Kit opened the can and dumped it into Ponch’s dish, filled the dry food dish, and checked to make sure that there was plenty of water in the bowl beside it. Ponch jumped up again, turned around in excited circles a few times more, and then went over to the dish and started to gobble his food.
Kit shook his head and rinsed out the can at the sink before throwing it out. In the living room it had gone quieter as Carmela got off the phone and went back to talking to the TV, or rather to someone the Powers That Be only knew how many light-years away. From the sound of it, she was translating a subtitled display rather
than listening to live Speech, but at the moment, this didn’t seem to be helping her much. “What?” Kit heard her say. “Do I what? Do I grenfelz? Uh, I don’t think so. No, I am not shy! Okay then, show me an image—”
There was a moment’s silence, after which Carmela dissolved into uncontrollable laughter. Kit was incredibly tempted to go see what she was looking at. I won’t do it, he thought. She’ll get the idea I’m trying to chaperone her, and she’ll give me all kinds of grief.
And I would be trying to chaperone her—
Kit went to look out the kitchen window again. He’d done this earlier, when he’d just come back from Nita’s and Ponch had still been asleep. Then, the sidewalk outside their house had been empty. Now, though, it was full of dogs.
There were at least ten of them. Most were neighborhood dogs: various multicolored and multisized mutts, the big blue-merle collie from the Winchesters’ place down the block, a pair of bulldogs from two streets over, and even the dysfunctional little terrier from three houses down, Tinkerbell—the one who normally threatened, in unusually fluent dog-language, that if he ever got out of his yard, he’d rip Kit’s throat out. Yet there he was, sitting peacefully on the sidewalk and gazing at the Rodriguez house as intently as all the other dogs were. The big silvery Great Dane from down Nita’s street, sitting next to Tinkerbell and as intent on the house as he was, shifted position slightly and put one huge foot on Tinkerbell’s rear end, nearly squashing him flat. Tinkerbell just wriggled out from under, shook himself, sat down again, and resumed staring at the house. Kit let out an annoyed breath.
“Are they still out there?” Kit’s mama said from the dining room couch, turning a page of the paper.
“Yeah,” Kit said.
“Remember our little talk the other day?” Kit’s mama said, her voice just slightly edgy.
“Yeah, Mama. I’m working on it.”
“Well, work harder.”
Kit turned away from the window, annoyed. He had spent some weeks in consultation with Tom Swale on the question of what was causing the increasing weirdness around his house. The best explanation Tom had been able to come up with was “hypermantic contagion syndrome,” an irritatingly vague suite of symptoms usually more casually described as “wizardry leakage.” Days of perusing his manual had left Kit completely in the dark as to exactly what kind of wizardry, or whose, was leaking, from where, into what…and until he figured those things out, there was no stopping the leak.
Kit looked out at the dogs and sighed. At least they were quiet at the moment. But they tended not to stay that way. And when they started making noise and drawing the attention of the whole neighborhood, his folks got tense. It wasn’t that they’d started giving him trouble about his wizardry as such. But the Rodriguez house used to be a fairly quiet and peaceful place, before the past month or so. Before the dogs, that is. Before the TV began evolving. Before Carmela became a boy magnet. The noise wasn’t his fault, and Kit had pointed out more than once that there was nothing he could do about the amount of noise Carmela made—the
number of times the phone rang in a given day was hardly anything to do with wizardry. But any time Kit said this, his mom would just glance first at the TV, which did have something to do with it…and then she’d look out the window to where half the dogs in the neighborhood were sitting, gazing at their house as if it were full of top sirloin, or something even more important. And then the howling would start—
Kit turned away from the kitchen window. “Ponch,” he said softly to his dog, “they’re all out there again.”
I keep telling them they shouldn’t do that, Ponch said silently, concentrating on licking his bowl clean. And for a while, they don’t. But then they forget.
“But why are they doing it?”
I don’t know. I keep asking them, hut they don’t understand it, either. They’re not so good at figuring things out. Ponch looked up, licking his chops. He sounded faintly aggrieved. I’ll let you know when I figure out what’s on their minds.
“Well, hurry up and do what you have to do to find out,” Kit said. “And when you go out there, tell them no howling!”
They like to sing, Ponch said, sounding a little injured. I like it, too. Even Carmela likes to sing. What’s the matter with it?
Kit closed his eyes briefly. His sister’s singing voice was, to put it kindly, untrained. “Just tell them, okay?” Kit said.
Okay…
Ponch turned his attention back to the bowls, starting a long, noisy, sloppy drink of water. From the living room, Kit heard Carmela start laughing again. Grenfelzing, Kit thought. Should I be worried that my sister is being invited to grenfelz I just hope this isn’t something that’s going to rot her morals somehow…
From down the street, Kit could faintly hear the sound of a familiar car engine coming toward the house: his dad, coming back from the printing plant three towns over where one of the bigger suburban New York newspapers was produced. The station wagon pulled in and parked. A few minutes later, Kit’s father came in the back door, pulled his jacket off his burly self, and chucked it at the new coat tree by the back door, which Kit’s mama had bought a few weeks before. The coat tree swayed threateningly, but for once it didn’t fall over—Kit’s pop was getting the hang of the maneuver. “Son, they’re out there again,” he said as he came through the kitchen.
“I know, Pop,” Kit said. “Ponch is working on it. Aren’t you?”
There was no reply. Kit looked over at Ponch, who had left the water bowl and turned his attention to the neighboring bowl of dry, crunchy dog food. He was now steadily eating his way through it with an air of total concentration.
Kit’s pop sighed as he came into the dining room, leaned over Kit’s mama (now sprawled out on the sofa) to smooch her, and took the newspaper from her, straightening up to glance out the window of the dining room. “It’s like being in a Hitchcock movie,” Kit’s pop said, “except I don’t think he would have gotten the same effect if he’d covered someone’s front yard with sheepdogs and Great Danes. Whose sheepdog is that? I’ve never seen it before.”
“I don’t know, Pop. I could go ask it.”
“Look, son,” Kit’s dad said. “Don’t bother. Just ask Ponch to have another word with them, okay? Otherwise we’re going to have the neighbors over here again, in a group, like last time…and I have a feeling this time they might think about bringing torches and pitchforks.”
“I asked him, Pop. He’ll go out when he’s finished his dinner.”
“Right. When’s ours, honey?”
“Three-quarters of an hour.”
“Then I’m going to go sit down and read this awful rag,” Kit’s pop said, “and see if I can figure out what’s wrong with the world.” He walked into the living room, leaving Kit wondering yet again why his dad was so unfailingly rude about the newspaper he worked for as a pressman. “Carmela, what are they doing there?”
“Grenfelzing.”
“Really. What’s the fire hose for?”
“I don’t think it’s a fire hose, Popi…”