* * *
Wiltred was sitting on his doorstep. There was a narrow pipe in his mouth and a placid expression on his face. Pale brown smoke brushed his wrinkled cheeks, and there was a glazed, contented look in his eyes. He blinked at a sudden movement, and one eyebrow rose as Billy burst from the woods and charged towards him waving a damp book in a huge, meaty hand.
"Help! I think it's dead!" shouted Billy as he got closer. He stopped several feet from the wizard and held the book up. Several pages fell out.
"Mornin' Billy," said Wiltred languidly. He took a drag from his pipe and coughed. "Where you been, son?"
Billy waved the book. "Please help. I think it's hurt!"
"Hurt?" The wizard sucked on his pipe, filling the air with a bubbling sound. "S'matter with it?"
"It got tied up and someone drowned it with water."
"Water, eh?"
"Please help, sir." Billy edged closer, holding the book out. "It's really hurt."
The wizard took the book and opened it gently. He tutted at the waterlogged paper, shook his head at the smudged ink and winced as he came to the torn strips where the pages had come loose.
"Can you fix it?" demanded Billy.
The wizard shrugged. "Could dry it out, maybe touch up the missing words. Cheaper to buy another. Never be the same again, anyway."
"Can you make it talk?"
The wizard gazed at Billy for a moment or two, then frowned at his pipe. "Must be having trouble with my hearing," he muttered. "Are you asking me to make the book talk?"
Billy nodded.
Wiltred closed his eyes. "Son, have you been sampling my ingredients again?"
"What?"
There was gust of wind, and the wizard pulled his gown closer. "Let's not have any more discussions about the verbal accomplishments of inanimate objects, eh?"
Billy's lips moved as he parsed the wizard's sentence several times. Once he'd worked it out, he jutted his jaw. "It spoke to me!"
The wizard waved his pipe. "Hallucination. I get them all the rime. Er, time."
Billy shoulders slumped. "I was going to sell it again."
"Sell it?" Wiltred looked up, a mildly questioning expression on his face. "Again?"
Billy nodded. "Yeah. First time around I got forty gold talons for it."
"Forty talons?" shrieked Wiltred. The pipe slipped from his fingers and shattered on the stone doorstep. "Forty gold talons for a mouldy old book? Who the f--" The wizard grabbed the book and stared at it intently. "Talk to me, Billy! Tell me what happened!"
"Weren't me that were talking," said Billy. "The book did. I sold it because it was a talking book. Then I got given it back because it talked a lot too much. They drownded it."
Wiltred stared into space. "Must have ... no, no that would be impossible. Perhaps a--" He turned to Billy, eyes narrowed. "Do you remember the exact sequence of events, Billy? Do you remember precisely what you were doing before the book spoke to you?"
Billy rubbed the mottled bruise on his forehead. "Oh, aye." His face creased into a frown. "Least, I fink so."
"You think so." Wiltred sighed as he settled back on the step. He placed the book on the cold stone and began picking up the pieces of his pipe.
"I c'n try!" declared Billy. He scooped the book up and began turning the pages. "I got to this bit an' then couldn't make out the words. Then I turned to here and ..." suddenly Billy looked around. "Hey!"
"What? What is it?" demanded Wiltred.
"The page is missing!" Billy stared around wildly, then spotted a square of paper stuck to a nearby bush. He raced over and plucked it from the leafy grasp. "Got it!" he shouted.
Wiltred staggered to his feet and came shuffling up. "Now lad, do you remember the spell?"
Billy stared at the page closely, his lips moving. "Can't read it," he muttered. "Something wrong with the letters."
Wiltred plucked the page from Billy's thick fingers, turned it the right way up and handed it back.
Billy's face brightened. "S'better!" he said. "Now, we need some beakers and glass pipes and stuff."
Wiltred's eyes narrowed. "How much stuff?"
"All of it wot I didn't break last time," declared Billy.
* * *
Billy's eyes widened as he surveyed the delicate bottles and hand-blown pipes. There were rows and rows of vials with etched labels and hand-carved glass stoppers, and jars of dried herbs and pressed leaves tinted the air with a warm, spicy aroma. "Wow!" he breathed.
"Now listen here, boy," said Wiltred sternly. "This cupboard is absolutely top-shelf. This equipment, these ingredients, those jars - you're looking at a lifetime of frugal saving and gathering. If there is the slightest chance - any chance, mind - that you're going to blow this lot up with some half-arsed magical concoction we can shut the door right now, go back outside and forget all about talking books. Is that clear?"
Billy nodded, his eyes round.
"Good. Now, what do you need?"
Billy gestured expansively. "All of it."
Wiltred swallowed. "Uh," he began. He moistened his tongue. "Wha'?"
Billy beamed at him. "All of it. I c'n make lots of books talk if I use it all."
