The New Magic - The Revelation of Jonah McAllister

by Landon Wark

  He stumbled, stutter-stepping to keep himself upright. He wasn't drunk, of that she was certain. Bill had never touched a drop past his twenty-fourth year when his uncle had died of bowel cancer. But he was not right either. Not right in the head. He looked like he hadn't slept in the entire week she had been gone.

  "You're coming home," he managed with an exaggerated blink.

  Jenny looked up at Clay who was frowning. If the larger man's presence was doing anything to dissuade her husband, it didn't show in Bill's swaying manner.

  "You took my debt!" Bill shouted hoarsely. "That was my debt! My price to pay! My goddamn paternal responsibility! You had no right to throw your... witch money at it!"

  Ezra placed the pages he was holding on the grass and struggled to his feet.

  "We're going home and things are going back to the way they were!"

  "I'm not going anywhere." Even though he was still metres away Jenny made certain the lawnmower was directly between Bill and herself. "Bill, if you want to stay here, that's fine."

  "Um, sure," Clay interjected.

  "With the witches?" Bill shouted. "Did they ask you to sign your name in the book yet? Did you give them your soul?"

  "Maybe you should go home and get some sleep." Clay took a step around the lawnmower but Jenny grabbed his arm.

  "Don't."

  Clay had a few centimetres on Bill and likely outweighed him by a good deal, but he didn't look prepared for the insanity that she saw in her husband's eyes. Even if he was, there was no need for anyone to get hurt. Bill would get tired eventually and leave. He had to.

  But there he was taking another step.

  As the three of them carried the boxes of equipment out into the field Sandy felt a long drop of perspiration roll down the side of her cheek. The exertion was not so great, however the humidity in the air brought a heaviness to what should have been light work. The strain of trying to keep everything organized was also weighing down on her more than a little. Keeping up with the finances, settling the little tiffs that arose among the normally congenial house residents, parsing the upside-down letters and daggers and double daggers in Jonah's notes, it was all starting to get to her.

  She caught herself breathing a little heavier than usual and tried to make the conscious effort to calm whatever area of her brain was so worked up.

  As she glanced up at the ungodly array of spires she was walking towards she couldn't help but feel like she was gradually being drawn in to one of the pulp novels that had occupied her up until nearly a month prior.

  Each one was nearly ten feet high and reminded her vaguely of the power line towers that ran around the county. From one of the lower supports, drenched with more sweat than she was, hung the slender figure of Jonah McAllister.

  It seemed strange to see his pasty skin outside in the sun.

  "You got a delivery," she said to his questioning, arched eyebrow.

  "I asked you to bring it when it came." He motioned to Paul and Carmen beside her. "Alone."

  "It's all a little heavy for just one person," she replied.

  "You could make more than one trip."

  "Jesus," Carmen muttered, receiving an elbow from Paul. "We're not spies you know? It's not like this whole... contraption is exactly covert."

  The lanky man paused. "It's dangerous is all."

  Jonah took the box from Sandy and fumbled around with the packaging for a moment before, with a pair of words, a deep fissure ruptured the box. He pulled apart the wrapping, spilling styrofoam peanuts over the grass. His hand emerged from the box with a small metal rectangle that he walked over to one of the eerie looking antennae and plugged into some of the wiring.

  On an obsessive roll Jonah tore into the box that Paul had been holding, revealing the packaging of what looked like several heavy metal stands. As he set upon this new challenge Jonah rooted around in his pocket, producing what looked like a compact sports camera, the kind that internet extreme athletes might use to film a mediocre skateboarding session.

  "Couldn't you just use a phone?"

  "No," Jonah replied flatly as he began flipping through the pages of his notebook. Upon finding what he was looking for he inspected the metal rectangle he had pulled from the package.

  "What—" Sandy took in the reality of the ten-foot spires once again, with a little more apprehension. "What exactly are you doing?"

  "Measuring electrical flow," he replied from a distance as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

  As he took the final package from Carmen and connected it to the final spire Sandy was overcome with the desire to go back inside. The idea that a platform would rise out the ground bearing a monster with bolts in its neck bloomed with frightening vividness.

  "You may as well stay and watch."

  Carmen and Paul seemed all too eager. It had not been long since they had come in and they were still unaware of the potential dangers of tampering in the dark places in between miracles. Sandy had seen one or two of Jonah's experiments, but managed to keep her anxiety in check. She doubted she could move her bulk fast enough to get back to the house before Jonah began anyway.

  Proving her point, Jonah hefted the heavy shelving and began walking into the intersection of the three spires. Mid-step he paused and walked back to hand the blue notebook clenched in his teeth to her. She took it like she was being handed a beaker of acid.

