The Magician: An Epic Dark Fantasy Novel: Book One of the Rogue Portal Series (5 page)

              Stuart nodded in an approving reply.

              "Keep going with that." He smiled.

              "With what?"

              "With your feelings. What feels right. I think they're your best bet at figuring this thing out."

              Connor smiled. "Thanks, Stuart."

              "Hey, sure. Anything for a friend, right?"

              Connor knew that the statement held far more meaning to Stuart than a simple joke or retort, and knew to take it seriously.

              "Absolutely. Anything for a friend."

              "Right. Well. Sweet dreams. And if you find a big library, I've been meaning to re-read
Moby Dick
."

              They both laughed, turned their backs to the interior of the room, and fell asleep, unaware that they were bathed in an aqua blue light emanating from the pocket watch.

SEVEN

⌛

The room looked the same as it had the night before. Almost. Connor couldn't place it, but something had shifted since his last visit. The endless rows of books, the megalithic hourglass, the cathedral of a room, all untouched. The domed roof offered him yet another astounding view of the cosmos beyond it. The colossal oak hourglass in the center of the room hadn't changed either. (Although Connor saw that a golden plaque read "The Sands" - he hadn't noticed that before.) Yes, everything looked the same. But it felt different.

             
The lighting,
Connor thought, suddenly aware of the cause for the shift in appearance. The night before a gauzy, matte glow had bathed the room in a bright if not eerie ambiance. But tonight it looked like candlelight. And then he saw them. Candles everywhere, completing the image of a cathedral with the stone walls and rows of books.

              "Welcome back, Dearie,"

              Connor spun around and found himself facing the crimson man, seated at the large cherry desk in the center of the room. By all appearances, he'd been sitting there, waiting for Connor's arrival.

              "Who are you?" Connor asked.

              "Oh, how rude could I be, failing to introduce myself to my guest," he said, rising from his chair, golden staff in hand. Placing a hand over his heart he bowed in a grand fashion. "I'm the Magician."

              He sprung into standing motion once more and continued.

              "So very nice to officially meet you." The man offered a gloved hand and gazed at him with cold, calculating eyes that contradicted his smile.

              "Yeah, pleasure, I'm sure," Connor replied to the man, refraining from meeting his handshake.

              "Oh, Connor, don't be so brittle."

              "How do you know me?"

              The Magician burst into laughter, leaning back and extending his staff to one side in a gesture far grander than seemed appropriate. Grandiosity, however, had become a running theme with the man, and Connor met his theatrics with bemused indifference.

              "I've known you longer than you've known yourself, I'm afraid."

              "That's not possible."

              "Isn't it?"

              Connor shifted his weight, uncomfortable under the weight of the idea that perhaps all of this nonsense really did exist.

              "Come with me," the man said, narrowing his eyes and turning on his heel.

              Connor followed him through the center of the room, as he turned left and headed for the far wall, and then as he approached one of the endless shelves of smaller hourglasses. Finally, the man stopped, closed his eyes, and a light dragging sound could be heard, no doubt enhanced by the incredible acoustics of the room.

              A small hourglass floated evenly from a shelf, through the air, and landed in the man's hands as though guided along by a perfectly even string, never shifting weight. Never tilting. In the dim light Connor couldn't make out what the engraving on the side said.

              Slowly filtering sand, mostly gathered at the top, trickled through the hourglass, glinting in the odd light as it fell. The sand mirrored the sparkling stardust of white he'd seen in the enormous version of the hourglass. The Sands. That's what they called it here. Original.

              The man's voice interrupted his sarcastic admonishment.

              "Take a look."

              Holding the glass up, he looked at the bottom to see the engraved text: "Connor Galveston".

              "Me?" he asked.

              "That's your name isn't it?"

              "Has to be more than one, doesn't there?"

              "Yes, but most of this realm functions on intention. And I very much intended to pull yours, my dear."

              "So what does it mean?"

