Magic Times

by Harvey Click

  “She did the same thing to mine. It’s hanging in that bedroom you slept in, just inside the door. First she paints something that looks more like you than you do yourself, then she cuts out pieces and hides them away somewhere, and then she owns you, or at least she thinks she does. I’m going to find every last piece of mine and burn them all to a crisp so she can’t try to own me from beyond the grave. I’ll burn yours too, unless you want to be haunted by a dead witch.”

  Mingo’s boys came up from the basement with the body wrapped in plastic. They opened the back door and carried it out.

  “I hope they know what they’re doing,” Jason said.

  “Don’t worry about the body. They’re professionals, they’ve done this kind of work before. If you want to be a successful businessman, you have to know how to make bodies disappear. It’s all part of doing business. Tell you what, Jason, we had a nice talk but I got chores to attend to. You get on that bus and don’t ever look back.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  “Rue Anne didn’t actually kill herself,” Drew said. “Once a sacrifice is offered, a sacrifice must be made. She was unable to kill you, so Hecate took her in your place.”

  Drew, Jason, Emily, and Hatter were sitting around the table in Drew’s study. Jason had called Hatter to pick him up, and Emily was there because Hatter had called her when Jason first went missing.

  Hatter had been staring at the words on the leather square for a long time:

  I AM MILK, A POISON, MOANS

  IN YOU + IS SLEEP

  LONE-EYE KNUR-PED

  “I don’t understand the middle line,” he said. “A cross generally means Jesus, but it seems awfully strange for Rue to say that peace is found in Jesus.”

  “That would be strange indeed,” Drew said, “but in this case the cross doesn’t signify Jesus. What you’re looking at is a very intricate magical square. I recognized it at once because I’m the one who taught her how to make them. They’re damnably difficult to compose, and this one is especially ingenious.

  “The first line represents the magus who offers the sacrifice, the last line represents the one who’s to be sacrificed, and the middle line represents what the magus wishes to gain from the sacrifice. The cross specifically names what Rue Anne desired, but the name is cleverly hidden within the other words of the square.”

  “I don’t see any hidden name,” Hatter said. “It doesn’t seem to be an anagram.”

  “No, it’s far more complex than an anagram,” Drew said. “If you write out the letters of the square with seven letters per line, the message can be read both across the page and down the page, and the hidden name will magically emerge. Here, let me show you.”

  He carefully printed out the letters on a piece of paper and slid it over to Hatter:

  “I’ll be damned,” Hatter said. “Even Vladimir Nabokov would be impressed. Rue should have been a writer.”

  He slid the piece of paper across the table to Emily.

  “Yes, Rue Anne was an impressive woman,” Drew said. “She could have been a writer, a scientist, a doctor, any number of things. When I met her she was a kind and sensitive woman. It’s a terrible pity she took the downward path, and I’m afraid I helped her descend it every step of the way. Her falling out with Jerry Mingler was probably what started her descent. I think that was when she began to fall into darkness and madness, but I was too blind to see the change.”

  “I don’t think you had nothing to do with it,” Jason said. “She said she begun following the devil when she was thirteen.”

  “The fact that Mingler’s name is intricately woven into the other words gives the magical square tremendous potency,” Drew said.

  “You’re obviously a very smart man, Mr. Dieborn,” Hatter said. “So I’m surprised you believe in this childish hocus pocus.”

  “You’re surrounded by hocus pocus, whether you believe in it or not,” Drew said. “Physicists say we exert an effect on particles merely by observing them. Likewise we all affect the world in ways we don’t understand and usually aren’t even aware of.

  “Successful gamblers know how to recognize that magical moment when their influence over the wheel or the cards is especially strong, but we all have those moments. We constantly alter the world by the invisible workings of our hearts. If you despise somebody, you can cause him misery or illness without speaking to him or touching him. A person overcome with morbid hatred poisons the people and events around him. Selfless love, the state that early Christians called caritas, exerts a healing influence, but unfortunately this state is much rarer than hatred.

  “So we’re all clumsy magicians, whether we recognize the fact or not. The magus is merely one who attempts to be less clumsy.”

  “If you believe this stuff, then for God’s sake why did you burn your book?” Hatter asked. “Eighteen years of exploring the unknown, all up in smoke.”

