The Revenge of Magic

by James Riley

  A slightly pudgy man around his dad’s age came through the doorway and smiled at Fort, who forced a smile back. The man wore a black suit and was holding a black briefcase handcuffed to his wrist, which didn’t seem exactly normal for a schoolteacher, but maybe boarding schools were different.

  Behind him, an African American girl with short curly hair wearing a green army uniform looked around the kitchen. Her eyes fell on Fort, and she grinned widely, then waved.

  “Fort, this is Dr. Oppenheimer,” Aunt Cora said, and the doctor stuck out his hand for Fort to shake, which he did. “He’s here to talk to you about that school I mentioned.”

  “That’s right,” Dr. Oppenheimer said. “And this is Rachel.” He gestured toward the still-smiling girl. “She volunteered to give you a student’s perspective of what it’s like at my school. I’ve found that can be very valuable for prospective students.” He glanced at Rachel, who nodded excitedly.

  “Ma’am, can I ask a favor before we start?” Rachel said, dancing from foot to foot. “Would you mind if I used the bathroom? It’s been a long trip.”

  Fort’s aunt blushed. “Of course! Let me show you where it is. And you don’t have to call me ma’am.”

  Rachel waved good-bye to Fort as his aunt led her away. Dr. Oppenheimer placed his briefcase on the table and thumbed the locks open. Feeling curious for the first time in months, Fort moved to look inside, but he was disappointed to find a pack of papers filling it.

  “You can call me Dr. Opps, by the way,” Dr. Oppenheimer said, not seeming to care that Fort was looking. “All the children do.”

  “Okay,” Fort said as the doctor removed the stack of papers from his briefcase, then felt around the bottom. Something clicked, and Dr. Opps lifted the bottom of the briefcase out, then reached back in and pulled out a long silver chain with some sort of round metal ball at the end.

  “Silver works better than any other metal at this,” he said to Fort as he placed the chain around his own neck. “We still don’t know why.”

  Fort stared at him in confusion. “Better at what?”

  “Can I get you anything, Dr. Oppenheimer?” his aunt said, coming back in, then stopping as she saw the empty briefcase and the silver medallion. “Um, what is—”

  Dr. Opps touched her arm, and Cora instantly collapsed to the ground, like a puppet whose strings had been cut.

  “Now,” the man said, sitting down at the table as Fort leaped to his feet in shock. “Let’s talk about the Oppenheimer School.”

  - FIVE -

  THE SIGHT OF HIS AUNT collapsing to the floor shocked Fort for a moment. But then that moment passed and rage filled his mind, memories of D.C. flashing in and out as he launched himself at the man from the school.

  “Don’t you touch her!” he shouted, drawing back his arm to punch Dr. Opps. Before he could strike, though, something burning hot slammed into his side, sending him crashing across the room into the opposite wall.

  “Rachel, no!” Dr. Opps yelled, stepping out over Fort, hands raised in the air. “Are you okay, Forsythe?”

  Fort groaned, rubbing his head, then quickly moved his hands around to feel where he’d been hit, finding his shirt blackened and charred by whatever it was that had struck him. “What . . . what is happening?” he said.

  Dr. Opps smiled sadly and extended a hand to help him up. “I’m sorry about your aunt. I should have warned you. But we can’t have her listening to our conversation. There are things she isn’t authorized to hear.”

  Fort shook his head, not sure he was hearing right. “You . . . knocked her out because . . . you’re going to tell me top-secret things?”

  “I actually encouraged her brain to sleep,” Dr. Opps said, helping Fort back into his seat. “Rachel, go find him another shirt, would you? Preferably the same color as this one.”

  Rachel glared at Fort. “Touch him again, and I burn you to ash,” she said, then turned and stalked out of the room.

  Dr. Opps half smiled. “One of our best students.”

  Fort stared at him. “What . . . what did she do to me?”

  “Let’s start a bit further back, shall we?” Dr. Opps said, and reached across the table for Fort’s hand. Fort yanked it out of reach immediately, but Dr. Opps just smiled at Fort’s nervousness. “No need to be scared. It’s much faster to do things at the speed of thought.”

