Hazardous Goods (Arcane Transport)

by John Mackie

  “She works for you.”

  “I know. I’m still trying to figure that out.”

  “Wait a second, what about that chick you were talking to yesterday? The cop?”

  Jesus, had he tapped my phone now?

  “Dibs on both of them.”

  “Wow. Kinky.” He smirked. “OK. Chances are you’re going to bomb out with at least one of them. Hedging your bets, huh?”

  He knew me too well.

  “Fair enough.” He peered over my shoulder. “Alright. Dibs it is. But I call dibs on Mrs. Jarvis.”

  I snorted, loud enough that a few heads turned in my direction, including my mother’s. Up shit creek again.

  I was the last to eat, and piled my plate high with a burger, chicken breast, spinach salad with bacon dressing, and a spoonful of pasta salad. Cradling the plate, utensils, napkin and an unopened but ice-cold Sleeman’s, I maneuvered my way down to the lower tier of the deck and balanced each item on top of the railing. I was mid-bite on the burger when my mother appeared at my side.

  “Please tell me you are not going to eat all of that.”

  “Mmfff.” I coughed, sending a fine spray of hamburger towards the Valley floodplain.

  “Close your mouth when you eat. Mon Dieu.”

  Ah. How I enjoy these tender moments with my mother.

  “Hey.”

  And Ted, too. Could it get any better?

  “Kara is a lovely girl.”

  “Hm.” Neither Ted nor I said anything, sensing danger looming over the horizon.

  “She works at your company?”

  “Yes. Dispatch and Reception.”

  “And Lamar?”

  “Jamar. Yup. He works part-time as a driver. Goes to U of T.”

  “These are very nice people. You had better treat them well.”

  Ted eyed me suspiciously over her shoulder, as if to say he would be watching me too.

  “And don’t think I can’t see you there.”

  “What?”

  “Every time I try to talk to your brother about anything serious, you...”

  Adopted. Or maybe I was a test-tube baby. That was it. Donated egg and sperm, a famous actress and her billionaire husband. Must be.

  The brief spat having petered out, the three of us admired the view in silence. Ted picked stray pasta noodles off my plate.

  “Nice spot, huh?”

  It was that. Clay’s lot was deep, and the two level cedar deck extended a third of the way to the back fence, a low driftwood affair that could not possibly be to local code. One advantage, though, was that the view was unobstructed.

  A gradual slope led down to the floodplain of the river. The slope was populated with a mixture of ash and maple, but I spotted the paper curled bark of a few birch interspersed here and there. The ground was undulating, fallen branches and leaves mixing with the natural undergrowth to form an organic quilt. The floodplain beyond was similar, but included a few big willows, fifty feet plus and a good yard wide at the trunk. Then came the river, the smooth surface broken here and there by ripples.

  “Hard to believe the natives hunted and fished along here, huh? From Lake Ontario to Georgian Bay. Then, in the 1800s, the good old white man bought the land, and set up a trading post at the mouth of the Credit. De-forested the whole region.”

  I stared at Ted, dumbfounded by the words coming from his mouth.

  “What? Not all TV is crap, you know. Anyways, looks like nature has battled back, huh?”

  It had, at that. The Valley was a restful calm in the midst of suburban rush – peaceful running water and banks of foliage.

  “Beautiful.”

  For once, I knew exactly what my mother meant.

  As we drank in our surroundings, we were gifted with a special moment. Maybe it was the peaceful spell that caused her to step out. Or maybe it was divine intervention. In any event, a white-tailed deer – a doe – peeked around the trunk of a tree, then trotted into view.

  My mother clutched my arm, but we watched on quietly. She was a beauty. Grey-brown coat with the distinctive white under the tail. She nosed through the undergrowth, foraging for just the right leaves or shoots and pausing to munch when she found something worth eating.

  We learn from very young that time is absolute. A day has twenty-four hours. You have a birthday once a year. No one lives forever. But at that moment, it was clear to me that time is relative. Those few seconds, maybe fifteen or twenty at most, they were the longest, most peaceful, most content seconds I had known in a long time.

