The Worm Turns
A fantasy short story related to the Different Dragons series
(This story can be read as a standalone. Its plot falls between the first and second books of the Different Dragons series. If you decide you want to read more, you can find the series at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08HSHSRGB.)
Mark LaRouse didn’t think of himself as a bully. There was an order to things, though. He saw himself as one of those whose job it was to maintain that order. Some guys like him were alpha males, chosen by nature to be at the top of the social pyramid. All the other males needed to stay in their lower place—or else.
Today Mark was a man on a mission. Max Murphy had forgotten his place and needed to be put back into it.
Mark couldn’t quite figure out what had happened, but he knew the change had something to do with the day Max’s creepy cousin from Indiana had visited campus. Superficially, the guy seemed mild enough, but he got in the way of Mark reminding Max who was boss. Even worse, at one point the guy stared Mark down, and Mark actually became frightened, though he’d never admit that to anyone. Mark felt as if something was looking through the stranger’s eyes, something not only alpha but ancient and angry.
Mark chuckled to himself. He knew he’d just been imagining the whole thing. Whatever. Max’s cousin hadn’t been on campus again, not exactly a big surprise if he lived somewhere else and wasn’t a high school student anyway. He would not get in the way today.
Mark whistled as he walked down the hall, receiving the usual admiring female glances and high-fives from his friends. It was the end of the school day and so close to the end of the school year that he could feel summer in the air. Since the last of the sports seasons was over, Mark could have just gone home—but first he needed to deal with Max.
Unfortunately, Max was nerd enough to still be studying, and because of the school’s strict anti-bullying policies, Mark couldn’t do too much to him on campus without getting hassled by the school administration. That meant Mark had to wait for Max to leave campus.
Max worked part-time at some auto repair place, so usually he took off right after school, but today he must have had the day off, and he hung around until the school library closed. Mark had to do the same thing, so he did his best to look busy, grumbling to himself the whole time. Being in the library that long was like having his teeth pulled out one by one with pliers, though Max’s leaving so late would work to Mark’s advantage.
Finally, the library closed, and Max left with a confident stride unlike the way he had walked just a couple weeks before. Why he should be so confident was a mystery to Mark. Sure, he had brains, but he was nothing much to look at, even though his acne had cleared up seemingly overnight. His skin had only the slightest tan, unlike Mark’s bronze skin. He had a little muscle definition, but nothing compared to Mark’s football-player build. No, Max was a beta male at best, and probably much lower. He just needed to be reminded of that from time to time.
Mark followed at a discreet distance as Max left the school. Luckily for Mark, Max didn’t use the student parking lot (technically part of the campus). Instead, he’d made an arrangement with a friend’s family who lived a few blocks away to let him park in their driveway.
Mark could understand a guy wanting to protect his car from dings and scratches. It was almost the only thing about Max he did understand. It was especially fortunate, though, that Max’s parking choice played so nicely into Mark’s hands.
Not only was the house off-campus, but Max had to walk a few blocks down Keith Street to get to it. Most of the distance was residential, with at least one adult in the family likely to be home this late in the afternoon. However, right before the point where Keith intersected Brackett Avenue, Max would pass through a one-block business zone. To his right would be the blind side of a taco drive-through. People would enter at the beginning of the block and be driving away from Keith Street—and Max. On Max’s left was an auto center that would have been closed at least thirty minutes by the time Max passed by. Right behind it was a convenient alley into which Max could easily be forced for a little conversation. It would have to be a relatively quiet conversation to avoid alerting any of the families whose houses backed up to the other side of the alley. Still, all things considered, it was the perfect opportunity to take Max down a peg or six.
Mark deliberately stayed about a block behind Max until Max got close to the fatal spot, then quickened his pace almost to a run. All those years of football and baseball made it easy for him to close the gap between them.
“Max! Wait up!”
Max glanced in Mark’s direction and immediately looked suspicious.
“What do you want?” Max asked. Mark had to admit the guy had guts—too much for his own good, really.
