A Tale of Highly Unusual Magic (6 page)

But she only thought that for a moment. Then she realized what a lowdown thing it would be to let a friend go into a graveyard full of hunching, hulking white stones all alone after dark. And so she forced one foot in front of the other.

Kai followed an elegant stone footpath, and shuddered as the wind blew behind her, making the gate creak like it thought it was a gate from some scary movie. “Doodle?” she called, as she wound her way between massive headstones. A white marble woman looked up at the sky, rooted to a pedestal that read,
M. Jonas 1835–1913
.

She tried not to think of M. Jonas under the ground, waiting to reach up and grab at her ankles. She called again.

“Over here!” Doodle cried.

Kai spotted her nearby, leaning over, looking at something at the base of a large tree. The tree was hunched and twisted, with a cluster of branches on one side that seemed to reach for the marble statue. This was clearly the Lightning Tree. Kai forgot her fear and hurried to join her. “Did you find one?”

“Look.” Doodle's voice was a whisper. She pointed at the trunk.

Kai clicked on her flashlight, but Doodle snapped, “Turn it off.” Kai did.

“I don't see anything.”

“Wait.”

So she did. Kai stared at the trunk of the tree, where Doodle pointed to a black hollow. Kai stood on tiptoe, looking down into the darkness. Slowly, something began to appear. Something long and luminous, like a misshapen pearl, glowed faint blue. “That's not a moth. Is it?”

“No, but it could be a cocoon.” Delicately, Doodle plucked it from the bark. “It's covered in resin.”

“Like a bug in amber?” Kai had seen a display of prehistoric insects at the natural history museum.

“Exactly.”

Doodle shone her flashlight on a red flower growing near the base of the tree. “Hm, I've seen this flower before. There's a bunch of them that grow in a field close by. But the factory always mows it.” She peered again at the cocoon.

Kai was just about to ask if Doodle thought it was a cocoon for a Celestial Moth, when a loud crack snapped behind them. Kai wheeled; Doodle leaped to her feet.

Something flashed—a movement between the gravestones. Kai let out a little scream.

Doodle lifted her eyebrows. “Really? You're screaming?”

Kai couldn't catch her breath. She wanted to say, “Something's there!” but she couldn't make the words come out. Not that it mattered. The thing moved again, and Doodle started chasing it.

“Don't leave me!” Kai called, running after her friend, who was pounding up the footpath.

The thing was on the other side of the iron gate, near the side of the coffin factory. At the sound of Doodle's footsteps, the thing raced off.

Oh, thank god,
Kai thought, immediately followed
by—
Why did Lavinia let me out after dark? Why?
“Stop!” Doodle shouted. “Stop, you stupid jerk!” She dashed after the thing, but it had disappeared around the corner of the building. She shook the net angrily in the general direction of the escapee.

“What was that?” Kai asked.

“Not what,” Doodle said, “who.”

Doodle looked in her net. The cocoon was still there, unharmed. She looked over at Kai. “Come on,” she said.

Kai didn't know what to make of any of this. “What was that all about?”

Doodle stormed ahead like a hurricane. She didn't stop; she didn't slow down. She only spoke one word. “Pettyfer,” she said.

The pale blue pearl in the net receded as Doodle stomped on. Kai wondered if it really was a cocoon.

And, if so, she wondered what was inside.

What was inside?
Ralph peered at the vial. It was small and flat, made of smoky purple glass. The man had told him to open it only when he was alone. There are three
magics inside, he had said. Don't let them all out at once.

Ralph hurried toward home, but he did not make it all the way. He passed American Casket and walked through a field of bright red flowers. Halfway across, he looked up at the sky, which was bleached close to white by the harsh sun. Around him, there were no sounds but the music of the grasshoppers at his feet. He stood in the shade of a slender sycamore and pressed his back against the patchy gray-and-white bark. Carefully, he unscrewed the silver cap on his vial. Like mist, fine white powder rose from the vial and a light breeze blew it against the tree. Ralph peered up at the canopy of wide, seven pointed green leaves, wondering for a moment if he was like Jack and the Beanstalk, and if the tree might rise into the bleached sky.

The grasshoppers whirred on. Nothing happened.

Perhaps I need to make a wish,
Ralph thought. “I wish,” Ralph said aloud, “that something would happen.”

Above him, the leaves whispered for a moment, and then were still.

