Midnight Snack and Other Fairy Tales Page 14

  What saved Lola, though, was the rabbits’ inherent stupidity: or perhaps campers had spoiled them by hand-feeding them. At any rate, scattered all around the little campstove by the babies’ depredations was a great pile of all kinds of food, which visiting aliens might not be able to eat, but which visiting rabbits were apparently finding too tempting to resist. The first one, a big one, she shot from hiding, at a range of about six feet, while it was eating her granola. Another rabbit, creeping out from bushes nearby, was briefly frightened away by this, but then came back only a few breaths later and started nibbling at the freeze-dried ice cream. That one Lola shot not only from need, but to put it out of its misery.

  Those’ll do for a start, Lola thought, and came out of the brush, rejoining the mom and the babies, and rummaging around in her backpack for the spare camp-stove pot and the Swiss Army knife. She was trembling, both with surprise at herself, for what she had done, and with fear that it might still somehow be useless. With certainty that surprised her, a person who had never touched a dead animal except the kind you get in pieces and wrapped in plastic wrap at the supermarket, Lola slit the first rabbit’s throat and held it over the pot to bleed into it. She was surprised at the amount of blood.

  She was also surprised at how fast it went. The babies crowded around the pot, put their suction cups down into it, and sucked and sucked and sucked. The blood from the first rabbit was gone in just a few seconds. Lola and the mom both looked at them anxiously: and after about half a minute, the glow began to get stronger. Stronger still—

  Lola slit the second rabbit’s throat and bled it. The babies kept on drinking. The glow got surprisingly bright: they were like little flying-saucer shaped Christmas lights, and somehow they simply looked more contented now. Their mom watched them: and she watched Lola. There was an odd similarity in the expressions in the two pairs of eyes…

  The babies got tired of feeding, after a while, and slipped away from the pot to lie flattened here and there on the ground. The light got brighter as they did. Digesting? Lola wondered, and speculated on whether they would need burping, and whether burping them would be safe without wrapping yourself in a fire blanket first.

  The mom humped along to the pot, then, having waited for the last of them to leave, and finished the contents herself. Her glow, too, started to strengthen: it never got as bright as the babies’, but it became deep, and its pulses, as she drank, were strong. With great care the mom polished the pot perfectly clean: then backed away from it, and looked at Lola.

  Lola reached out to pick up the pot, examined it. “I could use you around the house,” she said.

  The mom moaned. The babies humped themselves up again, came over to her.

  Lola and the mom looked at one another silently for a moment. “It’s a shame you don’t read minds,” Lola said.

  The look in the mom’s eyes suggested that mind-reading wasn’t everything.

  “You’ll want to get your ship going again and get yourselves home fast,” Lola said. “I understand.”

  The mom moaned again, and began leading the babies back up the slope. Lola went with them. At the top of the slope, the mom focused all five eyes around on her and moaned very loudly, which Lola took to mean “Stay back so you don’t get hurt.”

  “Okay,” Lola said. “Listen—go home safe. And drive more carefully this time, okay?”

  The eyes mixed themselves about briefly on top of the mom, then slid around the other side of her, and she headed down the slope.

  At the bottom of it, she and the babies gathered around the globe where it lay slightly burrowed into the ground. It was cold, stone-grey when they started whatever they were doing. It brightened, though, as one after another they pressed themselves up against its indefinite, misty surface, seeming to press themselves right through it. Lola couldn’t see exactly how it happened, but at the end of the process they had all vanished inside it, and the globe glowed and pulsed with a blue fire that was a combination, Lola thought, of all their inner lights.

  Utterly silently, the globe rose up out of the gully, arced up into the night sky, and receded, at greater and greater speed, a shooting star in reverse, getting smaller and further away until it finally vanished. No thunderclap, no flash of light: just one more star among many.

  Lola turned and walked back down toward her camp. The circle was completely trashed, smudged nearly out of existence. There was food all over the place. Most of it was in no condition for her to eat: it was going to be interesting work repackaging the rest. There was another rabbit eating her granola.