              "I trust you're familiar with the concept of an hourglass, yes?" the man replied sarcastically.

              "Yeah, I've heard of them once or twice," he shot back, matching his tone.

              "Then you know what this means. This is your life. Lucky for you, you've got a lot left."

              "Why are you showing me this?"

              "Because I'm trying to get you to understand that this place is real. I need you to understand that it's real." He paused. "I trust by now you know that I am very real."

              "Chemistry class...but..."

              "We don't have time for your questions right now, I'm afraid. Judging by the portal around your neck, you'll be waking up soon."

              Connor looked down to see that his pocket watch glowing the same ethereal blue he had become so reluctantly familiar with.

              "I don't understand."

              "Not yet. But you will."

              Connor turned and began to walk away from the man, no clear direction in mind, but not wishing to be in the presence of the Magician any longer. His head spun, his heart pounded, threatening the walls of his chest, and he wanted nothing more than to wake up in his dorm room with the contentment and knowledge that none of this existed. That magic itself didn't exist. That the dream existed, but nothing more.

              "Oh, my dear boy. Before you leave..."

              Connor stopped in his tracks and spun around.

              "What do you want now?" he spat.

              The man adopted a bewildered yet sardonic expression.

              "Me? It's not about me. Your friend...McElderry..." He made a snapping motion as though trying to remember something.

              "Stuart?"

              "Yes! Indeed. I believe he asked for this, no?"

              He materialized a large sapphire blue book with gold trim and ornate embossing that depicted a man on a ship and a behemoth whale. On the top it said "Herman Melville" and on the bottom, in much larger letters, it said "Moby Dick".

              Connor met the man's eyes with incredulity and disbelief.

              "You honestly mean to tell me that in the Universe's largest library in the middle of dreamland you keep a copy of Moby Dick?"

              The man shrugged. "We house the magical and the mystical, of course. But what's so un-mystical about literature? Isn't it just the magic of your realm?"

              Connor raised an eyebrow as though to say "I hadn't thought of that."

              Without warning the man tossed the book toward him, and he caught it. At the same time the man gave a flick of his wrist and returned the hourglass bearing Connor's name across the room up to where it had come from on an upper shelf.

              "See you soon, Dearie," the man said.

              Connor opened his mouth to speak, but a blue light engulfed his entire being, a nauseating sense of spinning overwhelmed him, and then - nothing.

⌛

              Connor awoke to the sound of Stuart laughing. Opening his eyes a slit, the sun greeted him with harsh enthusiasm. He looked over to see a fully dressed Stuart standing by the window. A jolt of panic went through his body, waking him with a start.

              "Am I late again?" Connor asked, tearing the covers off his body.

              "Oh, no. Not at all. I'm just an early riser." Stuart smiled.

              "Oh. Good to know."

              Connor looked at the clock as its red numerals declared it to be 6:45 in the morning. He still had plenty of time before they had to be in class. No chemistry today, thankfully. He didn't think he could handle any more confusion over Professor Rumsfeld. Or the Magician. Or whoever he'd claim to be next. Regardless of being jolted awake, he still found it a relief to be out of the dream, into reality, where he knew the rules and could play by them effectively. Where things made sense.

              "Why were you laughing?" Connor asked.

              Stuart looked distracted. He'd been standing by the window, staring out, holding a cup of coffee.

              "Oh, I'm sorry. It's just so uncanny that I'd find this in my things after mentioning it last night. I hope you don't mind that I borrow it."

              "Borrow what?"

              Stuart turned to fully face him.

              "Well this of course. I found it on your desk, right by your dad's pocket watch. I figured maybe you'd found it after I went to sleep and left it here perhaps. But, either way, I'd love to read it again."

              Connor's blood turned to ice. In Stuart's hand he saw a large sapphire book with gold embossing.

