by Carl Purcell
“When he came into the room he looked at me for a second like he didn't recognise me. I felt like maybe I wasn't who I thought I was or he wasn't who I thought he was and we stood there looking at each other. He asked what I was doing awake. I told him I was waiting for him. He just said he was going to bed, turned off the light and went to sleep. I stood there confused for a while longer and then I went to bed, too.
“I woke up the next morning because I could hear Lloyd and our master shouting. They were arguing over something but I couldn't make out what they were saying. By the time I got out of bed, Lloyd was gone. Our master told me that Lloyd had gone on another job. He said he didn't have any other jobs for me and then handed me an empty fruit bowl and a bag of apples.
“Turn them into oranges,” he told me. Then I was to tell him when I had made one that actually tasted like an orange. So I went into the backyard and started making and practising the spell. Lloyd came back in the late afternoon and didn't say a word to anybody. When Lloyd started getting jobs, everything was tense and uncomfortable all the time. It was almost unbearable.”
“It sounds like it begun when the master gave you the first jobs,” Caia commented.
“Yeah. That was when it started to go downhill.”
“Your fate was already decided. Everything played out in the only way it could. But why does he want to kill you?”
For a while, Griffith didn't answer. He stared out the window into the night, unable to see anything past the road. The town of Inverell came and went, vanishing into the night as they drove on. The name Inverell stuck out in his mind for some reason. There was something important about Inverell. Oh well, it couldn't have been that important. He'd remember if there was something special there. He continued. The words came out of Griffith's mouth slow and pathetic like clumps of squished, rotten fruit. Even the memories that should have been good were sour. But he owed Caia this story and he had to keep telling it.
“After the first couple of jobs he did, Lloyd finally told me what he was doing. His jobs weren't much different from what I had to do. They seemed less dangerous but just as menial. I tried to tell him mine were the same. He either didn't believe me or it didn't matter. Lloyd thought it was a waste of time that could be spent actually learning magic or using it for something worthwhile. I didn't ask him what he thought would be worthwhile. I didn't want to know. Lloyd was always a little cold, even to us. But sometimes he started talking and he'd make vague comments that nobody else understood. He was scary when he got like that.
“About a week after that conversation I came home from a job and found Lloyd reading one of my books. It was a book on disease – viruses, cancer, that sort of thing. He asked me if I minded. I didn't, of course. I had no idea why he wanted it, at the time. He smiled. I hadn't seen him smile in months. I thought that maybe something had happened and things were going to go back to normal or maybe he'd just gotten over it. Lloyd can be pretty childish. He gets upset over the smallest things and then has these mood swings where he doesn't care any more. For a while, after that, things were better. He did the jobs, he didn't complain and he was always talking to our master about something. If I wasn't so glad that things were peaceful again, I might have been jealous that he was getting so much attention.” Griffith chuckled and waited for Caia to say something. She yawned.
The darkness around them was thick and endless. Even inside the car, in the glow of the dashboard lights, Griffith could hardly see his hands in his lap. His eyes felt heavy. A green road sign came out of the darkness and then disappeared.
“What did that say?” Caia asked.
“I missed it. But we passed one earlier. The next town is Delungra and then Warialda.” Griffith answered.
“How many more after that until Salem?”
“I don't know I'll have to check the map. Just keep following the highway.”
“I will” She yawned again. “Keep telling your story or I'm going to fall asleep.”
“Do you want me to drive?”
“Just keep talking.”
“All right. Where was I?” Griffith stared out the window, into the permeating darkness. “The peace didn't last. Lloyd kept everything he was doing a secret. I don't know if our master knew what Lloyd was planning but I can't imagine he'd have helped Lloyd if he did know.”
“What was he doing?”
“Crafting new spells. He was developing a kind of magic I'd never heard of before. I didn't even think what he was doing was possible. But that's stupid. Everything is possible with magic. That used to be an exciting thought. Now it terrifies me.
“The first time I realised Lloyd was doing something weird was when I saw him leaving a doctor's office. We were never sick. Our master knew magic to protect us from most disease so we'd always be healthy enough to study. When he saw me he looked like he was going to run. Instead, he waited for me. When I asked him why he was at the doctor’s he just said, “To get sick.”
“I asked him why. He smiled and said that he'd show me. He asked me to follow and I did. He took me to a house not far from where we lived. I knew that house. I'd been on a job there, helping a sorcerer who had made himself blind and needed somebody to write notes for him. Lloyd took me inside; he had his own key to the door. The house stunk. It had that kind of smell that physically beats at you and pushes you away. I forced myself to bear it so I could see what Lloyd wanted to show me.
“In the back of the house was the blind sorcerer. He was dead. If he hadn't been wearing the sunglasses he always wore, I probably wouldn't have recognised him. He looked like he'd been dead and decomposing for years. He was frozen in this pose like he'd died in pain. His mouth hung open like he was still trying to scream. Lloyd was smiling. The house was full of animals, too. Cats, mostly. Lloyd said they were strays he'd caught. He'd caught possums too and once he'd even caught a neighbour's Rottweiler.
