The Evil Wizard Smallbone (5 page)

“Not a chance.” Smallbone sat in the rocker and got out his pipe. “Behind that door is a larder. Pull out some potatoes, some onions and carrots, and a head of cabbage, and I’ll tell you how to make a New England boiled dinner.”

Nick wanted to tell Smallbone what he could do with his New England boiled dinner, but the spider episode was fresh in his mind, and he was hungry. Under Smallbone’s direction, he peeled and chopped, filled a big pot with water, and put it on the stove to heat. Then he opened the refrigerator to get out the corned beef and saw a large glass jar full of round white things floating in a cloudy liquid.

His stomach lurched. “What’s
that
? Eyeballs?”

“Pickled eggs,” Smallbone said. “The eyeballs’re in the freezer. I wouldn’t eat what’s in the striped bowl, either, unless you got a taste for beetles. And don’t touch that package there. That’s powdered frog.”

Nick found the corned beef and put it in the pot, then made sandwiches with the pickled eggs and mayo while Smallbone smoked and commented on his progress.

When the sandwiches were made, Smallbone shook the plug out of his pipe and stood. “I like my supper at six.” He took a sandwich and headed for the door, pausing to say, “I expect you’ll have the shop clean by then,” before he disappeared.

Nick didn’t intend to clean the shop. He was done with Evil Wizard Books, and he was done with Smallbone. Warmth and sausages didn’t make up for knowing he might get turned into a bug if he messed up. He looked at the clock — two thirty, plenty of time to put some miles between him and Evil Wizard Books before dark. He didn’t know exactly where he was, but there was bound to be a town nearby, or a gas station, or an antiques shop — somewhere with a telephone and a TV and no wizards, evil or otherwise.

There was a slightly moldy ham and half a loaf of bread in the larder. Mutt and Jeff watched with drooling interest as Nick made sandwiches and found a large checked napkin to wrap them in.

He’d miss Mutt and Jeff — Tom, too. He’d never had a pet before. His mom had brought home a kitten once, a fluffy tortoiseshell scrap of fur with big yellow eyes. Uncle Gabe had grumbled, but he’d given in. The kitten had lasted about a week, sleeping on Nick’s pillow, lapping milk, playing with pieces of string. And then it was gone. Mom said it must have run away, but Nick was pretty sure Uncle Gabe had gotten rid of it.

The dogs followed Nick into the mudroom and watched, eyebrows twitching, as he dug out boots, peacoat, woolly muffler, and mittens and put them on. It seemed wrong to leave without saying good-bye, so, feeling kind of foolish, he knelt down and rubbed their velvety ears while they whined and licked his face. Then the cats arrived, clearly wondering what the fuss was about. Tom joined the lovefest, but when Nick tried to pet Hell Cat, she hissed and swiped at him with open claws. She missed.

It was time to go.

Anxious to avoid walking all around the house, Nick tiptoed through the shop to the front door, his skin twitching with the sense that he was being watched by unseen, angry eyes. Nothing stopped him, though, not even the animals. The door was unlocked and failed to creak when he opened it.

Outside, the sky was gray as a dirty sheet. A freezing wind tossed dry snow from the drifts against the house and bit at Nick’s throat and nose. He pulled his scarf up over his mouth. On the other side of the clearing, he saw a road, not very big, but paved and plowed. Next to it was a wooden sign, capped with snow. From where he was standing, Nick could just make out that it had
EVIL WIZARD BOOKS
painted on it in big black letters, like any tourists in their right mind would stop there.

Maybe it looked better in the summer.

Nick tromped across the porch and down the snowy steps into the long shadow of the corner tower. Unlike the rest of the house, the tower was built of stone, with a round window set high in each side. He cast a measuring glance at the nearest blank eye and, feeling horribly conspicuous, headed out across the windblown snow —

And found himself going up the porch steps.

Nick gritted his teeth and tried again. This time, he got almost halfway to the road before he bounced back to where he’d started. On the next try, he barely made it down the porch steps.

Nick tried taking different routes; he walked backward; he took little tiny steps; he took leaping strides. He went out the back door and walked down the long, neatly shoveled path that led to the woodshed and the big red barn where the goats that Smallbone wanted Nick to milk must live.