  Then one of Clay’s guests clinked a glass on the back of a deck chair, and the moment was broken. The doe froze, eyes and ears on alert, legs crouched slightly to permit a quick getaway. A second later she sprung forward, towards us in one arcing leap, then completing a tight turn with quick strides to dart back into the brush.

  “Nice going, Jamar.” Several of the guests razzed him, while Willis punched him in the arm. Seemed others had shared the moment with us, though it had felt as though we were alone in the world.

  The three of us remained in place, content to be together as one family. It was a good reminder that magic is around us every day. We just needed to slow down, and look.

  CHAPTER 16

  Much as I would have been delighted to spend the entire day drinking beer on the back deck, it seemed events were conspiring to eliminate that possibility. A short while after everyone had finished brunch, Harper gathered the guests for a toast to Clay’s health. As the group dispersed, Harper took the opportunity to introduce me to Sol Irving, who I had never formally met, despite our many phone conversations.

  I had a vision of the Professor, borne of my own experiences in college. As it turned out, Sol looked more like a retired businessman then my image of a Religious Studies lecturer. His meticulous white moustache and beard stood out against his deep tan and bald forehead, giving the impression he spent his winters playing golf in the Caribbean. Age lines, but more from the sun than stress. He wore a buttoned down long-sleeve dress shirt in a black gingham check, simple olive chinos, and black penny loafers. He could have fit in at any restaurant in Palm Beach as easily as he did at Clay Jarvis’ place. Hard to believe he had a PhD in Theology from Yale, and taught such esoteric subjects as “Native Americans – Myth and Oral Histories”.

  Sol proved a fascinating guy to talk to, at least for a big-time geek like myself. He was also one of my few windows into the new world I was learning about.

  I suppose I have always been open to the idea of magic. Certainly after sitting through a quantum mechanics seminar in Physics 101, I remember thinking that it sounded like magic. After all, if reality itself is determined by our perception of it, how can anyone say what is possible or not? Then years later I saw a show on the Discovery Channel about a woman with synesthesia, whose neural wiring had been crossed at birth. When she heard a sound, she would also see a color. Others tasted certain flavors when they heard music.

  To my simple mind, synesthesia raised a whole host of questions. If the woman saw black when she heard bass, did that mean the “color” of bass was black? Were the rest of us simply unable to see it? Maybe if we could use this portion of the brain that none of us seem to access, then all things could be interpreted by all senses. Colors would have tones and tastes, textures would have smells. And if that was true, how could anyone truly say there was no such thing as magic? After all, what is magic but something unexplained? A TV remote would have seemed magical to Archimedes (as would TV, for that matter). That didn’t make it any less real.

  But believing something may be possible, and seeing it with your very own eyes are two completely different things. Believing the Maple Leafs will win the Stanley Cup again, and seeing it in real life... well, maybe that would be magic.

  In the past few weeks, I had come to believe that there was such a thing as magic. Having a fridge thrown at you by an elderly woman tends to put a different spin on your views of the world.

  Why these things
happened was still an open question in my mind. Whether or not science would ultimately explain all of the so-called supernatural, I had seen things happen which were real.

  So talking with Sol helped me understand how this new world operated.

  “When the average person thinks of the occult, they think ‘abracadabra’. Ritual magic with a wand and a magic phrase. Harry Potter. But that’s a massive oversimplification. Most of them read their horoscopes, that’s astrology. Some may have had their palms read – palmistry. Both are forms of divination, an attempt to divine, or discover, information using so-called ‘magic’.”

  I nodded, feeling like I should be sitting at a desk taking notes. We had spoken about the nature of the package Clay and I had picked up from Sun Consulting on the day of the robbery. The Sun folks had apparently opened up a bit about the stolen item, and revealed it was a pendulum with a special stand, that operated like a Ouija board. He thought it might be mounted over maps or photographs. That seemed to ring true with the snippets I had mined from Helen Findlay.

