Wizardy Herbert and the Mobius Slipknot

The excitement in the air was so thick, you could spread it like custard on a crumpet. What a marvelous summer day it was to be a child, whisking through the knee-high rye, bounding over the hills with a smile challenging one’s face to contain it. What a marvelous day it was… for magic!

Scampering youths contributed to a gulf of human confetti. It was a surge of robes and floppy hats, broomsticks, mops, even a few dustpans and soap buckets. Giddy young hands clutched wands, scepters, staves, rods, switches, swizzlesticks, batons, and even an uncooked strand of spaghetti here and there. A menagerie of prospective familiars squawked and murmured a generic din of animal noises. The creatures were in various states of being caged, restrained, tame, disease-free, alive, and the opposites of all those things, in many, many permutations.

The children had propped up makeshift tables and set kettles to boil, as the lads and lasses were not ones for sparing afternoon tea. The shrill cacophony of whistling kettles and clinking sugar spoons barely overshadowed the racket produced by no less than four dozen impromptu cricket matches. Wicked googlies sliced through the air and laughter, much like, let’s say, an elusive winged golden projectile fluttering about, oh, a field in a fictional magical sport played on brooms. It doesn’t really matter what it’s called.

Quid itching to flee pockets and purses was wagered generously on games of skill and chance. Dartboards awaited darts whizzing towards them on trajectories perpendicular to the googlies. Union Jacks flapped gallantly. Giant pictures of Prince Charles and Margaret Thatcher were hoisted to the heavens, their likenesses made bleary through the children’s tears of pride. A vigorous vocal treatment of God Save the Queen boomed at a jarring volume, muffled patriotically through mouthfuls of meat pie and blood sausage. Somewhere in the crowd, several bobbies chased a man in fast-forward time to the tune of a humorous kazoo. The children were enamoured of their newfound lot in life, and savoured every moment of it.

This is exactly what happened. Every bit of it. Or that is, it is exactly what would have happened if the children were British. In fact, not a bloody one of them was British. They were all bloody Americans.

This requires admittedly a slight modification of the depiction of events thus far. It is not without chagrin that some of these accounts will be rescinded. Though let the record show that a certain easing into the possibility that a reality may exist in which young people who are not British may also be enamored (sensibly spelled, without a “u”) of magic and witchcraft. You are being asked, boldly, to peer through a rare looking glass into a strictly incredible universe in which the United Kingdom’s stranglehold on youth-based occult and whimsical childhood sorcery is marginally less like the grim vice grip of a pit-bull on a mailman’s groin. Much is being asked of you. This is fully conceded.

Though the abject silliness of tea and googlies and such may have been a cruel literary bait and switch, the rough picture still holds true (though there may have been a spare picture of Margaret Thatcher somewhere in the crowd by pure chance). There exists somewhere on a grassy landscape a teeming horde of youngsters, all sorcery enthusiasts and quite eager in a general sort of way. There is among this horde a singular boy who will be the subject of our attention. We will note two things in particular about this boy. Far from exhibiting the enthusiasm of his fellow children, he was mystified by the gayety, and more than a little alarmed as well. Additionally, far from hailing from Great Britain as the preceding deluge of bullshit might have had you believing, this boy was from the state of New Jersey.

This boy’s name was Wizardy Herbert.

Herbert scanned the crowd from behind his eye patch. Was he missing something here? The robes, the floppy hats… Was this a pajama party? That kid over there, he was chasing after an iguana. And another was attempting to coax a very grumpy badger into a magnificently undersized cage. Between the jubilant cheers, outbursts of song, and dispersed chatter of nonsense one makes when speaking in tongues, Herbert concluded every one of these children must be on drugs.

He began noticing a common thread among the kids, aside from the shared trait of exhibiting clinically psychotic episodes. Most of them were armed with books. Children’s books. Tales of marvelous imagination and adventure, and above all, magic. The most popular series were there. “Rutherford Trick, Volume Three: The Whooping Ghoul of Flatulan”, “ALASHA-ZAMMM! UP IN SMOKE!!!”, and some volumes in one of Herbert’s personal favorites, “Vera Valera and the Secret Sorceress Sorority”. This was a clue. It all started clicking in his mind. It was all starting to make sense…

No it wasn’t.

Herbert thought about the uninspired contents of his suitcase. Clipboards, an adding machine, some yellow notepads, a visor… a visor, of all things. That kid over there was wearing a billowing rainbow-patterned hat. It would almost look Rastafarian, if it weren’t so flagrantly homosexual. He hadn’t thought to bring anything magically-themed. Not even in a half-assed way, like the kid over there in his father’s robe, with stars and moons smeared on it with asphalt paint from the garage. Why should he? He thought he was going to Accounting Camp.

But then, he suspected something was askew from moment-one, with kids prattling on about magic and the repeated mention of some guy named Thundleshick. The name rang a bell for Herbert. It might have been the name of the man he guessed was the head… accounting guy, or whatever you wanted to call it. But the way the kids spoke of him was not how one expected any Chief Accounting Honcho to be spoken of. Usually the phrases “great magician” and “wise beyond the great cosmic manifold” did not appear in sentences pertaining to accountants.

All aside, it was a beautiful day. High spirits and good cheer were abundant, and it was difficult to anticipate anything ominous. Difficult to anyone there, except for Herbert (who found himself wondering what Office Depot’s refund policy towards clipboards was). Call it intuition. Also right in lockstep with this grave intuition was a girl. Though you wouldn’t know it by the playful expression she wore as she approached Herbert from behind. She tapped Herbert on the shoulder.

“You look lost,” she said.

He turned, startled to see someone wearing ordinary clothes. “Me? No, not at all. I just seem to have misplaced my enchanted scepter. Not to mention my potbelly pig familiar. He’s all I have, and I’d be crushed if I lost him.”

“I know what you mean,” she commiserated in the silently agreed upon language of sarcasm. “My magical flamingo freaked out and just… took off. I’m Beatrix, by the way. Beatrix Tipplepot.”

“Wizardy Herbert. Nice to meet you.” She made a peculiar face at this, and Herbert knew what was coming. It was the story of his life.

“So, your last name is Herbert? Do… do people call you Wizardy?”

“No. They call be Herbert. It’s my first name.”

“What is Wizardy, then?”

“It’s like… a first-first name. A pre-first name, I guess.”

“So what’s your last name?”

“I don’t really have one.”

There was a moment of awkward silence, one to which Herbert was accustomed and heavily inured. He allowed it to pass like a noisy ambulance before continuing with the conversation.

“That’s a nice… uh…” Herbert wasn’t sure what it was hanging from Beatrix’s neck. A kind of locket? He was no jewelrysmith, nor was he sure such a trade existed.

“Thanks. I’m not sure what it is either,” she said holding up the odd accessory. It was a silver disc, hollow in the center like a donut, and very much did look as if it opened up like a locket. “My sister gave it to me. This ring too!” She held up her hand, flashing an ornate silver ring with a pink jewel. “… Before she died, that is.”

“Oh. I’m sorry to hear that. I’ve lost family too.”

“It’s tough, isn’t it? Getting by without parents…” she said with a conversational melancholy.

“Huh? I, um… I never said I didn’t have parents.”

People were always assuming he was an orphan. Was it something about his demeanor? His looks? It was almost as if Herbert fit some profile for a type of person others needed to believe in. A person who’d lost his parents in a terrible, ominous event. A person who’d walk the earth as a lone, troubled soul, one day unraveling the threads of that event and colliding with destiny. One whose entire star-crossed existence would prove to be the epicenter of a dire evil which would either fall or flourish depending on the degree to which he’d realize his own inner greatness.

But he did have parents. They were two very loving parents who cared for him, and usually gave him what he wanted. When he revealed this to those who supposed otherwise, he was met with incredulousness, and frequently the additional query, “Are you sure you’re not adopted?”

“Oh… Are you sure you’re not adopted?” Beatrix asked, hemming.

“Very. Really, I wish I was sometimes.” Herbert said nonchalantly, as if to quell her flustered embarrassment by downplaying his attachment to his parents. She frowned. Herbert mistook it for sadness, and it was his turn to feel like a social imbecile. “Oh, sorry. I mean, no offense, if that is your situation. I kinda gathered you were implying you didn’t have parents, with what you said earlier. I hope I didn’t make you feel bad by saying I wished I didn’t, and… wow, I…”

Herbert didn’t have time to continue his ingratiatory blithering, because that is when some really exceptionally magical stuff started to happen. The grassy hills and blue skies were suddenly seen as if holographically projected onto luminous, all-surrounding silk drapes. Those drapes billowed and fluttered in a magical breeze, then dissolved, giving way to a new surrounding. It was now a dense forest, a lush, mossy, exceptionally magical forest. Gnarled vines and creepers wrapped about each other in taught spirals, tickling mammoth leaves, molesting bulbs and fondling toadstools. The thickness of the surrounding wood produced an element of claustrophobia, with all views obscured except directly upwards, which offered a look at the night sky so saturated with stars, it resembled a prolific thief’s cache of diamonds spread on dark velvet.

Herbert had to admit, it was magical. He noted all the other kids, including Beatrix, were as spellbound at the sight as he was. Or as he would be, at least, if he weren’t so cynical about magical affairs.

Through the splendor of illusionry and the muscle spasms of hysterical facial expressions, almost went unnoticed among the crowd was the silent work of nimble monkeys in dapper red suits. They efficiently gathered the children’s luggage, brooms, coats, wands, animal cages and the like, and heaped it all into one big pile in the center, ostensibly for later transport to somewhere else.

From above, echoing footsteps descended from a quietly manifesting stone staircase. It was as if a piece of a castle were being dangled from the sky, terminating with a stone platform suspended high above the pile of luggage.

A pair of old brown shoes clicked onto the platform. In those shoes were sweaty feet, and attached to those feet was a pair of chubby, elderly legs. Mercifully, they were mostly concealed by ancient rags you might have called a robe, if you were feeling daring with language. Emerging from rags was a chubby, smiling head with twinkling eyes and a greasy beard which had achieved dominance over the face long ago, and now only sought to make a perpetual and ostentatious show of military strength. It was as if someone had forced a gray Muppet through a paper shredder and glued it to the man’s face.

“Thundleshick,” was a whispered chorus among the awed children.

Elwin Thundleshick was a kindhearted man of good humor and renowned benevolence. A special wisdom and tranquility had been etched deep into his soul, much like the lines etched deep into his paunchy face, both in ways that uniquely stem from countless years devoted to magic and children in a venerable life (a life which has lasted no fewer than ten thousand years, we are to believe unwaveringly). He was the type of sage who could say volumes more with his smile than his words, and sometimes even answered questions with the odors emitting from his body. Such was his magnanimity that he’d sacrifice all worldly pleasures if it meant the enrichment of even one benighted child. And it had seemed that such a barter arrangement had been made for the luxury of bathing some time ago.

The children stood in silence, their heads craned upward. Crickets had their say, for the first time not drowned out by the fanfare of excited youth. The scepter rested gently on the stone, while a doughy, spotted hand raised itself with the import of one belonging to a person about to speak. The children held their breath. Even the beads of sweat rolling down their faces came to a standstill at the pregnancy of the moment.

Thundleshick’s face broadened, revealing hard boiled egg yolk-colored teeth. “Children,” said a surprisingly melodious voice. “With the authority vested from the spirits of this sacred land upon this humble servant, and with all due pomp, ceremonious circyooitry, and pontifical profundosities, I hereby decree this summer camp of whimsy and the occult to be… in session!”

For a moment, you could hear a pin whistling through the air like a bomb. But you wouldn’t hear it hit the floor. Because at that very moment, the children detonated into a mushroom cloud of noisy exultation. Children’s interlocking arms served as axels for spirited pinwheel dances which broke out spontaneously like bar fights in a saloon. Jittering hands collaborated to hoist a crudely scribbled banner declaring, “WE LOVE YOU THUNDLESTICK!”

It wouldn’t come as a surprise that the kid whose luggage was filled with tools of the accounting trade was not among those celebrating. Herbert always had a distinct mistrust for those who claimed magical authority. The beards, the robes, the mystifying smirks, it all ran against the grain of Herbert’s good graces. He could never explain why, but it possibly was an extension of his general distaste for the idea of magic.

Herbert glanced at Beatrix. Though she was clearly bemused and titillated by the surrounding events, he could tell she shared some of his cautious reservations about what was unfolding.

Thundleshick, as if reading Herbert’s mind (magical fellows love doing that), turned and beamed at him like a satellite dish, channeling the full vector of his oily complexion towards him. And then, through the intractable thicket of hair, beard, and eyebrows, which long ago lost the right to distinguish themselves from each other (hairbeardbrows), he winked.

The wink squeezed out a white, pulsing dot of light. The light ambled lazily like a firefly, drifting downward. Straight downward, towards the luggage. It nestled in the heart of the pile, unnoticed to all but the boy and girl we’ve been observing.

The fireball was blinding, and the shockwave knocked each child to the ground. The mountain of belongings was instantly incinerated, one could only presume, inside the raging, blood-red bonfire. Herbert looked up to see Thundleshick and his floating castle-part vanishing into thin air. The children were too stunned to scream, or even contemplate fear. All that was heard was the roar of the fire.

The deafening sound of the explosion was suddenly one-upped by the clap of thunder overhead. Rain fell in angry, biting stabs, and soon all that was heard was a steady rush of water. The rain extinguished the fire, leaving behind dreary, black soot, and nothing remotely resembling a piece of luggage, a broom, a wand, a book, or a caged creature.

Beatrix adjusted the makeshift umbrella, providing relief from relentless barrage of ice water. The sound above was uncomfortably loud, like a stampede of tiny horses thundering across the cardboard. Herbert squeegeed his face as he surveyed the smorgasbord of human misery that was the legion of sopping, disappointed children. He didn’t merely pity them. In looking at these drenched kids in their silly ensembles, scared, cold and defeated, Herbert noted that pity had stepped up its game. A large, round boy a few yards from him, inexplicably dressed in a Sailor Moon outfit, struck Herbert as an acutely tragic case.

“I’m glad I travel light,” said Beatrix with a wry optimism regarding the incineration of their belongings.

“Wish I could say the same.” Herbert made an unpleasant face, but on thinking about it, felt he wouldn’t lose much sleep over a few clipboards and visors. But still, there was at least one thing he wished hadn’t burned…

“Let me guess. You don’t have a clue about what’s going on here, do you?” she asked.

“You mean, like, the fact that this was some kind of magic thing?” He ventured. She nodded slightly and smirked.

He continued, “You mean like a largely un-chaperoned magic thing? A possibly deadly, sort of child endangerment-themed magic thing? A kind of wet, hypothermia-oriented youth-jam magic thing? ‘Cause no, that all caught me by surprise.”

“Ah…”

“How about you? Did you know it was a magic thing?” Herbert inquired.

“I had some idea,” she said. “I will say, the other stuff I did not see coming.”

“I don’t suppose many would show up willingly if all that stuff was billed in the brochure.” Nor would many kids in their right minds show up willingly to a camp celebrating the joys of accounting, thought Herbert.

A nearby kid whose flesh tones could be seen through his moist, clinging white robe was sobbing heavily into his floppy hat, further dampening it with his tears.

“So what now?” Beatrix posed.

“I guess we stay dry until the rain stops. Look for shelter, find a phone to call home, then get the hell out of this place.”

“Sounds good. Except the part about leaving. I plan on staying.”

“What?” Herbert stared for a moment at the puzzling girl, who said nothing. His eye drifted upward to the surface of the cardboard overhead. Printed on the board was a corroded, mud-caked image of Great Britain’s former Primer Minister, Margaret Thatcher.

“Who’s that?” Herbert asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe one of the Golden Girls?”

Herbert nodded in tacit agreement. They both trudged into the damp woods in search of shelter. Herbert ruminated on his fate, and that of every child there. This was by no means fun, sure, but at least the rain would subside, and maybe as a whole they could figure out how to survive. There was probably not one child there who hadn’t fantasized about a Lord of the Flies situation, in which authority was absent, children ruled, and fun was rampant (bear in mind that very few of these children had actually read Lord of the Flies). Maybe they could do it. They could pick up the pieces after a cruel old man’s hoax, restore some basic humanity to their situation, and find a way home. At the very least, they did not seem to be in immediate mortal peril. Just a little rain. No wild animals, no lurking child predators, it seemed. It was not as if they were being hunted by a pack of ferocious skeletons.

Herbert almost began to feel optimistic.

That’s when the children were attacked by a pack of ferocious skeletons. Gigantic, shrieking, angry, angry skeletons.

On a balmy evening in a New Jersey suburb, a faint shuffling could be detected in the waning daylight. The kind of shuffling you might hear from grandpa in the middle of the night when he makes his way down the hall to the bathroom. This shuffling however belonged to a hunched form negotiating the sidewalk, pausing in front of a house. The form coughed, then opened the lid to a trash can. It picked something out of the garbage, smelled it, then tossed it back in. It turned towards the house and shuffled towards the door. A fat, ancient-looking finger squashed against the doorbell like a greasy sausage.

Elwin Thundleshick was a shallow bastard of a man, a man of dodgy morals and renowned pettiness. A special miserliness and rapacity had been etched deep into his soul, much like the lines etched deep into his paunchy face, both in ways that uniquely stem from countless years devoted to swindling children in a unprincipled life (a life which has lasted no fewer than ten thousand years, we are still to believe unwaveringly). He was the type of sage who could say volumes more with his staggering and brazen deeds of kleptomania than his words, and sometimes even answered questions with lewd gestures. Such was his conniving that he’d sacrifice the enrichment of all the world’s children if it meant easing the discomfort of the stubborn rash on his backside. And it had seemed that he was already working on the former without even the promise of the latter, as a kind of twisted pro bono arrangement.

A cheerful woman named Donna opened the front door. The ragged form on her doorstep animated itself and smiled, providing the first decent evidence that it might be a person.

“You must be Mr. Thundleshick,” Herbert’s mother said warmly.

A herd of Pikmin stormed across a log bridging a river, when a cluster of the band foolishly corralled themselves into the water. Falsetto pleas for help preceded a cascade of little ghosts elevating from the plant creatures’ tiny drowned carcasses. When the dust had settled, twenty-one were lost.

Herbert muttered something vulgar. The sound of the doorbell did not divert his attention in the least from his GameCube playing. Something dreadful filled his nostrils. It must have been coming from downstairs, wafting beneath his door.

His parents earlier had mentioned something mysterious in passing about a visitor tonight. He hadn’t asked, but sensed the encounter had something to do with his fate. This sense tingled whenever others made plans for him behind his back. It happened often enough, usually involving his parents’ good intentions.

Herbert was reaching the age when the instincts for contrarianism were spiking. For most teens, to get through those turbulent times most easily, it helps to be in an environment which offers them actual problems. Things like being denied what they want, or being told to behave a certain way, or if it’s really not too much to ask, to be beaten once in a while. Such measures give a teen the feeling that his hormone-based antagonism complex is at least somewhat justified.

