Inherited Magic (13 page)

Chapter 44

Only a few months stood between the first time John opened The Book and when he figured out where the hidden pages were—a short moment or two in an overall lifetime. What you do in a moment or two can change a lifetime though, and he had changed a great deal in those months and he had also laid the groundwork for even greater change within himself. The thing that would surprise John, however, was how little it had to do with magic and how much it had to do with his sense of worth and his force of will. So, with all this change and the madness, John was prepared for what came next. He had expected it, but he never expected to be able to control it.

The click of the metallic pages vanished behind the blinding light, with everything else, and was replaced with the fantastic. He was aware that this was an elaborate illusion woven through careful manipulation and that he had it within his power to stop it. The illusion that he found himself immersed in took his breath away because of the skill needed to create it, because of the beauty of the scene it presented, and because it is one thing to understand the history, and it was another to see it.

He stood in a vast room with a high ceiling, long billowing curtains hung along the walls, and everything seemed to be made of stone that was polished to a mirror-like perfection. Through arches at the far end of the room, he could see bright blue sky and feel a dry breeze that carried scents he did not recognize. His footsteps echoed only slightly as he walked towards the arches and out on to a large balcony with a low railing and so many plants that it looked as if someone had tried to transplant a section of jungle to the terrace. The air was so dry that opening his mouth in the slightest made his tongue feel dry and leathery.

Hanging in the crystal perfect blue sky, the sun looked bright, brighter than he ever remembered it being. He shielded his eyes till they adjusted to the glare, and once they did, he was unsurprised to see sand dunes stretching to the horizons. He was atop some vast citadel overlooking a vast lifeless desert in what he felt must be Egypt.

“I am pleased that you have joined our ranks, for our numbers dwindle every year and soon we will be too few to rule.” He turned towards the woman’s voice, and made the conclusion that if it wasn’t Egypt, then it was made by an Egyptian. He had missed her because of the glare at first, but now that his eyes had adjusted to the sun, his mind had to adjust to her. To say that she was beautiful would be to diminish her in an almost insulting way. Her dark skin was smooth and flawless, her hair trimmed perfectly at her shoulders and framed her face in a full and flawless way, and on the crown of her head a golden cobra poised to strike. The shape of her figure was accented by the simplicity of the white gown she wore, hugging curves but providing freedom of movement as she lounged in a simple chair. She was perhaps the most exotic woman John had ever seen and at the same time so sensuously beautiful that it left him standing slack jawed.

“We deserve what has come to us. Others would argue with me and insist that we were meant to rule the unenlightened; they are fools, though and will soon vanish to time. We have been cruel masters to our fellow man, even when we wished to show kindness. We have all their failings and very seldom do we share their virtues. It is good that this era will end, and I would not wish it to last, but I fear the end of magic more than I fear my own death. It will not save us—we who touch this are damned to suffering and trials for the rest of our time on this world and only death will bring us peace—but we must use it to save and protect everything and everyone we hold dear.” She paused and looked into the distance behind John. In the silence, he could hear the sand in the wind.

“I listened to Moloch,” she continued, with darkness in her eyes—not sorrow but fathomless anger. “As the fool lay dying, I went to him, and he told me the truth that everyone else denies and refuses to accept as anything but madness. The evils he saw, the demons that hounded and tortured him, were real, and they seek this tiny gem of a world so that they can bring it to flames. The fool thought this was because of magic and that we may cast it aside and live free from danger for all time. But in listening to him, I realized that it was not just magic they feared, but our very existence, as if we were the seed that could never be allowed to sprout and bear fruit.” She gently shook her head and looked down. “I am not brave or fool enough to confirm my suspicions by going where he went, nor do I have time. The fools trap has sprung on us, and we proud few fight in a burning building rather than banding together against this calamity. This is the final proof that our arrogance and cruelty must end. No more shall Gods walk among men and govern them.”

She stood and walked to the edge of the balcony next to John. “Now, we must serve as Shepherd’s and make amends for our evils and remain strong through the long night that is to come, so that when the true danger is at the gates, we are ready. That is why I have sheltered my library and knowledge in these books. It is my plan that the line of teacher and student should stretch, unbroken, from this distant past to . . . ” She paused and slowly inhaled deeply. “To a future I can’t imagine, to protect it from a horror even more unimaginable. To insure that when Moloch’s devils arrive, there is a Guardian there to greet them with all the suffering they deserve. I hope you shall never see it, yet you must train for it as if it were upon your doorstep. I have no way to know if you are worthy, but since your teachers have brought you this far they have faith in you, and I have faith in them. So this is your heritage . . . .”

At the last moment, John realized he was in danger and tried to slam the book closed, but it takes time for those impulses to travel through clumsy
and slow human nerves and muscles
. It only took a microsecond for a message to leap across thousands of years.

Chapter 45

There was a series of bright flashes accompanied by several loud bangs and a hissing noise. John’s senses did not so much reel as stand up and promptly fall down again before demanding to know what the hell had just happened. Every cell in his body that could broadcast to the brain was desperately trying to send an urgent message that had to be acted on. One was hot, the other cold, another in total ecstasy and yet another was convinced that it was being chewed thoughtfully by a toothless llama. The sensory overload washed over him and did not relent till he was desperate to escape, so he fled through the collapsing corridors of his mind to one place he imagined might be safe. That inner large and empty place that somehow connected to his ability to do magic, that vastness inside that had appeared after opening The Book the first time, he fled there without thought or reason except to escape.

