The Evil Wizard Smallbone (4 page)

Dinah thought about this. “Maybe your grammy was making them up.”

“No,” said her mom, “she couldn’t. Grammy couldn’t make up a story to save her life. If she said Smallbone turned folks into frogs, then that’s what he did.”

“Is that why he doesn’t have to pay for anything, even the special orders?”

“Well, he keeps Smallbone Cove safe, too.” Lily took Dinah’s shoulders and gave them a squeeze. “Listen, honey. You know I told you how people aren’t comfortable talking about certain things? Smallbone’s one of those things. I’m glad we had this talk, but you better not try and have it with anybody else.”

Dinah nodded. She didn’t really understand why certain subjects made adults uncomfortable, but she did understand that nobody would discuss them with her. It was a disappointment that Smallbone fell into that category. She was curious about how anybody could live three hundred years and not just wither up and blow away.

Dinah was curious about many things. When she was six, she’d decided she was going to be a scientist and learn how and why things worked. By seven, she’d discovered that books will tell you things that adults will not, and she started to spend all her spare time in the library. When she was eleven, the Smallbone Cove librarian gave her an after-school job as her assistant.

The librarian’s name was Miss Rachel Smallbone, and in Dinah’s opinion, she was the most interesting person in Smallbone Cove. She wore thick glasses that magnified her eyes into huge pools of darkness. Her lips were thin, her nose small and flat, and she wore her mottled gray-and-white hair tucked into a bun at the nape of her neck. She spent her days by the library’s front window in a wheeled chair with a desk fastened across the arms, writing a book on the history of Smallbone Cove and keeping an eye on things.

As Miss Rachel’s assistant, Dinah helped her go through the Smallbone Cove archives, which consisted of old books and papers that had accumulated over the years. Since she couldn’t help reading what she was sorting and discussing it with Miss Rachel, the job went very slowly. But Miss Rachel didn’t seem to mind and always answered Dinah’s questions, however awkward — including the one about what had happened to her legs.

“Oh, Smallbone did that.”

She sounded so cheerful about it that Dinah was surprised and just a little suspicious. “Mom says she never heard of him doing anything really evil,” she said.

“That’s because it happened before she was born, dear. And it wasn’t long after that the wolf wizard and his were-coyotes started prowling the Town Limits again, so it didn’t get talked about much.”

Miss Rachel fell silent, but Dinah knew there had to be more to the story than that. “So,” she said carefully, “he just walked into town and blasted you? That’s pretty evil.”

Miss Rachel laughed. She had a deep, hoarse laugh like a bark that only came out when she was really amused. “As if he’d take the trouble! No. It was all because Silas’s grandfather John — he was little Johnny Smallbone then — said I wouldn’t dare steal a pumpkin out of the evil wizard’s pumpkin patch. We were fourteen, you see, and that’s what passes for courting at that age. Anyway, I took the dare and Smallbone caught me. He threatened to turn me into all kinds of horrible things, but in the end, he just withered my legs.” She shook her head. “It was a long way home, dragging myself and the pumpkin through the woods in the dark, but I made it. Johnny felt terrible.”

“You brought the pumpkin?” Dinah exclaimed.

“Smallbone said he thought I’d earned it.”

Recently, Smallbone Cove had become a slightly less perfect place to live. All summer, the tourists had complained of being kept awake by mosquitoes and howling coyotes. By Labor Day, they’d all gone home and nobody came back for autumn leaf-peeping. In November, the winter storms had hit heavy and hard, making deliveries difficult. The Christmas food order turned up so late, Lily had begun to worry that it wasn’t going to arrive at all, which would have been fine if it hadn’t included Smallbone’s monthly order of meat. It showed up at last on the morning of Christmas Eve, along with a box of decorations and all the presents the Covers had ordered to give to one another.

After a busy morning unpacking and distributing orders, all that was left to do was put up the decorations. Zery Smallbone helped his wife tack a bright-red banner with
MERRY CHRISTMAS
spelled out in gold foil above the counter, climbed off the ladder, and stretched.

“I’m in the mood for a game of checkers,” he said. “Dinah, set up the board.”

