“How cruel!” Carmela cried. Then she smiled, and the smile was wicked. “True, but cruel.”
“It’s the backward baseball cap,” Kit said. “I’m sorry, but that’s getting pretty ancient. Plus his cap’s too small for him, and the pop-fasteners in it always leave these marks like little rivets on his forehead—” Kit stopped himself. I’m seriously discussing my sister’s would-be boyfriends, he thought. This is not something I want her to get used to. “Listen,” Kit said, “there’s something more important than this that we need to discuss. You’ve been having a lot of fun with the TV… ”
“Since you fixed it so it shows alien cable,” his sister said, “I’ve revised my opinion of you way upward.”
“That concerns me so deeply,” Kit said. The “fix” hadn’t been intended to add that particular feature to the entertainment system, but when Kit had later tried to remove the alien content, the TV and DVD player had gone on strike. Kit had been forced to restore the system, and had had to admit privately that his sister’s demands that it be put back the way it’d been after the fix were even more annoying than the system’s refusal to function normally.
“So what’s your problem?” his sister said.
“We need to talk about that first thing you ordered off the Mizarthu shopping channel.”
“Which thing?”
“The laser dissociator.”
“Oh, that! It’s in my bedroom somewhere.”
Kit sighed. It sometimes seemed that the contents of whole planets could be accurately described as “in Carmela’s bedroom somewhere.” “Where, exactly?”
“I don’t know. I’ll look later; I’m busy right now. What’s the matter with it?”
“I need to make it safe.”
“From what?”
Kit rolled his eyes. “Not from,” he said, “for. As in, safe for being on the same planet with.”
“Oh, come on, Kit. There haven’t been any problems since we figured out where the safety switch was.”
There haven’t been any problems, Kit thought, his eyes nearly crossing with frustration. Repairing the tile and the plastering in the bathroom had been a week’s work, at a time when he had much better things to do—and his pop had insisted Kit do it the “old-fashioned way,” meaning by hand and not by wizardry. “There was nearly a problem,” Kit said, “when you thought you had it set for ‘hot curler’ and it was set for ‘low disintegrate.’”
“I got that sorted out,” Carmela said. “You always have to harp on the small stuff! I thought that wasn’t good for a wizard.”
I will not kill her, Kit thought. It would speed up entropy. But only a little… He let out a long breath. “Just find it for me in the next day or so, okay?” he said. “You can still use it on your hair, but I want to make sure that nobody else, like one of your friends when they’re over, can find it accidentally, go off with it, and blow up their bathrooms. Or more valuable real estate, like the insides of their heads.”
An odd look grew on Carmela’s face. “Like the inside of my head isn’t valuable?”
Kit gave her a dry look. His sister opened her mouth. “Left yourself open for that one,” Kit said. “And another thing. These alien chat rooms you’ve been using… ”
“You’re just jealous because I’m getting good at the Speech,” Carmela said, producing a pouting expression resembling that of a cranky supermodel.
Kit rolled his eyes. “I am not jealous. I just think you should be careful about who you talk to!” he said. “It’s like any other kind of online chat. What they show you and what they sound like may not have anything to do with who or what they really are.”
“I know that!”
“I don’t think you know how much you don’t know that! I don’t want you thinking you’re having harmless clothes-and-hair-and-pop-star talk with some alien girloid, and then have Earth get invaded because it turns out you were actually talking to some twelve-legged methane-breathing centipede prince who’s decided to turn up with a battle fleet and demand your hand in marriage!”
Carmela’s face wrinkled up. “Euuuuuu,” she said. “Centipedes. You just said the unmagic word.”
Kit kept his face straight. His sister was not wild about bugs of any kind, and he knew it. “So don’t give people in alien chat rooms your real name or address or anything, okay?” he said.
“Okay,” Carmela said with a long-suffering sigh. Then she looked curious. “What is Earth’s address, by the way?”
“I’m not telling you,” Kit said.
“You don’t trust me!”