Ralph fought the urge to dump out all of the powder in the vial.
Be patient,
Ralph told himself. Even Jack's beanstalk didn't grow right away. He screwed the cap
back onto the vial and hurried home.

The smell of cabbage overwhelmed him the moment he walked into the kitchen. As usual, his mother was at the stove, stirring. Ralph and his entire family stank of sauerkraut. All of their clothes stank of sauerkraut. That's because Ralph's mother put sauerkraut on everything. His parents were even starting to sell it at the store. It was his great-grandmother's secret recipe, and she said that it was what had helped her live to the age of 103. Sometimes Ralph wondered if he wanted to be a stinky, sauerkrauty 103-year-old, but he never said so to his mother, as it would have broken her heart.

“Where've you been?” Ralph's mother asked the moment he banged open the door.

“In town,” Ralph said. His hand automatically went to the vial in his pocket, and he closed his fingers around it.

“What've you got there?” Mrs. Flabbergast planted her fists on her wide hips.

“Nothing.” Ralph blushed as red as a boiled lobster.

“Ralph . . .”

“It's nothing, really,” Ralph said, pulling the vial out of his pocket and holding it out to his mother. “It's just . . . um . . .”

“Looks like a fancy salt shaker.”

“It is! Yes! I found it.” Ralph did not have much practice lying, and it showed.

“Hm.” Then, to Ralph's horror, Mrs. Flabbergast opened the vial and shook a bit of the white powder into the sauerkraut cabbage. “Well, I hope this does something for the sauerkraut,” she said. Then she handed the vial back to Ralph, whose jaw dangled dangerously close to the floor.

That evening, a storm blew in around dinnertime. Lightning flashed; thunder boomed. Nobody in the Flabbergast family noticed. They were too busy devouring sauerkraut, which—everyone agreed—was (for once) scrumptious.

Almost magically so.

T
HE MORNING SUN ROSE
feebly through the smoky Lahore sky. Leila was still jet lagged, and was only now—too late—beginning to feel tired after a sleepless night, but she didn't go back to bed. She had not dared to step out into the hallway until the sun rose. Elizabeth and Jennifer Dear often discovered mysteries when roaming around in strange, dark houses, but Leila felt she had enough mysteries already. For example: what was the deal with this freaky book? That was pretty much number one. That and, who was making up new parts to this story? What did sauerkraut have to do with anything? Was someone just messing with her?

Leila padded into the library and pushed
The Exquisite Corpse
back into the lone empty space on the shelf.
Her body loosened the moment she turned her back and walked out of the library. Now she could get a little nap before breakfast.

Back in her room, Leila slipped between the soft white sheets and closed her eyes. She did not bother closing the blinds. Leila liked sleeping with the sun on her face. It made her feel like a cat. Thinking of Steve's gray tail, she curled her knees toward her chest. Some pinchy pointy thing dug into her thigh.

“Ow!” Leila felt for the object and pulled out a book. Then she let out a slight shriek and fell out of bed.

I don't even have to tell you, do I? Fine, I will. It was
The Exquisite Corpse
.

She stood up and limped to the door, then down the hall. She peeked into the library. There was an empty space on the shelf where the book should be.

Leila knew that she was not dreaming, but she truly wished she were. She had always longed to have a strange, magical adventure. It sounded great when it happened in books! But now that she
was
having a strange adventure, she wished she could just go home. Well, maybe not home. Not yet. She just wanted to go somewhere nonmagical.
Someplace comfortable. Someplace where the books did not follow one around.

After all, she realized, this book situation wouldn't even make a good blog. People would just think she was crazypants. That her brain had gone soft in the heat.

Well! Leila certainly was not about to go back to her room, so she headed downstairs to the kitchen.

The kitchen was an interesting place. For one thing, there were two kitchens. “One for show, and one for blow,” as her mother would say. There was a beautiful kitchen with granite countertops and knives in a rack. It had a lovely white wooden table and matching chairs, and had a window that looked out onto a mango tree. Along one wall of the kitchen was a door. This door led to the second kitchen: the
real
kitchen. This was a cramped, narrow place with a concrete floor and pots and pans that looked like they had been used to bash rocks. This was where the servants cooked the meals. The show kitchen was for the family to make toast or heat up something in the microwave.

Leila sat down in a white wooden chair for a moment. Then she decided that she should drink a glass of water.
Elizabeth Dear always drank water when she needed to calm down. She crossed to the cabinets and pulled one open. Bowls. She tried the next one and let out a little yelp.

