The Magic Book

by Fredric Shernoff

  Nathaniel winced and looked away.

  “What? What did I say?”

  “It’s nothing. You just remind me of a friend of mine. One of those the Authority took from me.”

  “Ah. Okay. Sorry, man.”

  Nathaniel waved the sentiment away. “I am not broken, Goldman. But I’m not what I was, and I have no delusions about how this is going to go. The deaths of the Great Ones occurred closer and closer together with each successive generation, and there’s no good reason I survived when others near my age died out. I was ‘lucky,’ maybe, or there’s something in my bloodline that pushes back the decline. But my decline has begun. Truth be told, it began nearly two years ago. And it’s accelerating, though I will concede the point that my actions of late haven’t helped matters. I’m going to die, just as Opellius is going to die. The magic contained in the book gave him back some sight but if anything, it’s taking a greater toll overall.”

  “Fuck. When you put it that way…I guess I hadn’t really considered the whole picture.”

  “It’s not your fault,” Nathaniel said. “The Great Ones are mysteries to people even in my world. Even to me. My point is simply this: I can’t stave off the inevitable. Were I to swear off traveling through the portal, or fighting the Authority, or doing anything other than resting in bed for the rest of my days, my end will still find me before long.”

  “How long?” Goldman asked quietly.

  Nathaniel rubbed his shoulder.

  “Maybe a year. It’s imprecise. I will join my friends and my family in whatever comes next…if there’s anything at all. All I care about is making things right by any means necessary. The Authority knows the truth about the origins of the world. There’s an endless amount of existence out there and we were told there was nothing beyond the walls. They have kept us penned in and repeating the same type of lives forever.”

  “What do you want to do?” Goldman asked.

  “I want to break the Authority’s control on my land, and if there are other Authorities controlling other lands, I want to break them as well. I am a Great One and it was always my job to look out for humanity. I will give humanity its proper chance, no matter the cost.”

  It took a long time, but the car finally left the woods behind. Goldman pulled it near the edge of the trees and they exited and urinated into the underbrush.

  “Pretty for a rest stop,” Goldman said.

  “I don’t know what that means, exactly,” Nathaniel said.

  “It doesn’t matter. You know, when I was driving away from Philly, I got out on the highway and I saw all the open land and I thought, ‘it’s almost like there’s part of the country that’s immune from Weber and all the craziness.’ But I knew that was stupid. The CSA controls everything. Every blade of grass. But here…this world out here is the real deal. Free and wild and belonging to nobody.”

  “Everything belongs to somebody,” Nathaniel said. “There are mutants in my territory, and I believe out here as well, and they think everything is theirs. The Authority thinks it’s theirs. There will always be those who stake claim to virgin soil. It’s just a matter of making sure the one who claims it doesn’t hurt anybody else.”

  “Well, be a downer if you want, but to my nostrils this air smells like some serious fucking freedom, and I’m gonna suck in as many lungfuls as I can manage.”

  Nathaniel smiled. “Do as you wish.”

  Goldman sat on the ground, legs crossed. He turned his palms skyward on his lap and closed his eyes. “Come sit down here with me, Nate,” he said.

  Nathaniel did. “I don’t see the point, really,” he said. “We have a lot to accomplish.”

  “Shh. Do what I’m doing.”

  Nathaniel positioned his hands the same way Goldman had his.

  “Now close your eyes and breathe.”

  Nathaniel grunted his disapproval, then did as Goldman asked. He listened to the sound of the wind rustling through the leaves. He heard birds chirping in conversation. He felt a sense of something he couldn’t quite place or explain.

  “Relaxing, isn’t it?” Goldman asked. “When you take time to pay attention to the world, it pays you back in a bunch of ways.”

  “It’s…interesting,” Nathaniel said.

  “Damn right it is. I picked this trick up on the farm where I worked for a long time. It’s called meditation, though right now we aren’t even really scratching the surface, since we’re talking and all that.”

