Billy: Messenger of Powers (6 page)

“Powers Island. Specifically, we’re in the tower at the center of the island right now, in the Accounting Room.”

Billy had been right: he didn’t understand a word of that. Accounting Room? It sounded like someplace where there should be guys in suits with calculators, not a bunch of people in waiting in line for a fortune teller booth.

A sudden “pop” sounded behind them. Billy turned and saw a man appear out of thin air. He was dressed like a bobby—a British policeman—with a tall rounded cap and swinging a short nightstick with practiced ease. The bobby nodded at Mrs. Russet. “Lumilla,” he said in a precise English accent.

Mrs. Russet nodded back. “Bellestus,” she replied as the policeman stepped into another one of the three lines.

Billy’s brain was quickly overloading again. He opened his mouth to fire another machine-gun cartridge of questions at his teacher, then decided to just wait quietly for a few minutes to see if anything remotely understandable happened. He closed his mouth and Mrs. Russet—Lumilla?—smiled at him as though approving of his decision.

They moved forward in their line, slowly but surely approaching the glass-cased mannequin before them. During the time they waited in line, Billy heard three more “pops” and turned to see three more people appear out of nowhere: a man in a three-piece suit; a lady with a stethoscope hanging around her neck and a round badge that said “ENT’s are head and shoulders above the rest”; and what looked like a tribal warrior from darkest Africa, complete with ornate headdress and a thin bone piercing his nose. Each of these three arrivals nodded at Mrs. Russet with either familiarity or respect when they noticed her in line.

At last, it was Billy’s and Mrs. Russet’s turn to approach the mannequin. Mrs. Russet went first. She didn’t have to put a quarter in the machine, just touched a button on the side of the case. The mannequin—which had a thick beard and wore a jeweled turban and a blouse made of glimmering silk—moved a rigid hand and a card dropped into a slot at the bottom of the machine. Mrs. Russet took it and touched it to her shirt, where it stuck tightly.

“Lumilla Russet—Dawnwalker” is what the card said.

Billy stood silently for a moment, unsure what to do. Mrs. Russet pushed him gently toward the machine. “Your turn,” she said.

Billy walked forward hesitatingly, fearful of what was going on and what would happen next. Nothing had hurt him so far—though the dragon had seemed quite happy to try—but he still felt as if a meteor was going to fall on his head at any moment.

Unbidden, his mind cast up an image of Blythe Forrest, her beautiful eyes looking at him, her lovely face lit by a smile that was for him alone. His toes again felt like they were turning inside out, but at the same time just thinking about Blythe made him feel more…secure. Nervous, but happy and safe.

Billy stepped forward and pressed the button on the mannequin’s case.

The mannequin’s hand moved. It wavered, as though uncertain, taking much longer than it had with Mrs. Russet. But, at last, a card dropped into the slot. Billy took it.

“Billy,” it said simply. No last name, nothing else on it.

“First time, eh?” said the woman who stood behind him in line. The lady doctor. She touched him gently on the arm. “You’ll be fine,” she said gravely, glancing at Mrs. Russet. “You’re in good hands.”

Billy knew that the words were meant to be encouraging, but for some reason they just made him worry that much more.

“Come on, we haven’t all day for this. I’m getting far too old in the real world to spend all day on the island,” said Mrs. Russet. She took the “Billy” card from Billy’s hands and pressed it against his shirt. The card hadn’t been sticky, Billy knew. But it stuck to his shirt like it had been super-glued there. Then Mrs. Russet took Billy’s hand and walked him over to what looked like a nearby bank of elevators, the old fashioned kind with windows in the doors through which each passing floor might be glimpsed.

“What are those?” Billy asked, almost afraid of what the answer might be.

“Elevators,” answered Mrs. Russet. She looked at him like he had just dropped fifty IQ points. “You know, little boxes that take people up and down in tall buildings?”

“But…I thought…,” Billy stammered. His voice drifted off as one of the elevators dinged and opened. Mrs. Russet stepped in. Billy followed her, and the doors closed.

“What floor and department, please?” said a pleasant voice from a hidden speaker somewhere.