This was Herbert’s problem, though he didn’t know it consciously. His parents tended to give him what he wanted.

Unfortunately for Herbert, his teenage insurgency would take the form of an unwitting rebellion against fun itself. He rejected most of the predilections of his peers. He yawned as kids in his class chirped about their favorite books full of children’s magical adventures (though he did read one series, a guilty pleasure he’d never tell anyone about. There was something about a Secret Sorceress Sorority full of svelte, lightly-clad teen girls that spoke to him). Sure, he watched a lot of TV and played video games, but while those activities may appear recreational to most, to Herbert it was a form of self-imposed monastic vegetation.

In spite of himself, Herbert’s habits had the designed effect. It drove his parents crazy. They tried fruitlessly to get him involved in fun things hoping to rekindle some childhood enthusiasm. Herbert speculated their efforts had something to do with the absence of their other two sons, but he wasn’t about to crack the psychology books and sleuth that one out. It was certain that these kinds of shenanigans were afoot downstairs, but he wasn’t about to Sherlock that one up either. Though to be fair, the weird stench permeating the house was the most compelling case against the idea.

Herbert’s thumbs fidgeted as his loyal army slaughtered a hapless beetle and carried it home for sustenance.

“Would you like something, Mr. Thundleshick? Some coffee or tea?”

“Oh, do call me Elwin.” He wished she had mentioned scotch in the list. But he thought better of it to ask. Best to stay focused on the task at hand. “You are very gracious, but no thank you, madam. About this boy we spoke of earlier… your boy, Herbert?”

“Ah! There you are. Thundleshick, is it? So good to meet you.” William strode across the room to shake his hand. He was the kind of guy who would shake anyone’s hand, no matter what. “Donna, have you offered our guest a drink? Coffee? Or maybe scotch is your drink, eh, Thundles?” He said accompanied by a jocular pat on the back, releasing a cloud of particles which would make a HAZMAT team weep.

Thundleshick cleared his throat looking flustered. “You’re both so kind.”

“So, Elwin,” Donna began. “On the phone we were talking about your summer camp. It sounded quite… unique.”

Thundleshick was looking down at a coffee table which was host to a variety of domestic knickknacks. His eyes settled on some sort of ceramic frog. “Madam, I don’t imagine there is any other camp like it in the world.”

“And what was it called again? Your brochure didn’t seem to mention the name.”

Thundleshick scratched his beard and muttered something that sounded like “Camp Pawksa[inaudible]tucket.” Whenever anyone asked the name of the camp, he made up a vaguely Native American-sounding word and changed the subject. He glanced at a photograph behind them. “Is that your boy, there?”

They looked at the picture of Herbert wearing a goofy smile. “Yeah, that’s our guy.” While they were turned, Thundleshick stuffed the ceramic frog into his cloak.

“He’s a good looking boy. Good looking boy,” Thundleshick grunted with some effort.

“And about this camp…” Donna tried to piece together the coarsely muttered syllables in her mind, but didn’t want to risk repeating them incorrectly. “You say it really is a magical camp?”

Thundleshick seemed to light up. “Magical? Gadzooks! We’re up to our blasted necks in magic there, really. We’ve got magic coming out of our–”

“So you and the kids,” William interrupted. “You do magic together, then? You teach them magic?”

“Oh my, yes. And so much more. The kids earn their magical merit badges through great feats of wonder. They learn songs, and discipline, and about getting along with others and making friends. It promises to be an adventure young Herbert will never forget!” Thundleshick’s sudden enthusiasm might have been an act to get himself closer to a fine crystal swan he’d noticed on the windowsill.

“You don’t say?” replied William. “It sounds like a blast. But you should be aware, Herbert doesn’t know any magic, of course. And… well, the thing is, He’s a tough customer. He may not take to it very readily.”

“My friend, there’s nary a child I receive who knows a lick of magic. By the end of the summer, I promise your boy will be spitting out invocations like a veteran tobacco chewer. And his strength of wit and character will fill like a spittoon.”

The couple paused a moment to solve the peculiar analogy. Thundleshick, with wild eyes, gestured behind them again. “And those boys… who are they?”

The crystal swan disappeared into the mortifying abyss beneath his garment. The parents pretended not to notice. “Those… were his brothers.” There suddenly seemed to be a little less air in the room. Thundleshick wasn’t sure whether to feel the guilt of a thief, or the guilt of a social buffoon. He compromised by feeling neither.

“Thundleshick,” William broke the silence. “This all sounds wonderful. But I’m just wondering. Is there any way you can show us that this thing is… legit?”

“Hmm. You mean you would like to see a permit or a license or such?”

“No, no. I’m sorry, I don’t want to sound too skeptical, but before I go ahead and write this check, I was wondering if you could show us some… you know, magic.”

The mention of money was enough to put an additional spring in Thundleshick’s step. He clutched his scepter and scurried to the middle of the room.

“So it’s magic you want to see. Very well! If magic it is wish you to see…” He stirred the air with his scepter like an invisible batter. Wisps of glowing blue mist tailed its tip. “Then magic…” He raised the scepter above his head. “What you will see…” And pointed it at a cuckoo clock. “Will be it!”

An arc of blue caused the clock to vanish. A sudden, mysteriously cuckoo clock-shaped bulge manifested in his the back of his cloak.

William clapped his hands. “That was great! Well done, Thundleshick. To be honest, I’ve never actually seen that before. Magic, that is. It’s quite a treat.”

Donna glanced at her husband. “Yes, it really was. Honey, I think I will put some coffee on after all. Maybe you can help me for a second?”

“Sure, hon. What do say buddy, want a cup?”

“Ah, now that you mention it… I suppose I am feeling a bit… thirsty,” Thundleshick said while delivering a series a lip-licks and conspicuous blinks which was a kind of code a fellow drinker recognized as “I would like some booze, please.”

“Great,” Willam smiled. “I’ll open a bottle.”

In the kitchen, Donna was not bothering with the charade of threatened coffee-brewing. She stood with her arms folded.

“I know it sounds like a great time for a kid, William. But that man…”

“Thundleshick? Come on, dear. He’s just an eccentric.”

“The man’s a horse’s asshole!” snapped Donna, momentarily forgetting she was in a children’s book.

“A kindly old man. Reminds me of my grandfather. Wasn’t much to look at, but that codger knew how to boost a kid’s character.” He fondly recalled summers filled with lively games such as “Cane Fever!” and “Where’s Grandpa’s Colostomy Bag Now?”

Donna frowned. She knew she was avoiding the real issue. “Herbert will never go for it. He’ll shrug it off it like all our other ideas to get him excited about something. Even if he finally agrees, he’ll begrudge it the whole time.”

“Ah-ha,” said William, “That’s what you think. I have a plan.” He fished through his jacket, producing a folded flyer. He opened it, handed it to his wife.

JUNIOR ACCOUNTING CAMP

It really “adds up” for your child’s future!

• Spreadsheets

• Statistics

• 1040EZ Forms for kids

• “And more!” …

At the Newark Municipal Court Plaza

The fun begins June 3, 2004!

Call (201) 555-8387 (ask for Gene)

Donna scrutinized the document with charitable attention. The same you’d give a hobo if he rushed you into an alley for a furtive demonstration of his secret government espionage equipment, and with a finger to hushed lips, unveiled a dead raccoon. “I’m not following this. Accounting? What about the magic camp?”

“Herbert doesn’t even have to know!”

Donna’s face slightly relaxed with incipient comprehension.

“Ah-hurhur-AH-HEM.” William cleared his throat in a theatrical transition to a phony ‘serious’ voice. “Now Herbert, I think it’s time we had a heart-to-heart. You’re getting older, and with age comes responsibility. Responsibility is about paying the bills, and as such, it’s high time you acquired some real world, grown-up skills.”

Donna giggled. It spoke to their parental style that the mere insinuation of a heavy-handed approach was a major wellspring of comedy.

“The way I see it,” William said while pouring a glass of scotch, “he’ll go along with it and fully expect to be in for a long, boring summer of accounting. When he sees that it’s all really about magic and adventure and bonding with other kids, he’ll be so surprised, who knows, he might just let his guard down and have a good time.”

Thundleshick surveyed the DVD collection, leaving mysterious vacancies on the shelf. The “2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney: Women’s Gymnastics Competition” DVD was nowhere to be seen. Whether this was the case a moment ago will be left to the speculation of the reader.

“Mr. Thundleshick?” said William. Thundleshick sprang upright, causing the contents of his bulkier-looking cloak to jangle.

“No I wasn’t. I mean… yes?” His eyes, independently of the head, spotted the brown liquid in William’s possession.

“I guess we have a few more things we’d like to know. You know, this place, Camp Whatsit, it sounds really remarkable. I’m envious of Herbert. I never had the opportunity as a boy.”

“Anything, sir. What curiosity would you have me satisfy?”

“There’s so much to wonder, really. I would guess part of the fun would be reading about everything in Herbert’s letters, so I don’t want to spoil too much. Three meals a day, I presume?”

“Oh, goodness, yes. Feasts prepared in the blink of an eye with vapors of the ethereal. A bounty stretching to the horizon and back, thrice per day, plus once on the 4^th of July. Your dear lad will be gorged with gorgeous plump turkey legs, surfeited with stuffing, and chockablock with chocolate tartles!” He had this bit down pat.

“Tartles! You don’t say!” William was easy to win over once descriptions of food became involved, and was rarely deterred when the dishes in question didn’t actually exist.

“My mother’s embroideries are gone,” Donna hissed quietly to her right.

“Shh. It’s an unfortunate compulsive disorder and it’s not polite to bring it up. My grandfather had it too.”

Thundleshick was alert to Donna’s dissatisfied posture. This was where he really prided himself in working his magic, so to speak. With the ladies.

“Madam, I see your concern for your son runs deep. It is touching, and only solidifies my resolve to afford young Herbert memories he will cherish long thereafter. It is a promise this old man stakes upon his humble life.” From behind his back he produced an embroidered fabric featuring a violet. His dirty fingers fluttered with plump dexterity. He pulled the flower from the fabric, giving it the full essence of a real violet.

“Elwin, it’s beautiful.”

“Thundleshick, you magnificent bastard. I’ll tell you what. I can’t possibly think of anything better to spend this three grand on this summer.”

He pulled the check from his pocket, and seemingly by the most impressive magic trick yet, the check vanished from his hand and blurred into Thundleshick’s garb. No magic, however, was involved (except for possibly the fabled “Avarice Kedavrice”).

“This is wonderful. Herbert’s going to have a blast,” said William, with his oblivious hand still making the motion to offer the check it was no longer holding.

“You shall not regret it. Herbert is a lucky boy with tremendous parents. I owe much to strong guardians myself. Why, if I didn’t have parents like you as a boy, I wouldn’t have turned out to be the man I am today.”

“Worth drinking to! Your drink, sir. Have it before it evaporates,” William said, offering the glass. Thundleshick took the bottle from his other hand, and held it up with nod of gratitude.

“Then I’m off. I’ll keenly await meeting your son. Good eve!”

Thundleshick bounded out the front door and down the walkway with surprising agility for a fat old man. His loaded cloak jangled as curious-gotten trinkets spilled out and littered the yard. Each bound caught the underside of his cloak with a slight parachuting effect, revealing his corpulent alabaster legs, and for just a split-second, the porch light glinted off his bare bottom. Donna winced.

William beamed and threw back the glass of scotch. “It’s going to be one hell of a summer.”

A boy covered in mud swung a plastic bristled-broom pitifully at the air in front of him. He was flanked on all sides by 10 foot-tall skeletons, whose wet, black bones shined in the rain like polished onyx. Inside their ribcages were vibrant neon-green organs, which pulsated in mock-functionality. The bony assailants screamed through invisible vocal chords, sounding like a noisy vacuum cleaner might if it were part-cat.

One skeleton swung its jaw open to the limit, and let forth a prolific gush of phlegm-like ooze onto the boy. The ample colon of another skeleton came to life like a hungry tapeworm, darting swiftly through a rhythm of complex muscle movements. Its ‘mouth’ flexed and swallowed a child whole. The stomach bulged beneath the ribcage, and two small hands could be seen pressed against the tissue from the interior.

Legions of other skeletons stalked in the distance, performing similar acts upon panicking youngsters. Their dark forms were obscured by the night and heavy rain, lightning occasionally flashbulbing their silhouettes.

“Skeletons… why… did it have... to be skeletons…” puffed Herbert through aching lungs. He’d had no prior beef with skeletons. But even on an unconscious level, it’s hard to pass up sounding like Indiana Jones.

He and Beatrix ran through the forest, stomping in puddles and being whipped by stems and branches. Herbert took the brunt of the wet snapback of plants, while Beatrix had an easier time wending through the foliage, not being depth perception-hobbled by an eye patch.

“I’d like to ask you something which on any other occasion might seem strange. Well, maybe it’s still strange. In fact, I don’t think there will ever be a time I won’t feel ridiculous for asking it,” Herbert stammered, while Beatrix half-expected his query to be regarding what she is doing this Friday, and if she likes pizza. “Do you know any magic?”

“Of course not,” she puffed, hopping over a rock. “I actually had strong doubts about whether it existed at all.”

“That’s a shame. Some kind of invisibility spell, or skeleton-murdering spell might come in handy right now. Even though it’s all a bunch of silly crap.”

“Silly?”

“I hate magic.”

The two children were sliding down a muddy path at an alarming velocity. Herbert noted how unlikely it was for someone to make a terrified getaway through a forest without sliding down a muddy hill by complete surprise. It was always like a ride, with twists, turns, scares, false stops, and sometimes full-blown rollercoaster loops. It was as if a band of bored Ewoks had spent weeks preparing this primitive mud-luge path for their own amusement. This is what Herbert mulled over, as we ponder the sagacity of a second reference to a George Lucas film in about as many paragraphs.

“I know a lot of a people think it’s cool,” Herbert elaborated while vaulting off a mud ramp. “I mean, no offense if you’re into it or anything. It’s just so dumb.”

“Dumb or not, it appears to be a legitimate aspect of the universe. You might as well curse other laws of nature and call them stupid. They are what they are.”

Herbert skimmed through his mental list of natural laws he had cursed before. The law that the buttered side of a piece of bread, when in freefall, will demonstrate overwhelming magnetism towards the carpet. The law about good deeds and the rock-solid assurance that they will never escape retribution. The law about witty Irishmen writing down cynical laws, and without fail, having each one proven to be correct through trial and error (mostly the latter). But maybe she had a point.

“That’s true. It may be real and part of God’s big plan, or whatever. But it’s still stupid. Laws of nature are really basic and discrete. There are just a few forces, only so many elements… it’s simple at a fundamental level, and complex stuff arises naturally from it all, you know? Nothing just appears. That’s what I think is stupid about magic. There’s something about it that always struck me as just lazy. At least lazy for a writer to put in a book. Yeah, sure, it’s so convenient if you can make anything at all happen, by just waving a wand or doing a dance or stroking a toad in a really special way. It’s lazy. Finding out it happens to be real doesn’t change that much.”

“I guess God is just a lazy bastard too, then,” she said with a defiant smirk, while zipping around a wicked bend on the luge path. “Lucky for both of us He doesn’t really exist.”

Hebert exhaled nervously. He was no church aficionado, and he contemplated the reality of God as little as he did with magic. The statement was the unmistakable kind of gauntlet thrown down by one raring for a debate on theology. Herbert was inclined to leave such heavy metal objects resting harmlessly on the floor. He opted to refrain from saying, “Well, until recently you didn’t think magic existed either…”

The speeding kids tumbled to a halt on a welcome stretch of flat land. That welcome, however, wore out about ten yards in front of them, where the land ended with a cliff. The drop-off into blackness was made all the less welcome by the fact that it served as the only escape route from the skeletons now gathering to surround them.

Herbert looked to Beatrix, who appeared frightened and vulnerable. He became aware of a foreign feeling, something male in him. A feeling that he ought to be charged with her protection, and if situation presented itself, dazzle her with deeds of mind-blowing bravery. He wasn’t sure why this was incumbent on him, though it might have had to do with the blunt reality that when viewed from certain angles (i.e. from behind the eyes of a teen boy), she was actually pretty cute.

The skeletons encroached, and Beatrix clutched his shirt. Now was the time to do something brave. He was going to die. It might as well be a gallant death. He grabbed a small but sturdy-looking tree nearby.

“Hey… skeletons!” His mind raced for an adroit quip to throw down. We should not underestimate the willpower it took to avoid the phrase “bone head”.

“Eat branch!”

He tugged at the tree, which held fast. He might as well have been trying to uproot a sequoia. Above his grimacing face, a skull issued an unpleasant gurgling. It puked an obscene volume of luminescent goo onto Herbert and the unfortunate sapling.

He lay cocooned in the wobbling pile of bodily fluid. His nose blew a bubble from the surface of the mass.

Elsewhere in the forest, a pair of shiny shoes made a lively, rhythmic procession. Above the shoes was a dark form, blurred with sprightly maneuvers, vaulting over shrubs and ricocheting from tree trunks. It was trailed by a cape, tracing a liquid path in its wake. A glint of silver emerged from the form, like a silver needle, catching the moonlight.

A green colon whipped about Herbert’s phlegm-cocoon, his nausea-stricken face poking out and gasping like a fish. A mighty black claw held Beatrix, drawing her close to its permanently grinning face. Its eyes and nose sockets were sickening voids of misery, and stink spilled from the holes. She shut her eyes and waited for something awful to happen.

There was a pop. From beneath her eyelids, she could tell it was momentarily brighter. She opened her eyes. The skull was gone. The skeletal hand went limp and dropped her. She landed next to the disembodied skull.

The headless skeleton staggered backwards. There was another pop. A stream of incandescent colors attacked the torso. It exploded, scattering splintered bones like morbid shrapnel.

At the source of the weaponized color display was a boy. He struck a posture that conveyed a smug self-assurance in the same pitch-perfect way that a hunchback’s posture conveys a pressing need to go ring a huge bell. He held with elegant poise a long silver wand. It hummed noiselessly with magic, ready to strike, like an antique TV antenna might be ready to give you a static shock.

“Craven zealots, hear this. Savor these evil deeds.” He made a steady, fearless stride towards the towering mob. “They will be your last. You are done for. That is, if shall be any deciding factor the merit of my…” The dramatic pause was practically an assault in itself.

“Majyyks!!”

The skeletons shrieked in unison, as their new dinner entrée taunted them. The boy flicked his wand as if cuing up an orchestra. “Mistral nymphs, heed this summoning! Arraign my foes with fingers of wind!”

His wand stabbed the air, denting it with a pulse of distortion. A bony torso hoisted into the air as if weightless. His wand leisurely directed the skeleton into another with great force. Bones clattered, sounding like someone dropped a bunch of wood paddles on the floor. The combined jumble sailed over the edge of the cliff.

A new aggressor lurched forward sending a heavy fist into a soggy crater, where the boy stood a moment ago. He was gone. The monster labored to pull its fist out of the mud.

