by Landon Wark
And as Jonah McAllister, his mind clouded in the remnants of a dream that desperately clung to its own existence, looked upon it, it began to speak.
He awoke with a start, unsure of exactly where it was he found himself. For a moment he was in between that small apartment where he had nearly killed himself while going to university and the small single bed he had slept in as a child.
The screen door to his cabin slammed and he was cognizant that it was the opening of the door that had broken the sleep that had held him in its fragile thrall.
"Morning," Sandy was standing over his work table, holding a travel mug and a cluster of books. "Your textbooks were at the P.O. box when I swung by there."
As her gaze drifted to the cluster of loose sheets covering the bench in between some of the plants, their parts grafted securely together, he rose protectively, rushing over to gather them up.
Embarrassed that he had been doing little more than muttering things that might be words and writing down the sparse results he hurried the papers over to the sofa where he had been lying and shoved them under the mattress.
"It's been going slow?" Sandy placed the mug and books on the now barren table. "Maybe if you'd use the internet instead of drilling through these old tomes... that's the word we're gonna use, right?"
"No internet!" he snapped.
Jonah stretched out his hand and uttered a few syllables. The mug lifted from its resting place and drifted through the air towards his hand. It struck with a little more force than he intended, sloshing hot liquid out through the slit in the top and over his hand. He cursed, nearly dropping the mug onto the wooden floor.
"Yeah. It's going slow," he muttered in defeat. "We've got duplication of a few metals, a bit of fire and... The whole voxikinesis thing is powerful, but... I wouldn't use it around people."
"Voxi—? Oh, yeah. I nearly annihilated the footstool trying to get the remote last week," she said.
"Recruits?"
"Five, including Uncle Ezra. Enough that the two of us won't have to make a go of the quarters for a good long while. The two new ones haven't even seen our act yet, but I'm going to show them the quarters. I mean, as soon as the one wakes up."
"Okay." Jonah began sifting through some of his loose pages, lines of concentration appearing on his face.
"You wanna come watch?"
"Not really."
"You could manage to find a little bit of enthusiasm."
"I'll be enthusiastic when I can make some headway," Jonah rose from his place on the couch and plunked his collection of sheets next to the textbooks which he began leafing through casually. "These plants are the biggest successes I've had and I could likely have done this with just standard techniques."
"You act like there's some huge deadline looming or something. We have time, Jonah."
He raised his eyes to her face as if it was the first time she had ever said his name. There was a concerned look in her eyes as he began firing through the crisp pages of the new textbooks. Sandy reached out a hand to place comfortingly on his shoulder.
"Repulsion," he muttered.
"I'm sorry?" she scowled.
"That's how we move things around. That's what makes them solid," he retrieved the loose papers and sifted through. "Maybe there's too much power flowing through it somehow..."
Before she knew what was going on Jonah was walking in a circle around the table, his voice dropping into a low mutter. On instinct Sandy drew away.
"Should I get out of here? Is this the danger zone now?"
Jonah grasped another of the textbooks lying on the table, breaking its new spine. The travel mug pressed against his lips as he began pacing around the room.
"But maybe we could work out a way to dampen the amount of power..." he muttered intensely. "Two clouds of electrons can't occupy the same location, right? It's always electrons."
"Yeah, okay, so I'm going to take care of the people we've trusted to learn the power to fuck up the world then." Sandy motioned towards the door.
"Good, good," Jonah said as he went back to his pacing. "I'm going to need to recalibrate the amount of electrons I can manipulate at once."
Carmen winced as the light streamed into the kitchen through the slats in the blind. Her eyes turned up involuntarily with what she imagined was a withering condemnation at the man who was twisting the rod that controlled them.
The passable euphoria of the previous night had faded into a narcoleptic feeling of needing to be asleep and at the same time being unable to close her eyes. Her head was now throbbing and an oozing slick of nausea was probing its way up her throat. Still, she supposed she should be grateful to the large woman, whom she only slightly remembered from their time in a small college town coffee shop, reading dreadful poetry-esque essays. She had gotten her all that there was to get from the guy on the street, even if it wasn't enough, and had given her a place to stay. Even though she was genuinely thankful for that, Carmen's guard was still up. Gratitude could turn into a sinkhole pretty damn fast if you weren't careful.
"Do you mind?" She finally got fed up enough with the man fiddling with the blind to give a voice to her headache.
"Sandy said we needed light," he replied in a way reminiscent of a child relaying instructions from a teacher.
"Well, I'm gonna listen to this little MLM pitch and then I'm getting the hell out of here. I'd like to do so with my head intact." Carmen was still wondering how far she would get without completely breaking down into dope sickness. There was a bit of residue left in the waxy wrapper and she could try to get more, but she didn't have enough cash to both get a ride share home and shoot into her veins.
"Hungover?"
Carmen rolled her eyes. "Something like that."
"I'm Clay, by the way." He extended a hand which Carmen glared at.
"A sculpture and a poet?"
Clay's brow furrowed and Carmen savoured the small amount of dopamine produced by his confusion. It wasn't much, but it was honest work.
