Magus

by R H Frye

  As John moved to the couch she had indicated, Sarah gave herself a shake to awaken herself from whatever had caused her to brazenly invite this stranger into her home. She knew she should be panicked. The days when you could simply invite any unknown person into your home without a care in the world had died sometime during the previous century, even in the neighborly mountains of North Carolina. Weird as the situation was, she felt not the least bit of agitation about the man in her home. On the contrary, she was a bit surprised to realize that she was actually elated with his presence. Something about the man, some aura, told her that he was not a man to be feared. She knew, without any idea of how she knew that this was a man that a woman could trust.

  As John arrived at the sofa and began to turn to take a seat upon it, Sarah realized that he was about to catch her staring after him and quickly moved to close the door that she was still holding open in his wake. As she turned back towards the living room, she was greeted with one of the most pleasant smiles she had ever seen. She glimpsed his even, white teeth briefly in that smile and noticed their startling contrast to his bronze complexion. She risked a brief glance at his left hand and was appalled at the surge of happiness she felt when she noticed the absence of a wedding ring there.

  You’ve got to get it together, girl, Sarah thought firmly. Assuming a crisp manner to cover her embarrassment at the situation, she said, “Wait here. I’ll be out in just a minute.” She clutched the towel firmly about her body to ensure that her new client would not see any more of her skin than he already had. Of course, this also had the effect of molding the towel to her ample curves, but she decided that it was the best she could manage under the circumstances, and she walked calmly across her living room in front of the man and through her bedroom door. As she turned to close the door behind her, she noticed that the smile on the stranger’s face was even more pleasant than before and lines of amusement had appeared at the corners of his eyes.

  Sarah closed the door quietly and was surprised to feel an answering smile surface on her own face. The horrible embarrassment she had felt after opening her door was gone, and in its place a small knot of excitement was growing. She had no clue of what the afternoon would bring, but suddenly the day seemed filled with wonderful possibilities.

  John sat musing about the woman as he spent his time idly looking at the furnishings of her living room. The amusement that he was sure she had seen in his eyes was as good-natured as could be; he was simply amazed at how good he felt in light of the stressful events of his weekend. The impatience and irritation he had felt at his prolonged wait at her front door had vanished as soon as he saw the lovely auburn-haired vision that had opened the door for him.

  Struggling to tear his thoughts from the girl (undoubtedly naked) in the room next door, he forced himself to examine the furnishings of her living room instead of simply seeing them. The coffee table in front of him was a solid and serviceable centerpiece to the room. The table was made of oak that was stained to a dark glossy finish, and it labored under a load of books that were unfamiliar to John. All of the books seemed to have psychic development as the theme.

  White Venetian blinds were hanging in the living room windows, but they did little to hinder the bright summer sunlight blazing outside in the early afternoon, so John’s view of the room was reasonably clear from his seat on the sofa. A modest television was nestled in an oak entertainment center that was finished to match the coffee table in front of him. Videotapes and DVD’s were crammed on the shelves on either side of the TV. A quick glance at the titles of these movies revealed that the resident psychic was very much a fan of mainstream entertainment. The labels that John could see from his position on the sofa represented a broad spectrum of movies, spanning most of the entertainment genres.

  Just as John was completing his mental compilation and evaluation of the items in the living room (two end tables, an easy chair, two lamps) the bedroom door opened and revealed his hostess, wearing jeans and a tee shirt and with her damp hair trailing to about the center of her back. John was immediately forced to fight the urge to stare at her in open admiration. Instead, he shifted to one end of the sofa to make room for the vision that was walking towards him. Suddenly nervous, he quietly cleared the lump that had formed in the back of his throat before asking, “So…how do we do this?”

  Seeming much calmer, the woman asked, “How about some introductions first?”

  John was struck by the realization that he still did not even know the woman’s name. “My name is John Raintree. I spoke to you on the phone just a little while ago. I guess you’re Madame Serena?” This last was said with a slight hint of disbelief coloring his voice.