“Just want to have a friendly chat,” said Mark, smirking a little and positioning himself between Max and Brackett.
“You might want to save that for your actual friends, then,” said Max, unbelievably smirking right back at Mark and then starting to move around him.
Mark hadn’t anticipated such immediate resistance, but he had expected some, and he knew what to do about it. Laughing as if Max really was his friend and had told an incredibly funny joke, Mark grabbed him and pulled him toward the alley. From a distance, what he was doing should look like friendly horseplay. He ought to know—he’d had enough practice.
The one potential glitch might happen if Max started screaming like a little girl, but Mark figured the guy wouldn’t, and he was right. That was too bad in some ways, but Mark was able to get Max behind the auto place without attracting undo attention.
Max did struggle a little, but Mark had him completely outweighed and outmuscled.
“What’re you doing?” asked Max, as if it wasn’t completely obvious what Mark was doing.
“I told you already. We need to have a little talk.”
“The school has—” began Max, not sounding as frightened as he should. Mark was confident that would soon change.
“You’re off campus, dude,” Mark reminded him, looking around to make sure no one had a good line of sight or was within earshot.
“School policies apply from the time you leave home in the morning until you return home in the afternoon,” Max replied with surprising calm. “Remember the guy who got busted under the drug policy for smoking a joint on the way home? Bullying works the same way.”
“OK, Mr. Attorney, please don’t turn me in,” said Mark in the most mocking tone he could manage. “This isn’t really bullying.”
“Well,” Max replied, “If you aren’t trying to bully me, the only time anyone ever holds me this close is on a date, and honestly I didn’t know you liked me that much.”
“As if you have dates!” said Mark, determined not to lose control of the situation. He hadn’t really wanted to beat Max to a pulp, just get his attention, but that wasn’t working out so well. The problem was that now Mark had gone too far to just drop the whole thing. He tightened his grip a little.
“Take your hands off me!” said Max in a commanding tone. Mark was about to laugh, but suddenly he felt his hands release their grip, and Max effortlessly slid away from him.
“Be smart, and just let this go,” said Max in his normal voice.
Mark looked down at his hands, not quite sure what had happened. Then he lunged at Max, determined not to be made a fool of.
“Stay away from me!” Max said, even more loudly than before. Mark thought he saw the guy’s eyes flash, but that had to have been some kind of optical illusion.
What happened next was not as easy for Mark to explain. His feet didn’t seem able to take one step in Max’s direction, even though his leg muscles were tight with effort. Then, even more unbelievably, he started to back away from Max. His heart rate speeded up, and he breathed in short, ragged gasps.
“See you later—from a distance,” said Max, who then strolled away as if he didn’t have a care in the world.
Mark tried to follow, but it was as if he was paralyzed from the waist down, and his heart beat even faster. He’d never had that high a heart rate even after a long run.
Could he actually be frightened of Max? How was that even possible?
More important, what had Max done to him? Hypnosis, maybe. Mark, never having been in a situation like that before, couldn’t be sure.
Mark’s weird symptoms faded once he stopped trying to pursue Max, and he walked back to school to get his own car. By the time he reached the school, his previous reaction seemed unreal, just some kind of waking nightmare.
To test that theory, Mark decided to drive by Max’s house, even though it was some distance away—over on Summit Avenue, near the bridge across the Chippewa River.
The moment Mark pulled onto Summit, his heart skipped a beat. He managed to keep driving, but by the time he was three blocks from the house, he felt as if he was going to have a heart attack. He made a fast U-turn, and suddenly he could breathe again, and his heart rate slowed.
The next couple of days were among the worst in Mark’s life. He was able to go to school—not that missing a few days would have been that big of a loss to him—but if he saw Max from a distance or even thought about seeking him out, he started to have the symptoms he’d experienced the previous day.
Mark couldn’t admit to anyone that he had inexplicably become afraid of that little nerd, but he had to do something. One of his fellow baseball players, Jeremy, had an interest in psychology, so Mark, pretending he had heard about a similar condition on the internet, asked Jeremy what the sudden jumps in heart rate and labored breathing could mean. Not wanting to make the situation sound too unbelievable, he didn’t mention the leg paralysis.
