Mystify the Magician Read online

  Everworld #11

  Mystify The Magician

  K.A. Applegate

  Chapter

  I

  The tongue was about the same size as me and it was determined to shove me under those grinding teeth.

  I was too big a bite of pizza, too much chalupa. I was that bite you take out of the Big Mac when you're really starving, and you wish you could spit it back out and start over, but you can't because you have a yap full of gray meat and stale bread and you have no choice but to mash that puppy while the special sauce dribbles down your chin and makes you look like a two-year-old working his first solid food.

  The tongue shoved at me, heaved up beneath me, all wet muscle covered in bristly taste buds the size of cashews. I was facedown on the tongue, facedown on a wet, pink blanket draped over half a dozen WWF stars trying to heave me off, push me, shove me, force me under molars as big as my head.

  The roof of the giant's mouth came down, clamped me, forced the air out of my lungs, and the tongue tried to toss me again. I sucked air, sucked in his god-awful, stinking-like-a-week-old-corpse breath. The stink alone would have killed me if I'd had time to worry about it.

  The tongue twisted me around. I was holding on with my hands slippy-gripping, my feet up against the rubbery inner cheek, calves lined up perfectly across the anvil of the lower jaw, just waiting for the downstroke. I felt the jaw contract, sensed rather than saw the mashers coming down, yanked my feet toward me, into a fetal position, crying for Mommy and getting a mouthful of giant spit.

  Down came the teeth. I cleared them by a millisecond, but my convulsive movement had loosened my grip and now the tongue had me. It shot forward and sideways and I was on my back, big damned teeth sticking into my spine. I was lined up, gripped, held in place between tongue and cheek.

  The mouth opened, just enough light to see the uppers coming down hard and fast, and instinct took over — I rolled, pushed at the yielding flesh of the cheek, like pushing against a half-inflated balloon. I shoved off the uppers as they came down, and suddenly, I was peanut butter: a big wad of weeping, yelling, peeing-myself peanut butter between teeth and cheek.

  No way to breathe, the pressure of the cheek and gums was too much. And now the tongue was trying to dig me out, a freaking backhoe looking to dig a trench, and me in the role of the dirt.

  I grabbed the digging tongue tip and yanked it over and past me. It slid down my face, my chest, and was gone. Any second now it was going to occur to the giant to use his finger.

  Or he could just slap the side of his face and I'd burst like a prom-night zit.

  Panic. Sheer, no-brain, losing-it panic. I kicked, lashed out, slammed my fists in the confined space, buried alive and just waking up. Knees, feet, fists, head, and all-around writhing.

  Something gave. I kicked and kicked, with a target now. I kicked and there came a bellow, reverberating up through the flesh and the gums and the bones and rattling through me before it burst full-fledged from the giant's mouth.

  The tooth came loose. I gave a savage, blind kick and the whole molar rolled over onto the tongue. Blood gushed around me, blood and spit and the giant yelling and me yelling and mad now, mad because I'd had that tiny little impact and that total save-me-Mommy despair give way to screw-you hatred.

  I shoved my head into the gap and felt in the dark for the molar. I hefted the small boulder up and piled it on top of the nearest surviving tooth. Down came the uppers.

  "Chew on that!" I screamed.

  Crunch. And now a serious bellow and a gassing of manure-stinking breath and he slapped his cheek, slapped it and knocked me back out onto the tongue. I doubled up, legs numb from the blow, and kicked, unfeeling. I kicked with all I had, which wasn't much on the left side, where my leg was either broken or just numb. But my right foot caught the backside of a front tooth and knocked it spinning out into the air. How many teeth in the giant mouth? Well, whatever that number was, minus two.

  All at once I was falling. A long way. I hit ground and bounced. Head spinning, swirling, down and dark and...

  At the top of my lungs I shouted a four-syllable word that was very popular with Eddie Murphy back when he was doing stand-up.

  I shouted that word, jumped to my feet, spun, and fell into my girlfriend's mother. She was a small woman, and I carried her and her serving platter of lemongrass chicken right down to the geometric-pattern rug and lay on top of her panting like a sled dog in the last lap of the Iditarod.