“Control your humors, sir! Lest you should find someone willing to do it for you…” The boy sat on a high branch. He held out both arms like a scarecrow, moving his hands and fingers in a way one would manipulate an invisible marionette.

The skeleton promptly clutched its own plump organs. It ripped out a liberal wad of green viscera, and shoved it into its gnashing mouth, chewing, swallowing, and sending the masticated lump down its nonexistent throat passage and onto the ground. It then gripped its own skull and yanked it off. It dropped it on the ground and stamped it violently, crushing it like a Christmas tree ornament. The headless frame toppled over lifelessly.

One of its brothers opened its jaw, and fired a jet of slime like a fire hose towards the boy. He sprung to his feet and pointed his wand at the mucous geyser. “Please! Stay your foul offerings.”

The bilious stream dissolved into a hodgepodge of colors, fluttering, and wriggling. He hopped upon the cloud of butterflies, candy, and kittens, and rode the adorable current about the night sky.

The galloping kittens, et al, brought him in front of Beatrix. She sat on the ground, afflicted by some type of mesmerization at the spectacle.

“A token of consolation for a lady in distress.” He waved a hand. Lively pieces of candy danced through the air, accumulating in her cupped hands. One of the kittens absent-mindedly sidled up to her and purred.

A better look at the young man told her he was likely her age. He wore a smart burgundy suit with a vest and a white shirt. Rippling behind him was a velvet purple cape. Potent magics (or, excuse me, majyyks) emanated from him, surrounding his body as a subtle wind, teasing his clothes. His hair was a shining chestnut brown, looking as if the beneficiary of some truly unprecedented marathons in the salon. It danced in waves to the silent tune of his magic, like he was underwater. His smile was playful, yet profoundly confident and reassuring. His eyes sparkled with energy and kindness. He was probably the most attractive boy she’d ever seen.

He turned and strode into the bony melee. His mood for trifling games, his expression indicated, was threatening to expire.

“Armies of Odin, make your might my will!” he blustered, aiming his wand at the heavens. “Banish these accursed devils to toil the netherworld, forever!” Bolts of electrical current carved white-hot striations in the air. The heat and noise intensified, culminating in a jarring blast wave. Beatrix tumbled backwards, finding purchase an inch from the cliff’s edge. When the pyrotechnics subsided, there were no traces of any fully intact skeleton. All that remained were scattered, smoking bones. Some of them were actually melting.

Beatrix found herself being pulled to her feet.

“It’s alright now, miss…”

She was too dazed to realize his pleasantry doubled as a request for her name. She just stood with her mouth open. The boy broke the silence. “The name is Clove. Russet Clove. I’d naturally prefer to get acquainted under a more hospitable circumstance. But there you have it.” He cleaned the silver wand with a handkerchief.

The distant shrieks of other skeletons beckoned Russet. He tapped with his wand a loose skull smoldering on the ground. It sprung into the air. He waved an arm to clear the smoke billowing from its eye sockets, then perched himself on it. He tapped it once more from behind, and rode it into the night sky.

Herbert grasped the small tree he’d attempted to uproot a moment ago. It was now horizontal, jutting over the edge of the cliff. Dangling from it was a slime-soaked Herbert.

This was something else he could have predicted. If you happen upon a cliff, particularly in the context of a chase, it is a matter of preordained magnetism. You might as well just put on your best pair of dangling gloves then and there.

An equally certain outcome in Herbert’s mind was his imminent rescue. He just wasn’t sure how his rescue would go down (a potentially literal phrasing), and he was hoping whatever natural forces were at play would get on with it.

He felt a hand grab his wrist. He looked up to find it belonged to Beatrix. This was the worst case scenario. He was going to be saved by the damned girl.

“Hold on, Herbert. Are you okay?”

“Pthhh…” He vacated slime from his vocal passage. “I’m doing just fine.” Again, we must celebrate the magnificent restraint involved in avoiding the phrase, “Hangin’ in there.”

“Who was that guy?” she posed conversationally to a dangling Herbert.

“Dunno. Someone who knew some really killer skeleton-murdering spells, I guess.” Herbert instantly felt remorse for talking up the guy who stole his hero’s thunder. Well, not so much that he stole it, but that he was so obviously prepared to back up the gesture with astounding results. The best that could be said for Herbert was that he backed it up with a profound demonstration of his ability to experience the sensation of sogginess.

“Yeah. He was pretty impressive, wasn’t he?”

“Can you please let me up??”

“Oh… right.” She pulled Herbert, but noticed his eye took on a different demeanor, and pointed in a different direction. She saw the tiny full moon reflected in his pupil. The white reflection was briefly covered by a darting, black form. Something was behind her.

She quickly removed the locket from her neck. “Here, take this,” she whispered.

A black, slippery entity wrapped around her midsection, and pulled her into the air. Her grip was pried from Herbert’s hand. She was carried away into the night by a zipping, serpentine shape. Herbert watched, mortified, but instinctually snatched the falling locket with the hand he’d been using to clutch the sapling. He and the locket fell into the abyss.

The shovel’s pressure against the sole of Herbert’s foot caused a sharp pain as he stomped it into the frigid winter earth. He’d barely made half a foot worth of headway beneath he surface.

“Seymour, you really smell. Can’t you stand over there?”

“Herb, I think that smell is the corpse,” offered a pale Seymour.

“You might be right.” Herbert deposited a puny shovel-full of dirt over his shoulder. Sprawled on the ground was an older boy, possibly in his later teens. He was stone cold dead. His face was a grim ivory mask of bloodless skin. His eyes were sunken, like two marks left on an overripe peach by a couple of firmly pressed thumbs.

Sweat came to a dripping bead on Herbert’s nose. He toiled furiously, but the hole did not get deeper. In fact, it somehow seemed to have more dirt in it than before. This type of thing was a mechanic of the universe that was created whenever Herbert dreamt. There was good reason for such an occurrence now.

This was a dream.

“Seymour, I don’t know, man. You’ve had some serious body odor issues lately. And this corpse funk… I’m just saying, when stenches compete, everybody loses.”

“Who is he, anyway?”

“Doesn’t matter. He’s worm food. Let’s just get him in the ground.”

After another stab at the dirt, Herbert found his shovel stuck, rooted in the earth. It was no longer a shovel. It was the small tree he’d previously tried to uproot. The world darkened around him, and grinning skeletons closed in.

He tugged the tree, ripping it clean out of the ground. But to his surprise, it was not a tree. It was a Pikmin. Herbert found surrounding him a devoted band of googly-eyed plant soldiers. He blew his multicolored whistle, and the horde snapped to attention. Thousands swarmed around the skeletons, pounding the living (or undead) hell out of them. The skeletons were upended, brutally beaten to death (or unlife). The army carried their prizes to their base while humming a rhythmic marching tune.

His thumbs swiveled on both analogue levers of the controller. He was in his room again, playing the game. That smell. The knob turned. In walked Thundleshick.

“My boy…”

“Oh, hi, Thundleshick.”

“Having an enjoyable computer-box, are we?” Thundleshick eased his awful girth onto Herbert’s bed. “Boy, look here. I know you’ve been looking for this.”

He removed a spiral-bound book from his cloak. The cover was blank, apart from a strip of solid black, covering up where the title might have been. Herbert turned. He had been looking for that. In fact, he’d been completely infatuated with it.

“Where did you get that??”

“Now, now. We’ve all the time in the world for those questions. Come now. Join me for a look.”

Herbert, forgetting himself, sprung up and plopped on the bed next to the fragrant old man. The book was opened. Herbert peered in. His view was met with a full two-page spread of Thundleshick making a sly face. He was draped across a couch, completely nude.

Herbert woke up screaming. Birds fled from nearby trees, flapping into the sunrise.

Beatrix could barely move a muscle. A cold, oily sensation wrapped around her, binding her arms to her body.

“You forget how good my sense of smell is, little girl.”

A large eel floated, as if swimming, over the thick brush of the forest. The daytime in this wonderful, magical place was at least more forgiving than the night. Pleasant even, if a little warm. Above them sparkled sunlight through an emerald canopy. Beatrix, however, found it hard to enjoy while she was coiled in the center of the eel’s long body. It spoke through a perfectly, upsettingly human face. It had a big nose and a well-groomed moustache.

“I think you must have me confused for someone else.”

“Nonsense. Your odor is unique. I picked it up the moment you arrived. In any case, I distinctly recall introducing myself before. My name is Hastings.”

Hastings’ sense of smell was unrivalled. So canny were his olfactory capabilities, he could sniff out minor fluctuations in the stock market by odor alone. He could even close his eyes and “see” the world with a sort of nasal sonar. In fact, this was mostly how he did navigate the world, since he was legally blind.

“Maybe it’s my perfume you smelled. A lot of girls wear it,” Beatrix posited.

“Yes, yes. Auspicious Breeze. I have smelled thousands of girls with this accessory. There is no confusion here. You’d have better luck getting a monkey to mistake a banana for a ballerina by dressing it in a tutu.”

“I guess it depends on the monkey…”

“In this case it is a very hungry, banana-savvy monkey!”

“And what do you want with this girl you think I am?”

Hastings rolled his eyes. “Why don’t we get on with this? Where is it? The artifact?”

“Artifact?”

“The one supposedly hung from a human neck.”

“You mean like a tie? Or a scarf?” she asked, remaining coy.

“Very well. We will see what my employer has to say about it.”

“You mean Campmaster Thundleshick?”

“Heh-heh… Ah-hahahaha!” The turbulence in his torso caused Beatrix’s head to bob up and down. “Yes, wouldn’t that be something! That preposterous coot! You should be so fortunate. My employer isn’t quite as nice to children as Mr. Thundleshick.”

Hastings grimaced. The thought brought his attention to the magnificent horror of Thundleshick’s odor. It was the perfect storm of olfactory abuse, and Hastings could smell it every moment as clearly as if it were in front of his nose. He grew accustomed to its omnipresence, the same way you became used to the smell of dog feces on someone’s shoe if you were stuck in a car with that person for a long trip. It became ignorable out of sheer necessity. But the moment the conversation turned to feces or dogs or shoes, the mind couldn’t help but wander back to the aroma. In this case, the entire universe was the car Hastings was stuck in, and Thundleshick was the crap on the shoe somewhere in the car.

Beatrix sulked. A familiar feeling was setting in. It was a feeling of futility and oppression. She sighed, almost forming a smile. For the first time since she arrived at this summer camp, she began to feel somewhat at home.

“Simon, what are you doing? You’re not thinking about eating those, are you?” Samantha said, referring to her brother’s small pile of stale bread. Every street urchin worth his salt kept a spare crust in reserve at all times, to be used only in emergencies.

“Nooo,” her orphan brother replied through a puff of chilly, visible breath. “I was just thinking that maybe I could use it to start a fire to make us warmer or if maybe I shouldn’t do that and just save it and eat it later. You know, in case of an emergency!”

Samantha shivered in her vintage Strawberry Shortcake T-shirt as she glanced around the frosty, anonymous warehouse. It certainly would have been nice to have a fire, but she maintained the air of big-sisterly disapproval towards her brother, who wore a vintage Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle shirt. Their cage held a third orphan. She was older than the two young siblings, had very long black hair and wore a pink-stoned ring. She was trying to pick the lock, an activity which had kept her busy for the last several days.

“I don’t think you can start a fire with bread, Simon,” Samantha informed. “And anyway, it sounds like a waste of good crusts to me.”

“How do you know? I bet a good crust would make a really big fire like this. PCHOOO—FSSSHHHHHOOOO.” Simon’s fingers illustrated the concept dramatically.

“And how would you start it?”

“I could rub my bootblacking brushes together, like this!”

Beatrix interrupted Simon’s spirited demonstration. “It probably wouldn’t be a good idea to start a fire in here, guys. It would set off the sprinkler system, and then we’d just be colder.”

“I told you! Now put those crusts back in your pocket for a rainy day, silly!”

Beatrix concentrated on the bit of bent wire she’d salvaged earlier from the sweatshop. She fished around the inside of the keyhole hoping to catch a tumbler, or some other mysterious lock component her admittedly limited knowledge of the subject might cough up. She heard distant footsteps. “Darn! This stupid thing.” She hastened her efforts, redoubling her wire prodding and jimmying. “We’ve got to get out of here before he comes back. I swear, if I have to solder one more of those cheap iPod knockoffs…”

Unlike her two cellmates, and the hundreds of other children locked in adjacent rows of cages, Beatrix had landed herself in this pickle by choice. It wasn’t however to volunteer her time to help a large, unscrupulous thug manufacture “iPlods”, and help furnish bargain-savvy consumers with an MP3 player whose delicate interior circuits snapped like baby bird bones upon pressing the power button. She had her own agenda which was presumably important enough to warrant the trouble. But she was getting nowhere fast sitting in captivity all night, and it was becoming frustrating.

The wire snagged inside the hole and became stuck. The heavy footsteps were closer. “Argh! Why won’t you just open?” She slammed both fists against the bars. There was a click, and the cage whined open. Beatrix looked at the door with surprise, then at her ring, which she thought for a very brief moment flickered with pink light in the corner of her eye.

“You did it, Beatrix! That was so cool!” Simon marveled.

“Let’s go, guys,” she said. “I’ll need your help.” The hundreds of other caged orphans became excited, like monkeys at a zoo beholding one upstart monkey’s fecal-throwing defiance towards the zoological authority. Beatrix made gestures to settle them down.

“Shh! Please be quiet! You don’t want us to get cau…” She was interrupted, predictably, by being caught. Wrapping around her neck was hairy hand the size of a steak you’d win a plaque on the wall of a restaurant for consuming.

“There’s something I’m wondering…” Beatrix searched for the right tone to her question, a blend of innocent curiosity and rhetorical bite. “You say your sense of smell is so good, you were able to find me. So why don’t you use that amazing sense of smell to find the artifact you’re looking for?”

Hastings bristled. He didn’t like even a vague insinuation that his nose might be anything other than an embodiment of olfactory perfection. “I assure you I would have picked up its scent ages ago. I would have claimed the prize and would be engaged in much more fulfilling pursuits, you can be sure. I do have hobbies, you know. I like to watch sports on occasion. I paint model race cars, too. Wild goose chases with stubborn and dishonest little girls is very hardly what I would classify as a good time!”

She tried to picture Hastings with a paintbrush in his mouth, poring over a toy car with hours of loving attention. Even monstrous eel-men had to pass the time somehow, she guessed. “You would have found it… if?”

“If I had ever actually seen it before. Or smelled it, that is. It is more or less the same concept for me.”

“So you don’t know what it looks like. Or, um… smells like.”

“Ah, but I know what you smell like. You are my lead. And you will eventually lead me to it.” Hastings’ face spread itself into a smug grin.

Beatrix salvaged some comfort from this exchange. She was far from being as nasally gifted as her captor, but she had an active imagination. When she handed the locket off to Herbert, she tried to be discreet about it. But it was nevertheless hard to imagine the act could escape detection from Hastings’ masterful nostrils. Why he disregarded the exchange was unclear, but the front running explanation to Beatrix was that he wasn’t all that bright. The opportunity to mess with his head was hard to resist.

“I’m sure you’ll sniff it out eventually,” she said, sounding uncompelled.

“Oh, you doubt it?”

“I suppose I could hide an ice cube in a hot landfill and you could find it before it melts?”

“I could tell you if it was a cube or if it was one of those round ones with a hole in it!” Hastings was irked. Beatrix didn’t quite know where she was taking this “please don’t throw me in the brier patch” routine, but it never hurt to get the ball rolling on prodding his insecurities. “It doesn’t matter if you don’t believe me. It will be very clear to you soon.”

“How so?”

“I told you. I smell everything. I smell the confusion of the one-eyed boy you helped last night. And I smell the boy who is about to try to rescue you in a moment.”

This threw her for a loop. Boy? Not again…

Herbert—sore from his prior collision with a treetop and subsequent night’s sleep in it—struggled up a steep, ferny hill. He inspected the irregular piece of jewelry, mysteriously foisted on him last night by that strange girl. It was metal, maybe steel, tarnished with age or use (use for exactly what was anyone’s guess). Engraved around the outer ring was a pattern of interlocking loops, looking somewhat like infinity symbols. He flipped it open. Whatever fit inside the ring was likely secured in place when it was snapped shut.

He thought about Beatrix, and the hazy final moments before his plunge into the chasm. What was that thing that grabbed her? And why did she give him her locket? He found himself hoping she was alright.

She was probably fine, off having really incredible magical adventures by now. Herbert on the other hand, thought he’d be lucky not to starve to death at the bottom of a gulch before sundown. Maybe a good walking stick would make him feel better about his outlook. It might imbue him with a rugged, vaguely outdoorsy patina. He suddenly wished he carried a knife. He didn’t really know what outdoorsmen actually did with their fancy knives. Probably good just to have on hand in the likely event you had to amputate something.

He stooped over, haphazardly swooshing bits of organic riffraff about the forest’s carpet, looking for a walking stick. Maybe one that was gnarled fashionably, which might make him look like a cool wizard. With that thought, Herbert suddenly felt he would do just fine without a walking stick.

That’s when he noticed something poking out of a nearby thicket. It looked like a hand. A rather limp, dirty hand.

“A boy?”

“Yes. Quite a handsome one, too! I regret that you will have to witness me relieve him of that attribute.”

Beatrix’s thoughts shifted to last night. Was it really the same one? She detected her heart rate elevate at the prospect by some inscrutable force she found herself unfamiliar with. Why should this idea produce excitement? There was at least, by her measure, the strong likelihood that if it was the boy she was thinking of, this dapper, self-important eel-strosity would probably stand little chance against his magic (majyyks!). But that didn’t seem to be the source of her biorhythmic fluctuation…

Hastings’ nose throbbed like a small creature trying to attract a mate. “His magic… it reeks almost as much as his hair gel! And his cologne. And moisturizing balms. Ho-ho, this is a vain one! Let’s see… I also smell… silver…”

Beatrix was growing more certain by the second. What was his name again? Something to do with a potato? Or garlic? And the curious heart-hastening… it persisted.

“Yes…” Hastings said, probing the air for additional textures. “This boy is attempting to get the drop on me. Setting a trap. Let’s do the lad a favor and try to act surprised when he shows up, okay?”

“Alright.” Beatrix said, even though she knew he was being facetious. She was beginning to take some joy in needling him when possible. Hastings slithered through the air trying to act casual, unaware that most people have no ability to read an eel’s body language as casual or otherwise. His lips circled around a whistled tune.

As expected, a cloud of red smoke swelled out of the air, sharply, like a kernel of corn popping. The wind carried it away, revealing a boy.

“Oh my God, I’m really surprised!” Beatrix mocked. But she found to her surprise that she actually was surprised.

Standing there was a tall young man. Handsome, yes, but not the one she expected. He was a little older, with dark, short hair and a preppy-looking outfit. There was similarity in demeanor, though. It was an effortless broadcasting of confidence with every action, and it didn’t seem to matter if it was justified or not. He was too handsome for it to matter. The boy held a silver sword at his side.

