Three
When Duncan finally awoke, it was quickly, like coming out of a bad dream. One moment he was in the Void with the formless voices screaming at him, and the next he was in his bed, staring at the rough iron ceiling. Even after he opened his eyes, he could still hear those voices calling to him, pleading to help them. He sat straight up in his room, panting heavily and sweating profusely. His mother sat quietly at his side, knitting needles floating and merrily creating a sweater in front of her. She looked at him and smiled that smile only a mother was capable of.
“You’re back,” she said simply, as if he had just returned from school. “I’m glad you’re back.”
Despite the reserved way she spoke, her face was a mask of concern and worry. There were dark bags under her eyes, and her clothing was rumpled as if she had slept in the chair beside his bed for some time.
“Mom,” Duncan squawked, his voice crackling and weak from disuse. “The Golems…they aren’t conjured…”
“Shh, Duncan. It’s all right. You’re here now and safe. It doesn’t matter what happened. You’re home, and now you’ll stay home forever.”
“You don’t understand, Mom. Where he sent me, wherever Dr. Felix sent my mind…“
“That vile man has been seriously reprimanded for that incident. He’ll never be able to do that to you again. I…I wish you hadn’t let him in the first place, but it matters not. You’re back, you’re here, and I love you. I’m so sorry for what’s happened to you, and I can’t imagine what you’ve been through, but you’re home now.”
She hugged him and stroked his hair.
“I didn’t want to do it, Mom, but he said if I volunteered, he pass me,” Duncan told his mother, still unable to get the voices out of his mind. They were calling to him, begging him to set them free.
“And you have passed. You’ve even graduated early, Duncan. You’re finished with the Magic School. I…” she began hesitantly. “Your father and I should never have sent you there. You’re a special child, Duncan, and those horrible people at the school never quite seemed to understand that. We should have pulled you out when we first discovered you were…” she paused, looking for the right word, “…handicap. We should never have sent you there, year after year, but your father always thought that maybe, just maybe, the magic would kick in. None of that matters now, though. You’re done with it.”
“I…I don’t understand.”
“And you don’t have to understand. Just know that you are always safe here, with your father and I, and that you’re done with that place You don’t have to go there anymore.”
He was done with school. He wondered what possibly could have happened that day at school to cause that. “Mom…how long was I…?”
“A Golem? You’ve been laying there a week, Duncan. The best Magicians in the city have tried to revive you, including Dr. Felix, much to his disdain. None of them were able to. But right now, you just sort of woke up.
“I’m sure he tried very hard,” Duncan said, wondering why the teacher had even bothered. He was now out of his classroom, out of his hair. Why would any of them try to bring him back from his Golem state? No one in the city really cared, and he was, at best, a curiosity.
“Oh, I doubt that,” his mother quipped. “Maxwell Felix is a horrible man. I’m sure that you, as a Golem, would have suited him just fine.”
“Still…a week…I…” Duncan didn’t know what to say to any of it. “Who saved me?”
“You did. They were unable to do anything and wrote you off as lost forever. Marissa and I convinced them to leave you here.”
How he’d rescued himself from the Void was a mystery that could wait until later. His personal situation was miniscule in importance compared to those stuck in that formless place. Those Golems, he was sure, were actual people. “Mom…the Golems. They aren’t constructs. They are, or were, people.”
His mother smiled again, but differently than the first time. It wasn’t an I’m happy to see you smile. It was much more annoyed. “Duncan, the Golems are constructs, nothing more than enchantments of flesh and bone. I suggest you put any other idea from your mind, and, this is especially important, never mention this idea ever again. Do you understand me?”
He didn’t, but there wasn’t a point in saying so. “Yes, Mother.”
“Okay, well, get yourself together. Your friend Marissa is waiting in the garden and is quite worried about you.” His mother stood to leave, smiling at him once more. “I love you Duncan.”
“I love you, too.”
Sliding down the pole after he’d lain in bed for a week was a chore, and he accidentally let go less than a story from the bottom. He didn’t hit the ground with the expected thump, though, and found himself floating a few feet off the ground on a cushion of air.
“I still don’t understand why your father insists on the house levitating like that. I mean, it’s all cute and what not, but it doesn’t really do much for your plants. They won’t grow in the shade, will they? I know the houses that float above yours are interesting, but despite what those snooty Magicians say, they’d kill to have an original piece of land beneath their feet. This is one of the oldest homesteads in New Dallas.”
Duncan stood and smiled. You could always count on Marissa to make a point of the obvious. “I don’t know. I’ve tried to tell him but he won’t listen. Anytime you try to talk to him about how the plants actually grow, he just clams up. And he thinks just the opposite of the houses above us, I think. To him they’re wealthy and we’re…well, we’re poor. If the house is floating it makes us a little like them.”
“That’s silly,” Marissa insisted. “Just absolutely silly.”
“I know, but you know Dad. It’s how he thinks. By the way, thanks for the save.”
“I couldn’t bear to see you break your back after I’ve watched you lay in a bed the past week.”
“You’ve been here the whole time?”
She nodded gently and smiled at him.
“Thank you,” he said, taking her hand and noticing the dirt on it. “You’ve also been working in my garden?”
“The weeds were choking out the plants. I didn’t want to see them die while you were…” she paused, trying to find the right words, “…while you were away.”
“But you could have just cast a spell. Why did you do it by hand?”
“It’s your garden, Duncan. You did it by hand, so I did it by hand. It didn’t seem right to use magic on it.”
