The Stranger's Shadow Read online

  “Max, if you want to, we can ask them to put up a second bed in my room,” Melifaro said, his voice quavering. “You won’t survive here.”

  “Believe it or not, I like it,” I said, laughing. “So don’t fret, I won’t be using your armoire. Besides, I get a warm, tickling sensation when I think of how I’m going to stomp around in my boots on your ceiling right after you fall asleep. I like pacing the floor.”

  “And I sleep like a log,” said Melifaro. “So stomp all you want.”

  “We’ll see what kind of tune you’ll be singing tomorrow morning,” I said. “Let’s go eat now. Our food is probably getting cold again. The next thing we know, they’ll whisk it away to warm it up again, and it will go on and on until dawn.”

  “It’s so surprising to hear words of wisdom coming from your mouth sometimes,” said Melifaro. And we went downstairs.

  The hospitable red-haired innkeeper was waiting for us in the company of a pleasant-looking woman with completely gray hair and a young, ruddy complexion. That must have been Bemboni, who had warmed up our food. Five clay pots and two large wooden plates stood on one of the tables. The woman was inspecting the crown I had given to the innkeeper with unconcealed curiosity. It seemed she didn’t get the chance to see money very often.

  Our entrance distracted the woman from the coin. Now she was staring at us with the impudence of an ill-mannered child. When we began eating, the woman’s beautiful eyes opened even wider. The red-haired man gazed at us with similar intensity. At first, their staring annoyed me, but soon I was able to filter it out. If they wanted to study my manner of chewing food, let them stare all they wanted, I thought.

  The food—stewed meat and vegetables with an unusual spicing of wild herbs—was decent, although I couldn’t quite fathom why the plump man thought he knew how to cook five different dishes. To my taste, all the pots contained approximately the same dish.

  “Do you have any beverages?” said Melifaro.

  “I have a kossu herb liqueur,” said the man. “Bemboni, could you go fetch it from the cellar?”

  The gray-haired lady got up from her stool and disappeared behind the door.

  “What’s that?” said Melifaro.

  “It’s delicious, and then it becomes really pleasant,” said the innkeeper.

  “Can you make kamra?” I said.

  “Oh, yes, and I’m good at it, too. That tall man you were talking to, he had three mugs of it,” the innkeeper boasted. “Except that he refused to pay for it. But he didn’t criticize it, either.”

  “I see. Well, if he didn’t criticize it, could you make some for me?” I said.

  “I already have. I’ll warm it up,” the innkeeper said, and went into the kitchen.

  “Are you too scared to taste his liqueur?” said Melifaro.

  “You’d be scared, too, if you were me. If it turned out it had the same effect on me as your Soup of Repose, then I wouldn’t envy anyone here. Including myself.”

  “Ah, that’s right. You’ve got those quirks.”

  “Quirks, yes. I’ve got lots of them. Do you know how my affair with Tekki began?”

  “I’m sure it was nothing like normal people begin their affairs,” said Melifaro, laughing.

  “Right you are, mister. Tekki gave me some local potion and killed me.”

  “Oh, that explains the smell. I’ve been puzzling over it, and now it turns out you’re just an ordinary decomposing corpse.” Melifaro prepared to laugh and then stopped himself short. “Wait, are you serious?”

  “Dead serious. Although then Juffin arrived and brought me back to life. It’s going to take him much longer to get here, so I think I’ll pass. Death is a nasty business. I didn’t like it one bit.”

  “Some life you’ve got, buddy,” said Melifaro. “Now I’ll tie you up and gag you myself if you decide to taste that liqueur.”

  “Deal,” I said, helping myself to more stew. “You, on the other hand, can knock yourself out on it. In fact, gulp it all down.”

  “Do you remember what happened to you after you died?” said Melifaro.

  “Praise be the Magicians, I remember almost nothing,” I said, my mouth full. “But I do remember the process of dying itself. A most unpleasant experience. Here’s a piece of advice for you, buddy: try to become immortal. On second thought, forget it. I’m sure everyone has his own death. Maybe yours will be a cute young lady with a corpulent bust. That’s more like your style.”

