Magic Street

Chapter 19

COUNCIL OF WAR Puck was waiting for them inside the house. The living room was furnished exactly like Yo Yo's living room. In fact, it was her furniture, right down to having Sherita's blanket tossed on the couch.

"Puck," said Yo Yo, "just keep your hands off my stuff."

"I never know what's going to show up here," said Puck. "The boy comes in bringing you—so your stuff appears. Bingo! Presto! Abracadabra!"

"Bite me," said Yo Yo.

"You always offer, but you're all talk."

"I know what he does to his servants who, uh, bite you."

"We got a situation," said Ceese, "and we got to figure out what to do."

"You?" said Puck. "You don't have a situation, my lady and I have a situation."

"This shit tonight didn't happen to you, it happened to people in our neighborhood, and we're going to do something about it," said Ceese.

"Ceese, he knows that," said Mack.

Puck grinned cheesily.

"Asshole," muttered Ceese.

"Bad language exacerbates the situation," said Puck. "I know they taught you that in cop nursery.

Always stay calm."

"What in the world is going on with you people?" said Grand Harrison. "Tonight I was just minding my own business, and then I get my tools and my SUV borrowed, I dig up a grave, open a coffin, and take my next-door neighbor out. Then I get brought down here into a house that doesn't exist and listen to a bunch of fools argue about nothing. You know what I want? I want to know how you all going to keep this stuff from happening again."

"What stuff?" asked Puck.

"Wishes," said Mack.

"Mack's dreams," said Ceese.

"He's cut loose a big one tonight, Pudding," said Yo Yo.

"That means he's got himself a pony to ride," said Puck—again talking as if Yo Yo were the only person in the room.

"Yes," said Yo Yo.

"A pony?" asked Ceese.

"Some human he can work through. Kind of like the way my lady and I using these two bodies."

Grand didn't like hearing that. "You telling me that you—that these bodies are possessed?"

"Leased," said Puck. "With option."

"This old coot," said Puck, "be eating out of dumpsters and licking sweet roll wrappers and walking around talking to his dead dog named God, cause he figured as long as he knew it wasn't really God, just a dog with God's name, he wasn't actually schizo."

"We don't take bodies somebody actually using," said Yo Yo. "And that's the truth, Mr.

Harrison."

"What did you mean," said Mack, "when you said 'leased with option'?"

"Didn't mean a thing," said Puck.

"You always mean something. Usually about six things."

"He means," said Yo Yo, "that if something happens to these bodies while we using them, then our option's up."

"You die?" asked Mack.

"Not the part of us in those glass jugs," said Yo Yo. "Just the part of us that can move around on its own. Be like living in a wheelchair after that."

"Worse," said Puck. "Be like living as a human."

"So you're not completely immortal," said Mack. "Just partly immortal."

"And that's why Puck couldn't tell you the truth," said Yo Yo. "He's under strict orders. He can never tell a mortal the truth unless he's sure he won't be believed."

"That's not true," said Puck. He grinned.

"Shut up, Puckster," said Yo Yo.

"We got a situation," said Ceese, "and you got a situation. Not the same situation, but they got the same cause. Your husband, your master, the king of the fairies, whatever he is, he's got himself a pony, right? And doing that made all those wishes come true tonight. So to solve your problem, and our problem, what can we do?"

"Nothing," said Puck. "We are absolutely helpless. Go home. Cry into your pillows until your dreams come true."

"He's so funny," said Mack to Grand. "Always joking. You know how Puck is."

"Mack," said Yo Yo. "The thing is, it's a fight you can't fight. You already did all you could. For years you did it, deflecting his power so they never finished their dreams. That was good work, but now it's done. He's got his power out in the world."

"Oberon's pony isn't doing this stuff," said Yo Yo. "In your neighborhood, I mean."

"Who is, then?"

"Puck," said Yo Yo.

Puck elaborately curled himself into a fetal position as if he feared being struck by stones.

"This isn't funny, Puck," said Mack. "You did this?"

"It's in my nature," said Puck.

