DIANE DUANE - A Wizard Alone

 Say no more,  Tom said.  We re on the same wavelength. It s just another facet of the way wizards have to behave in our culture. Attracting attention toyourself is usually unwise. In this particular situation, if people start noticingyou in the neighborhood around the object of our mutual interest, they won t think too much about it it s not far enough from your own stamping grounds to provoke suspicion.Whereas if Carl or I went to investigate personally, notice might be taken. This kind of initial fact-finding is better suited to a wizard of your age.

 Besides,  Carl said, peering up at the bottom of the cupboard,  lately you ve been evincing a certain talent for finding things.

 Well,Ponch has,  Kit said.

 I m not sure he d be producing these results without you as part of the team,  Carl said, as he appliedduct tape liberally to the cupboard s underside.  Let s not get overly tangled up in details at the moment.

 From a man in your position, that has a hollow ring,  Tom said.

 Sure, go ahead, mock me in my torment.

 Anyway, are you willing   Tom said. To go over there during the next couple of days  See what the kid s doing, physically, talk to him if you can, try to get a sense of what his state of mind is.

 Sure,  Kit said.  Am I allowed to tell him I m a wizard, if he asks 

 I ll leave that up to you,  Tom said.  Normally I would suggest that you try to avoid it if possible. You don t want to take the chance of altering his perception of his Ordeal, maybe even making him think you re supposed to be involved in it somehow. But if you can come by any sense of why his Ordeal s taking him so long, I d be glad to hear it.

Carl straightened up.  Okay,  he said. The strip lights under the cupboards were now actually on. He looked at the light they cast on the counter with some satisfaction.  At least now I m going to be able to see what I m cooking without getting blinded.  He went over to the wall, turned the dimmer switch.

Clunk!

 I could stop by the supermarket on the way home and get you some candles,  Kit said as he got up.  Fire still works.

 Very funny,  Carl said.  I hope that someday, when duct tape is sticking toyour gray hairs 

 Kit,  Tom said,  ignore the whimpering from the sidelines for the moment  Be careful not to get sucked in. This youngster may seem very, very stuck when you meet him, and you ve got to resist the temptation to give him help he doesn t need. You could end up endangering yourself, not to mention altering the focus of his Ordeal  which could make him fail it.Or worse.

 I ll watch out.

 Okay. Go see what you can find out. You may want to leave your manual on record when you re talking to him; it may pick up some nuance that you miss at first.  He paused.  Listen to that,  he said.

Kit listened, puzzled.  I don t hear anything.

 What the master of sarcasm over there means is that the dogs have stopped barking,  Carl said.  They ve been having some kind of metaphysical discussion for days now. And they re loud about it.

 Have they been asking you about the meaning of life   Kit said.

Both Tom and Carl gave Kit a look.  Uh, yes,  Tom said.

Kit covered his face.  It s my fault,  he said.  A new kind ofblackmail, and I know where they got it. They probably want dog biscuits.

 New tactic,  Tom said wearily, getting up. Old problem. I ll bear it in mind.

Ponchcame lolloping back into the dining room. Kit got up, too.  I ll get in touch as soon as I find anything out,  Kit said, opening the patio door to letPonch out.

 Thanks,fella ,  Tom said. Daistiho.

 Yeah, you go well, too. Well enough not to electrocute somebody, anyway!

They headed back the way they d come, Kit pausing briefly in Tom s backyard with the spell-chain in his hands to adjust the variable that determined how much and how fast the air displaced around their transiting mass when they  came out of nowhere. Ponch was bouncing up and down around him, making it difficult for Kit to remember where in the structure of the spell the variable actually was.  Would you sitdown   he said under his breath toPonch , while passing the softly glowing chain of words through his hands until the little barbed bit sticking out from the variable scratched his skin. Kit held the word up in front of his eyes, squinting at it like someone threading a needle, and managed to catch the delicate outward-hooked tail of the spell character between finger and thumb.

Chicken!Ponch was shouting in his head.Hurry up! It s chicken !

 And philosophy goes right out the window, huh   Kit said as he twiddled the mass-displacement variable; it shaded down from a bright blue to a darker one.  You re a bad influence on those guys, you know that 

Me Never. Chicken!

 Right,  Kit said, folding the variable s tail back in and shaking the spell through a quick sine wave tounkink it. It fell smoothly to the ground and knotted itself.  Now sit down or you regonna wind up in two different places, and not in one piece!