  “Beyond those you have alchemy — the old ‘lead into gold’. Voodoo. Try visiting a backwoods town in Louisiana and telling people there’s no such thing as magic. And countless other forms of worship, dating back to the earliest days of man. Shamanism, Wicca, even Satanism, the favorite of Hollywood producers and the authors of cheap horror stories.”

  “Hey, that’s my taste in reading that you’re putting down.”

  “Ha! Mine too, if the truth be told. My point is, we have lumped this vast collection of religions, beliefs, practices, habits, all of them into the ‘occult’. But there are as many variations in the occult world as there are outside it.”

  “What I don’t understand is why we don’t hear more about this. I mean, I had never heard of most of our clients before.”

  Sol scooped another shrimp, dipping it into the seafood sauce then wolfing it down. I loved shrimp, but the sauce was too heavy on the horseradish for my taste. I start sweating at the slightest hint of spicy. Love it, but it eats me alive from the inside out.

  “I can’t say for sure, but I see two obstacles. The first is mankind’s naïve perspective on the world. I would wager that the average person on the street believes we know everything there is to know about this planet of ours. But there are tens of thousands of new species discovered every year. There are still tribes of people living on this planet that have never been seen by a white man, or examined by modern scientists. For goodness sake, we haven’t even cured the common cold. So why we would believe we know all there is to know? It mystifies me. Second, you have to look to history. Society does not treat these people well. Man has always attacked that which is different. You don’t need to be Jewish, or Islamic, or black, or Native American, to recognize that. Tell me, you’ve heard of the Salem witch trials?”

  I nodded, crunching away on a carrot. Kara had ambled up during our conversation, and I had a tendency to become a health food fanatic around pretty ladies.

  “How about the trials in Bury St. Edmunds? Or the Basque?”

  I’m not sure I could even say what countries they were in. I shook my head.

  “Kara?”

  “I think I’ve heard something about the Basque.”

  “OK. How about witch hunts? Were you aware that the term ‘witch hunt’ originated with actual hunts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? Mob hysteria, lynching.”

  Made sense.

  “So, how many people do you think were killed during the witch hunts and trials?”

  This one I might be able to figure out. My interest in horror fiction was paying off.

  “Well, I seem to recall there were twenty witches killed in Salem.” The Professor nodded for me to continue, so I figured I was close enough. “So, assuming there were ten, even twenty towns worldwide where they held trials... that works out to about four hundred. Let’s be wacky and, I don’t know, quadruple it to take into account hunts and the like. Say, two thousand?” The number seemed big to me, a bit overblown. But I sensed the Professor had a big number in mind, and I didn’t want to insult his sensibilities.

  “Kara?”

  “That sounds about right. Maybe even a little high?”

  Sol sharked down another shrimp.

  “How about forty thousand?”

  Forty thousand? That’s a big number. Wait a second – forty thousand?

  “Seriously?”

  “Oh, academics will debate these things well past last call. Some will say the maximum is no more than ten thousand, others will tell you that it’s more like one hundred thousand. My feeling – an unsubstantiated guess, mind you – is that it is somewhere in between. So forty to fifty thousand.”

  That was a lot of people. Maybe not significant in the overall course of history. I knew that 20 million Russians had died in World War II, and just as many Chinese. Six million Jews had lost their lives. Those were horrible numbers, stark evidence of humanity’s inhumane nature. Hell, you didn’t need to be a combatant in a war, or even the innocent civilian of a nation at war to recognize that mankind was gifted when it came to killing one another. Rwanda, Darfur, the list went on.

  But forty thousand was still not a number to ignore. Cultures had gone to war for a hell of a lot less.

  “The fact is that witch hunts, the condemnation of occult practices and the persecution of practitioners, all have gone on since pre-Biblical times. Exodus 22:18 – ‘though shalt not suffer a witch to live.’ A lot of men, women and children have died because they were suspected of being witches, or having occult powers. Tens of thousands of people burned at the stake, stoned to death. The Witch Trials during the so-called Age of Reason. Heck, in 2011, a young woman and her mother were stoned to death for witchcraft in South Africa. 2011! And there are many other more recent examples. If you don’t believe in magic, these deaths are a travesty. If you do, it’s genocide. No, even in the best of times, practitioners have kept low profiles.”

