Duck Boy (7 page)

Chapter 5

Steve stared at the padlock—seconds ago it had been a clock.

“It’s all right, Steve. It really did happen. I can assure you of that.” His
aunt waited a couple of minutes for Steve to absorb her words. Then she
continued, “I guess I always knew that clocks were locks, and locks were
clocks. I just never realized how closely related they were.” She picked up the
lock from her workbench and passed it to Steve. “Unfortunately, when you turn a
clock into a lock you never get a key with it.”

Steve held the padlock in his hand. It felt quite heavy.

“Do you want to try?”

Steve looked up at her. He tried to mumble something, but Aunt Shannon
interrupted with a laugh. “I really surprised you with that one, didn’t I? I’m
so glad. Get used to being surprised.” She stepped back from the bench. “Come
on over. I’ll tell you how to do it.”

Steve stepped up to the bench, goggles still on. “This is a fairly easy
transformation,” Aunt Shannon explained. “So the bit of power you can get
through me, as I touch my Benu stone, will let the transformation happen.” She
placed her hand lovingly on top of Richard’s remains. “Now all you need to do
is repeat the word
lock
seven times and change it
into the word
clock
. It goes quite easily. Then the
lock will transform back into a clock.” She put her hand on Steve’s shoulder.
“Now you have the power. Go ahead and try.”

“Lock. Lock. Lock. Lock,” Steve said.

“Stop,” Aunt Shannon ordered. “Don’t put such a big space between your
words. Let them run together more. They must run together.”

“Lock-lock-lock-lock-lock-lock-lock,” Steve said the words seamlessly. He
counted each repetition and then switched words without hesitation.
“Clock-clock-clock-clock-clock-clock-clock.” He stared at the lock. An
electrical shock numbed his shoulder where her hand was, and traveled down his
arm toward Aunt Shannon’s padlock. He wanted to let go of the lock, but Aunt
Shannon used her free hand to push his arm firmly against it.

The lock began to dance under his hand. Aunt Shannon released her grip and
stepped back, so he did the same. The lock seemed to flatten into a photograph
of the lock. And then, with a giant tear, the photograph split in two. Light
gushed through the tear as a small, powerful wind circled the workbench,
whipping loose bits of organ sheet music in a circle. The light from the torn
photograph brightened, making it difficult to see what was happening.

“Close your eyes, Steve,” Aunt Shannon screamed above the din. He obeyed.
Suddenly it stopped. He opened his eyes carefully. On the workbench lay the old
alarm clock.

“Ah…” was all Steve could manage in the silence that followed. A minute
passed before he mustered another word. “Wow.”

Aunt Shannon leaned over the workbench to view Steve’s face. “Hah!” she
trumpeted. “Surprise two. Steve nothing.”

“It’s amazing,” Steve whispered.

“It’s amazing, all right,” she said, matching his whisper with her voice.
“But it’s only the beginning. Something about experimenting makes me hungry,”
she announced suddenly, and declared an official coffee break. The two of them
headed to the kitchen to raid the fridge.

“Steve, you saw the power—the energy level that filled the room when the
clock transformed, didn’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s a lot of power for such a simple transformation. And I know that
that energy must be useful for something besides turning clocks into locks.
It’s like a whole other power source.” She sighed. “You’d think after all the
years I’ve been working on this, I’d be a whole lot farther along. I know
you’re impressed. But honestly, it’s the only thing I know how to do. I’ve
messed with many different word combinations, but I can’t find another. It
seems kind of like it’s a short circuit in the language, or something. These
words are so close together, and both are relatively common household objects,
that the transformation seems almost certain. I mean when you say them out
loud, it’s as if one word melts into the other one, right? That kind of
connection between words is extremely rare, and I know because I’ve been
looking for years.”

“So you don’t know any other spells?”

“They’re not spells. This isn’t magic. It’s more like a linguistic base to
matter.”

“Huh?”

“There’s some kind of connection between words and matter.”

“Oh,” Steve replied.

“And, no, I don’t.”

“Huh?”

“I don’t know any other word combinations.” She paused and looked at the
ceiling. “God knows I’ve tried. I’ve spent years of my life on this riddle.”

She peered over the fridge door at Steve with a sympathetic look. “Now, I
know you don’t want to talk about your mom, but I think what I just showed you
means you should humor me for a few minutes.” She paused and watched her
grand-nephew’s face.

“I’m listening,” Steve promised.

She smiled. “Good. Very good.” She filled the kettle with cold water and
settled into her seat. “So, alchemists have always been obsessed with
transforming one object into another, mostly transforming an inexpensive object
into an expensive one. To make money. I can’t do that, but I can transform one
thing into another. But what if this transformation wasn’t just limited to an
object? What if it were possible to transform places? You can see for yourself
that there’s a huge amount of power available. I doubt the power is limited
just to locks and clocks.

“Of course, there’s another possibility.” She got up and dropped a teabag
into a grungy looking teapot, then grimaced as though the thought hurt. She
sighed as the kettle began to boil and poured the hot water into the pot,
seemingly stalling for time. “Your mother might have fried herself by getting
in the middle of that transformation somehow.” She came to her senses suddenly
and gaped at Steve. “I’m so sorry, Steve. I shouldn’t have said it so rudely.”

Steve rubbed his temples. “It’s OK, Aunty. I’ve heard worse.”

“But I think you would have found some of her remains, like ashes or
something, you know.” She smiled briefly, and continued. “Here’s what I think happened.
Your mom knew about my work, and I think that power did something that caused
her disappearance, though I don’t know what happened, or where, or even
when
she went. Time travel is possible, too, I’d guess. I
mean, why not? Who knows what that power is and what it can do?”

“So how does the Benu stone work?”