“Three thousand seven hundred sixty-eighth floor, Glimmer Detection and Decisionary Department,” replied Mrs. Russet.

“It is my pleasure to lift you there. Would you care for a refreshing beverage or some kind of tasty treat on your trip?” asked the elevator. It began whirring, and Billy’s stomach lurched as he felt the elevator begin to rise.

“No thank you,” said Mrs. Russet.

Over three thousand floors? Billy thought. He did a bit of math in his head: at ten feet per floor, that was over thirty thousand feet, or about…
six miles
!

The elevator went up one level, and through the window in the elevator’s door Billy caught a glimpse of what looked like a forest. A forest? he thought. How could an entire forest be inside a single floor of a building?

Then he realized that if there was a forest in the first floor, that meant that ten feet per floor was probably way too little. Who knew how high up they would be when they got wherever they were going?

“Are you sure you wouldn’t like a treat?” cajoled the elevator. “I have very yummy snacks. Dell-Diddly-Delites?”

Another floor passed, and Billy glimpsed a herd of something that looked like pigs the size of dump trucks galloping by.

 “Bing-Bing Belly Boomers?” continued the elevator as it picked up speed. The floors flashed by faster and faster, and the things Billy saw grew stranger and stranger. What looked like a truck-sized armadillo on one floor, a group of men and women in white coats chasing each other while holding what appeared to be huge butterfly wings on another, house-sized beehives stretching as far as the eye could see on a third. Then the elevator was moving up too fast for the floors to be seen, and they became mere flashes of light that strobed by as the elevator sped upward.

“Scuddle Snackers?” The elevator was really hard-selling its inventory. “Fizzy Floaters? Shakka-Shakka Shakes? Blue Lightning Crumpets? Candy bar?”

“Shut up,” said Mrs. Russet. No more words came out of the speakers, but Billy felt for some reason as though the elevator were sulking.

Mrs. Russet swiveled to look at Billy. She tapped a spot on the wall of the elevator. It looked no different to Billy than any other spot on the wall, but when she did so, two softly-velveted seats emerged from the sides of the elevator. Mrs. Russet sat down on one, gesturing for Billy to do the same.

“You must have many questions,” she began.

Billy nodded. He was afraid to actually
ask
any questions, since that just ended up making him more confused. But Mrs. Russet was looking at him expectantly, and he didn’t want to irritate her, so finally he said, “What was the key?”

“This?” asked Mrs. Russet, drawing out that strange beehive key. “It is an Imbued Object.” Billy stared at her blankly. “It means it is magic.”

“Magic?” said Billy.

“No, magic,” said Mrs. Russet.

“Magic?” asked Billy again.

“
Maqic
,” she emphasized.

Billy couldn’t hear a difference between the way he was saying the word and the way Mrs. Russet was. His look must have told Mrs. Russet this, for her brow furrowed. “Can’t tell the difference between magic and magic, either,” she mumbled, as though Billy had failed some kind of test. Then she re-focused her attention on him. “You can’t hear the silent ‘q’? Try it again: magic,” she said, over-enunciating the last word as though she were trying to teach Billy a new language.

Billy, now thoroughly befuddled and maybe even downright bamboozled, shook his head. “It sounds like you’re saying, uh, ‘magic.’”

Mr. Russet shook her head. “Fine, for now we’ll just call it magic, since you haven’t been Determined yet.”

Billy still didn’t understand anything she was saying. But he felt some hope, because at least her words were starting to sound a bit more like threads of a normal conversation, rather than just a spewing of random words.

She held up the key. “This is a key that has been Imbued with magic.”

“Imbued?” asked Billy.

“Imbued means that a Power—what I suppose you would call a wizard or a witch—has put a small piece of his or her magical essence into an object to give it certain special properties. In this case, a Power named Artetha put some of her essence into the key and made it magic. The key can take its possessor from one place to another through doorways in space and time that it creates. So the possessor is me, and I wanted the key to open a doorway to Powers Island—to where we now are—and that is what it did.”

