Mystify the Magician

by K. A. Applegate

  I hid my face and pushed past the woman.

  And Trent, wild-eyed, said, "Do the woman, you can't leave a witness."

  I shook my head violently. I was doing a pretty good job of playing the hyped, frazzled, stunned killer.

  Trent gripped me hard and pulled me into him. "Do the woman, you moron, or she'll ID me, too, and I'll have to testify against you."

  Yeah, kind of like we planned.

  "I'll take care of it," he said.

  And in my dazed-idiot state I said, "Okay," having no freaking idea what he was talking about. Till I saw him pull out his own gun.

  When the brain is frozen, sometimes sheer dumb instinct is all you've got. Sheer dumb instinct swung on Trent, caught him with my own gun barrel under the chin.

  Jalil jumped up off the ground and came running. Trent was staggered, fumbling to get his own gun out, and I was pretty sure he had not pried the slugs out of his bullets.

  Jalil took a flying leap and down went the three of us. The woman ran for the street screeching. April came running up.

  David was crossing the street. Cops would be there in two minutes.

  I had Trent's gun hand and Jalil pried the weapon out of his hand.

  David loomed up. "Get his keys out of his pocket."

  I did as I was told, glad to have someone tell me what to do.

  The four of us hustled the future Fuhrer into his rusty old Econoline van and kicked and shoved him into the dirty, crowded back.

  "Plan's working pretty well," I said, wincing as I banged my shin on a wooden crate.

  "Does this stuff wash out?" Jalil wondered, looking at the bloody mess on his shirt.

  "What are you punks after?" Mr. Trent managed to ask around his split lip.

  "I'm trying to raise money for the school band by selling magazine subscriptions," I said. "And by the way, this is your gun I'm pointing at you, not mine. I shoot you, you won't get up like Jalil here."

  David cranked the wheezy engine, April in the passenger seat buckled her seat belt, and we lurched away just as the sound of sirens got really loud.

  "I just want to say, hell of a plan, guys, just a hell of a fine plan. It's like Mission: Im-Freaking-possible. Why did I let you two talk me into this? Am I stupid?"

  It took about ten minutes of driving around without a clue, me bitching nonstop, before one of us — Jalil, naturally —noticed what we were sitting on.

  "These are crates, man," he said. "Look: stencil markings."

  "I can't see anything."

  The back windows of the van were painted black. The only light came from the windshield.

  We found a place to stop, in the parking lot of a twenty-four-hour Dominick's grocery store on Green Bay. It still wasn't light in the back, so April went into the store and bought a pair of small flashlights while we all sat and stared at Trent.

  "What's up with you?" David asked the man.

  "You get nothing from me but name, rank, and serial number," Trent snapped.

  "Rank? What rank?" David asked. "We have your name, you don't have a rank, and you don't have a serial number.

  What are you, an idiot?"

  "Is that Jew I smell?"

  Before David could answer, April returned. Using the flashlights and the tire iron we found in the back, we opened one crate. A row of shells lay in a molded plastic form.

  There was a long moment of silence, and a slow exhalation.

  I looked at David and Jalil, both smirking. “Don't even look smug, you two. It doesn't count if the plan works by accident."

  In the next crate we found a mortar, broken down in pieces.

  And then a second crate of mortar rounds.

  "Now what?" April asked. "We can't just dump this stuff somewhere."

  "Sure we can," Jalil said with his slow, reptilian smile forming, "I know exactly where we can dump all this stuff."

  Later that night the FBI office in Chicago got a call from a pay phone. They discovered a parked van outside their building. The van contained a hog-tied Nazi and a large cache of illegal weapons.

  Chapter

  XX

  Everworld me was getting better. I could walk normally. I could eat. The fever was gone. I was well enough to bathe myself. Which was a shame because I was also well enough that I'd have enjoyed having Etain give me a sponge bath.

  See, there's the Catch-22: If you might enjoy it, you don't get it. Pretty well sums up life as we know it.

  The hospital was no longer as full. The men and fairies had learned how to keep their heads down. And for now Senna was stopped at the castle gates. So Etain's visits with me could take a little longer. Mostly she asked about the real world.