  “What are you talking about?” Fort said, his hands safely beneath the table.

  Dr. Opps held up the ball at the end of the silver chain. “Our students made it for just this purpose. Wearing it grants me the power to speak to you mind-to-mind.” He shrugged. “It’s really much easier to explain things by way of memories, honestly.”

  Fort glanced down at his aunt, who was now gently snoring on the floor. Dr. Opps hadn’t lied about putting her to sleep, apparently. But even seeing that, Fort couldn’t believe he could hear Dr. Opps’s thoughts or see an actual memory. It didn’t seem possible.

  Then again, neither did the attack in D.C.

  He slowly brought his hand up to the table and laid it down palm-up. “You better not be lying.”

  “Oh, I never lie,” Dr. Opps said, reaching for Fort’s hand. “There’s no need. If I didn’t want you knowing something, I’d just erase your memories.”

  Fort’s eyes widened, and he started to pull away, but Dr. Opps clamped his hand down on Fort’s, and the kitchen immediately disappeared, replaced by the interior of a car, one stopped above what looked to be an archaeological dig site. Not only that, but the sun was high in the sky, when a moment ago it had been early evening.

  “What did you do?” Fort shouted, but no sound emerged from his mouth, and he realized he couldn’t move. Instead, he found himself staring at the steering wheel of the car, where shaking hands held it tightly. But they weren’t his hands. And in his mind, Fort could hear someone else’s thoughts, someone trying to stop the shaking of his hands, trying to appear in control.

  Dr. Opps. This was his memory, and Fort was somehow in his mind, seeing everything the doctor had seen and even hearing his inner thoughts!

  The man turned to look at himself in the rearview mirror, and inside, Fort almost shouted again in surprise. A man in sunglasses stared back at him, a much younger Dr. Opps, at least by a decade. Fort watched in the mirror as Dr. Opps straightened his hair before opening the car door.

  As the doctor stepped out of the car, Fort’s new height—the doctor was much taller than him—made the world seem a bit off. As he reoriented himself, he heard Dr. Opps think that he should try to appear unconcerned when he reached the site, just like the government agents he’d seen in movies. But since his hands wouldn’t stop shaking, he shoved them in his pockets, where at least they wouldn’t be so obvious.

  Fort sighed. Between that and the sunglasses, hopefully no one here in Acadia National Park would be able to tell how little sleep he’d gotten, not since early that morning when the news had started coming in from around the globe. . . .

  Wait, no. Fort pulled back a bit, realizing he’d been getting lost between Dr. Opps’s thoughts and his own. It was Dr. Opps who hadn’t gotten sleep, after some news from that morning, not Fort. This was so weird, living out someone else’s memories and hearing their thoughts!

  But maybe he should just embrace it and follow along? It wasn’t really that much different than watching a movie . . . a very 3-D movie. One where he could also hear the person’s thoughts. And feel what they felt. And know what they knew.

  Okay, it was nothing like a movie. But still, he didn’t want to miss anything, so Fort settled in to watch.

  Walking purposefully down the path to the dig site, Dr. Opps tried to keep his pace slow and orderly, but the incline of the path forced him to jog a bit. He frowned, hoping he didn’t look too ridiculous in his black suit, now covered in a layer of dust and who knew what else.

  “Agent Oppenheimer?” said a woman from below in a green park ranger outfit. She moved up to meet him. “I’m Dr. Lang, N
ational Park Service. Oppenheimer . . . are you by any chance—”

  “No relation,” Dr. Opps said, showing the ranger his badge. “So, you reported something odd here today?”

  Dr. Lang raised her eyebrows. “Odd doesn’t begin to cover it. We’ve found at least three things that genuinely shouldn’t be possible. But I didn’t think they’d send someone from the National Security Agency?”

  Dr. Opps shrugged, trying to downplay the seriousness. “Well, I’m a new agent and I studied ancient languages in college. They probably just wanted an outside opinion.”

  She frowned at that, clearly seeing through his obvious lie, but gestured Dr. Opps to proceed toward the dig site. She led the way toward an enormous set of five tarps, each at least ten feet long, with four or five archaeologists standing around, waiting for them. The wind blew at the tarps, kicking dirt up and blasting Dr. Opps (and Fort) in the face.