“But you wanted us to go to somewhere that we could almost be killed by a dragon first?” asked Billy slowly.

Mrs. Russet frowned. “No. Artetha makes, on the whole, very good keys. Unfortunately, she is occasionally a bit sloppy with her Imbuement process, so once in a while you might end up getting sent somewhere you didn’t wish to go. The dragon Serba’s lair, for example, or the surface of the sun.” Mrs. Russet shrugged as though to say, “What can you do?”

Billy lit up as he made a connection. “Was the frog in your room on the first day of school imboobed?”

“Im
bued
. Yes it was.”

“What did it do?”

“That’s a bit complicated,” responded Mrs. Russet.

“But the frog and the key are both magic?” asked Billy.

“Well of course,” said Mrs. Russet. “Haven’t you been listening to anything I’ve been saying?”

“And are you magic?”

“If by that you are asking am I a Power, then the answer is yes,” said Mrs. Russet.

“Then is everyone here at Powers Island also magic?” asked Billy.

“Yes,” said the teacher.

“But everyone I’ve seen, all the people in the line downstairs, they all looked…normal.”

“Good heavens, Billy, what would you expect us to look like?” asked Mrs. Russet, a glimmer of amusement in her eyes. “We wouldn’t get along so well in the rest of the world if we wore Greek togas or long robes and pointy caps that had stars all over them, now would we? Powers are all human beings. Or at least, most of them are. And those that are human all live in the world the same as you, and have jobs, and families, and everything else that makes a person a person.” She shrugged, apparently suddenly realizing that she had dropped into what Billy thought of as his teacher’s Lecture Mode. “At any rate, as an answer to your question, yes, everyone here is magic.”

“So…,” Billy gulped. “Am I magic?”

Mrs. Russet paused, seeming unsure for the very first time since Billy had known her.

At that moment, the elevator dinged. “Three thousand seven hundred sixty-eighth floor, Glimmer Detection and Decisionary Department,” it intoned. Sure enough, it sounded piqued and offended.

 “We’re here,” said Mrs. Russet, and stood to leave as the elevator door whooshed sulkily open, leaving Billy’s question unanswered.

Billy followed her into a hall, and couldn’t help but gasp. The hall seemed to go on forever. In fact, it extended so far that it actually dwindled to a pinpoint and disappeared in both directions.

More than that, though, the wall on one side was made of fire. It was bright and flickering, a living flame, but though Billy stood within mere feet of it, he could not feel any heat. He put a hand toward the wall, to see how close he could get to it before he could feel any warmth, but his hand was slapped away at the last second.

“Don’t!” shouted Mrs. Russet. “You’ll get it dirty.”

“But…it’s fire,” protested Billy.

“And very clean fire,” agreed Mrs. Russet. “Now come along.”

Billy walked behind Mrs. Russet’s quick feet as she sped down the hall. He looked to the other wall, the one not made of fire, and discovered it was a translucent blue. It looked familiar, but he couldn’t place it. Then, suddenly, a large dark shape appeared in the wall nearby. It was indistinct at first, then its outline slowly sharpened as the shape came closer. Finally, the shape was completely clear. It was an enormous blue whale, about two hundred feet long, swimming through the wall and keeping exact pace with Billy and Mrs. Russet, one great eye staring unblinkingly at them. Billy glanced at Mrs. Russet, but she seemed to be paying no attention to the boy for the moment. So he reached out a hand and gingerly touched the blue wall. His fingers came back dripping wet.

“Is that the ocean?” he asked, awed.

“Of course it is,” said Mrs. Russet. “What else would have a great blue whale in it?” She nodded curtly at the whale, which dipped its forequarters in return.

The whale then turned its huge eye to look squarely at Billy. Billy felt at a loss for a moment, unsure of what the proper protocol was when being stared at by a blue whale through a wall of water. He watched the whale for a moment as he walked, still trying to think of what he should do, if anything. Finally, he decided to follow Mrs. Russet’s lead, and slowly and respectfully he bowed his head toward the leviathan. The whale seemed to consider this for a moment, then it winked its great eye at Billy and swam off again.