The Wizard of Dark Street Read online

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  First published by Egmont USA, 2011

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  New York, NY 10016

  Copyright © Shawn Thomas Odyssey, 2011

  All rights reserved

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Odyssey, Shawn Thomas.

  The Wizard of Dark Street: an Oona Crate mystery/Shawn Thomas Odyssey.

  p. cm.

  Summary: In 1877, in an enchantment shop on the last of the Faerie roads linking New York City to the Land of the Fey, just after twelve-year-old Oona opts to relinquish her apprenticeship to her uncle, the Wizard, and become a detective, her uncle is stabbed, testing her skills.

  ISBN 978-1-60684-143-3 (hardcover)—ISBN 978-1-60684-277-5 (electronic book) [1. Wizards—Fiction. 2. Magic—Fiction. 3. Apprentices—Fiction. 4. Uncles—Fiction. 5. Orphans—Fiction. 6. Mystery and detective stories.]

  I. Title.

  PZ7.O258Wiz 2011

  [Fic]—dc22 2011002496

  Printed in the United States of America

  CPSIA tracking label information:

  Random House Production • 1745 Broadway • New York, NY 10019

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher and copyright owner.

  For Anne, Barbara, and Shari.

  The magic is real.

  Be sure to check out Shawn Thomas Odyssey’s mysterious performances and curiously concocted music videos, all created specifically for this book, at www.thewizardofdarkstreet.com.

  CONTENTS

  On the fourth of November, 1876

  CHAPTER ONE Oona and Deacon

  CHAPTER TWO The Missing Dresses

  CHAPTER THREE The Faerie Servant

  CHAPTER FOUR The Wizard and the Lawyer

  CHAPTER FIVE Through the Eyes of the Magician

  CHAPTER SIX Lamont Learns the Basics

  CHAPTER SEVEN The Glass

  CHAPTER EIGHT The Faerie Catcher and the Faerie Death

  CHAPTER NINE Waiting for the Authorities

  CHAPTER TEN Pink

  CHAPTER ELEVEN A Roomful of Suspects

  CHAPTER TWELVE The Inner Garden

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN The Tale of the Really, Really Long Sleep

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN The Barrier, the Riddle, and the Circle of Stones

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN Goblins

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN Quick and Bop

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Adler Iree

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN The Museum of Magical History

  CHAPTER NINETEEN Oswald Descends

  CHAPTER TWENTY The Cobblestone Theif

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE The Showroom

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO The Secret Entrance

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE Into the Dark

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR The Crones

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE An Unexpected Visitor

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX Lux Lucis Admiratio

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN The Loophole

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT Open for Business

  Acknowledgments

  On the fourth of November, 1876, the Wizard of Dark Street placed the following advertisement in the classified section of the New York Times:

  Within three days of the advertisement’s publication, the New York City post office received a grand total of 3,492 letters addressed to Pendulum House, Number 19. To the postmaster’s great displeasure and utter vexation, no Dark Street could be found on any of the regular route maps, city plans, or postal grids. Nor could anyone recall ever having heard of a Little London Town located anywhere within New York City. The letters were stamped ADDRESS UNKNOWN and returned to their original senders.

  (Monday, May 14, 1877)

  Magic is a fickle thing,” said twelve-year-old Oona Crate. “I prefer things that work.”

  Deacon stood upon her shoulder, silent and foreboding. Black as midnight and glossy as ink, the magnificent enchanted raven ruffled his feathers as the two of them peered curiously through the window of The Dark Street Enchantment Shop, the storefront where Oona’s uncle sold his latest bits of magical wonder. Behind the shop’s cobwebby windows could be found all manner of mysterious things: charmed feather dusters that giggled when dusting, and sponges that gargled a tune. Ever-burning lamps and never-melting ice—two of the Wizard’s best sellers—lined the shelves, ready for purchase and gift wrapping. But Oona had little interest in entering the shop today. Nor did anyone else, it would seem.

  The storekeeper, Mr. Alpert, a grizzled old man with an enormous overbite and glasses as large and round as tea saucers, sat idly at the front counter, his magnified eyelids drooping as if he might doze off at any moment. From the look of the empty store, one might begin to think that magic was about as exciting as watching fruit dry on a windowsill. Not very exciting at all. And quite honestly, the store itself looked in dire need of a good paint job.

  Next door, however, a handsome, newly painted storefront stood squarely between the enchantment shop and the shoemaker’s shop on the other side. With its doors open wide, the shop in the middle was a bustle of activity. A large sign over the shiny front window advertised: MR. WILBER’S WORLD OF MODERN WONDERS. Shoppers and lookie-loos alike jostled to get out of one another’s way as they pressed through the doors of Mr. Wilber’s fantastic shop, which sold everything from the latest in modern toothbrushes and bicycles to photographic equipment and spectacular newfangled waffle irons. Nearly any technologically advanced gadget to have come out in the present year of 1877 could be found at Mr. Wilber’s World of Modern Wonders.