“That was a really… cool trick, young man. Radical, even. As you can see, I speak in your youthful vernacular. I trust this gains me enough credibility with you to put away your sharp thing and let us pass?”

“It doesn’t look like she has much say in where you’re going. That’s not very cool. Dude.”

“An impasse it is, then!” Hastings’ moustache puffed up like the quills of a threatened hedgehog. His smile revealed awful rows of razor-sharp teeth. The boy aimed his sword at the eel. A fierce howl of wind flowed from the silver blade. If you looked closely—and you didn’t have the time to—you would notice the jet stream was composed of many tiny swords, like a rushing school of glittering fish.

Hastings evaded the attack, uncoiling, dropping Beatrix in the process. He charged the boy, who raised his sword for an urgent rebound, but it was too late. Hastings’ face was already bearing down on him at impossible speed, making a hissing noise from his mouth, or maybe worse, his nose. Hastings’ teeth sank deep into the boy’s knee, his grip locked by surprisingly strong jaw muscles.

The boy dropped his sword. “Augh! Let go of me, you slimy son of a bitch!”

He swatted at Hastings’ head, messing up his neatly-groomed gray hair. Hastings’ shook his head back and forth like a coyote trying to snap the neck of a rabbit. It looked disturbingly instinctual. The boy’s nice khaki pants were soaking into a dark brownish color in the knee region.

Suddenly, Hastings’ eyes shot open, bulging out like Ping-Pong balls jumping to the surface of water. His face froze. A dot of blood under his nose became a trail down his moustache. The eel-body flipped wildly like a fish in the background. It was no longer attached to its head.

Beatrix stood over Hastings’ severed head, which was still locked onto the boy’s knee. She held the silver blade, now covered in a dark, thick fluid.

Eel sauce.

Smoke filled the warehouse, triggering the building’s sprinkler system. The water doused the bonfire of cheap furniture and even cheaper MP3 players. The children became soaked and would probably catch pneumonia, but they didn’t care. They were free.

In a secluded area of the building, away from the icy downpour and smoke inhalation hazards, Beatrix was sifting through the contents of a filing cabinet. The criminal mastermind who ran this facility kept extensive records on children of a certain ilk for the needs of his rather specialized business model. This mastermind at the moment was lying unconscious several yards from Beatrix and the two orphans.

“How did you do that, Beatrix?” Samantha asked with unbridled awe.

“She was… she was like…” Simon stammered as he executed a variety of spastic movements. His dramatization of the incident was foggy at best.

Beatrix pulled a folder from the drawer, and slid a sheet of paper from it. As she read the document, her face of concentration dissolved into one of satisfaction.

“So what now?” Samantha said, struggling to contain her excitement. “I’m looking forward to leaving here so we can all do fun things together. Doesn’t that sound great?”

Simon chipped in, “Yeah, it’ll be awesome! I can’t wait to show you the places Sam and me used to hang out! The train yards, the old bootblacking corner…” Most anecdotes originating from a homeless orphan usually had something to do with train yards or bootblacking.

“Sounds great, guys.”

“What is that anyway, Beatrix?” Samantha said regarding the document.

Beatrix browsed the text again, which was blotchy from bad photocopying. Next to the text was a photo. A photo of a boy wearing a goofy smile. And an eyepatch.

She smiled, and tussled the orphan’s hair. “Nothing you need to worry about.”

Beatrix jimmied the sword between the teeth and the raw leg wound. There was an unfortunate popping sound, likely a break in the jaw bone. Hasting’s pale head tumbled away. The boy shouted, unable to remain stoic anymore.

“Don’t you know any healing spells or anything?” Beatrix asked.

“No. Never could get the hang of those,” the boy replied through a grimace of pain. He ripped the sleeve off his finely cut, snow-white shirt, and tied it around his wound. She detected a brief moment of silence as he mourned the fashion downgrade. “Name’s Grant. What’s yours?”

She introduced herself. As Grant listened, it seemed to Beatrix that he was studying her, scrutinizing her face as if he thought he knew her, but couldn’t place it. It was only a passing impression, as he returned to a standard social posture.

“Pleasure. I was just traveling the woods looking for my mate when I saw you getting manhandled by that foul thing. I felt it was only right to intervene, but…” He looked at Hastings’ lifeless eyes, forever frozen in his last moment of surprise. “In retrospect, maybe you had it all in hand!”

“Oh, not really. If you owe thanks, then so do I,” she said. Grant sliced the excess sleeve from his bandage, and used the spare material to clean his sword to a sparkle. She continued, “You said you were looking for someone?”

“My friend. He went wandering off somewhere and I lost track of him. He’s sick, you see. I need to give him his pills. I suspect he’s out of them... not that he’s very mindful of taking them in the first place. Frustrating. That’s why I think he could be in bad shape. Have you seen anyone?”

“I’ve seen lots of guys around. None since yesterday, though. Does he wear an eye patch?”

“No, that’s not him. Never mind, I’m sure you didn’t cross paths.”

“I could watch out for him, if you described him.”

“Tell you what. I think we should stick together. So if you come across him, I will too.”

“Oh. Um…” She didn’t know how she felt about accruing another male party member, particularly one she knew nothing about.

“Yes, absolutely. We’ve got to stay together. It’s dangerous out here, and I have this troubling sense that you don’t know anything about magic. Am I right?”

“Sorry to say, yeah,” she confessed.

“And if we’re ever separated, and you do run into my friend, here…” He took something out of a pouch tied to his belt. It looked like a Russian doll. It was bright red, and very shiny. It seemed to glow, like a polished, precious stone.

He opened it. Inside was a smaller doll, which he removed. The smaller one looked just like its larger parent, but was half-red, half-blue, the colors divided down the center of the face and body. He held it with a hand on each color. A thin line of light separated the two colored halves, and the doll became two dolls. They were identical, except one was red, the other was blue. Grant handed her the blue one.

“Take this. You’ll be able to find me with it. Instantly!”

“Herbert, cut it out! God, what’s your problem?” Herbert’s fingers pulled at the edge of his older brother’s bowl of Captain Crunch. Seymour gingerly restrained the bowl in a delicate game of tug of war.

“Man, there’s no milk. It’s buried like an inch beneath the cereal. I can’t eat this dry crap,” Herbert griped.

“But I just split the last of the milk evenly. It was a fair split!”

“Yeah, but come on. You know you like your cereal on the dry side. I like mine to swim a little.”

“Okay, yeah, but I poured myself a bigger bowl. Proportionately speaking, there is already less milk in mine!”

“Nobody told you to have so much. You could stand to cut back a little, anyway. Maybe you’ll shed a few.” Herbert, in spite of his other passive qualities, was blessed with the mind of a bully. Unfortunately for Seymour, this virtue appeared to be making a critical spike at Herbert’s ripe age of ten (placing this moment, the keen among you may have already calculated, about four years ago). A true bully knows it’s not the size or age of your target that matters. It’s his mind’s demonstration of willingness to be bullied. It is the combined displays of weakness, desire to accommodate, and scarcity of self assurance which any real bully will smell like blood in the water. The boys’ parents couldn’t bring themselves to police the behavior after the recent disappearance of their older brother, Louis. They figured children have their own ways of coping with loss, and these natural mechanisms shouldn’t be tampered with. It would work itself out in time.

“Alright, fine.” Herbert let go, sending the bowl’s contents onto Seymour’s lap.

“Jesus!”

“Oops. Sorry.” It was a sincere statement. Being a bully didn’t necessarily mean you wanted to make a big mess in the kitchen. It was more a creed of psychological harassment.

“Damn it, Herbert. Damn it! Now I’ve got to go change. Look, if the bus comes, can you just hold it up until I’m back?” Herbert gummed a mouthful of dry, razor-sharp Cap’n Crunch. It was like an endurance sport for the soft interior of the mouth. As he poured the remainder of Seymour’s milk into his own bowl, he idly gazed at the empty milk carton. It exhibited on one side something he’d grown accustomed to looking at. Text reading “Missing:” and things like “Last seen:” and “Eye color” and “Hair color”. Beneath this was a picture of their older brother, Louis. This image was going to change soon.

For the next four-plus years, Herbert would be looking at a picture of Seymour on milk cartons.

“I hope you choke on your stupid eye patch,” Seymour muttered as he hustled up the stairs to his room.

“Thaf doefn’t mafe any semse!” Herbert yelled with a mouth full of jagged grain rectangles. “Why would my eye fatch efen be in my mouf?”

That was the last time he ever saw Seymour.

Herbert looked down at the unconscious boy as if examining a heap of manure someone had dumped on to his front doorstep.

There was something familiar about him. He looked simply ghastly—almost stone cold dead. His face was a grim ivory mask of bloodless skin. His eyes were sunken, like two marks left on an overripe peach by a couple of firmly pressed thumbs. He was…

No, he wasn’t that person. This boy was alive. He was breathing.

The boy’s clothes were caked in mud. Maybe they were nice at one point, but not now. A brown suit with a vest and a possibly-white but now-brown shirt. Languishing underneath him was a velvet purple cape, also re-pigmented—amazingly enough—to mud brown. There was something tucked into his garment, something metallic, long. A wand?

No way, Herbert thought. That seemed even less likely than finding his dreamed corpse sprawled in the mud. There was something in his hand. Herbert carefully plucked it from the boy’s sleepy grip. It was an empty prescription bottle. It read:

Russet Clove

Divalproex 500 mg

Take one capsule by mouth

Two times daily for 30 days

It didn’t seem possible, but it was true. It was the same boy. He thought to himself, when some people crash, they really crash.

“You would like to eat him? He looks to be a very tasty young man, that is what you are thinking is what?” Someone was talking to Herbert. Herbert looked around, but could not find the owner of the melodious and strange question. It went on. “It’s his soft portions! That’s on which you have your eye on? Yes?”

Herbert saw it. It was a metal cylinder a couple feet tall. Halfway down the object was a pair of eyes, large and quite biological-looking, as if they once belonged to a horse. Beneath the eyes was a jagged mouth carved out of the metal and likely razor-sharp. It was twisted upward into a ludicrous smile. Beneath the mouth was printed in plain, black lettering, “LENTIL”. As in LENTIL SOUP.

“What? Uh… no?” Herbert said, vexed, as the phrase “soft portions” ran naked laps in front of his brain’s stunned audience. “I am hungry, yeah. But there’s no way I’m going to eat this guy, no. If that’s what you’re getting at.”

“A tiny nibble!” the can said, undaunted. “That’s all I will allow is all, should you accept my offer. The price I ask is the solution to my riddle is my asking price!”

Herbert’s face was blank. “No, I’m really not interested.”

“It’s smoothed and ceramic

Like a whitened dish-cradle,

It soothes like a hammock

When invitened by ladle…”

“Seriously, that’s alright. You’ve misunderstood…” Herbert feebly protested.

“Be it a bouillabaisse bed

Or a consommé cot,

Be so tempted your head,

Recall a hat it is not.”

It looked at him expectantly, quite pleased with itself. Herbert hesitated, as the silence expanded into something of an idiotic face-off.

“Just ignore the damn soup. Tell it to go away,” Russet said, stirring in his mud crevasse. He made a face like he was nursing a migraine.

The soup can bounced towards Herbert. “Well?? What will you hazard?”

“It’s a bowl. A freaking bowl.” Russet now sat upright, barking at the can. “The thing you put soup into.”

“Yes!!” The can sprung into the air as if clicking its nonexistent heels.

Herbert was surprised to hear Russet talking, but not more surprised than hearing the same from a can of soup moments earlier, just to put things into perspective.

“He’s been pestering me all morning. Seems to be under the impression he needs to protect me,” Russet said, as he reclined again into the muck and leaves. He seemed content to catch a few more hours of sleep without so much as another word.

“Russet, huh? So that was you? The one who killed all those skeletons?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“What happened to you, man?”

“Pfffffft.” Russet pulled his grimy cape over himself as a blanket.

Herbert laughed in recollection. “Arraign my foes with fingers of wind?”

“Look, cut me a little slack,” Russet sneered. “I’m not proud of myself, alright? Are you happy to hear that? I feel really damn silly about it all, and I’d like to forget about it and just lie here. And I would like you to go away.”

Herbert was still chuckling. “Wait, wait… what was that one about Odin? Odin’s might?”

“Oh, shut up. Just get out of here, will you? And see if you can lure away that dumbass soup can with you. Go!” Russet hurled a stone at Herbert. He sidestepped, watching the stone sail through a gap in the trees where the sky was visible. That’s when Herbert saw it, floating in the sky in the distance.

“What the hell is that?” Herbert gawked. It was hard to identify beyond its three obvious characteristics. That it was floating, it was twirling, and it was… him.

It wasn’t him, exactly. It was a picture of him, on both sides of a sort of digital token, slowly spinning like a coin on a desk. Underneath it was a blinking arrow pointing straight down, making it seem like a computer icon. It was also quite far away, as it started to dawn on Herbert, who would never find himself ahead of the curve in matters of depth perception.

“What’s what?” Russet asked. Just a drop of earnest confusion polluted his sour demeanor. “Is that… me??”

Herbert perplexed. “Don’t you mean me?”

“No. It’s me, you dolt. Can’t you see?”

“Huh.” Herbert had a thought. “Hey, you. Soup. Lentil. Can you come here?” Lentil perked up, delighted to be getting attention again. “What do you see there? A picture of me? Or Russet? Or is it you?”

Lentil focused with all his might on the task. “I seee… a steaming bowl of clam chowder!”

Herbert frowned. “What?”

“No! No! It’s changing… It is a bowl of minestrone is what it is! And now… and now a hungry gourmand is drifting over slowly… and here comes the spoon! Drifting… drifting… there!”

“No, no,” Russet said. “You’re looking at the clouds, stupid soup. I don’t give a flying crap about what kinds of soup you think you see in the clouds. Do you see anything else. Anything floating, that is not a cloud?”

“I… am sorry.” His metal smile creaked into a frown. “I am ashamed to say I cannot answer your riddle is the thing I am ashamed of.”

“So he can’t see it, and we only see ourselves in it?” Herbert deducted.

“I guess. Yeah. Who cares.”

“Well, you know what this means. We have to go there and see what it is.”

“Oh screw you!”

“Come on. I’d go alone, but I’m sure I could really use your magic.”

“I’m not doing no damned magic, that’s for damn sure.”

“Come on, man.” Herbert pulled the boy to his feet in spite of a limp resistance.

“God, hey, let go, alright! Alright!” Russet struggled away from Herbert. “Jesus.”

“Look, what were you going to do? Lie in the mud all day long? That’s retarded.”

“Would’ve suited me fine.”

“Well, not me. Someone’s got to find a way out of this… summer camp.” The phrase was weighed down with enough irony to keep a fleet of hot air balloons grounded. “Even if it kills one of us.”

Russet looked back longingly at his groove in the mud.

“There’s not as much to it as one might think.”

“I guess you have to do a lot of reading? Memorizing spells and magic words and such?” Beatrix speculated.

“Nah, it’s simpler than that. And more subtle. Magic words in my experience are optional. They sound cool, I suppose, if you really want to be a showboat,” Grant explained. “And as far as books go, yeah, I guess it couldn’t hurt to bone up. But that’s not really how I learned the magic I know. It’s kind of an intuitive thing.”

Beatrix squinted, trying to absorb this. According to all the fictional material she’d been exposed to, magic was a complex affair rife with arcane babble and simmering cauldron sludge. There was intrigue in cryptic protocol, and such protocol invited a kind of comfort, the way a prisoner becomes acclimated to, and then dependent on, the stiff the prison regulations. But then, maybe this was a device fiction authors were apt to lean on for those very reasons.

“All you need is a decent imagination, and some concentration. Once you get the hang of it at a low level, the complexity of your spells builds from there. Oh… You need one other thing, of course,” he continued. “A magic item.”

Rats, she thought. She was starting to think she might be just minutes away from casting her first spell. “You do? Why?”

“I suppose it’s a conduit for magic energies. Actually, I don’t know. All I know is trying magic without a decent magic item is like starting a fire with a couple sticks as opposed to a lighter. Possible for the proficient, but still awkward. And impossible for someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing.”

“Are these items usually something like a sword? Or a wand?”

“Actually, they can be anything at all. A staff. A cloak. Even an ice cream scoop, if it was enchanted properly.” Grant paused, looking down at her hand. “Or… a ring. Like the one on your finger.”

She held up her hand to look at her ring. “You mean one like this one?”

“No, I mean that one. I’m quite sure it’s magic. You get a sense for these things.” He tapped the pink stone gently with the blade of his sword. The air rang with a sweet harmonic note as ephemeral sparks leapt from the collision. Beatrix was wrong. She was less than minutes away from casting her first spell.

“What do I do?”

“Start slow. Just concentrate on the ring. Then just think of… well, just magic, I guess. In the abstract.”

Beatrix closed her eyes, even though she wasn’t instructed to. She thought about her ring, then thought, in the most general way possible, about magic. Almost instantly, she felt warmth around her hand. She opened her eyes to see a mild glow surrounding the ring. “Wow. That was easy!” she said, laughing a bit at the favorable absurdity of it.

It was easy. But a mild glow was one thing. It might be useful when trying to illuminate a dark keyhole at night, or when faced with the need to impress a primitive culture of ape-people and make them fly into a fit of wild pant-hooting and bone-throwing. But what about something with a little more bite?

“So what else can I do?”

“Depends. Nothing too fancy for a while, I’d expect. But keep working at it. The forces at work tend to feed off what you’re most driven towards. Magic that helps you accomplish what you most want comes the easiest, and is usually the most powerful. It also depends on the makeup of your character, who you are, and all that.”

Beatrix nodded, holding out her ring-hand. She focused, as Grant went on. “There’s a variety of magic types, of course. Healing spells, curses, illusions… Hell, pick up a copy of the D&D manual. I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you.”

“Illusions?” She didn’t know why this one jumped out at her.

“Yeah, they’re often easier than other kinds. Making the appearance of something, it stands to reason, is easier than causing the actual thing itself to come into existence, as with manifestation. Something about thought-energy-matter transfer, no doubt.”

Bands of light coalesced around the pink stone. First formless, but then became dancing wisps wrestling with each other like snakes. The snakes wove a material that morphed and rippled and folded in on itself, becoming convincingly like silky cloth.

“Wow, nice! Told you, not much to it. You’ve got a knack for it, I’d say.”

“Thanks,” she said, still concentrating on her thoughts. What you’re most driven towards… so that was the key. Beatrix’s purposes may have been hazy to her, but the images associated with them were sharp, and came and went from her mind’s slideshow as they pleased. The snakes of light tangled, composing as an impressionist painter would an image of Herbert’s face. They jolted suddenly, like a swarm of tadpoles reacting to a pebble thrown in the pond, and composed for an instant a portrait of an older girl with short black hair. Then she was gone.

Beatrix, startled, threw her hand behind her back, bringing to a halt her amateur magic act. She looked at Grant, who she was relieved to find did not appear to notice the last couple of illusions. He was looking at the landscape in front of them, at a hill. Behind the hill, there was the silhouette of a metal tower. Originating from somewhere near the tower was a rising trail of smoke.