  The rosy-faced woman returned and put a small pitcher and a tall, thin ceramic glass on our table. She blushed but managed to say, “It’s a hundred-year-old kossu herb liqueur. We try not to waste it. We only give it to people who give us money.”

  “It’s great to be rich! Thank you, miss,” said Melifaro and made a gallant bow.

  He took a cautious whiff of the contents of the pitcher, poured a little into his glass, and took a sip.

  “It’s really good,” he said. “Poor Sir Nightmare. It’s so sad to be a monster from another World. No fleeting pleasures for you, I guess.”

  “Don’t worry about me,” I said, smiling. “I’ll make up for it. As for pleasure, I have more than I can handle. I’ve always been a lousy hedonist.”

  “The words you use sometimes . . .” said Melifaro. He shook his head as though I had been cursing left and right for three hours straight in the company of several dozen frightened women and children of the upper classes.

  The innkeeper came back with a large mug of kamra for me. The kamra wasn’t any good. Kofa was right when he refused to pay for it. He probably didn’t criticize the innkeeper for it only because he knew it was too late for the poor fellow to learn how to make a good mug of it. Still, it was better than nothing. I leaned back, resting my back against the warm wooden wall, and lit up. It felt great.

  Melifaro finished his pitcher in no time. Judging from his expression, the effects of the mysterious potion were not much different from those of regular Jubatic Juice.

  “Now it’s best not to go outside until the morning,” the innkeeper told him suddenly. “After such a big helping of the kossu herb liqueur, I always become afraid of darkness, just like a child.”

  “Huh?” said Melifaro. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I just get very scared, is all.”

  “How quaint,” I said. “Do you want me to walk with you to the outhouse, sonny?”

  “No,” Melifaro grumbled. “I want to go to bed.”

  “That’s a sound idea,” I said. “Even I want to go to bed. Some day it has been, eh?”

  We said goodbye to the innkeeper and Bemboni and went upstairs.

  At the door to his room, Melifaro suddenly froze, hesitating.

  “Max,” he said, pulling a fold of my looxi. “That red-haired fellow wasn’t lying. I don’t feel like going in the room.”

  “Ha!” I said. “But it’s not dark in there. There’s a candle burning.”

  “Right, but it’s still dark in the corners.” Melifaro was becoming difficult. “Max, could you sit with me for a while?”

  “I’d love to, but I feel like smoking and I know you can’t stand the smell,” I said.

  “We’ll open the window,” said Melifaro. He was adamant.

  “Are you pulling my leg?”

  “I’m not, I swear. I’m really scared. A hole in the heavens above that fat joker and his poison! I’ve never been scared of darkness before in my whole life. Even in my early childhood.”

  We went into Melifaro’s room.

  “I don’t think anyone’s afraid of darkness in his early childhood,” I said, settling down by the window. “The fear comes later, when a nanny tells you spooky stories about the bogeyman that gobbles up misbehaving boys and girls who don’t want to go to bed.”

  “Goodness me!” said Melifaro. The fear in his eyes was very real. “Is this what actually happens in your homeland? A bogeyman that eats children seems even scarier than a mad werewolf. Hey, he won’t come for us, will he?”

&nb
sp; “Of course he won’t,” I said, laughing. “The bogeyman doesn’t exist, I’m telling you. He’s a made-up character, along with many others from spooky ghost stories.”

  “What other spooky ghost stories?” said Melifaro.

  He clearly felt torn between his craving for new information and the desire to stick his fingers in his ears lest he hear another word of it.

  I was beginning to have a great time. Fate was giving me a unique chance to scare Sir Melifaro with a silly ghost story. I thought it would be unwise of me to pass up such a rare opportunity. Still, I felt sorry for Melifaro’s poor drugged head and decided to tell him the least harmful one.

  “Have you heard the one about the Black Hand?” I said in a typical spooky-tale voice.

  “The Black Hand? Just a hand? Without a body? Yikes!”

  To my utter delight, Melifaro jumped out of the bed and sat next to me.