  There was a horrible silence. A silence so complete that of the four people in that tastefully decorated dining room with the matching antique table and sideboard and the table linen that was the same as that favored by the late Princess of Wales, I don't believe there was so much as the sound of a single heartbeat.

  My girlfriend, Jennifer, my girlfriend for a week, said,

  "Christopher, I think you'd better go."

  Up till that point I had not guessed that Jennifer had a talent for understatement.

  Jennifer's father was not a big man; I had a good six inches on him. But the deep moral authority that comes to a man who has just stood by while someone screamed that particular Eddie Murphy word and then launched himself into the cleavage of said small man's wife as though determined to make that word a prophecy, well, a man in that position carries more than his natural height and weight.

  I babbled an incoherent apology, tried to help the mother up, was grabbed by Jennifer, who literally shoved me toward the door while her father snatched up a silver candlestick and came after me.

  I fled into the night and ran for my car with cries and shouts and shrill accusations following me.

  Then I woke up, on my back, soaked with giant spit and tooth blood and stinking like the gym locker of the kid who left his sweats behind through the long months of summer vacation.

  The giant loomed huge. His leprous, rotting, distorted, snaggle-toothed, malevolent-idiot face wore a dimly abashed expression.

  "You okay?" David asked calmly.

  Before I could work up a suitably savage reply, there came a woman's voice. A voice that was, literally, music.

  "The poor boy, the poor boy," the voice said. "Oh, look at him, the pity of the world. There is the stream nearby. I will bathe him and tend his wounds with my own hands, poor, lovely young lad."

  I wiped giant goo out of my eyes and sat up and looked at her. She was simply the most beautiful creature I have ever seen.

  "I really could use a bath," I said.

  Chapter

  II

  Everworld.

  Someday I hope to be able to book tours of the place. It'll be huge with borderline psychotics who don't get quite enough charge out of blindfolded extreme snowboarding, or who find handcuffed NASCAR too tame.

  Everworld. Sure it's a place, but more than that: It's an idea!

  A really bad idea.

  Way back in the day, way, way back before the discovery of toothpaste; back in the days when even the nicest folks were expected to maintain at least three distinct species of body vermin; way back in the glorious days of yore when you could be considered good-looking if the smallpox had gouged only pea-sized holes in your face rather than excavating craters the size of condiment cups; way back then, the gods of myth decided they'd had enough of Earth as we know it and wanted to set up a new home.

  Why did they bail out on the real world? We don't actually know, but the best guess is that they were put off by the rampant sanity that was breaking out all over. You might not think of the darkest of the Dark Ages as being a riot of liberalism, what with plagues of the week; a lifestyle consisting almost entirely of backbreaking work, heavy drinking, and wife-beating; homes that were about as pleasant and sanitary as the kind of puppy-mill kennel
that gets shut down by 60

  Minutes; and entertainment that involved the widespread killing of witches — and the even more widespread killing of chicks who somebody thought might kind of look like witches.

  And yet it seems this all smacked of some kind of crazy feminist, socialist, NPR fund-raiser, vegan bran muffins, and grande lattes kind of thing to the gods of yore.

  Zeus and Odin and Isis and Quetzalcoatl and the Daghdha and the whole panoply of divinely infantile personalities got together in a rare moment of unity and created Everworld. A universe apart. A universe where magic is real. A universe where the gods could be left alone to run things their way and keep H. sapiens in his place: kneeling, begging, and in some cases playing the role of the pig at the barbecue.

  And all was fine. Oh yeah, it was a happy little asylum. Until outsiders began to crash the party. Riffraff. Other gods. Alien gods. Because, you see, madness is not a singularly human thing.

  Alien gods — and their obligatory alien suck-ups, servants, and victims — began popping into Everworld and lowering the property values. But even that was cool because one thing you can say about pagan gods: They're pretty tolerant of one another. Hey, why not? There are plenty of virgins for everyone to feed to the flames.

