“How'd you do it, fuck ball?” said a voice behind him.
“Urgggghhh?” John tried to ask what was going on, but whoever was behind him was still making a slow but determined effort to put his head through the wall.
“You can do better than that,” said a second voice. “We'd at least like your answers to be in English.” There was some laughter as John was pulled away from the bulletin board, and then was slammed into it again before being allowed to fall to the ground. He looked up at two men dressed in suits, very nice suits, who were laughing at him in a way that reminded him of every high school bully that had ever been. John was scared, but unimpressed.
“Relax, Fuck ball.”
“We just want to ask you a few questions.”
John made a move to sit up and was promptly kicked back to the ground.
“How the fuck did you win so much money at so many different games?”
“I cheated?”
“We know that, Fuck ball. We just want to know how.”
“Magic.” John figured it was the truth, and there was no way they would believe it, so he may as well tell them. A bad idea with poor instant results when the one with the limited vocabulary kicked him in the balls.
“I don't have time for you or for this shit. If I ever see you in my casino again, I will kill you. Kill you slowly.” There was a long pause and through his pain John could hear a train in the distance. “You gotta pay taxes this time though.”
The less verbal of the goons opened the briefcase and pulled out a handful of bills, while the foul mouthed goon wrenched John’s arm till he gasped in pain. The other one shoved the handful of bills into John’s mouth till John choked on them. He could hear them laughing as they walked away with the briefcase and the approaching train slowly drowned their voices out.
John felt stupid and powerless.
Chapter 14
John dreaded showing up for work that Monday. He knew the bruises on his face were not going to go without comment by Owen. He expected some lecture about how abusing power was foolish or perhaps even about not being greedy—no matter the topic, he was not looking forward to it. So when he opened the door to the shop and Owen looked up from his ever present book by the register, he was shocked to see a slow smile spread across the old man’s face.
“What casino did you go to, kid?” Owen said, with a light chuckle.
“The one out in Aurora.”
“A good choice. How much did you win?”
“About forty five thousand.” John wanted to be proud but instead felt more like he had been caught masturbating by an elderly nun.
“Not bad.” Owen allowed a hint of approval to slip into his voice. “How much did you get to keep, though?”
“Including the two grand they tried to shove down my throat, I got away with about ten.”
“Ya hide the rest in your socks?”
“Yeah, most of it was in my underwear though. Good thing, too. It softened the kick to my nuts.”
Owen couldn't hold it in anymore and burst out laughing. He was happy John had survived, happy that he had shown some brains and gone out of town, but mostly he was happy to see he was taking it with a grain of salt. Owen had not known John long, but he saw enough to know life had not been good to the kid. John was strong; he just didn't know it yet.
Owen smiled and said; “When I was a kid, my father warned my brother and me against it. Told us flat out he would kick our asses if we did it. Then, when we called him for help from the train station, he told us he had done the same damn fool thing.” Owen put a bookmark between the pages of his book and got off his stool. “Its human nature and we gotta learn that there is a price for cheating or being too greedy. Lock the door, kid. I wanna show you something.”
“Yes, sir.”
Owen led John into the back room and unlocked the door that led to the upstairs apartments. John knew Owen lived there but had never been invited up before. He didn't know what to expect, though he figured it would stink of cigarettes and be filled with books. On those counts, he was not disappointed.
Every room had at least two bookcases, filled to overflowing, and in places there were stacks behind chairs and in corners. It was the most books John had ever seen outside a library. Textbooks on lost wax casting, chemistry, physics, and forensic science were mixed in with novels, biographies, and histories. It gave John a new respect for the knowledge and wisdom that Owen possessed. It did stink of cigarettes, but not as bad as he had expected. It was tidy, and there were no pictures of any sort and everything had a utilitarian feel about it. A few chairs, a simple reading desk, another small desk with a computer on it, but no TV anywhere in sight.
“You own a computer?” asked Owen, as he sat down in front of his and tapped a few keys, bringing the machine to life.
“No, I've been learning on the ones at the library.”
“Put it on the list of things you need right away. Without one, you are cut off from the modern world and you will always be caught by surprise. It's amazing what you can find just looking around different web sites.” Owen skillfully tapped keys and maneuvered the mouse till a graph showing a series of different lines appeared, each with sharply contrasting peaks and valleys. “This is my stock trading program. They are easy enough to set up and use. You won't be able to predict anything more than a day or so in advance, but most times that's all you need. You won't get rich overnight, but you won't attract a lot of attention either.” As Owen talked, John saw that he was going to be spending his ill-gotten gains on a computer sooner, rather than later.
“Is this how most mages make their money?”
