Magic

by Audrey Niffenegger

  The wind soughs in over the walkway, catching at shreds of plastic and paper. There’s a deadness and emptiness up here – aging graffiti scrawled on front doors that somehow Grace senses never open any more. She makes her way to the green door she was told to look for, the last door on the highest floor.

  “Hello, Lady Jingly Jones, it isn’t locked,” pipes a voice from inside. It’s a high, pure-toned, remarkably posh voice, like that of an aristocratic child.

  She pushes open the door and Seven Magpies – Morgane – scrambles to her feet to meet her.

  She can’t be as young as she looks – from her blog, she’s about Grace’s age, surely? – she doesn’t even look out of her teens. She’s frighteningly thin; bare, sapling limbs emerging from a beaded flapper-girl dress that’s too big for her. Her hair is bobbed flapper-short, too, though it seems likely Morgane might have done that herself. Her feet are bare and slightly bluish on the grey carpet. She must be freezing.

  “Do come in,” says Morgane, in her cut-glass accent, gesturing elegantly. A princess in a tower, thinks Grace, and wonders what she’s come here to do with her.

  The room is tiny, one corner occupied by a grubby kitchenette. There’s a sewing machine on a stained coffee table surrounded by cotton reels and swatches of black satin, and there’s a pattern of bones laid out on a makeshift hearth of slate tiles in the middle of the floor. But there’s also an Xbox by the old cathode-ray television, a laptop lying on a crumpled velvet blanket on the unmade bed. And there’s Angels of the Embers, stacked with other games beside a tall bookcase that is nevertheless too small to contain all Morgane’s books.

  “I thought he’d stay for a week and then come home,” offers Morgane. She sounds so forlorn that Grace seethes with an unstable brew of guilt and anger.

  “He’s trying to kill someone,” she says.

  Morgane titters. “He wouldn’t have to try.”

  “He nearly did kill someone else!”

  “I did tell you what he was like.”

  “But I didn’t think he was real!”

  “Oh,” says Morgane. “So you were humouring me. You shouldn’t have done that. We’re supposed to be friends. I was only trying to help.”

  Grace deflates. Scrubs her hands over her face and into her hair. She moans, “So what are we going to do?”

  Morgane reaches down and lifts a stone from a heap beside the tiles. It has a hole through it which Morgane positions against her eye.

  “Can you see him?” Grace breathes.

  Morgane nods. “I saw him when you came in together,” she says. “This only makes it clearer. I always see them. All of them.”

  “There are others?” Grace tries to keep from visibly shuddering. “Here? Right now?”

  Morgane’s voice quivers. “They’re too much for me all on my own. Mr Levanter-Sleet is very different from most.”

  “How?” asks Grace.

  Morgane puts down the stone. “He’s a lot nicer.” She smiles. “Shall we make a start?”

  Morgane kneels daintily on the floor, gesturing for Grace to do the same, and says “I’m going to need some blood.”

  “Somehow I knew you would,” says Grace, sighing.

  “I’m very hygienic,” protests Morgane.

  She is, actually, producing a pair of small surgical scalpels in sealed plastic sleeves, and handing one to Grace. “Not yet, though,” she says. She clears away the bones and places pebbles at points on the square of tiles, then pours out black sand from a bottle, drawing a pattern.

  “Have you always... been like this?” Grace ventures after a while.

  “I always saw things,” says Morgane neutrally, frowning thoughtfully at her stones and rearranging them. “But was I always a witch? No. That takes a lot of self-training. Now, please.”

  She cuts her own hand with practiced indifference, and carefully spills the blood into a circle of sand that’s joined, by a long winding pathway, to a similar point on Grace’s side of the hearth. Grace, reluctantly, mirrors her, and Morgane begins whispering. Grace wonders if it’s Latin or something, but then realises it must be English, although Morgane is too quiet for her to catch any words other than, occasionally, “please.”

