A Wizard Alone yw[n&k-6 Page 5

  He looked back at Kit. “So go do what you can,” Tom said. “Let me know how it comes out. But I want to really emphasize that you need to stay in the observer’s role. This Ordeal is strange enough to get extremely dangerous, especially if you stray out of your appropriate role.”

  “I’ll be careful.”

  Tom’s expression got slightly less severe. “I’ve heard that one before,“ he said. ”From myself, among many others. But, particularly, I want you to watch yourself when you’re inside his head.

  Talking to Darryl is a good idea… but getting too synced to his worldview may make that more difficult, not less. Talking is something you do to other people; if he has trouble with that concept, you could get in trouble, too. And when you’re inside someone else’s head and using wizardry, no matter how careful you are, there’s always the danger of rewriting his name in the Speech. Do that in such a way that Darryl buys into the rewrite, and you take the risk of excising something that makes the difference between him passing his Ordeal and him never coming out of it. Walk real softly, Kit.“ ”We will.“

  Kit left Tom’s by use of another transit spell, one that let him out in a sheltered spot by the town library. He spent a while there Web surfing, printing out what he’d found, and then located a few books and checked them out. His mother was up when he got home, showering; by the time she came out, wearing her bathrobe and drying her hair, Kit was lying on the living room floor with papers and books all around him. His mama paused, looking over his shoulder at one of the printouts he was reading. “Autism?” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  She headed past him into the kitchen to find her big mug, filled it with the coffee that Kit’s pop had left in the pot for her, sugared it, and came back in to sit down on the sofa behind him. “Big subject, son,” she said.

  “You know much about it?”

  “Enough to get by.” She drank some coffee. “There are a lot of different kinds, and we’re still feeling our way around to the causes. Once they thought autism was caused by being raised wrong, by having parents who were cold or abusive. That theory got thrown out a long time ago. But there are still a lot of possible causes, and some of them seem to include each other. Some autism may be too little of one chemical or another in the brain. Or it may be caused by an enzyme that’s missing, so that certain chemicals build up in the nervous system and damage it, or make it behave erratically.

  It may be caused by something wrong with the immune system, or rogue antibodies that attack brain and neural tissue, or even a virus, or pollution, or vitamin A deficiency…” She raised one hand in a

  “who knows” gesture, then let it fall. “There’re a hundred answers, maybe all of them right sometimes… Is this for school?”

  “No. It’s what Tom wanted to see me about.”

  His mama’s eyes went wide. “Your missing person? He’s autistic? Oh, honey, that’s terrible!

  His parents must be heartbroken. Do you think you’re going to be able to find him?”

  “I already have,” Kit said, sitting down at the table and tilting his chair back to rock on its rear legs. “He’s at school. Centennial, over in Baldwin.”

  “What? Well, that’s a relief! I thought you’d meant he’d vanished. So how is he missing?”

  “It was just a figure of speech, Mama.” Kit had been wondering for a while how much detail he should give his parents about his wizardry. Now it occurred to him that he should have been giving them a lot more, if only to keep them from worrying. “When the wizardry first comes to you, it doesn’t come all at once. You get a test first: your Ordeal. If you pass, you’re a wizard. If you don’t…”

  Immediately, the look on his mother’s face suggested to him that he might have misstepped.

  “You die” his mother said.

  “Not always,” Kit said. “Sometimes you just lose the power that was given you to take the test with.” His mama was looking at him rather narrowly now, and Kit realized that she would immediately detect any attempt to soften this. “But it’s true that some kids don’t come back,” Kit said. “Some disappearances are failed Ordeals. Maybe a few percent.”

  His mother sat, quietly digesting that, and had another drink of her coffee. “So this Ordeal,” she said. “He’s having some kind of problem with it?”

