by Ramsey Isler
“What does all that mean?” I asked.
“It means that if we’re going to unlock your true potential, we need to expand your mind and expose it to new and extraordinary sensory experiences.”
I frowned. “Does that involve dropping more acid?”
“No,” Newton said, a devious little grin appearing on his face. “I have something much more potent in mind.”
* * *
It usually takes a few hours for me to feel the agonizing hangover that accompanies overuse of magic. But this time, after that little LSD trip pushed me beyond all my limits, I felt the aftereffects almost immediately. My head started pounding and exhaustion made my limbs feel like they were made of lead. On top of it all, the drugs were still in my system and I was trying not to get too freaked out by the dancing peanut butter and jelly sandwiches leaving crumbs on the floor as they did The Twist.
“How long is this shit supposed to last?” I asked.
“It’ll be a few more hours probably,” Newton said.
“I just want to go to sleep.”
“Maybe not a good idea,” Newton said. “Sleeping while high might result in some very disturbing dreams.”
“I’ll chance it,” I said. I rolled over on the couch, face down. Then I placed pillows over my head to block out the light. “I just need to escape.”
“Fine,” Newton said, removing the pillows. “But we can’t have you in any kind of darkness while you sleep. Wouldn’t want you to accidentally use some magic and push half the damn hotel into the Rift or something.”
“It’s too bright in here,” I said, covering my eyes.
Newton ran into his bedroom and quickly returned with a black sleeping mask and a pair of noise canceling headphones. “Just put these on.”
I didn’t object. I’d never worn one of those masks before but once it was over my eyes, I felt much more comfortable. The sensory deprivation was welcome, and the hallucinations faded away. I was asleep in just a couple of minutes.
When I woke up, the world was dark. After a brief moment of panic I remembered I still had the sleep mask on. I removed it and found the room still bright. Beyond the windows, the outside world was cloaked in an orange-red dusk sky. The sun was going down again. I’d missed sunrise and afternoon, which meant I’d been asleep for at least fifteen hours.
I didn’t see Newton anywhere, but I heard a bubbling sound coming from the kitchen. Had he left something boiling on the stove and forgotten about it? I got up and went to investigate.
Newton was in the kitchen, hunched over a mini laboratory. It looked like he’d taken all the glassware in the place and re-purposed it to make something that resembled a demented chemistry set. There were fluids bubbling in a coffee pot and gasses being collected in a beer mug and a bunch of other things I really wasn’t sure about. He smiled when he saw me stumble in.
“I’ve made a new formula,” he said. “It’s something custom that picks and chooses the LSD effects we need and throws away the ones we don’t. It should give you all the effects of synesthesia without the hallucinations.”
“But isn’t that what synesthesia is? A hallucination?”
“Not quite,” Newton said. “A hallucination is at least partially a product of your imagination. Synesthesia is just your brain’s sensory machinery getting rewired. If we’re going to use your abilities against powerful nightcrafters, we can’t have you hallucinating. But a little synesthesia seems to be just the kick in the ass you need to do some really cool shit, so we’ll stick with that.”
“As long as it’ll be less trippy, I’m up for it. When do we start the tests with the new stuff?”
“Tonight I guess. But you’re not going to take it here. Too dangerous. Last night was a pretty controlled experiment. You had a nice calm trip in a relaxed environment with a friend nearby and a very high quality and well-tested formulation of the drug with predictable effects. But this new formula, though I stand by its quality, is untested and I’m not sure there won’t be any side effects that might lead to you going completely out of control. So when we do this test we’re going to go to a more remote location.”
“And where is that?”
“You’ll find out,” he said, and he had mischief in his eyes. “By the way, I had some new clothes delivered for both of us. You’ll find them in your bedroom. How about you freshen up and get packed so we can get out of here? We’ve got a lot of work to do.”
I shrugged and headed to my bathroom to pee, take a shower, and change into the clothes Newton bought. Luckily we’re about the same size so he picked stuff that fit for the most part, but some of the clothes were a little loose. At first I didn’t think anything of it. But when I looked at the size label on the jeans I just put on, I got an unpleasant surprise. They were 29 inches in the waist, which is what I usually wear, but they hung a little lower on my hips than I expected.
I tried to remember the last time I’d had a hearty meal, and came up with nothing. I was wasting away and hadn’t even realized it. I wondered if the advanced nightcrafter spell book included something that could slow down my metabolism, because there was no way I’d ever find the appetite to eat more. With nightcrafters constantly trying to kill me and Newton doping me up with mind-bending drugs, I figured I’d end up looking like a crack whore by the end of the month.
For now, I didn’t let it bother me much. We had to get moving, and I was curious to see this new location Newton had in mind. I stuffed my old clothes into the shopping bags the new clothes came in, and went back out into the living room to find that Newton had quickly packed up all the gear. He stood next to several big boxes of stuff.
“And how are we going to move all that?” I asked.
“A featherweight spell and a lift from a guy I know,” Newton said with a smile.
“A guy? Would this happen to be the same guy you got your LSD from?”
“Yeah,” Newton said. “He’s something of a jack of all trades.”