"All?" murmured Wilted faintly. "All of it. He wants it all."
Billy frowned. "I prob'ly don't need that one," he said, pointing at a glass jar full of spiky leaves.
Wiltred peered at it. "Good, because I'll need those myself if this spell goes wrong." He looked over his hoard, then sighed. "Billy, are you familiar with the expression 'in for a penny, in for a pound'?"
Billy shook his head. "What's it mean?"
Wiltred began taking jars and bottles from the shelves. "It means you can use it all."
* * *
Billy stepped back from the table to examine his handiwork. He tilted his head on one side and half-closed his eyes, surveying the tangle of glass pipes, tubes and funnels with the air of an experienced arch-mage. The apparatus covered every square inch of the wizard's heavy-duty granite-topped workbench, and included every breakable item he'd been able to lay his hands on. Billy heard a snort, and turned to frown at the source.
Wiltred was sitting on the doorstep, his back to the door frame and a ragged-looking cigarette in his mouth. He was staring at the horizon, and the last rays of sunlight were making a ploughed field of his lined face.
Billy ambled over. "Did you say summink?"
Wiltred removed the smoking cylinder from his mouth and glanced up. "Billy, I'm a patient man, but if you don't stop tinkering I'm going to pack that lot up and then I'm going to look through one of my remaining spell books for a particularly nasty little curse and then ..."
"Spell books!" cried Billy. "Dat's it! I need spell books."
"Why?" demanded Wiltred. His eyes narrowed. "You're not going to use the pages to light my spirit burner, are you Billy?"
"Spirit burner!" Billy stared at the glass spaghetti sculpture on the workbench. "Fire. Las' time I lit something."
"In the cupboard," said Wiltred through a cloud of smoke. He watched Billy open the door and extract a small silver orb. "Other way up," he said, as clear fluid pooled on the floor around Billy's feet. "Do you mind if I leave you to it? I need a new pipe, and I want to be a little further from your experiment."
Billy tried to nod, but his chin was pressing down on a teetering stack of magic tomes. As Wiltred gathered his cloak and hobbled off towards the trees, Billy staggered over to the bench and plonked the pile down. Then he pulled the top one off and stared at the cover.
"You again!"
The book said nothing.
"Right then, you're the first. Seein' as you've done this before it should be easier for you." Billy hefted the book and placed it on a metal tray beneath a dripper. When it was aligned to his satisfaction he reached for the tap and opened it a fraction. A pearly green drop fell on the cover and vanished with a hiss. Billy turned the dripper off and snatched the book off the dish, gazing with horror at the hole in the cover.
He held the book up and blinked as the sunlight shone right through it.
"Sorry," he muttered. "Musta been too strong." He set the book on the dish and poured the contents of a small, round bottle into the hopper, then stirred it in with a glass rod. He opened the dripper and the liquid pooled on the cover with a muted hiss and slightly less bubbling.
Billy fired the burner and adjusted it until he had a solid blue flame, then took the book in shaking fingers. He offered it up to the flame - closer and closer, until the cover began to smoke. Then he dropped it in a wide dish filled with soapy green liquid.
BAM!
The explosion was sudden and violent, fusing glass to the ceiling, scattering a hundred and eleven herbs and spices and exfoliating every book in sight. In the blast, Billy was knocked from his feet and buried under a snowstorm of pages.
"Cripes," he muttered, as the echoes died away. He surveyed the scene in horror, then did a double-take as he saw a pair of legs protruding from a mound of paper: a thick pair of legs in dung-encrusted boots. "Who's there?" cried Billy, his voice shrill. "Who's that?"
The legs kicked, and Billy gaped as he saw a copy of himself sitting up and rubbing its head.
"Flipping 'eck!" squeaked Billy, rustling his pages in shock. "We been swapped!"
"Is that so?" The towering figure regarded Billy with its curious green eyes, then burst into laughter. "Now there's a turn-up for the books."
About the author
Simon Haynes was born in England and grew up in Spain, where he enjoyed an amazing childhood of camping, motorbikes, mateship, air rifles and paper planes. His family moved to Australia when he was 16.
From 1986 to 1988 Simon studied at Curtin University, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Film, Creative Writing and Literature.
Simon returned to Curtin in 1997, graduating with a degree in Computer Science two years later. An early version of Hal Spacejock was written during the lectures.
Simon has four Hal Spacejock novels and several short stories in print. Sleight of Hand won the Aurealis Award (short fiction) in 2001, and Hal Spacejock: No Free Lunch was a finalist in both the Ditmar and Aurealis Awards for 2008.
Simon divides his time between writing fiction and computer software, with frequent bike rides to blow away the cobwebs.
His goal is to write fifteen Hal books (Spacejock OR Junior!) before someone takes his keyboard away.
Simon's website is https://www.spacejock.com.au
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