  Mr. Wilber, a gawky toothpick of a man with a flat face and highly pronounced Adam’s apple, never looked bored, such as Mr. Alpert so often did, and Oona supposed that this was because Mr. Wilber was far too busy trying to keep up on the demands of his technology-craving customers.

  Oona sighed. The day was bright and the air clean. The smell of spring leaves and dusty cobblestones permeated every shadowy corner of the street. Gazing at her reflection in the enchantment shop window, Oona straightened the lace-trimmed bonnet on her head before running her fingers through the front of her hair. The hair had grown little, if at all, since the incident with the guillotine the previous night, and she couldn’t keep from readjusting her headpiece to flatten her hair down—a near impossible proposition.

  “You’ve got to be more careful!” That had been her uncle’s advice on the subject of her nearly getting her head chopped off. His words had been direct, and his tone uncharacteristically stern. “I will only agree to this detective business of yours if you promise not to go getting yourself into such terrible trouble. I mean it, Oona! Igregious Goodfellow is a scoundrel, a thief, and a homicidal maniac all rolled into one. You’re incredibly lucky that it was only your hair that got caught in that horrible man’s guillotine. You should never have followed him to his secret hideout. The moment you discovered he was the Horton Family Jewelry Store thief, you should have left matters to the police.”

  Oona had rolled her eyes at that. Surely her uncle knew better than to place his faith in the police. For nearly three years, ever since Head Inspector White had taken over the top position, the Dark Street Police Department had become an utter joke in the eyes of both law-abiding citizens and criminals alike. It was no secret that crime on the street was at an all-time high.

  “You are lucky that you managed to slip out of those rop
es before that madman released the blade,” her uncle had continued in a stern voice, “and that Deacon got to the police as quickly as he did, or … or …” The Wizard sighed, shaking his head. “You are still a child, Oona. And you are not your father.”

  Those words had hurt. Oona had needed to bite her tongue to keep from telling the Wizard that he was not her father either, and that her father was dead, buried six feet under the ground in the Dark Street Cemetery. But why bring that up? It would only have upset him.

  Her uncle may not have been the greatest magician who had ever held the highly honored position of Wizard of Dark Street—some even criticized his magical abilities as downright mediocre—but he was surely the greatest uncle and guardian a girl like Oona could have hoped for. And besides, he had, after all, agreed to let her out of her magical obligations so that she might better pursue her true interest in detective work. What more could she have asked from him? So Oona had agreed, no more snooping around deadly criminals … if she could help it.

  Presently, she turned her gaze north, and before her lay all of Dark Street, the last of the thirteen Faerie roads, connecting the World of Man to the fabled Land of Faerie. A broad cobblestone avenue more than thirteen miles long, the street stretched out in a continuous line, a world unto itself, unbroken by cross streets or intersections. The buildings rose up from the edges of the sidewalks like crooked teeth crammed into a mouth too small to fit. They listed and leaned against one another for support, giving the impression that if one of the buildings should ever fall down, then all of the others would quickly follow, toppling one by one like dominoes.

  She considered the street for a moment, this ancient world between worlds, with its enormous Glass Gates at one end and the equally vast Iron Gates at the other. And yet of these two gateways, only the Iron Gates ever opened, and then only once a night, upon the stroke of midnight, when the massive doors would swing inward on hinges as big as houses, opening for a single minute upon the sprawling, ambitious city of New York. For the amount of time it took a second hand to travel around the face of a clock, the Iron Gates remained open to any who should choose to venture across their enchanted threshold. Few ever did. Few ever even noticed.

  In a city such as New York, even at midnight, the people were too busy getting from one place to another to observe anything out of the ordinary. And those who did see the street suddenly appear out of nowhere might simply pretend that it was not there at all. They might turn their faces, and when they looked again, the street would be gone, and they would tell themselves that it had been a trick of the light. Nothing more. The children of New York would surely have been more apt to see the street than adults, but of course, at midnight most good little children were tucked safely away into their beds, dreaming of stranger places still.

  But if an outsider had ventured through the gates, what he or she would have found was a place not so different than the city from which they had just come. A place filled with everyday people going about their everyday lives—lives of simple pleasures and skullduggery alike. They might first notice how the majority of residents on the street carried on their conversations in various British accents, instead of American ones, and how some of the inhabitants referred to the street as Little London Town. A visitor might then observe how, no matter the season in New York, freezing cold or blisteringly hot, the temperature on Dark Street would be breezy and mild, just cool enough for a jacket or shawl. Or it might be pouring rain on the street, yet New York would be dry as a bone. And the peculiarities would not stop there, for upon closer examination the outsider would find that, here, the shadows appeared slightly darker, so that they might think twice before stepping on them, for fear of falling in. They would discover a world where the blue of the sky in daytime appeared almost purple, and by night the stars shone bright enough to read by. It was a place as ancient as the wind, where candlestick trees replaced light posts, and street clocks told jokes as well as time.