  “But look at Arcane. Look at our business. We couldn’t stay in business if people weren’t interested in the occult. And it’s not just a handful of folks. We must be talking hundreds in the GTA alone.”

  “Yes, but look to the simple math. When the witch hunts took place, there was half a billion humans on this planet. If you were to assume that all of those people who were executed were practitioners, and you were to apply it to our world today, you would end up with a number in the hundreds of thousands. However we know that a significant number of the trials were politically or personally motivated. So cut it in half. You still end up with a number in the six figures. And that’s practitioners. I’m not including dabblers, or the simply curious.”

  I did the math in my head. Couldn’t help myself. Let’s face it, I was running a business here. So, just under six million in the GTA. Seven billion worldwide. Call it one in eleven hundred. So if there were one hundred thousand occult types worldwide, and maybe ten times as many who dabbled or were just plain curious, that worked out to more than 1,000 potential customers in the GTA.

  I was going to work out market share, but I noticed Kara and the Prof both looking at me in silence.

  “Sorry. Just trying to see how that compared to what I’ve seen so far.”

  “And?”

  “Sounds about right. Might even be low, if you assume even distribution globally.”

  “Well, that’s another interesting point.”

  After an hour of chatting with the Professor, I excused myself. My head was spinning with way too much information.

  Harper had said we had the run of the place, and a group was settled into the living room, two matching tan-colored sofas on either side of a sunken sitting area, with a pair of wicker chairs pulled up to accommodate the head count. My mother was fussing with a stack of cushions, moving them aside to give Clay more room to sit. I kept my head down, and stepped through the first door I saw. In front of me was a short flight of stairs leading to the basement.

  Small bedroom
to my right – looked like a guestroom. Washroom. Then a room that smelled of leather and appeared to contain a very large TV set.

  My kind of room.

  Turned out Clay had real nice taste in electronics. Sixty inch widescreen LCD set. Built-in sound system. Two rows of black leather theatre-style seating, with the works – built in consoles and drink-holders. Small bar in the corner. I wandered over to the bar, looking for nothing stiffer than a Coke. I found a Ginger Ale in the bar fridge. I was checking out some knick-knacks displayed in a glass cabinet on the wall behind the bar when a voice startled me out of my reverie.

  “So, what do you think of my little hidey hole?”

  Clay was looking better. He still walked with a cane, which made his trip down the stairs awkward. But his strength was improving, and his skin was no longer the dull shade of grey that had given me such concern in the hospital.

  “Very nice. Something to aspire to.”

  “Heh.” He shuffled over to one of the theatre seats and took a seat. “If you told me forty years ago that I was going to own a color TV, I would have laughed. Now I’ve got three, and every HDTV, HDMI watchamacallit going.”

  “Not bad.” I gestured to the cabinet and some of the keepsakes on display. “I like the salt and pepper shakers.”

  “Neat, eh?” The shakers were miniature Mason jars, one filled with salt, the other with pepper (go figure). Both bore the Arcane Transport logo, engraved on the side. “We did them up for our 10th anniversary, way back when. Sent a set out to all of our customers. I can dig up a pair for you, if you like. I’m sure we have extras floating around.”

  “That’d be great. Thanks.”

  “My pleasure. Take a closer look, if you want.”

  I opened the glass cabinet and lifted the shakers out. Pretty neat. Must be my geek nature, but I love quirky things like that. As I replaced them, I glanced at the other items in the cabinet. On the same shelf as the shakers, there were a few other items bearing the company logo. Mouse pad, keychain, sleeve of golf balls. The next shelf up was occupied by several photos – one showing the office staff, standing out front of reception. The other two showed Clay receiving business awards. I had seen similar photos at the office, along with the actual awards.