Ponchsat down but still managed to bounce a little.

The spell flared up, its blue a little darker this time. A second later they were standing in Kit s backyard again, without the ear-popping effect this time, and the light faded out of the spell.

 Better   Kit said, winding the spell-chain up and sticking it back in his  pocket.

It s fine. I m hungry!Ponch shouted, and ran for the house.

Kit breathed out, feeling hungry, too, and tired. This, at least, had nothing to do with the emotional climate. No wizardry is without its price, and this was the normal reaction toa transit wizardry: a small but significant deduction from Kit s personal energy supply. It was one of the reasons why, as they got older, a lot of wizards spent as much time as they could making sure they were in decent physical shape.

Kit went afterPonch and was surprised not to see his mama and pop eating in the kitchen, as they usually did. He wandered into the living room and found them there on the sofa. Kit s pop was finishing the last of what must have been a second helping ofarrozcon polio , watching the TV screen, while Kit s mama sat next to him, cross-legged, punching the scan button on the remote and looking at the TV with an expression of extreme bemusement.

His father looked up.  Five billion channels and nothing on,  he said in a kind of horrified astonishment.

 The story of modern life,  Kit said, resigned, and headed to the kitchen to gethimself a plate.  Just be-cause a species is more scientifically advanced than us doesn t mean its TV is any better, believe me.

His father absorbed this assessment with a thoughtful look.  Maybe that should make me feel better. I ll let you know. What did Tom have to say 

 It s complicated,  Kit said.  A missingpersons case.

 And areyou likely to go missing   his pop said.

 Not right away,  Kit said.  I have to do some detective work here first.

 Oh, my god,  Kit s mama said,  what are theydoing

Anything that could so seriously gross out Kit s mama, the nurse, was worth a look. Kit grabbed a plate and ducked back into the living room, looked at the writhing, thrashing, stridently colored image for a moment, then took the remote away from his mama and punched it for subtitles.  Oh, that s what I thought,  he said, after spending about ten seconds reading them.  It sa soap .

 Not of any brand I recognize,  his mother said. She looked scandalized.

 It s real basic, Mama,  Kit said.  Boy meets girl meets thing meets other thing. Boy loses girl loses other thing finds thing. Boy loses thing gets girl loses thing. Happily ever after   He tossed the remote back to his mother.

She fielded it badly as she studied the screen for any signs of boys or girls, and looked like she was having trouble finding any, though there were plenty of  things.    Basic,  you said 

 Old, old story, Mama. You should see some of these guys  literature. Shakespeare would have loved it.  Kit considered that briefly: His lit class had been doing the late Shakespeare comedies, and suddenly a whole set of opportunities opened out before him.  Just imagineA Midsummer Night s Dream with ten or twelve extra genders 

His mother raised her eyebrows, gave up on the soap, and started changing channels again.  Doesn t this thing have an online channel guide   she said.

 I ll have a look at it later and let you know,  Kit said.

He saw the look she threw at his pop.  Are there cooking channels 

 Oh, yeah. Then Kit paused, having a horrible thought.  On second thought, it might be smarter to avoid those. Some of them feature humans  and not as the cooks.

The look on his mother s face made Kit wish he d kept quiet. She began changing channels with unusual speed. Kit raised his eyebrows and went back into the kitchen with the plate.

He was spooning out rice when his dad came back in and began rooting around in the silverware drawer in an aimless way that didn t fool Kit for a moment.  Son,  he said, very quietly,  is therereally a cooking channel, uh,  about  us 

 Pop,there s lots of them.

His father looked shocked.  But how is something like thatpermitted* .

Kit shrugged.  You go where you shouldn t go,  Kit said, and couldn t help grinning,  youfind out stuff you shouldn t find out. Like how you taste in a sweet-and-sour sauce with galingale. The universe is full of little surprises.

 I always have the feeling that there s a lot about this wizardry you re not telling me,  his father said.  Sometimes it worries me. Then come times like this when I m horribly glad about my ignorance. Just don t go places where you shouldn t go, okay 

 I try to avoid it,  Kit said.  Is it okay with you if I go toBaldwin in the next couple of days, though 

His pop looked surprised.  Baldwin  No problem with that.

 Thanks.