"That's true enough," said Yo Yo. "He can't help being a trickster. But also he has Oberon's direct command to find these twists. The thing is, Puck can't tell you because it would be the truth, but he's also deflecting them. He can't stop it from happening, but... well, for instance, Ophelia and her husband could have been entwined in a love embrace under the HOLLYWOOD sign. Or halfway to Catalina. And Sherita—it didn't have to be a boy her family knew about, it could have been some rich boy in Beverly Hills or Palos Verdes, and how would you have found her then?"

"So he was helping," said Mack skeptically.

"As best he could," said Yo Yo.

Puck ducked his head in a show of modesty.

"He does what he can," said Yo Yo. "Here's the thing. What he can do, what I can do, it isn't much. The part of us he locked up, it includes most of our powers except persuasion and... pony riding. And the way it works is, we can't get that part out. Because this part of us, the wandering part, the curious part, is walking around free. It makes it so we aren't hungry enough to force anything.

"But him," she went on, "we pushed him all the way under. Didn't divide him. So to do anything he has to squeeze it out of his captivity. Get some part of him to the surface of the earth. But that part is never completely separated from him. He's not divided like we are." She sighed. "Took him a long time, but the force of his wandering part was so great that it worked its way through a channel to the surface of the earth."

"And that's the pony you were talking about," said Mack.

"No, Mack," said Yo Yo. "That was you. Seventeen years ago. You the first thing he squeezed out. We could feel him breaking through like a mother hen watching her chicks jiggle their eggs and then peck a hole. But we couldn't stop him. Puck here couldn't even try—he's bound to Oberon by vows he can't break. All I could do was try to persuade Ceese here to kill you, and he was too strong for me. His love for you too strong."

"Now I just don't understand that saying," said Puck. "A piece of needlework? Or, like, when we call a woman a 'piece,' only she does it for money so she's, you know, working when—"

"Shut up, Puck," said Yo Yo.

"What you're saying," said Mack, "is you want me to break you out of your little glass jars."

"Eventually," said Yo Yo. "But not you. You couldn't do it."

"I couldn't?" asked Mack.

"Impossible," said Puck.

"He lying, right?" Mack asked Yo Yo.

"Do you believe him?"

"No," said Mack.

"Then it doesn't matter if it's true or not, does it?" asked Yo Yo. "Look, Mack, I've tried to tell you several times. You are the part of him that he squeezed out first. You are Oberon."

"Bull," said Mack.

"That's why you can find where this house is hidden," said Ceese. "And why you don't change sizes going into Fairyland."

"I'm me," said Mack. "I don't have any memory of being Oberon. I got no powers."

"Excuse me," said Yo Yo. "You think seeing dreams ain't a power?"

"It's not a power if I can't control it," said Mack.

"But you did control it," said Ceese. "For a long time."

"You wander freely through Fairyland and nothing hurts you," said Yo Yo. "Puck goes twenty feet in and birds pick him up and damn near feed him to their babies."

"Because I'm Oberon."

"You're part of him," said Yo Yo.

"So I'm his spy?"

"No," said Yo Yo. "He probably can't use you for that. Like I said, you're not his pony—he'll see through the eyes and speak through the mouth and hear through the ears of whoever he's inside.

But you—he's about as conscious of you as a mortal normally is of his heartbeat."

"That's right. Under stress, you're more aware. Same with him. Sometimes he notices you but only when you're in trouble."

"I'm in trouble right now," said Mack. "Cause the only fairies I know keep telling me I'm their enemy."

"You're not our—" Yo Yo began.

"We're your enemy," said Puck, "but you're not ours."

"You're not our enemy," Yo Yo said forcefully, shutting Puck up.

"And if he feels like it, he can make me betray you."

"Hasn't yet, though, has he?" asked Yo Yo.

"I'm not some discarded piece of the king of the fairies," said Mack heatedly. "I'm not some appendix or tonsil, I'm me. I was raised by Miz Smitcher and Ceese here. I was trained up on the Bible and I try to be a decent man. I work at whatever I'm supposed to work on. I even work to oppose Oberon, and he doesn't stop me. He's not me, I'm not him."