  “Medi-tay-shoon?” Nathaniel asked.

  “Close enough for government work.”

  Nathaniel opened his eyes and saw Goldman smiling at him.

  “Look, Nate, the point is, there’s something special about your world. I don’t know how I’m here, or how the hell it has a breathable atmosphere, but none of that changes that this is pretty cool compared to everything I’ve seen and experienced the last many years. It’s worth taking a moment to appreciate the little things before we go risk our lives.”

  “I see. I do hope to spend more time exploring this world. It’s as new to me as it is to you. But for now, I don’t want to fool myself into thinking it’s all this simple. To stay out here means everyone in my land is trapped forever.”

  Goldman nodded. “I gotcha, man. So, onward to the wall?”

  “Aye. We’ll see if your idea holds water.”

  They returned to the car. Driving outside the woods was still rough but less treacherous, and there were no obstacles blocking their way. Nathaniel tracked their progress and occasionally pointed to direct Goldman in a slightly different trajectory.

  Finally, they saw the wall appear before them far in the distance.

  “Hoo boy,” Goldman said. “That’s a big motherfucker.”

  “Aye.”

  “You fell off that thing?”

  “Aye. It hurt.”

  “I’ll bet it did. You were right—there’s no way in hell we could climb back over that thing.”

  There was a loud thud, and the car jolted to the right. Goldman spun the wheel furiously. The car bounced from one wheel to the next, trying to find its balance.

  “What the fuck was that?” Goldman asked.

  Nathaniel looked out the window. He saw a large blue shape charging at them.

  “Mutant. It’s a big one. It’s gaining on us.”

  “Should we shoot it?”

  “No. Let me handle it.”

  “Handle it how?” Goldman asked.

  “Can you make this car go quickly in the opposite direction?”

  “I thought we wanted to get away from the angry genie thing!”

  “Just do it!” Nathaniel yelled.

  Goldman brought the car to an abrupt halt, then started moving in reverse. Nathaniel opened the door, which swung wide as the car picked up speed. He perched on the edge of the door opening, watching as the mutant drew near.

  It was the same size as the one that had fought him in the woods. That one had caught him by surprise as he hunted the deerkin. This one had his full attention.

  He roared as he jumped from the car. He caught the approaching mutant in a powerful tackle that sent both of them sprawling and rolling across the field.

  Nathaniel punched the mutant with his right hand, then his left, then his right again. The thing grabbed him with both hands around his arms and tossed him away.

  “Nate are you okay?” Goldman called.

  “Stay at a distance!” Nathaniel responded. “This mutant wasn’t prepared for a retaliatory attack.”

  The mutant came at him, and Nathaniel side-stepped. He was feeling much better than he had in a long while, and he wondered how long the good feelings would last. He jumped on the mutant’s broad back and cinched his arm around its neck. The creature snarled and tried to toss him off, but he held on.

  The mutant shook him like a cornhusk doll, but Nathaniel refused to relinquish his grip. He pressed hard against the pulse of its blood, and finally the beast slowed. It fell to the ground and Nathaniel rolled awa
y.

  He got up and ran to the car, which Goldman had positioned nearby.

  “Did you kill it?” Goldman asked as Nathaniel got back in his seat and closed the door.

  “No. I thought it uncouth. This is its world, not mine. Just as one would kill all the insects that invade one’s home but wouldn’t go hunting for them outside. We are fortunate that these beasts seem to hunt alone. Their weaker brethren live in packs within the territory.”

  “Like the hive mind?”

  “I don’t know. There’s something that links them together. It’s apparent in their skin. But the hive mind don’t have the raw strength. In that, the mutants are more like me, or the woman I fought in your world.”

  “So these mutants from the outside can get over the wall?” Goldman asked.

  “It seems like at least one of them did. But I don’t really know. And I’ve never encountered anything with the power to scale the wall. Not to mention it’s heavily guarded on the inside, as I can personally attest.”