  And then the wrong guy walked in the door: Ka Anor. Ka Anor went too far even for the gods. He was way out of line. His deal was he ate other gods.

  Ka Anor and his Hetwan hordes were messing with the basic constitution of Everworld, which holds, right there in the first amendment, that gods can screw with humans, but no one screws with the gods. Congress shall make no law allowing some alien creep to do to the gods what the gods did to humans.

  The gods were outraged. Also scared. Real scared. So you'd imagine they might all unite to fight this new power. You'd think that, except that the gods are not necessarily the brightest bulbs on the Christmas tree. And what they lack in sheer stupidity they make up in shortsighted malice. Too many of the gods still think they're going to work old Ka Anor. Manipulate him. Use him to gain advantage.

  Well, I've seen Ka Anor. And I've seen Zeus and Huitzilopoctli and Neptune and Hel and even Athena, who is pretty decent compared to most gods, and that bunch is as likely to manipulate Ka Anor as the local Methodist church's Little League team is to take the Yankees down four straight in the World Series.

  Loki is actually the smartest of them in his own sick way: He just wants out. He wants out of Everworld and back into the real world. And he even has the way to do it: Senna, the witch, the gateway, a girl I once made out with back in the real world when I was still under the impression that she was just different and not different.

  So, anyway, as long as we're awake in Everworld we're in Everworld. Of course we're also in the real world, carrying on with our staggeringly normal lives amid the SUV's and Pottery Barns' and eighty-seven cable channels of Chicago's northern suburbs. When I fall asleep (or get knocked on the head by some freak-show nightmare) the Everworld me pops back into the real-world me to give real-world Christopher a CNN

  Breaking News update: "Dude! Guess what? Some freaking melted-candle-faced, snaggle-toothed, all-over-hairy giant just tried to Juicy Fruit your ass. Have a nice day."

  Which sometimes causes you to scream unfortunate words and leap all over the woman your girlfriend will be in twenty years.

  Anyway, so there are five of us if you count the witch, and I don't see how I can avoid counting her since she's the reason we're here without so much as a razor, a bar of soap, or a change of underwear.

  David Levin is our Fearless Leader, our Ulysses S. Grant. He wants to grow up to be Russell Crowe in Gladiator but without the beard. He's our very own hero. The man with the sword —

  Galahad's sword, no less. The man with the great big stick up his hinder. David "no booze, no babes, no party" Levin. David of the perpetually gritted teeth and manly clenched jaw.

  Don't get me wrong, I'm glad David's here. Hey, without him I'd be even more thoroughly and deeply screwed than I am. I'm still alive and bitching in large part because of General Davideus. But lord, the boy is a buzz-stomper.

  Then there's Jalil. Jalil, whose motto is, "I'm smarter than you." Jalil, the only person I've ever known who actually did the extra-credit reading. Possibly the only person who has never slept in math class. He's a prickly, touchy, superior, arrogant, condescending butt-spasm, he really is, but I'm getting so I like him. First and foremost because Senna hates him. Senna taunts and humiliates her half sister, April; she has contempt for me; she uses David like her own personal sock puppet; and all that's fairly normal for Senna. But she hates Jalil the way a Republican hates Bill Clinton. She hates him with the special hatred you reserve for someone who has slapped you around the parking lot in the past and may just do it again.

  You have to admire that. You don't really hate what you don't really fear. Senna is afraid of Jalil for some reason, and the enemy of my enemy is my friend, as they say in all the really squalid, hopeless, self-destructive corners of Earth.

  Finally, among the "normals" there's April. As much as Senna, shall we say, dislikes Jalil, that's how much April can't stand her half sister. April is sunshine to Senna's overcast, nice to her nasty, Ben Kenobi to her Anakin.

  She's a babe: about five cubic feet of lose-yourself-in-it red hair; the kind of wise, confiding, I'm-in-on-the-joke green eyes that give you the feeling that, hey, what the hell, give it a shot, she'll let you down easy.

  She's a wanna-be actor. A people collector. A friend magnet. A rare example of a person who can be religious and moral and all that without making a happy, decent, self-serving swine like me want to choke her.