“Good question. In the old days, alchemists thought that you added a little
bit of the stone to things and the object you added it to would transform into
something else, like lead into gold. Some people thought that the Benu stone
was really just another word for a person’s own life, so if a person underwent
some intense situations, he would be refined to the point where he was
transformed. Some thought it was a spiritual thing. These were old ideas.” Her
face brightened a little. “But my own research tells me it’s not the way. It
wasn’t so much research, actually, as an accident. I can’t really say how it is
that it even happened. All I can say is that it worked. The Benu stone is some
kind of important object in your own life, something that has a deep personal
meaning. When I touch this object, I get power.”

“How’d my mom find hers?”

“I actually don’t know what your mother’s was because we hadn’t talked for
some time. We had a bit of a spat.”

“A what?” Steve asked.

“A fight.”

Aunt Shannon looked sheepish, sipping at her empty teacup. “I showed her my
Benu stone and how it worked. I showed her what I showed you. We talked about
it, back and forth, for a few weeks, and suddenly she found hers. Then, before
we ever got together to discuss it, we got into a fight. About you, actually.”

“Oh.”

It was all Steve could think of to say, and Aunt Shannon seemed to clam up.
After a minute he drained his cold tea, left the cup on the table, and went
back to his room.

This time when he tried his wireless he found an open network named “dlink,”
and started surfing the Internet for information on alchemy. Other than
historical material, he couldn’t find much about what his aunt had just showed
him. He googled alchemy. Just more weird pictures, stories of strange, dead
people, and a fog of contradictory ideas. Eventually he gave up on finding
helpful information and played a few online games.

A sharp knock distracted him, causing the little stick-figure man on his
screen to get shot in the head and explode into a red ball of blood.

Aunt Shannon opened the door a crack and stuck her head into the room. “Time
to eat a little lunch and decorate for Christmas,” she called cheerily.

Steve winced as he thought of what might be for lunch. But in the kitchen he
found a very respectable egg-salad sandwich and a glass of milk. He sat and ate
his plate clean in what seemed like seconds.

“Guess you were hungry,” she commented.

“Yeah, I guess,” Steve grunted, still chomping. He stood to return to his
room.

“Just a minute, Sonny. The plate and glass go in the dishwasher.”

“Right.”

“And who made the sandwich?”

“Thank you for the lovely lunch, Aunt Shannon,” Steve said without
enthusiasm, resorting to the script grownups sometimes forced him to use.

“Did you like it?” Aunt Shannon asked. “It’s my special egg recipe.”

Steve nodded his whole upper body as he gulped the last of his milk.

“We’re going to get ready for Christmas now. This isn’t going to be easy—we
haven’t decorated for Christmas here for many, many years. But since you’re
staying with us, we’re going to have a bit of a party,” she said with a wink.
“I’ll meet you in the living room.” She headed down into the basement, leaving
Steve to flop onto a psycho-colored paisley couch.

She was gone for a while, but from somewhere in the clogged bowels of the
basement, Aunt Shannon produced a boxed Christmas tree layered with the dust of
decades.

“We haven’t used this tree since Richard left us,” she blurted, suddenly
near tears. “We got one of those new-fangled pretend trees, so we wouldn’t hurt
another Christmas tree.” She sniffed and buried her nose in the puffed shoulder
of her dress as she gripped the box. “It was Richard’s idea. I…I don’t think I
can open this box. Would you?”

She looked towards Steve, holding the box suddenly like a swaddled baby.
Dust caked on the front of her dress. Steve took the box from her carefully, as
though he were lifting a newborn from her arms.

He gently placed the box on the floor and unfolded the cardboard flaps,
flinging a garden of dust into the air. Within he found what looked like a box
of giant green toilet brushes.

It took quite a while to insert each branch into the centre post of the
tree. The finished product looked very much like a brush that would have been
used to clean the toilet of a three-story giant.

Merry stinking Christmas.

“That does look like it always did,” Aunt Shannon sighed sweetly, tears streaking
through the dust on her cheeks. “Oh, Richard, I miss you.”

Steve began stringing the old-fashioned Christmas lights around the tree,
and after another moment of reverie, his aunt seemed to wake up.

“Now we need some ornaments.” She disappeared again, returning with a box of
jumbled kiddie crafts. “These are things that Richard made for our tree over
the years.”

There were rock-hard, marshmallow-and-toothpick snowflakes. Yellowed paper
snowflakes that looked like they were cut by someone recently introduced to
scissors. Strings of popcorn garland, looking very, very old. Glued noodle
angels. Aunt Shannon pulled each item tenderly from the box and laid on the
cushions of the couch with great care.

Steve took a few items at random, placed them on the tree.

“Oh no, dear, not there,” Aunt Shannon exclaimed as he hung a crayon-colored
popsicle-stick star from a thick arm of the toilet-brush tree. She pulled the
decoration from his hands and set it down lower. “He could only reach about
there, then.”

Steve sighed quietly to himself, lifting another piece off the couch. It
looked a little more sophisticated than the last ornament so, he figured, it
would probably go higher on the tree. He took a wild guess and stuck the kiddie
craft on the branch about chest height.

“Yes,” she approved absently. “That’s about right.”

Pleased, he persevered. An angel made out of bent brass wire, he thought,
seemed fairly advanced as a craft, so he placed it a little over head-height on
the tree.

“Oh no, dear,” Aunt Shannon said with a chuckle. “I helped him with that
one. In fact, I did most of it myself.” Her smile soured. She pointed to where
he had hung the ornament. “He never did make it quite that high on the tree. He
was shorter than you are.”

Giving up, Steve relinquished the task of decorating the tree to his aunt,
who talked to herself as she placed each thing on the branches. He couldn’t
hear most of what she was saying as she worked, but since TV wasn’t possible,
she was the most entertaining thing around.