“Uh . . . huh. And where is this shady ass dude taking us?”
“Oh don’t worry,” Newton said playfully. “You’ll feel right at home there.”
CHAPTER 9
“The Guy” turned out to be a jacked Samoan dude. He looked like he must have had steroids in his baby bottle or something. That’s the only way a human being could get that muscular at such a young age. He couldn’t have been much older than me.
His truck looked like it had once been in the U-Haul fleet and had been re-purposed and re-painted an obnoxious shade of doo doo brown. It literally looked like a shit box. Newton put our stuff in the cargo area, which was also where we had to sit because “The Guy” couldn’t be seen with passengers in the cab for some reason. The cargo area smelled surprisingly like flowers, but it had no lights installed. Once the door was closed we had to sit in total darkness. I didn’t object because Newton seemed to have absolute trust in the dude, and if anybody came looking for trouble they’d quickly find out that I do just fine in a pitch black box.
The trip to our destination was uneventful, and surprisingly short. When the ride was over, “The Guy” opened up the cargo door and we took a deep breath of the cool nighttime air as we stared out the back of the truck. At first, the place didn’t look familiar at all — just an industrial area with gravel, weeds, and the shadowy block-shaped silhouettes of factories in the distance. It was only when we’d hopped out of the truck that I was able to see that we were parked in front of a building that I thought I’d never see again. It was the old warehouse where I used to work as a night watchman.
“Newton,” I said, “I . . . kinda hate you.”
Newton shoved a crate out of the truck and snickered. “Oh come on. I bet you’ve missed the old place.”
While Newton unloaded the gear, I surveyed the building. It looked bad. It was never a gorgeous building, but now it seemed dusty and forgotten. Not a single light shone through the grimy windows.
“Is it abandoned?” I asked.
�
�Yup,” Newton said. “The owner went through bankruptcy about a month after you joined NATO. All the equipment got sold at an auction. Now the place is just empty.”
“So why did you bring me here?”
“Like I said, it’s empty and nobody would ever imagine we’d be here.”
“And?” I said.
“And what?”
“By your own admission you use your knowledge of psychology to analyze people all of the time,” I said. “There must be plenty of empty warehouses in this city. You had a reason for picking this one specifically.”
Newton pulled the last featherweighted crate out of the truck. He nodded to The Guy, who nodded back, closed the cargo door, got in the cab and drove off. Newton watched the truck disappear and didn’t say a word. His back was turned to me, so I couldn’t see if he was angry, sad, or his usual irreverent self. All I could do was wait for him to answer me.
“Sometimes,” he finally said, “to get to where we’re going we need a reminder of where we came from.”
“And what is this place supposed to remind me of?”
Newton turned to face me, and his expression was completely serious. “How much time did you spend walking the floors in that building, practicing the only spells you knew? How many hours did you spend wishing you could be better than you were? How many nights did you spend here dreaming of a chance to end the danger that comes with magic?”
I did remember those long winter nights, alone in the cold and dark. Endless evenings spent in those halls with only my Rift-sense to navigate. Countless repetition of every spell I thought might help me one day. It felt like so long ago, but it had not even been a year. So much had changed in that time. My life was light years from where it used to be.
But Newton was right. Being here again brought me right back to the state of mind that had started this journey. I wasn’t just being driven by fear of what might happen to my parents, or even what might happen to me. It was more than that. I was ready to change the world again.
* * *
We went inside the warehouse. Newton had scoped it out ahead of time and had keys for all the padlocks that had been placed on the doors. The place had no electricity. It didn’t have much of anything, really. A warehouse with no wares is a sad thing. A building with no purpose, dying a slow death.
We got to work setting up Newton’s gear. Since there was no power here, Newton brought high-capacity portable batteries. They wouldn’t last forever, but they would certainly do the job for tonight. Newton brought some portable lamps too, but he didn’t turn them on. Instead, the only light in the vast empty space came from the indicator LEDs and LCD screens on the equipment. They provided just enough glow for us to see each other, but not much more than that. My nightcrafting would be unencumbered by stray light.
Once all the sensors and gadgets were powered up and positioned, Newton pulled out a metal case. He opened it up and retrieved a sugar cube and a tiny vial of his new formula. “Let me know when you’re ready to start,” he said.
“I’m ready right now. Let’s do this.”
“Good,” he said. “I came up with a name for the new formula. I’m going to call it crisscross. Catchy, right? And it’s a pun because it crisscrosses the sensory—”
“Yeah yeah yeah,” I said, cutting him off. “You’re hilariously brilliant. Now dope me up so I can get this over with.”
“Well fine then,” Newton grumbled. He took a little eye dropper, filled it about halfway with the clear crisscross fluid, and added a few drops to the sugar cube. He handed it to me and said, “Bombs away.”
I popped the sugar into my mouth and let it melt against my tongue. It tasted a little different than the one from last night. There was a bit of a metallic taste; definitely artificial. But it was gone just as quickly as my taste buds registered it. The sugar disintegrated on my tongue and nothing else happened.
