DIANE DUANE - A Wizard Alone

His father looked up. Five billion channels and nothing on, he said in a kind of horrified astonishment.

The story of modern life, Kit said, resigned, and headed to the kitchen to gethimself a plate. Just be-cause a species is more scientifically advanced than us doesn t mean its TV is any better, believe me.

His father absorbed this assessment with a thoughtful look. Maybe that should make me feel better. I ll let you know. What did Tom have to say

It s complicated, Kit said. A missingpersons case.

And areyou likely to go missing his pop said.

Not right away, Kit said. I have to do some detective work here first.

Oh, my god, Kit s mama said, what are theydoing

Anything that could so seriously gross out Kit s mama, the nurse, was worth a look. Kit grabbed a plate and ducked back into the living room, looked at the writhing, thrashing, stridently colored image for a moment, then took the remote away from his mama and punched it for subtitles. Oh, that s what I thought, he said, after spending about ten seconds reading them. It sa soap .

Not of any brand I recognize, his mother said. She looked scandalized.

It s real basic, Mama, Kit said. Boy meets girl meets thing meets other thing. Boy loses girl loses other thing finds thing. Boy loses thing gets girl loses thing. Happily ever after He tossed the remote back to his mother.

She fielded it badly as she studied the screen for any signs of boys or girls, and looked like she was having trouble finding any, though there were plenty of things. Basic, you said

Old, old story, Mama. You should see some of these guys literature. Shakespeare would have loved it. Kit considered that briefly: His lit class had been doing the late Shakespeare comedies, and suddenly a whole set of opportunities opened out before him. Just imagineA Midsummer Night s Dream with ten or twelve extra genders

His mother raised her eyebrows, gave up on the soap, and started changing channels again. Doesn t this thing have an online channel guide she said.

I ll have a look at it later and let you know, Kit said.

He saw the look she threw at his pop. Are there cooking channels

Oh, yeah. Then Kit paused, having a horrible thought. On second thought, it might be smarter to avoid those. Some of them feature humans and not as the cooks.

The look on his mother s face made Kit wish he d kept quiet. She began changing channels with unusual speed. Kit raised his eyebrows and went back into the kitchen with the plate.

He was spooning out rice when his dad came back in and began rooting around in the silverware drawer in an aimless way that didn t fool Kit for a moment. Son, he said, very quietly, is therereally a cooking channel, uh, about us

Pop,there s lots of them.

His father looked shocked. But how is something like thatpermitted* .

Kit shrugged. You go where you shouldn t go, Kit said, and couldn t help grinning, youfind out stuff you shouldn t find out. Like how you taste in a sweet-and-sour sauce with galingale. The universe is full of little surprises.

I always have the feeling that there s a lot about this wizardry you re not telling me, his father said. Sometimes it worries me. Then come times like this when I m horribly glad about my ignorance. Just don t go places where you shouldn t go, okay

I try to avoid it, Kit said. Is it okay with you if I go toBaldwin in the next couple of days, though

His pop looked surprised. Baldwin No problem with that.

Thanks.

Kit brought his plate into the living room, where he sat down on the floor and watched his mother change channels one more time. Well,that s pretty, she said, sounding relieved.

Kit glanced up at the screen, chewing. Uh, Mama, he said, I m probably too young to be watching anything that explicit.

Her eyes widened. But, honey, it s just a big cloud of gas, or smoke, or She stopped, her eyes widening even more, then changed the channel six times in a row without stopping.

Kit grinned and turned his attention back to the chicken.

Investigations

Circuses even just the thought of them had always scared Nita when she was little. Later on, she had felt that the fear was ridiculous. Circuses were supposed to be so much fun for small children all the sparkle, glitter, and noise, the processions of elephants parading along trunk-by-tail, the blare of brass music, the daring acrobats and tumblers, the goofy clowns.

Yet it hadn t worked that way for Nita the first time she actually went to one. Where the other kids in the audience had laughed and clapped, she sat amid all the raucous noise feeling terribly unnerved. It wasn t so much being afraid that an acrobat would fall, that a lion would eat the lion tamer nothing so concrete or obvious. But the darkness, the gradually strengthening smells of sawdust, animal sweat, greasepaint, and canvas, the spotlighting that left too many other things purposely obscure while half-seen forms moved in those shadows, themselves concealed by the light all these slowly combined to suggest that something unexpected, something unavoidable, was going to happen. And that looming unknown frightened Nita badly. At intermission she d begged her parents to take her home.Dairine had cried at the thought of leaving, and so their mom had stayed with Dari while her father drove Nita back to the house.

That her dad had never pressed her for details about this was still one of the things Nita thought about when counting up the reasons she loved him. But even his silent support couldn t do anything about the nightmares thatfollowed, nightmares full of leering clown faces and the musky smell of big cats. Finally the nightmares faded away and left Nita wondering what in the world had been the matter with her. Yet she never went to another circus. And even now, sometimes the mere sight of a spotlight aimed at an empty floor, with darkness lying silent beyond it, was enough to induce in her a feeling of tremendous foreboding that would darken her soul for hours.

