The Misadventures of the Magician's Dog (10 page)

Peter hesitated one last time, then stepped into the magician's house.

Peter was standing in the middle of what looked like an enormous carnival, with games and rides and booths stretching out in all directions as far as his eye could see. “Whac-a-Mole, Whac-a-Mole, Whac-a-Mole!” cried a man to Peter's left, waving a mallet in Peter's general direction but not really looking at him. “Popcorn, get your free popcorn!” shouted a woman to his right, robotically shaking a bag of popcorn so that it fell like snow to the ground. “It's the fastest drop in the universe!” declared another man, gesturing toward a ride that seemed to reach impossibly high into the sky. “It's the fastest drop in the universe!” the man repeated a moment later, in exactly the same tone.

Peter didn't know what he had expected, but certainly not this. There was no roof. There were no walls. And aside from the vendors working the booths and rides, there were no people, either. It was like nothing he had ever seen: at once tantalizing—the sounds, the smells, the promise of fun!—and disturbing, because it felt so, well,
wrong
.

From wherever he must have been hiding in the shadows, The Dog materialized at Peter's side.

“So what do you think of it?” The Dog asked, ignoring the vendors, who continued to recite their spiels without regard for whether anyone was actually listening.

“Where are we?” asked Peter.

The Dog chuckled. “The magician's house, of course.”

“It doesn't feel like a house.”

“What were you expecting?” The Dog asked. “A living room with a sofa and a TV? The magician has one of those, too, hidden around here someplace, but it certainly wouldn't make for an impressive entry.”

“Is it real?” asked Peter. “The games, I mean, and the rides and food, too? What about the people? They don't seem like illusions.”

“Oh, it's all real enough,” said The Dog. “It's easy to change one thing into another; you know that. Creating life, now, that's a lot trickier. My magician solved that problem by transforming one living thing into another. For example, all the people who work here were once plants. That guy over there,” he said, pointing with a paw to the Whac-a-Mole man, “used to be a ficus. Still is in his heart. You'll find that the people in this house don't have much going on upstairs. You can make a ficus into a man, but at his core, he still knows he's a plant. Just the way I was still me even when I was a mushroom.”

Peter looked more closely at the Whac-a-Mole man. Now that The Dog had told him, he could see the greenish tinge to the man's skin. The man even waved the mallet as if it were a branch bowed by the wind.

Peter smiled tentatively, but the ficus man didn't smile back.

“The magician didn't program this lot to do much,” The Dog continued, “just say their lines over and over again. They could have been more sophisticated, but the magician didn't often use this room. He saw a carnival one morning, thought he wanted one, and over the next few days, built this. When he was finished, he spent a few hours whacking the moles and riding the rides, and then he was done. But he left it here because it made for a grand entrance.”

“Do the plants
mind
?” asked Peter.

The Dog scratched his ear. “It's hard to know,” he said. “As I told you, they're not all that bright. Would they rather be sitting in a pot of soil? Undoubtedly. Do they spend their days dwelling on the unfairness of the universe? Probably not.”

Peter looked once more at the ficus man. His leaf-shaped eyes looked sad, no matter what The Dog said. Peter's sense of the wrongness of all this was getting worse, not better. “How do we get out of here?” he asked. There was nothing like a door anywhere in sight.

“Don't you want to whack a mole?” said The Dog.

Peter shuddered. “No. I just want to go.”

“Right this way, then,” said The Dog, and took off, weaving through the booths. Peter stumbled behind him. All around them, the plant people continued to call enticements, until Peter finally put his hands over his ears to shut out the noise.

The Dog stopped in front of a haunted house ride. A series of open cars rolled by on the track, then
disappeared into a dark tunnel. “Two tickets,” The Dog said to the man at the gate.

“Get your chills and thrills here!” the man said, sticking the tickets in The Dog's mouth, and then—in what struck Peter as a waste of time—taking the tickets back and opening the gate.

“Thanks,” said Peter as he walked through. The man, he noticed, had whisker-like needles coming out of his ears.

“Get your chills and thrills here!” the man responded.

“Cactus?” Peter whispered to The Dog.

“Cactus,” The Dog confirmed.

They climbed into the next car that came by. Hoping they weren't really about to enter a haunted house, Peter snapped the seat belt over his lap. As the car moved into the tunnel, the noise of the carnival faded away. The inside of the ride was so dark that Peter could see nothing, and panic welled up in him: what if he were stuck in this darkness forever? The third time he blinked, though, he knew even before he opened his eyes that everything had changed. The silence itself was different; it was warmer, the silence of things waiting, not the silence of emptiness.

Peter was in a restaurant. No, it was a kitchen, but it felt like a restaurant. The floor was covered with red-and-white-checked tiles; the walls were painted a cool lime green; and the kitchen counters were spotless stainless steel. A man was chopping onions next to the stove; he wore a tall chef's hat and a white apron, and he didn't seem to have noticed Peter and The Dog sitting at the
kitchen table. Because they were now sitting at the kitchen table, Peter realized with a start: the haunted house car had disappeared, although Peter's hands still curled around the empty air where the seat belt had been. Across from him, The Dog perched on a red stool, his gaze focused on a menu that lay open on the table.