That time, he ended up actually walking through the back door into the kitchen.

By now, the hard gray light had faded and the snow had started up again. Grimly, Nick fetched a hatchet out of the woodshed, tied a rope to the handle, and pitched it into the snowy ground. He checked that it had caught and pulled himself forward to meet it. And then he did it again, hauling himself toward the road bit by bit, farther than he’d ever come before, all the way to the
EVIL WIZARD BOOKS
sign. He heaved his improvised grappling hook to his shoulder for a last throw . . .

And found himself on the front porch, with the hatchet stuck quivering in the door frame.

Smallbone opened the door and turned his spectacles from the hatchet to Nick. “Running off, are you?”

Nick swallowed a shameful lump in his throat. “Nope. Just wanted some air.”

Smallbone let the lie hang between them. “Dust got to you, eh? Well, tomorrow’s another day.”

They ate the New England boiled dinner. Smallbone grumbled at the overcooked cabbage and made lavish use of the mustard, but he didn’t turn Nick into anything. In fact, he didn’t speak to Nick at all, except to direct him in feeding the animals and washing the dishes and the floor. When everything was shipshape, he picked up his lantern.

“Come along, Foxkin,” he said. “Chore time.”

The night was cold as a deep freeze and black as Smallbone’s hat. Nick crunched down the path after the lantern, shivering. It was warmer in the barn, if smelly, and even darker than it was outside. Nick stood just inside the door, listening to an excited chorus of clucks and
maa
s, as Smallbone lit another lantern and hung it on a hook.

A raucous bray made Nick jump and spin, fists raised, to see a donkey’s fuzzy gray face by his elbow, long ears twitching curiously.

“Noisy cuss, ain’t he?” Smallbone said, pseudo-sympathetically. “Name of Groucho. Groucho, this is Foxkin.”

Cautiously, Nick held out his hand and Groucho lipped it. His nose was very soft.

Nearby, a buff-colored hen perched on a straw bale like a feathery toilet-roll cover. Smallbone said her name was Daphne. He had seven hens, plus a rooster called Apollo.

Among the lies Nick had told Smallbone was the one about not knowing anything about animals. When he was in fourth grade, his mom had enrolled him in 4-H. He’d had four chickens, which he’d kept in the backyard until his mother died, when Uncle Gabe had sold them. Nick hadn’t minded leaving 4-H — he couldn’t stand listening to the other kids talking about their parents and their projects. He’d missed the chickens, though.

Unlike Nick’s chickens, who had laid their eggs in the coop he’d built for them, Smallbone’s chickens nested everywhere, even in Groucho’s manger. They were a lot feistier than Nick’s chickens, too, and pecked at his fingers when he reached under them, looking for eggs. The goats, on the other hand, crowded to the front of their pen and bleated at him in a friendly way. One put its front hooves on the rail and nosed at Nick’s shirt. Nick thought it was saying hello until he felt a tug and saw his scarf disappearing into the goat’s busy mouth.

“Harpo will eat anything,” Smallbone said. “Just give him a good shove. You got to be firm with goats or they’ll be up to shenanigans.” He scratched a slot-eyed doe between her ears. “This here’s Thalia. The other two are Aglaea and Euphrosyne.”

Nick groaned. “I can’t remember that! I can’t even say it. Why don’t you call them something normal, like — I don’t know — Betty? Or Nanny? Nanny’s a good name for a goat.”

“Because Nanny’s not her name, of course. Names are important, Foxkin. You know something’s right name, you know what it
is
. Knowing what something
is
gives you power over it.”

“You don’t care about my right name!” Nick snapped.

“Oh, I think I do, Foxkin mine. The question is, do you?”

When the goats had been fed and watered, Smallbone took Nick to the back of the barn, where a large pinkish-white lump snored gently in the straw. “This is Ollie,” Smallbone said, hanging his lantern above the stall. “Finest Yorkshire hog on the coast.” He took an apple-size blue rubber ball out of a small bucket and shook it so a bell inside jingled invitingly. Ollie heaved himself to his trotters and squinted up at Smallbone, his saucer nose twitching eagerly.

