The Evil Wizard Smallbone Read Online Free PDF

his back, his arms and legs curled into his chest. Wet snuffly noses tickled his face, and anxious doggy whines echoed in his ears.
    He opened his eyes and saw Smallbone’s rimless spectacles glittering like tiny moons against a backdrop of books.
    “You feeling human yet, Foxkin?” Smallbone asked.
    Nick stretched experimentally. Nothing hurt, exactly, but he felt achy, like he’d had a fever, and his mouth tasted like dust and copper. His arms and legs felt weak and wrongly jointed, and there seemed to be too few of them. Which made no sense, because he still had two of each, fingers and toes intact.
    “I’m asking,” Smallbone went on in a conversational tone, “because you’ve been a spider for the best part of a week.”
    Nick sat up so fast, the books swam around him. “You’re kidding.”
    “I was you, Foxkin, I’d think twice before I called me a liar.”
    Nick was not in the habit of thinking twice. It felt too good to say what was on his mind, even when it got him in trouble. “Because you can turn me into a spider? Maybe. If I believed you. I bet you just drugged me or something.”
    Smallbone shook his head. “Stubborn, ain’t you, Foxkin? Maybe I should have called you Jackass. Keep an eye on him, boys,” he said to the dogs. “I got things to do.” And he stumped off.
    Slowly, Nick got to his feet. They seemed smaller and farther away than they should. He swayed uncertainly. Mutt and Jeff steadied him with their warm, solid bodies, and he petted their sleek heads. Wagging muscular tails, they herded him gently toward the kitchen, where he got himself a glass of water. As he drank it, his eye fell on the kitchen calendar. There was a blue-penciled cross through every date up to December 26. Last he remembered, it had read December 21.
    He’d missed Christmas.
    Nick told himself he didn’t care. At Uncle Gabe’s, the only difference between Christmas and any other winter day was reruns of
A Charlie Brown Christmas
and
Miracle on 34th Street
on TV. Uncle Gabe might have brought home a mangy tree he cadged from his friend at the tree lot and pitched a fit because he couldn’t remember where he’d put the decorations. Last year, he’d given Nick a sweater from the church charity box. It was way too big. Jerry had laughed, Nick had kicked him, and it all ended up with Nick spending Christmas Day in the ER. That’s when he got the broken tooth.
    No, Nick didn’t mind missing Christmas.
    He did mind missing five days out of his life, though. He set the water glass on the draining board. Maybe he hadn’t missed them at all. Maybe the old man was just messing with his head. Without a TV or even a radio, Nick couldn’t know for sure what day it really was. But something had happened — that was for certain. Now he was thinking about it, he could remember a thread twitching under his feet and a fly buzzing and struggling against his sticky silk trap. He remembered sinking his teeth into its body, wrapping it in silk, and feasting on its liquid insides when it was ripe.
    Nick sat down hard in Smallbone’s old rocker, feeling slightly sick. It was true. He had really been a spider. Magic was real, and Smallbone was just what he claimed to be: a genuine, card-carrying evil wizard.
    A cold nose nudged his hand. Nick looked down. Mutt — or maybe Jeff — was gazing up at him with eyes the color of pumpkin pie, his forehead wrinkled and worried. Nick stroked the black velvet ears. He wished that Mutt — he was sure it was Mutt — really was his dog. And while he was wishing, he wished his life in Beaton was a bad dream and Smallbone was a character in a horror film and his mom was alive and life was the way it used to be before they moved in with Uncle Gabe. But that would be another kind of fairy tale than the one he seemed to be stuck in, the kind that had fairy godmothers instead of evil wizards, the happily-ever-after kind that really wasn’t true even if the scarier ones might