Kit brought his plate into the living room, where he sat down on the floor and watched his mother change channels one more time.  Well,that s pretty,  she said, sounding relieved.

Kit glanced up at the screen, chewing.  Uh, Mama,  he said,  I m probably too young to be watching anything that explicit.

Her eyes widened.  But, honey, it s just a big cloud of gas, or smoke, or   She stopped, her eyes widening even more, then changed the channel six times in a row without stopping.

Kit grinned and turned his attention back to the chicken.

Investigations

Circuses even just the thought of them had always scared Nita when she was little. Later on, she had felt that the fear was ridiculous. Circuses were supposed to be so much fun for small children all the sparkle, glitter, and noise, the processions of elephants parading along trunk-by-tail, the blare of brass music, the daring acrobats and tumblers, the goofy clowns.

Yet it hadn t worked that way for Nita the first time she actually went to one. Where the other kids in the audience had laughed and clapped, she sat amid all the raucous noise feeling terribly unnerved. It wasn t so much being afraid that an acrobat would fall, that a lion would eat the lion tamer  nothing so concrete or obvious. But the darkness, the gradually strengthening smells of sawdust, animal sweat, greasepaint, and canvas, the spotlighting that left too many other things purposely obscure while half-seen forms moved in those shadows, themselves concealed by the light all these slowly combined to suggest that something unexpected, something unavoidable, was going to happen. And that looming unknown frightened Nita badly. At intermission she d begged her parents to take her home.Dairine had cried at the thought of leaving, and so their mom had stayed with Dari while her father drove Nita back to the house.

That her dad had never pressed her for details about this was still one of the things Nita thought about when counting up the reasons she loved him. But even his silent support couldn t do anything about the nightmares thatfollowed, nightmares full of leering clown faces and the musky smell of big cats. Finally the nightmares faded away and left Nita wondering what in the world had been the matter with her. Yet she never went to another circus. And even now, sometimes the mere sight of a spotlight aimed at an empty floor, with darkness lying silent beyond it, was enough to induce in her a feeling of tremendous foreboding that would darken her soul for hours.

Sometimes she tried to work out in more detail why she d been so scared. She kept coming back to the clowns. To Nita, there was a fake quality about them, nothing genuinely humorous. It was strange to think that someone seriously thought that makeup could make you funny. But there was no question in Nita s mind that makeupcould make you scary. The stylized clown face, too generic, toocartoony : That really bothered her.The baggy, motley costume, disguising the real body shape so that it could have been a bare steel skeleton underneath instead of flesh and bone. The slapstickjokes, endlessly repeated, which were supposed to be amusingbecause of the repetition all these left Nita cold. There was something mechanical about clowns, something automatic, a kind of robot humor; and it gave her the creeps.

It was doing so again, right now, because here in the darkness, followed around by one of those sinister spotlights, was a typical clown act the clown riding around and around in circles on a ridiculously small bicycle, in ever decreasing circles. There was nothing funny about it to Nita. It was pitiful. Around and around and around, in jerky, wobbling movements, around and around went the clown. It had a painted black tear running down its face. The red-painted mouth was turned down. But the face under the white greasepaint mask was as immobile as a marble statue s, expressionless, plastered in place. Only the eyes were alive.They shouted, Ican t get off!I can t get off ! And, just this once, the clown didn t think it was funny, either.

Thedrumroll went on and on, as if for a hanging rather than a circus stunt. The chain of the bicycle rattled relentlessly in the silence inside the light. Beyond the light, in the darkness, the heartless crowd laughed and clapped and cheered. And through the sound of their applause, low, but building,came the growl of the tiger, pacing behind the bars, waiting its turn.

Thedrumroll never stopped. The clown rode in tighter and tighter circles, faster and faster. The wheels of the bike began to scream. The crowd shouted for more.  Stop it,  Nita yelled.  Stop it! Can t you see it s killing him 

 As often as possible,  growled the tiger. And never often enough.

The crowd roared louder.  Stop it!  Nita shouted back, but now they were drowning her out, too.  Stop it!

 STOP!

She was sitting up in the dark, alone. It took her a ragged three or four breaths to realize she was in her own room, in bed, and that her own shout had awakened her.

Nita sat still for a few moments, praying that she wouldn t hear anyone coming to find out if she was okay. She wasn t, but she still hoped no one would respond. There wasn t anyone in the house who d been sleeping well for a while now.