  April loves to bust me. I love to be busted by her. There's absolutely no chance we'll ever be a couple. And yet, the optimist that I am, I figure to keep giving it a shot.

  Figured on that, up until the point when I saw Etain. That was her name. Etain.

  Chapter

  III

  After our water-breathing adventure in Atlantis we had washed up on a scruffy little beach of dark sand and gnarled driftwood, overhung by low bluffs beneath a glowering dark sky. The bluffs were cut by a brook that ran right into the sea carrying no great amount of water.

  We climbed the bluffs, something the giant did in one big step, and found ourselves in a lumpy, rolling landscape of stunted trees and mossy rocks. There were sheep grazing nearby. There were stone fences that looked more picturesque than functional. In the distance I saw a suggestion of a castle, a hint of a village.

  Etain led us up and over the damp, springy grass to a bend in the brook.

  I did not let Etain bathe me. Give me some credit. I'm not a complete dog. Besides, David wouldn't let me.

  But I let her show me where the stream formed a deep, still pool. A big elm tree, not too different from the one in my own front yard, but unique in this landscape, grew tall beside the brook. The pool was so still, so mirror-smooth that the tree was reflected in perfect detail.

  I nervously stripped while everyone ostentatiously turned away, and waded into water so cold it should have been solid, all the while resisting the illusion that I was really plunging into the branches of an inverted tree.

  Etain took my filthy clothes and rinsed them and slapped them on the rocks and rinsed them again and slapped them and finally hung them from a low branch.

  Which left me standing waist-deep in arctic runoff and wondering what happened if half your body Popsicled.

  Etain noticed my predicament, me shivering and clutching myself. She laughed her laugh and I smiled and Jalil smiled and April smiled and even David smiled. She had that kind of laugh.

  Senna did not laugh. Senna doesn't laugh a lot.

  Etain unwound a shawl from her shoulders and handed it to me, careful not to let it get wet. I did a nonchalant exit that involved advancing up out of the water while simultaneously adjusting the shawl lower and lower, all the while trying to look as cool as 007 in his tuxedo.

  The giant was stil
l there, still looking huge and scabby and a little sheepish, like a kid caught feeding his broccoli to the dog. Clearly the giant was under Etain's control. That fact made me pause. She was hot, Etain was, a red-haired, blue-eyed, creamy-skinned honey in a long, green, low-cut dress that showed more than a Victoria's Secret bra model bending over to pick up a quarter. But at the same time, this was Everworld, and this girl had a thirty-foot giant tugging at his forelock and digging his toe in the dirt.

  "Lorg is very sorry to have swallowed you up the way he did," Etain said to me. "Apologize to the boy, then, Lorg."

  The giant thought that over. Not as if he was deciding whether or not to obey, but rather as if it just took a while for the words to sink down into his brain, and longer still for him to figure out what they meant, and what he should do about it.

  But at last he said, "Most humble apologies, sir." And to everyone's amazement he actually stuck out one leg and executed an arm-sweeping bow. And what could I do but bow right back?

  People bow to you, it just brings out the counter-bow, like it or not.

  "I hopes his honor ain't too discommoded?" the giant rumbled, his hideous face a mask of hideous concern.

  "Who, me? Nah. I'll probably wake up screaming every night for the rest of my life, but hell, Lorg, I was doing that anyway. No hard feelings."

  "There, and that was generous, wasn't it, Lorg?" Etain said pleasantly.

  "I take it most kindly," the giant agreed with another bob of his big old rodeo-bull-sized head.

  "They are an impetuous people, the Fomorii giants," Etain explained. "They are charged now with defending the land from invaders. Of course they are meant to deal with Vikings and Saxons and the like, not helpless, pitiful, shipwrecked souls."

  "Where are we?" David asked. His sword was still drawn, held point down, but not sheathed.

  "Do you not know?" Etain laughed. "This is the home of the Tuatha De Danann. The sacred isle of the Daghdha. 'Tis upon the blessed shores of Eire you've landed."