“Could be an anxiety attack,” said Jeremy. “Be careful about what you read on the internet, though. A lot of people can’t tell an anxiety attack from a real heart attack, at least at first.”
Mark did his best fake chuckle. “Not to worry, dude. It’s not like that’s happening to me. I was just curious about it.”
Unfortunately, it was happening to Mark—whatever it was. He didn’t have any reason to feel anxiety about being near Max, and even if he did, that wouldn’t explain the paralysis that hit him if he got too close.
After a couple more days of not being able to figure out what to do, Mark pretended to be too sick to got to school, and then, once his parents had left for work, he drove over to Max’s house—or at least where Max was living right now. His actual house was in that ridiculously named nearby town, Le Dragon, but Mark had heard there’d some kind of problem—a shootout, as bizarre as that sounded. After that, Max and his parents had moved temporarily into his grandmother’s house. Since he knew Max was at school this time, he had no difficulty making the trip. He didn’t see anyone around, so he took a few minutes looking the house over, even though he had no clue what good that would do. Doing something felt much better than doing nothing. At least this time, Mark didn’t freeze up or panic, perhaps because he knew Max wasn’t home.
What looked like an impossibly tall hedge turned out to a tightly packed group of cypress trees that more or less surrounded the place. By poking around, Mark figured out there was a wrought-iron fence behind the trees, though very little of it was visible. The wrought-iron gate that opened on the walkway up to the house was visible, and even to Mark’s untrained eyes it looked much older than he might have expected.
For that matter, so did the house itself. Mark was no architecture student, but the house looked far older than the rest of the neighborhood, more like what he’d expect to see in the Randall Park area or one of the other historic districts in Eau Claire. The tower on the left side stuck out like a sore thumb, but the gabled roof and rose-tinted clapboards weren’t exactly typical, either, and the heavy burgundy drapes visible in the windows looked like something Mark would expect to see in a museum, not in a current house.
Mark walked up and knocked on the front door. As he expected, no one answered. He’d done his homework before making the trip and knew that Max’s parents had moved back to Le Dragon, though for some reason they left Max alone in this old place.
“Maybe they can’t stand him, either,” Mark said to himself.
Then it occurred to him that seeing the house was pointless if he couldn’t get in. Come to think of it, what exactly did he expect to find if he had gotten in? He didn’t have a single clue. What had made him think this visit was even remotely a good idea?
Well, having wasted part of the morning anyway, he might as well have a look around. The cypresses would make it difficult to see him from the street if he walked around the house once, so he might as well.
At the back Mark found a weathered looking cellar door with an enormous, brand-new steel padlock. The very size of the lock made him wonder what could possibly be hidden down there that needed that much protection. Unfortunately, even if Mark had wanted to risk breaking in, he wasn’t packing the right kind of hacksaw for that kind of job, and pounding on the padlock with a rock seemed unlikely to produce results.
“Young man, what are doing back here?” asked an elderly but extremely loud voice. Mark turned quickly and saw an old woman wearing a dress of the kind he’d occasionally seen in old family photographs. It matched the house—which meant it looked hopelessly old-fashioned, maybe even nineteenth century.
The woman definitely looked old, but she stood straight, walked without the aid of a cane, and seemed more than capable of calling the cops if she didn’t like his response.
“Oh, I’m sorry, Ma’am. I knocked, and there was no answer—”
“Which doesn’t explain why you came around behind the house,” interrupted the woman, frowning at him.
“I’m a friend of Max’s—”
“I doubt that very much,” she snapped.
“He’s told me a lot about the house, and I just wanted to see it. I’m going to be studying architecture next year—”
“Ah, a student of architecture,” said the woman. “What can you tell me about the style of this house?”
Since Mark knew almost nothing about architecture, he had no idea what to say. Instead, he stood there with his mouth open, which wasn’t likely to impress the woman.