  Mostly about stuff I didn't know much about.

  "Light has a particular speed, then? And how do you know it doesn't go faster or slower depending on whether the spirits are agitated or calm?"

  "I don't know. Scientists do this stuff. I just get tested on it.

  Doesn't mean I understand it."

  "One hundred and eighty-six thousand miles per second,"

  Etain marveled. "Faster even than one of your bullets."

  "Yeah. And faster than sound. That's why you see the flash of a gun and don't hear the sound till a second or so later."

  "Is that true, then?" she said excitedly. "Come, let us go to the walls and see."

  "You want to get shot at so we can see if light travels faster than sound? I'm thinking, no."

  She smiled. "There is something in what you say."

  Mostly that was it: a lot of talk about cars and internal combustion engines and jet engines and medicine and space shuttles and DNA and phones and television and why Survivor had been a hit and so on.

  But that was okay, she liked talking about the real world and I liked talking to her about anything as long as she'd sit close to my bed and look beautiful and smell great and be nice to me.

  When you've spent a couple of months wandering around lost in Weird World, running from one evil mess to the next, and finally getting up close and personal with a hand grenade, you are desperately, giddily, puppy-dog grateful for a pretty girl who'll sit there and give you a lively sense of what you're living for. But still, nothing had gotten personal. No kiss, no grope, no exchanges, shall we say. I knew I had to get up serious nerve.

  But things were so nice I just didn't want to mess it up by trying for the next level. Plus, of course, there was the omnipresent fear of Etain's fairy bodyguard.

  But eventually I had to make some kind of a play. I was right on the edge of being the kind of guy some chick's father would approve of. That couldn't last.

  It was to be my last night in the hospital. The last time when Etain could legitimately come to see me as my nurse, without it being some big thing. She mentioned that she'd be by after supper. She mentioned it casually. But she blushed when she mentioned it casually, so I had my hopes up pretty high.

  As it happened, she came by earlier than usual. Two hours earlier. I figured, hey, if she's showing up two hours early she must actually like me. Clearly the time had come to make a move.

  She asked me how I was doing. She asked me how I felt.

  And with the grace and subtlety for which I am justly famous, I said, "So, Etain, on another topic entirely, do you have a boyfriend?"

  "A boyfriend?"

  "A squeeze. You know, some guy you're involved with."

  "A betrothed?"

  Hmmm. "Okay, sure, a betrothed."

  "I was betrothed," she said without too much sadness. "He was a prince of Blackpool. But alas, he died. He was gored by a boar and infection set in, the wound mortified."

  "Alas," I said with some genuine sympathy; When you get blowed up real good you discover you have a lot of sympathy for anyone who's suffered something similar.

  "He might have been saved with April's mold," Etain said thoughtfully.

  I nodded. "Yeah. April needs to see about patenting her mold. The girl's looking at some serious cash flow."


  "April is an inspiration," Etain said sincerely. "The druids fairly worship her."

  April's mold was crude penicillin. Not all that hard to grow in a land where it seemed to be damp pretty much all the time.

  Between boiling everything in sight and demanding that everyone wash their hands and introducing antibiotics, April had moved medical science forward about a thousand years.

  She had used up her stock of Advil, but now she was at work figuring out how to make aspirin.

  "Yeah, well, watch out for April: She'll have you all eating broccoli and saying the Rosary if you're not careful. But enough about her. The thing is, if we don't all get killed, is there any way you and I could see each other?"

  "Do we not see each other now?"

  "Yeah, but I mean see as in 'see.' Hang. Do things together.

  Date."

  "You mean court?" She laughed, trying to cover for a blush that reddened her cheeks and extended down her neck.

  "Yeah, it's like courting, but less serious. I mean courting is about getting married, right? Dating is like courting except you don't get married. I mean, maybe in Utah you get married, but mostly not."

  "No?"

  I shrugged. "Well, no, probably. I mean, someday. I guess."