  “So what do you think?”

  Nathaniel looked out the window at the approaching wall. “I think that maybe there’s something to your theory of an access point. We’ll know soon enough, anyway.”

  When they reached the perimeter of the wall, Nathaniel asked Goldman to stop the car. He opened the door and climbed out.

  “What are you doing?” Goldman asked.

  Nathaniel took hold of the roof of the car and pulled himself onto it.

  “Dude, why are you doing that?”

  “The windows of this car are limiting for me. In the open air I can better inspect the wall as it passes.”

  “Okay…are you going to be able to balance up there?” Goldman called out his window.

  “If you don’t try to shake me loose and keep the speed low, I think I’ll be fine.”

  “He thinks he’ll be fine. He thinks! I’ll remember that when you go bouncing off my hood.”

  Goldman started the car again, rolling it along slowly enough that Nathaniel could have walked alongside it.

  “What do you see?” Goldman called.

  “Very little. The surface is constant so far.”

  “Well, have no fear. There’s only a hundred miles of this thing left to go.”

  They drove on for a significant distance. Nathaniel felt oddly positive about the fight with the mutant. The last time he’d fought one of the monstrosities, the battle had served as a painful reminder of his growing limitations. This time around, it had given him a thrill to engage in combat, and he felt noble for letting the mutant live.

  Maybe there was something to Goldman’s point. He had no great desire to spend the rest of his days in pain and conflict, but there was a mission to complete, and he couldn’t sit in medi-tay-shoon while the Authority still kept his people bound in a lie.

  He wondered if perhaps he was presenting Goldman with too optimistic a view. True, he had been honest about his body’s failing powers, and the impending end of his long life. But he had boasted a little when speaking about the quest and his goal to see the land liberated before he died.

  He wasn’t afraid of the Authority, nor any of the cruel things they could do to him. Still, he cared for Goldman and had already lost so much to the Authority’s ruthlessness. Worse, he had no plan. Even if they somehow found a way back into the land of lies that had once been everything he knew, he was only one man. To take on Gustavus…

  His thoughts drifted, and so he was surprised when Goldman called to him.

  “Nate! Look over there!”

  Along the horizon, there was something visible—a small blemish on the wall’s otherwise massive perfection.

  “Continue on to whatever it is,” Nathaniel said. “It could be what we’re looking for.”

  The dark structure grew as they moved closer. It looked like metal bars, twisted and deformed.

  Goldman pulled the car around several feet in front of it, and Nathaniel hopped down from the roof.

  “Somebody did a number on that thing,” Goldman said, pointing at the distorted bars. “I think we found how your mutant got in, Nate.”

  “Aye. And that’s how we can get in too.” He looked at the bars, and the tunnel they had once protected, leading underground. He tilted his head and studied it more closely. There was something at the edge of his thoughts, if only he could push it to the front of his mind.

  “What’s wrong?” Goldman asked.

  Nathaniel saw the young man had the nearly useless weapon at the ready.

  “Nothing wrong, per se,” Nathaniel replied.

  “But there’s something bothering you.”

  “Aye. Not something about this scene, but what it represents.”

  Goldman walked over to the bars and put his hand on one of them. “It represents that a bad motherfucker did this. This is some solid stuff. But we’re pretty sure you killed the dude, right?”

  Nathaniel shook his head. “It’s not that. Not about the mutant’s abilities.” Suddenly it hit him. “The mutant got in and nobody knew. He tore this entrance to shreds and it hasn’t been fixed or dealt with in any way.”

  “You don’t think the Authority knows this tunnel exists?” Goldman asked.

  “I don’t know what I think. Everything I’ve ever known has been proved wrong.”

  Goldman sat on the hood of his car. “You’re a complicated dude, Nate,” he said.

  “I don’t understand what you mean.”

