The Magician's Dream (Oona Crate Mystery: book 3) (15 page)

Oona shook her head in disgust. “Why would anyone with a decent-paying job live in such a place?”

“You can ask Mr. Hackelsmith yourself,” Samuligan said, and moved to the left. A darkened stairwell spiraled to the upper floors. The three of them ascended the rickety wooden steps, rusty nails creaking with each step.

Oona’s heart gave a heavy thump when she stepped upon the second-story landing and saw what appeared to be an enormous snake coiled upon the floor. She stepped back in surprise, nearly slipping down the stairs before realizing that what she was looking at was not a giant snake but a human body lying in the corner. The body was dressed in clothes made entirely of snakeskin.

Seeing the body was startling enough, but when the body moved, Oona leapt onto Samuligan’s back for safety. Deacon shot from her shoulder and landed on the faerie’s cowboy hat.

“Hello chap,” the man on the floor said. “Want to buy a magic fring . . . I mean ring . . . I mean . . . yeah, ringy?”

He held up his hand, wiggling his ringless fingers.

“I see no ring,” Samuligan said.

“It’s invisible, so it is. Enchanted!” the man replied.

“What does it do?” Samuligan asked, now sounding quite amused. Oona wished he would just move quickly on.

“What does it do?” the man on the floor asked indignantly. “I’ll tell you what it does. It gives you whatever you fish for . . . hiccup . . . I mean
wish
for!”

“Ridiculous,” Deacon said. “Never has such a ring existed.”

Samuligan cocked his head to one side, looking down at the man in the snakeskin suit, and spoke quite earnestly. “And what, pray tell, did
you
wish for, good sir?”

The man sat up slightly, propping himself against the wall with his left hand and holding himself steady with a green glass bottle in his right. Oona could see his eyes look about as he tried to think of a quick answer. He took a thoughtful swig from the green bottle and nodded.

“I wished for this fine alligator suit,” the man said, and then smiled as if he were quite clever.

“The suit you are wearing is clearly made of snakeskin,” Deacon said pompously. “Not alligator skin.”

The man looked down at his suit, feigning surprise. “Oswald’s fury! Look at that, so it is. This ring must be faulty. But still, I’ll sell it to you half frice. . . . I mean . . . hiccup . . . half price. Now that’s a deal.”

“We will pass,” Oona said sternly as she released her grip from Samuligan and dropped to the floor. “Shall we go, Samuligan?”

The faerie nodded, but instead of continuing up the stairs, he knelt down beside the man on the floor.

“I’ll make
you
a deal,” Samuligan said. “I’ll give you my ring for yours.”

The faerie reached into his pocket and brought out what appeared to be a solid gold ring. It gleamed brightly, despite the lack of light in the stairwell. There was something not right about the ring, Oona noticed, but she couldn’t quite tell what it was.

The man in the snakeskin suit’s eyes went wide and he sat up perfectly straight. “You got a deal!”

The man pretended to remove the invisible ring from his hand. He held it up and held out his open palm. “On the count of three we exchange.”

Samuligan nodded and held out his own hand. “One, two . . . three.”

As the golden ring fell from Samuligan’s pinched fingers into the man’s hand, it seemed to lose its solidity. Indeed, by the time it reached the man’s open palm, it had vanished completely. Contrarily, the fake ring that the man pretended to drop onto Samuligan’s palm did quite the opposite, gaining solidity as it fell, so that by the time it touched the faerie’s skin, the ring was a solid piece of silver.

“Hey, what gives?” the man protested. He made as if to stand, but then just as quickly slid back down the wall. “You tricked me!”

Samuligan smiled broadly. “Not at all. I gave you a gold illusion for a silver one. I’d say the one you have now is worth quite a bit more than the one I have now.”

The man frowned, clenching his fingers around the emptiness in his hand. He suddenly sounded more sober than he had only a minute before. “But one illusion isn’t worth more than another. They’re both just illusions.”