“So what do people call you? Wizardy?” asked Russet, as the two boys traversed the rocky hills outside the forest.

“No. Just Herbert.”

“What does that make ‘Wizardy’ then?”

“Let’s just drop it.”

“Sounds like a pretty moronic name to me,” muttered Russet. Herbert thought this place really was a magical land of miraculous wonders if it could produce a boy even more wretched and awkward than he was. It didn’t seem possible, but here he was in the flesh.

Russet nearly tripped over a stationary can of soup. Lentil sat in silent fixation on the path ahead, contained on either side by sheer rock faces. There was a brook of gurgling water along the path, and drinking from the brook was an elephant. Or to be more precise, an elephant’s skeleton.

Russet was paralyzed with mortification. It wasn’t exactly the sight of the ghastly skeletal elephant (which some may be tempted to refer to as a “skelephant”, a temptation which shall henceforth be resisted very little). What troubled him more was the fact that as a party their aptitude for discretion rested on the whims of a small metal creature with the rational temperament of a five year-old.

Not that their hiking impediment wasn’t all that ghastly. Twice the size of an African elephant, its black-boned frame carried an impressive girth of green organs. A great network of intestines bundled in its abdominal region, ending with a magnificent colon. The colon stretched from its rear towards its front, strung through its ribcage into the skull, and out the front of the skull where its trunk would be. It used its long mock-trunk to slurp water from the brook, and deposit it directly into its stomach by reaching into its ribcage. Whenever it did this, the two frightened children who were trapped in its ribs had to cower evasively from the appendage. If Herbert had binoculars (or simply an ocular), he might have seen the young boy and girl were wearing vintage Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Strawberry Shortcake T-shirts, respectively.

Lentil seemed to come to a conclusion about this obstacle. It was an obstacle he wanted dearly to engage, fraternize with, and perhaps pose a series of challenging riddles. He hopped towards the skelephant, causing Russet to let out a small yelp. “You get back here this instant!” Russet hissed urgently. Lentil bounced undeterred. Russet dove into a mad lunge and tackled the can, pinning it to the ground.

“It looks to be a fine new friend is what it looks…” Lentil’s voice was muffled by a large wad of Russet’s dirty cape.

“I’ll ‘fine new friend’ you. Shut your fat ugly mouth before I show you the business end of a can opener.”

“Russet, calm down, man.” Herbert sidled up to the caviling pair. “Hey, why can’t you just kill it?”

“Why don’t you kill it?” He was elevating his voice in spite of himself.

“I mean, weren’t you basically offing skeletons all night? This should be a piece of cake for you. Let’s see some of those magics, or majycs, or whatever. Come on, light him up.”

Russet fumed, turning red. Herbert tried to grab his cape, but was swatted away in a spastic flurry of panic. “Don’t touch me! Just keep your grubby paws to yourself, you busybodied cycloptic prick!”

“It’s just that this path looks like the only way through here. And those kids, they look like they need help. You like saving kids, don’t you? You are, like, really heroic or something, right?”

Russet was about to snort another angry volley at Herbert when he noticed he’d lost track of the soup can. Lentil was, as he feared, “engaging” the skelephant, possibly flummoxing the beast with esoteric verse about bouillon cubes. The skelephant however was not looking at Lentil. It was looking at Russet and Herbert while scraping the dirt with one massive foot, as if about to charge. And the “about to” part of that activity was looking to be very short lived. In fact, it had downright flat-lined.

“It’s running at us!” Herbert observed hysterically. “Stop dicking around, okay? Just kill it!” Herbert shoved Russet toward the raging locomotive of bones and organs. Russet was shaking, frozen in place. He held his wand tentatively, then closed his eyes and took a breath. The wand began to smoke. It became engulfed in a thin, yellow mist which rose like the aftermath of blown out birthday candles. A plaintive sound of flatulence crept out of the tip as the spell came to an ineffectual demise. Russet frowned, dropped his arms to his sides, resigned to what would come next.

Beatrix surveyed the acres of tarmac spread across the flat valley. There was hardly a square foot of it that wasn’t cracked and sprouting weeds from beneath. Hangars of corrugated steel had corroded to the point of being porous. Large planes, though otherwise not appearing to be historic or antique, showed the unmistakable disrepair of age. The rusting hulks had missing parts, broken windows, and only a flecked insinuation of the original paint job. Atop the control tower was a satellite dish which looked like it was supposed to be spinning, but no longer was. In piles initially viewed as scrap were caches of ancient artillery and ammunition. In fact, the more she surveyed, the more it didn’t look like a normal airport at all. Not like one a civilian would use. It was more like a military airport.

Conspicuous among the disintegrating metal was a small shack of corrugated rust with a flat roof. Not because it was a remarkable structure, but because there was smoke coming from a pipe in the roof.

“An airport? Why?” she asked.

Grant shrugged. “Could be any number of reasons. To facilitate air travel I’d say was the safest guess.” She smirked at his possibly non-deliberately satirical reply.

“Well, don’t you know things about this place?”

“Not everything. It’s a big place, and I’m afraid the affairs of those who inhabit it can be somewhat… complicated.” Grant motioned her to follow as he marched down the hill towards the shack. His sword was slung around his back. The handle caught the sun, and the shape of the reflection lingered in Beatrix’s eye.

The skelephant had Russet coiled in its intestinal trunk, and flailed him about vigorously as if using him to battle a cloud of flies. Its trumpeting was exultant and victorious.

Herbert looked on with a mix of shock and disappointment. He was sure when faced with death Russet might snap out of his mood and put the beast in its place. Herbert began to suspect that maybe Russet had some sort of problem.

“ThiiiIIiis iiIIiis aaAAaall yoOOour faAAUUult!” shouted the flailed boy.

“Perhaps it is a helping hand for which you would care for a hand with which to help you with?” Lentil was at the foot of the frisky skelephant.

“WhaaaAAAaaaAAAaaat?”

“Ah! But no free lunch goes unpunished!”

“ShuuUUuuUUuut uuUUuuUU…”

“Ahem…” Lentil modified his posture, as if preparing for a histrionic soliloquy.

“Most trust has that broth

In which steer places stock.

Like a flame to a moth

We race to its crock!”

“UuuUUuurgh… BeeEEee quiiIIii…”

“Whether bubbled in cauldron

Or it’s simmered in kettle,

Our taste buds are called on

To put test to their mettle!”

The skelephant pressed Russet’s head against the rocky dirt, and twisted him around as if putting out a large, boy-shaped cigarette. “Mmmph! I don’t… pthff… PTHFFFT! I don’t know!”

“Is it some kind of chili?” one of the trapped children suggested.

“Oh! Oh! What about boot soup! It’s one of my favorites!” said the other.

“I don’t kn… ptfffff… know! I don’t care! Whatever! Soup! Something to do with soup! Just ki… thbbffthhh… kill this thing!” Lentil looked sad, as if his young son had just told him a lie when he’d given him one last chance to tell the truth.

“If that answer is that which you provide my riddle with the answer to, then I am afraid I have little choice…” Lentil did a short jig. A sparkly aura filled the air, and two more identical skelephants appeared.

“Oh bloody… thhhhhhhbbpt… hell.”

“Each fort is a kind of residence,” Grant explained. “Sort of a community for kids attending the camp. Kids who come here, the luckier ones, I guess, will eventually find their way to one of them. Thundleshick established the forts at the onset of this thing, some time ago.”

Beatrix was almost startled at hearing something nearly regarding the existence of organization, however shoddy, for the summer camp. “Where are they?”

“Well… I’m not completely sure where we are now, but each one is roughly east, south, west, and north. Let’s see… to the east, you’ve got Fort Crossnest. South, that’s where Funnelbunk used to be. You don’t want to know what happened to that one. Uh, then west, you have Slurpenook. Stay away from that one at all costs. Just a warning. And up north is Pizzahut.”

“… Pizzahut?”

“Uh… yeah. It’s really just a name. Don’t get your hopes too high. But anyway, if you want to head that way, north, or to the east, those places are fine.” He pointed in both directions as he mentioned them. Beatrix caught something out of the corner of her eye as he said “east”. Something strange, floating in the sky. It was a picture of her, somehow, spinning on a disc. She turned to look at Grant. He was still prattling on about something, seemingly oblivious to the floating object. Surely he wasn’t simply failing to notice it. It was as if he couldn’t see it at all. This had her gears turning.

“Don’t you see that? In the sky?” she said, looking directly at him, careful not to be actually looking at the floating object itself.

“Huh? See what?” He looked all around, scanning the horizon. She thought for sure he would have seen it now. If he actually could see it. Beatrix took her eyes off Grant, putting into play a minor deception. She looked at the sky, but not facing east. She faced north, gazing at a vacant portion of the sky.

Grant watched her, then came around to her vantage point and scrutinized the patch of sky she was fixed on. “What do you see there?”

Beatrix appeared to snap out of it as a cloud passed in front of the thing she wasn’t looking at. “Oh. Nothing, I guess. I must be seeing things.”

“Well, what was it?”

“For a second there, I thought I saw myself! Must be exhaustion.”

Grant scratched his chin, looking a bit concerned. “Do you think,” he said after some time, “someone could be expecting you here?”

“I don’t know. I can’t imagine why.” She shrugged. More silence followed.

He looked pained, then addressed to his bloody leg. It appeared to be in worse shape from the hiking. “I’m no good out here like this. Maybe someone in here can help,” he speculated, as he again limped towards the smoking airport shack.

“What are you hoping for? A magic potion or such?” she asked earnestly.

“Maybe. Something like that.” They stepped onto the cracked, uneven tarmac. Heat radiated off the dark surface and started to bake them instantly. Beatrix wiped her forehead, and snuck a brief glance to the east. It was still there, floating and spinning. She allowed herself a mischievous, if hardly perceptible smile.

The two new antagonists took turns beating Russet with uprooted, prickly shrubs while the third beast held him aloft like a piñata. “Mmmph! Fthh! Gthh damph ith louthy mphthr fthckrth!”

Herbert watched Russet’s tragic embarrassment unfold. Whatever luster there was to Russet previously, the spring in his step, and indeed any positive attribute, had simply vanished. This was no longer a hero. He was a charity case.

Herbert rolled up his sleeves (mentally-speaking). Magic was not the solution to everything. In fact, he proposed in his own hazy, non-intellectual way, something to the contrapositive, which held that if magic was not the solution to everything, then anything but magic was the solution to, if not everything, then some things. He felt this situation might fall under the category of “some things”. He felt even more strongly that “anything but magic” was one of his strengths.

The conspicuously not-magical thing Herbert did was pick up Lentil, and in a gloriously un-magical fashion, chucked him at the skelephant’s skull. The impact made a sound like a hammer hitting a coconut. “Elephant! Yeah, you, Dumbo! Aren’t you bored with that one yet? Why don’t you have a go at this!”

Herbert flashed a lewd gesture, then ran towards a wall of foliage. The ground shook with the stampede equivalent of six African elephants in pursuit. Herbert dove into the shrubbery, tucked and rolled. What Herbert knew which the skelephants didn’t, though, was that this was not a forest. The trees and bushes terminated abruptly only ten feet into it, opening to a steep, rocky hill descending into a gulch.

The monster stampede exploded through the trees like a huge, voraciously trumpeting cannonball, splintering the sturdy tree wood like it was cheap particleboard furniture. As the creatures made an inexorable rotation through the air, Herbert reached up and grabbed Russet by the foot, prying him away from the trunk’s grasp. The skelephants tumbled down the hill in one great tangle, while the sound of screaming orphans could be heard vaguely.

A limp, bramble-scratched Russet collided with Herbert, who took the brunt of Russet’s weight as awkwardly as possible. Herbert heard a ‘snap’. And then he heard pain. But in this case, “felt” would be more appropriate than “heard”.

“Augh… I think you broke my arm.” Herbert looked up, as if cursing whichever God was responsible. Perhaps Loki, the Lord of Mischief was the one who warranted his scorn. Not so much for the broken arm, but that Herbert’s one deed of breathtaking heroism would be wasted on this miserable loser.

Grant knocked on the door which responded like hollow metal drum. It opened, revealing a woman’s elderly face. But elderliness was only the beginning and most superficial of the misfortunes which had befallen her face. Her eyes were scarred closed. Her lipless mouth was a thin line amidst creases of age. It was seemingly fused shut, possibly from a burn or a surgical procedure. She wore earmuffs, which straddled a badly unkempt head of silvery hair. She was otherwise not an unattractive woman, possibly even glamorous if caught in the right period in her life (such as a fondly looked upon pre-disfigurement period, for instance).

“Yes, who’s there? What do you want?” Her mouth did not move. A voice could be heard from within the shack through a filter of radio static.

“Hello, madam, my name…”

“Dott! For heaven’s sake, get over to that door and let me see who it is!” crackled the static voice from the interior. The old woman felt around impatiently with waving arms, while Grant’s introduction was left in suspended animation. Beatrix, to no avail, tried to peer into the shack and get a glimpse of the voice’s owner.

Something caught their attention from below. It looked like a small child, not more than two feet tall. But it wasn’t a child. It was mechanical, with its clockwork and moving bits exposed, everywhere except for its face, which was a painted, polished metal face of a female doll. It had two sophisticated, perpetually focusing lenses for eyes. It looked up at Grant and Beatrix, and as it did so, the old woman looked up simultaneously, at about the same angle.

“There you are!” snapped the cheerful voice from inside the shack.

Grant, recovering from a bewildered expression, opted for another stab at formality with the blind woman. “Um, hello, ma’am. Grant Anonama, here. Pleased to meet you. This is Beatrix.” He offered his hand towards the woman. The small robot stared at his hand, lenses twitching and zooming furiously. The woman waved at the air until her hand found Grant’s, and completed a limp, inattentive handshake.

“Where is my radio? Blast, just one moment, children. Where the devil…” the radio voice spoke in a discombobulated tone. She stooped down, swatting the air in the vicinity of the robotic doll. The doll, or ‘Dott’, as Grant presumed might be its name, turned and tottered into the shack. “Please, don’t stand there! Come in! Get out of that heat!”

“So… how’s the arm?” Russet said, finally interrupting what was likely a long and chilly drought of conversation.

“Never been better,” Herbert said, cradling his blue arm. “I’m about to give it a real workout, in fact. Maybe some one-arm pull-ups, or a few handstands. I’m about to pump some major iron with it in a second, if you want to see a real show.”

“Well, um, Wizardy… for what it’s worth, I feel just awful about it.”

“So do I. Don’t call me Wizardy. I should have let you roll down that hill with those elephants.”

“Don’t think for a second that would not have suited me just fine!” spat Russet with sudden volatility. Herbert rolled his eye while trudging ahead. He briefly reaffirmed the position of the spinning icon. He thought he heard a weak sob from behind him. Herbert re-rolled his eye.

“Not even a ‘thank you’, huh?” Herbert muttered under his breath.

“Wh…” Russet said between poorly disguised sniffles. “What?”

“Nothing. It’s just that you’d think you might show some appreciation. For getting you out of that jam. That’s all.”

“I’m sorry. Yeah. I mean, no. I mean… big deal. Who cares!”

Herbert ignored him. He began to hear rushing water ahead.

“That is…” Russet continued, again withdrawing his combative tone. “I’m not much worth saving, am I?” He drew a heavy breath and kicked a small stone.

“Wow, you really are a miserable shit, aren’t you?”

“Yes. Yes, I am a shit, aren’t I?” Russet’s face appeared to don a semi-earnest, semi-delirious sense of revelation with this statement, as if a burdensome shroud of ignorance was lifted from his eyes. Herbert had no interest in getting suckered into a pinch psychotherapy role on this hike, or ever.

“If you want to make it up to me, how about giving me your cape?”

“M… my… cape?” He began stuttering at the thought of shedding an important fashion accessory, even if it was a very muddy, wrinkly one. Somewhere deep in the ravaged recesses of his psyche there was still a very vain boy. “What on earth do you want with my cape?”

“Well, there’s a bridge coming up. See?” Herbert pointed to an upcoming ravine. Strung across it was a rickety-looking rope bridge with intermittent wood slats as footholds. “It doesn’t look all that stable, so I’m going to need a free hand to hang on to the rope.”

“Um… and this has what to do with my cape?” Russet was unconsciously caressing it like Linus did with his blanket in Peanuts.

“I can use it to tie my arm in a sling. The arm you broke, if you recall.”

“Oh. Right. Ahh…” He looked as if he was searching for the precise wording for the reason that excused him from surrendering his cape. Herbert advanced menacingly. “Whoa!” Russet jumped, suddenly terrified. “No, no, no! Of course not! Here, take it. Take it!” He handed over the cape with shaking arms.

“Mm-hmm, mm-hmm!” Dott squawked robotically. She was intently focused on the radio sitting on the table. She pointed, then looked deliberately at the old woman, then back at the radio, then back at her…

“Okay, okay! Goodness! Don’t get so overexcited,” spoke the static radio voice. “Now hold your head still, silly, so I won’t trip and hurt myself.”

“Ma’am, can I… assist you somehow?” Grant asked.

“Zoe, dear. Call me Zoe, and no. I’ll be just fine,” said the radio. “Please hold your horses for one moment. I’m having a little trouble hearing you from all the way over there on the table.” Grant watched the old woman, which he cautiously presumed might be named Zoe. She made her way to the table while fixed in the eerie, sterile glare of her little toy helper, navigating the through hovel of gadgetry that was her abode. The obstacle course consisted of wires, glass tubes, bubbling crucibles, hefty jars and barrels, hundreds of other unnamable knickknacks. She lifted the radio from the table and fidgeted with the knobs. “There, that’s better,” came out of the walkie-talkie-like device. “If you need to say something, please say it into this. I’m afraid my ears are currently operating its corresponding device!”

“Your ears?” Beatrix jumped in, sensing the same question on Grant’s mind. “Sorry if this is a dumb question, but who is on the other walkie-talkie? Who are we talking to now, I mean?”

“Oh! I suppose I should have introduced them. It’s just that, well, they aren’t even here to be introduced, so you can se how it would slip the mind. To answer your question, you are talking to me, Zoe. Or to put a face to it, that poor old soul over there scuffling by the heap of batteries, if you pardon me for a moment… (oof)… while I get to my blasted… stool. There!”

“Uh-Unn, Uh-unn!”

“Oh, right,” Zoe’s radio-voice said, “Of course I should have introduced you too, Dott. But you know perfectly well I can’t actually see you most of the time, so, without the slightest bit of offense, dearest, I tend to forget you are there. But…” Zoe lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “That is how I know you are doing a wonderful job!”

Russet’s pace progressed asymptotically to a dead halt before he was anywhere near the ravine. He made a grim inspection of the bridge, which seemed to him a generous appraisal of what the structure really was. “Crumble-tether” might have been better. “Plummet-rope” seemed more to the point still.

“No. I’m not crossing it. I just won’t do it.”

“It’ll be fine. We’ll cross one at a time, carefully.”