“No. Some use their talents to become smugglers and others make counterfeit art or money. The list of ways to make money with magic is long and impressive, but most of them attract attention eventually. Either the money starts to pile up, or people get mad you are cutting into their cheese. Part of the reason each mage has their own region is to cut down on fights over money and turf.” Owen paused to rub the ever-present stubble on his chin. “The coin of the realm is not raw power, it’s money, and eventually it attracts attention, one way or another.
Chapter 15
There are times when we wake up and realize that our lives are so truly different from what they were a short time ago and so seriously different from what we ever expected them to be. We suddenly feel as if we have been catapulted into some random direction and are more shocked to find ourselves at ease in this new environment rather than lost and disorientated. This is where John found himself a month after his misadventure at the casino.
His daily tasks at the pawn shop had become a natural flow and habit. While Owen had not yet let him handle cash or deal with customers, it was clear that he was slowly grooming him to. That was fine in John’s mind because he wanted to take his time. He felt no rush or pressure to be a star employee. It was enough that he showed up on time, did as he was asked to, and knew when to keep his mouth shut. It was all extremely different from working at the call center, where there was a constant pressure for “performance improvement.” It was such a change that John didn't mind cleaning the toilets.
The daily lessons were another matter. Here, John felt not only a deadly seriousness about how much he had to learn but what was at risk. His experience with the thugs had taught him that the chain of cause and effect is long, subtle, and often brutal. So while he understood that the same pattern that lit a cigarette could set a building ablaze, at no point was one less dangerous than the other. He also learned a couple of other things about magic that shocked him and terrified him: he was good at it, and he enjoyed it.
When he learned a new pattern or successfully cast a complicated one, he not only felt a measure of pride in his newfound ability, but he felt connected. It was as if he had finally found his place or niche in life, but in a deeper sense that went beyond John's sense of himself. To him, it felt as if had become grounded with his family history and traditions and yet it also bound him to a
sense of a higher purpose. He, at last, felt as if he found something that he could do that would make a difference, not just in his life, but—if he was careful—for the world. It was a new and powerful feeling for John, one that he realized might have gone to his head except for one fact: he still had to clean the toilet at the shop every day.
It was this combination of a humbling experience, awe inspiring knowledge, and self discovery that had lead John to start keeping a journal. Not just of his daily experiences, but also of patterns he had learned and ideas he had about magic. He also kept track of his fruitless efforts to unlock the mysterious golden book that had started the whole adventure. John had no way of knowing what his efforts would produce and to him that was part of the fun of it, recording it all so that perhaps someday his distant grandchildren might read it as he had read the letter. He liked the idea. He shouldn't have.
Chapter 16
“Can I use magic to turn into a hawk? Or maybe a shark?”
“Why the hell would you want to turn into a shark?” Owen could see why a hawk was appealing but was truly offended by the shark idea. Something about it seemed too sinister.
“Sharks are bad ass. Nothing eats them. I could swim around, and nothing would mess with me.” John knew how childish the idea sounded, but he couldn't help himself.
“It doesn't matter because you can't shape shift or alter other living things.”
“Really? Why?”
“Again, no one knows. Look at my pattern and tell me what you see.”
John hardly had to think about it anymore and seldom got dizzy; he was truly getting used to it. While Owen would never tell him, he was impressed. John looked at Owen’s pattern. It was a mass of overlapping and shifting curves, spirals, and lines. There were threads leaping out of it and into it, like multicolored ghosts of their outside influences. In the center of it was a rotating angular light that flashed and changed color as it interacted with the patterns. It was all ordered and eternally moving.
“What’s that light near your heart? Your life force?”
“That light is associated with life, but it can sometimes be found on items that have been altered and locked. If you find one, be careful. It's likely to be old and dangerous.”
“Locked?” John thought of that troubling golden book.
“As in it can't be changed: it's fixed and locked. Someone may have once known how to do it, I'm sure of that. But, like so much else about magic, it was forgotten, destroyed, or never passed on.”
John paused and thought about what this meant and quickly saw it was another mixed blessing of this strange ability. He would never shape shift, and that was perhaps for the best, but there was another question . . . “What about healing people? Fixing their patterns?”
“No way I know of to do that.” Owen shifted on his stool and started patting his pockets in search of a pack of cigarettes. This was becoming another wandering question and answer session, and he felt the need to fortify himself for the long journey.
“I've been wondering . . . Was Jesus a mage?”
“I've wondered about that a lot, and I don't know. I think the important thing is that no matter what he was, he said a lot of smart things and tried to put people on a better path. Whether it worked out how he wanted is anybody’s guess.” Owen lit the most rumpled cigarette that John had ever seen.
“So what about God? Doesn't this mean there could be a mage who . . .”
“Take it easy, kid.” Owen flicked ashes into an ashtray. “If there is a God or not . . .”
“But . . .”
“As a mage, we work with patterns and connections. We have to see things differently, so try this on for size: Hydrogen is one of the most common and simple elements in the universe. It is mathematically consistent throughout the universe, no matter where you look. Hydrogen is hydrogen; there is no deviation in it. Consistency of that kind is not an accident.”