Can you guess what was inside?

“No,” she whispered, even as she pulled out
The Exquisite Corpse
. She flipped the pages. It was the same book. There was no doubt about it. It was the same. The same handwriting.

She clutched the book to her chest, thinking about how to destroy it.

There was no point in throwing it away, after all. It would just creep up on her again, like a book boomerang. What else? What else could she do?

Her eye fell on the stove. It was gas.

I'll burn it,
Leila thought. Hah!

The right burner lit with a whoosh, and she held the book over the flame, letting fire lick at the edge of a page. The paper flared and the whole book burst into flame. Leila let out a little squeal, and let go. The pages sat awkwardly on the burner, blazing. “Sorry, sorry,” Leila whispered as she watched it burn. Seized with a sudden panic that the fire might burn down the whole house, Leila grabbed
a pair of metal tongs hanging beside the stove and used them to grab the book. She tossed it into the sink.

Thick black smoke had started to fill the kitchen, smelling like the hippie gift shop that her friend Ta'Mara loved. Leila coughed and wondered if there was a fire extinguisher—

Footsteps slammed toward the kitchen, and Leila thought about running, but Samir appeared before she could take off. “Is the house on fire?” he cried.

“It's not the—ugh!” Coughing, Leila fanned the smoke away from her face. “It's not the house!” She turned on the tap, dousing the pages while Samir slapped on the fan beneath the microwave. Then he cranked open the window.

A fire alarm started to shriek. It was directly over Leila's head, and seemed to be screaming inside her skull. “Do something!”

“Chup kar!”
Samir grabbed a broom and gave the alarm a solid whack, knocking it to the floor, where it died with a squawk. He looked up at Leila. “I did not even know we had that thing.”

Gingerly, Leila pulled her hands away from her ears.
The smoke had finally died down, and Leila turned off the tap. The book lay in the sink, soggy, but otherwise undamaged.

“Oh,” Leila whispered. She picked up the book.

It hadn't burned. She opened it. The ink hadn't run under the water.

In fact, there was a new sentence:
You couldn't see the damage that the fire had caused, but it was there.

She slammed it shut.

“What's that?” Samir asked, looking at the wet book. Then he looked at Leila's face. “Are you all right? You look—”

“What's going on?” Babar Taya burst into the kitchen, followed by his wife and a very irritated-looking Rabeea. Everyone was in their pajamas, but Jamila Tai had pulled a jacket on over her sleepwear. “Is everyone all right?”

Wali pranced in shouting, “What was that?
Kya ho raha hai?
What is the smell?”

A drop of water dripped from the book onto Leila's little toe.

“Leila just burned some toast,” Samir explained. “Did you know that we had a—” He gestured to the smoke
detector. “Did you know that it works?”

“It doesn't look like it works anymore,” Rabeea said, eyeing the smashed pieces on the floor.

“Of course we have a smoke detector,” Jamila Tai put in. “I had Chirragh install it.”

“Why?” Rabeea asked. “The house is concrete.”

“Because your father and I lived in Connecticut for two years, and everyone in the United States has a fire alarm,” Jamila Tai replied. “They're positively pathological about reminding you to check the batteries—I never broke the habit. Leila, if you would like some toast, I'd be happy to make you some.”

Leila glanced at Samir. His permanently cocked eyebrow lifted slightly, and he nodded.

“Yes,” she said slowly, sinking into a chair. “Thank you so much.”

“I'm going back to bed,” Rabeea announced. Nobody tried to stop her.

Wali climbed into the chair beside hers. “Halvah poori!” As usual, everyone ignored him as they bustled around. Babar Taya began measuring coffee and Jamila Tai asked if anyone else was in the mood for roti. Then
she shouted for Chirragh, who limped in wearing his signature glare.

Silently, Samir placed a glass of orange juice in front of Leila. She looked up at him, and he smiled gently. The damp book sat in her lap, and Samir glanced down at it. He didn't mention it.

You couldn't see the damage that the fire had caused, but it was there.

The sentence was burned into Leila's mind. She tightened her grip on the book.

It had only just dawned on her to wonder what the book might want from her.