  With a wry look, she nocked an arrow, sighted, and shot it. Everyone else has had their dinner, she thought. I might as well too…

  Some hours later—skinning a rabbit can be harder for a beginner than merely cutting its throat—Lola sat back from a good meal of roast rabbit, and considered the results of her first attempt at magic. She thought that, by and large, she would leave it alone after this.

  Yet at the same time, Lola kept remembering from her reading that the particular virgin goddess she had been invoking—besides being patroness of the bow, and the divine huntress—was also supposed to be the protectress of weak and helpless things, and, oddly for a virgin, of childbirth and little children. It had struck her as odd, when she had first read it.

  It didn’t now. Lola began to suspect that the whole subject was bigger than she had thought: that motherhood might not be strictly biological—any more than virginity was—and that those who invoke goddesses might possibly have to get used to surprises. Maybe even routinely. …No, she thought, I’ll leave the magic alone.

  …Years later, when Lola took the gold for archery at the summer Games in Salt Lake City, much would be made of her ability to concentrate completely on the target, as if life or death depended on her hitting it. Those who asked her how she mastered such powers of concentration usually got the offhand answer, “Oh, shooting rabbits.” In later years, at other events, they would ask the same question, and get the same answer.

  And Lola would smile, and go home to her kids.

  About “The House”

  This next one was written for the wonderful Denise Little’s anthology about a US high school dedicated to the education of young witches and wizards. For some reason or other Denise thought I might have something to say on the subject. I’m sure I can’t imagine why…

  The House

  She lay face down on her bed, clutching her pillow over the back of her head, and moaned, “It’s useless. Useless!”

  In the hallway outside her bedroom, Brianna’s mom had the linen closet open and was stacking sheets in it: Bri could smell the lavender water from here as her mom sprayed it onto layer after layer. And for the moment, the light clean scent infuriated her. Her mother’s compulsive housewifeliness didn’t usually bother Brianna so much except at moments like this, when the world was ending, and how nice the sheets smelled wasn’t even slightly germane.

  “Sweetie,” her mom said, “maybe you should just wait a few days and ask him again.”

  “It wouldn’t help,” Brianna muttered. “He’d just get the idea I really wanted to do this project with him.”

  “Yes, but you do really want to do this project with him.”

  “That’s not the point!!”

  From out in the hall came the perhaps understandable long silence as her mother tried to parse this statement. Unfortunately Brianna had noticed that her logic and her mom’s sometimes just didn’t intersect, and occasionally serious annotation became necessary. “If I ask him again,” Bri said, pulling the pillow up a little so she wouldn’t have to shout, “he’ll tell everybody that I was desperate. It’ll be all over school. My rep will never recover.”

  “Which rep are we talking about, honey?” her mother said, pausing to spray some more lavender water, and then to sneeze. Her mom was allergic to lavender, which always added a slightly surreal quality to this operation in Brianna’s eyes.

  “My reputation as an inde
pendent kid who doesn’t need anybody’s help to get the job done!”

  “Well, you don’t, if you ask me. So do it without him. If he’s not smart enough to want to pair up with you on this science fair thing—”

  “Parascience, please, Mom! This is not just people fussing around with anemometers and toy erupting volcanoes: it’s going to be the main event of Heritage Week!” Though she had seen Carol Anne Naylor’s plan for a real miniature exploding volcano, genuine magma and all, and had been consumed by envy at not having thought of it first. If it worked, it would be terrific, and even if it malfunctioned, that could still potentially be desperately cool. After all, there was never any guarantee when you were working with a fire elemental, even a baby one, that it wouldn’t get out of hand —

  Another few sneezes came from outside, and then the sound of her mother shutting the linen cupboard. A few seconds later her mom came in and sat down on the bed beside Brianna, smelling strongly of lavender. “All right,” she said to Brianna, “I’m missing something here. What exactly is it that makes Arthur Etchison so necessary to what you’ve got in mind?”

