A Tale of Highly Unusual Magic (5 page)

But Leila caught herself.
No,
she thought.
Not Aimee. I'll tell Ta'Mara.
Leila was still getting used to the idea
that Aimee was her ex-friend. It was like her jet lag; sometimes her heart felt like it had been left in a different time zone.

A chair was brought for Mamoo and his hat and cane taken away. Everyone settled back down to dinner, and Leila recommenced picking at her food. She felt someone's eyes on her, and when she looked up, she discovered that Rabeea was watching her. She wasn't smiling. When Leila caught her look, Rabeea looked away.

Chirragh stumped out and put a new pile of hot chapatis on the table.

“Lovely, Chirragh Baba!” Mamoo proclaimed, rubbing his hands together. “The best chapatis in Lahore.”

Chirragh didn't acknowledge that he had heard, but Leila caught a little smile on his lips as he turned toward the kitchen. For half a moment, he was Not Glaring. Naturally, Leila made a mental note of this. Was Mamoo evil, too? She hoped so! She could bust him in
Blog Three: Villains Revealed!

Things are happening,
Leila thought as she took a red-hot bite of chicken
jalfrezi
.
Things are happening all around me, and I don't know what they are. Yet.

But she didn't mind. Every good story has a mystery, doesn't it?

A few hours later, Leila sat in the middle of a red coverlet in the guest bedroom, staring at the off-white wall. She had tried to Skype her mom, but got voice mail. Then she dialed her dad, and got voice mail. She left each of them an I-love-you message.

Leila wondered what they were doing. Working? They both worked like crazy. Her mother was a freelance writer and editor who always took on five more projects than she could handle. She was really good at her job, and she loved it, and she had a hard time saying no.

Her father did something with computers that involved a lot of blank staring at a screen and strong black tea.

They were kind people, and had even considered coming along on the trip to Lahore, until they both realized that they had major projects in critical stages that could not just be abandoned for three weeks. Leila loved her parents, even though she sometimes wished they were a little more—extraordinary. Like the parents in books who always seemed to be absentminded geniuses, or
super-spies, or evil, or dead. Because who could have an adventure with parents like hers? They were just so
normal
. . .

But she missed them, anyway.

Leila stared up at the ceiling, which was a different shade of white from the ceiling in her room at home, although she couldn't quite say how. The bedroom was strange. It was too big. It had never occurred to Leila that a big bedroom could be a nuisance, but it was. For one thing, the large room made the twin bed and three-drawer bureau seem miniature. For another, it took her twenty-three steps just to get to the closet. Twenty-three! She had counted. That was a long way to go just to hang up a shirt, but her salwar kameez was too nice to just toss on the floor. With a sigh, she hauled herself off the bed and trekked to the closet. Then she changed into her fuzzy Hello Kitty pajama bottoms and an old Waffle Shack T-shirt. She felt better already.

As she made the long journey back to the bed, she noticed the book she had carelessly tossed there earlier.
The Exquisite Corpse
. She had read through it earlier and decided that she had better return it to the library the next
day. With the exception of the first sentence, the pages flowed with beautiful, old-fashioned handwriting. This was no gruesome mystery-romance; it was clearly someone's treasure.

Leila opened the window for a moment to let out some of the stale over-conditioned air. The city smelled of smoke, but she still breathed easier with the window open. She looked out, thinking how lucky she was to have a room on the second floor. The house was large, and was surrounded by a garden that would have been quite lush if the sun weren't so harsh and if the wind didn't deposit dust on every leaf. That very morning, while she stood at that very window, Leila had spotted a green parrot perched on a tree. She had assumed it was an escaped pet, like the parakeets she sometimes saw back home. But Rabeea had explained to her that, no, these were wild, and they were everywhere.

But I'm getting off the track again!