  “He’s been in the middle of it for a long time,” Kit said. “He may need help. And I can’t help thinking the autism has something to do with it.” He sighed. “I’ve been doing a lot of reading, but I don’t know anything about what’s going on in his head yet. And he may not be able to tell me. I think I’m going to have to get in there and take a look myself.”

  “In his head” His mother looked alarmed. “Kit, my love, I don’t claim to understand the details of what you’re doing… but wouldn’t that be a violation of his privacy?”

  “Maybe,” Kit said. “But couldn’t you make a case that CPR is, too? Still, you do it.”

  “To save a life, yes.”

  “That’s what this might be,” Kit said. “Ordeals are crucial by definition, Mama. I had some help on mine. Maybe now I get to pay those favors forward.”

  “So you get inside his head how, exactly?” his mama said. “Is this what Carmela keeps describing as ‘magic telepathy’?”

  Kit shook his head. “It’s more complicated,” he said. “I’m still working out how to describe it.

  Ponch sees it as making a new world to go to…or finding that world ready-made. Once you make it, or find it, you go there.”

  “Ponch sees it…” His mother shook her head, sloshed the coffee around in her cup, drank some, and made a face: It was going cold.

  “We’ll go there and look around,” Kit said. “We’ll see what his world looks like to him.

  Assuming we can get in all right. If that doesn’t work… I’ll have to think of something else. But at least this is a place to start.”

  His mother put the cup down and pushed it away. “If you do actually get to talk to him,” she said, looking thoughtful, “there’s possibly something you should keep in mind. Autistic people have trouble, sometimes, predicting what other human beings’ minds are going to do. It’s a skill they have to develop with practice, whereas we take it almost completely for granted, that prediction inside: ‘If I do this, then she’ll do that,’ and so on. So you have to be prepared for the things you say to really upset him, more than would seem reasonable. He may even have trouble believing in you.“

  Kit looked at her, wondering what she meant. “It’s not that he’d think he was hallucinating you, exactly,” his mama said. “This isn’t that kind of perceptual problem. But some autistic people have trouble conceiving of anything existing outside the workings of their own minds. The concept of ‘the other’ seems to take a long time forming. That’s part of why so many of them can’t make or keep eye contact with other people. Yet for the same reason, a lot of them seem not to know what fear is.”

  “Weird,” Kit said.

  “Not as such,” said his mother. “Different, yes. You may not scare him, but you may upset him… so be ready for that.”

  “Okay,” Kit said.

  His mother sat back and looked sad. “The problem is that there are probably as many kinds of autism as there are people who have it,” she said. “And not enough of them come back from that side of things to tell us how what’s happened to them looks or feels.” She shook her head. “Some of the few who have say that the world just got too overwhelming to be borne. They felt like they were surrounded by sounds that were too intense, sights they couldn’t bear to see. So they had to withdraw inside themselves to get away, or even hurt themselves over and over again as a way to blot out the pain outside. It’s the only way they can control it. Others tell about feeling so sealed away from the world and the things and people in it that they hurt themselves just to be able to feel something. You get kids who are autistic from age two, and others who’re perfectly normal until suddenly they turn ten or twelve
and something just goes wrong…and they turn inward and don’t come out again for years. If ever.” Kit’s mama looked haunted.

  Kit nodded slowly. “I didn’t know it was this complicated.”

  “It is.”

  “You know anything that would be good for me to read?”

  “There are lots of books,” his mother said. “Some of the ones in the hospital library are going to be too technical for you.” She looked over Kit’s shoulder at the books spread out on the floor. “But some won’t be, and they’re more recent than these. Let me see what I can bring you.”

  “Great. One thing, though. I really need to take tomorrow off to work on this. Can you call school and get me off?”

  She scowled at him. “You don’t have a test or anything tomorrow?”

  “Huh? No.”

  “I’m not going to make a habit of this…”

  “’m not asking you to, Mama! But it’s going to take more than just lunch hour to make a start on this, and I don’t want to have to run off all of a sudden in the middle of something that’s going to make a difference.”