  “Something can be true and still be false,” Drew said. “When I started writing the book, I wanted to investigate the nature of the first cause in every possible way. First by a priori reasoning. Secondly by examining all documents purporting to shed light on the first cause—scriptures, cabbalistic texts, the Gathas, grimoires, and so on. Thirdly I decided to experiment by performing some actual rites described in some of these texts to see if they worked. Unfortunately some of my experiments led me very far astray.

  “The kind of magic I became immersed in is the opposite of enlightenment. It’s the ultimate form of self-absorption, because it seeks to make the self more important than anything else. But I’ve learned the self is a prison, and we’re truly enlightened only when we free ourselves from its confines. The magus tries to control the world around him by making himself into a sort of god, but in fact he locks himself deeper and deeper into a prison of his own contrivance.

  “By dying I discovered that what we need to know is far less complicated than thousands of pages of occult babble. I’ve come to believe that all the magic we need is faith and prayer and an occasional shot of whiskey—the rest is bullshit.”

  “But magic saved my life,” Jason said. “Magic’s what busted that strap.”

  “Maybe the buckle was defective,” Drew said. “As for your ghostly visitant, it’s possible you simply imagined her. You described Marmara’s face quite accurately, but on the other hand the figurine you broke looked almost exactly like her, so perhaps you based the image on the figurine. Plus there’s a photo of her on my dresser, and maybe you glanced at it when you were gathering up my clothes. In your last desperate moment, when you needed something to give you that great burst of strength, maybe your brain manufactured what you needed and adrenaline did the rest.”

  “Nope,” Jason said. “She was real all right, a helluva lot more real than most things. She saved my life.”

  He noticed Emily watching him. She was sitting across the table with her chin resting on her fist. She hadn’t said anything for the past hour, just sat there looking thoughtful as if she was carefully chewing over every word, and he liked her thoughtful look. She wasn’t as pretty as Marmalade, but she was pretty enough to suit him.

  “Well, Hecate is the goddess of necromancy, the art of calling back the dead,” Drew said, “so maybe her presence invoked Marmalade.”

  “See, you’re at it again,” Hatter said. “I give you one week, and then I wager you’ll be busy rewriting your book.”

  “No, my next project is going to be physical therapy,” Drew said. “I’m going to get out of this damned wheelchair. I’m going to walk again.”

  “Well, it’s past 2:30, and I’ve got a long drive ahead,” Hatter said. “We’d better get moving.”

  He had offered to drive Jason back to Glum Fork, which he said wasn’t too terribly far out of his way, though what that way was he hadn’t said.

  They went to the living room, and Drew handed his guitar to Jason. “You’d better take this,” he said. “You definitely could use some practice.”

  “Thanks.�
�

  “You’ve got my phone number,” Drew said. “Please keep in touch.”

  “I will.”

  “Same here,” Emily said, and she gave him a slip of paper with her address and phone number.

  Jason nodded and smiled. He wanted to do more but didn’t know what. He slung the guitar over his shoulder, picked up his duffle bag, and followed Hatter out to the Hudson. Emily tagged along, and Drew watched from the front door while Hatter started the engine. It backfired twice and then began to idle with a noisy shake.

  Jason threw his gear on the back seat and was about to get in when Emily grasped his shoulders and kissed him. It was just a friendly kiss, not much more than a peck, but it felt good. He put his arms around her, held her tightly, and kissed her back. It was much more than a peck, probably more than what was appropriate, but he didn’t care and she didn’t seem to either.

  “I hope I’ll see you again someday,” he said.

  She squeezed his hand and smiled in her serious way. He got in, and the car lurched onto the street with an unhealthy whine.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  “Everybody’s always looking for some kind of miracle,” Hatter was saying. “Something to transform the world, give their lives some kind of meaning.”

  They were more than an hour out of town, heading southeast through darkness on Route 33. So far the road had been fairly straight, but now it was beginning to rise and fall and curve and twist into Hocking Hills, the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains.

  “Drew hunted for it for eighteen years and Rue apparently hunted for it her whole life. Mingo wanted some of that good juju himself, and of course you wanted to scarf up all the spells and potions you could get your hands on. Even Hempy—for him tilting his lance at government is a religion, The Church of Your Choice, some kind of abracadabra that can turn the world into utopia and make his paltry life significant.”

  He coughed and said, “So the big question is, are they all suckers? Are we just meat machines peering out of our five faulty senses at a meaningless world that’s purely material and exists solely by accident? Or is there something outside this box, something that gives it significance? I’m coming to think that’s the only question worth asking. What do you think, kid?”