Across the street, the dark dome of a mosque blotted out a section of sky. She felt the largeness of the room behind her, the empty space. And, just as she was about to pull the curtains, something fluttered up and over the
windowsill and floated toward her bedside lamp. The moth was lovely, silver green and blue, and it perched for a moment on the lip of the shade, perfectly still. But the light was too intoxicating; the moth fluttered again, circling and circling the light, dipping toward the bulb.

“I know it's pretty, but that's not going to end well for you,” Leila told the moth. She walked over to the lamp and shut it off. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the dim room, but when they did, Leila saw that the moth was luminous—phosphorescent in the fading light. It fluttered around the room for a while, and then turned toward the open window, where it slipped out, seeking light elsewhere.

“You're going to burn yourself up!” Leila called after the moth, but it didn't come back. The moth didn't understand English—just Urdu.

She shut the window, and then headed back to the bed. She reached for the book and flipped through the pages, not bothering to read the strange story about Ralph Flabbergast again, just looking at the handwriting. When she reached the end of the handwriting, she stopped.

Wasn't that beautiful?

A new line of elegant script flowed at the bottom of the page:
Wasn't that beautiful?

Like it was talking to her. Like it had seen the moth.

She didn't remember reading that earlier and wondered if she might have missed it. But she didn't see how. This morning she had begun reading a handwritten story about Ralph Flabbergast, fool, believer in magic. And now there was a sentence:
Wasn't that beautiful?

It gave her a strange feeling—as if those too-far-away walls around her had dropped away completely. Like her bed was a raft floating in space. It wasn't a happy, fun, Elizabeth-Dear-discovers-a-spooky-mystery feeling. It was a creepy this-is-scary-and-where-am-I? feeling.

But when she looked at the page again, the sentence had disappeared. She found that reassuring, although she really shouldn't have. When you think about it.

There was a pen on the side table. Leila picked it up.

The last line of the story was now,
He had seen magic
.

Did I see magic?
she asked herself.
No. You imagined the new writing. You're still jet lagged. It wasn't real. . . .

She stared at the page.

Don't do it,
she told herself. But the book was like
the light. She was like the moth. Suddenly, she was compelled to write in the space left by the sentence that had disappeared. Maybe she wanted to be sure that it wouldn't come back.

In the book she wrote,
But the magic Ralph loved was fake. It wasn't real.

Then she put down the pen, slammed the book shut, and put it on the side table. She turned out the light and sat, perfectly still, in the shadows.

It wasn't real.

She felt those words, pulsing in the book beside her, even with her eyes closed.

It doesn't matter, Leila told herself. I'll put the book back on the shelf in the library in the morning. Then I'll forget all about it.

Which just goes to show you that people have no idea what's going to happen to them.

But the magic Ralph loved was fake. It wasn't real.

“How did you do that?” Ralph asked the man in the hat.

“Do what?” The man smiled, each tooth like a piano
key, as his fingers danced over the walnuts.

“How did you make the pea disappear?”

“Why, magic, young lad.” The man leaned down, and placed his lips near Ralph's ear. “You do believe in magic, don't you?”

“Of course,” Ralph whispered.

Leaning back, the man narrowed his eyes and looked down his long nose. “Yes,” he said slowly, hissing like a thoughtful snake. “Yes, I believe you do. It's not everyone that does, these days.”

“Can you teach me?”

“I can do better than that.” Reaching into the pocket of his vest, the man brought out a small glass vial with a silver stopper. “I can give you a bit of magic, if you like. Three magics per bottle.”

“Wow!” Ralph reached for the vial.

“Not so fast, young man! Something this precious costs money. I can't go giving it away for free.”

The silver stopper winked in the sunlight, setting Ralph on fire with wanting. He had to have that bottle. He had to! “How much?” he asked.

The man wrapped his fingers around the bottle and
closed his eyes. “Two paper dollars . . . one half dollar . . . five quarters . . . a dime . . . three nickels . . . forty-seven pennies.”

Ralph began to feel very queer. How strange that this man would list exactly the coins that Ralph had hidden behind the loose board at the back of the bread box. All of the money he had earned from doing odd jobs and helping his father at the store for the past two years.

