Nick followed the light to a paved road and a mailbox and a wooden sign, its words half-veiled with snow. Beyond the sign was a drive way and a big, shadowy house lurking among the pine trees. Nick stumbled up the porch steps and banged on the heavy front door with hands numb with cold. Nothing happened for what seemed a very long time. Then the door flew open with a shriek of unoiled hinges.
“What do you want?”
It was an old man’s voice, crotchety and suspicious. Given a choice, Nick would have turned right around and gone somewhere else. As it was, Nick said, “Something to eat and a place to rest. I’m about frozen solid.”
The old man peered at him, dark eyes glittering behind small round glasses. “Can you read, boy?”
“What?”
“Are you deaf, or just stupid? Can you read?”
Nick took in the old guy’s wild hair and wilder beard, his old-fashioned coat and his ridiculous top hat. None of these things made Nick willing to part with even a little piece of truth about himself. “No. I can’t.”
“You sure?” The old man handed him a card. “Take a look at this.”
Nick took the card, turned it upside down and around, then handed it back to the old man with a shrug, very glad that he’d lied to him.
The card said:
Evil Wizard Books
Zachariah Smallbone, Proprietor
Arcana, Alchemy, Animal Transformation
Speculative Fiction
Monday-Saturday. By Chance and by Appointment
Mr. Smallbone peered at him through his round glasses. “Humph. You’re letting the cold in. Close the door behind you. And leave your boots by the door. I can’t have you tracking up the floor.”
That was how Nick came to be the Evil Wizard’s new apprentice.
At first he just thought he was doing some chores in return for food and a night’s shelter. But next morning, after a breakfast of oatmeal and maple syrup, Mr. Smallbone handed him a broom and a feather duster.
“Clean the front room,” he said. “Floor and books and shelves. Every speck of dirt, mind, and every trace of dust.”
Nick gave it his best, but sweep as he might, the front room was no cleaner by the end of the day than it was when he started.
“That won’t do at all,” said the Wizard. “You’ll have to try again tomorrow. You’d best cook supper — there’s the makings for scrapple in the icebox.”
Since the snow had given way to a breath-freezing cold snap, Nick wasn’t too unhappy with this turn of events. Mr. Smallbone might be an Evil Wizard, ugly as home-made sin, and vinegar-tongued. But a bed is a bed and food is food. If things got bad, he could always run away.
After days of sweeping, the front room was, if anything, dirtier than it had been.
“I’ve met dogs smarter than you,” Smallbone yelled. “I should turn you into one, sell you at the county fair. You must have some kind of brain, or you wouldn’t be able to talk. Use it, boy. I’m losing patience.”
Figuring it was only a matter of time before Mr. Smallbone started to beat up on him, Nick decided it was time to run away from Evil Wizard Books. He took some brown bread and home-cured ham from the icebox, wrapped it and his flashlight in his checked handkerchief, and crept out the back door. The driveway was shoveled, and Nick tiptoed down it, towards the main road.
And found himself on the porch again, going in the back door.
At dawn, Mr. Smallbone found him walking in the back door for the umpteenth time.
“Running away?” Mr. Smallbone smiled unpleasantly, his teeth like hard yellow tiles in his bushy beard.
“Nope,” Nick said. “Just wanted some air.”
“There’s air inside the house,” Mr. Smallbone said.
“Too dusty.”
“If you don’t like the dust,” Mr. Smallbone said, “you’d best get rid of it, hadn’t you?”
Desperate, Nick used his brain, as instructed. He started to look into the books he was supposed to be cleaning to see if they held any clues to the front room’s stubborn dirt. He learned a number of interesting things, including how to cast fortunes by looking at a sheep’s liver, but nothing that seemed useful for cleaning dirty rooms. Finally, behind a chair he’d swept under a dozen times before, he found a book called A Witch’s Manual of Practical Housekeeping.
He stuffed it under his sweater and smuggled it upstairs to read. It told him not only that there was a spell of chaos on the front room, but how to break it. Which he did, taking a couple of days over it, and making a lot of noise with brooms and buckets to cover up his spell-casting.
When the front room sparkled, he showed it to Mr. Smallbone. “Humph,” said Mr. Smallbone. “You did this all yourself, did you?”
“Yep.”
“Without help?”
“Yep. Can I leave now?”
Mr. Smallbone gave Nick the evilest smile in his repertoire. “Nope. The woodbox is empty. Fill it.”
Nick wasn’t at all surprised when the woodbox proved as impossible to fill as the front room had been to clean. He found the solution to that problem in a volume shoved out of line with the books around it, which also taught him about carrying water in colanders and filling buckets with holes in them.
When the woodbox was full, Mr. Smallbone found other difficult tasks for Nick to do, like sorting a barrel of white and wild rice into separate jars, building a stone wall in a single day, and turning a branch of holly into a rose. By the time Nick had mastered these skills, it was spring and he didn’t want to run away any more. He wanted to keep learning magic.
It’s not that he’d gotten to like Mr. Smallbone any better — Nick still though he was crazy and mean and ugly. But if Mr. Smallbone yelled and swore, there were always plenty of blankets on Nick’s bed and food on his plate. And if he turned Nick into a raven or a fox when the fit took him, he never raised a hand to him.
Over Summer and Fall, Nick taught himself how to turn himself into any animal he wanted. November brought the first snows and Nick’s twelfth birthday. Nick made his favorite meal of baked beans and franks to celebrate. He was just putting the pot to bake when Mr. Smallbone shuffled into the kitchen.
“I hope you made enough for three,” he said. “Your uncle’s on his way.”
Nick closed the oven door. “I better move on, then,” he said.
“Won’t help,” said Mr. Smallbone. “He’ll always find you in the end. Blood kin are hard to hide from.”
Round about dusk, Nick’s uncle pulled into the driveway of Evil Wizard Books in his battered old pick-up. He marched up the front steps and banged on the door fit to knock it down. When Mr. Smallbone answered, he put a beefy hand on the old man’s chest and shoved him back into the shop.
“I know Nick’s here,” he said. “So don’t go telling me you ain’t seen him.”
“Wouldn’t think of it,” said Mr. Smallbone. “He’s in the kitchen.”
But all Nick’s uncle saw in the warm, bright kitchen, was four identical black Labrador puppies tumbling under the wooden table.
“What in tarnation is going on here?” Nick’s uncle face grew red and ugly. “Where’s my nephew at?”
“One of these puppies is your nephew,” said Mr. Smallbone. “If you choose the wrong puppy, you go away and don’t come back. If you choose the right one, you win two more chances to recognize him. Choose right three times in a row, and you can have him.”
“What’s to stop me from taking him right now?”
“Me,” said Mr. Smallbone. His round glasses glittered evilly; his bushy beard bristled.