  Another of those appealing blushes colored the woman’s cheekbones as she said, “Well, yes and no. That’s what I call myself in my ads…and with most of my clients. But I’d really like it if you called me Sarah.” She fought the urge to rush breathlessly onward and explain how Madame Sarah just did not seem to fit the image of mystery that she wanted to portray. She could tell from the look on John’s face that the explanation probably was unnecessary anyway

  “Sarah.” John approved of the name. It was unadorned, but beautiful, much like the woman it labeled. “Sarah it is. So, Madame Sarah, where do we begin?”

  Sarah’s blush deepened as she quickly answered, “Please, just call me Sarah.”

  “I know. I was just giving you shi…um, I was just kidding.” John realized at the last second that the rough and ready language that he used with his construction workers might be inappropriate under the circumstances.

  “That’s okay,” Sarah was quick to assure him. John was relieved to see that his near slip of the tongue had caused Sarah to smile slightly. She looked much more relaxed than she had upon entering the room. “Well, first you should tell me how you want me to proceed. I can give you a reading in a couple of different ways. I don’t really have a preference since my results are pretty consistent either way. I can use tarot cards or crystals. Or I can just sit with you for a little while and tell you what I see. Of course, for a cold reading, knowing nothing more than your name, I’d want to hold your hands while I concentrated on seeing what there is to see.” Physical contact with a client usually yielded the best results with the clearest intuitions of what was in store for the person, but Sarah always let the client make up his or her own mind.

  “Well, how do you think we should do this? I’ve never really had any experience with this sort of thing, you know?” John asked.

  This was Sarah’s favorite response from a new client. It showed that the client was placing a large amount of trust in her judgment and usually led to some fantastic readings. She took a moment to consult with her intuition before deciding on the course that she felt was the best. “Okay, lean back, relax and close your eyes. I’m going to take your hand and do the same. In a few minutes, I’ll start to give you your reading.” John immediately moved to comply, tucking one leg beneath the other (with his boots carefully off the seat cushion) and placing one hand on his knee while leaning back against the sofa and closing his eyes. He was amazed at how compliant he felt and how much he trusted Sarah. He had only known her for a few minutes and now he was letting himself relax completely in front of her.

  Sarah watched John settle in and had to fight a wanton surge of pleasure she felt at the prospect of touching his hand. She shifted her seat closer to the center of the sofa until her knee was almost touching his. Her posture was almost a mirror image of John’s as she reached to take the hand that was lying relaxed upon his knee. When her hand touched John’s she sagged against the back of the sofa and closed her eyes.

  And seconds later she bolted upright as she saw a torrent of images pour into her mind’s eye! She snatched her hand away as if it had been burned and her eyes flew open to see John sit up from his relaxed position with concern written plainly across his handsome features. “What is it? What’s wrong?” he asked with sudden fear making him hoarse.

&nb
sp; For a few tense moments, Sarah could not reply as she struggled to come to grips with all that she had seen in their brief contact. Finally, she answered John with a dumbfounded, “What…the fuck…was that?” She watched confusion, fear, and a slow, dawning comprehension chase each other across the face before her. When an answer was not immediately forthcoming, Sarah repeated the question in a quick, firm voice. “What the fuck was that?”

  John’s mind raced as he pondered the best way to answer Sarah’s question. When he realized that she was growing more agitated and appeared ready to repeat the question again if he did not answer soon, he decided that he would follow his instincts, as he had with the old man at the store. “I promise I’ll answer any question you ask, if you’ll just tell me what it is that upset you so much.”

  Sarah, still numb, and a little frightened from the deluge of images, was quick to reply. “What upset me? Are you serious? Are you telling me you didn’t feel that? What exactly are you mixed up in?” She could easily have continued with a flood of questions to match the confusion and apprehension she felt, but she stopped her rapid-fire delivery to give John time to reply.