“No. And, anyway, it’s complicated, and you don’t have the technical vocabulary to say it.”
“Yet,” Carmela said. “I don’t think it’s going to take me that long. And once I’m really good at the Speech, maybe I should look into becoming a wizard, too.”
“It doesn’t work that way,” Kit said, feeling incredibly relieved that it didn’t. Yet the very idea still freaked him out somewhat. Just what I need. My very own version of Dairine… ! Oh, please, no. “You can’t be a wizard unless the Powers invite you,” Kit said. “And you’re too old.” Oh please let her be too old! “Besides, it’s a lot of hard work.”
“I’m not sure I believe that,” Carmela said. “Nita makes it look easy. She just reads out of her book, or waves that little white wooden wand of hers, and things happen.”
“It is not that easy,” Kit said, starting to get irritated, possibly by the insinuation that wizardry was easier for Nita than it was for him. “It’s like saying that someone just sits down at their computer and fiddles with the keys and things happen. Wands are just hardware. At the end of the day, it’s the software that does the job. And you have to write it yourself.”
Carmela gave Kit a not-entirely-convinced look. “Well,” she said, getting up, “I’ll go get the thingy for you.”
Downstairs, the phone rang. “In a while,” Carmela said as she ran out, pounding down the hall. “And when you’re playing around with it,” she added from halfway down the stairs, “make sure you don’t void the warranty!”
Kit felt like banging his head against the wall. “The warranty,” he said to no one in particular. “Why should she care about the warranty?”
He looked down at Ponch and heaved a sigh. Ponch opened one eye. “You weren’t asleep,” Kit said.
Not the whole time, Ponch said silently.
“What am I going to do with her?”
Ponch looked after her. Ignore her. She’s just saying things like that to make you chase your tail; I can hear it in her voice. She thinks it’s fun.
Kit shook his head. “The problem with sisters is that you can never tell what they’re going to pull next. And she’s been getting… unusual lately.”
Then Kit wondered if he should have chosen another word. Ponch, too, had been getting unusual lately. This by itself wasn’t a surprise—wizards’ pets often start to acquire strange abilities or behaviors as their companions use their wizardry more, but in Ponch’s case, the level of unusual had become very high indeed. Here was a dog who recently had developed the ability to create a new universe and take Kit for a walk through it. And you have to wonder, Kit thought, is someone who can do that really a dog anymore?
Ponch rolled to his feet, got up, stretched fore and aft, and then came over to Kit and put his nose on Kit’s knee. Dinner? Ponch said.
Kit laughed. Whatever his own concerns, there were still some things about Ponch that were entirely doggy. “Yeah,” he said. “Come on.”
The two of them went downstairs together. Kit’s mama was slumped on the dining room sofa reading a newspaper, dressed in one of her pink nurse’s uniforms; she was just back from the day shift at the local hospital and hadn’t yet bothered to change. In the living room, Carmela was on the phone, talking rapidly about some new music download to what Kit assumed was yet another of the crowd of guys who were chasing her around. “Mama,” Kit said, “when’s dinner ready?”
“About
an hour. Nita coming?”
“She said so, yeah.”
“Okay. You feed the monster there?”
“I’m doing that now.”
“You looked outside yet?”
“Not yet,” Kit said, with dread. He was sure he knew what he was going to see.
As they went into the kitchen together, Ponch started alternating between dancing around and spinning in circles on the same spot. Dinner!
“Yeah,” Kit said, “and you know what it is?”
What?
“It’s dog food!”
Oh, hurray! Dog food again! Ponch said, and jumped up and down some more.
But Kit caught the amused glint in Ponch’s eye as he got a can of dog food out of the cupboard where the canned goods were kept. “You making fun of me?” Kit said.
His eyes on the can, Ponch sat down, very proper, with his front feet placed so that the white tips on his forepaws came right together, making him look extremely composed and serious. Never, Ponch said. At least, not at dinnertime.