"You're not the part of him that chooses," said Yo Yo, gently touching his arm to calm him. "See, Mack, here's what happened. He needed a changeling here to store up the power of all these people's wishes. So he sent you. It doesn't matter to him whether the wishes come true or not, except that if they do, he has Puck here assigned to make sure something ugly happens for Oberon's entertainment. That he likes—so when Puck comes back, if he does, Oberon will want a full report."

"So what am I, then? His gas tank?"

"No," said Yo Yo. "No, you're his conscience. That's the part he had to get rid of. That's the part that was stopping him from doing something truly hideous to us and to all the mortals. By taking every good thing out of his own heart, all his decency and honor and hope and joy and love, and putting them in you and shoving you out into the world, he left only pure ambition and pride and vengefulness and power-lust and violence there in his own heart."

"He decided to be evil," said Mack. "And I'm supposed to be all the good he threw away?"

"He would say, all the weakness and softness."

"I'm not weak," said Mack.

"That's his mistake," said Yo Yo. "That's our secret weapon. He thinks you're weak because he always managed to hide his kind heart under a mask of jokery and rages and malice. But it was there, and it kept him from utterly destroying people. Once you were... born, Mack, then there was no restraint on his will to evil. It could grow and grow. Bit by bit. Without you in his heart, he turned himself into the devil."

"Meaning that he is the real devil? Cause Puck lies?"

"He lies," said Yo Yo, "but it doesn't mean that whatever he says is the opposite of the truth, either. That would be just as sure a guide as telling you the truth in the first place."

"Yo Yo," said Mack. "The stuff you're telling me. What difference does it make? I think I'm a free man, you think I'm secretly Oberon. So what?"

"So you can do things that we need. We can use you," said Yo Yo, "to set up the old dragon and—"

"Kill him?" Mack whispered.

"No, but castration and stomach stapling seem appropriate," said Puck.

"Is he fat?" asked Ceese.

"No, I just want him to throw up every time he eats more than three little bites of a meal."

"We got to get out of the jugs," said Yo Yo. "And not just set free. Protected till our... souls are given back."

"Why should we free his soul?" asked Mack, thumbing at Puck.

Puck let out a long, loud fart. Fortunately odorless. In fact, knowing Puck, it probably wasn't a real fart.

"Don't, if you don't want to," said Yo Yo. "Just remember that without me, Puck would belong completely to Oberon. No more attempts to make it possible for you to avoid letting people hurt themselves."

"My head is spinning," said Grand. "I want to go home and go to bed."

"I didn't invite you," Puck said cheerfully. "Feel free to leave any time."

"What exactly is the plan?" asked Mack. "And what can we do to help?"

"Nothing," said Yo Yo. "It's too powerful for you. Thanks for all you did so far, but except for one tiny thing, we don't need you at all and don't intend to put you at risk."

"What's that one tiny thing?" asked Mack.

"Get us out of those jars."

"How?" asked Mack.

counterword. So we do need you to get that. You or somebody."

"Where do I learn this 'counterword'?" asked Mack.

"Oh, you already know it," said Yo Yo. "You just don't know that you know it. In fact, you think you don't know it. But you know it."

"So you do need me."

"Just a little bit. Then we're on our own."

"Okay," said Mack. "I'll help you find that password—"

"Counterword," said Puck with all the smugness of Alex Trebek.

"But you got to help us, too."

"We are helping you," said Yo Yo. "Once we get out of those jars and put back together properly, then we can go find Oberon's pony and shut him down. Put him out of business. Stuff the genie back into the bottle. So to speak."

"Won't he know you're out?"

"Well," said Yo Yo, "probably."

"So won't he come down on you the second you're free?"

"That's the other little thing we need."

"The counterword and something else."

"We need a distraction. We need—"

Grand Harrison interrupted her. "What you need is a fairy circle."

Yolanda looked at him like he was insane. "Do you know how many fairies it takes to make a decent circle?"

"But it's what you need, isn't it?" said Grand.

"We got no fairies to work with," said Puck. "Oberon keeps a tight rein on them. He only lets the ones he absolutely trusts to come out to... um... play. So we can't raise a circle."

"He lying?" Mack asked Yo Yo.

"Do you believe him?" asked Yo Yo in reply.

"Can't get a straight answer into a crooked mind," said Puck.