“I thought so. You’d best be on your way, then.”
Considering Mark wasn’t accomplishing anything by being there, he might as well take her advice—except that maybe talking to her would get him some kind of usable information.
“I forgot to introduce myself,” he said. “How rude of me! I’m Mark LaRouse.” He extended a hand, and she shook it. He couldn’t help noticing that hers was amazingly cold.
“Ah, yes, the bully,” she replied. “I’m Maeve Murphy, Max’s grandmother.”
“I think ‘bully’ is a little harsh—”
“In case you haven’t already noticed, I don’t really care what you think,” the old woman replied, grinning. “What I think is that you need to—”
The woman stopped talking abruptly and stared at him. “On second thought, would you like to come in for a few minutes? You seem a bit scrambled. Perhaps it would do you good to sit down for a little while.”
Her change in attitude was so abrupt it almost gave Mark whiplash.
“No thank you, Mrs. Murphy. I really should be going.”
“Oh, I insist. I wouldn’t want you to get dizzy or something like that and have a car accident.”
Something about her sudden interest in Mark’s welfare gave him the creeps.
“I’ll be fine,” he said, turning to walk back around to the front of the house.
“I don’t want to take the chance,” she said. “Anyway, I’m sure you don’t want to risk making me angry—in which case I’ll have to report your odd behavior to the police and the school.”
Mark had never heard a threat delivered in such a neutral tone, but Mrs. Murphy’s meaning was still unmistakable.
“I haven’t done anything!” he protested.
“I can’t prove you were planning to break in, but I can make a pretty good case for trespassing. Your loitering in my back yard seems suspicious at best. The school might also be interested in knowing you’re truant today.”
Mark wasn’t really sure what the penalty for trespassing was or whether she could make such a charge stick, but if nothing else, her telling the school was bound to cause problems with his parents.
“Of course, if you’re afraid of a little old lady—”
“I’m not,” he insisted, not wanting to seem like a wimp. However, this was one little old lady who made him feel very nervous. “I guess it wouldn’t hurt for me to sit down for a minute or two.”
“That’s more like it,” said Mrs. Murphy, motioning for him to follow her. They walked back around to the front of the house and through the front door.
The interior was every bit as old fashioned as the exterior. Mark had a hard time escaping the feeling that he had just stepped into a museum and felt awkward sitting in a chair upholstered in gold and burgundy brocade, colors that matched the elaborate Persian rug on the floor.
“Can I get you anything to drink?” asked Mrs. Murphy in a sweet tone, as if she hadn’t just blackmailed Mark into coming in.
“No thanks. I’m good,” he said. Actually, he was a little thirsty, but an image of the old woman drugging him popped into his mind.
This was ridiculous. First he was afraid of nerdy Max, and now he was apparently dreading Max’s grandmother.
Then Mark remembered something his surprise at getting caught had pushed out of his mind until now.
Max was supposed to be living alone here. Hadn’t he heard Max’s grandmother died a couple of years ago? Yes, he had.
Mark had never believed in ghosts, but what other explanation could there be? This house was haunted, and its resident ghost had invited him in!
“I…I really should…be going now,” he said, though he could barely get the words out. He managed to stand, though his knees felt rubbery.
“But you only sat down a minute ago,” said Mrs. Murphy. “I’m still worried about you—more so, in fact, now that you look so pale.”
Mark bolted from the room before she reiterated her threat. If she was a ghost, she wouldn’t be able to file a police report, anyway. If she wasn’t, dealing with the consequences seemed better than taking the chance she might be.
He sprinted to the front door, but the knob wouldn’t turn in his hand.
“You can’t leave unless I say you can,” she called after him. Frantic, he looked for some kind of lock he could undo, but he didn’t see anything. The door wouldn’t budge, though, no matter what he did.
In desperation, he threw his full weight against the door with a loud thud. He didn’t expect to break it down with one hit—but he didn’t expect to end up lying on the floor, either. The door was was stronger and heavier than it looked, and the impact had thrown him backward.