Dinah unfolded the checkerboard on top of a pickle barrel, pulled up a couple of stools, and laid out the pieces. Her father sat down and pushed a red checker forward. Dinah expected he’d beat her. He usually did.

The Mercantile was quiet except for the sounds of her mom folding sweaters on the counter and a faint buzzing, like a distant hive of hornets.

Her dad pushed a red checker into the last row. “King me,” he said.

Dinah crowned his checker. The buzzing grew louder.

“Bikers,” her dad remarked. “Funny time of year for them.” He jumped his king across the board, capturing all Dinah’s checkers.

“Aw, Dad!”

The buzzing swelled to a coughing roar, then cut off. As her father reset the checkers, the Mercantile’s glass door flew open, letting in a blast of frigid air and two men in brown leather jackets.

Dinah shivered, and it wasn’t just the chill. She’d always thought of herself as brave, and she was, about things like skinned knees and worms and climbing trees and swimming out over her head. But there was something about those bikers that made her skin crawl. They were dirty and skinny and they smelled terrible — not just BO terrible, but like they’d been rolling in something old and rotting. It was all she could do not to retch.

“Afternoon,” Lily said in a bright shopkeeper’s voice. “Can I get you folks anything?”

The bigger of the two bikers went up to the counter and leaned on it. There was a picture of a howling coyote on the back of his jacket, under the words
HOWLING COYOTES
painted in spiky yellow letters, outlined in red. “A pack of smokes and some beef jerky.”

“I’m sorry.” Lily sounded anything but. “We don’t sell cigarettes and we don’t sell meat. You’ll have to go to Blue Hill, I’m afraid.”

The second biker’s eyes narrowed, mean as a junkyard dog’s. “That’s funny. I smell meat.”

“Special order,” Lily said.

He bared his teeth. “Sure it is. For us.”

“Hand it over, honey,” the first biker said, “and nobody’ll get hurt.”

Dinah’s dad jumped to his feet, sending the checkerboard flying and the checkers rolling across the floor. His face was flushed and he was snarling. Dinah had never seen him so mad.

“Back off!” he barked.

The big biker laughed. “Who’s going to make me? Sit down, fatty, or Sid here will take a bite out of you.”

The second biker growled and lunged, teeth bared. Zery Smallbone plopped back into his chair, panting. Dinah released her breath in a frightened little puff.

“Meat’s in the freezer in the storeroom,” said her mom, her voice even colder than the freezer.

The big biker turned to his companion. “You heard the lady.”

Helplessly, Dinah and her parents watched as the Howling Coyotes took every bit of Smallbone’s special order, threw it all into plastic bags, and screeched away in a cloud of black exhaust, leaving a tense silence behind them.

“
Dang
it,” Lily said shakily. “That kind of thing isn’t supposed to happen. It’s in the Contract. No mosquitoes, no snakes, no drugs, no shoplifters, no tax collectors, and no scruffy, no-good, vagabond thieves, with or without motorcycles!”

Zery got up and hugged her and Dinah. “There’s something bad wrong.”

“Will Smallbone fix it?” Dinah asked.

“It’s not that simple, honey,” her mom said. “For Smallbone to fix it, somebody has to tell him it’s broken. Which means somebody has to go to Evil Wizard Books and knock on his door and stand in that horrible dark old bookshop with the spiders and the rotting books and tell him something’s gone wrong with his magical Sentries. And that his Christmas ham is gone. If all he does is turn us into frogs, we’ll be getting off easy. No, I think I’d rather deal with the Howling Coyotes.”

Zery said, “You’ll have to tell him sooner or later, when he comes for the meat.”

“Even he’s not going to be running to town in this weather. With any luck, I’ll get it replaced before he shows up. In any case, I’d rather tell him on my turf than his.”

“It’s all his turf,” Zery reminded her.

“I know, but at least this part of it is clean.” Lily sighed. “If those bikers come around again, I’ll reconsider. In the meantime, let’s just call the meat their Christmas present and go down to Eb’s for dinner. I hear he’s making gravlax.”