He leaped into that void and instantly felt relief, not because the mad signals had stopped burning up and down the lines of his nerves but because he now felt separate from them. He floated and drifted in an inner nothing and watched the chaos wash over his brain from a safe and peaceful distance. He waited for it to fade, but it did not. He reached into himself out of the void, and it was like touching a power cable that someone had jammed into a bowl of jelly that left him seeing vanilla and smelled like the sound of a truck grinding its gears. It was chaos in the truest sense of the word and handfuls at a time were not the way to deal with it.

So, slowly and carefully, he started snatching bits of information and dragging it into the vastness, each time following the pattern of the signal back to its source and making sense of it before moving on. It was slow frustrating work, but John found in himself patience that he had never known he possessed. It had been hidden somewhere, but now it served him well. Slowly and steadily, he picked signals and made sense of them, one by one, till he had a toe, then a foot, a leg, and then a hip. He couldn’t rush, dared not rush, but he couldn’t slow down or stop. It had to be done in one constant movement, now that he had started. Lifetimes seemed to slip away as he worked, his senses were too incomplete to connect him to the outside world, and what information he gained was slim. In time, though, he finished and was in anguish that he no longer had tenuous bits of himself to sort and organize. When he finally opened his eyes and dared feel the abused nerves of his self all at once, it was with satisfaction that he had gotten it right, amazement that only a few moments had passed, and he was shocked at what his careful work had done.

He opened his eyes to a new reality. He could see patterns and threads without effort or thought, far clearer than he had ever been able to before. At first, he had smiled and been proud: here was an achievement that would surprise even Owen! When he tried to step away from what had once been an empty inner space, he couldn’t, nor could he close it off like he could before. It only took a moment’s thought to realize why. In his desperation to stop the pain and confusion, he had pulled himself into that emptiness and by pulling thread after thread in, he had anchored himself there. After thinking for a moment, John shook his head slowly and whispered; “What the fuck did I just do to myself?”

Chapter 46

John was angry, but had no one to be angry with but himself. He felt trapped in a stream of events that did nothing but get stranger and more difficult to cope with. Sure, he had adjusted to the idea of life as a mage with unimaginable power that was so dangerous and complicated that simple use of it seemed to attract the attention of lots of bad people and have dangerous consequences. Sure, he had even started to better himself and move forward with his life, but it was a balancing act that he was still learning. He was even learning to cope with seeing the strange silent Tribesman. But it was hard enough when he could shut it off and pretend to be normal, but what the hell was he supposed to do now that he couldn’t shut it off?

He closed his eyes and was not amused or surprised that he could see the forces at play in his eyelids. The steady pulse of his heartbeat pushing blood through his veins was reassuring against the backdrop of his eyelid pattern. How the hell was he supposed to sleep?! He sat up and fumbled for his cell phone. He turned it on, and it flooded the room with an extremely faint blue pattern of radio waves that rippled and bounced as his phone connected to the network. He dialed the number for Owen’s shop in a flurry and hit the green button. The blue ripples rushed and bounced in a frantic march before a ripple came back through the walls, and he could hear the phone ringing on the other end. When the archaic answering machine that Owen insisted on using clicked on, John realized it was very late, and Owen had said he would be out of town.

He wanted to call Radha and at least hear her comforting voice, but how could he explain any of this to her and not have her think he was crazy. The idea of her turning away from him seemed more horrible than the hell he already found himself in and it shocked him. A couple of dates and he was feeling the need to have her as a permanent part of his life? It was more insane than magic and more ridiculous than some terror from beyond that he had guard against and wonder about. Yet, it was an idea that he liked.

Love to John was a cruel thing that somehow always ended up with him standing alone, clutching his emotional wounds, and wondering how he dared to go on and dream of anything else. He was still young, and Barbara had been his first real girlfriend, yet there were women he had lusted after and wanted in the same way that we all want faster cars and better homes. He thought it was what would make him happy. Radha had hardly entered his life, and he could already tell it was something different with her. You and I know that when you realize you have feelings for someone, you have already had those feelings for a long time and that it is far too late to pretend otherwise. This opens the door to the idea of love at first sight, and while I can’t condone such emotionally reckless policies, as your narrator, I am stuck in the difficult position of saying that John already had strong feelings for Radha. Feelings strong enough that they would cloud his thinking at later times and . . . But, really, it clouds all our thinking at times, till we realize that we just have to live with this pleasant mental illness known as love.

No matter how you look at it, the idea of going crazy kept John awake the rest of the night and most of the next day. He struggled to shut off his ability to see the patterns and his inability to disconnect his mind from the slow flood of information he was getting. He knew when anyone in the building turned on a cell phone or sent a text message; he couldn’t listen in, but he saw the potential for that because there was a distinct pattern to the rippling quicksilver waves that flowed past him. He could tell where the mice were in the walls because he could see their body heat change the surface temperature of the wall ever so slightly. He also could plainly see that someone had painted over something by the door to his bathroom, because whatever it was, was under different strains and stresses than the paint around it.

John got up and got a knife out of the drawer in his tiny kitchenette. He approached the patch of paint by the bathroom door and ran his hand over the surface; it gave ever so slightly under the pressure. There was something there, hidden in the wall, a long time ago. He delicately raised the knife and tried to pick the edge of the hidden space beneath the paint. At the moment he was about to cut into the wall, he stopped. I, as your faithful narrator, realize it's not fair to do this to you, but I have to be truthful to events. John didn't cut into the wall. He put the knife away and sat on the bed, staring at the small bit of wall with an angry feeling slithering around in his gut. As of late, his curiosity had gotten him into trouble and he was second guessing if he wanted to know what was in his wall. He decided to be cautious and wait till he knew more. John fell asleep, staring at that bit of wall, and had nightmares of a nest of spiders hidden within and when they hatched, they tried to devour everything and left behind the most beautiful webs.