  The fever seemed to be coming back. "But what you do is you go to places and have fun. You take a drive in the car. Or the...

  horse. You go horse riding together. You catch a movie or possibly a druid ritual, depending on what's showing, or you grab a burger. You talk about stuff."

  "Just talk?" she asked.

  I hesitated. Was that a signal of some kind? Was Etain a couple of steps ahead of me? "Talk, mostly” I said cautiously.

  "Do you never embrace?"

  "Embrace?"

  "Do you never kiss?"

  Yes, yes, she was a couple of steps ahead of me. She leaned close, leaned right across me, and kissed me on the lips.

  Right away it wasn't right. I knew what I expected. I'd spent a few hundred hours thinking about kissing Etain, and this wasn't it.

  I felt strange, disturbed. I felt as if I was getting sicker. As if someone was drugging me, that was it, like someone had slipped me a Demerol or something.

  I tried to pull away. But it was too late. I opened my eyes.

  And now I was too far gone even to register surprise. Of course it was Senna's face, Senna's eyes so close to my own. Laughing, contemptuous eyes.

  "Hi, Christopher," she said as she drew back. "Long time no see." I felt muzzy, fuzzy anger and fear way, way down inside me. But on the surface of my mind, in the brain that actually controlled my rawest emotions, my actions, I felt only helpless surrender.

  I knew it was Senna now. Senna, the shape-shifter. Senna the witch. I knew what Senna was. I knew exactly what she was doing. And still I reached for her. Still I leaned to kiss her.

  "One more to seal the bargain," she breathed.

  And I was lost.

  Chapter

  XXI

  "You'll see this is for the best, Christopher," she told me. "All this fighting and killing has to stop. Too many people are getting hurt. And why? Because David wants to play the hero.

  You know it's true."

  A grain of truth. Not the real truth, not the complete truth, but a grain.

  "Everworld is a mess," Senna went on. She was pacing beside my bed, alternately wringing her hands slowly, glancing nervously toward the door and favoring me with syrupy pity looks. "My creatures forever killing one another. It needs to be organized. I mean, how is it ever going to become a decent place unless someone comes along to guide them toward the kind of life that we all believe in?"

  Yes, that was true, Everworld was a mess.

  She was working on me, I knew that. Part of me was still there, functioning. Part of me was still skeptical, still aware that I was being fed a line of b.s.

  But that part of me was wrapped in gauze, a mummy. That part of me mumbled and shuffled and blinked nearsightedly, unable to quite focus.

  "I know you want to support your friends, but aren't I your friend, too?" Senna asked. "We were close once, Christopher, before David came along and pushed you out of my life."

  Is that what happened? Kind of. No, no, it was more... that wasn't it. But kind of, right?

  "David and Jalil are in this together, you know that, don't you? Jalil thinks he's so great. He thinks he's better than you. You must know that. You must know that secretly, behind your back, be laughs at you."

  She was lying, wasn't she? She had tried to kill me. Jalil had saved my life more than once.

  But there was truth in what she said, too. Of course there was truth. David was a jumped-up martinet. Jalil was an arrogant smart-ass.

  "And what about April? She's just a tease, Christopher. I mean, you're not stupid, Christopher; you know it's not an accident when she lashes a little leg or some cleavage at you.

  You know she's playing with you, and there's no chance she'll ever be yours. No, no, it's Jalil she wants. You know, some girls are like that."

  Jalil and April? I searched my memory, but memory was a slow, slow, slow-loading file. The software all frozen up, couldn't quite reach it, couldn't quite get it to boot up.

  "Nice boy like you, Christopher, you don't have a chance with April, not with that smart-ass Jalil in there, taking what should be yours."

  No, that was... that wasn't right. But it was true, wasn't it?

  April did like Jalil. And of course he liked her, of course, who wouldn't? And everyone knows how they are. Everyone knows.

  Senna was still close. Close enough that I could smell the perfume of her; God, she smelled so sweet, so beautiful. The most beautiful girl in the world, a movie star, a shining angel. I wanted her She cared about me, oh she didn't always show it but she cared about me.

  "Etain is the same way," Senna said. "But she wants David.