“I asked him what it all meant. He told me even the flies were dead or dying. The house was full of animals and corpses and rotting food. He had made the perfect environment to breed his creation. I still didn't get it. He looked me straight in the eye and said: “Me. I am death incarnate.”
“I told him he was insane and I left. I ran. He caught me outside and, as soon as he touched me, I felt this pain building up all through me. I couldn't breathe; my heart felt like it had stopped, everything went numb and cold. He let me drop to the ground and he stood over me. He said to me, so proud:“I killed a man with HIV just to get his blood. Then I injected myself with it. I've gathered all this disease and I've bred it and mixed it and now it's all in me. Thanks to your books and your gullible master's teaching, I not only control the most deadly organisms in the world – I am one of them. What you're feeling now is how it feels to die. It's a disease with no cure.”
“He left me there and I thought I was going to die.”
“Why did he leave you? He must have known that healing people is what you do and you had your teacher's spells to protect you.”
“Maybe he didn't think I could do it. Or maybe he didn't want to kill me. He was, or he is, insane but we were still brothers. I think he still wanted to be brothers and hoped I'd understand what he was doing.”
“But now he's changed his mind.”
“That's the thing about Lloyd. You're either with him or against him. He's your best friend or your worst enemy. There's no in-between for him. No middle ground. Even in his own eyes he's either a god among men or a weakling. When he thought our master was teaching him to be a weakling, it was too much to bear.”
Another town, Delungra, came and went as Inverell had and Griffith went on with his story:
“When I could stand and walk again I went looking for a phone. I had this instinctive feeling that Lloyd had gone home to our master and something bad was going to happen. I called the police and told them about the house and the corpses. Then, even though I still felt half-dead, I ran the whole way home. I could hear sirens. Huge plumes of black smoke were rising u
p into the air ahead of me. I kept running. I knew I was too late but I kept running.
“Our master's house was on fire. So were the houses next to it. The sirens had been a fire truck. Police had set up a perimeter and were keeping onlookers away. I heard somebody say that the house had just suddenly burst into flames and spread to the neighbours. It was the kind of big, sudden fire you get when a sorcerer wants to destroy something. I left. I knew that our master was dead and that Lloyd had escaped. I thought maybe he'd go back to the corpse house.
“But when I got there, it was a similar scene with the police. They'd closed the street and were searching the house. An ambulance was being loaded with a body bag. Lloyd wasn't there, either. I thought about walking away from it all and never looking back. My whole life went up in flames along with Master Edan and his house. It seemed like a good time to visit my parents and make plans for a new future. It was the perfect time to forget about Lloyd and forget about magic and try to go back to living a normal life.
“But I couldn't. I just couldn't.” Griffith paused again to collect his thoughts. He thought he'd escaped Lloyd once and for all. He thought that chapter on his life was closed for now. He was so close to reaching Salem. There he could pick up where he left off and he'd be safe from Lloyd. Lloyd was insane and powerful, but even he wouldn't try to go toe-to-toe with one of the greatest sorcerers that ever lived, the master of life and death himself. So Griffith had bided his time, he'd made his plans and everything was set. And then Lloyd reappeared. It was about as bad as luck could get.
The car started shaking. The tires thumped against uneven ground. Griffith turned away from the darkness out his window and onto the road. The road was vanishing, slipping away into the darkness. The car tilted. He looked at Caia. Her head hung, resting on her chest.
“Caia!” Griffith shouted. He shook her by the shoulder. Bad move. The car swerved. Griffith didn't want to see what came next. He threw his arms up in front of his face and braced himself. Without slowing, the car spun off the road and dropped nose first in a shrub-filled ditch. The air bag exploded into Griffith's face. The engine of the car spluttered and choked like an asthmatic before giving out. Griffith whimpered into the air-bag. When he was sure they weren't moving, he pushed the deflating balloon away, out of his face.
Caia woke up.
“Where are we?” She asked.
“You took us off road.” Griffith answered.
“What? Oh.” She paused. “You stopped talking.”
“Only for a minute!”
“Sorry.” She said her apology quickly and almost inaudibly. “Don't worry, we can fix this.”
“How?”
“Magic.”
“I don't know any get a car out of a ditch spells.”
“Then we make one. Get out.” Caia jumped out of the car and carefully made her way around to the front, placing one hand on the car to guide herself and using the other to steady her balance. Griffith followed, moving slowly over the rough, leafy ground. Now that the headlights were gone he couldn't see a thing and guided himself with a hand on the car.
When he reached the front of the car he felt Caia take his hand.
“Now what?” He asked.
“We do this together.”
“Do what?”
“The easiest way to do this is to lift the ground up so that it's even with the road, then we can just push the car onto the road. I've done similar spells before.”
“That's easy, is it?”
“Easiest.”
“All right. How do we do it?”
“Focus.” She said. She tugged him down closer to the ground by his arm. “Focus on the earth, we can't see it but try to get a feel for how it is around us. First see it through your will, put the field and the road in your mind and hold it. That's the hard part.”
Griffith focused. “Okay.”
“What?”