  “You look at the world in this sort of black and white way. And that got you through just fine for a shit ton of years, right? But now, all of a sudden, there are shades of grey and you don’t know how to handle them.”

  “I suppose. I don’t have a resource. Opellius taught me some things, but he doesn’t know much more than I do when it comes to all of this.”

  “Right,” Goldman said. “But you had a teacher, didn’t you? And parents? Family and friends?”

  Nathaniel sat next to him and stared at the remains of the gate that had blocked the tunnel back into the land he had sacrificed so much to leave. “I had all those things.”

  “And what about a girlfriend? Wife?”

  Nathaniel gave a brief laugh. “I could ask you the same thing. You’re a loner chosen to wander your world. We aren’t all that different.”

  “So there’s never been anybody?” Goldman asked. “I’ve had my share of girls, Nate, don’t you worry. If we survive, I’ll tell you all about it.”

  “I had someone. It was long ago. Most of my life was ‘long ago.’ And when she and all of that had come and gone, I was left as this relic of a forgotten time. The one thing that changed in thousands of years was the death of the Great Ones. So they put me in a palace and treated me like a minor god. Someone to be respected but mostly ignored.” He stopped, lost in thought. Then he said, “Achmis and Esther, they took good care of me, though they really didn’t know who I was…who I had been. And still it cost them everything.”

  “This someone you had…can you tell me about her?”

  “It was a different world, Goldman. It doesn’t matter anymore.”

  “Fuck that, Nate.”

  “What?”

  “Fuck that. Stop bullshitting me and yourself.” Goldman got to his feet and began to pace as he had done in Opellius’s house. “You want to tell me this sad story and claim that nobody knows you, but I’m here with you in the middle of fucking no-man’s-land trying to extend an olive branch and actually talk to you like a person, and you’re cutting me off. You don’t want to tell me about your history, or you want to screen it through some kind of filter, that’s your choice. But don’t waste your time or mine complaining that nobody got to know the Great One. You read my fucking journal. You know me. It just seems fair that you should, I don’t know, tell me something about who you were before you were the last. Or second to last, or whatever you are now.”

  He looked up, frowning. “Are you going to say something?”

  “I don’t know what to say, G
oldman. You’re right. I’m unaccustomed to sharing anything with anyone. It’s a foreign tongue. I’m sorry for ‘bullshitting’ you.”

  “Ah, man, I get it. I mean, I can’t totally get it, but I get the gist of what you’re dealing with. Sorry to rag on you, man.”

  “It’s fine. We should make camp here. We need to observe the tunnel and plan before we attempt to get in. And night is coming.”

  VI

  The Return

  20

  They made a fire with wood they had loaded outside Opellius’s house. Nathaniel wandered off for a while and returned with the carcass of a large wild bird.

  “How did you hunt that?” Goldman asked.

  “Sticks,” Nathaniel answered.

  “Of course, right. Who doesn’t knock birds out of the sky by chucking sticks at them?”

  He looked at Nathaniel, who had begun preparing the bird for cooking.

  “You’re not in the mood for my humor?”

  “It’s fine,” Nathaniel said.

  They ate the bird in near silence, other than Goldman’s proclamation that it “tasted like chicken.” They drank from the containers of water the hive mind had provided. Nathaniel wondered about the life Opellius had set up for himself, and how the hive mind knew so much about so many things in the world that they could provide for the old man in such a fashion.

  He wondered a great many things, all of which tumbled over each other in his mind. Goldman’s words had registered in a way he hadn’t expected, but then, he hadn’t expected such a strong rebuke from the man either.

  Nathaniel took a bite of the bird and moved the meat slowly around in his mouth as he chewed and thought. Finally, he swallowed, washing it down with a swig of water.

  “Her name was Amara,” he said.

  Goldman jolted from the sound after nothing but the crackles and pops of the fire for such a long while. “Amara? She was your…what? Wife?”

  Nathaniel shook his head. “I was far too young for that, though I thought in time…maybe…”