Castles and Cauldrons

Summer brings a visitor to the Barclay house. Jimmy's cousin Len arrives with a suitcase so large that George teases him about it, and George uses the occasion to give his son a lesson in hospitality: the guest gets the bed, and Jimmy takes the cot. Jimmy is more interested in what Len has brought. He hopes for Zappazoids. Len tells him Zappazoids is a baby toy compared to what is in the suitcase, and unpacks a rulebook, a set of plastic swords, belts and other gear for a role-playing fantasy game called Castles and Cauldrons.

The rules, Len explains, are simple and not negotiable. A player becomes someone else, and the person who brings you into the game chooses your name. Len has been playing for a long time, and he is already Luther the Magician. Jimmy becomes Jondell the Apprentice, whether he likes it or not. Some things, Len tells him, you cannot choose or control.

Out in the woods, Jimmy learns how seriously Len means all of it. Calling his cousin by his real name earns him a scolding: Len and Jimmy stayed back at the house, and only Luther and Jondell are here, surrounded by the Black Monks of Benthrid. Len has Jimmy shut his eyes and picture the monks - giants in black robes, faces veiled, voices low enough to shake him from the inside. Then he strikes Jimmy's plastic sword with his own, again and again, telling him to listen. At first Jimmy hears only plastic. Then something shifts, and he hears steel on steel, and the two of them fight until the monks are vanquished. Jimmy's heart is hammering. It felt real.

What comes next unsettles him more. Len says the victory has to be sealed with an incantation, and that the incantation must be said kneeling. Jimmy hesitates, because kneeling makes it feel like a prayer. It is not a prayer, Len says. It is only a game.

Across town at Whit's End, John Avery Whittaker drops a glass for no reason he can name. He tells the friend who helps him clean up that he suddenly felt as though something terrible were about to happen. Hours later the feeling has not lifted. Alone, he prays about it, describing himself as weighted down and oppressed, disturbed in the very core of his spirit by something he can only call dangerous and evil, and asking God either to take the feeling away or to help him understand what it means.

Back at the Barclays', Len keeps talking over Jimmy whenever Jimmy comes close to telling his father about the game. Afterward he explains why. Adults get fussy and stop kids from playing; the book says the game stays secret, and Jimmy has to promise. That night, by candlelight with the lamp off and the window cracked, Len tells Jimmy about worlds inside this one and powers beyond the senses - visions of the future, seeing through a bird's eyes the way his old friend Medwin the Miraculous could, moving things without touching them. Lately, he says, he has been able to do things himself. When Jimmy presses him, Len says he is not ready yet, and that he can read Jimmy's heart.

In the morning Donna storms in with her collector's doll, both arms torn off. She is certain Jimmy and Len are responsible, and she says they have been sneaking around ever since Len arrived. George examines the tear marks, decides the family cat is to blame, and makes Donna apologize. She does, but she does not believe it.

Walking down to the creek, Jimmy asks his cousin whether it is the way of magicians to tear the arms off a doll. Len only asks whether Jimmy really believes the cat did it, then says that cats can be persuaded to do anything, and that in Castles and Cauldrons anything is possible. The wizards of Kith are plotting against them now, he says, and swords are no use against wizards. This calls for magic. Jimmy protests that he does not know any magic. Len tells him it is time he learned, and leads him on.