  She wants to be taken, you know, taken by a strong, dominant, aggressive man. And David will do it. He'll do it."

  I blinked. No. No, there was no truth there. Was there? No.

  Senna was just wrong. That wasn't it at all.

  Senna didn't know Etain.

  That fact stuck. As loopy as I was, that fact was I solid: Senna had not been here these last weeks, she didn't know Etain.

  Senna peered closely at me, looked at my eyes with the detachment of an optometrist checking for glaucoma. She pressed her lips together, angry at herself, sensing that she'd played her cards wrong. Then she relaxed into a smile.

  "I can give you Etain," she said playfully, teasing. "That's what you want, isn't it?"

  She was changing tactics, changing approaches. Trying to come at me from a different direction.

  Come on, Christopher, shake free. Shake free.

  "We'll get rid of David and Jalil," Senna whispered. She laid her hand on my arm, on the bare skin, and I felt a shiver run up and down my spine.

  My brain, my memory, just surfacing, just coming up for air, just emerging from the smothering water, was thrust back down, pushed hard, back under, back under.

  Couldn't hold on. She was talking again, talking to me close, so close, so beautiful, and I was slipping, further than ever. A song was in my head, a song going round and round.

  Santana?

  "Better leave your lights on. Because there's a monster.

  There's a monster living under my bed, Whispering in my ear."

  "Now, go."

  The word "go" snapped in my head. Electric. Irresistible. I stood. I fumbled for my sword. "Go, Christopher. Be my true hero."

  I went.

  "Help me, Christopher. You want to help me, Christopher, and it will all be yours. Etain will be yours. Etain will be yours forever."

  And then she was Etain, she was Etain, and she was pressing her body close, covering my face in hot kisses. Etain.

  Etain.

  "It's time to go," Etain breathed in my ear.

  "Go where?" I mumbled.

  "You must go," she
whispered.

  There's a monster, Christopher, a monster whispering in your ear. "Wha... where?"

  "To the gate of the castle. It needs to be opened. You would be my hero, Christopher."

  Not Etain. It was...

  "Be my hero, Christopher, and you'll have me, all of me without reservation. Go to the castle gate. You must open the gate. Take your sword. Lift up the crossbar. Then cut the drawbridge rope. Do those things, Christopher, do them and I am yours forever and ever."

  Etain kissed me again. No, the monster. Etain.

  Chapter

  XXII

  I closed the door behind me. Stepped into the hallway. A passing fairy nodded at me, the respectful nod due to a wounded fighter.

  What was I doing? Open the gate. Drop the drawbridge.

  Why?

  Um...

  Open the gate, drop the drawbridge.

  The monster whispering in my ear. But Etain was no monster. Etain was not Etain.

  That damned David. Freaking glory dog, that's what he was. Him and Jalil working together to cut me out. Laughing at me behind my back.

  Jalil wanted Etain. Or was it David? One of them. Both of them? Etain and April and everyone.

  Down the hall. Down the turning, turning stairs. Like Sleeping Beauty's castle. I'm Sleeping Beauty, that’s what it is, I'm sleeping, way down here inside my own brain.

  My sword. I was wearing the sword old King Camulos had given me.

  What was going to happen to the king and to Goewynne?

  Oh, it would be okay. Senna would be decent to them. She wasn't going to hurt anyone, not the monster, not the monster Senna.

  Out into the courtyard. Weird, fresh air. Fresh cold night air.

  First fresh night air in a long time. It was good to be out of the hospital.

  Still a little shaky, though. Shaky. Weak. Walking like an action figure, stiff, unnatural.

  Like a puppet.

  Across the courtyard. There was the gate, massive timbers bound with iron straps. Two things: the inner gate and the drawbridge beyond it. Had to open both.

  If Keith and the Sennites just made it across the drawbridge but ran into a locked gate, they were screwed. There was a narrow passage between the drawbridge and the inner gate, high walls looming over it all, firing positions everywhere. Come in the drawbridge and get held up by the inner gate, you were toast: crammed into a space twenty feet long and six feet wide with fairy archers above you, pouring arrows into you. Or worse, some of Jalil's acid bath.