  Yet to the sensitive tourist, even more striking than the discovery of new and enchanted things, there was the subtle sense of magic lost—a street that had forgotten more magic than drops of rain had fallen to the earth. It was an ancient road, from time before time. Since before the construction of the Iron and Glass Gates, before the building of Pendulum House, and the naming of the first Wizard, and even before the great Magicians of Old fought their terrible war against the armies of the mighty Queen of Faerie, Dark Street existed. In one form or another it had always been there, a bridge between the fantastic and the ordinary, between magic and reason, between the Land of the Fay and the city that never sleeps.

  Oona returned her attention to the enchantment shop window and stared for a moment at her reflection in the wobbly glass. Large green eyes with thick, curling lashes blinked as they took in the heart shape of her face, and the full-skirted, gray dress that cinched in around her waist. Really, her uncle had been right. What had she been thinking to believe that she, a slight four-foot-three-inch-tall girl, could ever have hoped to apprehend a dastardly lunatic like Igregious Goodfellow, the Horton Family Jewelry Store thief? At twelve years old she was still a child in the eyes of Dark Street society, and yet her birthday was only three months away. Thirteen was a special age for a girl on Dark Street. It was the age when she became a lady proper, the age at which many girls entered the Academy of Fine Young Ladies. It was a prospect that Oona had no interest in. She preferred to continue her independent studies with Deacon. The raven was, in her eyes, the best teacher on Dark Street.

  As it nearly always did, the thought of her birthday sent a shock of guilt through her, bringing with it a wave of sadness that seemed to make the daylight dim slightly, and turn the soft breeze to a chill. The image of her mother’s wondrous face drifted through her mind like a distant ghost—those great green eyes so similar to Oona’s own, with a bright, radiant smile like a gleam of sunlight—and another image, this one of Oona’s baby sister, too small and too young even to walk, clapping her tiny hands in her mother’s arms. The image was burned into Oona’s memory like a cruel scar: the mother and the baby beneath an enormous fig tree, its leaves rustling in the breeze as the magic lights danced around them, swirling faster, and faster, and then …

  Oona quickly shoved the thought away. She swallowed a lump in her throat and thrust her finger in the air. “I prefer science, Deacon! Not spells, and wands, and magic rings. Give me facts. Give me logic. Give me the most incomprehensible riddle … the most complicated problem. That is what I love.”

  Her tone was markedly serious, and her London Town accent both highly educated and refined.

  Deacon dug his talons into her shoulder, ruffling his thick black feathers as the two of them began to stroll up Dark Street in the direction of Pendulum House. Horse-drawn carriages clattered and clacked up and down the broad avenue, and the sidewalks bustled with pedestrians, all of them hurrying this way or that, hardly taking notice of the girl with the chopped hair and the raven on her shoulder. Surely they had all seen her before. She was the Wizard’s niece after all. His apprentice. More than that, however, she was the so-called Natural Magician: a freak of nature so rare that in every hundred years only one might be born.

  “You are very special, Oona,” the Wizard had explained to her nearly five years ago on her first day as his new apprentice. Several months past her eighth birthday, she’d listened eagerly to the gray-bearded man she so revered, her father’s older brother. “I myself am what is called a Learned Magician. Like nearly all the magicians who have ever lived, I have had to learn magic through decades of hard scholarship and training. Someone like myself must force magic to do my will. But a Natural Magician such as you, Oona, is a human being born with the extraordinary magical powers of a faerie. No one quite knows why. Indeed, some believe that Natural Magicians have active faerie blood in their veins, but so far as I know, that is but a rumor. And yet, unlike faeries, who are born with the instincts and know-how to control their spectacular magic, Natural Ma
gicians must learn to handle their powers. They must be taught. You must be trained.”

  And Oona had trained. For nearly two years the Wizard had schooled her. She lived with him in the great Pendulum House, assisting him, absorbing all she could, honing her skills so that one day she might become the next great Wizard, which was the title given to the head of all magical activity on Dark Street, and the protector of the World of Man.

  “What good is being the head of magical activity,” Oona had once asked the Wizard, “when no one on Dark Street does any magic? There aren’t any magicians anymore, Uncle, except for you and me. I read in the Encyclopedia Arcanna that Learned Magicians used to number in the thousands, both on Dark Street and in the World of Man.”

  The Wizard nodded. “Yes, but that was nearly five hundred years ago. After the end of the Great Faerie War—after Oswald the Great closed the Glass Gates, cutting Dark Street off from Faerie—the magic began to weaken. People eventually lost interest in the old ways, and, as it is said, the world moved on. You are correct, Oona, that there is less interest in magic than there ever has been before. Some would even call magic impractical. But there are still those out there who might find some bit of spell work in a book and attempt to use it. There are still innumerable magical objects out there, many of them faerie-made bits of mischief left over from five hundred years ago. It is the Wizard’s job to handle such occurrences when they arise, and of course to protect the World of Man, should the Glass Gates ever be broken and the Land of Faerie once again be opened. It is an important job we do, keeping magic alive. Do you believe that?”

  On that day, which now seemed like a lifetime ago, Oona had nodded that she did believe. But that would all change. It would change a year and a half later, the very day she’d turned ten years old, when the sudden and hard truth that magic could not be trusted proved itself to Oona once and for all.