“So there is a God?”
“I don't know if there is or not, but I doubt he was a mage. We got limits, kid.
“I know it seems so powerful at first, so limitless.” John looked out the gated windows at the cars rushing past on the street outside. “Then, the more you learn, the more you see there are limits and costs.”
“The more you know, the more you can do. You'll see as you get older and learn. There is something about knowledge and experience that makes it easier. Everyone has a different limit to their ability. I don’t know how and why for sure. But, it seems the smarter and more knowledgeable a mage is, the more powerful they are. There has to be a limit somewhere, though.”
“Why?”
“Because some idiot would have already done something stupid like pull the moon out of orbit to impress a girl.” Owen's sense of human nature was best described as morbidly hopeful. He wanted the best in people and often saw it, but knew that if there was a poor choice to be made, some fool was gonna do it.
“It all starts to make sense and then it falls apart.”
“What do you mean?”
“We can easily enough set someone on fire or freeze them to death, but we can never heal someone? Mages posed as gods, and we see proof there is a real God in the patterns, but we are just as confused as everyone else . . .” John’s voice held a note of despair that Owen had not heard since the day he first met him.
“Kid, you're not seeing it right.” Owen understood all too well how he felt. “We don't know how to heal someone. That knowledge got lost. The sad fact is that it is easier to kill, destroy, and be an asshole than it is to create, heal, and do the right thing. The hard way is to get up and work for something. Magic . . .is the easy way out; it’s cheating. As for God . . . I don't know what to tell you.”
Owen stubbed out his cigarette before telling John to go home for the night. John cleaned up and put on his coat, his head spinning with the complexities of the universe. As he watched John leave, Owen considered many of those same complexities and wondered when he had stopped exploring them so fervently.
Chapter17
John's journal was fairly new and yet it was page after page of patterns—he couldn't bring himself to call them spells. He still felt there had to be a science behind it all, perhaps something at the quantum level, whatever that was. John was not stupid but there were times when he was painfully aware of his limited education and often felt like everyone knew something he didn't. He was self-aware enough, though, to see that this was part of the reason he had thrown himself into learning magic so hard and become so committed to it, despite his initial reservations.
He flipped through the pages of his journal: patterns for fire of various types, freezing objects, making things lighter or heavier, and his favorite, moving things from a distance. Whenever he pulled something across the room to himself, and caught it in mid air, he felt like a Jedi knight straight out of the movies. However, all those feelings collapsed when he opened the golden book and the enigma it represented.
When he looked at the pattern of it, things only got more confusing. The pattern when it was closed was simple and straightforward, unchanging, as if it were glued in place. He felt that this was set up to conceal the inside, a cover pasted in place. When he opened it, and looked at the patterns inside . . . . It was amazing, to say the least. There were six bright angular lights locked into a three dimensional cube, which in turn locked away large shadowy portions of patterns. The pattern of the lock was exposed, but it was difficult to decipher because it was so compressed. It was pressed into an almost impossibly flat and tiny space that altered only slightly when he put the key into the book. Everything about the book puzzled him and convinced him he was missing something. Even the writing on the pages themselves frustrated him. The words, or letters, looked like shapes, dots, lines, and sometimes almost like Latin or Greek letters. He had spent days at the library searching and wandering the internet looking for anything like them, only to end up with more questions.
The only thing about The Book—John was start
ing to even think of it in capital letters—that he had discovered he could understand was troubling to him. Thin golden threads were tied to the locking points on The Books pattern. They were very fine and hard to see, even by magical standards. He had found them through sheer persistence, and they left the pattern if and when the lock was opened or the pages exposed. The part that made John uneasy, and made him feel a deep sense of caution about looking closely at The Book was that they stretched out to the horizon, well past where he could see or follow. To whom or what was the question that made him hide the book in an unused air vent by his door, along with the key and the ring. John was much more careless with his journal and kept it next to his bed by his alarm clock.
Chapter 18
Jimmy didn't think of himself as a bad guy. He was though. He thought of himself as someone that people didn't like, and that made his life difficult. It was true. Few people liked Jimmy, but not for the reasons he imagined. He also just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time for most of his life. We can leave that up for debate. No matter how you cut it though, Jimmy was a felon—nothing glorious, mind you. He had been to jail for assault several times, as he had a habit of getting drunk and beating his sometimes girlfriend, frequently drug supplier. There were, of course, the things he did and never got caught for, but smiled about when no one was looking. The fact that he was on the run from charges relating to several young college girls who felt he had taken advantage of them with the aid of drugs and alcohol only added to his charm. It was also why he was in Chicago doing maintenance work for his uncle, off the books. He didn't think of himself as a bad guy, though—just unlucky.
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