Soon there wasn't a chicken anywhere in Peaksville that had fewer than four legs.

Anthony had experimented a little, so some had five or six legs. The more drumsticks, the better, he reasoned. But those chickens were failures. They never adapted to their new forms and had to be killed very quickly. The four-legged chickens did get used to their extra legs after a while. They even kept laying eggs.

The townsfolk regarded four-legged chickens with deep suspicion, but there weren't any normal chickens, anymore, and people needed to eat, didn't they? And cut off from the world, there weren't going to be any new sources of food. They had to hoard their canned and dry goods, and do their best to survive on what they could raise and make themselves.

Kids stopped coming over to play. Their parents told them to stay away. At first, a handful came over anyway, at least in the beginning. Like Anthony, they thought their parents were dumb, and besides, they wanted to see real magic, just like in the storybooks. Anthony showed them a few small tricks, like changing a dull brown rock to bright purple crystal, and giving a mouse three tails.

They thought that was neat.

But then, for reasons Anthony never really understood, several of them suddenly got angry. "You can really do these things," said one boy a year older than Anthony. "You really did make all that gray nothing around our town, didn't you?"

Another boy yelled, "If you can do these things, you should put Peaksville back the way it was! We don't like it this way."

The other children, emboldened by their peers, also got mad. "We can't get anything new," one said. Another accused, "The movie house and the TV don't work anymore, and it's all your fault!" They all started shouting complaints and accusations.

The two biggest boys loomed over Anthony, and one of them raised a fist, and Anthony got scared out of his mind. "No!" he cried, covering his head with his hands, and power surged. The boy's fist disappeared before it could hit Anthony. Blood spurted from the gory stump. The boy dropped to the ground, and screamed and screamed.

The other children started screaming, too. Most of them ran away, but some stayed and just kept screaming. The maimed boy's screams overrode them all.

"Stop it!" Anthony also screamed, plugging up his ears with both hands and scrunching his eyes closed. "Just go away! All of you go away!"

And they did. Their screaming stopped, and they vanished into the cornfield.

After that, no more children ever came to the Fremont's house. They didn't even walk near it, instead finding long, roundabout ways to avoid it. But Anthony didn't care. Other children were mean. They'd been mean in Valeria, and they were mean in Peaksville, too. It was a good thing they stayed away.

He was afraid other children would hurt him, and that maybe the adults might hurt him, too. He remembered that Dad had been afraid of what other people might think, or do. "I'm trying to protect you," Dad had said. Anthony knew he needed to protect himself. He wished really, really hard that no one would ever do anything to hurt him. He didn't know if that wish worked. There was no visible sign, but at least he'd tried.

The children weren't the only people to stay away. The adults didn't come over to visit if they didn't have to, either, and Anthony's family didn't encourage anyone to even try. Dad went into town and had a talk there, and after that everybody did their best to be nice to Anthony. Sometimes, Bill Soames would come by on his bicycle to deliver a few special grocery items that Mom requested, like cans of the tomato soup that Anthony liked so much.

Mom and Dad and Aunt Amy rooted around in the storage shed and the barn, and found some wonderful old antiques that didn't require electricity. They found an iron stove that burned wood, and an old, manual clothes washer and wringer, and all sorts of neat things from the past that had just been rusting. Dad cleaned off the rust, and oiled the moving parts, and made them work again.

Everyone in town did the same, getting by as best they could without electricity and any of the modern conveniences it provided. Anthony thought he could make things easier for them, but everyone just told him he was a real good boy, and that he should just go play and enjoy himself.

One Sunday, there was a funeral for Missus Kent's husband, who had died recently of a heart attack. Anthony hadn't done it. He hadn't had anything to do with it at all, but people still looked askance at him. Dad hadn't let Anthony go to the funeral, or to the potluck where people brought special food for poor Missus Kent.

Anthony liked her. Missus Kent had always been nice to him, and he felt awfully sorry for her. She was so sad. Without thinking, he wished her husband would go back to her. And Mister Kent did, a shambling, not-alive thing that walked home from the graveyard the very next day.

No one ever asked Anthony for anything. No one ever let Anthony see anything but a smiling face.

Anthony learned a valuable lesson from what he'd done with Mister Kent. He learned that maybe he could raise the dead. Sure, it had been an accident, but he had still done it. Mister Kent wasn't really alive, Anthony knew, but rather an animated dead body. It was starting to rot, but it kept moving. Anthony's magic wish would keep it moving until it fell apart.