Smallbone pitched the ball into the straw, and Ollie plunged after it with excited grunts, his little corkscrew tail awhirl. He rooted until he found the ball, then nosed it around the floor, pushing up a wave of straw with his nose and head to the accompaniment of much jingling and grunting.

Nick broke out laughing and glanced at Smallbone. What with the beard and the hat and the glasses, it was almost impossible to see the evil wizard’s face, but Nick thought he might be smiling.

“Keeps him healthy,” Smallbone said cheerfully. “He’ll be good eating, come spring.” He said some words Nick didn’t understand, and the ball — streaked now with what Nick hoped was mud — sailed out from under Ollie’s nose and into the bucket with a splash.

“Take that and rinse it off. Then you can fill the water troughs, and I’ll show you how to milk a goat.”

I
t was barely light out when Smallbone banged on Nick’s door the next morning. “You want eggs for breakfast, you’ll have to gather them.”

Groaning, Nick slid into the hick clothes and staggered down the stairs.

Out in the barn, the chickens had hidden their eggs so well, Nick only found eight. He ate three for breakfast, black and crispy around the edges because he had the fire up too high, and a piece of charred toast. Smallbone disposed of two more, without comment, and went out to the barn to milk the goats. He didn’t remind Nick about the shop. He didn’t need to. The smell of mold and rotting leather was creeping down the passage into the kitchen. There was even a new spiderweb across the top of the connecting door.

Nick put the eggy plates on the floor and watched Mutt and Jeff rinse them with their long pink tongues. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that cleaning the bookshop was some kind of test. Nick hated tests. In his experience, they were designed to separate the good kids, who knew the answers, from the bad kids, who didn’t. He already knew he was a bad kid. Good kids knew how to stay out of trouble. Good kids didn’t get turned into spiders and spend almost a week spinning webs and eating flies.

Or at least that’s what tests were for in Beaton. It was anybody’s guess what an evil wizard would be testing for.

Nick gathered up the plates and put them in the sink. Then he lugged a ladder out of the mudroom, trying not to trip over Mutt and Jeff, who were bouncing around him in the mistaken belief that this was some sort of new game. He propped the ladder against the wall next to the new cobweb, then climbed up and examined it.

Spiderwebs, as Nick now had good reason to know, are designed to trap things. A network of smooth threads allows the spider to navigate his web without sticking, but most of the threads are gluey, clingy trap threads. Sticky as they looked, the threads of this web felt like smooth cotton thread, and smelled sharp, like a thunderstorm. Also, a just-built web would have a spider lurking on it somewhere. This one didn’t. In fact, it wasn’t a real web at all. And neither, he suspected, were the others. But the fake ones just might stick to a real one.

All Nick had to do was find the one he’d spun.

He peered out over the rows of grimy bookshelves marching into the darkness. For all he knew, they just extended back forever into another dimension, in which case he might as well give up. Or maybe that web in the next aisle back, the one that wasn’t all dusty and drapey and movie-like, was the one he was looking for, his web that he’d spun himself.

Nick descended the ladder and dragged it into the gloom, wishing Smallbone had left him a lantern. Back among the shelves, he heard something rustle. It was like a bad horror movie, he thought — the old house, the old man, the eyeballs in the freezer, the shadows, the mysterious noises. The prickly, uncomfortable feeling that someone was always watching him, someone with crazy eyes and possibly a knife, watching and waiting until just the right moment . . .

No. He wasn’t going there. Sure, Smallbone was nuts, but it wasn’t an ordinary, knife-in-the-dark kind of nuts. The noises were probably just the cats, hunting mice in the dark. And the airless feeling was just from breathing all that dust.

It was the right web. Once he climbed up and looked at it, he recognized it at once. A little lopsided, and the stay threads were kind of clunky, but for a spider new to the work, he thought he’d done a pretty good job. He pulled it down, wrapped it around his broom handle, and swirled it through the fake webs. They stuck to it like, well, magic. Before long, the broom handle was surrounded by a big silky cocoon of magic fake cobwebs. Nick gave it a tug and slid it off, leaving his web clinging to the broom handle. Encouraged, he swirled his way row by row right to the back of the shop — which was not so far after all, though very dark and stuffy — until all the cobwebs lay on the shop counter in fluffy gray rolls.