  “Listen then,” I began, suppressing my laughter. “It is the story of a little girl who is at home all alone at night because her parents have gone to a party. And then the radio turns on all by itself. You know what a radio is, don’t you?”

  “Yes, I’ve seen it in films,” Melifaro said in a wooden tone. “It’s not supposed to turn on by itself, right? You need to press the button.”

  He moved even closer and clung to my stool as though I were the dearest and closest thing to him in the Universe.

  “Right,” I continued. “So the radio turns on by itself and a voice comes on saying, ‘Little girl, little girl, the Black Hand is walking down your street. Little girl, little girl, the Black Hand is entering your house. Little girl, little girl, the Black Hand is coming up the stairs.’”

  I spoke in howling intonations, drawing the vowels, just like my cousin, from whom I had first heard the story of the Black Hand. I had barely turned five and remember being paralyzed with fear.

  Melifaro was grinding his teeth and clenching my wrist.

  “‘Little girl, little girl, the Black Hand is knocking on your door,’” I said in a demonic whisper.

  Melifaro gave out a single, constrained moan.

  And then we heard quiet knocking on the door. Now it was my turn to moan and jump.

  “Max, there it is!” Melifaro said in a hoarse voice.

  “What?”

  “The Black Hand! It’s coming to get us.” He was absolutely serious.

  The knocking came again.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “I told you the silliest ghost story I’ve ever heard. That must be the innkeeper. He brought you another pillow or something.” I looked at the door and said in an angry tone, “Come in!”

  “No, don’t!” said Melifaro.

  But it was too late. The door opened with a long drawn-out chilling creak, just as it was supposed to in scary stories. In the doorway stood a gigantic black hand. Just a hand, without body or head. The sight was horrifying.

  Before I had time to realize what I was doing, I snapped the fingers of my left hand and launched a Lethal Sphere. A little ball of bright-green light flew toward our visitor. Instead of destroying it, however, the Sphere went right through the monstrous extremity and hit the door behind it. Then the Sphere grew momentarily, became transparent, and disappeared.

  At first I thought that Melifaro and I were sharing the same hallucination. The hand was approaching us, slowly but surely. Deep inside, I was sure it wasn’t a hallucination. It was an actual, factual monster, dangerous and invincible. I wish I knew why I was thinking that.

  And then it dawned on me.

  “I can’t kill it,” I said. “I can’t kill it because it’s the incarnation of your fear, not mine. But you can kill it. Easy. Just don’t be afraid of it. You’re not afraid of it. You’re not afraid of anything. Ever. You’re the most heroic fellow in the Unified Kingdom. And it’s not you, it’s the darned liqueur in your stomach that’s fearing it. But you’ve got a lot more than a stomach. Such as your bright, brilliant head. Actually, this Black Hand is funny. It’s hilarious. Look, look at it. Imagine this thing dropping by General Boboota’s office!”

  “Boboota’s office?” said Melifaro and gave out a nervous laugh.

  The next second he burst out laughing, let go of my poor hand, and jumped up. He folded his hands as though he were holding a Baboom slingshot.

  “Boom!” he yelled and made a graceful gesture with his right hand.

  His impression of firing a Baboom was so perfect that I could almost see the trajectory of the tiny explosive projectile. The “hallucination” disappeared at once, as though it had never existed.

  “Brilliant!” I said. “Now that’s true magic.”

  “Thanks, Monster.” Melifaro fell in his bed. “All thanks to you. Once you thought of General Boboota, the vision disappeared. You were right, one shouldn’t experiment with unfamiliar drinks. I think I’m completely healed now. You don’t have to babysit me anymore. In fact, you shouldn’t, because I’m really falling asleep.”

  “Yeah, but now I need you to babysit me,” I said, “after all that just happened. Unlike you, I’m not the most heroic fellow in the Unified Kingdom. I don’t need a Landaland herb liqueur to get scared.”

  “It’s your own fault, though. You shouldn’t have tried to scare me to death,” said Melifaro. “I’ve heard about Magician’s Horror many times before, but I never thought it would happen to me.”

  “What’s Magician’s Horror?” I said.