  “Sarah, look. Some crazy things have happened to me in the last two days, things I can’t explain and that I’m trying to understand. That’s the reason I came to see you. But this is all new to me, so it might help me if you’d give me some idea of how what just happened was different from what usually happens during your readings.” The tension that John had briefly escaped during his first few moments with Sarah had returned. He suffered from a desperate need to understand all the crazy events of the last two days, and the urgency and frustration that he felt were evident from the blunt manner of his speech.

  Sarah sat studying John’s eyes, searching for any sign of deception or malice. At the same time, she studied her intuition, a tool which she had sharpened far beyond what she would have imagined when she took her first steps down the road towards being a psychic. Her mind saw only worry and fear in his eyes, and her intuition was still telling her, more strongly than ever, that she could trust the man before her. Since what she saw and what she felt were in agreement, she decided to trust John and tell him exactly what had startled her.

  “Okay. You wanted to know what was different about what just happened, so I’ll tell you.” Sarah paused for a moment to collect her thoughts. Finally, she began to speak. “When I give a reading, especially to a new client, I usually just get a vague impression of what’s on the person’s mind. I use my intuition to tell the person what I feel the best path is for them to follow. There are never any clear images during a first reading…at least not until I met you. In fact, about the best I can usually do is to feel what the person is feeling and get some sort of impression about the source of their emotions. And sometimes I may sit for ten minutes before I get any impression at all from the person.

  “But when I touched you and closed my eyes, everything was different. I got this incredible rush of images and a huge torrent of emotions from you. I don’t understand half of what I saw, and I’m not sure I want to, to be totally honest.” Sarah paused once more to collect thoughts and emotions that were again threatening to spin out of control. “Maybe we should start at the beginning. Who are you? And what are you involved in? Please don’t lie to me because I’ll know. And I’ll tell you to leave and never come back.” Since her initial shock was fading, she was feeling a slow return of her unreasonable attraction to this man, and the thought of sending him away was almost too much to bear. She would send him away if he lied to her, however. There was nothing she hated more than a liar.

  It was John’s turn to collect his thoughts. After a few moments, he finally began to tell his tale.

  When John finally finished speaking, the sun had traveled across the sky enough to send its golden warmth through the window behind them. Sarah was sitting framed in a halo of light that sparked fire from her auburn hair. Her beauty was a living, dangerous beast beating at the defensive walls that John had long ago unknowingly placed around his heart. As he finished telling her about the old man in the store, his words trailed off until he sat mute with naked admiration shining from his eyes. Sarah seemed not to notice his attention as she sat musing over the preposterous tale she had heard. It could not possibly be true. The events that John had described only happened in movies. But she sensed not the slightest hint of falsehood in his voice, and she had become adept over the last several years at knowing when she was being played for a fool.

  Still, she felt compelled to check. “John, look me in the eyes and swear to me that everything you’ve told me is the honest-to-God truth.”

  “I swear on the soul of my grandfather, everything I’ve told you is the honest-to-God truth,” John replied without the slightest hesitation.

  Sarah sighed. She felt confused, exhausted (despite the early afternoon hour), and more than a little afraid. “Well what do you want me to tell you, John? I don’t know any more about what you’ve described than you do.”

  “Well…I’m not sure, but according to the old man, I’m supposed to learn something about what to do next. You really don’t have the slightest idea?” John felt the desperation again beginning to creep into his voice, but he felt powerless to stop it. If Sarah could not help him, he did not know where to turn.

  “I really don’t know.” Sarah saw a misery that she could not bear begin to enter the face of the man before her, so she rushed on before he could reply. “I mean, I’m way out of my depth here. All I do is help people make good decisions about problems in their lives. I don’t know anything about fighting some magician that has somehow been awakened out in the sticks. I wouldn’t even know where to begin.”

  “Are you sure? I mean, if anyone ever needed some help about making a good decision about a problem, it’s me. So are you really, really sure?” John glanced around Sarah’s living room briefly before continuing. “I mean, is there something in one of these books that might help…or something?”