N
ick was on his back, his arms and legs curled into his chest. Wet snuffly noses tickled his face, and anxious doggy whines echoed in his ears.

He opened his eyes and saw Smallbone’s rimless spectacles glittering like tiny moons against a backdrop of books.

“You feeling human yet, Foxkin?” Smallbone asked.

Nick stretched experimentally. Nothing hurt, exactly, but he felt achy, like he’d had a fever, and his mouth tasted like dust and copper. His arms and legs felt weak and wrongly jointed, and there seemed to be too few of them. Which made no sense, because he still had two of each, fingers and toes intact.

“I’m asking,” Smallbone went on in a conversational tone, “because you’ve been a spider for the best part of a week.”

Nick sat up so fast, the books swam around him. “You’re kidding.”

“I was you, Foxkin, I’d think twice before I called me a liar.”

Nick was not in the habit of thinking twice. It felt too good to say what was on his mind, even when it got him in trouble. “Because you can turn me into a spider? Maybe. If I believed you. I bet you just drugged me or something.”

Smallbone shook his head. “Stubborn, ain’t you, Foxkin? Maybe I should have called you Jackass. Keep an eye on him, boys,” he said to the dogs. “I got things to do.” And he stumped off.

Slowly, Nick got to his feet. They seemed smaller and farther away than they should. He swayed uncertainly. Mutt and Jeff steadied him with their warm, solid bodies, and he petted their sleek heads. Wagging muscular tails, they herded him gently toward the kitchen, where he got himself a glass of water. As he drank it, his eye fell on the kitchen calendar. There was a blue-penciled cross through every date up to December 26. Last he remembered, it had read December 21.

He’d missed Christmas.

Nick told himself he didn’t care. At Uncle Gabe’s, the only difference between Christmas and any other winter day was reruns of
A Charlie Brown Christmas
and
Miracle on 34th Street
on TV. Uncle Gabe might have brought home a mangy tree he cadged from his friend at the tree lot and pitched a fit because he couldn’t remember where he’d put the decorations. Last year, he’d given Nick a sweater from the church charity box. It was way too big. Jerry had laughed, Nick had kicked him, and it all ended up with Nick spending Christmas Day in the ER. That’s when he got the broken tooth.

No, Nick didn’t mind missing Christmas.

He did mind missing five days out of his life, though. He set the water glass on the draining board. Maybe he hadn’t missed them at all. Maybe the old man was just messing with his head. Without a TV or even a radio, Nick couldn’t know for sure what day it really was. But something had happened — that was for certain. Now he was thinking about it, he could remember a thread twitching under his feet and a fly buzzing and struggling against his sticky silk trap. He remembered sinking his teeth into its body, wrapping it in silk, and feasting on its liquid insides when it was ripe.

Nick sat down hard in Smallbone’s old rocker, feeling slightly sick. It was true. He had really been a spider. Magic was real, and Smallbone was just what he claimed to be: a genuine, card-carrying evil wizard.

A cold nose nudged his hand. Nick looked down. Mutt — or maybe Jeff — was gazing up at him with eyes the color of pumpkin pie, his forehead wrinkled and worried. Nick stroked the black velvet ears. He wished that Mutt — he was sure it was Mutt — really was his dog. And while he was wishing, he wished his life in Beaton was a bad dream and Smallbone was a character in a horror film and his mom was alive and life was the way it used to be before they moved in with Uncle Gabe. But that would be another kind of fairy tale than the one he seemed to be stuck in, the kind that had fairy godmothers instead of evil wizards, the happily-ever-after kind that really wasn’t true even if the scarier ones might be.

“Well, if that don’t beat the Dutch!” The old man —
the evil wizard
, Nick reminded himself — glared at him from the door. “It’s past noon!”

Nick looked at him blankly.

“I want my lunch!” Smallbone said. “You can cook, can’t you?”

Nick almost laughed. There hadn’t been a lot of cooking in Uncle Gabe’s house since Nick’s mom died, just lots of cold cuts and frozen dinners, Dinty Moore stew, and SpaghettiOs out of a can. “I can’t do anything.” He gave the old man a sly look. “Maybe you should let me go home.”