“Forget it. You’ve wasted enough energy on me. I’ll save you some right now. Don’t bother trying to get me on that absurd wobbly suicide-harness.”

Herbert sighed. “Okay, whatever you say. But I’m going first. I’ll show you it’s perfectly safe. If you still don’t want to, fine with me.”

Russet narrowed his eyes suspiciously, not wanting to commit to any devious bargains, even though the terms appeared to demand nothing from him. He couldn’t be too careful though.

Herbert held the rope with a white-knuckled grip. He focused on his footwork with heightened concentration to make up for the lack of his right arm. Under his foot, and the wood slat it stood on, roared the white rapids at the bottom of the ravine.

“See? Easy!” he yelled upon reaching the other side. “Now you cross!”

Russet hesitated. It was clear the bridge passed the test, but that only proved it was sturdier than his backbone. He reached for a rope cautiously. “I… don’t know!”

“Look, Lentil is there to help on that side, and I’m on this side! Nothing will go wrong!”

Russet turned to Lentil warily. “Listen, tin can,” Russet hissed with incriminating urgency. “You better not play any of your stupid games. No games, you hear? I’m watching you.” He did something with his fingers that made it clear that he was, indeed, watching him.

“What I am here to do is help you on this side is what I…”

“Alright, alright! God. Look, just stand far away from the bridge and I’ll go. Go over there. Further. Further. Keep going. Now stay there.”

Russet inched to the center of the bridge like an elderly man in physical therapy. He wouldn’t dare behave more gracefully, even if it genuinely improved his stability, for fear of jinxing the procession. “That’s it. You’re doing it! Nice going, man!”

Russet almost hazarded a little smile. The cool air rushing up from the river was certainly a relief from the sweltering oppression of the day. He made the mistake of glancing down and almost threw up, but then rebounded nicely.

Russet thought about increasing his pace, when he heard a gnawing sound. He craned backwards to see Lentil chewing on the ropes with air-headed abandon. “Oh, now what the hell do you think you are doing?!” Russet blithered incredulously. “No, get away from that! I am not goddamned kidding!”

There was a snap, then a jolt under Russet’s feet. “I thought you were supposed to be protecting me! Does this seem very much like protection to you?? Does it, you tin of unfathomable excrement?! Does it?!” Mention of Lentil’s alleged purpose seemed to get his attention. He hopped onto the bridge to join Russet. There was not a shred of restraint in his bouncing advance.

“No! No! Off the bridge! Off the bridge!” Russet scrambled for security, striking a pose like he was playing an invisible game of Twister in midair.

“So be it your desire to have yourself saved is what you wish me to do? Ah-ha!”

“No! No save! Leave! No bounce! Leave bridge!” Russet stammered.

“Ahem…”

“Oh, I swear to God, if you start on with another friggin’ riddle…”

“Its steam billows up, like prandial phantom…”

“Aaaargh!”

“Haunting its stew with character-noodles…”

Russet put the can of soup into a choke hold and pounded its lid with his fist, making metal clonking sounds. “Shut up! Shut up you ugly son of a canned whore! Shut your miserable trap!” Clonk, clonk.

“To the surface they rise, ordered any but random…”

“I’ll kill you! I’ll wipe that hideous grin off your moronic face, you… you pea-brained, inconsiderate… turd merchant!”

“Spelling— it’s true!—‘You’ll love it, but oodles!’”

There was a ‘snap’. The hopeless tangle of rope, soup and boy fell towards the rushing water below. Herbert merely watched in quiet disbelief. A “clonk-clonk-clonk” could be heard all the way down, until they both disappeared into a small, white splash and were carried away by the river.

Beatrix watched the powerful lenses poking out of the otherwise innocent-looking doll’s face. They whizzed and chirped with a kind of depth, a human soulfulness now that Beatrix began to understand that the images captured by them seemed to be channeled directly into this old woman’s awareness, as if they were her own eyes. Her own, albeit separately perambulating outside of her own head.

“And… the others? You mean, there are more of these little fellas to help you?” Grant said, as he began to catch on in his own way.

“Yes, the boys! Graham and Ferris. Troublemakers sometimes, but what boys won’t be? You are very kind, Ms. Zoe.” The voice from the walkie-talkie suddenly changed in tone.

“Who was that?” Grant inquired.

“That was Ferris.” The voice resumed to what they’d come to know as Zoe’s. “How goes the work, dear? Oh, fine, I suppose. My brother is completing a crosscheck and then we may retire for the evening and play some games.”

It was becoming a tad confusing listening to a conversion between two people out of the same walkie-talkie, while one of the voices supposedly belonged to this perfectly silent elderly woman sitting in a stool. It might seem more confusing yet if it was known the two voices on the walkie-talkie were coming from the same source, the mouth of a small robotic doll.

“I have them both out in the hangar taking care of some busywork for me. No use dragging my old bones out there for this,” spoke Zoe’s voice again. “That one was vociFerris. He is my voice. And what a lovely voice he is. Aww shucks, Ms. Z.”

“And his brother? What does he do?” Beatrix asked.

“sonoGraham plays the part of my ears. He’s listened to everything through the radio on the other end to help me keep up with you kids, and he’s done a heck of a job too. He’s a shy one, though. Quiet as the wind. Heeheehee! Heeheeheeheehee!” Robotic giggling erupted from the walkie-talkie. “Ferris, for heaven—Heeheehee!—sake what are—Heeheehee!—about?”

Beatrix and Grant looked at each other. It was hard not to observe the exchange as a full-blown schizophrenic having a conversation with him/herself through a radio.

“Heeheeheehee—me mad—heehee! Just sto—heeheeheehee! Oh, I am so sorry (heeheehee!) Ms. Z. It’s Graham, isn’t it. Won’t you tell me what he is signing to you? You know I can’t see what he is saying unless Dott is there. Heehee… oh, I really shouldn’t translate. (snicker… stop it, will you!) I really shouldn’t!— I hope it is nothing vulgar. Really, that Graham is just too clever for his own good sometimes. Completely fresh. Heehee! Oh, it’s nothing. Don’t worry. I will make him shut up.”

“Mm-hmm, mm-hmm!”

“fociDott! Please, don’t encourage them.” Dott became expressively contrite. “And please don’t sulk! It’s all well and good for you to have your moods, but whenever you sulk I wind up with a lovely view of the floor! Thank you!”

“Madam Zoe, refreshments sound lovely,” Grant kindly replied. “But really, what I should take care of first is this little cut on my leg. I don’t mean to be a bother, but…”

The woman on the stool suddenly had a posture of alarm. “Dott! For goodness sake, go over there and have a look! My goodness, my goodness, if I’d known you were hurt… Dott, why couldn’t you have had a better look at the young man’s leg earlier? Oh, don’t show me the floor again! Go! Go!”

The little robot sprang off her pile of junk and skipped over to Grant’s leg. Through its powerful digital capture equipment, a rich, detailed view of Grant’s blood-soaked knee filled the space of Zoe’s optical awareness. It zoomed in closer as the software auto-adjusted the image for lighting. The makeshift bandage had obviously run its course.

“It’s just a flesh wound, naturally,” Grant disclaimed. “I was just thinking, perhaps if you had a special remedy or such? Potions or curatives?”

Zoe held her hand to her chin, becoming absorbed in mentally locating such a thing. “Yes, I think I’ve got just the thing. Dott, will you trot yourself on over to the bins behind me. Yes, that’s it. Take a right at my stool… no, no, the other right. There you go. It’s a gray metal box in there some where.”

Grant smiled uneasily at Beatrix, as if the gesture performed the function of a wink. She returned the smile with her own vintage of uneasiness. “Anyway,” she began in a way she hoped the old woman would interpret as a private conversation. “You were telling me about this camp. I’m curious, what else do you know?”

“What did you want to know?”

“Well… I mean, this obviously isn’t a real summer camp. It’s some kind of big trap. Kids are lured here and captured. So what does Thundleshick want with them?”

“I see what you mean. You’re sort of right, but not quite. It very much is a real summer camp, in many ways. Well, except for being able to leave if you want to.”

Beatrix didn’t seem satisfied with this. “What? Are you sure about that? So Thundleshick is… he is the one in charge, right?”

Grant was visibly hemming for something to say. The subject appeared to make him uncomfortable. “I… yeah. No, he’s the guy in charge. Technically, he did set the whole thing up, all the forts and whatnot. And he runs it all, in his own way.”

“And he was the one who came up with all those silly fort names? Pizzahut and such?” Her tone was sarcastic, but it was a legitimate question.

“Oh. I guess so. I’m not sure, actually.”

“So, why does he do it?”

“That is… a really good question.” Grant’s sudden ease of response, and look of relief, you might call it, made Beatrix think this was a question he finally felt he was “allowed” to answer freely. She decided to believe him.

“And why are you here?” she asked, masking her suspicion.

“Me?” Grant replied innocently. “Already told you. I’m looking for my friend, Russet. But now at least I have someone to help me look.” He produced the most disarming face he could muster.

The name stuck in her mind like a knife-thrower’s blade. Russet. That Russet? She opened her mouth as if to say something, but then closed it.

“Ah-ha! Got it!” Zoe shouted through her walkie-talkie. Dott held aloft a gray box triumphantly. “Good, Dott. Now please take it to the poor boy… or, I’m sorry. Mr. Anonama. There you are, boy.”

“Mm-hmm, mm-hmm!”

Grant took the box from the doll-faced robot with a smile. “Thank you very much, Dott.”

He sneered at the sudden awareness of his stinging leg. He’d been able to ignore the pain while distracted by amusing antics of robots/sensory aids and various kinds of chitchat. But now that he was about to treat the wound, the sharp throb placed itself front and center at the head of the line, like the fattest bum in the soup kitchen. He was looking forward to a splendidly instantaneous magical remedy, nice and tidy. Maybe a kind of thick salve coaxed out of the udder of a rare mystical breed, like a half-giant falcon, half-wildebeest. Or maybe the curative simply came in the form of a topical toad. A kind of tree-climbing variety, which would hug his knee with suction feet, while its enchanted belly absorbed any maladies and repaired his wound.

He flipped open the lid to see only wads of gauze, a syringe, a couple of bottles of alcohol, and some Band-Aids. “Oh. It’s a first aid kit. Wow.”

“Yes, you should get that old bandage off and clean the wound right away.”

Grant was already untying the knot on his bloody, severed sleeve with a look of distaste. “Yes. Um, I was just thinking, maybe you had some kind of remedy that was… a little more… magic?”

“Magic? Oh, no, I never was much for that sort of thing,” she confessed. Grant looked around again, rethinking his initial presumption about this shack and the one who inhabited it. It was full of oily rags, machine parts, and scattered doodads. This was the den of a kindly old grease monkey more than that of a sorceress. He felt foolish.

Beatrix looked out the small window, which she noted faced east. She noted this because from this window, she could see the mysterious floating icon she’d spotted earlier. It spun, distantly and silently, beckoning her.

Grant flinched as he pulled the bandage unstuck from his clotting wound. Without removing his eyes from the deep gouge, he held out the sleeve towards Beatrix. “Beatrix, would you mind, please find somewhere to throw this out so I don’t mess up the place?” She took it between two fingers, looking about, wondering how a single bloody sleeve could possibly elevate the disarray in this cluttered shack even one iota. With her other hand, she felt the cool metal on the underside of her ring with her thumb.

There was a sudden roar from the walkie-talkie, sounding like a rocket blasting near the receiver. It made the old woman jump. “Sweet Jesus Christmas almighty, if you boys are going to fire up the engine like that, Graham, at least have the decency to step outside for a second, or at least cover up your little ear-holes! I’m sor(static) Zoe, it wo(static) Graham’s almo(static)…” She strained to decipher the words from her own mouth. “What? Oh for Pete’s (static). I (static) hardly hear a word… (static)ut the eng(static)or the love of(static, static, static) cut off the damned engine! Are you trying to make your mother… Oh! There we go. He’s all done.”

Beatrix, amidst the commotion, flicked the bloody cloth in a way that looked rather convincingly absent-minded. It landed on Dott’s head, covering her eyes. Zoe shook her head, swatting at the nothing in front of her eyes by pure reflex, but was undeterred in her tirade. “Really, you’re going to overheat the thing if you’re not careful. Don’t make me second-guess myself about leaving you alone out there. I feel compromised enough here with only Dott to look after me, the silly girl.”

Dott finally tugged the bandage off her head, removing the bloodstained darkness from her, as well as Zoe’s, field of vision. Grant was applying alcohol with swabs to his leg with a great deal of focus. Beatrix stood looking out the window motionlessly, with her back to the room.

“Anyway, Beatrix, sorry if I wasn’t all that clear in answering your questions. There’s a still lot I don’t quite understand myself. And I was just a little distracted, what with this dang leg, and all… Really, what do you want to know? I’ll try to do better.”

She made no reply. He paused, assuming she wanted him to continue his train of thought. “Well, like I said, it is a kind of camp. But yeah, that is a loose term for it. For one thing, like I said, it is very… well, difficult for a kid to leave here. Just about impossible. The thing is, summer here is very… it’s a very long summer. You might say it lasts forever…” He looked up from his sentence, almost hopefully. He was trying to break certain things in a way that first of all made sense, but also in a way he hoped wouldn’t be too upsetting. He didn’t know why he felt he had to sugarcoat things like this, especially to someone like Beatrix, who he presumed might appreciate a straight answer more than the average girl. It was, he reflected in a grave half-second, part of his personality he detested. But then the alternative, the other side of things he noted with the other half of the second, was even worse…

She remained silent and still. Grant was growing concerned. “Beatrix? What is it?” He crept to her side. She didn’t budge an inch. He then hunched a bit, bringing his face closer to the window. He wanted to get a look at her face.

But she had no face.

It was blank, totally featureless. Grant took a step back, startled. He might have been worried for her, except the explanation was almost immediately apparent to him. He noticed a shimmering quality to her perimeter. The hair lacked detail, not discernable strand-for-strand, but somewhat blurry with gently dancing artifacts you’d see on compressed satellite TV. He waived his hand, which passed right through her body, leaving a misty trail of momentarily-dissolved clothing.

It was an illusion.

Grant hurried to the door. He swung it open and manically threw his head this way and that, but there was no sign of her at all. She’d managed to elude him without putting the slightest dent in his obliviousness.

Another thing which failed to put so much as a ripple in his tranquil pond of ignorance was the other occupant of that shack. The occupant who was neither a technologically adept blind/deaf/mute old lady, nor a diminutive neurologically-linked seeing-eye robotic doll. This occupant was in fact smaller than either of them, and remained perfectly unseen in the clutter.

The lid to a medium-sized jar slowly lifted. Under the lid, now wearing it like a hat, was the head of a very small horse. The tiny horse head scowled surreptitiously at Grant. It was a scowl far more menacing, far more expressive than you’d think a horse head was capable of. It disappeared, and the jar clinked shut.

With the accompanying sound of a great volume of mucous being forced through a large flailing colon, a half-dozen slippery children splattered on to the steel grate flooring. It was a kind of second birth, really, and if their fathers had known about it, they might be proudly pointing camcorders towards the dilating sphincters of the towering skeletons, with a cache of cheap cigars at the ready to be passed around. The parallel is not fully without merit, since these children were beginning a very new life indeed.

In a closed loft above the floor, a young man occupied his computer station. His large, thin-rimmed glasses reflected the light from his web browser, while the sneer on his gaunt, sallow face similarly reflected some vague technical frustration. He wore black shorts with black shirt neatly tucked into them. Crossing his chest was a wide black sash, littered with rows of colorful badges sewn on to it. They were merit badges, signs that he was one of the very few in the organization, if not the only one, who took this realm’s institutional role of “Summer Camphood” seriously. There were a couple reasons for this. One very plain reason was that he carried the title of Camp Counselor. The other reason was that Counselor Slinus Marlevort was quite probably out of his mind.

He let out a noise of mild exasperation. “This internet connection is absolutely ridiculous.” In the browser, the lower edge of the image crept slowly. A downward-pointing snail stuck to the screen might have beaten it in a footrace.

“No, I wasn’t talking to you,” Slinus said into his cell phone. “What were you saying?” He wheeled away from the desk, rolling noisily on the fashionable, yet very sinister-looking brushed steel floor. He looked out the window without any purpose to his expression, surveying the gooey huddle of children.

“She killed him,” said the small voice on the phone.

“Killed him?”

“She cut off his head.”

There was a pause. “… That’s hysterical. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. I wish I could have seen that.”

A brusque silence came from the other end of the phone.

“Come on, Terence. I’m not worried same thing will come of you. I know you are in a different league from that eel man and his ridiculous moustache.”

“That’s very reassuring,” Terence snorted, “Anyway, I’ve lost track of the girl. But I’m on the trail of a boy. The one who calls himself Grant.”

Slinus removed the phone from his ear for a moment to register some amusement upon hearing this. “Oh, right. Him.”

“Anyway, he seems to know where the girl went. I’ll follow him, see if he leads me to her and get back to you.”

Terence hung up curtly. Slinus snapped his phone shut, and turned in his chair to see a portly boy standing in the room waiting for his attention. His clothes were too small for him, as if he had grown out of them long ago. His face was dumpy and sad, and no trace of exuberance seemed to remain underneath his wispy preteen moustache and goatee. He wore a black sash with just a few merit badges sewn to it, and tucked into his belt was a comedically small wand with a star on the tip.

“There’s no sign of any of them in this group,” he muttered.

“I didn’t think so.” Slinus rested his head on his fist in resignation. “Just hose them down and prep them for orientation.” He swiveled, giving his new prizes on the floor below another nonchalant inspection. He suddenly looked as if he left his keys in another pair of pants, and the pair of pants in question was locked in his car.

“Where the hell is my skelephant?”

Grant limped across the rough terrain, muttering to himself about being outmaneuvered by his female companion. He was so preoccupied, he didn’t notice the faint scuttling noise behind him. The thing doing the scuttling though, to be fair, had little trouble evading detection since it was the size of a lobster. You might even say it was a lobster, if you disregarded the fact that it had the head of a tiny horse. He scowled as he clambered among the rocks covertly. It was, again, a surprising scowl, since you didn’t tend to see horses offering much expression with their faces. On closer examination, it was mostly in the eyebrows. He had marvelously well-defined and quite agile eyebrows.

Grant removed a small compass from his pocket and confirmed his bearings. He was practically certain Beatrix had gone north, the direction of Fort Pizzahut. He’d reassured her before that it was only a name, but when he thought about it again, the allure the name presents may overpower even the most stodgy intellect with conjured visuals of pepperoni and cheese-stuffed crust. But that wasn’t really why he thought she went this way. When she was watching the sky, he’d concluded she may have seen an invisible beacon designated for her, and simply didn’t tell him about it. If this was the case, there was no telling who had set up that beacon for her. Time was of the essence, now.

North. That had to be it.

Heading east, Beatrix felt a renewed surge of wind in her sails. She looked at her ring with a sense of amusement, as well as certain gratification in her newfound abilities.

