Loremaster Page 15

  This hole had been made by Agatha to imprison Vella. When Agatha tried to consume the Wishing World in fire the first time, Vella had stopped her. When Agatha tried the second time, Vella came again, but this time, Agatha tricked her and shoved her down this hole, trapping her without the spinner or the hourglass. Vella might have died here, except something happened. Flicker was born.

  The two parts of Connie’s personality fought, and their battle raged throughout the caverns under the volcano. Flicker was strong, but Agatha was stronger. Finally, Flicker had to run, and she ran here to find Vella and enlist her as an ally. She came to this place, which had no throne at the time, and jumped into the hole. Flicker told the hands that she was Agatha and ordered them to reverse their efforts. Because she was, in a sense, the other half of Agatha, the hands believed her, and carried Vella and Flicker up and out.

  Together, Vella and Flicker defeated Agatha and locked her away behind the giant steel door that I had destroyed.

  I opened my eyes and smiled. I was getting the hang of this.

  I pulled out my pen and wrote: I will seem like Agatha to all red hands.

  I willed the message to go into myself and the walls of the prison. The golden glow rippled out, and the hands shot out of the wall all at once. Each touched fingers to thumb and pointed at me like a thousand sock puppets without socks.

  “Wow,” I said.

  They “looked” at each other in confusion.

  “I mean, cleanse. Bad bad people. Witches and things.” I put an arm firmly around André. “You ready?”

  He nodded weakly. How long had Jimmy kept him down here?

  “Take us out,” I commanded.

  The hands lifted us up. They pushed on our feet, our legs, our backs, and our butts, and gave us to the next set of hands, all the way to the top. Now if you haven’t had the unique experience of a hundred disembodied hands grabbing you all over the place and lifting you up out of a pit, I wholeheartedly recommend it.

  Except no. I don’t. It’s totally weird.

  In moments, the hands brought us to the top and pushed us gently onto the throne. The hands retreated, sinking back into the walls of the hole, becoming little red bumps again. The throne swiveled back, covering the prison.

  I slumped against the throne in relief. The air up here was a cool breeze compared to down in the hole.

  André’s eyelids flickered, and I hugged him. “I got you,” I said. “I got you back.”

  “Lorelei,” André murmured. “I am sorry. That I was weak. We would not be here if I had not . . . When Jimmy made his offer, I should have come to you. I knew that he was not good, but . . . my Flimflams. I thought if I could just see them again, I could . . . But now they are all dead. My fault.”

  “Don’t say that. We’ll find your Flimflams.”

  He shook his head. “I could not stop him. He meant to kill me, but the Watchdog came. I fled into the Kaleidoscope Forest. I meant to come back for my Flimflams, but Vella Wren found me. She said that you must—”

  “The hourglass. Yes. Do you have it?”

  He nodded. “I do. And Vella?”

  “She is . . . gone,” I said.

  He nodded at that as well, and he didn’t seem surprised.

  “Did you know? That Jimmy killed her?”

  “Did you . . . defeat Jimmy?” André answered my question with a question.

  “It’s on my list. I have a long list. We also have Agatha, and I think she needs stopping first.”

  “Who is . . . ?” He shook his head. “Never mind. We must hurry.”

  A spot glowed on André’s chest, visible beneath his shirt. It became the outline of an hourglass the size of a house key. The glowing hourglass slid across his shoulder and down his arm. It slid underneath his skin to the palm of his hand, where it surfaced and became an actual little hourglass.

  “Holey moley,” I whispered.

  “This,” he said, “is for you.”

  Twenty-Five

  How Connie Became A Three-In-One Shampoo

  As André passed the hourglass to me, the lights dimmed in the chamber, and a red glow grew in the archway below. Agatha walked into the room, right to the edge of the lava lake. She stared at me in disgust.

  “Squeak,” said Squeak.

  The lava lake roiled and erupted upward in columns. Agatha stepped onto one, which became a wave and carried her toward us, growing taller as it came.