  “What you just witnessed. When a powerful magician becomes truly afraid of something nonexistent, that ‘something’ materializes and becomes as existent as it gets. It can be pretty dangerous, too. Only its conjurer can destroy it, and he can’t do it while he’s afraid of it. If you hadn’t reminded me of General Boboota, we’d have been in big trouble now. By the way, I imagined that the Hand came into Boboota’s bathroom at home rather than his office.”

  “Right,” I said, “and just sat down on a porcelain throne right next to his. That’s even better.”

  And we both laughed.

  “Look, now I’m really scared,” I said after I finished laughing.

  Melifaro looked at me askance. “Do you want me to walk you to your room? I’m sure you’re joking again.”

  “I’m not joking, but you don’t have to walk me. I’m not afraid of darkness or the Black Hand. I’m afraid of myself. You can’t help me there. Good night, hero. Tomorrow night I’ll tell you a story about a hearse.”

  Melifaro laughed with relief. His laughter seemed to light up the stairs better than any lantern. At least I didn’t see anything spooky in the darkness there.

  I went up into my room and almost hit the low lintel of the door frame with my head. I sat down on the big soft lump that was my bed and stared through the window at the sharp outline of a slice of the slightly greenish moon.

  I felt very uneasy. It was as though that Magician’s Horror was a trap designed specifically for me. Juffin was right when he said I was especially good at believing the fairy tales and ghost stories I tell myself. If one of my silly fears materializes one day, just like that, I thought, what then? Thinking of General Boboota is not going to save me. Unlike Melifaro, I’m no hero.

  “Go to sleep, man,” I told myself out loud. “You know you want to.”

  Well, once you give yourself a piece of advice, you’d better follow it. I unrolled the bundle of furry blankets, lay on the thickest one, and covered myself with the others.

  What I wanted most was to send Juffin a call and discuss the Black Hand with him. I wanted to hear Juffin say that the idea that I’d ever have the power to bring my fears to life was just vanity, pure and simple. But I didn’t dare disturb Juffin. What if he was still ambushing whoever it was and I distracted him at the most inappropriate moment? Also, I had my doubts that the boss would comfort me. He’d be more likely to say he couldn’t figure out why something like that hadn’t happened to me sooner.

  I closed my eyes and then remembered that I knew someone with whom I coul
d discuss Magician’s Horror or anything else under the sun. Sir Loiso Pondoxo was happy to meet me whenever I wished.

  It had been a while since I dared to dream of visiting Loiso. I had been telling myself that I needed a break from miracles, but in fact . . . In fact, I was scared. Not so scared as to grab the first friendly hand I saw but scared enough to keep telling myself: Not today.

  Not today, tomorrow maybe, that’s what lazy people say. Where did I hear that silly rhyme? In any case, it’s not just lazy people who say it. It’s also frightened little boys when they don’t want to climb up to a scary, dark attic that they absolutely must climb up to.

  “One Loiso Pondoxo please. Shaken, not stirred,” I said.

  Loiso had told me that just saying out loud that I wanted to see him would be enough. Good, then. The meeting had been scheduled. There was no way to cancel it. There was nowhere to retreat. No point in doubting or fretting. My only option was to live, no matter what happened.

  Nothing extraordinary happened. I simply fell asleep. I dreamed of the gently sloping hill covered in pale, stiff blades of sunburned grass, the place where Sir Loiso Pondoxo, former Grand Magician of the Order of the Watery Crow, and I always had our rendezvous.

  This time I immediately remembered that I needed to walk to the top, and I meandered up following a barely visible path. I must have made the path myself during my previous visits—the place wasn’t exactly a popular resort. There was no one but me and Loiso here, no one who could be called another human being.

  I reached the top, sweating and panting, giving the lie to the popular notion that people go to sleep in order to rest.

  To my surprise, there was no one on top of the hill. The yellow translucent rock on which Loiso had been sitting before was empty. I looked around. Bummer, I thought. It took me so long to muster enough courage to come and see Loiso, and it looks like nobody’s home.

  “I’m right here.” Loiso’s mocking voice came from behind. “Did you think that on top of all the rest of my misfortunes I was also glued to that rock?”