Kit opened the can and dumped it into Ponch’s dish, filled the dry food bowl, and checked to make sure that there was plenty of water in the bowl beside it. Ponch jumped up again, turned around in excited circles a few times more, and then went over to the dish and started to gobble his food.
Kit shook his head and rinsed out the can at the sink before chucking it into the recycle bin. In the living room, things had gone quieter as Carmela got off the phone and went back to talking to the TV, or rather to someone the Powers That Be only knew how many light-years away. From the sound of it, she was translating a subtitled display rather than listening to live Speech, but at the moment, this didn’t seem to be helping her much. “What?” Kit heard her say. “Do I what? Do I grenfelz? Uh, I don’t think so. …No, I am not shy! Okay then, show me an image—”
There was a moment’s silence, after which Carmela dissolved into uncontrollable laughter. Kit was incredibly tempted to go see what she was looking at. I am not going to do that, he thought. She’ll get the idea I’m trying to chaperone her, and she’ll give me all kinds of grief.
And I would be trying to chaperone her—
Kit went to look out the kitchen window again. He’d done this earlier, when he’d just come back from Nita’s and Ponch had still been asleep. Then, the sidewalk outside their house had been empty. Now, though, it was full of dogs.
There were at least ten of them. Most were neighborhood dogs: various multicolored and multisized mutts, the big blue-merle collie from the Winchesters’ place down the block, a pair of bulldogs from two streets over, and even the dysfunctional little terrier from three houses down, Tinkerbell—the one who normally threatened, in unusually fluent dog-language, that if he ever got out of his yard, he’d rip Kit’s throat out. Yet there he was, sitting peacefully on the sidewalk and gazing at the Rodriguez house as intently as all the other dogs were. The big silvery Great Dane from down Nita’s street, sitting next to Tinkerbell and as intent on the house as he was, shifted position slightly and put one huge foot on Tinkerbell’s rear end, nearly squashing him flat. Tinkerbell just wriggled out from under, shook himself, sat down again, and resumed staring at the house.
“Are they still out there?” Kit’s mama said from the dining room couch, turning a page of the paper.
“Yeah,” Kit said.
“Remember our little talk the other day?” Kit’s mama said, her voice just slightly edgy.
“Yeah, Mama. I’m working on it.”
“Well, work harder.”
Kit turned away from the window, annoyed. He had spent some weeks in consultation with Tom Swale on the question of what was causing the increasing weirdness around his house. The best explanation Tom had been able to come up with was “hypermantic contagion syndrome,” an irritatingly vague suite of symptoms usually more casually described as “wizardry leakage.” Days of perusing his manual had left Kit completely in the dark as to exactly what kind of wizardry, or whose, was leaking, from where, into what… and until he figured those things out, there was no stopping the leak.
Kit looked out at the dogs and sighed. At least they were quiet at the moment. But they tended not to stay that way. And when they started making noise and drawing the attention of the whole neighborhood, his folks got tense. It wasn’t that they’d started giving him trouble about his wizardry as such. But the Rodriguez house used to be a fairly quiet and peaceful place, before the past month or so. Before the dogs, that is. Before the TV began evolving. Before Carmela became a boy magnet. The noise wasn’t his fault, and Kit had pointed out more than once that there was nothing he could do about the amount of noise Carmela made—the number of times the phone rang in a given day was hardly anything to do with wizardry. But any time Kit said this, his mom would just glance first at the TV, which did have something to do with it… and then she’d look out the window to where half the dogs in the neighborhood were sitting, gazing at their house as if it were full of top sirloin, or something even more important. And then the howling would start—
Kit turned away from the kitchen window. “Ponch,” he said softly to his dog, “they’re all out there again.”
I keep telling them they shouldn’t do that, Ponch said silently, concentrating on licking his bowl clean. And for a while, they don’t. But then they forget.
“But why are they doing it?”
I don’t know. I keep asking them, hut they don’t understand it, either. They’re not so good at figuring things out. Ponch looked up, licking his chops. He sounded faintly aggrieved. I’ll let you know when I figure out what’s on their minds.