  “Sorry about the wind,” Dr. Lang said, covering her face with her arms. “It picked up down here just a little bit ago. That’s why we covered the find. Didn’t want it to get damaged.”

  Based on what he’d heard from the other sites, Dr. Opps wasn’t sure the thing could be damaged. But he wasn’t about to share that.

  Dr. Lang directed the archaeologists closest to the tarps to raise the first one. “We didn’t have any active digs in the area,” Lang shouted over the wind as they untied the tarp. “Two students actually discovered the bones while hiking. We think a mudslide uncovered the edges.”

  Dr. Opps nodded, hoping that two students really had just randomly happened upon this place. But considering the timing, he doubted it.

  The archaeologists raised the tarp high, both uncovering the find and giving them a bit of protection from the wind. Lang gestured for Dr. Opps to move in closer, so he carefully picked his way in, stepping over the rope that encircled the site.

  “So, Mr. NSA, what’s that look like to you?” Lang asked from behind him.

  Dr. Opps stared at the bones embedded in the dirt, and for a moment, felt hope for the first time since the calls had begun coming in that morning. “Like some kind of dinosaur, actually,” he said.

  “Which would be odd by itself, since there’s never been a dinosaur fossil found in the park, let alone in all of Maine,” Dr. Lang said. She pointed at what looked to be the leg bones of a huge reptile. “And while those do resemble the hind legs of a Theropoda, like a Tyrannosaur, that’s not the case here. Because first, these bones are only a few thousand years old, not sixty-five million. Second . . .” She nodded at the other archaeologists, who lifted the next tarp.

  Long, thin bones ran up from the back of the creature, then separated into extended fingers, like the wings of a bat. “. . . tyrannosaurs didn’t have wings,” Lang finished.

  Dr. Opps’s stomach sank into his shoes, and he almost dropped to his knees right there. A fourth site. What did this all mean? It couldn’t be happening, it just wasn’t possible.

  “That’s not even the weirdest part,” Lang said as her colleagues lifted the third one.

  “I know,” Dr. Opps said quietly, not looking up from the wings. “There’s a rider.”

  The ranger’s eyes widened in surprise as the third tarp lifted to reveal a human skeleton seated around the creature’s midsection as if it were riding it. “How could you possibly have known that?”

  He nodded at the fourth tarp. “And I’m guessing there’s something in the rider’s hand?”

  The archaeologists all stared at each other as the wind whipped by them. Finally, one of them coughed uncomfortably.

  “This has to be fake, right?” Dr. Lang said.

  A nervous laugh escaped Dr. Opps’s lips, which he quickly covered with his own cough. “I’m going to need whatever it is the rider is holding.”

  The archaeologists paused in lifting up the fourth tarp, and Dr. Lang shook her head emphatically. “You can’t remove anything from a dig site, Agent Oppenheimer!” she shouted, looking like she couldn’t even believe he’d suggested it. “If this is real, it’s something we’ll need to catalog exactly as found. Winged reptiles that humans rode? We’ve never seen anything like this before. And only a few thousand years old! That’s after the pyramids were built. This is too important—”

  “This isn’t the only site, Doctor!” Dr. Opps blurted out, gesturing around. “Do you have any idea what that human is holding? Because we don’t. All we know is that there were three others exactly like this, all discovered today on completely unrelated digs. What do you think that means?”

  Dr. Lang stepped back, a shocked look playing over her face. “This has to be some sort of prank, then. There’s no way . . . we didn’t even know about this site until a few weeks ago. We couldn’t have—”

  “Take off that tarp,” Dr. Opps said, gesturing at the scientists. “Do it!”

  The archaeologists scrambled to do just that, slowly revealing the rest of the rider’s bones, moving up the body until two arms were exposed. Just past those arms, a strange reptilian skull, the head of the creature, reared back as if screaming.

  Dr. Opps stepped through the winged creature’s rib bones, not caring whether he disturbed the site. He picked his way closer to the rider and found the item: something a little over a foot square in the human’s hand. Fort couldn’t tell at first if the object had always been brown, or if it was just covered in dirt, but as he approached, he saw that there wasn’t a speck of dust on it.

