neetha Napew - The Paths Of The Perambulator

“Go ahead, my boy,” Clothahump urged him. “You might as well make the attempt. I am as uncomfortable with the present circumstances as anyone else. With my thoughts as unsettled as they are, it is difficult to think clearly.”

“I’ll take care with the lyrics,” he assured the wizard. So he would—if he could think of some. Mudge had a point. Their present situation was not one your average performer would think about when sitting down to compose a song.

Something he’d picked up while poking around the Department of Ethnic Music might work, but he’d taken that course years ago and didn’t exactly practice African chants or Indonesian gamelan tunes daily. That wasn’t the kind of music likely to put him on Billboard’s Top 100. His rock repertoire was considerably more extensive and up-to-date, but for the life of him he couldn’t recall anything that related even vaguely to changing humans into animals. Not that the lyrics had to be that precise. As he’d learned, it was the feel of the song, the driving emotion behind it that mattered most of all when one was spellsinging.

There was one song that might accomplish what the perambulator had already done. Suppose he sung the lyrics backward? Crazy—but no crazier than their present predicament. He knew the song well enough, cleared his throat, and began to play.

It didn’t sound right, but neither was his friends’ situation. Perhaps that was appropriate. Certainly something was, for as he passed the halfway point, there was a shudder in the air, that familiar queasiness in his belly, and a sudden haziness before his eyes, like waking up slowly on a Sunday morning. He kept singing, wanting to finish the song, and when he concluded with the opening stanza and emerged from that wonderful performer’s trance, he saw with relief that it had worked exactly as he’d hoped. The perturbation had been reversed and everything had snapped back to normal. His friends were his friends once more.

“Me! I’m me again!” Mudge yelped as he jumped two feet into the air. He ran his fingers through his thick brown fur. “I’ll never knock bein’ meself ever again.” He was prancing around like the kid who’d just discovered he’d won the special dessert at the school picnic.

Dormas had been restored to her powerful, four-legged form. “Disgusting experience. What did you sing, young one?”

“Rick Springfield song—’We All Need the Human Touch’ —only I sang it backward. Worked as well as I could’ve hoped.” He beamed at his restored companions.

Clothahump had his shell back. Sorbl was already in the air, driving through dives and barrel rolls. Colin flexed his short, muscular arms, wiggled his oversize ears, and rubbed his damp black nose.

“Much better, Spellsinger.” He frowned at Jon-Tom. “Uh-oh. My friends, we’ve got ourselves another problem. I guess we ought to have expected it.”

“Damn,” said Mudge, staring in the same direction as the koala, “do you think we’ll ever be free o’ this thing’s insidious effects, Your Wizardness?”

Clothahump, too, was gazing with interest at the center of attention. “Not until we find it and free it from its prison.”

Jon-Tom tried to turn and look in the same direction as his friends, until it occurred to him that they were not staring past him but at him. At the same time he became aware that something was still not quite right. He swallowed. His spellsong had done everything he’d asked of it—and more.

Mudge studied him critically, lips pursed, hands on furry hips. “Well, Your Lordship, wot are we goin’ to do about this?”

Standing there before them and looking very forlorn indeed was a tall, very slim howler monkey. It wore Jon-Tom’s indigo shirt and lizardskin cape and boots, and it held tightly to the duar. Looking down at himself, Jon-Tom took note of his long arms and curving, prehensile tail. He flexed his mouth, feeling the thick curving lips and the sharp canines inside.

“That were some spellsong, mate,” the otter told him sympathetically.

“Personally I think he looks better this way,” said Colin. He stepped forward and drew his sword.

Jon-Tom retreated a step. “Hey, I can’t look that bad, can I?”

“You deserve to see yourself as your friends see you.” The koala held the highly polished blade upright.

Jon-Tom gazed into the narrow mirror thus presented for his use. His jaw dropped when he got a glimpse of himself. It dropped quite a ways, in fact, much farther than any human jaw could have fallen.

“Oh, my God. What have I done?”

“Right by us,” Mudge said, “but maybe not so good by yourself.”

Jon-Tom continued to stare at the reflection in the (flat of Colin’s sword. He’d gone and done it for sure this time) Until now the only one who’d ever been able to make a monkey out of him had been an attractive senior in his morning class on torts. She’d stood him up twice on successive weekends. Now he’d managed to better her efforts, physically as well as mentally.

“I’ve got to try to sing myself back.”

“Wait a minim, mate. You can’t use that same song again or you’re liable to put the rest of us right back to where we were before.”

“But that’s the only appropriate song I know.”

“Then you will have to try something else, my boy,” Clothahump told him. “My powers are useless in this matter. I cannot help you. Only you can help you. But you must figure out a way to help yourself without harming us. That is only right.”

“I know, but I’ve used so many songs. I’m tired, and I’m sick of these damn changes. I don’t know what else to sing.”

“You’ll find somethin’, mate.” Mudge tried to encourage his friend. “You always do. Just try singin’, maybe, and you’ll likely ‘it on the right tune.”

“I don’t know. It seems awfully haphazard.”

But he didn’t know what else to do. He didn’t want to change his friends back into their unbearable human shapes any more than he wanted to remain a skinny simian with his knuckles dragging on the ground. There seemed no way out. Maybe Mudge was right. Maybe he should just sing whatever came to mind, whatever pleased him the most. He never felt more whole, more complete, than when he was singing. Maybe that was all it would take.

It was so damned unfair, though. Really, he was nothing but an ordinary and not too bright law student and would-be rock musician misplaced in time and space, and here these people kept expecting him to perform miracles. Which he’d done, time and time again, to help out this one or the other.

Now, when he was the one in need of assistance, what did they suggest? That he help himself. They couldn’t do a damn thing for him. All right, then, he could damn well help himself, and to blazes with this whole unsettled, unnatural world!

He swung the duar around across his chest, clutching it to him with those impossibly long arms. His attenuated fingers easily spanned both sets of strings as he began to sing. So involved was he in his own pique, so mesmerized by his honest fury that he forgot just what he’d turned into.

There is nothing in the animal kingdom that has the proportionate lung power of a howler monkey. It has a voice that carries for miles, over mountains and across dense forest. Backed by the duar and combined with the anger Jon-Tom was feeling, the resultant explosion of sound was magnified and sharpened by the magic of his spellsinging.

So what emerged from his throat was not a passionate plea for restoration so much as it was a primal concussion, a sound so raw and powerful that Mudge and Clothahump, who happened to be standing in the line of lyrical fire, were blown off their feet. The wizard retreated into his shell. Dormas was knocked to her knees. Sorbl instinctively took to the air, only to find himself fighting for balance in the grasp of the small hurricane Jon-Tom was producing. It blew him up over the trees and out of sight down the far side of the hill.