“Are they?” Samuligan asked philosophically. He turned to Oona, eyebrows raised.

The look sparked something in her, a realization that she had known from the instant he had pulled out the golden ring. She had
known
it was an illusion before it had even disappeared. Her eyes had still been fooled . . . but she had known something was off. It had not been real. Unlike the day before, when she had traveled through Samuligan’s faerie illusion and gotten completely lost in the belief of its fantastic reality, this time she had sensed the flaw.

Samuligan seemed to read the realization on her face. “You learn fast, Miss Crate. You will be a great Wizard.”

He turned and began moving up the steps to the third floor. Deacon returned to Oona’s shoulder, and the two of them quickly followed the faerie, leaving the man in the snakeskin suit behind with a baffled expression on his heavily lined face.

***

“Who’s there?” a voice asked from behind the door.

Oona had knocked several times upon the door of number eighteen, and was just about to give up when the voice sounded from the other side.

“Is that you, Mr. Hackelsmith?” Oona asked. “It is I, Oona Crate.”

The sound of several locks could be heard unbolting, followed by the creak of rusty hinges as the door swung inward. Elbert Hackelsmith stood in the doorway in a set of well-worn sleeping pajamas. He looked bleary-eyed, and his hair stuck out in different directions as if he had just awoken.

“Oh, hello,” he said, his expression one of mild surprise at finding a thirteen-year-old girl with a raven on her shoulder standing in his hallway. He looked around suspiciously and discovered Samuligan standing nearby looking rather ominous in his long black cloak. The faerie gave a nod of the head, and Hackelsmith shuddered. He then peered past Samuligan down the hall before bringing his gaze back to Oona.

“I thought you might have been the landlord when you first knocked,” he said. “Don’t like it when he comes around. Creepy sort of bloke. Always in the same snakeskin suit.”

Oona blinked several times in surprise. “You mean that man in the stairwell is the landlord of this building?”

Hackelsmith scratched nervously at the back of his head. “Sounds like him. He try to sell you a magic ring?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact, he did,” Oona replied.

Hackelsmith nodded. “That’s him. Don’t like him much, myself . . . but I try to stay on his best side. He is the landlord, after all. Anyway, you’re welcome to come in if you like.”

He stepped aside and Oona could see past him into the room beyond. The room was quite dark, with no direct sunlight entering through the windows because Hackelsmith had hung several layers of ragged towels over the glass. As her eyes wandered over the scene, Oona spotted what could only have been the corner of a coffin sticking out from around the edge of the short entryway.

Oona swallowed a lump in her throat and thought:
If he thinks I’m going in there, he’s mad.

And now that she looked at him, Mr. Hackelsmith did look a bit . . . not crazy, that was not the word . . . but she was fairly certain she had seen that look before. But where?

You’ve seen it before in the eyes of stray dogs
, a voice in her head said.
That’s where you’ve seen it.

And then she realized what the look was. It was hunger. It was strange, but Oona had a sudden idea of what a potpie might feel like. She squinted at Hackelsmith’s dim face, and he smiled faintly at her . . . and that is when she saw the teeth. Not exactly fangs . . . or were they? It was hard to tell, but they definitely seemed pointy—pointier than a normal person’s teeth would have been—and all at once the bone-chilling thought that Mortenstine’s monster had never been found barged into Oona’s mind like an uninvited guest.

That’s ridiculous
, Oona thought.
That was hundreds of years ago.

Still, Oona made no move to enter the apartment, even with Samuligan’s accompaniment.

“I have only come to ask one quick question,” Oona said, and was surprised to hear a slight quaver in her own voice.

Was that disappointment she saw on the night watchman’s face? She could not tell.

“Yeah, all right, what’s this all about?” he asked, and stepped forward into the hall, crossing his long muscular arms but keeping his slight smile.

Now that he had come into the light of the hallway, Oona realized that his teeth were not truly pointy at all.

Did I imagine it?
she wondered, but on second consideration she believed that she had not. His teeth, she was most certain, had changed.