After lunch, Jamila Tai had asked Leila if she wanted to buy any trinkets—that's how she put it, “trinkets”—for friends or family while she was visiting Pakistan. Nadia had asked for purple
khusas
, size 5, and Leila wanted some bangles for Ta'Mara, so she said yes. Rabeea announced that she wanted to get some kohl for her eyes, and Wali liked any excuse to leave the house, so he asked if he could come along.

So they all piled into the car, and Asif, the driver, pulled
into traffic. “I can't find my seat belt,” Leila said, wondering if Rabeea was sitting on it. They were squashed into the backseat with Jamila Tai.

“Oh, I don't think we have them in this car,” Jamila Tai said vaguely.

Wali was in the front passenger seat, playing with the radio and bouncing happily.

Leila's parents were heavily into seat belts and life vests and bike helmets. Most of that stuff was required by law, anyway. But Leila had noticed that people in Pakistan didn't seem as . . . safety conscious . . . as Americans. She was noticing it now, as Asif's driving technique seemed to be to head straight for all oncoming cars at top speed until the last moment, and then swerve aside while honking furiously. Nobody else seemed to think that this technique needed improvement. Leila shut her eyes and focused on her breathing. It was something her mother liked to do when she was stressed out. When she inhaled, she smelled the smoke that lingered in her hair from that morning's book disaster. Leila inhaled again, hoping that the book wouldn't decide to follow her on the shopping trip. For some reason, this relaxation
technique was not working.

They pulled into a parking lot in front of what appeared to be a strip mall. But it wasn't like an American strip mall; it was crammed with stores, each of which was overflowing with goods. An old man with one hand used his stump to bang on the car window. His black eyes pleaded as he said something in Urdu, the words muffled through the glass window. Leila shrank back a moment as a memory surfaced—she was a little girl, visiting her grandmother in Lahore. A despairing woman held a black-eyed baby up to the car window, and Leila had buried her face in her grandmother's shawl and burst into tears. For years, Leila had remembered Lahore as a place where she was treated like a princess. She had forgotten what it was like to be out in the city.

Leila reached for her purse, but Rabeea put her hand on Leila's wrist. “They will all come over,” Rabeea told her. Her eyes were gentle, but her voice was firm. That was when Leila realized that people were milling around the cars—children selling flowers, old women, crippled, poor, desperate people.

“Sad.” It was the only word Leila could think of. All
other sentences had been squeezed from her—her throat was closed, her chest heaved with the weight of sadness so strong that it felt like fear.

“You can't help them all,” Rabeea said. “Besides, a lot of them work for organized crime. The bosses take the money and let the people starve.”

Leila wasn't sure if that was supposed to make her feel better, but it didn't. Instead, she felt as if she had been stabbed—unable to move with the shock. She was starting to wonder if Rabeea's heart was made of granite.

Jamila Tai stared straight ahead as Wali pointed to a vendor who stood with an enormous bouquet of gaudy balloons.

Leila looked down at her lap. Breathe in, she told herself. Breathe out.

Beyond the vendor was the market. Shop after shop—fashionable children's clothes, glittering jewels, a bank, a carpet store with vibrant rugs. Asif wove through the parking lot and jerked to a stop. Lightly, he sprang from the driver's seat and yanked open Leila's door.

“Thanks,” Leila told him.
“Shukria.”

“You are welcare.” He enunciated, smiling beneath his
black mustache. Asif was a young guy, only in his twenties, and very handsome. Leila had seen him helping out with the kitchen work once or twice. He usually had earphones plugged into his ears, and would chat on the phone while arranging fruit on a platter. She wondered what his life would be like in the United States.

“Liberty Market,” Jamila Tai announced, as if she were a stewardess. She led Leila to the bangle stall and Wali stood on tiptoe to help her choose. Leila was pretty sure that Ta'Mara's favorite color was purple, but Wali insisted that turquoise was the nicest, so that's what Leila chose. Then the jewelry seller—a pockmarked man with large ears and several missing teeth—tried to interest her in some earrings. He held them up to his own ears, as if he were a model. Leila had to mash her lips together to keep herself from giggling. For a moment, she considered getting them for Aimee, but rejected the idea just as quickly. What would be the point? “Just these,” Leila said, gesturing to the turquoise bangles.

They went to a store that sold CDs and DVDs—all pirated, and offered for a fraction of the price that they would cost in the United States.

“Pakistan Idol!”
Wali cried, pointing to a rack of CDs. “Zamad Baig!”

“He won the first season,” Rabeea explained. “Wali is his biggest fan.”