The man's black eyes were open now, and so was his palm. The vial shone like a faint star. Ralph had to have it.

“I'll be right back,” Ralph said.

T
HE MOMENT
K
AI PUSHED
open the door to the kitchen, she was overwhelmed by the smell of apples and cinnamon and something else—ginger?—and she saw herself as a small child, reaching for the stove, and someone bending down to tell her gently, “No, no, Kai, the cake isn't finished yet.”

“I've made my famous apple cake for dessert,” Lavinia crowed. “It was your daddy's favorite! He drug the recipe out of me when he was in high school.”

Kai did not know what to say. Her mother always whispered the words, “your father,” as if he were something too special to share with the world. Kai was used to thinking of him as a myth, or maybe a magical creature—not as someone who ate cake. Or baked it. Kai stood for
a moment, just breathing. For some reason, she could not imagine the taste. “It smells really good.”

“Well, let's eat, then!” Lavinia boomed. “The sooner we get to dinner, the sooner we get to dessert. Go wash up, sugar.”

Kai used the small downstairs bathroom, enjoying the fancy soap cut into the shape of a rose and the lace-trimmed towels. Those were the kind of things her mother always said were “too good to use,” so they sat in a closet, collecting dust, while they used the same old set of rose-patterned towels that had faded to gray with too many washings. Schuyler was a very careful woman. Very careful and reliable, which was, Kai thought, mostly good. But she was also a woman who knew that good things could be used up too soon, gone before their time, and that fact ruled both her life and Kai's.

Kai walked into the dining room. Lace doilies covered every available surface, and oil paintings of roses covered the walls. The dining table gleamed with old wood and a silver candelabra. Silver sprigs of flowers snaked up and down the faded wallpaper, and the late-afternoon light cast everything in shadow and shades of gold.

Two plates of sausage and sauerkraut were on the table, along with a small salad at each setting. Kai looked at the sauerkraut suspiciously. She did not like sauerkraut.

“Old family recipe,” Lavinia said, reading her expression. “You'll like it.”

“You promise?” Kai asked doubtfully, but she liked the old lady, so she tried a bite. She paused a moment, chewing.

“See?”

“That's really good.”

“Don't I know it. Eat some with a bite of that sausage there.”

Kai obeyed, and was rewarded with a burst of savory, sour, sweet deliciousness that crunched and melted across her tongue.

“Your mother called,” Lavinia said as Kai took another bite. “She sends her love and says she hopes you've practiced the violin.”

Kai chewed thoroughly, then swallowed. “Thanks.” Kai thought about her violin, closed in its case, shut in the dark closet. Lavinia didn't ask any more questions, didn't actually ask if she had practiced. And so Kai didn't actually lie.

“How was the Walgreens?” Lavinia asked.

Kai told her great-aunt about Doodle, and Pettyfer, and the moth.

“Oh, she's a hoot, that Doodle Martell!” Lavinia crowed. “Her father's a hoot, too. Poor man.”

“Why poor man?”

Lavina looked up at the ceiling and shook her head. “He's got a thankless job, I tell you. Working in that casket factory.”

“The Pettyfer factory?” Interesting. Doodle hadn't mentioned that her father worked there.

Lavinia scowled. “That's what folks call it, but the rightful name is American Casket.”

“Would it be all right if I go look for this Celestial Moth thing?” Kai asked.

“Why not?” Lavinia asked.

“Well, it's after—dinner.” Kai stopped herself from saying “after
dark
,” though she cast a glance toward the window behind Lavinia, where long shadows stretched across the garden.

“The moth ain't going to come out during the daytime, is it?” Lavinia asked. “My old uncle used to talk about those moths. Said they liked the Lightning Tree.”

“What's that?”

“An old sycamore what got blasted by lightning about a hundred fifty years ago. Seared off a major branch, so that it grew all lopsided for years and years. It's still there, I think.”

“Where is it?” Kai couldn't wait to hand over this idea to Doodle.