He pulled out a chair and sat down, still looking as if he was trying to gauge exactly what she was doing there. Almost immediately the two of them were joined by a huge bulk of a man that bore a passing resemblance to Sandy herself. A younger balding man who was dressed like one of the youth pastors all too common in these parts emerged from behind him. Finally a small, thin woman in her thirties who looked like she had seen into the darkness of hell walked in behind them. Each pulled out one of the chairs at the small table in the side room. Carmen soon found herself squished into the corner by the huge man, wrinkling her nose at the smell of the terrible amount of cologne he was wearing.
"D'you mind?" she winced, trying to wedge herself out of the corner.
"I'm Clay," her reluctant comrade continued his attempts to introduce himself to anyone who would listen. The thin balding man shook his hand, but said something like 'Mall' or 'Gaul'.
Carmen tried to gauge the mood of the room. The three that had come in radiated an air of something that lay somewhere in between wariness and excitement, as if they had seen something that had opened a door for them, but were not quite sure what lay on the other side.
They all stared at each other for what seemed like an eternity, the silence might have overwhelmed Carmen were she not an hour or so from crawling into a hole and dying. Clay looked like he might jump clean out of his skin if something didn't happen right away.
"Where is ever—" he started just before the large figure of Sandy appeared from out of the kitchen, a clump of papers clamped messily in her hand.
"All right," she interrupted Clay with a tone that felt like she was a professor addressing a class of psychology students. "This isn't going to take very long. We just need to get you guys making some money."
"Ahhh. There it is," Carmen pulled out her chair and started to push through the vertigo of standing up. "What are you going to have them do? Call relatives and tell them they're being held for ransom?"
"What?"
"I
'm assuming that you've got yourself a nice little cult here, Sandy," she said as she tried to wiggle her way out from behind the fat man. "I don't blame you. This shit happens during depressions. Thanks but no thanks, guys. I may be a—" She swallowed. "A borderline addict, but the only thing more pathetic than an addict is an addict in a cult."
"We're not a cult." Sandy's brow crinkled into what looked like white tree bark.
"Yeah? How charismatic is your leader?"
"Umm, not very?"
Carmen stopped just before breaking clear of the table.
Maybe you're being a bit too hasty.
There might be a bit of a story here, a little slice of life in the depression. A short draft of a premier of a serialized report took form in her mind before it morphed into an enter non-fiction, a study of religious desperation in the heartland. But it was pretty far from the things she needed. If she could just get into the city once every couple of days maybe... Cult leaders liked having the ear of the world, so, yeah, maybe.
No. It wasn't worth it.
"Tell you what; put it in a pamphlet and mail it to me."
"But," the thin woman spoke up with restrained enthusiasm, "We've all seen what she can do. What they can do."
"Um," Clay raised his hand. "I haven't seen it."
Carmen furrowed her brow as the rest of the assembled sallow-eyed monkeys seemed to ratchet up their excitement. Her left eye narrowed as the idea that there was something out here that she could maybe get a couple of pieces—decent ones that might break back into some more mainstream media outlets—returned.
"Yeah..." she said warily as she looked them over as Sandy produced three rolls of quarters. "Me neither."
The migraine that had been playing havoc behind Carmen's eyes had been shoved to the rear of her consciousness. It was still there, to be sure, but... The nature of her reality had shifted in such a way that it didn't seem to matter anymore. She was uncertain if anything mattered after what she had just seen.
The world just shuddered! was all that she could think. Shuddered.
Why shuddered and not split or broke, she could not say for certain. Maybe it was the fact that nothing had physically moved, at least not much. Maybe it was because that was the actual visual effect of the single pile of quarters that seemed to diverge into two.
It was a damn good trick the first time when Sandy had done it. It was goddamn shuddering staring at her own small pile of quarters, even the strange imperfect ones on the tops of the four piles, stuck together like pancakes poured too close together. The effect was something like what she would have expected for not getting whatever words she was supposed to say right.
"They... mitosed," Clay whispered into the silence that gripped the table.
"Why is the table singed?" Jenny asked.
"We'll use a metal table next time," Sandy said sheepishly.
Carmen ran her fingers around her face, trying to open her eyes as wide as possible. She had done whatever she could to try to foul the trick: Moving the piles from the place where Sandy had placed them. Splitting the piles and restacking them. In the midst of all of it, she was certain that it was still a trick. Her fingers trembled as she picked two of the coins, the ones stuck together, from the piles.
The fat man next to her started laughing.
"So-so-so," Paul stammered for a moment. "What does this mean?" He looked around them all. "What does it mean?"
"The six of us just need to keep doing this to make enough money to keep this place running while Jonah does his research."
"Uh, so, counterfeiting?" Clay raised his hand again.
Sandy looked at them. "The future is not going to be one where counterfeiting is an actual thing."
For some reason Carmen got the feeling that this was something that she had been practising for some time. The earmarks of justification were laced tightly into her voice. It was a good justification to be certain. It evoked in her the same feelings as someone telling her that pirating a movie was not a crime in an era when binary data flowed freely. It was a damn good justification. You wouldn't download a quarter, would you?