Sometimes she tried to work out in more detail why she d been so scared. She kept coming back to the clowns. To Nita, there was a fake quality about them, nothing genuinely humorous. It was strange to think that someone seriously thought that makeup could make you funny. But there was no question in Nita s mind that makeupcould make you scary. The stylized clown face, too generic, toocartoony : That really bothered her.The baggy, motley costume, disguising the real body shape so that it could have been a bare steel skeleton underneath instead of flesh and bone. The slapstickjokes, endlessly repeated, which were supposed to be amusingbecause of the repetition all these left Nita cold. There was something mechanical about clowns, something automatic, a kind of robot humor; and it gave her the creeps.

It was doing so again, right now, because here in the darkness, followed around by one of those sinister spotlights, was a typical clown act the clown riding around and around in circles on a ridiculously small bicycle, in ever decreasing circles. There was nothing funny about it to Nita. It was pitiful. Around and around and around, in jerky, wobbling movements, around and around went the clown. It had a painted black tear running down its face. The red-painted mouth was turned down. But the face under the white greasepaint mask was as immobile as a marble statue s, expressionless, plastered in place. Only the eyes were alive.They shouted, Ican t get off!I can t get off ! And, just this once, the clown didn t think it was funny, either.

Thedrumroll went on and on, as if for a hanging rather than a circus stunt. The chain of the bicycle rattled relentlessly in the silence inside the light. Beyond the light, in the darkness, the heartless crowd laughed and clapped and cheered. And through the sound of their applause, low, but building,came the growl of the tiger, pacing behind the bars, waiting its turn.

Thedrumroll never stopped. The clown rode in tighter and tighter circles, faster and faster. The wheels of the bike began to scream. The crowd shouted for more. Stop it, Nita yelled. Stop it! Can t you see it s killing him

As often as possible, growled the tiger. And never often enough.

The crowd roared louder. Stop it! Nita shouted back, but now they were drowning her out, too. Stop it!

STOP!

She was sitting up in the dark, alone. It took her a ragged three or four breaths to realize she was in her own room, in bed, and that her own shout had awakened her.

Nita sat still for a few moments, praying that she wouldn t hear anyone coming to find out if she was okay. She wasn t, but she still hoped no one would respond. There wasn t anyone in the house who d been sleeping well for a while now.

She stayed still for a long time. Mercifully, no one showed up, and Nita began to relax, realizing that she might have expected this outcome if she d really thought about it.Dairine , when she slept these days, slept hard, in utter exhaustion. Their dad lately had been doing much the same, a change from the previous month, when he had hardly slept at all. It didn t take a wizard to figure out that he d beenafraid to fall asleep, because of who he would, again and again,not find beside him when he woke up. Finally his body had overruled that kind of behavior and now was trying to sleep too much, to not wake up at all, if possible. Thereasons were thesame, and just thinking of them made Nita want to cry all over again.

Shelay back against the pillows and let her breath out at the thought of the dream.It s just me , she thought. She hated to describe it any further, for the next line of explanation would have been,Since Mom And she refused to blame her mother for it; her mom now had nothing further to do with pain. It was Nita s own pain that made her nights so awful. The shrink at school, the counselor at the hospital, both told her the same thing: Grief takes time. The pain discharges in a lot of different ways, in old repeated patterns, weird symbolic images, mental unrest. Try to stop it, and it just takes longer. Let it take its own time; let it go at its own speed.

Like I have a choice, Nita thought bitterly. She could have used wizardry to combat the sleep disturbances, but the manual had told her plainly that this would be counterproductive. Easing others pain is one thing; willfully trying to avoid experiencing one s own is another, and has its own price, too high for the intelligent wizard to pay. It was smarter to let the hurt discharge naturally, without interfering.

But these commonsense counsels were still no comfort in the middle of the night, when she was alone in the dark. All Nita could do was wipe her face repeatedly, dry her eyes on the pillow, and hope to fall asleep eventually. Lacking that, she d lie there and wait for dawn.

Nita lay there, almost seeing the eyes hidden in the exaggerated colors and shadows of the painted face, and squeezed her own eyes shut.It s just my pain in

disguise, she thought.Pain expressed as a symbol, one step away from the reality .

I wish this were over with. I wish life were normal again... But she knew that the old kind of normal was never going to come back. Somehow she was just going to have to make a new one.

Nita turned over to try to go back to sleep, but it took a long while: From the shadows of dream, those eyes kept watching her

The next day was Tuesday. Kit went through his early classes more or less mechanically. The problem of Tom s lost wizard was on his mind. Tracking him down and identifyinghim wouldn t be a problem the manual would be able to localize him and point him out when Kit was close enough.But what then he thought as the bell rang for fourth period. He picked up his backpack and walked out of his math class on his way to history.Do I just walk up to him, say, Hi,there. I m on errantry and I greet you. What s the problem Is it better to just take a good look at him from a distance, maybe