But if he could do that much, Anthony reasoned, why couldn't he someday really raise the dead? He could raise Fai himself someday, even better than he'd raised Mister Kent. "I can learn to keep the dead flesh from rotting," he said to himself, "and that way I can bring Fai back. I just need to learn to keep things from rotting away."

After that, when he killed something, he practiced reanimating it. But no matter how much he practiced, he just couldn't figure out how to keep the dead-alive animals from rotting, stinking, and falling apart after two or three weeks. This was going to be much, much harder than anything else he'd done. Dad, Anthony knew, approved.

"That's real good, Anthony," Dad said with a broad smile, when he saw a crow that Anthony had reanimated. "That's a real good thing you've done, bringing that crow back to life."

Anthony poked the crow with a stick. It was just a dead bird he'd found near the tree. He hadn't killed it, and it was a bit ragged, since it had already been dead for a day or two. The crow hopped stiffly and tilted its head at a strange angle. It was kind of funny, Anthony thought.

Dad shuddered, but Anthony had gotten used to seeing Dad act a little weird. At least Dad didn't tell him not to use his magic anymore.

"It's not really alive, Dad," said Anthony, feeling compelled to tell his father the truth. He poked the crow again. "I haven't gotten that part figured out yet. He'll fall apart in a few weeks, just like the other animals, and like Mister Kent did a while ago. I need a lot more practice."

Dad shook again, all over, and then he smiled even more broadly. "It's a good thing you're practicing, Anthony. It's real good."

Anthony smiled up at him. It was so nice that Dad was happy again. "Thanks, Dad," he said, and went back to playing with his dead-alive crow.

Anthony didn't just experiment with making dead things move and pretend to live. He learned accidentally one day that he could be somewhere else just by wishing it. He had been a long way out in a field, looking for a cat he'd seen out there. He wanted to play with it, but then Mom had called him in for supper. He wished he didn't have to run so far, and by magic he was in the kitchen, still covered in straw and dirt from the field.

Mom had let out a little shriek, then said, fanning herself, "Oh, Anthony, you scared me. How did you get here so fast?" And then her eyes had widened, and she put a hand over her mouth. "Oh, but it's real good that you got here so fast. Real good! You're a good boy to come in for dinner so fast!"

"I wished it, Mom," Anthony said, answering her question with pride. "I just wished I was back here, and I was! Isn't it great? I've never done that before!"

Mom nodded, her head jerking up and down. "Yes, it's real great. It's the greatest thing ever," she said. She took a deep breath. "But you need to wash up for dinner. Go get cleaned up now, son."

"Okay," Anthony chirped, and went out to pump some water.

After that, he experimented with wishing himself all over Peaksville. It was funny the way people would let out a little shriek and jump whenever he popped in right in front of them. But he knew they didn't really mind, because they always told him what a good trick that was, and how he was getting really good at magic.

He got really good at wishing himself around that way, so good he wondered if maybe someday he could wish himself to wherever that magician was. That magician was really, really far away, in a whole different world, but he had Fai, and Anthony knew that, someday, he was going to have to go find Fai. He would need Fai's body in order to bring Fai back to life.

"That magician had better keep his promise," Anthony growled to himself, whenever he thought of that. "He'd better keep Fai from rotting."

One day, he was ruminating on the worrisome idea that Fai was rotting, while playing with a gopher, a sparrow, and a lizard. He got the good idea to put them together into one animal, but he must have been feeling so grumpy it affected his magic, because his creation turned out to be an ugly, nasty thing. Its mood was as bad as his own, and it snapped at him and tried to bite him. With half a thought, he wished it into a grave in the cornfield.

Behind him, Aunt Amy sat in her rocking chair on the porch. She was singing softly while rocking. Anthony still didn't like singing. He always put up with it from Aunt Amy, because he liked her a lot, but he was in a really rotten mood. Before he knew it, he wished she wouldn't sing.

And she stopped singing.

Oh, no. Sometimes, when he wasn't thinking, he accidentally did things, like that time he had wished Mister Kent would go back to Missus Kent. Or at other times, if he was careless, he caused a strange transformation, or sent things away to the cornfield. He turned, half expecting her to be gone. "Aunt Amy?" he said. To his relief, she was still there, rocking in her chair.

She smiled at him with empty eyes. "Hello, Anthony," she said.

After that day, Aunt Amy never sang again, and her gaze was always vacant. She didn't do much except rock in her chair on the porch, and her smiles were weak and bland, but she was still nice to Anthony, and he still liked her. But she wasn't very lively, anymore.

And so days passed into months, and everyone was nice to Anthony, really nice.

Everything was good.