“Next to the casket factory,” Lavinia said, just before shoving a huge bite of salad into her mouth. A little piece of green spinach poked out of the corner of her mouth, which made her look like a happy lizard munching a leaf.

Next to the casket factory?
Kai's old habit of worrying about what her mother would think kicked in. Kai had never been allowed outside after dark by herself, and her mother would go ballistic if she knew that she was planning to creep around a dark coffin factory. . . . She felt that fizzy, pent-up, almost-bursting feeling she'd had earlier, when Lavinia had said she could walk to the Walgreens.

Lavinia looked over her shoulder, out the window. “Clear skies,” she said. “Sometimes, with heat like this, we get a storm. But you should have a good view of the stars tonight.”

The stars. You never could see them very well in
Baltimore, and Kai was seized with the urge to go outside right then. After all, her mother would never have to know. It would be like the violin practice—she just wouldn't mention it. And so what if the factory made caskets? They were just boxes. It was just a factory. It's not like it would be scary. Swallowing her fear along with another bite of sausage, she asked, “Where's the factory?”

Lavinia gestured over her shoulder, toward the window where the light was fading quickly. She winked with her small eye, while the larger one bulged wider. “Right at the other edge of the graveyard, sugar,” she said.

After dinner and apple cake (Kai actually ate half the cake—it was that good), Kai went upstairs to her room to grab a sweater when she spotted the book on her bed again. Slowly, as if she were approaching a snake, Kai crept near. She opened the book.

“No way,” she whispered.

There was more story.

Kai skimmed the page. A vial? What—what was this?

A knock on the door made Kai jump. “Eee!” she shouted. The book fell to the floor with a thump as the
handle turned and . . .

“Jeez, what's the matter, you drink too much coffee, or something?” Doodle asked as she stomped into the room.

Kai crossed over to the door and peered into the deserted hallway. The faint smell of apple cake was all that lingered there. “Who let you in?”

“Lavinia, of course.” Doodle looked around. The glow from the setting sun had turned the white walls and coverlet rosy. “I really love this room,” she said. “It gets the best light.” For a moment, Kai had forgotten that Doodle knew her great-aunt. And, apparently, her house. “What's this?” And before Kai could stop her, Doodle had swooped down and picked up
The Exquisite Corpse
.

Kai snatched it away.

“Whoa!” Doodle said. “What is it, your diary or something?”

“No, it's . . .” But Kai didn't know how to finish the sentence.
It's a freaky magic book
? “Yeah, it's kind of my diary.”

Doodle just shrugged. “Cool. So, you want to go look for a moth?” she asked. She held up an orange-handled, battered butterfly net.

“Sure.” The two girls headed downstairs and into the kitchen to say good-bye to Kai's great-aunt. Lavinia sat at a well-worn farm table, scribbling madly on a yellow legal pad. She looked up and nodded at Doodle's net. “You girls fixing to go get yourselves a moth? You ain't hoping to catch it with that, are you?”

Now, it was true that this net had been purchased at Target for a dollar. And it was true that it did, perhaps, have a hole in it. “Don't you think it's big enough?” Doodle asked.

“Too large, if you ask me.” Lavinia chewed her lip. She hauled herself up from the table and stomped across the room to yank open a closet door. Out spilled a mountain of things: hockey gear, three umbrellas, a beach ball (inflated), a goblet made of golden plastic, a stuffed bear, a pith helmet, several pairs of shoes, and a lampshade rolled around her feet. She thrust her arm into the mass of stuff, and after a moment of banging and rattling, she pulled out a long ivory handle, at the end of which was a silver net that glittered in the low lamplight. “There's what you'll need!”

“We couldn't possibly take that,” Kai said. The
beautiful net looked as if it belonged in a museum.

“Why not?” Lavinia demanded. “You're only borrowing it. This belonged to
my
great-aunt!”

“We'll bring it right back,” Doodle promised.

