Midnight Snack and Other Fairy Tales (20 page)

“No, Daddy,” Brianna said. “We’re going to be out in the back; we’ll be working on our parascience fair project.”

Brianna’s dad nodded, and looked away, unconcerned. Knowing her dad, she could just hear him thinking:
oh, the Magic Sword thing fell through—
but refusing to say anything about it out loud. She hoped desperately that Dirk couldn’t hear him thinking it. Brianna started blushing—then pushed that, and the embarrassment about it, aside; there was just no time for it now. She and Dirk headed out towards the back door, and into the back yard of the house.

On the other side of the screen door, Dirk stood on the steps and looked around him with a strangely satisfied expression. “Good,” he said.

Brianna regarded him with astonishment, as this was a word that had never occurred to her in connection with her back yard. “Good?” she said, incredulous. “What we’ve got back here is crabgrass city. This is
good?”

Dirk grinned at her a little. “Well,” he said, “this process could get a little bit… destructive.” He glanced around at the expense of scraggly, dried out, weed-ridden “lawn” that constituted the Wilkes back yard. “If there was anything like landscaping back here, I could feel guilty about what might happen to it. And it might take time to put back.”

Brianna shook her head, laughed, and walked out into the middle of the crabgrass, looking around at it. “Dad keeps saying he thinks the ground is cursed. Mom keeps saying he put too much bonemeal on it a few years ago, and it’s never recovered. Dad has no green thumb whatsoever. Any plant he touches, usually just withers right up.”

“That might come in useful later,” Dirk said. “But never mind it now. You have the bag?”

Brianna nodded, and from the schoolbag over her shoulder pulled out the plastic grocery bag that had taken them the better part of the after-school afternoon to fill with the right ingredients. They had spent lunch going over the
Materia Magica
together, working out the exact characteristics and species of the ginger they were going to need. Then they wound up teleporting out on the sly to three separate supermarkets, one after the other, looking for the right kind of ginger. The difficulty was that all the ginger rhizomes looked approximately the same, whether they were magic or not: there were few signs to guide you with certainty to the kind you needed. But finally, in the fourth supermarket they’d gone to them—an Asian supermarket that specialized in supplying the local Chinese restaurants—they had stumbled across the right stuff. Now, as she handed Dirk the bag, he rooted around in there and pulled the knobby golden root out, regarding it with satisfaction.

“This has to be what they used,” he said. “Must have gotten to Europe by coming all the way down the Silk Road. It doesn’t look like much, does it?”

Brianna shook her head. From the carrier bag she pulled out a sack of whole wheat flour that they’d picked up at the first supermarket they’d gone to. “Is this going to be enough for the whole thing, do you think?”

“Should be fine,” Dirk said. “Under the Law of Contagion, part stands for all. If you can hold the right imagery in your head, it’s not the amount of materials that will matter; it’s the quality of the imagery and the amount of power you apply to it. Like you saw before, with the barley sugar column. That whole thing came out of one sugar packet from the cafeteria, and a lot of intention.” Dirk walked around the weedy expanse of the backyard for a few moments, pacing. “Okay,” he said. “You got it all into your notebook out of my laptop, I think—”

“I think so,” Brianna said. “Let’s give it a shot.” She pulled the notebook out of her shoulderbag, paging through it past the notes she’d been making all day for the posters and other visual aids that would be mounted in and around the gingerbread house. Brianna sighed at the sight of the scribbles, all of which were going to need extensive work in the computer to smooth out the wording. But it was going to look good when it was done, especially all the data about the cultural background of the house, and the worn-down “magical” rhymes that still persisted in some versions of the Hansel and Gretel story. Probably there’d also be room for some heartfelt commentary about how witches should not allow their cultural heritage to be peeled away from them, even if it sometimes seemed of dubious value or correctness in this modern time. “We are all part of
all
of our heritage,” it would go; “we can’t afford to try to cherry-pick the parts we want to keep or the parts we’d prefer to throw away. The context can only be understood in terms of the entire picture. And this is part of the picture, no matter how stereotypical it looks and how many calories it seems to contain …”

But right now the fancy verbiage could wait. Brianna put her notebook down on the ground. Then she stood over it for a moment, held her arms out in the proper invocatory gesture, and called up in her mind the words that she would need to kick it out into expansion mode.