  “You will understand in the end,” she said. “When you have been purified, you will understand.”

  “By purified, she means dead,” I told André.

  “This is Agatha?” he asked. “What are you going to do?”

  “What I should have done in the first place. I’m going to help her.”

  “You are going to what?” His eyes got big. I mean, not Connie Cobblestone big, but big for André.

  Agatha’s wave reached the island—turning back into a rising, bubbling lava pillar—and shot upward to reach the high throne.

  I grasped the hourglass in one hand, and with my other hand I wrote: Lorelei saw Connie’s story.

  The hourglass flashed, and everything went white.

  I could hear nothing. I’d never been in a place—any place—that had absolutely no noise. I felt like I was falling. Ever been to Splash Mountain at Disneyland? That big drop at the end where it seems like you’re going to fall out of the fake-log? Yeah. Like that.

  There were no walls and there was no ceiling, only a white light coming from somewhere. The white faded, replaced by red stone with crevices and crests. Where was I?

  As soon as I thought that, the stone came into full focus, and I realized I was staring at the cavern wall of Flicker’s throne room, except I was tiny. Translucent shimmers drifted on the air.

  Agatha was enormous, the size of an entire mountain, but it wasn’t just her this time. The lava columns she made were also mountain-sized, and frozen.

  I’m tiny. The hourglass shrank me. I held up my hands to look at them, but nothing came up in front of my eyes.

  Flippin’ phantom phalanges. I have no body!

  Time had stopped. Not in that “there’s only one hand on the Veloran Clock and it always points to now” way, but in the “Agatha can’t move and I can” way. Except I had no body.

  As soon as I thought about my body, I saw myself standing next to André, the hourglass clenched in one fist, pen in the other. I was almost as giant as Agatha.

  My black hair was wild and tangled, flung back from a flushed, sweaty, freckled face. I gripped the hourglass like it was a knife handle and my blue eyes blazed.

  Double-take with a mind warp on top.

  Do I really look like that? No wonder Jimmy was scared of me. And, well, now it was easy to see how Agatha thought I was possessed by demons.

  Okay. So I’m small and I’m not actually me, except for my brain, which seems to be me. Are you me, brain? Say something “me.”

  Let’s waste a little more time on useless questions, shall we?

  Okay, that sounded like me.

  I thought of walking over to myself, but I didn’t have any legs to walk with.

  I am over there, I thought. And suddenly, I was halfway inside my own face, staring up my giant nostril.

  Gross. Back up, back up!

  I floated backward away from my big, scary face. My teeth looked like horse teeth.

  Okay, note to self. I can float toward things, and actually go inside things.

  So that was what the hourglass did. Pretty cool. Vella could stop time whenever she wanted. That had to be handy. It also made me wonder how in the heck Jimmy ever got the best of her.

  Which, in turn, gave me a chill. Because if Jimmy ever got his hands on this, he could just stop time, kill everyone he wanted to, then start time again.

  For me, though, it meant I could take a breather and sort things out before dealing with the single-minded Puritan who wanted to torch me.

  Go into Agatha, I thought.

&nb
sp; I drifted toward that enormous caricature of a face. I shut my eyes. Except no, I didn’t. No eyes to shut. And that was really weird. Try closing your eyes and having nothing happen. So I got to see her get larger and larger like a shuttle approaching the moon. Finally, I touched her pale skin and went inside.

  Suddenly I was in the town square of an old timey village. In the center was a well with a winch on top of it. A bucket rested on the side of its circular wall. To the left of it was Flicker, locked in one of those wooden things that traps people’s heads and wrists between two chunks of thick wood. Stocks. She was in the stocks. She had drooped to her knees, and her head and hands hung limp.

  Beyond the square, where there should have been a town, everything dissolved into white mist.

  I moved closer to Flicker and went inside her. Suddenly, I felt everything that Flicker was feeling. Loss, failure, exhaustion, pain. Anger.

