“Nope, I’m the sex-crazed Wiccan madwoman with the ideas. Later, bitches.”
“Lord of the Rings,” I said.
“Oh, God no!” Tess said pulling a face. “All that portentous language, the endless travel and the singing. It’s like the guy really liked the Sound of Music or something.”
“Gandalf the fricking Grey, showing you how to travel through inter-dimensional portals. I’m just going to put that idea on the table.”
We were driving over to our grandfather’s tossing around ideas in response to Jez’s suggestion and not getting very far. Usually, Tess got a lift home with Jez, but with the way she was looking at the prince, Tess figured she’d be safer with me.
“Gandalf the Grey . . . do you think he’d look like Ian McKellen?” she asked.
“I have no idea. I have a copy of Fellowship on DVD, gets you around the portentous language thing. . . .”
“Oh, but we have no guarantee who would come through. What if it was an Orc?”
“Were they those really ugly guys? The ones in the mud?”
“If you mean the big muscly ones? They were Uruk-hai, which might I add is piece of evidence number two against LOTR. I mean what if Saruman the White came through?”
“Was he the bad white wizard dude with the locks? Oh, God, what about Gollum?”
“OK, that book is done. No LOTR until this spell is sorted. What about the Narnia books? An obvious choice.”
“And get help from Cat-Jesus? Nah, he was always saying that the kids could never go through the same way and that when they got too old or started touching themselves inappropriately, they couldn’t go to Narnia. I don’t want to lose the portal because I had a wank.”
“I don’t remember Aslan telling the kids off for masturbating . . .,” Tess said.
“Then there’s Mr Tumnus or the White Witch–”
“OK, not that one, either. How about Alice in Wonderland?”
“That whole film/book was some kind of kiddy-porn hash dream. I don’t need to try and get advice from a bad trip while not under the influence of said trip.”
“What if the Mad Hatter turned up looking like Johnny Depp?”
“No, no, no.”
“Um, Peter Pan?”
“Oh, that has potential. I found him totally sexy when I was a kid.”
“Really? Flying pubescent boys, huh? How about Outlander?”
“The one with all the Scottish dudes? We’re not looking to get me laid, we’re looking for someone who can tell us what to do. We need a great sage or eldritch wizard or something.”
“Without horrible bad guys that could possibly come instead. What about Merlin?”
“Now that has potential, Merlin the mother-fucking wizard. It’s like Gandalf but minus creepy eyes in the sky. Yeah, we need to get you a copy of that movie, Excalibur, on the way home.”
“Not the Monty Python one?” Tess asked as we pulled into Pa’s driveway.
“Not the Monty Python one!”
6
“So, you want to look at your Nan’s notebooks?” Pa asked as we all filed into the dining room and started dishing up the Chinese. Nan would have had a fit, cartons of MSG-laden food being placed on her good lace tablecloth, rather than being plated in the kitchen.
“If that’s OK. We’re having some difficulties with the shop, and we assumed she left some kind of instructions.”