  His eyes. His shoulder muscles. His haircut. His— But there was no point in getting into this line of reasoning with her mother. Brianna pulled the pillow up over her head again, this time with reason, as she was blushing again. It was the curse of her life: she had always been an easy blusher, and this year when Arthur arrived at school from England, an exchange student, yes, and I’d exchange any ten of our guys for one of him, he is just so— Brianna moaned again, feeling like her face should just about be able to scorch the sheets under it at this point. “Mom, it’s just such a good idea! He’s the King of Shop: he’s got a way with metal, it listens to him. You should see him under the hood—” Wouldn’t I like to get under his hood!! said one completely unrepentant part of her mind: in response, the blush scaled right up to blowtorch level. She started talking faster, hoping to distract herself. “And nobody, nobody else has even thought about doing anything with the paraphysics of magic swords. Everybody’s all hung up on organics this year, the specific gravity of potions and catalytic thaumachemistry. Or else this vague paperwork stuff, diagramming hexes, the structural analysis of spells.” She waved a hand from under the pillow. “Airy-fairy stuff where nothing’s likely to blow up or make a mess. Nothing concrete. Nothing practical.”

  Her mother sat quiet for a moment. “Okay,” her mom said. “So if you can’t ask him again to help you, what are you going to do?”

  Brianna was tempted to cover her head with the pillow again… except that wouldn’t help her solve the problem. “Think of some other project?” she said after a moment.

  “Sounds like a possibility,” her mother said. “Let me know if you need any help with that.” She got up. “By the way, I’m going down to the mall later. Let me know if you want to come.”

  “What’re you getting?”

  “Just some clothes, honey.” She got up and stretched, heading for the door.

  Brianna winced, as for her, there was no such thing as just clothes: they were a statement of who you were and how you felt from day to day, self-revelatory, vital. But not so for her mother. Brianna took the pillow off her head and sat up, sighing. Her mom was a little on the plump side for her height, the gray in her hair needed touching up, and no matter how Brianna tried to work on her to style herself up a little, her mom never saw the point. Her jeans were all the wrong cut, her tops made her look like a sack of potatoes, her skirts—no, the less Brianna thought about those, the better.

  Her mother paused in the doorway, looking oddly at her. “Sweetie, you’re looking awfully flushed, are you all right?”

  The Arthur-blush hadn’t worn off yet, and the realization started making it come back. “Mommmmmm!! I’m fine!” Brianna said, desperate not to be looked at. She launched herself off the bed, past her mom, and out into the hall, through a long zone of lavender-smelling air, down the hall past her brother’s bedroom and down the stairs. There at the bottom of the stairs she paused, not sure where to go or what to do.

  Books. Books are always good. If nothing else, they make you look busy. She went to find where she’d dumped them when she came in from school, on the breakfast-nook table in the kitchen.

  Her brother Mick was there, cooking—never a safe time to venture in: her brother’s tastes in food sometimes veered into the wildly experimental. Walking very softly, Brianna tried to sidle in past the refrigerator, and failed: the door flipped open right in front of her face. I don’t even have the protection of hearing him working now, Brianna thought, annoyed. At the start of this last semester, Mick had been fast-tracked into sixth-grade nonverbals, and had been seriously sucked in by what he (and everybody else, at first) perceived as the luxury of not having to say a spell out loud any more. Eventually, like everyone else, he’d get over it. Brianna merely hoped that would be soon, as living in a house with a twelve-year-old “silent” magic user closely resembled playing in traffic.

  For the moment, the smartest thing to do was stand still. Vague thumping and rattling noises came from inside the fridge. “What are you making?” Brianna said, more or less to the refrigerator door.

  “Spaghetti,” her brother said, and slammed the door shut without touching it. The half-open jar of pasta sauce he’d been looking for was floating across the kitchen to him: the skinny, redheaded, floppy-T-shirted shape working at the stove put one hand out and caught the jar without looking at it, while staring down into the steam from a large saucepan and fishing around in the pan with a fork. “You want some?”