As he pulled himself off the floor, he tried to focus. He had to decide for sure whether she was a ghost or not. If she wasn’t, he was just making a fool out of himself and should stop. If she was, he could probably break a window to get away.
“I told you so, young man,” said Mrs. Murphy, who sounded as if she was standing right behind him. “You can’t leave unless I give you my permission. The house won’t let you.”
Mark spun around to face her, but she was so close he would have knocked her down—if he hadn’t passed right through her. He felt a chill but no physical impact.
He screamed and ran around her—actually, partially through her, though he tried not to think about that—and back into the room where he’d been sitting. There were windows he was sure he could break.
That certainty shattered much more quickly than the glass, which resisted everything from books to a fireplace poker to an end table. Everything bounced off the glass as if some kind of force field protected it. If he’d even cracked the pane, the crack was too small to see.
“You’re going to clean up this mess, aren’t you?” said the ghost. It wasn’t really a question.
“I…I don’t understand!” wailed Mark, falling to his knees and trying frantically not to cry.
“You do understand, I’m afraid. It would have been easier for you if you didn’t.” The ghost sounded almost apologetic. “At least you understand about me. I should have made myself appear as Max’s mother, but that takes more effort, and I didn’t realize you knew I’d already passed away.”
Mark tried to pull himself together. Blind panic was getting him nowhere, and the ghost wasn’t doing anything overtly hostile—unless you counted keeping him a prisoner in the house.
“When…when we shook hands…you were solid,” said Mark.
“I can become solid, but only for brief periods. It takes a lot of energy. That’s why you need to be the one to clean up the mess—well, that and the fact that you made it in the first place.”
Her casual, matter-of-fact way of speaking made Mark feel a little less frightened. “I only made a mess because you trapped me, and I was trying to get out. Why not just let me go?”
The ghost sighed. “After the first two or three objects didn’t break the glass, you could have stopped. You didn’t need to test everything in the room.
“Anyway, you aren’t going to believe me when I say this, but I’m keeping you here for a little while for your own good.”
“A little while?” asked Mark, trying to keep the tremble out of his voice.
“Yes, a little while,” the ghost repeated. “I’m not any happier spending time with you than you are spending time with me, but when I realized there was a spell on you—”
“A spell? You mean magic is real?”
“Asked the kid talking to a ghost,” said Mrs. Murphy with more than a touch of sarcasm. “Yes, magic is real. I used to be quite an accomplished practitioner in my day. Unfortunately, most kinds of magic require the caster to have a physical presence in order for spells to work in this world. As a ghost I can’t access the full range of my abilities. Manifesting from time to time and manipulating the protective spells on this house are about all I can do, and it’s taken me a lot of time to get to that point. That’s why you have to wait. I need to get someone here who can fix you.”
“Why…why would you care…whether I’m fixed or not?” asked Mark.
The ghost chuckled. “Talk about looking a gift horse in the mouth! Actually, I could care less about you, if you want to know the truth. However, there are…rules, for lack of a better term, among those of us who use magic. One of the most important is that our use of it must be inconspicuous to ordinary people.
“You’ve got a fairly powerful spell on you that looks as if it affects your behavior, yes?” asked the ghost. Mark nodded. “I suspect it probably works more…dramatically than the caster intended, and it’s got you poking around. You were aware of the spell’s effect before, weren’t you?”
“Yeah, I guess,” Mark admitted. “I didn’t believe it was magic, though.”
“You might have come to that conclusion eventually, however, and we can’t have that.”
Mark heard the front door open and thought of making a run for it. As if reading his expression, the ghost said, “You’ll never make it to the door in time.”
“Grandma! Where are you?” asked a familiar voice.
“In the living room, dear,” said the ghost.
“That’s—” started Mark, but before he could get the words out, Max came, and Mark’s heart rate skyrocketed.
“What’s he doing here?” asked Max, looking annoyed.