Dirk suddenly looked a little concerned. “You
do
have a visual-blocking ‘glamourie’ field around the edges of this place, don’t you?”

Brianna paused, grinned. “With my brother?” she said. “Oh yes. And it’s robust. When Mick built his first rocket ship to go to Mars, the neighbors never even noticed the ignition.”

“That would pass for robust,” Dirk said. “Okay… let’s go for it!”

Brianna said the words. Immediately the notebook began spreading itself away across the back yard, like an oversized picnic tablecloth covered with designs—the very specific spell diagram necessary to let the ginger do its job, and the outlining of the “blueprint” for the house itself. She and Dirk had gone back and forth about the basic design, but at the end of a long discussion it had seemed simpler to go for something that would duplicate a German peasant’s cottage of the 1600’s, rather than a prettied-up version that might have more room for people to stand around inside, but also possibly be accused of being less realistic. The final result—two rooms, one with a small bed for the witch and a tinier one for Gretel, the other containing a sort of condensed kitchen/dining area, complete with nasty small cage—had satisfied them both and would, Brianna thought, impress everybody who saw it. “We’ll get as close as we can to archetype,” Brianna said, as she now looked over the fully expanded blueprint where it lay glowing on the ground, “without getting fetishistic about it.”

Dirk gave her an amused look. “Is there anybody else at our school,” he said, “who would use the words ‘archetype’ and ‘fetishistic’ in the same sentence?”

Brianna actually paused, wondering if that was something she ought to be blushing about—then laughed out loud, because the look Dirk was giving her was nothing whatsoever like the looks she either got from Arthur, or dreamed about getting from him. “Probably not,” she said, “so if you won’t tell on me, I won’t do it again. Is the magic ginger ready?”

“It was born ready, as far as I can tell,” Dirk said, and walked out into the middle of the cottage plan. “I think you’d better put the flour down first, though.”

“Right,” Brianna said. She walked out onto the plan after him, and carefully tore just a corner off the bag of flour. “Is it going to need a whole lot of this, or will just a little be enough?”

“Keep it light,” Dirk said. “You’re going to want to have enough to resurrect the design when you put it up in the school gym, or the parking lot or wherever.”

Brianna started to head for the outer edges of the diagram—then changed her mind.
No, better do the inside first: you’ll be less likely to mess it up.
Cautiously she sprinkled the flour over the glowing spell-tracery of the “blueprint”, covering up the lines that marked where the interior walls would rise. “I feel like the kids in the story,” she said. “Except without the breadcrumbs.”

Dirk watched how she was walking, not looking up. “What breadcrumbs?” he said. “I thought when the wicked stepmother tried to lose them, they used rocks or something to mark their trail.”

“Pebbles,” Brianna said, finishing with the outlining of the interior walls and moving to the outer ones. “And that time Hansel and Gretel got home okay. The stepmother wouldn’t let them bring rocks the next time, though. That’s where the breadcrumbs come in. Hansel improvised with the bread the stepmother gave him. But the birds ate it…”

Dirk shook his head, still watching carefully to make sure the lines were being covered evenly. “What kind of parents take their kids out into the woods to lose them on purpose?” he said.

Brianna shook her head as she finished the second exterior wall and headed for the third one. “The story says the parents were starving,” she said. “Or afraid they were going to. But it still sounds kind of fishy to me. If everybody around there was starving, how come the witch had food? And enough of it to fatten Hansel up, too.”

Dirk shook his head again as he fished around in his pocket for something, came up with it: a couple more packets of sugar from the school cafeteria. “You missed a spot there…” he said.

“Yeah.” Brianna went back to do it again, then headed for the fourth wall. “I mean, it’s all very strange. What’s the moral?”

“Being an honest woodcutter doesn’t pay well?” Dirk said as he ripped the sugar packets open. “Don’t get married twice? Stay out of the woods no matter who takes you in there? Become a witch and always have plenty to eat?”

