Diane Duane - A Wizard Alone

The sound of paws scrabbling up the steps was as distant as everything else. Kit watched the shining unreality forming around him, watched his bedroom fade away, a backdrop without meaning. Into that backdrop burst something that shone, a line of blue light around a dark creature’s collar. The creature looked up at him, the only gaze he could stand, the only eyes that didn’t hurt him. Boss, take the leash! Take it, put it around your wrist .

Kit couldn’t see the point, but the creature’s eyes were so beseeching that he did as he was told.

As he looped the other end of the line of light around his wrist, the world in which he was standing finally became totally irrelevant. Kit took the step forward into the real world, or into the one that had become real, and the black creature beside him stepped through, too—

“Kit,” his mama’s voice said from down the hall, “I’m going out now. You call me if anything comes up here. Can I bring you anything back on my meal break?”

No reply.

“Kit? Sweetie, are you asleep?”

No reply.

Kit’s mama came down the hall. “You know, I brought that cold medicine home, the one with the zinc in it,” she said. “I wonder if maybe you should just take some, so you can head this thing off—”

She stood in the doorway of his bedroom, looking in at the empty bed.

“Oh, no,” she whispered.

At Nita’s house, the phone rang. Her dad, sitting at the dining room table and working his way through the Sunday paper with a beer and a sandwich, got up and answered it.

“Hello? Oh, hi, Marina…No, he’s not, as far as I know. Wait a minute…”

Nita’s dad looked around the corner into the living room, where Nita was sitting on the rug, playing an extremely frustrated game of solitaire as relaxation from nearly an hour of utterly unsuccessful attempts at getting a simple “guess the card” trick to work. “Nita?” her dad said. “Is Kit here?”

Nita was surprised. “No.”

“His mom’s looking for him.”

Nita’s heart went cold inside her. “I thought he was going to be home all day today.”

“He’s not there, his mom says.”

Nita sat still for a moment. Kit ?

There was no answer.

She broke out in a sweat. There was no way to be absolutely sure where he was, but she thought she could guess. And it upset her to be right so quickly. “I don’t hear him nearby,” she said. “Wait a minute, Daddy.”

She went to get her manual, paged through it to the messaging section, and said to it, “Kit, where are you? Urgent!”

“Send message?” the manual page said.

“Send it!”

“Recipient is out of ambit. Please try again later.”

Nita swallowed. She got up and went into the dining room. As she did so, she suddenly started to hear something she hadn’t been able to hear in the living room; the sound of dogs howling a few streets away, more and more of them.

She took the phone from her dad. “Mrs. Rodriguez? It’s Nita. I just called him, but I don’t get any answer. And the manual says he’s not in this universe. He’s gone again.”

There was a long, frightened pause on the other end of the phone. “He said he wasn’t going to do that until Tom and Carl gave him the word,” Kit’s mama said. “But he really hasn’t been… himself, these past couple of days.”

That was exactly Nita’s worry at the moment: that Kit wasn’t himself, but somebody else. She had started wondering last night, as she wrestled with the cards, what possible effect autism might have on an abdal’s ability to be two places at one time. If that ability could start “slopping over” onto another party, one already susceptible to the abdal’s worldview, from having been inside it a few times—

She held still. I have got to keep my cool here , she thought. It’s the only way I’m going to find him

. “I’m going to go look for him,” Nita said. “It may take me a while to find him. I can’t do it the way he does it with Ponch; I’ve got to be asleep.”

She heard Kit’s mama take a long breath, the sound of someone else controlling herself as tightly as Nita was having to right now. “I have to go to work,” she said. “I’ll be back around midnight. But if you hear anything before then, will you call me? I think Kit gave you my work number.”

“Yeah,” Nita said. “Mrs. Rodriguez, please… don’t worry.” It’s going to he all right , Nita wanted most desperately to say, but she couldn’t say it: It might not be true.

“Okay,” Mrs. Rodriguez said. “Thank your dad for me, sweetie. Good-bye.”

Nita hung up the phone. Outside, faint but clear, the howling continued. Her father was looking at her in distress.

“Where is he?” he said.

Nita shook her head. “I don’t have a name for it, Daddy. It’s not another planet or anything like that. I wish it were, because it’d be easier to get to. It’s somewhere inside of Darryl, which means it’s closer to us in some ways, but in some ways much further off than anything that would just be way out in conventional space. And it’s a lot more dangerous, in its way. If Kit’s stuck in there, and I can’t get him out…“

She began to shake. Here it was, full-blown, what she’d been most afraid of — a crisis that she was terrified she wasn’t going to be able to handle. And you’re all alone on this one , she thought.

Dairine may be able to offer some support, but you’re going to be the one who has to figure out what to do with it. And if you can’t figure it out …

Her father saw the look on her face and came over to her, put his arms around her. “Nita,” he said. “Listen to me.”

She looked up at him, rather shocked at his tone of voice. It was unusually stern for him.

“You’re tough,” her dad said. “You’re tougher than you think. That’s what you need to hang on to now. That’s what I’ve been hanging on to the best I can, and as far as I can tell, it turns out to be true every time if you just don’t let the idea go. What you have to do now is take one thing at a time — don’t let the stress overload you. Will Tom or Carl know what to do? Call them.”

“Yeah,” Nita said, and went back to the phone, dialed it hurriedly. A moment later, Carl’s voice said, “Hello?”

“Carl,” Nita said, “we’ve got trouble. He couldn’t hold it. He’s gone again.”

Wizards tend not to swear, since the results are likely to be unfortunate if they slip into the Speech while doing it. Nita, however, distinctly heard several swearwords in Carl’s silence. “When did he leave?”

“It might have been just a few minutes ago.”

“Okay. Wait a second.”

Carl put the phone down. She could hear him going to the table, where his version of the manual usually lay hidden. She heard him flip one volume open and start going through it. Listening carefully, she could hear a hiss, the little breath-between-teeth noise that Carl made when there was trouble.

A moment later he picked up the phone again. “He’s out of ambit, all right,” Carl said. “And the energy signatures are too vague to track him with, in terms of getting an ID on a specific universe… even assuming I could do that. The universes Ponch has been finding are nontypical, as is his mode of transit; the normal wizardry-tracking routines won’t work. But this much we do have in our favor.

Ponch went with Eat.”

“I bet Ponch made Kit take him,” Nita said, feeling sure of this without knowing why. “Carl, I’ll go try to find them.”

“I wouldn’t do that right this minute,” Carl said. “They might still be in transit. I can’t tell. Give the situation an hour or two to settle.”