"What do you mean by that?" demanded Mack.

"I mean the only time you believe me is when I lie."

Grand Harrison spoke up again. "If he can suck our wishes out of us, why can't you use us mortals in your fairy circle?"

"And that's really starting to bother me," said Puck, rising to his feet. "What do you know about fairy circles?"

"It's how you do truly great magicks. You bring together a bunch of fairies and they form a circle and all of the power of all the fairies in the circle becomes part of the great thing you're trying to do."

"And you learned this where?" asked Yo Yo.

"The Blue Book of Fairy Tales," said Grand. "Or the Red one. Or whatever."

"Not in those books," said Puck.

"Stay on topic, Puckaroo," said Yo Yo.

"If I had any real power, she'd drop dead when she called me that," said Puck. Then he grinned at Yolanda. "Just kidding, darling."

"Fairy circle," said Ceese. "Grand's idea."

"It might work," said Yo Yo. "Except we don't know just how much of him he's put into his pony. If it's all there, except for the part that is Mack—then we could do it using a fairy circle made of mortals. But if part of him is here in this world, and part of him in Fairyland, that would be like lassoing a one-inch-thick snake with a lariat that won't get any skinnier than two inches in diameter."

"Will this be on the geometry test?" asked Mack.

"So to do a fairy circle in order to confine him long enough for us to get free, you have to find out where he is, exactly," said Ceese. "And in order to find out where he is, you need—let me guess—Mack, because he is Oberon. Sort of."

"That's right," said Yo Yo.

"Only Mack doesn't know it," said Ceese.

Puck suddenly had a moustache and twirled it. "Little does he know..." The moustache disappeared when everybody looked at him and nobody laughed.

"So how you going to get your counterword and your information out of a guy who doesn't actually know the things you think he knows?" asked Ceese.

"He's seventeen!" said Ceese.

"It's the time-honored tradition," said Grand. "Fairy queen needs to find out something from a mortal. She gets him into Fairyland, boffs his brains out, and then he just won't go away. Mortal stalks her until she takes pity on him and makes him forget."

"Blue Fairy Book or Red?" asked Mack.

"He's just making this up," said Puck.

"I'm a folklorist," said Grand. "Amateur. Started with slave narratives and slave magic beliefs.

Then I branched out. I never thought it was real."

"If you think this is real," said Puck.

"Shut the Puck up," said Yo Yo.

"Ha ha," said Puck. "Aren't we the class clown."

"But you've got to do it all at once," said Grand, "which is impossible. Because you can't use the fairy circle to bind him unless you two fairies are in control of it, and you can't get control of it till you're reunited with your imprisoned selves. And you can't be liberated until the fairy circle has distracted him."

"Plus I ain't sleeping with you," said Mack.

Both Puck and Yo Yo looked at him like he was crazy. "Everybody wants to sleep with her," said Puck.

"Not me," said Mack.

"Yes you do," said Yo Yo. "You think I don't know?"

"Oh, I want to," said Mack. "But I don't want to."

"Try English this time," said Puck.

"I want to sleep with her but I don't choose to sleep with her."

Yo Yo was on her feet in an instant. "Why not? What's wrong with me? I have never had a mortal turn me down!"

"Because I'm not sleeping with a girl I'm not married to," said Mack.

"Wow," said Ceese. "You don't hear that very much."

"Yeah, but I'm not sure how much of that is voluntary and how much is inadvertent."

Puck giggled and spoke to Mack. "So you want to get married?"

"She's already married," said Ceese.

"It doesn't matter," said Yo Yo.

"It does to me," said Mack.

"I mean, it doesn't matter that I'm married to Oberon. You are Oberon. So I could sleep with you right now."

"Oberon and you might be married, but I'm not Oberon," said Mack. "And we're not married."

Ceese tried to summarize it. "So this all comes down to, Mack gets it on with Yolanda White here, you find out what you need to know, then all the other stuff happens at once."

"That's it," said Yo Yo.

"Including a fairy circle," said Ceese.

"If the neighbors might be willing to cooperate."

"We form your fairy circle," said Grand, "will that make these horrible wishes stop?"