“You wouldn’t by any chance have placed a spell on him?” asked the ghost, looking at Max sternly.
“You…you told him about—” stammered Max.
“He figured out I was a ghost,” said Mrs. Murphy. “It won’t matter, anyway. I’ve already summoned Morfesa to wipe his memory for us. Now answer my question.”
Wipe his memory? Mark didn’t like the sound of that at all, but it was hard for him to know what to do. Being this close to Max was giving him that impending heart attack feeling again, and the sudden paralysis of his legs effectively trapped him in the chair.
“Just a little spell,” Max admitted. “Just so he’d stay away.”
“A little one?” said the ghost, snorting derisively. “You could have done that with much less force and much greater subtlety. Don’t use a sledgehammer when a fly swatter will do. Besides, haven’t Morfesa and I told you not to use magic unsupervised unless you’re in a situation so dire only magic can save you. I presume this young man wasn’t trying to kill you.”
“Just beat me up,” Max conceded.
“Wasn’t,” Mark managed to gasp. “Just wanted to…scare you a little.”
“Scare him a little?” asked the ghost, her tone much more severe. “Well, now that you’ve been on the receiving end, maybe you’ll be less eager to scare someone again.”
“Not…scared,” insisted Mark, though he could barely breathe.
“I’ve noticed,” said the ghost mockingly. “Max, will you please lift the spell before he wets himself?”
Max closed his eyes for a moment, and suddenly Mark’s breathing and heart rate returned to normal.
“Can…can I go now?” Mark asked, eying the doorway, beyond which lay the entry hall, the front door, and escape.
“You need to have your memory erased first,” the ghost reminded him.
“I could—” began Max.
“No,” replied his grandmother firmly. “You don’t have the experience, and memory erasure is tricky at best.”
“I’ll promise not to tell,” said Mark. The last thing he wanted was people messing around in his brain.
The ghost smiled thinly. “Even if I believed you—which, let’s be clear, I don’t—the risk is too great.”
“Aren’t I going to wonder why there’s a big hole in my memory?” asked Mark, worrying he would think he was having blackouts.
“There won’t be one,” the ghost assured him. “Morfesa will give you a magical command to forget certain details, and your own subconscious will fill in the blanks with something plausible. With any luck, you’ll never notice the difference.”
“But what if—” Mark began, stopping abruptly when he heard the front door’s hinges creak again. Without thinking he jumped up, intending to make a run for the open front door. Despite what the ghost had said earlier, he could be there in seconds, maybe fast enough to keep whoever had opened the door from closing it.
Up to a point, his plan worked. Max was apparently caught too much by surprise to zap him with another spell, and from the entry hall Mark could see the front door was still open.
What he hadn’t counted on but should have was that the person who had just come in was blocking his path. Despite how frightened he was, he hesitated for a second. The person in his way was a woman, and he could easily have knocked her aside, but he’d never hit a woman before. Maybe if he charged her, she’d step out of the way.
Even as he rushed her, Mark doubted she would be easy to intimidate. She was an ordinary looking, middle-aged woman with reddish hair, but he couldn’t help noticing her piercing green eyes that somehow held his attention even in his current state of panic.
He also had time to notice she was wearing a long white robe and carrying a staff—not exactly ordinary street clothes. Despite not looking physically as old as Max’s grandmother, there was something…ancient about her, as if she had just stepped out of a myth.
Or as if she were another ghost!
She seemed solid enough when Mark collided with her, but he had no time to worry about whether she only seemed physical or whether he had struck a woman. All that was important was that she staggered out of his way, giving him an opening to race out the front gate and reach freedom.
That plan quickly hit another snag. The gate, like the front door earlier, wouldn’t budge. Its latch remained stubbornly frozen in place as if locked that way by centuries of rust.
“Help me!” Mark yelled. He couldn’t see anyone on the street, and the houses sat on relatively big lots, which meant they were spaced a little further apart than in his neighborhood. Still, if anyone was home nearby, they could probably hear him.