  Sarah had started to glance about the room in an unconscious imitation of John’s actions when she was struck by a sudden realization. “Oh shit! How could I be so stupid?” John’s look of bafflement about her sudden outburst almost caused a laugh to burst from her traitorous lips. She stifled the laugh and turned it into a smile as she realized that she was pronouncing herself a failure without even using the tools at her immediate disposal, tools that she had spent the better part of the last six years developing. As a frown, undoubtedly caused by her inappropriate levity, began to darken John’s handsome features, Sarah hurried to still his ire. “I’m sorry John. But you’ve got to be able to laugh at yourself when you’ve been an idiot, and I just realized that I haven’t actually tried to apply my intuition towards solving your problems. I was so shocked by what I saw and felt that I was in a hurry to confront you about it, and I didn’t try to analyze what I’d seen at all. Can you forgive me?” Sarah’s smile as she finished speaking was so stunning in the halo of sunlight that she unknowingly wore that the rime of ice that was quickly building over his emotions quickly melted away to nothing.

  “So, you can help me?” John asked with evident relief in his voice.

  Sarah hesitated for the briefest of seconds before answering. “Maybe. The least I can do is try. Give me a few minutes, okay?” Without waiting for an answer, she leaned back against the sofa and closed her eyes to sort through the jumble of images that she had seen.

  John sat looking at Sarah’s angelic face in its halo of sunlight for a short while. When it was apparent that she was not soon going to stir from her musings, he impulsively reached out to again take her hand and leaned back to rest against the sofa with his own eyes closed.

  Sarah was surprised to feel the renewal of the flood of images that had startled her so badly only a short while ago. In the distant, conscious portion of her mind, she knew that John had apparently renewed their earlier contact, but she found that forewarned apparently was forearmed and she resisted the impulse
to snap out of her consideration of the problems he was facing. Instead, she worked to moderate the flow of images into something that she could process and analyze with her intuition.

  Sarah saw a very young boy with soulful eyes crying over a grave. A man with familiar features was standing behind the boy. The man’s eyes were red, but the redness did not seem to be from crying. The man looked bitterly angry about something, and after a few minutes he called the boy to him and stomped off towards their car, a battered brown Ford that had seen better days. A man with salt-and-pepper hair stared after the departing pair with tears streaming down his face…

  The boy, a bit older now, and the man with graying hair were walking in a forest. The aging figure of the dignified old man would stop and point out plants to the boy, an expression of pure love written clearly on his face. The boy looked excited and stared up at the old man with an expression of round-eyed admiration coloring his own young features. Eventually the pair moved deeper into the forest and they were lost from sight…

  A figure, obviously a much older version of the boy that Sarah had seen earlier, was bent crying over another grave. The angry man from before was nowhere to be seen, and the old man, with hair that was almost completely white, was standing behind the boy with tears again streaming from his eyes. A short time passed, and the boy turned to stalk towards an old Chevrolet pickup. The aged figure called to the boy, but the boy strode onwards towards the pickup, climbed inside, and slammed the door behind him. The old man sighed, turned to distribute tobacco about the grave before him, said a few words, and finally moved to climb into the driver’s seat of the pickup. Without a word to the angry boy beside him, the old man started the truck and drove away…

  Sarah briefly glimpsed an even-older version of the boy she had seen in previous images. His sweating form was curled in a fetal position on a small bed with the sheets twisted about him. Suddenly the scene of an ancient battle covered the image of the boy on the bed. She flew over the battlefield observing the terrible carnage that was visited upon the figures below her. With an application of her will, she was just able to turn and see the adolescent figure of the boy flying naked beside her. With a fleeting sensation of horror, she glanced at herself and was horrified to see that she was also flying about unfettered by clothes. She hurried to cover herself until she belatedly realized that the adolescent figure beside her only had eyes for the carnage unfolding on the ground beneath him. She returned her attention to the battle on the ground just in time to see an arrogant man fall beneath an onslaught of glowing arrows unleashed by radiant figures amongst the trees…