  “No thanks,” Brianna said, carefully making her way past Mick on the storage-cupboard side of the kitchen.

  Mick looked over his shoulder at her. “So what about Arthur?” he said, and then turned his head away again to watch as a single strand of spaghetti shot up out of the pot and hit the ceiling over the stove. There it clung, while Mick stood bizarrely counting. “A thousand two, a thousand three—”

  “What about Arthur? And what in Hecate’s name are you doing, that’s going to fall down and burn somebody!”

  “No it’s not,” Mick said. Sure enough, the strand fell down into the pot again. “Another thirty seconds, I think. …You sure? I’m using the sauce with extra garlic…”

  “No thanks,” Brianna said, “our anti-vampirism unit isn’t for another three weeks, why rush it?” Besides, it takes the garlic smell a little while to wear off, and if I do ask Arthur again tomorrow — Her bookbag was where she’d left it: grabbing it, Brianna retreated to the far side of the breakfast nook, over by the conservatory windows, plopped down in the lounge chair there, and started going through it.

  The textbooks were all the normal parascience books for her year, and she’d sweet-talked Mona the school librarian into letting her have a couple of the more advanced reference works that didn’t normally leave the building. She knows I’m good for them… And Brianna sighed. Maybe that’s the problem with Arthur. Maybe he thinks I’m too much of a library babe. Too much of a geek.

  Then Brianna let out a breath at her own insecurity. I’m not gonna waste any more time on it, she thought. I’m going to assume it’s a lost idea. If he asks me about it in the next few days, fine. Otherwise I’m going to have something else ready, because if I mention it to him again, he may just think, Hey, what a great idea!—and hand it off to one of his little clique. Brianna was not quite willing to admit that she had been a willing enough member of that clique until recently. There were still plenty of girls willing to follow Arthur around Salem, both the town and the school. Done with that now, Brianna thought, reaching for the thickest and brainiest of the books. No more being one of the sheep.

  Brianna sighed and opened up the book in her lap, the Materia Magica, intending to spend a while scanning it for more parascience fair ideas. But it was dry as a broomstick’s bristles—ingredients for spells, mostly, both organics and synthetics: how they were isolated, how they were combined, what went with what and w
hat emphatically didn’t. Botanicals, mineralissimae, animal extracts and contributions… She scanned through the index, trying to spot something that might be useful.

  Mick glanced over at her, recognized the book, and returned his attention to the pot. “You’re wasting your time going all techie on him,” he said, fishing out another strand of spaghetti and looking at it thoughtfully. “The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.”

  Brianna looked up scornfully at her brother. “You know any men we could ask about that?” Brianna said.

  Mick just fished out another strand of spaghetti. “Seriously,” Mick said. “Why don’t you do something about food?”

  “Food!” Brianna rolled her eyes. “Please. So Home Ec.”

  “What’s the matter? Afraid you’re gonna put back some of that puppy fat?” Mick looked over his shoulder at her again and gave her a wicked look as another strand of spaghetti shot toward the ceiling.

  Brianna stared after it as it hit the ceiling and clung. One thousand… two thousand… three thousand… It fell back into the pot. “Only puppies have puppy fat,” she said. “As you’ll discover if you keep annoying me. And will you stop that? Dad’s gonna have a fit when he sees. You know how he is about not making more cleaning work for everybody.”

  “He won’t see,” Mick said, getting the spaghetti drainer down from the pot rack and dropping it into the sink. “I’ll have it cleaned up by the time he gets home from work.”

  Brianna sighed, turned her attention back to the Materia Magica’s index. Boredom, boredom from A to Z, nothing nearly as cool as a magic sword… She wrinkled her nose at the A’s, and turned to the Z’s and started reading the materials-and-ingredients index backwards in weary desperation. Zyzzal, zugreb, zingiber, zameron, zacinth—

  Something stopped her. She glanced back.