EIGHT

⌛

He hadn't mentioned the book to Stuart. Hadn't bothered to tell him that he'd neither found nor given it to him from his personal effects. Hadn't thought it would be particularly useful to explain to him that the book, in fact, came from the Library of the Cosmos, given to him by the snarky man in a crimson coat who called himself the Magician and largely resembled their chemistry professor.

              Of course, he didn't understand it himself. How in the world would he breach the subject in the first place? He'd thought about it. For about twenty minutes in the afternoon over his lunch between classes Connor had seriously considered approaching Stuart with the reality - at least as much of it as he knew - of what was going on.
Hey Stuart, remember how I told you about the weird guy in my dream that looks like our chemistry professor? He gave me the book.
No, that wouldn't do.
Stuart, you know that book? I actually got it in a dream.
Not even a slight improvement.

              This trial and error experiment went on until it became quite clear that no amount of euphemistic sculpting would make the subject sane. Approachable. Even halfway believable. Were he submitting the story as a script, he imagined it would come back with comments like
Implausible, even for a magical world.
And he would have agreed.

              But, as unlikely as it seemed, he faced an implausible reality. And he'd have to find a way to breach the subject with someone. Just, perhaps, not the person with whom he shared living quarters. Stuart had enough stress in his life. The last thing he needed on his plate was the sneaking suspicion that his roommate had gone mental and would, given the chance, commit any number of unspeakable acts toward while he slept.

              And so, here he sat, alone at a table in the quad. His introductory psychology class had ended a half hour previous, but the dorms seemed more like a claustrophobic prison than a bedroom, and he didn't want to go back. Not just yet. He had thinking to do. Pondering to do. Figuring out to do.

              "Keep that face up and you'll engrave a line on your forehead!"

              He looked up to see Kit standing in front of his table, her bright red hair glowing like an ethereal fire as the sun passed through it.

              "Hey you." He smiled.

              "How goes it?"

              Connor laughed. "Fine, I guess."

              "Fine? That's a lame answer, try again."

              At this Connor melted into laughter. It felt like breathing after surfacing from the ocean after almost drowning.

              "Alright I'm pensive. How's that?"

              "Ooo, pensive. Now we're getting somewhere."

              "That makes one of us."

              Kit sat down in front of him on the seat, tossing her backpack up on to the table between them. The picnic style bench metal bench consisted of too many holes so that a person could not write on it without a sturdy surface between the paper and the table unless he wanted holes in his work. This struck Connor as rather odd, given that he'd always thought the express purpose of a table to be a flat, solid surface upon which a person could write, or eat.

              "So what's up, really?" she asked, taking on a more serious tone.

              "Honestly I don't even know where to start."

              "I told you. A big library."

              Connor looked at her sideways.

              "Yeah...about that. What exactly did you mean?"

              "Well, libraries have books. Books have information. Big libraries have lots of books. Logic would dictate big libraries would have loads of information. I thought they covered that in elementary school."

              "You're hilarious."

              "Thanks, I try."

              Connor laughed.

              "Why did you ask me what I meant by a big library?"

              Connor met her gaze, then shook his head. "Nothing. Nothing, really. Just..."

              He pinched the bridge of his nose between his forefinger and thumb, letting out an audible sigh.

              "You're kind of freaking me out. Just tell me what's going on."

              "Kit, I wish I could. Seriously. But I don't even know where to start. The whole thing is just so...impossible."

              She nodded.

              "Well, I gotta take off, but here's my number." She retrieved a scrap of paper from within a book and scribbled on it. Handing him the paper, she smiled.

              "Thanks," he said, returning her smile.

              "Don't mention it. You need anything, text me. Call me. Whatever."

              "I will," he said. "Thanks again."

              "Sure thing."

              She picked up her bag, slung it over her shoulder, and started to walk away, but then stopped.

              "You know what helps me when I'm stressed, Connor?"

              "What?"

              "A good book. You should try it. One of the classics, maybe." She winked.

              He smiled and chuckled. "Oh? Any recommendations?"

              She shrugged.

              "I've always been a fan of
Moby Dick
."