"Is this my letter to Hogwarts?" Carmen asked dumbly.
"Yeah. 'cause their American campus is a teal house in the middle of some mouse infested farm fields," Clay muttered.
"But, like... Are we going to learn—like—sorcery?"
"They don't know that much," the woman, Jenny, said with authority. "There's more, but this, Jonah, is just feeling his way around. What was it? Doing research?"
Sandy looked almost embarrassed as she addressed them. "Yeah. There's making the money this way and a couple of other things he's shown me. Other than that, we still don't know a whole lot. We're..." She struggled. "Still writing the ancient magics."
Carmen felt a thrill run down her spine. I was there when the ancient magic was written, she thought. But, more than that, she looked at the pile of money and found herself licking her lips.
"So," the fat man, Ezra, began. "You just want us to keep doing this, piling up quarters?"
"I thought we'd take shifts."
A fist pounded on the window flanking the table causing the group to jump and the long, pale face of a young man who had yet to grow into his nose butted up against the glass. He held up an open blue notebook whose pages were covered in tight hand written notes.
"Sandy?" his muted voice nonetheless betrayed his shouting. "I need some more supplies! I need a voltage meter! Now!"
"That would be our charismatic leader," Ezra said drearily.
Late night moonlight slipped in around the drapes lining the hallway window, lighting the footsteps of Clayton James as he staggered, blearily towards the room Sandy had said he could use. Despite his mouth being dry from having to practice more than the others to get the quarters trick to work he had had to get up to use the bathroom three times in the night. The excitement of the entire situation was playing havoc with both his kidneys and his intestines.
He rubbed his eyes, still unsure if he was dreaming or not. Maybe his subconscious had conjured up a fantasy that would allow him to escape from the tedium of his daily life when it had finally become unbearable. Well, if his work with quarters was any indication the minutiae of... magic wasn't much more interesting. The results were, certainly, but the journey to get there didn't seem too much different from a week in the lab. Figure out what works and what doesn't. He found he needed to put a hand to the wall to steady himself when the realization hit him like a brick, someone was doing research on goddamn magic. And it was research that he could be a part of. He had, unbelievably, been in the right place at the right time. Even if it was just in a dream.
He snorted, wondering how many times the reality of this situation had been questioned by those before him.
Was there anyone before him?
A light still on in the hall caught his attention and before he could stop himself he found his head turning to look in on the girl who had been seated first at the table with him. She was at least as bleary eyed as he was, her face contorted into a grimace as she stared at the small square of waxy wrap with its sallow, yellowish flakes laid bare in the light from the lamp.
"Y'all right?" he asked from the door, his words running together into some kind of beaten down accent. "That is what I think it is, right?"
"Yup. Some of the South's most passable yellow gold." She snorted. "I hurt fucking everywhere. When I said earlier I was almost an addict, that... might have been an understatement."
The corners of Clay's mouth turned down. His experience with narcotics was purely academic. "How bad is it?"
"I need more than this or I'm gonna get really bad, really fast."
"So, what are you going to do? Go back to town?"
"I..." she trailed off, wondering if she should allow this thought to slip out. "I was wondering if what worked for those quarters will work for this too. It'll get me through the night. And what's more, it's safe."
Clay's frown deepened. "How's th
at exactly?"
She groaned. "It's only a matter of time before I buy a batch that some overly ambitious asshole has mixed with too much of the wrong thing. Fentanyl, something worse. This stuff is... okay. And If it could last me forever... At least the risks would be low and I wouldn't have to go out on the street."
"I don't know if that would be any safer. Remember what happened to the quarters. The ones that were stuck together. If it happens down on a molecular level too it could be just as dangerous."
Her head sank and a low expletive came out under her breath. "How can it be that there's literal magic in the fucking world and I'm still doomed?"
Clay drummed his fingers on the door jam. "Dopamine is a helluva drug."
"I don't think I really have a choice," she said in defeat. "It's either pump some kind of magical potion of dubious safety into my veins or... go into town and get some mundane potion of... maybe equal dubious safety and pump that into my veins."
Clay exhaled. It was beginning to sound like the girl had already settled on a course of action. "I mean, maybe I can try to weasel some way to determine if it's safe out of—"
She held up a hand. "I appreciate the effort, big guy, but I don't need you to save me."
"Oh, I wasn—"
"You were. It's okay. I'm a big girl. I've been at parties with the Governor. I've seen people giving blow jobs for meth in tents by the side of the road."
"I..."
"Too shocking?"
"Well, I guess. I was more thrown by the talk of oral sex mucking up this whole 'magic academy' vibe I was trying to get into."
"Welcome back to the real world. Also, no offence, but you don't seem like the weaseling type. More like a big, dumb farm hand to be honest."
Clay snorted. "I could tell you a thing or two about groundskeeping."
There was a moment of silence between the two of them that might have passed for solemnity.
"Tell you what," Clay broke it. "If you won't take some intervention then how about someone to just watch and make sure you don't... I don't know, grow a second head or a set of gills or something?"