  She sits motionless, silent. Grace watches anxiously, sucking at the back of her hand. She assumes she’s not supposed to speak but this goes on for so long that at last she asks: “Is it working?”

  Morgane opens her eyes. “No,” she says, and destroys the pattern in a sweep of her bony arm and collapses into a huddle over the wreck.

  “He likes you better,” she moans into her arms. “He likes what you do more.”

  “What I do?” Grace asks, baffled, but Morgane shakes her head and moans. Grace watches her weep awkwardly then reaches out with her uninjured hand to pat her hair. It’s the first time in three years’ acquaintance they’ve ever touched. “I’m so sorry,” she says, “Is there anything I can do?”

  Morgane lifts her head and shakes it again, bravely this time, “I’ll have to work harder.” But just for a moment all the shadows in the room seem wrong.

  Grace flees, but from Morgane’s plaintive cry of “Mr Levanter-Sleet!” Grace knows she’s taken him with her.

  And so he must still be with her at New Cross station, and London Bridge, and so it’s ridiculous that she feels safer now she’s away from Morgane’s tower. But then it’s not her he means any harm to.

  She struggles to think. She refuses to accept this effort has been a total failure.

  He likes what you do more.

  She emailed him to me, Grace thinks. However much messing around with blood and sand she did first, that’s how he got to me. She didn’t know where I lived, how else could he have found his way?

  She stares at the pattern of coloured lines on the Tube map.

  “I’VE BEEN THINKING,” says Jawad, and Grace tenses. “Maybe... you see, we could both save a lot of money, if... oh lord, that is the least romantic way of putting it. I mean, I miss you so much when you’re not there. Maybe we could move in together?”

  Grace cannot speak.

  Jawad’s smile falters, and then, bravely, reappears. “You look less than delighted, so we’ll just pretend that never happened, and...”

  “Let’s get married,” says Grace, sharply, suddenly. And then she smiles, takes his hand and says it again, properly.

  BEING ENGAGED, PERVERSELY, gives her time away from him to do what needs to be done. She tells him she doesn’t want them to live together before the wedding; it will make moving into their new home less special. And she needs to talk to her friends, make plans.

  It’s really not as if she can tell him the truth.

  Thank God none of this happened when she was unemployed. She has to spend a lot of money: a powerful new desktop with its own server and a backup generator, because she dare not take chances – and this is going to do awful things to her electricity bills.

  She calls in sick to work, and begins.

  She starts by ganking a lot of code from a virtual reality game called World of My Own, and cobbles on some from Angels of the Embers for old times sake, and sets about layering in complexity – patterns of algorithms and pipelines of data and soon starts to panic – for how does this come close to the places she’s visited with Mr Levanter-Sleet?

  She remembers the cathedrals, the forests, the music, the stars.

  She’s programming in a sequence of fractals when it occurs to her that the games she was using as raw material are designed to render a three-dimensional world to human eyes on a two-dimensional screen. But why should Mr Levanter-Sleet be so limited?

  It’s so hard and it goes endlessly wrong, that late into the night she weeps with effort and desperation. But when at last she thinks that, if everything she’s guessed and remembered about Mr Levanter-Sleet is right then she might have made something he could perceive as a six-dimensional space, something alters, she starts to feel a lonely pleasure in what she’s doing. She’s crafting a palac
e, hung with tapestries of code, stocked with various flavours of infinity, and no other human being will ever see how beautiful it is.

  And then she thinks it might be ready.

  She types:

  Mr LEVANTER-SLEET, do you want this?

  It’s past four in the morning. Even suspense can’t keep her going any longer. She’s been running on coffee and stubbornness for days. She can’t even make it to her bed; she collapses in her clothes on the sofa. She dreams of nothing.

  In the morning, the computer is thrumming audibly. Grace sweeps the mouse to clear the screensaver and drops into the chair because always, through all of this, part of her knew it wasn’t real – she was losing her mind, or compulsively playing a game she’d eventually be able to stop–

  But there, on the screen is Mr Levanter-Sleet’s reply:

  YES

  THAT ISN’T THE end of it, of course.

