A Wizard Alone New Millennium Edition Read Online Free PDF

support couldn’t do anything about the nightmares that followed, nightmares full of leering clown faces and the musky smell of big cats. Finally the nightmares faded away and left Nita wondering what in the world had been the matter with her. Yet she never went to another circus. And even now, sometimes the mere sight of a spotlight aimed at an empty floor, with darkness lying silent beyond it, was enough to induce in her a feeling of tremendous foreboding that would darken her soul for hours.
    Sometimes she tried to work out in more detail why she’d been so scared. She kept coming back to the clowns. To Nita, there was a fake quality about them, nothing genuinely humorous. It was strange to think that someone seriously thought that makeup could make you funny. But there was no question in Nita’s mind that makeup could make you scary. The stylized clown face, too generic, too cartoony: that really bothered her. So did the baggy, motley costume, disguising the real body shape so that it could have been a bare steel skeleton underneath instead of flesh and bone. And the slapstick jokes, endlessly repeated but supposedly amusing because of the repetition—all these left Nita cold. There was something mechanical about clowns, something automatic, a kind of robot humor; and it gave her the creeps.
    It was doing so again, right now. Because here in the darkness, followed around by one of those sinister spotlights, was a typical clown act—the clown riding around and around on a ridiculously small bicycle, in ever-decreasing circles. There was nothing funny about it to Nita. It was pitiful. Around and around and around, in jerky, wobbling movements, around and around went the clown. It had a painted black tear running down its face. The red-painted mouth was turned down. But the face under the white greasepaint mask was as immobile as a marble statue’s, expressionless, plastered in place. Only the eyes were alive. They shouted, I can’t make it stop! I can’t make it stop! And, just this once, the clown didn’t think it was funny, either.
    The drumroll went on and on, as if for a hanging rather than a circus stunt. The chain of the bicycle rattled relentlessly in the silence inside the light. Beyond the light, in the darkness, the heartless crowd laughed and clapped and cheered. And through the sound of their applause, low, but building, came the growl of the tiger, pacing behind the bars, waiting its turn.
    The drumroll never stopped. The clown rode in tighter and tighter circles, faster and faster. The wheels of the bike began to scream. The crowd shouted for more. “Stop it,” Nita yelled. “Stop it! Can’t you see it’s hurting him?”
    “Not nearly enough,” growled the tiger. “Never enough.”
    The crowd roared louder. “Stop it!” Nita shouted back, but now they were drowning her out, too. “Stop it!”
    “STOP!”
    ***
    She was sitting up in the dark, alone. It took her a ragged three or four breaths to realize she was in her own room, in bed, and that her own shout had awakened her.
    Nita sat still for a few moments, praying that she wouldn’t hear anyone coming to find out if she was okay. She wasn’t, but she still hoped no one would respond. There wasn’t anyone in the house who’d been sleeping well for a while now.
    She stayed still for a long time. Mercifully, no one showed up, and Nita began to relax, realizing that she might have expected this outcome if she’d really thought about it. Dairine, when she slept these days, slept hard, in utter exhaustion. Their dad lately had been doing much the same, a change from the previous month, when he had hardly slept at all. It didn’t take a wizard to figure out that he’d been afraid to fall asleep, because of who he would, again and again, not find beside him when he woke up. Finally his body had overruled that kind of behavior and now was trying to sleep too much, to not wake up at all, if possible. The reasons were the same, and just