The garden looked even more beautiful than when he’d left it a week ago. He didn’t know if she had used her magic to work on it, or just her hands like she’d said, but either way the garden seemed to have come alive at her touch. The tomato plants were a couple feet taller and the tomatoes themselves were much bigger, a brighter red, and threatened to jump from the drooping vines. The corn stalks were taller, the green ears of corn bright and shining. The green bean vines were at the top of their trellises, overflowing with bean pods. Even the chickens were singing a happy song and laughing.
“The hens were against me working here in the garden, and even took a vote. They voted to evict me, banishing me to the ‘realm of dogs, cats, and rats,’ as they call it. They said I was trespassing on your domain.”
“You were!” Henrietta squawked from the coop. “Trespasser…you came in and touched Duncan’s garden and expected us to lay eggs for you. You are no better than the cats and dogs!”
Duncan laughed. “I guess you talked them out of that, though?”
“I threatened to drop the shield and they cheered right up.”
Duncan laughed, waking slowly through the rows and containers, touching each plant as if it were a dear friend he hadn’t seen in a week. Satisfied that they didn’t need any attention, he began to tire and suggested that they sit down inside his shop. Marissa agreed and followed him in.
He’d built the small wooden building from scratch, using ancient pieces of wood and other rubbish from the debris fields a
t the edge of town. He’d never ventured past those fields of junk and rot that surrounded the city of New Dallas and didn’t know anyone who had. It just wasn’t done. He was, as far as he knew, the only one that ever actually went into the junk fields at all on any sort of regular basis. When someone needed to expand their house they would travel there, but the houses had grown so much over the years that people rarely did expand them anymore. The thousand years of refuse from the city contained everything from the old wood planks he’d built the shop with to stone and rock, and a myriad of other potential supplies. It was a wonderland to him, and he enjoyed rambling through the great piles, always avoiding the shimmering shield that protected the edge of the city. His father had told him the day that they’d picked up his bedroom in the junk fields and rode it home like cowboys that the field was a holdover from the Last War, when Magician families gathered in the center of Old Dallas to protect themselves from the humans. It had served as a barrier and, over the years, had grown into the mess it was now as people dumped their unwanted items there.
Steve, his family’s Golem, was sweeping inside the shop, carrying a big bag behind him to dump the dust and dirt in. Duncan went to him and stopped him, looking into his eyes. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I don’t think anyone knows.” He paused. “I don’t know what to do to help you.”
No emotion registered in the big Golem’s face, and nothing stirred in his eyes. He stood still until Duncan released him and then went back to his work.
“What was that about?” Marissa asked, bemused.
“They aren’t constructs. They are something else entirely. I think they were, at least once, men. I think they were alive. I heard them while I was…while I was in that place.”
“What place? Dr. Felix said you would simply be away, and that when you woke up you’d have no memory of the time in between. He said the last thing you would remember would be class.”
“He was wrong,” Duncan replied defiantly. “He has no idea what he’s talking about. These were people. Steve was a person. I don’t know from where or when, or how they managed to come here through the Golem summoning enchantments, but they were real. Their minds are trapped out there. It’s a black place, Marissa, a Void. There are thousands of voices there, thousands of minds, but each and every one of them is alone.”
“I don’t know what to say about that, Duncan. The best minds in the realm have said they are simple constructs, without minds or emotion. They are just tools created by Magic. They aren’t people.”
“They’re enslaved by Magic!” Duncan spat.
Marissa turned away from him, silent. He went to her and put his hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry; I didn’t mean to snap at you.”
“It’s okay,” she said, her hand on his hand. “It’s just a lot to think about.”
“And that’s one of the reasons I love this place. No one ever comes in here besides Steven and I. It’s the perfect place to think.”
His shop was a mix of the strange, the broken, and the not quite finished. The building was tiny and a great bench took up the middle part. There were shelves around the edges, as well his cool box. Cold water from the house ran through coils of copper pipes inside the heavily insulated box. It only lowered the temperature a few degrees inside the box, but the cooler temperature went a long way to preserving his vegetables longer. The table was filled with other projects, some completed and some not. There was the mechanical arm he was building from small, interconnected metal rods tied to a glove. He could put his hand in the glove and flex his fingers and the rods would flex at the end. He’d planned on passing the coloring test from Year One Magic School with it, coloring without touching the colors. There was a mechanical plow that ran on vegetable juice and followed a string through his rows of crops, churning up the soil. There were dozens of incomplete projects, or other things he’d given up on like the wall climber he’d hoped to help him get up the school walls, and the motorized sled, run on another vegetable juice engine, that would help him collect more resources from the junk fields. He just couldn’t build the engine big enough to make it work, and the juice itself was underpowered.
Above it all was the glider he’d been working on since he first built the shop. It was the purpose of the shop, the purpose of his life. He hoped, one day, to make it not only fly, but allow him to leave the city and explore the wastes with it. He’d had great success at smaller gliders, and even had one that would run off a small vegetable juice engine and would cover many, many more miles. His problem with the bigger version was the same as with his mechanical sled. The vegetable juice just wasn’t powerful enough to run anything much bigger than a toy.
“Well,” she said, turning to him, “I’m relieved that you’re all right. I’m more than relieved. I’m not sure what I’d have done if you’d stayed wherever you were. I don’t want to lose you, Duncan.” A tear streaked down her cheek but she tried to smile.
“I’m not going anywhere, Marissa.”
She smiled wider and gripped his shoulder. “I’ve been gone from home awhile now, though, and I need to get home. I guess I’ll won’t see you at school,” she said sadly, “so I’ll see you in a few days, okay?”
Marissa smiled before she blinked out, teleporting herself away. Duncan stared at the glider for a long, long time, then started to get up to go outside to gather something for his growling stomach. Steve stood there, just outside the door, his hand outstretched and holding a tomato.