Brianna snickered as she finished the last wall. “Maybe,” she said, “there
isn’t
a moral?” She stepped away from that last corner and took a turn around the blueprint, checking to make sure that all the outlines were properly covered.

Dirk was shaking his head. “Always a moral,” he said, and broadcast the contents of one of the packets over the design: then sprinkled the contents of the second one in front of where the door would be. “Sometimes they just hide it better than usual.” He glanced up as Brianna finished her round. “You ready?”

“All set,” Brianna said.

Carefully Dirk placed the ginger root in the middle of the blueprint, in the place prepared for it, and stepped back. Then —

It was a twofer spell, so there was no way around it: they had to hold hands. This was the prospect that had given Brianna delicious shivers when considering what it would be like with Arthur—but now she only felt excited to see what was going to happen. When she took Dirk’s hand—which he held out to her without really looking at her—the only shiver Brianna got was because his hand was cold.
Can he really be nervous that this might not work?
Brianna thought.

He had his laptop open now, and Brianna had her notebook: the electronic resource and the magically written one had coordinated with each other so that each was now carrying the complete version of the spell. Together they began to read the invocation to the Universe and the listening Aion-spirit of Magic, the force within everything that made witchery work: and with that solemnity done, they went on to the concrete stuff, the instructions for the spell that were more like the ingredients of a recipe than anything else. Normally this part of a spell bored Brianna—but this afternoon, for some reason, she started to feel like laughing out loud when they got past the mystical stuff and started invoking the chemical fractions of the ginger root which produced the prestress / reinforcement part of the spell. “Sesquiphellandrene, bisabolene, farnesene,” she and Dirk chanted together, and Brianna had to choke back a snicker as she wondered who, or where, Farnes was: “cineol, citral, gingerol, shoagole,
zingerone!”

“Sounds like Italian food,” Dirk said under his breath: and then they both cracked up together.

And in mid-laugh, the spell took, and took off. The ground humped and bucked, the lines of the diagram writhed and slid and then reared up proud of the ground, getting taller and thinner, shifting their shape and color.
Oh no,
Brianna thought at first,
did we get something really wrong?—
because the color was green. But then she realized that she was seeing the ginger root starting to do its business, its virtual leaves growing outward into the spell-pattern, sheeting up along the uprearing lines of the floor plan, then flattening out and spreading sideways and upward like some odd veiny green wallpaper. And up after them went the flour, going weirdly liquid and spreading itself across the green leafery like confused wallpaper paste as the walls grew and stretched upwards. It had only been a few breaths now since the Italian food joke, but the walls had already reached the height of Brianna’s and Dirk’s heads and were growing higher still. Brianna craned her neck to see the roof forming, its peak pointing itself, the chimney sprouting upward in the midst of the whole business like an afterthought.

“Almost there,” Dirk said under his breath.

“Are you sure?” Brianna said. “Did we forget something? Look at it, it’s still green, what if it—”

— and all at once, the green faded, darkened. “That’s the dessication routine cutting in,” Dirk said. Brianna breathed out, relieved, for there was no mistaking it: the flour stopped looking pasty, started looking brown. A heavy scent of ginger filled the air. The color of the walls darkened further: golden brown, dark brown—

“Here we go,” Dirk whispered. All in a rush, with a strange crackling noise that at first sounded like paper burning, the ornamental sugar routine went off. Once more the fizz and sparkle of spell artifact seemed to be everywhere; for a few moments, as the crackling noise got louder, Brianna wondered if they’d plugged too much energy into that part of the spell. It was running enthusiastically all over everything, like yellowy-white sheet lightning. But the crackle faded away, and Brianna saw the skin of mint-wafer roof-til start growing down over the roof, watched the licorice chimney-pot form at the top of the chimney, grinned as ribbons of red spiral down the white tubes of the candy-cane drainspouts. Rock-candy icicles formed at the roof corners, icing-sugar snow piled itself tastefully over the nougat windowsills: the windows sheeted over with perfect sugar glass an inch thick. A very creditable fake wood-graining ran down the textured gingerbread-and-halvah front door. And on either side, as the last of the spell effect grounded itself out and fizzled away, there they were, on either side of the door: two twisted pillars, one slightly golden and one slightly green, both clear as glass.