The illusion… it was so effortless. She barely even thought about it, and in an instant, a complex spell that might taken a junior sorcerer years to master became manifest. And it all arose from a single, potent will of hers—the will to deceive.

She bit her lip unconsciously, then became cross with herself for the flicker of guilt. Was it guilt? Surely she didn’t feel guilty for leaving behind Grant. Maybe it had more to do with what the spell said about herself. Was that really who she was at the root of her being? Someone so keen on deceiving others, the impulse was actually a form of raw, ethereal energy commanding the universe to change around it?

She decided resolutely to dismiss the thought, and any disquieting effects on her conscience about ditching Grant. She operated better alone, and in any case, there was something about him. For one thing, she was inclined not to trust Grant Anonama because she seldom trusted anyone with such an obviously fake name. Really, he could have done much better.

The icon in the sky was getting close now. Exhilaration at what she might find was creeping up on her, like a prankster with an inflated brown bag and a poised popping-hand, or like heart disease on the elderly (an effective prankster indeed). She’d be there in no time, certainly before nightfall assuming she wasn’t a total nincompoop.

Well after nightfall, Herbert walked on shaky legs through blackness, guided only by the pittance of light from the stars.

Cradling his aching arm, the fine velvet cape was muddy and clammy, and served to perpetually refresh his rancor towards that idiot Russet Clove. He thought, if only he’d get his hands around the neck of that miserable basket case… or rather, get one hand around it while using his other bloated arm to sort of limply flog him, like wielding a rubber chicken.

The floating icon was now directly overhead. It was by far the brightest object in his field of vision, fully self-luminous, though unfortunately for Herbert and his inglorious nighttime hiking follies, it cast no light on anything else. Whatever it was pointing to ought to have been right in front of him, but he couldn’t see a thing.

Then he saw something, just barely. As his eye adjusted, he could make out faint shapes that very much spoke a certain geometrical language. A tongue loosely in the ballpark of Buildingese. He couldn’t tell what kind of building it was, though. A castle, a bungalow, an architectural marvel like Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water? He had the sudden dreadful thought that he might be stumbling into a magical abode, perhaps a palace, rife with whimsical enchantments, wizardly oddities, and infectiously excited children practicing spells and preening their familiars. Though if it came to that, he would give it a pass if it featured one of those really long banquet tables full of magically appearing foods, the kind that tended to have an absurd overabundance of colorful wobbly puddings.

He was almost there, though each step felt like lifting an obese howler monkey clinging to his shin. Now that he thought about it, he didn’t feel tired so much as legitimately ill. He searched his memory for the last time he felt this sick, but to no avail. We, however, would not have similar luck.

Jill Valentine emptied the remainder of her ammo clip into a zombie. Unfortunately, the salvo did not halt the monster’s sluggish advance, and she was forced to flee. As she foolishly jogged in place near an obstacle, her undead assailant helped itself to a greedy bite from her soft portions.

Herbert’s thumbs danced about the Playstation controller as he looked nervously to his side. His brother was less than two feet from his face, glaring at him with worried interest. Herbert squirmed under the scrutiny. “I don’t know how you talked mom and dad into letting you stay home from school. It’s not like you’re the one who’s sick.” He coughed, causing Seymour to flinch.

“Are you sure you’re alright, Herbert? I could call a doctor, you know. Maybe I should…”

“Well, no, I’m not alright. Do I look alright? But I don’t need a doctor, for Christ’s sake. Can’t you go find something else to do?”

“I’m calling a doctor.”

“Are you out of your mind? It’s nothing. What are you so worried about? Hey, put down the phone!”

“I’m sorry, Herb, but I just can’t take the risk.” Seymour began dialing, undeterred by not actually knowing the doctor’s phone number. Herbert sprung to his feet and struggled over the phone with Seymour’s plump fists.

“Seymour, put it down. Why can’t you just be an uncaring asshole like a normal older brother?”

“Let go, Herb! Maybe he can write you a prescription or something…”

“If you don’t put the phone down, I’m going to tell mom and dad. About you know what.”

“Oh, come on, Herbert, just ‘cause you found that girl’s gymnastics DVD in my room doesn’t mean…”

“Not that. The really bad thing. You know.”

“You wouldn’t!” Herbert’s expression spoke to the contrary. Seymour was a literal person with little instinct for bluffing. “Come on, please don’t, Herbert! But seriously. This is serious. It reminds me of… it, you know? The same thing you’re talking about? That day?” He tried to stare as knowingly at Herbert as he could, hoping something, anything, would suffice in place of words.

Herbert knew it was serious. He looked serious. A kind of robot-sent-from-the-future-to-kill-someone-serious. “I’m just a little sick. It’s got nothing to do with that.”

“How do you know? That’s how it started, with really sick-looking people! And then with the coughing and the moaning and the dying—” As Seymour became more hysterical, his inner Jerry Lewis tended to surface.

“You mean… our brother?”

“Well… I mean…” Seymour anguished over a response.

“Was Louis sick? Is that how it happened?”

“Well… not… really…” Herbert watched his brother expectantly as he hemmed around the issue. “… but it’s all… related, you know?”

“No, I really don’t know.”

“Herbert, why can’t you just remember?” Seymour blubbered.

“Why the hell can’t you just tell me?!” Herbert grabbed him by the collar and pushed him backwards onto the coffee table, as if making an urgent motion for an amateur wrestling match. A ceramic frog fell to the carpet. Seymour’s abject face quivered like a rubber mask.

“Careful, Herbert, some of this stuff is valuable.”

“Tell me how our brother died!”

“I…”

“Yeah…?”

“I…” He pushed Herbert off of him easily with his much greater but seldom used strength. He scurried to the Playstation controller and held it unconvincingly. “Look, why don’t we forget about all this doctor fuss and play our game! I’ll be the monsters and you can be the commando. Hey, look, I just obtained some sort of plant. How many points do I get for that?”

Herbert ignored the question, and stooped over the ceramic frog on the carpet, suddenly examining it with what appeared to be profound interest. Seymour hesitated, worried there might be a small crack in the supposedly valuable amphibian. Herbert twitched, then convulsed. He puked a warm geyser on to the frog.

On the screen, numerous zombies were huddled into a similar position over Jill Valentine’s rapidly deteriorating torso as the screen faded to red.

Part 2

If Herbert had only known what was contained by these walls, he might have sported a gait more sprightly than a pallbearer’s shuffle. For these walls, these magnificent, nay, pantheonic boundaries were custodial to…

Exceptionally whimsical enchantments!

Towering gates of lucent crystalline splendor swung open. Out pranced two rows of rouge-cheeked youths in full magi-scout regalia. They fluttered on tippy-toed skips in their polished mithril hiking shoes as their phalanx bent gracefully into a spiral around Herbert. A chorus of sweet melody, presumably a patriotic hymn in praise of their beloved Fort Crossnest, filled the air and seemed to tickle it, a kind of lively persuasion which talked it, wooed it, into a dance. It, in return, swirled about the children, teasing their uniforms of titanium white. The golden kerchiefs around their necks billowed like liquid metal, and dapper, polished safari hats capped off their cheerful heads. Four lads rushed towards Herbert with the Palanquin of Valorous Merit, hoisted him upon it during a decisive pause in the musical composition, and hurried him into the gates as if he was a basin of water, and inside was their burning village.

Alas, no blaze was to be found inside, but for the warmth of good cheer and youthful camaraderie! Every whimsy the brave mind could dare to entertain found representation in these shimmering halls. Mirthful satyrs blew exultations into the mouths of their trumpets with no less gusto than what they’d use to resuscitate a drowned lover. Imps juggled opalescent orbs which, to even the most brusque imagination, looked as if they surely harbored entire universes, and which occasionally shattered on the floor in a likely well-rehearsed brand of contrived folly. Scribbling upon decaying scrolls were wrinkly creatures which looked sort of like deformed, little old men. They probably weren’t really men, but you wouldn’t dare ask what species they were just in case they actually were. Witches toiling over bubbling cauldrons recovered from their ghastly green swills glazed hams the size of award-winning pumpkins, and other such glittering comestibles.

The food. The aroma caressed Herbert’s nose, and through the same magic spell which affects hobos when in the vicinity of a pie cooling on a windowsill, Herbert found himself levitating towards its source. A stout race of servile mushroom creatures spared little haste in bringing food to the tables, using their spatulate mushroom caps as a kind of waiter’s tray.

They were long tables. There would be no disappointment in at least the one of their three dimensions. But as impressive as the tables’ proportional shenanigans indisputably were, the real showstopper was what rested on their surfaces. Herbert squeezed in-between two vigorously dining campers and began filling his huge plate. He wielded a butcher knife like it was a battleaxe towards a Volkswagen Beetle-sized ham nearby, dealing critical hits to it and knocking off several whole pineapples which had been lanced into the mammoth meat-hock with hatpins.

As much as Herbert took from the table, it was perpetually refreshed by servants with things that looked even better. Colorful teacakes stacked to a height beyond perception. More chocolate tartles than any sensible gourmand’s gullet could possibly account for in a lifetime. Meat pies so big they could be reclassified as mass graves for livestock, and piles of bloodsausage you’d need a bulldozer to realistically transport anywhere. And the wobbly puddings. Oh, how there were wobbly puddings. Wobbly puddings so copious you’d swear they’d started breeding, and so diverse in color and composition, any naturalist would stand agape at the depth of their gene pool. And wobbling, ever wobbling. A wobbling so soothing, so hypnotic, they might have used it to hypnotize an inquisitive rat long enough to engorge it, slowly dissolving its carcass with digestive enzymes, and who knows, probably did.

The crowd was riotous, bantering about magic and food and good times remembered. Herbert latched onto one bit of dialogue from the din. “Bertie, good bloke! Be a clam and pass me some of those spanking tartles, won’t you?” Bertie shifted in his spotless scout’s whites, assuming a smug position of advantage. “Oi then, Finny, wot’s innit for me, then? I wouldn’t right mind to seein’ towards somma them wob’ly puddin’s. Might force me to loosen the ol’ grip on these tartles, here!” Finny looked as if for the first time in his life a worthy adversary had found him. He beamed, “Well, why didn’t you say so, fine bean! The puddings are as good as yours, friend!” The two exchanged a couple of jocular winks and some magical gesticulations, and the desired menu items took flight and traveled to their respective recipients.

On another day Herbert might have lampooned their personable affectations. But today, surrounded by warmth and friendly spirit, he ventured a smile. A genuine one, a throwback to something pure and boyhoodsmanlike, entirely in spite of himself. And as long as he permitted himself to bask in the succour of great times being had, and the fervour of strong male bonds, he submitted to another questionable train of thought. He would have thought a wizardly dining hall such as this would be complemented, or in fact crowned, by an overseeing wizard. But alas, there was not a wizard.

There were twelve wizards.

They surrounded the hall, spaced regularly, per the hours of a clock. They maintained a solemn, profoundly wise-looking vigil, though not stone-like, as their presence was invested with an all-assuring benefaction. There was Girgund the Stately, a plump little wizard with a red bushy beard, and a twinkle in his eye which possibly served as the only light in some distant, darkened realm. There was Frigglish the Jocund, a broad-shouldered wizard whose beard curled at its tip to nearly come back to his mouth, and whose mirrored spectacles were said to reflect ignorance back at its original projector in the form of frightening serpents. There was QuianZu the Auspicious, a frail man with a wispy moustache and a serene face, one undoubtedly kissed by the divinities of Buddha himself.

And then there was Cloudspindle the Maven, a lanky figure sitting hunched, relaxed, almost stewing in his own wisdom. Herbert felt this wizard was looking at him and became locked in the crosshairs of his abstruse gaze. His eyes shined like diamonds, and the lines in his face deepened, blooming like a flower, as the wizard drew a wizened smile. His beard flowed like a gentle river of pure, silken white, as soft as the coat of an aggressively shampooed show dog. Herbert against all odds felt secure in his gaze, and felt he could swaddle himself in the man’s beard and sleep soundly in his lap. Maybe Herbert had it all wrong. Maybe he’d been harbouring unfair prejudice, and done little honour to the reality of wizards. Maybe, Herbert thought, wizards were ok after all.

Or maybe, he thought, wizards were not ok.

Herbert hated wizards.

Another embarrassing impasse has crept upon us, as it must again be admitted with the due fleet of dump trucks weighed down with industrial-grade chagrin. The author of this book has unfortunately established a track record of dishonesty. Any guarantee that no lies will stain the pages beyond this point would be a flimsy pact indeed. Comfort perhaps is taken in the almost sure prospect that not one of you for a moment bought the ludicrous hogwash appearing above this paragraph. If one did not pick up on the subtle shades of satire, or the uncharacteristic bit of good fortune befalling our hero, then surely those remaining stragglers of you were tipped off by the sudden turn to badly caricaturized Brit-speak, and the irrational placement of the letter “u” in words they simply don’t belong. And for those of you who until even this moment suspected nothing amiss, and were keen on finding out the names of the rest of the twelve wizards, being quite sure they’d play a huge role in the rest of the book, you’ll be allowed a moment to compose yourselves and pretend you knew it all along just like everyone else. (FYI, they were: Smarny the Quiescent, Dillfly the Sober, Executus the Spry, Bund the Laconic, Gastrell the Munificent, Zazzerpan the Learned, Ockite the Bonafide, and Cuttletard the Deft)

It might further mollify the reader-author relations to suggest that the preceding horseshit-laden hoax, or fantasy we’ll now call it, may very well have been an exhaustion and hunger-induced fabrication in Herbert’s mind. This is a plausible enough explanation, and one we’ll stick to as we press onward.

Herbert’s awareness returned to unforgiving reality. Visions of tables festooned with piping meats had caused him to entertain sympathetic thoughts, fond thoughts even, about kindly old wizards. Normally an unforgivable lapse in judgment, this was something he’d just have to chalk up to overexertion, and not beat himself up about too much.

The building was not a glittering palace or anything of the sort. From what he could decipher in the darkness, it was a stumpy building, featureless, like a concrete bunker. He got the impression by the way it was rooted that the bulk of inhabitable space existed underground.

The rusted metal door had a tiny, muck-coated window, and exhibited only traces of an ancient paintjob. He held little hope that it would be unlocked, but as he reached to touch the handle, he heard a “BUZZZZZ”, and then a click. The handle gave way to his inquiring grip, and the door opened.

Inside, the smell of age was dominating. It was dark, but not lightless. What there existed of illumination told him, as he’d suspected, that the primary direction to go in this building was down. The clanging metal staircase took him to a corridor, where the sickly flicker of fluorescent lights revealed peeling painted walls. Also painted on the walls were words, possibly a kind of utilitarian signage directing those who would navigate the building. They were written in an alphabet only somewhat similar to that used in English, and in a language barely similar to English at all.

Herbert gingerly placed his feet to avoid debris. The hall was strewn with litter, like broken glass, crumpled, moldy pieces of paper, and things Herbert hoped were just clumps of dirt, and not rat droppings. Was that a broken wand on the floor? It might have just been a bent TV antenna.

As he made his way down the corridor, he passed a number of doors, some ajar. A noise from behind him caused him to jump and spin around. It was a faint scuffling coming through one of the doors, and suddenly Herbert suspected the stuff on the ground might not be dirt after all.

He obliviously nicked a shard of glass with his shoe, sending it tinkling across the hall with an inescapable audibility. He tensed, and froze. “I’ll be right out! One second!” shouted a frazzled female voice from behind the door. “Gosh darn it! Just had it. Where is it?? Stupid!” hissed the self-scolding whisper. Herbert’s head floated into the doorway, allowing his unpatched eye a clear line of sight into the room.

The voice belonged to a girl who was picking up clothes and shaking them without really looking at them, then tossing them into haphazard. Her hair was wild and unkempt, mercifully drawn back into a ponytail, and resting on it tentatively was a witch’s hat. She wore quite casual clothes which might have passed for her pajamas, and her legs were stuffed into a pair of black boots, one kind of crooked, like she’d just put them on hastily a moment ago.

Herbert, having fully digested the innocuous laundry room scene, pushed the door open a little wider. “Hey. I’m Herbert. Who are you?”

“Shh, shh, shhhhhh-zshhh-zshh-zshh…” The sounds became phonetically similar to the first sound in Zsa Zsa Gabor’s name. “Zshh, zshh, zshhhzshhzshhhhhhhzzzshhh—Herbert, I’ll be right with you, ‘kay?” She slammed the door.

Herbert located a piece of the floor free of rat turds and plunked down there, leaning against the wall, welcoming the chance to rest his battered, exhausted body. “Take your time.”

As if in defiance of his remark, the door that instant swung open again with violent metal yawn. Smoke poured out of the room as if a fire extinguisher had exploded in there. The girl pranced out with her arms raised and a bright smile on her face. It was the smile, it would prove, of a showman.

“Welcome! Welcome all, adventuring sprits! Welcome to the great Fort Crossnest, refuge for the Champions of Charms and the Sorcerialous… —shh! No! Ok…— Sorcerially Serious! Those serious about sorcery! You know what I mean!”

She was wearing something new, perhaps the target of her mad garment scramble. It was a sash slung around her chest, covered in badges. Herbert wasn’t any kind of summer camp aficionado, but to him, a lot of those badges looked really homemade. Some of them were small squares of paper with pen scrawlings on them, while another, quite clearly, was the wrapper to a piece of Starburst candy sewn onto the cloth.

“You’re all just in time for orientation. I’ll be your guide. I’m Camp Counselor Carmen Pearlskipper, but just call me Carmen ‘cause we’re on a first name basis around here. We’re all friends around here, okay? If one thing is paramount here, it is friendship. I must warn all of you that nothing outside the boundaries of excellent cheer and brotherhood will be tolerated. Stiff penalties of time-outs will be issued at the failure to comply! Is this understood?”

Herbert looked around, paying weary lip service to the implication that anyone besides him was being spoken to.

“Alright! Can I get a high-five?” Carmen held up her hand, and Herbert reciprocated with one of the weakest high-fives he’d ever given. And he was not exactly legendary for his gusto in that department to begin with.

“Then let’s go! Let’s get on with the tour! If you’ll just follow…”

“OWWW!” Herbert recoiled, but Carmen’s grip on his wounded arm was steadfast. “That arm is broken. Can you please let go? I’m being very friendly about it, see?”

She gasped, pulling her hand away like his arm was a hot stove. “I’m so sorry! —shh! Idiot! Stupid!— Sorry. It doesn’t really look like a sling.”

“Never mind. Can we just do this thing? The orientation, or whatever?”

“Is that a… is that a muddy cape?”

Somewhere in a desert, it was dark but for the light offered by a great display of stars, whose constellations would be foreign to any astronomer with a degree in the subject. With the dunes reflecting the cool luminance of the stars, Grant could see reasonably well.

Though seemingly there was no one around for miles, at times he thought he could hear a kind of scuttling from behind him, and occasionally, a very small whinny. He was strongly beginning to suspect Beatrix had not actually headed north, as he found it hard to imagine she could have outpaced him for so long.