“It will take a few minutes before you feel anything,” Newton said. “But, like I said, it should be a much more lucid experience. You’ll still have the synesthesia but none of the disconnect from reality.”
“So I should just get into the Rift while we wait? Same as last time?”
“Yup,” Newton said. He pulled a little salt shaker out of a container and handed it to me. “Second verse, same as the first.”
I sat cross-legged on the floor and scattered a few salt crystals in front of me. They stood out as little pinpricks of whiteness against the dark bare concrete. There were only about six of them, and as I focused my mind on the task of making them move, my breathing quickened and I started to sweat. Newton slipped the sensor cap on me and surrounded me with a variety of other sensors, then he moved about ten yards away, and waited.
I had just managed to move one of the salt grains about half an inch when I heard the color blue.
“It’s starting to work,” I said.
“I can tell,” Newton said. “Talk to me, Kal. Tell me what you’re experiencing.”
“So far I can just hear blue,” I said. But right as I said that, my vision changed. Although I’m not sure if it was actually my vision. I struggle to find the right words to describe the experience. It was like more than one sense was working at the same time but my brain could only present one for me to focus on so it picked the best one for this particular information. In this case it was my vision, and what I was seeing was fascinating.
“There’s something else,” I said. “It’s a grid or something. It’s like a sheet of graphing paper overlaid on top of everything. But the grid is kind of technicolor. The lines are almost like they’re made out of a rainbow.”
“Go on,” Newton said.
I stood up and slowly walked through the empty warehouse to get a better idea of what I was seeing. As the drug continued to course through my system, I became aware of more weirdness. The chill in the air tasted like cranberry sauce, and I could still hear blue but there were other sounds as well and they actually had an effect on the grid. As I walked, the sound of my feet shuffling on the bare concrete floor sent tiny ripples through the grid that gradually faded away in the distance. I explained all this to Newton in the best way I could, but he didn’t say anything.
Everywhere I looked, I could see more of the world I thought I knew changing in ways I never would have imagined. I walked up to an old steel beam, rusted from years of exposure. “I think . . . I think I can touch it,” I said.
“The beam?” Newton asked.
“No, the grid.” I reached out with two fingers, delicately pinching a line in the grid as though it might break at the slightest contact. As soon as I touched it I tasted tangy sweetness, like the sweet and sour sauce at a cheap Chinese restaurant. The line wouldn’t budge. I moved my fingers up the line, towards the vertex where two lines intersected. That point was loose. Pliable. Soft. I plucked it like a guitar string and the whole beam vibrated. I pinched the vertex and pulled, just a little bit. The beam warped like it was made of putty. I pulled more, and more, until the line just snapped. A colorful spray of particles filled the air and distracted me from what I had been doing. I watched in awe as a dazzling display of pieces of the grid flew into the air in slow motion. The little pieces twirled in multicolor disarray until they started to balance themselves and regain order. Soon, they hit other strands of the grid and rejoined it like nothing had happened.
“Wow,” I heard Newton say.
“I know, right?” I said. “That was beautiful how all those little pieces just came back together like a sticky rainbow.”
“What are you talking about?” Newton said. “You do know that I can’t see this grid, right?”
“Then what are you wowing about?”
Newton pointed ahead of him. “That.”
I turned back to the steel beam, but it wasn’t a beam anymore. What was once a pillar of solid metal was now a wide pool of brown and silvery goop on the floor.
“You just melted that thing,” Newton said.
“Did I?”
&
nbsp; “Yes, you did. Congratulations.”
“That’s pretty bad ass,” I said. “I wish I’d been aware I was doing it. Should I try another one?”
“Yes,” Newton said. “But let’s try to make sure it’s not a load bearing beam. We don’t want the roof caving in on us. Try that one over there.”
I walked over to the beam that Newton had picked out. The grid was wrapped around it just like I expected. I touched the beam with my fingertips and felt the abrasive rust on my skin. The sensation triggered an orange kaleidoscope in my peripheral vision. It was pretty, but not particularly enlightening.
What was enlightening, however, was how I could just think about tugging one of the vertexes of the grid and it moved all by itself. It was like taffy being pulled by a ghost. I didn’t even have to move a finger.
“Can I leave it like this?” I said to Newton. The beam was hilariously deformed, with part of it sticking out at a 45 degree angle like a sharp tree branch.
“Uh . . . sure,” Newton said. “It’ll be a nice conversation piece for the next owner of the building.”
“All right. So what’s next?”
“Let’s try an experiment,” Newton said. He dug into this shirt pocket to retrieve a pen.
“What kind of experiment?”
“Catch this pen,” Newton said, “but don’t use your hands.”
“What? How in the hel—”
The pen was already in the air. Newton tossed it high on a slow, arcing trajectory. I watched it ascend towards the ceiling, quickly moving outside of the meager range of the dim light from Newton’s electronics. The pen disappeared into the darkness, and my vision suddenly changed again.
I could sense the pen itself, but I could also tell where the pen was going to be. It was like a future trail — a collection of translucent images showing the path the pen would follow in the next few moments. But they weren’t just images. It was like they were real, solid things that I could just reach out and touch. So I did.