  The computer in the garage of their new home has to be left on twenty-four hours a day. She tells Jawad it’s for work – there are things – very sensitive things – she has to monitor remotely, and so he must not touch it. And it’s not as if she can just leave the program and forget about it. She checks it every morning and evening, and every few days she spends at least an hour tinkering with it, expanding, searching the internet for new ideas, adding more toys for Mr Levanter-Sleet to play with.

  She’ll be doing that forever, she supposes. Mr Levanter-Sleet isn’t trapped. He could leave the program whenever he likes. She has to make it worth his while to stay.

  Mr Levanter-Sleet is busy in the program.

  She can track him, spooling through the algorithms, the fractals; one day she turns on the monitor to find the screen dancing with colours that shift into a hallucinatory sequence of shapes: arches, spirals, fountains and, right before it ends, an explosion of flowers. She feels certain it’s a gift for her, and before she can stop herself she smiles, and lays her palm wistfully against the screen, because it’s beautiful but she can’t really see what Mr Levanter-Sleet does.

  She no longer has those wonderful dreams. And she’s free to have nightmares again. They don’t come often (and Jawad doesn’t have them at all any more). But when they do...

  (Mr Levanter-Sleet wouldn’t need to try, Morgane had said.)

  Sometimes Grace dreams of scattered plastic and glass and blood, Jawad lying on the concrete floor of the garage, amid the ruins of the computer.

  She dreams of patterns, and their necessary conclusions.

  She dreams that no one ever obeys an instruction to stay away from that door, never open that box, don’t touch that computer forever.

  BUTTONS

  GAIL Z. MARTIN

  Investigators of the supernatural and the strange are something of a tradition in genre fiction and have included such luminaries as William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki the Ghost Finder, Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden and, of course, the X-Files’ Mulder and Scully. Gail’s unlikely investigators run a rather esoteric antiques store and one character’s penchant for old buttons leads to a very interesting case.

  “MORE BUTTONS, CASSIE? I swear, you read those things like a steamy novel.” Teag Logan sailed into the shop and never even slowed his pace.

  Some people read novels. I read objects, especially buttons. I can glimpse the dizzying highs and shadowed lows of a stranger’s life in a single, beautiful button.

  I’m Cassidy Kinkaide, and I own Trifles and Folly, an estate auction and antiques shop in beautiful, historic, haunted Charleston, South Carolina. Truth be told, we were also a high-end pawn shop on the side. I inherited the shop, which has been in the family since Charleston was founded back in 1670. We deal in antiques, valuable oddities, and, very discreetly, in supernatural curios. It’s a perfect job for a history geek, and even more perfect for a psychometric. My special type of clairvoyance gives me the ability to ‘read’ objects and pick up strong emotions, sometimes even fragments of images, voices, and memories.

  “Shipment from the weekend auction just came in,” I called to Teag. “I love Mondays.”

  “Let me know if you find any sparklers or spookies,” Teag answered. “I’ll get the mundanes out on display.” Over the years, Teag and I have developed our own private language. ‘Mundanes’ are items that are lovely but lack any psychic residue whatsoever. ‘Sparklers’ resonate with the psychic imprints of their former owners. I’ll set those aside until I can go through them. ‘Spookies’ reek of malevolence. They go into the back room, until Sorren, my silent partner and patron, can safely dispose of them.

  Most people think Trifles and Folly has stayed in business for over three hundred years because we’re geniuses at offering an amazing selection of antiques and unique collectibles. There is that, but it’s only part of the story, a small part. It’s the back room that keeps us in business. We exist to find the dangerous magical items that make their way onto the market and remove them before anyone gets hurt. Most of the time, we succeed, but there have been a few notable exceptions, like that quake back in 1886 that leveled most of the city. Oops.

  “This is all from the Allendale house south of Broad Street, isn’t it?” Teag asked, coming back in with a steaming hot cup of coffee.