  His mother sat thinking. “All right,” she said. “I’ll take care of it. You can have a stomach bug or something.”

  “No, Mama! Don’t lie to them. Just tell them I need a personal day.”

  She gave him a slightly approving look. “Okay.”

  “Thanks, Mama. You’re the best.” He got up and kissed her, and took her coffee cup. “You want some more?”

  “Yes.” His mother leaned back on the sofa. “Two sugars. And then I want you to explain to me why I can hear the DVD player and the remote yelling at each other in Japanese in the middle of the night.”

  Kit shut his eyes briefly in horror, and went to get the coffee.

  Pursuits

  Quite early the next morning, Kit came downstairs to find his sister sitting in front of the TV with a plate of half-finished toast, and a most peculiar expression on her face. “Brother dear…”

  Carmela said.

  This tone of voice usually meant that something bad was going to happen. And I haven’t even had my cornflakes yet

  , Kit thought. “What?”

  “I need to talk to you about the TV.”

  “Uh… what about it?” He went into the kitchen to make a start at least on the cornflakes, before she really got rolling.

  “Why did Pop tell me not to watch it?”

  “Uh,” Kit said, “maybe I should ask you first — if Pop told you not to watch it, then what’re you doing?”

  If he hoped that taking the offensive with his sister would help him even a little, the hope was misplaced. “Why do what they say until you can figure out why?”

  Carmela said from the living room. “And with Pop at work and Mama asleep, there’s no way I’m going to find out the whys from them for hours. So I ask you, instead… while having a look myself.”

  Kit said nothing, just rummaged enthusiastically in the fridge for the milk.

  “Most of the shows don’t make much sense,” Carmela said. “And a lot of others are in weird languages. This has to do with all the yelling in Japanese the other day, am I right?”

  “To a certain extent,” Kit said, getting a bowl out of the cupboard and then opening a drawer for a spoon.

  His sister sighed. “You know,” she said, “you’re bad at covering your tracks when you’ve busted something. Hey, that’s a local phone number!”

  Kit’s eyes widened with shock. He hurried in to find his sister goggling at a screen full of billowing white smoke and a number with a 516 area code…both of which, to his vast relief, then dissolved into whangy guitar music and an offer for cut-rate Elvis CDs.

  Carmela looked up at Kit, registering his reaction, and shook her head. “I can’t believe you’re into this retro stuff,” she said, changing channels to her more usual morning fare, the channel with all the cartoons. “It’s a good thing you’ve got Nita, because it’s gonna be a long time before anybody else wants to date you, the taste you’ve got.”

  “I have not ‘got’ Nita,” Kit said through gritted teeth. “And as for taste, you shouldn’t be talking.

  Tom and Jerry cartoons? Give me a break.”

  “I’m waiting for the Road Runner,” Carmela said, managing to sound both pitying and incredibly stuck-up. “A symbol of innocence endlessly pursued by the banality of evil.”

  Kit went back to his cornflakes. “I wish the evil I keep running into was a little more banal,” he muttered as he picked up his bowl and started eating. The Lone Power’s favorite tool, entropy, had already struck locally: His cornflakes had gone soggy.

  Resigned, he sat down and ate them anyway. Shortly Carmela came wandering into the kitchen and stuck her head in the refrigerator. “You got today off, huh?”

  “Yeah. ‘Business’ stuff.” He ate the last spoonful of cornflakes and went to rinse the bowl. “And I didn’t ’bust‘ the TV, either.”

  “Well, it has a gigabillion new channels, looks like,” his sister said. “The one before this one looked pretty neat. They were selling some kind of eternal-youth potion.” She paused to primp herself unnecessarily in the dark glass of the microwave. “Might come in handy.”

  “You have to grow up first before the fountain of youth’s going to do you any good,” Kit said, putting the bowl and spoon in the dishwasher, “and anyway, what you need is the fountain of brains.”