“Save your breath,” said Maeve, who must already have drifted up behind him. “No one can hear you. Morfesa always puts an illusion over the front of the house to cover her sudden…appearance.” He would have figured she was lying, but just then a pedestrian passed right by the house and seemed deaf to his yells.
Mark could still see one way out: climb the fence. Unfortunately, the moment he tried doing that, the cypress trees just on the other side started grabbing at him with their branches. Most of those limbs were relatively small, but he couldn’t manage to break them, and they kept pulling at his clothes and poking at his fingers. Worse, the treetops bent over until they formed a solid barrier at the top of the fence. Would they try to smother him when he got high enough?
“We mean you no harm,” yelled an unfamiliar voice, presumably the woman he had just pushed out of the way. “This can all be over quickly if you just come down and stop making a fool of yourself.”
Her tone was hardly reassuring, but Mark knew when he was beaten. The cypress branches now gripped hard enough that he couldn’t climb any higher, and even if he could, there was no obvious way to get over the top of the fence. Reluctantly, he started to ease himself down. The moment he did so, the branches let go of him, and the trees resumed their normal shape. In just a few seconds they looked deceptively ordinary again.
As soon as his feet touched the ground, he turned to face his foes—and the inevitable messing with his brain that he now knew he couldn’t escape.
“Don’t look like that,” said Max. “Nobody’s going to hurt you.”
“Yeah, right,” muttered Mark, trying to hide the fear that was causing his heart to skip beats.
“It’s not just to protect us,” said the ghost. “It’s to protect you as well. Ordinary people who learn that magic is real usually get themselves into trouble sooner or later by trying to learn more about it, maybe even use it themselves. That never ends well.”
“How often does wiping out someone’s memory end well?” he asked, knowing he wouldn’t believe whatever reassuring answer he got.
“Just take it like a man!” said the woman in white, obviously impatient. She must be the Morfesa Maeve had spoken of earlier.
“It’s not as if you’re dealing with some mere novice,” Morfesa continued. “I’m the druid of Falias, one of the four cities of Tír na nÓg—and I have been for centuries. If there is anyone who can do this spell without harming you, it is I.”
Mark couldn’t make sense of her title, and he had never heard of Tír na nÓg, but he did catch the part about her having been around for centuries. Somehow, that didn’t make him feel any better.
“Look, dude, I know we aren’t friends,” said Max, “but you have to know me well enough to know I’m not out to hurt you.”
Given how drastically Max’s spell had affected Mark, he didn’t find Max’s words all that reassuring, either.
Not only did Mark feel as if he were having a heart attack, but everything he thought he knew about the world had been ripped away from him suddenly and painfully. What could any of them have said at this point to reassure him?
Perhaps Morfesa had also realized further conversation would be pointless. She raised her staff and spoke a few words in a language Mark didn’t understand. He felt himself getting sleepy and tried to resist, but he lay down despite himself.
“Don’t…don’t,” he mumbled as his eyes closed.
Mark opened his eyes slowly and found himself staring at the ceiling of his own bedroom. At first, he couldn’t remember why he was there.
Oh, yeah, he hadn’t been feeling well, and so he’d stayed home from school. He squinted at the clock. It was already after four PM, so his mom would be home pretty soon. Dad would follow somewhat later.
Mark sat up in bed, feeling a little better than he had that morning, but having a hard time remembering the last couple of days. He had been worried about something, but what?
Then it came back to him. He’d had tacos with that Max guy after school one day and then been worried about the effect that might have on his reputation if people found out.
Mark chuckled to himself. He was just being silly. His reputation was bulletproof.
Anyway, Max wasn’t such a bad guy once you got to know him.
Mark shuddered momentarily, though he wasn’t sure why. Maybe he’d had a nightmare while he was asleep. Whatever. He didn’t really have anything to worry about.
He pulled himself out of bed, looked in the mirror, and smiled. Life was good!
(Originally published in Unknown: A Collection of Sci-Fi and Fantasy Stories, Hidden Worlds, Volume 1, 2017.)