  Flicker? I thought to her, but there was no response. She couldn’t tell I was here any more than anyone else who was frozen in time. I backed out of her, looking at her hanging there forlornly. Okay, so this is how Connie perceived the inside of her head. I was guessing that all three of them were in here somewhere,: Connie the original, Flicker, her angel, and Agatha, her devil. And the angel was locked up. That didn’t bode well. That was probably why Agatha was running amok.

  I raised my hand to write—

  No hands. Are we getting the notion yet, Lore? Come on.

  Show me your story. Take me to the moment right before you entered the Wishing World.

  The white mist moved back, revealing an entire town of wooden houses with stone chimneys. Everything had been misty before, but now it was all very real. I could see the wood slats of the nearest house wall, the seams in the cobblestones underneath me.

  Beyond Flicker, I heard sobbing, and Connie burst in to view, running hard. She came up one of the many streets that met at the well. She ran like a pack of wolves chased her, but there was no one there. She wore the same dress she did in the Wishing World, but her little buckled shoes were scuffed and covered in mud. She ran right past Flicker—

  Wait. Flicker was gone now. The stocks were empty, and the white misty light was gone. A bright crescent moon shone overhead and more stars than I’d ever seen filled the sky. Wind ruffled the weeds between the cobblestones and moved the rope that connected to the bucket on the well.

  This wasn’t just the way Connie saw the inside of her head anymore. I’d been sucked into an actual memory. That’s why Flicker was gone, why the white mist had vanished, and why details of everything had become as lifelike as if they were real. This was something that had actually happened to her before the Wishing World.

  Connie rushed past me.

  Follow her.

  I moved after Connie, and she ran until she was standing in front of a forest, breathing hard. One look, and I knew this was an Earth forest. It was dark and the trees were different greens, no purples or oranges or silvers. Overhead, the crescent moon glowed white. No white lines across the sky. No big red rip.

  Connie slowed as she came to the forest, fearful of the tall trees as if this was a place she knew she shouldn’t be. She glanced back the way she’d come, then at the forest.

  Her attention was caught by a shining silver stone on the path.

  Hello. That’s a comet stone if I ever saw one.

  Connie picked it up.

  As soon as she did, HuggyBug appeared, and the normal Earth forest became the Kaleidoscope Forest, with its wild multi-colored trees.

  Connie screamed, turned to run, but then HuggyBug was behind her. He laid down on his stomach and put his head on his paws.

  She watched him, trapped between this giant monster and the scary forest. But HuggyBug didn’t do anything else. He just waited, looking as cute as I’d ever seen him look.

  That calmed Connie down, and she walked up to him slowly. With a trembling arm, she reached out, and HuggyBug let her pet him. He licked her arm. She looked into his eyes, saw her reflection, and drew a breath. The Connie reflected in HuggyBug’s eyes stood atop a burning pyre, unharmed. She was taller, older, and she was pulling another person—an adult—from the flames.

  HuggyBug vanished and appeared at the edge of the forest, waiting for her. She spared a glance behind her, for whatever had been chasing her, then followed him into the trees.

  Take me further back. Take me to the reason that Connie was running.

  The forest faded and suddenly I was in a barn. Wooden chairs of different sizes had been pushed next to each other, with dozens of people sitting in them. It was daylight outside, but gloomy in the barn. There was a man with a long, white wig sitting on a chair on top of a pallet that had been raised above everyone else’s seats. It was a primitive courtroom, and that guy was the judge.

  All the women wore those serious black and white dresses that Agatha wore. The men wore black as well, except shorts gathered at the knees and white tights down to their shoes. Everyone seemed stern, except for the poor man and woman kneeling before the judge. Their wrists and shoulders had been bound back against posts so that they were forced to face the judge.

  This is an actual Salem witch trial.

  To the left of the judge stood Connie and five girls about her age. They were corralled together in a little space that had rails around it, like horses. Two of them were rolling their eyes back and bobbing their heads like they didn’t have control over their necks. The other three were pointing at the bound man and woman, making little sounds like chirping birds. Connie stared at the accused witches with huge eyes.