Wishing simply to turn and make a run for it, Oona forced herself to stand her ground, reminding herself that Samuligan was there, and that he would not let anything happen to her.

“Is it possible that you misheard what the male thief said to the female thief at the museum?” She spoke so quickly that it took Hackelsmith a moment to comprehend what she had said.

“Misheard? What do you mean?” he asked.

“I mean, is it possible that the male thief might have actually said, ‘
Mrs. Shusher
, he’ll hear you,’ instead of, ‘
Shush
, he’ll hear you’?”

Hackelsmith’s face pinched up, as if he had just bitten into a sour lemon. “Mrs. Shusher? You mean the librarian? I don’t think so. I mean . . . anything’s possible, my ears were ringing from getting knocked on the back of the head, it’s true . . . but I heard the voice quite clearly. Why are you asking about all of this, anyway? You’re too young to be working for the police.”

But Oona was already turning to go. She had an overwhelming urge to get as far away from the Mortenstine Building as she could manage. “Thank you, Mr. Hackelsmith. That’s all I needed to know. Sorry to disturb you.”

“Hey!” Hackelsmith said, and he reached out a hand as if to stop Oona from leaving, but a sound like that of thunder cracked in the hall, echoing off the walls and shaking the floor. Hackelsmith cried out in pain.

Oona glanced back to see what had happened, only to discover Hackelsmith cradling his closed fist. Thin tendrils of what looked like steam rose from the back of his hand.

“That hurt, it did!” Hackelsmith said, looking accusingly at the faerie servant.

Samuligan placed his hand on Oona’s shoulder and turned her in the direction of the stairs. “Let us depart, Miss Crate.”

“Yes, let’s,” Oona said as various doors along the hallway opened and heads poked out to see what was causing all of the noise.

“I’ll tell the police about this!” Hackelsmith called after them, but to Oona it sounded like an empty threat. She had a feeling he would not want the police to come snooping around his creepy apartment.

***

They descended the stairwell, stepping over the slumped landlord, and less than a minute later emerged from the building onto the front sidewalk. Oona stopped beside the carriage and peered up toward the third floor, to where she thought Hackelsmith’s apartment was located.

“You know, I believe that night watchman might be a vampire,” she said.

“Vampire?” Deacon said. He paused a moment to check his memory. “There’s no mention of it in the
Dark Street Who’s Who
. But then again, many vampires go their entire lives without their secret being discovered. They excrete a kind of chemical when they bite their victims that make them forget who it was who bit them. The victims often wake up in strange places, wondering what happened. It is, of course, extremely rare that vampires will actually kill their victims, choosing instead to feed off the same prey for as long as they can . . . like returning to a favorite restaurant.”

Oona squinched up her face in disgust. And then a thought occurred to her: “Do you think that’s what happened to the landlord? Mr. Hackelsmith did say he did not like him.”

Samuligan looked skeptical as he climbed to the top of the carriage, but then shrugged.  He did not seem much interested.

“Well, I’ll be sure to let Inspector White know my suspicions all the same,” Oona said, before adding: “Not that it will do any good.” She frowned. “And the whole thing was just a waste of time anyway. Hackelsmith’s answer was no help at all.”

“You mean that it was not what you wanted to hear,” Deacon said pompously from her shoulder.

Oona decided to ignore this and instead turned her attention to the newspaper stand up the street. The stand seemed quite busy, with pedestrians of all sorts jostling to get their hands on a copy of the paper. Having risen so early this morning, she had not had a chance to peruse the
Dark Street Tribune
to see if anything had been printed about Molly Morgana Moon’s political rally and the ensuing riot.

She approached the stand, sliding between two men in expensive business suits, only to discover that the entire front page of the newspaper was devoted to the riot. She snatched up a copy and scanned the cover image. An illustration of Molly Morgana Moon’s smiling face stared out from the top page, just below the headline:
overnight polls put molly morgana moon in lead
.