  Kit spent the next few minutes running around the house while his sister, in pursuit, whacked him as often as possible with a rolled-up boy-band fan magazine. He could have teleported straight out of there, but it was more fun to let her chase him, and it would keep her in a good mood. Finally eight-thirty rolled around, the latest time when she could leave and still get to homeroom on time, and Carmela got her book bag and headed out. “Bye-bye,” she said as she went out the back door.

  “Don’t get eaten by monsters or anything.”

  “HI try to avoid it.”

  The door closed. Kit went off to get his manual, reflecting that things could be a lot worse for him. A resident sister who found wizardry freaky or annoying could cause endless trouble, forcing him to live like a fugitive in his own house, hiding what he was. But so many human wizards have to do that, anyway

  , he thought, going into his room to get the manual off his desk, and carefully walking around Ponch, who lay on the braided oval rag rug beside his bed, still asleep. They have families they can’t trust, or who can’t cope

  … The thought of telling someone you loved that you were a wizard, and then discovering that he or she couldn’t handle it and would have to have the memory removed, made Kit shudder. I was lucky. Not that it wasn’t a little traumatic at first, with Mama and Pop. But they got past it. And so did Helena, sort of.

  His older sister had been the cause of some worries for Kit when he’d told her he was a wizard.

  Helena had at first been dismissive, in an amused way: She hadn’t believed him. But when Kit had started casually using wizardry around the house, Helena had actually gone through a short period when she’d thought he’d done some kind of deal with the devil. Finally she calmed down when she saw that Kit had no trouble participating at church along with the rest of the family, and when Kit got Helena to understand that the Lone Power, no matter which costume It was wearing, was never going to be any friend of his. But Helena’s moral concerns had died down into a kind of strange embarrassment about Kit, which was as hard to bear, in its way, as the accusations of being a dupe of ultimate evil. When she went away to college and didn’t have to see what Kit was doing from day to day, their relationship got back to normal, if a rather long-distance kind of normal. What would it have been like if she’d stayed around, though

  ? Kit had found himself thinking, more than once. How would I have coped? It was a question he was glad not to have had to answer. And if that makes me chicken, fine. I’m chicken.

  He glanced down at Ponch. He was still asleep, his muzzle and feet twitching
gently as he dreamed. Kit sat down to wait until the dog finished the dream. The wizard’s manual lay on his desk; he flipped it open to Darryl’s page again and considered that for a few moments.

  He’s only eleven

  , Kit thought, looking over the slightly more detailed personal information that had added itself to Darryl’s listing since Kit had become involved. Eleven wasn’t incredibly young for a wizard— Dairine had been offered the Wizard’s Oath at eleven— but it was still a little on the early side: a suggestion that the Powers That Be needed Darryl for something slightly more urgent than usual. All we need to do is try to figure out what it is… try to help him find his way around whatever’s blocking him. Without getting in the way of whatever his Ordeal’s supposed to do for him.

  That’s likely to be a tall order…

  Ponch had stopped dreaming and was breathing quietly again. Kit hated to wake him, but free days like this weren’t something he got often. He nudged his dog’s tummy gently with one sneaker.

  “Ponch,” he said. “C’mon, big guy.”

  Ponch opened one eye and looked at Kit.

  Breakfast!

  His dog might be getting a little strange, as wizards’ pets sometimes do, but in other regards Ponch was absolutely normal. Ponch got up, stretched fore and aft, shook himself all over, and then headed for the hallway. Kit grinned, picked up the manual, stuck it into the “pocket” of otherspace that he kept things in for his wizardly work, and went after him.

  In the kitchen, Kit opened a can of dog food and emptied it into the bowl. Ponch went through it in about five minutes of single-minded chowing down, then looked up. More?

  “You’re only supposed to get one in the morning. You know that.”

  But today’s a workday. Today we go bunting.

  “So?”

  I have to keep up my strength.