“Well, hurry up and do what you have to do to find out,” Kit said. “And when you go out there, tell them no howling!”
They like to sing, Ponch said, sounding a little injured. I like it, too. Even Carmela likes to sing. What’s the matter with it?
Kit closed his eyes briefly. His sister’s singing voice was, to put it kindly, untrained. “Just tell them, okay?” Kit said.
Okay…
Ponch turned his attention back to the bowls, starting a long, noisy, sloppy drink of water. From the living room, Kit heard Carmela start laughing again.
“Grenfelzing,” Kit thought. Should I be worried that my sister is being invited to grenfelz? I just hope this isn’t something that’ll rot her morals somehow…
From down the street, Kit could faintly hear the sound of a familiar car engine coming toward the house: his dad, coming back from the printing plant three towns over where one of the bigger suburban New York newspapers was produced. The station wagon pulled in and parked. A few minutes later, Kit’s father came in the back door, pulled his jacket off his burly self, and chucked it at the new coat tree by the back door, which Kit’s mama had bought a few weeks before. The coat tree swayed threateningly, but for once it didn’t fall over—Kit’s pop was getting the hang of the maneuver. “Son, they’re out there again,” he said as he came through the kitchen.
“I know, Pop,” Kit said. “Ponch is working on it. Aren’t you?”
There was no reply. Kit looked over at Ponch, who had left the water bowl and turned his attention to the neighboring bowl of dry, crunchy dog food. He was now steadily eating his way through it with an air of total concentration.
Kit’s pop sighed as he came into the dining room, leaned over Kit’s mama (now sprawled out on the sofa) to smooch her, and took the newspaper from her, straightening up to glance out the window of the dining room. “It’s like being in a Hitchcock movie,” Kit’s pop said, “except I don’t think he’d have gotten the same effect by covering someone’s front yard with sheepdogs and Great Danes. Whose sheepdog is that? I’ve never seen it before.”
“I don’t know, Pop. I could go ask it.”
“Look, son,” Kit’s dad said. “Don’t bother. Just ask Ponch to have another word with them, okay? Otherwise we’re going to have the neighbors over here again, in a group, like last time… and I have a feeling this time they migh
t think about bringing torches and pitchforks.”
“I asked him, Pop. He’ll go out when he’s finished his dinner.”
“Right. When’s ours, honey?”
“Three-quarters of an hour.”
“Then I’m going to go sit down and read this awful rag,” Kit’s pop said, “and see if I can figure out what’s wrong with the world.” He walked into the living room, leaving Kit wondering yet again why his dad was so unfailingly rude about the newspaper he worked for as a pressman. “Carmela, what are they doing there?”
“Grenfelzing.”
“Really. What’s the fire hose for?”
“I don’t think it’s a fire hose, Popi… ”
A pause. “Oh, my lord—” Kit’s pop said.
The phone rang again. Halfway to the living room, Kit dived back into the kitchen for the wireless phone on the counter, and managed to pick it up and hit the talk button before Carmela could pick up the phone in the living room.
“Rodriguez residence.”
“It’s me,” Nita said.
“Oh, good. Thanks for not being yet another of the thundering herd.”
Click. “I heard that!”
“Get off, ‘Mela! It’s for me!”
“Wow, I’ll call the media.” Click.
“She giving you a hard time?”
“Always.” Kit let out a harassed-sounding breath. “Please, please, please, come over and give me something to do besides keep my sister off the phone. That chicken’s gonna be ready soon, anyway.”
“Be over in a few. But you need to hear about this first. My dad wants me to go away on this exchange thing!”
“You gonna go?” Kit immediately began to itch with something that felt embarrassingly like envy.
“Yeah. And when we got back from shopping, my manual was about half an inch thicker than when we’d left, and a whole bunch of sealed claudication packages were sitting on my desk.”
“Hey, super,” Kit said, and was instantly annoyed at himself for not sounding as enthusiastic as he thought he should have. “This’ll be so great for you! You should get out there and have a good time—”