  “The house itself was impressive,” I answered, “but it was packed to the gills. Old man Allendale was a collector and a hoarder.”

  “Bad for the family; good for our business,” Teag replied. “It’s not often we need four full-day auctions to clean a place out, and that was after the family took what they wanted and got rid of the trash.”

  “The crowds came for the Civil War relics,” Teag pointed out, brushing a strand of hair out of his eyes. He’s in his late twenties, tall and skinny, with a skater-boy mop of dark hair, and a wicked sense of humor. He looks more like a starving artist than an aspiring art history Ph.D. candidate, but he’s ABD (All But Dissertation) at the University of Charleston. Blame Trifles and Folly for derailing his ambitions. One summer’s part-time job working with the amazing antiques and oddities that come through this store, and academia lost its attractiveness. Now he’s my full-time store manager, as well as assistant auctioneer, archivist, and occasional bodyguard.

  “The guy spent a lifetime wandering around battlefields, since he was a kid in the Twenties,” I replied. “If you think the pieces we got for auction were good, imagine what the museum took. They got first pick, for the new Edward Allendale Memorial Exhibit.” I glanced at the pile I was sorting. Mostly small stuff, like musket balls, belt buckles, old postcards, and buttons. A big glass jar of buttons.

  I shifted in my chair, trying to get more of the draft from the air conditioning. Summer in Charleston was brutal between the heat and the humidity, and my strawberry blonde hair was more frizzy than usual. I tucked a lock behind one ear because it refused to stay in a pony tail. One look at me and you could guess my ancestors’ Scots-Irish background, with the green eyes and pale skin that had a tendency to burn the instant I stepped out into the hot South Carolina sun.

  “Be careful, Teag. We’ve got at least one Spooky in the pile that came today. I can feel it. I’m getting a very strong sense of something... evil. I just haven’t found the damned thing.”

  Teag looked at me and raised an eyebrow. “Dangerous?”

  I frowned. “Dark. Consider it dangerous until proven otherwise.”

  Teag leaned against the doorframe. “Didn’t Sorren say there were stories about old man Allendale? About the house?”

  I nodded. “Yeah, but there are stories about most of the old homes south of Broad, and most involve ghosts. Sorren wanted us to take this auction because he was certain there was more to these particular stories.”

  “Grumpy old man with no close family, hoarder, has a heart attack and dies,” Teag recapped. “Happens every day, somewhere.”

  I tried to split my focus between my inner sense and paying attention to Teag. “Not quite like this. Neighbors complain about a shadow watching from an upstairs window. Reports of str
ange noises. People say their dogs don’t like to walk near the house.” I let my hands hover a few inches above the large boxes yet to be unpacked.

  “There’s a... residue that clings to everything, like old cigarette smoke, but it’s not physical, it’s spectral. I can feel it. Everything’s tainted.”

  Teag looked at me over his trendy eyeglasses. “If it’s so dark, how come we let it go to auction?”

  “Sorren and I went down to the auction site while you were busy dealing with the rest of the event details. We tagged everything he and I thought had a powerful enough resonance to warrant a second look, and had it taken out of the auction until we could go through it.”

  “So what you’re saying is, we’ve got a whole shipment of Spookies, or at least Sparklers,” he replied dryly. “Wonderful.”

  “Sorren says he’ll be here after sundown to help us go through everything,” I said. “All we need to do is catalog what came in, and let him know if anything in particular gives off a strong vibe.”

  “If anything gives off a vibe strong enough for me to feel it,” Teag replied, “it would probably knock you flat on your behind. You might want to let me open the boxes and have a first look.”

  “Fine by me. I’m going to start on the buttons.” Buttons speak to me more often than most objects. I’ve always thought it was because they were worn for long periods of time, day in and day out, often close to the skin.

  I reached for the large tray I use to sort buttons, and picked up the jar to dump it out. I felt a tingle in my hand, and I knew that I’d be picking up strong images from some of these buttons. Strong... but nothing felt evil. I promised myself I would be careful.