"It would give me and Puck the power we need, if there are enough of you."

"And we got to get all those people into this house?" asked Grand.

"No, dear no," said Yo Yo. "Mortals' wishes have no power in Fairyland. Especially not here in this passageway. No, the fairy circle has to be in the mortal world."

"But you're imprisoned in Fairyland," said Mack.

"Right," said Puck. "Why do you think we haven't already worked this out with some other neighborhood long ago?"

"You haven't worked it out with this neighborhood, either," said Ceese. "You got a long way to go before most of these folks willing to cross the street for Miz Yolanda."

"You haven't worked any of it out," said Mack. "Including the part where you sleep with me just to get information. It's like some bad World War One movie. What was that musical one with Julie Andrews and Rock Hudson?"

"Who are they?" asked Ceese.

see Mary Poppins do a striptease."

"I wouldn't mind," said Puck.

"I'm not going to lie with a woman I'm not married to," said Mack.

"That one heavy Bible-reading boy there," said Puck.

"Good for you, Mack Street," said Grand.

"Queen of the fairies wants to sleep with you," said Ceese, "and you saying no?"

"I'm saying, Marry me," said Mack.

"Whatever," said Yo Yo.

It infuriated Mack that she dismissed him so easily. "Marry me and mean it."

"I meant it the first time I married you," said Yo Yo impatiently. "Isn't that enough?"

"You never married me," said Mack. He got up and walked out the front door.

"Oh good," said Ceese. "Now how are we going to get home?"

"You don't need his help to get out, you boneheaded mortal," said Puck with a cheery smile.

"Only to get in."

"Why is that?" asked Grand.

"Because that's the world you come from," said Yo Yo. "The world of the street out there. It's where you belong. You can always go home."

"So does that mean Mack belongs in our world, too?" asked Ceese.

Yo Yo patted his hand. "You such a sweet boy, Ceese. Still looking out for your little Mack Street. That boy lives in both worlds. He lives in both worlds all the time."

"You mean when he's in Fairyland, he's walking around here, too?" said Ceese. "I'm surprised he wasn't hit by a car."

"I mean he casts a shadow in both worlds. He makes a footprint."

Puck snorted. "That boy barely is a footprint. Doesn't even make it up to shadow."

"He's more than a shadow," said Ceese. "He's the best kid in the world."

Ceese turned away from him and spoke to Yolanda. "I don't want him to marry you."

"Like I said, I don't care either way. I just got to know what's going on with my husband."

"I know a lot of people slept with a lot of other people and still don't know squat about any of them."

"Ceese,' said Yolanda. "Didn't you ever wonder why the Queen of the Fairies kept wanting to sleep with wandering minstrels and farmboys? In all those fairy tales?"

"Same reason white women always want to sleep with black men," said Ceese.

"Poor boy," said Yolanda. "When mortals hook up like that, they don't even know each other's bodies. It ain't even carnal knowledge. But when I hook up with somebody, I know everything, I see everything. I even know stuff they don't know they know. It's all mine. That's what I love."

"Oberon do that too?"

"He thinks he does, but he got no idea what-all I get from it. Truly knowing everything about another person—that takes me way higher than all that trembly screechy moany stuff mortal women get so excited about."

"But fairy men don't do that."

"Maybe they could, if they bothered to look into their partner the way I look into mine."

"Just seems to me," said Ceese, "you taking a lot from Mack and giving him pretty damn little."

"I'm a queen," said Yolanda. "What planet you been living on?"

"So, you going to spoil him for other women? You going to make it so he can't be happy with somebody like Ebony DeVries?"

Yolanda almost answered. Then she shook her head. "I won't keep him from anything he ever had a chance of having."

"Oh, you're all heart," said Ceese. "You're Miss Congeniality times ten."

"Cecil Tucker," she said, "I will never do anything that harms Mack Street. But I also can't give him any happiness that is out of his reach by nature."

"Nothing natural about any of you fairies."

"I don't like the way you said 'fairies,' " said Puck.

"And I don't give a flying Puck what you like," said Ceese.

"Hush," said Yolanda. "We need Ceese."

"What do you need me for?"

"Sometimes you got to have a giant."