A teenage boy wearing wire-rimmed glasses and carrying a notepad scurried across the room from where he had been waiting in a corner. When he reached the table, he cleared his throat.

“Can I take your order?” he asked, his voice unexpectedly high-pitched. Unlike the carnival people, he actually looked at Peter and The Dog when he spoke, although his gaze was quick and nervous, as if he were expecting one of them to pounce.

“Are you ready?” The Dog asked Peter.

“Ready for what?” asked Peter.

“Ready to order, of course. You can read the menu, but if nothing on it sounds good, the chef can make pretty much anything you like.”

“How did . . . ,” Peter started to say, and then stopped himself. When it came to magic, there was no point in asking how. “Does the car always stop in the kitchen?” he said instead.

“It will take you to any room in the house,” The Dog said. “Depends on what's in your head when you go through the tunnel.”

“Is the magician here, then?” Peter didn't see a rock.

The Dog looked slightly abashed. “Actually, he's not. I meant to be thinking of his bedroom, but I must have gotten a little distracted.” His stomach growled. “The chef here makes steak and onions just the way I like them.”

“We're here because you're hungry?”

The Dog shrugged.

“We're supposed to be finding the magician so he can obliterate me. And now we're stopping for a kibble break?”

“Kibble?” The Dog said, insulted. “For steak and onions. Don't get me wrong; I've enjoyed my stay with your family. But the dog food diet is really getting to me. And although magic food tastes good, it's just not as satisfying as the real thing.”

It started as a burning in the center of Peter's chest, then spread outward, until it felt as if his whole body were in flames. Only, it wasn't fire; it was anger burning through him. In the little part of Peter's brain that remained Peter, a voice said there was something wrong with this reaction. What did it matter if The Dog wanted to eat? That voice was tiny, though, and easily overwhelmed by the fury that had taken over Peter's body. He was so angry he couldn't speak, just sat there fuming at the high-handed audacity of The Dog, who was wasting Peter's time to have a snack.

But I didn't perform any magic!
the little voice that was Normal Peter complained in bewilderment.
I shouldn't feel like this!

Angry Peter didn't bother to respond.

The Dog didn't seem to notice Peter's reaction. “The usual,” he told the waiter. “And a big bowl of water.”

The teenager turned toward Peter, peering at him through his glasses. “I don't want anything,” Peter snapped.

The waiter retreated, jotting the words down on his
pad, and the chef, behind him, started a whirl of motion, onions flying, knives flickering, the sizzle of grilling meat filling the air. It smelled delicious, and Peter found himself suddenly starving; nonetheless, he sat with his arms crossed on his chest and glowered at his dining companion. His hunger made him more furious; even his own body was turning against him.

It was maybe three minutes before the waiter scurried back with The Dog's food. As Peter watched, The Dog lapped up most of his bowl of water, then began methodically working his way through his steak.

Peter sat silent for as long as he could stand it. It wasn't very long. “Are we going to get on with this soon?” he asked when The Dog was about half finished.

The Dog glanced up at a clock Peter hadn't noticed before. It was already after one
AM
, which meant they had left Peter's house more than three hours earlier. “Soon enough,” The Dog grunted, steak juice dripping down his beard.

What bothered Peter most, he realized, was The Dog's assumption that he was in charge.

“I want to go now,” said Peter, standing up and pushing back his chair.

The Dog didn't bother to look up from his plate. “I'm not done yet.”

Peter leaned over and shoved The Dog's plate to the floor. It fell on the tiles with a clatter, steak and onions splattering across the spotless red and white. “Now you are,” Peter said.

The Dog growled. Really growled, a loud, low sound that echoed through the kitchen, so that even the
oblivious cook paused for a moment in his seemingly endless chopping. “Waiter!” The Dog called through bared teeth. “I'd like another steak. Make it well done, and take your time.”

Someplace inside, Normal Peter trembled. “I'm going,” said Angry Peter.

“Good luck finding the magician,” retorted The Dog.

“No problem,” said Peter, his eyes already scanning the room. This new self always seemed to have a plan. “You,” he said to the cowering waiter. “You must know where to find the magician.”

The waiter backed farther into his corner. “Yes.”

“Take me there,” demanded Peter. “Now.”

The waiter cast a frightened look at The Dog, who responded by turning back to his bowl of water. “Umm . . . this way,” the waiter said to Peter, and scurried toward one of the doors.

Without a backward glance, Peter followed the waiter out of the kitchen. Now, he thought, they would finally get somewhere. He didn't know what he expected to see on the other side of the door: the carnival again, perhaps, or maybe the magician's bedroom, although that seemed too easy. Something
exciting
, that was the only thing he was sure of. Instead, he found himself in a long, ordinary-looking hallway. It had brown carpet on the floor and beige paint on the walls, and every few feet stood another closed door, just like the one that had swung shut behind him. It reminded Peter of his pediatrician's office building. It must be the servants' corridor, he realized; after all, the servants would need some way to get from one room to another.

While Peter took stock of the new situation, the waiter hurried ahead, moving surprisingly fast for someone who had once been a plant. By the time Peter started to follow, the waiter was maybe a hundred feet down the hallway and showed no signs of slowing.