“I've got it. I can see the field.” He felt the earth resonating and it filled his mind with a clear vision. He could see the grass beneath him, the road and the car in front of him, even the fields behind him sat clear in his mind, glowing as his magic-fuelled senses touched them.
“All right.” Caia hesitated. “Now pull the ground towards us and pile it beneath the car.” Griffith exhaled. Without saying a word he and Caia commanded the dirt beneath them. The earth obeyed. They gathered grass, soil and rocks from the field and from deep underground and built it up beneath the car until the ground beneath them was level with the road. Griffith opened his eyes and the world disappeared back into darkness.
“Do you think you can start it again?
“I can try. But I don't think so.”
Griffith nodded his understanding. He didn't know much about cars – or anything, really. But he was pretty sure that when the front of a car looks like it's got a broken nose, it doesn't start again. They could pull the branches and leaves out of the engine and even push the car back onto the road. But the twisted, dented and broken metal would need work. The steam hissing off the engine was a bad sign and Griffith was pretty sure, although not certain, that the tires used to sit in a neat circle around the wheels. He looked over to Caia for guidance but she had the same thoughtful, puzzled expression on her face.
“I can do this.” Griffith started pulling branches out of the fractured metal frame.
“You can start the car?” Caia asked.
“No. I can fix it.” Griffith swept the leaves off the hood of the car. “I once fixed a friend's broken nose while I was an apprentice. This is just like that.”
“The car doesn't have a nose, Griffith.”
“Of course it does. And it's broken and the car can't breathe properly. I need to undo the damage.”
Caia watched, arms folded, tapping her foot.
“Give me a hand with this one.” Griffith struggled to pry a broken branch out of the undercarriage. Caia shrugged. She stepped in and together they pulled it out. Griffith left Caia to discard it and turned his focus to the car. He knelt down in front of it and closed his eyes. He felt through the car with his mind. The damage was fresh. Easy. He knew the spell. He had cast it on himself every day for years. All it needed was a little reworking for cars, instead of people.
Caia tossed the last broken branch back into the ditch by the side of the road. She took a step back from the car and watched Griffith kneel and go to work. He knelt, hands resting in his lap and eyes closed. For a while nothing happened. Griffith wasn't sure what the first sign would be, but he was sure his spell was working. Confirmation came through silence. The hissing of the engine stopped. Small, metallic creaks and whines from the car followed that. The score of sounds grew as Griffith worked his magic. Then the crumpled frame of the car unfolded and straightened. The bonnet, the engine, the wheels and even the tires unbroke, as though it was crashing in rewind. When it was done and the car looked as good as new, the engine whirred and grunted to life.
Griffith opened his eyes and stood up. He took the time to look over his work and smile at a job well done.
“Just a broken nose,” he told Caia.
“I'm impressed.”
Griffith shrugged. “I already knew the right spell. I just had to change it a little. Anybody could have done it.”
“But only one of us.”
“Well, thanks. How about you let me drive this time?”
Caia didn't answer but climbed into the passenger seat. Griffith took the driver's seat. Seconds later, they were on the road. With every minute taking him closer to Salem, Griffith began to feel relaxed.
“So where did you go?” Caia asked.
“Huh?”
“After the fire. Where did you go?”
“To one of our master's friends.” Returning to the story did an excellent job of killing his triumphant buzz. “I did plan to leave but I thought somebody should know the truth about what had happened. They needed to be warned that Lloyd might come after them, too. He resented not only Master Edan, but everybody who
associated with him. I walked the whole way there from the corpse house. It took me a few hours but even though I should have, I didn't want to hurry. The walk gave me a long time to reconsider getting involved. Lloyd probably didn't think I was dead, but he might have thought I'd stay out of his way. If I did, he'd have no reason to kill me.
“But that's not what I did. I went to warn the other sorcerers. But when I reached the house of our master's friend, Lloyd was already there. I found him going through the bottom floor of their house. I had to wonder how many friends had been killed while I took my time. I even asked him. He told me it was only two, so far – the master's friends I'd come to see. Lloyd found them in their bed, asleep. He stabbed them with a kitchen knife and then decided to help himself to anything valuable or powerful they had. After all, as he pointed out, they wouldn't need it any more. Then he asked why I was there and if I wanted to join him. I told him the truth. I told him I'd come to warn the other sorcerers about him.
“He didn't say anything. He just came for me. He looked so angry. I think he was genuinely surprised I didn't want to help him. But, as you know, trying to kill a sorcerer with magic is a lot harder when they're ready. I knew what was coming and I was able to resist. So when his disease spell failed, he tried to choke me. I think all that disease in his body has made him weak, though. I wouldn't let him get a hold of me and I broke away from his grip easily. Finally, he went for the knife.”
“What did you do?” Caia asked. “Did you actually fight him?”
“I'm not proud but, yes, I did. All I could think about was getting out of there and warning the other sorcerers. When he grabbed the knife from a shelf, I went for the closest thing I could get: A chair. He came at me and I threw it at him. It knocked him clean off his feet. I picked up the knife and pinned him to the ground. I couldn't kill him. He was my brother, after all. Even if he wasn't, it's just not in me to hurt someone.