!” he gasped. “Bye!”

  So now he was even later as he got back onto his bike and powered off back down the road, standing on his pedals to add weight to each thrust.

  That was when he realised his hands were cold. More than that: they were freezing. It was only a ten-minute ride into Salisbury, but this was the first really cold morning of December, and if he kept going like this then he would get to work with two numb ice blocks on the end of his arms.

  Later he admitted that he could have just stopped for ten seconds to put his gloves on.

  They were in his right coat pocket. He tugged one glove out of his pocket with his right hand and tried to balance it on his raised fingers so that it would just sort of slide over his fist. It didn’t – it got stuck half way and almost fell off. So Ted held the base of the glove between his teeth, blocking one eye’s view of the road, and tried to work his hand into the rest of the glove.

  One down! By now he was rather enjoying the challenge of putting gloves in flight. He put his right hand back on the handlebars and carefully reached across with his left for the other glove. This time he tried a different tactic. He used the thumb and forefinger of his right hand to hold the glove steady against the handlebars while working his left hand into it. It meant that out of a possible ten fingers to control the bike, just three of his right hand were now being used for the task.

  At some time during what followed, it seemed that his spirit rose out of his body and into the air, and from a safe distance he observed the actions of a complete wally who should never have been allowed out onto public roads.

  The bike was already leaning to the right. It hit a bump and began to swerve. He was still holding the handlebars and glove with his right hand, and his left hand was still stuck inside the glove. Both hands were on one side of the bars. He took a moment to work out what to make his left hand do, so the situation got a little worse before he was able to correct it. He corrected it so hard that he over-compensated and the bike swerved over to the left. Another over-compensation and it was heading to the right again, leaning at a dangerous angle.

  He began to topple.

  And here it goes, his detached mind thought as the bike finally leaned past the point of no return. I wonder if I’ll die ...

  You won’t.

  Ted slammed into the road in a tangled mass of limbs and metal. His chin took the brunt of the impact and the rest of his body telescoped bone by bone into the back of his head. His brain vibrated in his skull and only the high, padded collar of his coat saved his jaw from being split open.

  Then it was over. For a moment he just lay there in the road, his detached mind suddenly reunited with his aching body, and contemplated being alive.

  “Aa-ah-ah!”

  He moved, very slowly, arm, arm, leg, leg, neck. Nothing seemed to be broken.

  “Arse!”

  Ted realised he was lying in a public suburban road. He pushed himself gingerly upright, though it felt like he was pulling himself out of a hole in the ground. He sat on the wet road and tilted his face up to the dull, wet sky. Drizzle fell gently down upon him. Then he climbed slowly to his feet, while every move made pain stab into him at random points.

  For a moment he thought of going back home, but there was no real point. He wasn’t that badly hurt and anyway, the thought of going back to Barry and saying, “I fell off my bike” …

  He pulled the bike upright and climbed gingerly onto the saddle. He paused to let his head clear a bit more, then kicked the bike forward. It stopped so suddenly that he almost slid off. And that was when he noticed, through his daze, that the front wheel had buckled. This bike
wasn’t going anywhere.

  He swore one more time and turned slowly back to his house.

  “I fell off my bike,” he muttered when Barry opened the front door. He stared with sullen dignity at his stepfather and dared him to laugh. Barry didn’t, though the effort made him slightly cross-eyed.

  “I’d better give you a lift, then.”

  And so Ted was officially late for work, because Barry still had to get dressed, and get the car out, and Ted’s mum decided that she had to run through a list of things to do that day, and they both had to pause for a very understated argument that absolutely had to be held there and then ...

  Ted phoned ahead to the shop to give his apologies while he waited for the bickering to die down. At least these disagreements were regular and predictable, though apparently not so predictable that they couldn’t see them coming.

  He still wasn’t quite sure why they had married in the first place. His mum had only been a widow for two years when it happened, and it wasn’t out of the question that they only got together under the influence of the thief as part of his greater overall plan of totally buggering up Ted’s life. Now the thief was gone, it was quite possible they would find they had no reason to stay together. Or, as Zoe liked to point out, maybe they would, they just needed to reassess where they stood. Or something.

  But the thought of them separating made Ted a lot unhappier than it would have a few months earlier.

  Finally, he was in the car with Barry and heading down Henderson Close. They approached the corner where Ted had had his spectacular fall. Barry indicated, slowed–

  BANG

  –and with an interesting crunching noise the car lurched into a deep pothole that flung Ted hard against his seatbelt.

  “What the-!?” Barry exclaimed. In a flash he was out of the car and running round to the passenger side. He stared down and ran his fingers through his hair. “I don’t believe it! How long has that been there?”

  Ted wound his window down to have a look at the hole in the road. It was right next to his door.

  “Just what the hell are those morons doing with our council tax? Right, I’m writing to them the moment I get back–”