  Jason didn’t answer. He was staring out at the dark hills and valleys and thinking of Glum Fork. He was thinking of run-down houses and bumpy black coal roads and hollers littered with old washing machines and other rusty junk. He was thinking of unhappy men grimy with coal dust and unhappy women worn out by poverty. He was thinking of his friends, who spent their time getting drunk or stoned and fighting over nothing because there was nothing better to do. He was thinking of the little house he was returning to, which no longer had anything of value left inside it and by now possibly had different locks on the doors and the bank’s For Sale sign in the front yard.

  “Go ahead and ignore me, kid, I don’t care,” Hatter said. “I’m used to talking to myself. My life’s been one long monologue from the word go.”

  He kept talking and Jason kept staring at the hills. After a long while he said, “Maybe you can call Drew and tell him when your book comes out so I can look for it.”

  “There won’t be any book,” Hatter said. “I’ve decided not to finish it. It started off well enough, nice and amusing, but then it turned sour just like everything else I’ve ever written.”

  “Whaddaya mean, amusing?” Jason said. “I was in constant trouble from the minute I set foot in that damn town, and I don’t see nothing funny ‘bout none of it. It’s only funny if it ain’t happening to you.”

  “The mistake was putting myself into the story,” Hatter said. “That’s when it started turning sour like my other novels. No matter how they start out, they all end up in the same horrible little box. No light, no sun, no air, no life. Dead, just plain damn dead. This one starts off a jolly comedy and ends up with somebody dead in the basement. Only a damn fool would want to read a book like that.”

  “I know what you’re planning to do,” Jason said. “You sneaked off with some a Drew’s book, and I bet it’s sitting in your trunk right now. I was planning to tell him but with all the excitement I forgot. You’re planning to publish it, ain’t you? I was right all along, you’re a plagiargeist.”

  Hatter chuckled and coughed. “No, kid, I’m not planning to publish it, I’m planning to experiment with it. I’m tired of toiling in obscurity, so I may as well see if I can conjure up some spooks to put me on the bestseller list. If it doesn’t work then all I’ve wasted is a few candles.”

  “You were just griping that everybody else is looking for some kinda magic, and here you are doing the same damn thing.”

  Hatter shrugged. “Sometimes we all need a little magic, kid.”

  He pulled over for gas. They both got out, and a fat man wearing a greasy denim jacket over gray coveralls came out of the station.

  “Fill ‘er up,” Hatter said.

  “Ain’t seen a Hudson like this for a number of years,” the man said while he pumped. “She looks like a sweet ol’ girl too. Looks to be in pretty good shape.”

  “She is,” Hatter said. “She takes good care of herself, doesn’t smoke or drink or whore around.”

  “I know somebody might be happy to buy this,” the man said.

  “Oh, I’d never sell old Jane Hudson,” Hatter said. “She and I have traveled too many miles together. I’ve spent more hours with her than with any two-legged woman, and most of them were pretty good hours.”

  Hatter paid the man, and after he went back into the station Jason got his bag and guitar from the back seat.

  “What are you doing?” Hatter asked.

  “I ain’t going back to Glum Fork,” Jason said. “They’s nothing left for me back there.”

  “Then where are you planning to go?”

  “Back to Columbus.”

  “You can’t do that. Mingo’s men will kill you. You’ll end up at the bottom of a landfill with Rue.”

  “They might kill me if they get lucky, but they ain’t gonna push me ‘round. All my life I been letting people push me ‘round. I let Holly and Rue and Mingo and everybody else push me ‘round. I ain’t doing that no more.”

  “For God’s sake, kid, this is plain damn stupid. You’re going to get yourself killed. Do you have any money?”

  “Mingo gimme a hundred, and I still got ‘bout twenty bucks left from what I come with.”

  “Well, I can’t drive you back. I have some matters to attend to at home.”

  “That’s okay, I still got a thumb. It was nice meeting you, Mr. Hatter, and I hope you don’t start wading too deep in all that devil stuff. Drew says it’s dangerous.”

  “Then I guess we’re both headed in dangerous directions,” Hatter said.

  His right hand twitched a couple of times as if it intended to shake Jason’s. The third time it raced to his mouth to muffle a cough.

  “Good luck, kid. Maybe I’ll see you around someday.”

  “Maybe.”

  Jason slung the guitar over his back and crossed the highway. The Hudson pulled away with a clatter of gears, and he watched it until the taillights disappeared into darkness.

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