He held the Russian doll in his palm, turning it over and over with his fingers. Should he just break down and use it? He had to find her soon. But if he did use it, he’d risk losing half of the doll in the swap. He began to wish he’d thought this whole thing out a little better.

As he put the doll away, something caught his eye up ahead. It was an indistinct shadow, trudging in one direction, slowing to a stop. Then it reversed directions, and slowed to a stop before reversing yet again Grant concluded this was because it was moving in circles. It was a clumsy form, kind of like a stumbling baby bird. But unlike a baby bird, as Grant could tell as he got closer, it was huge. The size of an elephant. Even bigger, in fact.

“Behold, enchantments galore!” Carmen blustered, as she brought Herbert through another anonymous metal door somewhere in the bowels of the bunker.

“So what is this? A kind of rec. room?” Herbert puffed, still winded from their madcap procession through the twisting corridors.

“You’ll find all sorts of scintillating recreations here, yes. And each one a point of spellbinding wonder. This over here, for instance! A humble black box, yes? But no! Pictures, illusions, of living, moving, breathing things, talking, dancing, entertaining…”

“You mean the TV?”

“Yes! You’re familiar with Television? Alright! High-five!”

“Yeah, I’ve had a few encounters with it,” Herbert downplayed, while high-fiving. “Really, really magical stuff. Is that a computer over there?”

“Yes! You are all really sharp ones today, aren’t you? High-five!”

To Herbert, everything in this room looked so old, so coated in decades worth of congealed film, it was astonishing that any of it worked. But there was the computer, obediently playing its Windows screensaver on a faded monitor.

Carmen explained, “The way I understand it—mind you, I’m no ace magicker myself—is tiny druids of silicon use little pails to draw from wells of ether, and make their great pilgrimage at the speeds of light across…”

“And that’s a phone? Does it work?”

“Yes! It is a phone!” Herbert carefully observed she only answered his rhetorical question, and not the other one. “It takes the essence of your breath into small saddlebags and is carried off by ponies of wind through…”

“What’s that weird thing it’s hooked up to?”

“And this over here,” Carmen carried on, ignoring his question, “This is incredible. Great warriors at your command, fighting for your cause. Each shrunken and made one with great iron staves of agility. They spar and vie for one and only one orb of conquest and take no pleasure in anything but sweet victo—”

Herbert cut short her depiction of a dilapidated foosball table. “Carmen, sorry, that’s really great. Actually, all this is really nice. Maybe we could come back to this later. I’m just wondering if you have anything to eat around here?”

Carmen was silent, though her mouth was still moving, perhaps from momentum. Her silence segued into looking suddenly aghast. “Idiot! Dumb! Dumb, dumb, fool. Foolishhh!— Of course, how rude of me. You all must be half-starved, no doubt from your heroic and spellbinding journeys. What’s say we cut to the chase and hit up the mess hall, huh?”

“High-five?”

“High-five!” she agreed.

With that, another mad dash was on through a convoluted sequence of corridors. Herbert could swear she was sometimes doubling back in directions they’d already gone. “You won’t even believe your eyes when you see it! The whimsies of our magic kitchen, they will challenge your imagination!”

“Right.” Herbert felt that if the whimsies where anywhere nearly as challenging as the ones he’d just seen, he probably wasn’t exactly in grave danger of having a wonder-induced stroke.

They were welcomed into the kitchen by a thunder of pans, tins and other garbage being kicked across the floor by their motoring legs. Carmen threw Herbert’s arm out of her clutches and looked as if she hardly knew where to begin embellishing shamelessly upon this scummy, perfunctory-looking hovel of a kitchen.

“Oh! Oh! Now this… You see, this chamber, this… vault, it contains very agitated demons.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And you see, these, these cryptodigits, you press and listen to their song.”

“Yeah?”

“The song rattles the demons’ cage and they become very upset and produce heat…”

“You’re talking about the microwave, here?”

“Yes! High…”

“High-five, high-five, I know. That’s really cool. So what is there to put in the devil-box then?”

“In here, in the cavern of…”

“The refrigerator.”

“… winter, you’ll find anything your heart desires, and as much as you could ever want. So long as portion yourself judiciously. It is all strictly rationed, you see.”

“I do see,” Herbert capitulated, as he examined the uninspired mound of plain-looking frozen goods. “Are those frozen burritos?”

“Yes!”

“So what you meant was, anything my heart desires, so long as my heart desires a frozen burrito heated in a microwave?”

“Yes!! High-five!”

“Sure. How ‘bout you high-five me one of those frozen burritos over here?” Herbert grasped the sad, icy log. He smacked it on the counter, knocking off half its volume in frost, and tossed it into the microwave like a brick. The ancient machine lurched to life with a plaintive hum.

“Anyway, in the next leg of the orientation, you will all be pleased to know…”

“Whoa, whoa…” Herbert called off Carmen’s voracious dogs. He didn’t lose eye-contact with his burrito through the barely transparent glass. “Carmen, why don’t we take a breather from the orientation? Anyway, what’s with this ‘you all’ stuff? You know it’s just me here, right?”

Her eyes darted back and forth, which might have meant she feared the jig was up on some sort of prank she was perpetrating. Or maybe it was just one more symptom of a lurking mental disorder. “Dummy! You dunce! We’ve done it now!...”

“And that. Why are you doing that? Who are you talking to?”

Now that Herbert thought about it, maybe there were others here. Some unknown entities, hidden through some insidious affiliation with magic (which would be the first such affiliation of anything, appliance or otherwise, found so far in this dilapidated compound). Maybe they haunted this poor girl, and told her to do things. Then again, maybe she was just mildly schizophrenic.

“Oh, come on, Herbert. I know I’m only talking to you. You’re so crazy! High-five!”

“Do you?” he said with reservation.

“Yeah! All that ‘you all’ stuff, that’s just standard to the orientation. You know, usually more kids show up than just one.”

“Really?”

“Oh, yes! Naturally. But the truth is, you are not the only one here. Oh, no.”

Herbert tapped the glass of the microwave, rousting it from a momentary nap. “Is that so?” It seemed likely to him that her brand of eccentricity was the result of years of solitude. He couldn’t imagine anyone else living in this deteriorating, lonely bunker. “Where are they, then?”

She looked nonplussed, further evidence to Herbert that she was probably full of it. He continued, “I will bet you anything that there is not a single living thing in this bunker, Fort Crossdress or whatever it was, aside from you, me, and the legion of very intestinally-active rats.” The microwave beeped and ground to a halt. The subsiding hum gave way to the fiercely sizzling noise from the payload inside. Herbert knew enough about cooking with microwaves not to touch it unless he was an avid collector of third degree burns. “And this thing isn’t magic, you know. It’s just a crappy microwave. You know that, right? None of this stuff is.”

“What am I, stupid, Herbert? —Yes!— I know that. I’d have to be really silly —Yes! Shh!— to think all that. The orientation has always had to be, um, spiced up a little, since this place is a bit depressing, and truth be told, isn’t all that magical. We don’t want to disappoint people.”

“I’m afraid talking about a foosball table like it was the damned Lost Ark of the Covenant could only serve to do exactly that.”

“Maybe you’re right. I don’t know. But some kids really seem to like it!”

“You mean the ‘others’ who are here? Still kind of wondering where they are.”

“No, not ‘they’. She! A girl. She came in today. First one in a while! High-five!” Herbert was sure he knew exactly which girl she was talking about, even before he saw the girl in question suddenly peering in through the doorway. Beatrix gave a polite knock on the doorframe, then waved.

“Junior Camper Beatrix, this is our newest camper, Junior Camper Herbert.”

“Yeah, we’ve met. I think he’ll make for a fine Junior Camper in this outfit.” She said with a satirical smile.

“Okay, how about we not go crazy with all the Junior Camper stuff,” Herbert muttered.

“Idiot!”

“Beatrix, I don’t know if you’ve had the chance, but Counselor Carmen gives one hell of a spiel about this place. If you have a spare moment, I’d highly recommend it,” he said while blowing on his burrito, which he somehow managed to get onto a paper plate, a feat managed through a delicate procedure involving a number of odd utensils, including a wire whisk.

“Oh, I’ve had the spiel. It was something, alright. Quite illuminating.”

“Really??” Carmen was delighted to hear the rave reviews.

“Well, this is all fun and everything, standing around in this dirty kitchen, but I think I’m going to go eat this burrito before it gets cold. Or less than thermonuclear-hot, I guess. Carmen, bang-up job with the orientation, but you can get back to bed. You look exhausted.”

“Whew.” Carmen took off her hat and appeared to relax. She clomped away, ostensibly to go back to bed. “Shh! Dumbass!”

The injured skelephant issued a weak, pleading trumpet. A child’s voice came from its ribcage. “Hey, Mister! Can you please help us?”

“I have a marble in my pocket. You can have it if you just please help us!”

Grant came to a stop in front of the limping beast-slash-child prison. One of its legs was shattered, while another on the same side was wounded. This caused it to drag itself in circles, and from the look of the circular ditch in the sand, it had been doing so for some time.

“You can keep your marble, kid. I’ll get you out of there. How’d you get in that thing anyway?”

“He swalloweded us through his trunk! Like this! Sluuurrrrrp!” Simon mimicked cheerfully. For what these children had likely been through, they maintained positive demeanors, Grant thought. Maybe they were just accustomed to perpetual misfortune of one kind or another.

Grant crawled into the ditch and up onto the other side, standing on the central circular plateau. He walked along with the beast, eyeing it critically. He drew back his sword, and plunged it between its huge ribs. There was a final wail of trumpeted misery, then the massive green heart—which Grant found his sword piecing—stopped beating. He pulled the sword out, and in a continuous sweeping motion sliced several ribs from the cage, sending the orphans tumbling onto the sand.

“Thanks so much, mister! Here, you can have my marble anyway.” Samantha held up the humble sphere with a grubby hand. Grant shrugged, and took it.

“Alright. I’d be honored.”

“So what are we gonna do now, mister?” Simon asked.

“Well,” Grant said, suddenly gathering up the persona of the “fun babysitter”. “What do you kids think about becoming my sidekicks?” The two orphans looked at each other agape. It was as if they’d caught Santa Claus in their living room, and in pursuing him, a rip in the bottom of his sack deposited a trail of presents. “What are your names?”

“I’m Simon and this is my sister, Samantha! We’re orphans!”

“Simon,” Samantha scolded, “Ixnay on the orphanyay already, okay?”

“Sorry, sis.”

“Okay, Deputy Simon. If you and your sister don’t mind walking a little bit, I’m traveling north to a place called Pizzahut.” There was another exchange of agape looks. “It’s just a name. Don’t get too excited. Though I’m sure there will be things to eat there.”

“Will there be dandelion stew?”

“Ooh, ooh, will there be gruel cubes??”

“Let’s keep our fingers crossed.” The orphans put their finger joints to the test. “Also, listen carefully, sidekicks. We’re on a secret mission, and we’re being followed. But the guy following us doesn’t think we know he’s following us, and we should keep it that way, okay? So if you hear any scuttling behind you, like the noise a crab or lobster might make when it walks, or if you hear any small whinnies, just pretend you didn’t notice anything, okay?”

The two stood at attention and gave their most official-looking salutes. “Yes, sir! I don’t really know what a small whinny sounds like, so I’m sure it wouldn’t occur to me to notice it!”

In a sort of dormitory room, Herbert sat on a grungy bed, chewing. It was a surgical kind of chew, one adapted to the process of negotiating a food product that was scalding hot in some places, but ice cold in others.

“The burrito’s actually pretty good. You should go make yourself one.”

Beatrix made a face like a grumpy infant in the vicinity of a mall Santa. “Oh, I already tried one. It was… words fail me.”

Herbert took a swig of lukewarm orange soda, the only beverage available in the dysfunctional kitchen.

Beatrix sat across from him, on another grimy bed. The beds were made, but probably a long time ago, and had gathered little speckles of black fungus on the blankets. She cleared her throat expectantly, in as subtle a way as she could pull off.

“Oh! Right,” Herbert remembered. “I’ve got something that’s yours.” He reached into his pocket. He passed the locket to her. She looked happy to have it again, and wore it around her neck. “It slipped my mind, listening to your harrowing tale and all.”

“Oh,” Beatrix began, after a pause. “You might like to know, I did find out my ring was magic!”

Herbert choked on a particularly disagreeable clump of burrito. “Really.”

“And speaking of magic, since I know you’re so interested in the subject,” she said, camouflaging her sarcasm with a normal tone, “check this out.”

“What’s that?”

“Kind of like a Russian doll. There are smaller versions inside, and this one itself came out of a larger one.” She popped the doll open, and removed the smaller half-red, half-blue doll. “These separate vertically, and magically, I suppose. Like this.” The two-toned doll became two separate dolls, one of each color.

“Huh.”

“Then you take this one.” She handed him the red one. Herbert put the plate containing the grisly half-eaten burrito down on the bed, and took the doll. “Then I turn it. Like this. Hang on.” She twisted her blue doll, so that the top half was turned around facing the other direction.

Herbert felt the doll move in his hands, as if coming alive. It turned quickly to look at him, but its fit of animation was very brief. His ears felt pressurized, and popped. He looked up at Beatrix, who was still sitting there, but things were different. Slightly different, and he couldn’t immediately put his finger on how. He looked down, and sitting next to him were the two halves of the doll which once contained the smaller dolls. They had been sitting next to Beatrix a moment ago. Beside Beatrix was his mangled burrito. It dawned on him that the objects hadn’t moved. He and Beatrix had.

“See? The dolls swap positions, and so does anyone who’s holding them.”

Herbert was silent, feeling his torso to make sure all of it was still there. He’d never been teleported before, and he always thought he would be one of those people—assuming teleportation existed, which it apparently did—who had a phobia about it. He opened the little red doll. Another smaller half-red, half-blue doll was inside, which he felt leery about removing.

“Another thing,” she went on, “I determined it doesn’t work when one of them is open. See?” She demonstrated by again twisting her blue doll, but no magical event followed this time. “I suspect those two smaller dolls could be taken out and used in exactly the same way, if you wanted. But it would render the bigger pair inoperable, since the smaller ones have to be inside, and both pairs have to be closed for them to work. See what I mean?”

Herbert slowly nodded his head. The moment had the stink of learning something difficult, or something he didn’t particularly care to know. Not because it was necessarily uninteresting, but because, as Herbert feared on some level, all kinds of knowledge carried a type of burden.

“I don’t know how many dolls are inside the dolls. Or for that matter, how many bigger dolls there are out there. ‘Parent dolls’, I guess. But I do know,” she said, with a look of contained self-assurance, “that if you don’t want someone using the corresponding doll to teleport to you, all you have to do is keep your doll open.”

“Hmm.” Herbert eyed her, wondering if there might be some purpose in this observation. Was she hinting that she didn’t want him popping in on her unannounced via doll at the drop of a hat? “Do you think we can use it to get out of here? Like, teleport away?”

“I hadn’t thought of it, actually. If that is the case, we would at least need to find the doll’s parent.”

Herbert shrugged. “Why bother. I’m going to get us out of here soon anyway. I saw a phone in the rec. room. I’ll call my parents. Or maybe the police, I dunno…”

“It might not work. Everything around here seems in such disrepair. There isn’t even any running water. I was really hoping for a hot shower, too.”

“Can’t you fix it? With your magic ring or something?” Herbert proposed.

She looked as if it never occurred to her, in an honest, sort of sheepish way which Herbert found somewhat endearing. He was surprised to admit it, but since they’d been separated earlier that day, he found he missed her. In retrospect, she made for a quite reasonable companion for discovery within this rare circle of hell seemingly engineered for Herbert’s personal displeasure. She was good company, particularly when compared with other unpalatable travel mates he could think of. If he could just get his dad on the phone, and convince him to somehow haul his SUV through whatever planes of reality divided this realm from his own, he would consider inviting her back to his place to hit up the Gamecube.

But then Herbert recalled she had said earlier that she didn’t want to leave. He scratched his head, visibly perplexing at her.

She looked a little to his right, her eyes widening with surprise. There was a male voice from behind him. Herbert didn’t even need to turn around.

“I should have guessed it’d be the two of you. Methinks destiny’s put its vexing designs on us all, wouldn’t you say?” Russet leaned on the doorframe with crossed arms and a cocky smile.

Herbert sagged. “Oh, hell.”

It was, as it had been before, hard to believe it was the same person.

Russet stood in the room, radiant as ever. His clothes, miraculously, or maybe magically, were spotless and fresh again, wrinkle-free and quite fragrant. His black shoes shined like a freshly waxed sports car. His skin again was soft and vital, not sickly and grimy, and his features again were fair, yet commanding, not marred by haunting inner tortures.

The only way he differed from his former self one night ago, to Herbert’s displeasure, was the lack of a cape. “And it was threatening to be such a nice evening…”

Russet vaulted himself onto a small table against a wall, crossing his legs into a sitting position. He placed his chin on top of his folded hands, and proceeded to besiege them with his effluent charisma. “Wizardy Herbert. Friend. It eases my soul to know you’ve found your way safely. Followed your guiding star, have you?” Russet snorted, continuing on a train of rapid prattle. “Ha! Imagine, navigating by one’s own face in the heavens! To think my visage belonged with the constellations, as if my ego needed it! Good grief!”

Herbert rolled his eye, and had a feeling he’d be resorting to that activity again soon.

“And the same sentiments of relief are in effect regarding your safety as well, miss. Though I do regret I was unable to obtain your name in my haste the other night. Perhaps, in this most leisurely setting we find ourselves enjoying this eve, you might favor me with it?”

“You’ve got to be joking.” Herbert said under his breath, but audibly enough. Between the mania of Carmen’s orientations and the turbulence of Russet’s weird moods, he wasn’t sure he could take any more helpings from the burgeoning buffet tray of psychological disorders.

“Excuse me, Herbert, but don’t you think it’s a little rude to interrupt a lady as she’s about to speak?”

“Oh. Sorry. Where have my manners gone? I should have introduced you. Russet, this is Beatrix. Beatrix, this is Russet, a complete nut-job.”

“Beatrix, then. Charmed and deligh…”

“Wait, wait, alright…” Herbert stood up in an agitated tizzy. “What am I supposed to do, here? Pretend this is all normal? Is that the etiquette for dealing with people as crazy as you? One minute you look like something fished out of the sewer. And now, you’re all ‘finding ourselves leisurely enjoying this eve blah-blah-blah’. You really expect me not to say anything?”

“Jeez, Herbert. What’s the matter?” Beatrix asked.

“No, no, it’s ok.” Russet spoke diplomatically. “Now Herbert… and Beatrix, I suppose it’s only fair that you know too. Earlier, Herbert and I encountered each other. And in a moment of weakness, I’m afraid to say… well, I became a little cross. Completely unjustified behavior, and I apologize.”

“A little cross?” Herbert echoed.

“A bit of a spoilsport, yes.”

“A spoilsport?”

“Yes, and I feel just rotten over it. What’s say we make amends right here and put it behind us? Put the old hatchet six feet under, so to speak?”