  “Did you see your parents at the well yesterday?” A chilling voice spoke, and Agatha walked toward her, except this Agatha wasn’t twisted into a giant paper-mâché-head with enormous hands and feet. This was what Agatha must have looked like as an actual person: a tall, hook-nosed woman with black hair pulled tight back into a bun. Her eyes glittered like chips of onyx in dark caves beneath her eyebrows. Her skin was sallow, and her thin, white lips turned down at the corners. She looked like, if you bit into her, she’d taste like a lemon.

  She regarded the man and woman on their knees, her face impassive. The woman was sobbing, shaking her head and looking at Connie. “It will be all right,” she said. “It’s going to be all right, Constance.”

  “Mommy—”

  “Answer my question, child,” Agatha said.

  “Tell them, Constance,” the bound woman said. “Say what they want you to say.”

  “You will hold your tongue,” Agatha snapped, and Connie’s mother hung her head.

  Connie was shaking, and her eyes were so wide. “I . . . They went to the well.”

  “And they cursed it,” Agatha said.

  “No! They went there every day,” Connie shouted. “Just like everyone went there every day—”

  “The Lord helps us through you, child,” Agatha said, looming over Connie, ignoring her pleas. “The sickness spread from water they touched.” Then she addressed the judge and the gathered villagers. “We cannot suffer a witch to walk among us. If we do, we let evil magics into our village, and we will all be damned.” Each and every one of them nodded agreement, some fearfully, some with bloodlust glinting in their eyes. Agatha knew she’d won. She’d won before she even started speaking. “We must cleanse these witches by fire. We will send them back to the hell from which they came.”

  No, I shouted silently.

  The memory faded, and I was spared seeing what Agatha did to her victims, spared the moment that had scrambled Connie’s brain into a boiling lake of lava. Connie’s true self had run from Agatha, the real Agatha, centuries ago. She had wanted to stop Agatha, but was so completely outmatched, she could never have won. She was unbelievably strong to have even run. How did you fight for normal when the whole world was crazy?

  I realized that she’d never really escaped, though. The actual Agatha was long dead, but Connie had kept her vicious personality alive inside herself, a perpetual punishmen
t that she believed she deserved. And when she came to the Wishing World, where anything can happen, Connie lost control of her fears. They became real. She made Agatha real, a larger-than-life, bobble-headed demon.

  I wondered if Agatha had originally resided inside the same body as Connie just like Flicker, popping out every now and then.

  It would make sense, and I could envision Vella extracting Agatha like a poison and locking her behind the big, iron door, like paring away a bad spot on an apple and sticking it in a box. Except I broke the box, and when I did, the three pieces of them had reunited in one body, with Agatha in control—

  The story was over, and I slammed back in my own body. The white light receded. Agatha towered above me on her pillar of lava, which was dripping again.

  “The world deserves to be free of your stain,” she said. “If we do not cleanse it, all will fall into sin and witchcraft. There is no sun beyond that horizon.”

  “You’re the one in the dark place,” I said. “You think what you’re doing is right, but history proved you wrong a long time ago. Connie deserves a life free of you.”

  I knew what to do. It was as clear as my reflection in Theron’s armor. Connie had trapped herself in her own nightmare, stuck herself in her own mental snowglobe of fear and fire. I could help her find her real story. I could help her live it. And I could work with the story of another to get it done.

  Agatha opened her mouth to spit hell and damnation at me . . .

  But my words burned first.

  Theron came to my rescue.

  Twenty-Six

  The Real Mirror Man

  “See?” Theron said, picking up the little cage with broken wires twisting in every direction. It had taken him some time to wrangle the broken cage closer with his rope, but he’d finally done it. Grappling the torch he’d used to light up the Flickapaws should have been so much harder, but it hadn’t been. Theron suspected he had gotten as lucky as a boy could have gotten with that throw.