“All right, girls, happy hunting!” Lavinia boomed. “Don't let me keep you!” Kai and Doodle swirled in Lavinia's eddy as she circled them, herding them toward the back door. Before she knew what was happening, Kai found herself standing on the vine-covered porch.

“Good night!” Lavinia shut the door.

The girls blinked at the closed door for a moment.

Kai turned to Doodle, who was now staring at the beautiful net. “Was that a little weird?” Kai asked.

“Poets are like that, sometimes,” Doodle told her. “Now, let's go catch a moth.”

The night was a revelation for Kai. It would be an exaggeration to say that she had never been outside at night, but it would not be a
huge
exaggeration. She had certainly never been outside at night without an adult. She had never been allowed to roam about the neighborhood once darkness fell, and now it was as if she were full of helium, like she
might float away at any moment, right up to the stars. Her fingers brushed the trunk of a tree as she walked past, feeling the rough, ridged bumps and the smooth moss.

“What are you doing?” Doodle asked.

“Just . . . just feeling the bark.” It had looked different in the dark. Although everything looked different in the dim light, Kai was surprised at how much she was able to see, and she found herself noticing things she had not paid attention to before. She and Doodle each had a flashlight, but the beams only illuminated a small patch of ground before their feet. It made the darkness around them seem blacker, somehow. Kai had never before realized that there are a thousand shades of shadow between gray and black.

The moon was not full, but it hung low, fat and yellow, looking close enough to step onto. It seemed like a different moon entirely from the sick, pale thumbnail that she often glimpsed through her bedroom window back home. “The moon is huge here,” Kai said.

“It'll get smaller as the night goes on.” A twig snapped beneath Doodle's foot. “When it's higher in the sky.”

“Because it's getting farther away?”

“No—it's called the moon illusion. When it's low on the horizon, you see it next to trees and telephone poles, and stuff, so it looks bigger. When it's up in the sky, there's no—” Doodle's feet kept moving, but her words stopped.

“Comparison?”

“Yeah. When it's by itself, you can't tell how huge it really is.”

Now that the sun had set, everything seemed to breathe again. Around Kai, insects chirped. She tried to follow the tune. It reminded her of something—the opening bars of a Haydn sonata, maybe? The digits of her left hand tapped against her thigh, remembering the fingering of the opening bars. She didn't even notice herself doing it, but I did, and that meant she was concentrating on the strangeness around her.

A white cat darted across a yard. A small light flickered. Then another. “Fireflies!”

“We could catch some, if you want,” Doodle said.

“No, that's okay.” Kai hadn't meant to sound so excited, but the flashes had taken her by surprise. She just had never seen lightning bugs in real life before, and it made her both happy and a little sad as she wondered how
long it had been since her mother had seen one. “How are we going to find these moth things?”

“They're bioluminescent. Like the fireflies, only not as bright.” Doodle took a sharp turn, and Kai nearly danced after her, swinging her great-aunt's silver net. Over on the other side of the iron fence, gravestones hulked, casting long, eerie shadows. “Here we are,” Doodle said.

Well, now that they were
here
, Kai did not like the look of the place very much. But she didn't want to say that to Doodle. “What's that?” she asked, pointing to the building hulking on the far side of the fence.

“American Casket, of course. Home of the famous Eternal Casket. Guaranteed to stay in perfect shape for two hundred years.”

“Wow,” Kai said. “How would anyone know?”

“Exactly,” Doodle replied.

“So—uh, what now?”

“We go inside.” Doodle had already slipped through the gate, which—though chained—gaped wide enough to let a middle schooler through.

Now, as I've already mentioned, Kai was a planner. But in all of Kai's years of planning, she had never before
come up with a strategy for what to do if a friend headed into a creepy-looking graveyard, expecting her to follow. Kai was not someone who was very accustomed to being brave. In fact, the bravest thing Kai'd ever had to do was perform Mozart's Concerto #4 in D Major for Susan Laviere, which was terrifying, but in a completely different way. So you will please excuse her for thinking that it might be wise to just leave Doodle in the graveyard and head on home, preferably at top speed.