The Song of the Quarkbeast

‘It depends on your viewpoint. Did you hear that the Amazing Blix is attempting to accolade himself “the All Powerful”?’

Moobin laughed.

‘His arrogance will be his undoing. Right, then,’ he continued, clapping his hands together, ‘to work. What’s the Holy Grail of the Mystical Arts?’

I never saw him so excited as when he was experimenting, and excitement made his wild hair look wilder, and his unkempt manner of dress that much more shabby. He looked less like a person, in fact, and more like an unmade bed with arms and legs.

‘Invisibility?’ I asked incredulously, for not even the Mighty Shandar had ever achieved that. As far as we knew, no one had, although entire lives had been spent in the attempt.

‘Okay,’ said Moobin, ‘what’s the slightly-less-than-Holy Grail?’

‘Moving cathedrals?’ suggested Tiger.

‘Levitation,’ sniffed Moobin, ‘nothing more.’

‘Flying without a carpet or aeroplane under you?’ I asked.

‘Okay, even-slightly-less-than-Holy Grail?’

‘Teleportation?’ I said.

‘Exactly!’ replied Moobin excitedly. ‘The physical shifting from one place to another more or less simultaneously. The current record stands at eighty-five miles.’

‘The Great Zambini in his youth,’ I said to Tiger, ‘over sixty years ago.’

‘My personal best,’ announced Moobin grandly, ‘is thirty-eight feet, and I’m going to try and increase that to  . . . seventy.’

‘I see,’ I said, wondering what could possibly go wrong, and thinking of eight possibilities almost immediately, which ranged from the destruction of two city blocks, through several stages of varying destructiveness to nothing more innocuous than liquifying the earwax of those in the immediate vicinity – the usual knock-on effect of a teleportation. In fact, the purpose of the original enchantment had been precisely that – ear cleaning. Spooky instantaneous transportation was simply found to be a fortuitously useful side effect. The wizard who wrote the original spell in 1698 had been beta-testing it as ‘An Improved & Much Sanitary Method of Ear Cleansing’ when he found himself inexplicably on the street outside. Much research followed and the range and accuracy greatly increased, but the earwax issue had remained. You could always hear better at the end of a jaunt than at the beginning.

‘Not only will I teleport seventy feet,’ continued Moobin dramatically, ‘but I will also travel through a sheet of three-millimetre plywood on the way.’

Tiger and I looked at one another doubtfully. Moobin’s last attempt to pass through solid objects had ended with a broken nose and a bruised knee.

‘I’ve been working with silk, paper and cardboard,’ he said, in an attempt to reassure us as he led us into the corridor outside, ‘and it’s time to move on up.’

‘And you’re no longer leaving your clothes behind?’ I asked, referring to an earlier and mildly embarrassing episode.

‘Not at all,’ said Moobin, who hadn’t been the one embarrassed, ‘I had been eating nougat earlier – I should have known better.’

Owing to its status as a former hotel, Zambini Towers was not short on long corridors, and in the one outside his room, Moobin had hung a large sheet of plywood from a light fixture. He drew a cross on the floor about two yards in front of the ply, handed Tiger a pocket Shandometer to measure peak wizidrical output, then gave me a tape measure to hold.

‘Call out when I get to seventy feet, will you?’

And he walked off past the sheet of ply and into the darkness while I watched the tape pay out.

‘Can’t he teleport around the ply?’ asked Tiger.

‘Curved teleporting is not possible.’ I told him. ‘Magic’s effect only works in straight lines. A teleportation around a corner means taking the shortest route through whatever the corner is made of. Passing through the rock and soil of the planet on a straight-line journey through the earth from here to Singapore takes a lot of wizidrical energy – it makes carpet travel a lot more crackle-efficient than transcontinental teleportation.’

I thought for a moment.

‘There was an enchanter over in France who experimented with high-end clear-air teleportation. He started from Paris and reappeared two and a half thousand feet over Toulouse.’

‘That must have been unexpected.’

‘On the contrary, it was planned – but his parachute failed to open and he fell screaming to his death in a very undignified manner. The power of magic began to wane soon after, and no one tried it again.’

‘Isn’t that greater than Zambini’s record?’

‘It’s not official if you don’t survive it.’

‘I can recommend hayricks for soft landings,’ Tiger replied thoughtfully. ‘Sorcery isn’t really straightforward at all, is it?’

Tiger had been with Kazam only two months, and he was still trying to get his head around the limiting practicalities of magic. Most people thought you just wave your hands and sim-sallah-bim, but it was a lot more complex than that. Sorcery was not so much doing what you wanted to do, but doing what you could do – or ingeniously finding a way around the physical limitations of the craft.

The tape measure continued to pay out, and when it had reached the correct distance I called out and Moobin stopped.

‘Okay, here we go, then,’ came Moobin’s confident voice from the other end of the corridor. ‘Seventy feet and through a three-millimetre sheet of plywood.’

I nodded to Tiger, who had lifted the cover from one of the many ‘Magiclysm’ alarms dotted about the building. In the event that Moobin’s spell went squiffy, Tiger would press the red button and the sprinklers would trip, spraying water over the interior of the building and quenching any spells. Wednesday morning was traditionally the spell test day, and many of the residents wore gumboots and raincoats indoors on that day, just in case.

We waited in silence. Magic was odd stuff, and the powers of sorcery are more often found in those who can obsess to a degree that would be considered faintly undesirable in society. You had to focus every synapse in your mind to the exclusion of everything else and fire the magic out of your index fingers. That’s why observers remained quiet when spelling was afoot. Break the concentration and whoever was casting the spell would have to start again. It’s like interrupting poetry. It just isn’t done.

We heard a few grunts from the darkness beyond the sheet of ply, then a pause while nothing happened. There was another pause, more grunts, and then nothing happened again. It was just when nothing was about to happen for the third time that there was a faint ‘pop’ from the other end of the corridor as the air rushed in to fill the hole in the air where Moobin wasn’t, and a half-second later he reappeared in front of us, the air he had displaced hitting us a moment later as a faintly discernible shock-wave.

‘Ta-da!’ said Moobin, staring at his feet where he had appeared, directly above the white cross. ‘Seventy feet, and through a sheet of three-millimetre plywood. Tomorrow I’ll try six-millimetre ply, then chipboard.’

‘Impressive. I’ll mark it up in the records ledger tonight.’

‘It’s also a new personal best,’ continued Moobin excitedly, ‘and if those heathen scum over at iMagic aren’t also doing teleport work, it makes me the best teleporter on the planet. Why are you both staring at me?’

‘You look like you’ve been glazed,’ I said, putting out a hand to touch him, ‘like a doughnut.’

Just then, the separate sheets of thin wood veneer that made up the plywood fell neatly into three thin and very flappy pieces.

‘Oh dear,’ said Moobin, ‘I appear to have picked up the glue from the plywood as I passed through. How did that happen?’

He wasn’t asking any of us, of course, he was simply confused. But that was what research and development was like. Full of semi-triumphs and perplexing unforeseen consequences, such as the whole violent hiccuping thing when conjuring up fire – or the propensity for fillings to fall out of bystanders’ mouths when attempting to tease a rainstorm out of a cloud.

‘The Transient Moose can teleport almost without thinking,’ muttered Moobin, faintly annoyed,