  Another impossibility.

  He bent down and stared at what looked like a leather-bound book in the rider’s hand.

  “We don’t know what the words say,” the nearest archaeologist said to him. “Some language we’ve never seen before. But it must have been placed there recently. This leather would have decomposed in fifty years under these conditions.”

  Dr. Opps nervously reached out a hand and gently touched his finger to the book. When he didn’t get electrocuted or anything, he nodded and wrapped his hand around it.

  “You can’t touch it!” the scientist said, but Dr. Opps just looked up at him, and the man backed away.

  Using his other hand, he pried the rider’s finger bones off the book, then raised it up out of the dirt. As he did, the words on the cover in an alphabet he’d never seen before seemed to blur, then refocus, now completely readable.

  The Magic of Destruction, and Its Many Uses.

  Dr. Opps felt a chill sail down his spine.

  Out of the four books of magic that had been uncovered that day around the world, this one might actually be the most dangerous—

  And then the connection broke, and Fort found himself staring at Dr. Opps across the kitchen table at his aunt’s house, thousands of miles away from Acadia National Park.

  “So,” Dr. Opps said casually. “See anything interesting?”

  - SIX -

  I WAS . . . I WAS IN YOUR memory,” Fort said, his mind still trying to come to grips with what had just happened. “That was you. I was in your head!”

  Dr. Opps nodded. “That was around thirteen and a half years ago. On that day we discovered several . . . artifacts. The book you saw and three others were all unearthed on the exact same day around the world, Forsythe. None of the digs were aware of each other at first, but my agency put it together.”

  “You work at the National Security Agency?” Fort asked. “I thought you ran a school.”

  “The digs themselves were shocking,” Dr. Opps continued, ignoring him. “But these books would become a thousand times more important. Not that we knew that at first.”

  “What’s in the book?” Fort asked. “It said . . . magic. The Magic of Destruction, and—”

  “The books contain knowledge,” Dr. Opps said. “Knowledge long lost. But now that we’ve found that knowledge again, it allows us to do things like, well, show you my memories.”

  He took Fort’s hand again, and the scene shifted to a circular room with descending benches made from stone curving around the room, surrounding a
podium in the middle with two books on it. Rachel, the girl who’d arrived with Dr. Opps, was standing in the middle, reading from the same book Fort had seen in Acadia National Park.

  Another memory. But this time Dr. Opps looked older and seemed confident, much less nervous for what was about to happen.

  Rachel returned the book to the podium and closed her eyes. She raised her hands and formed a circle with her fingers, then mumbled something too quiet for Fort to hear.

  Instantly, her hands began to glow, getting brighter and brighter until she held a blinding ball of light in the air between them. Her words grew louder, but even hearing them aloud, Fort couldn’t understand them or repeat them. It was like they disappeared from his mind as soon as he registered them.

  Rachel turned, energy crackling throughout the room. Dr. Opps’s hair began to rise on end as Rachel opened her eyes, now filled with the same energy that glowed between her hands. She pulled back, then launched the energy at the nearest wall, where it struck with a blinding flash that made Dr. Opps cover his eyes in pain.

  It took a minute for his sight to return. When he was able to see, he found that the wall she’d hit was no longer there. In its place was a jagged hole easily six feet in diameter, the wall around it still sizzling with the same energy.

  Rachel had been blown back against the other wall and was slowly picking herself up, a huge grin on her face.

  “Did you see that?” she shouted, jumping up and down in excitement.

  Dr. Opps stood, clapping his hands. “Well done, Rachel,” he said. “Though we’re going to have to get that wall fixed now.”

  Rachel blushed, but her smile didn’t fade. “Just imagine this against one of those creatures that attacked D.C. I’ll totally destroy it!”

  Dr. Opps started to nod, but the memory of the monster in D.C. appeared in his head, and it was like someone had slapped Fort in the face. The image filled his mind, and he began to scream silently inside Dr. Opps’s head, only to abruptly find himself back in the kitchen, screaming for real.