  "You'd better hang on to this."

  Paul steadied the camera as Jonah's sweaty, lanky form walked a few paces in and dropped the shelving into place on the grass, climbing onto it with restrained enthusiasm. His hands dropped to his side and a string of quasi-words started coming from where he stood. A feeling began to creep over Sandy's skin, the sort of light feeling acquired from spending too much time in an office building.

  Jonah focused his attention, trying to concentrate on the precise pronunciation of each step. It was an ambitious procedure and without the crutch of one of his familiar notebooks to hold on to he fought to swallow against his dry throat. His mind kept quick pace with his mouth, feeding phoneme after phoneme down his neurons into his mouth.

  He clenched his fingers.

  The hair on his arm began to stand on end as he progressed. A point of repetition passed and he was back to the beginning of the procedure. He knew it would be best to stop, take the measurements, but he spotted Paul with the camera out of the corner of his eye. The smell of ozone hit him all at once and everything told him to stop, but the desire, the raw need to see what was just around the bend gripped him.

  BANG

  It was not the loudest crack of thunder he had ever heard. A rainy day on the farm of an uncle whose parentage he could not recall took that prize. This was more of a pop than a full fledged bang. But it was the most exhilarating. The burring of the bolt from the farthest spire into the trees drowned out the nearby gasps and shouts, but only for a moment.

  The knowledge that, despite his memories of his uncle's farm, it was plenty enough voltage to kill him, had he not been standing on the shelving and three observers if they had been standing a few metres closer flickered over him and he felt his legs start to buckle.

  Jonah exhaled after what seemed like forever as the others regained some of the composure they lost momentarily.

  "So," Carmen was the first to speak, "Kinda wasted a bit of money on those meters then."

  Ignoring the sentiment, Jonah walked to the nearest spire and pulled down the meter that he had placed only a minute before. He removed the wiring and began turning the device over, examining it. He tapped the side of it where a USB port glared up at him.

  He was so busy rummaging around in the packaging for instructions that he failed to notice the look on the faces of the others. While he worried that he had not been careful enough to avoid killing someone accidentally the others glanced around with the unvoiced concern: What happens if this kid wants to kill someone?

  Bill jumped, falling backward on his unsteady feet and scrambling over t
he gravel back towards where Jenny thought she could still make out the outline of the car. He looked around wildly, trying to figure out where in the sunny, virtually cloudless sky the thunder clap had come from.

  After the initial disorientation Ezra recovered the fastest, pointing a thick finger at where Bill was trying to regain his feet.

  "Oohhhh. You're in for it now, Bucko," he said with what Jenny would have called the swagger of a ranch hand. "The black mass is about to start. That's the demon lord himself knocking on the door."

  Jenny reached out a hand to wave him off. There was nothing to be gained by agitating Bill any further. But the damage was already done with her husband's feet scraping against the gravel and, with a single look back at her, carrying him back down the road in a pathetic display. His pace slackened and the staggering stutter-step returned as soon as he was far enough away from the house.

  "What the hell did you do that for?" Jenny turned on Ezra.

  "It got him out of here," the older man replied.

  He turned away and made his way for the corner of the house that led into the backyard where the pop had come from, stopping on his way to pick up the pages he had left under the tree.

  "I thought that's what you wanted."

  "I..." The explanation of what she did want died in her throat. Bill needed someone around, someone to help hold the weight of guilt, but she needed the same help and they were both so worn out that they were of no help to each other anymore. It might be better that he left, but having him out there, raising a stink with the town might prove dangerous to the house. Fortunately, from what she could tell, he had come up here alone... This time.

  "You're gonna have to do something about that sooner or later," Clay echoed her concerns as the sound of a car starting up echoed against the trees of the road.

  After the two of them stared at the gravel for several seconds, Clay started walking away from the lawn mower and towards where Ezra had disappeared.

  "All right, don't you want to see if the world's coming to an end?"

  A Quick Game of Cards

  Paul Kwon was just surrendering a game of solitaire at the kitchen island table when the large shape of Ezra Mansfield appeared around the corner. His thick hand grasped the chair across from Paul and pulled it out. Despite the relatively lukewarm atmosphere provided by the air conditioning in the house he wiped away long ribbons of sweat from his face and plunked himself down. The chair and floor squeaked in slight protest. He placed a small plastic bag on the table with a clunk.

  "Don't see too many kids your age playing solitaire," he said. "It's one of those things that must be becoming a lost art."

  Paul gathered up the cards, his nimble fingers scooping them into a reasonable pile.

  "My grandfather used to say, if you're ever lost you could sit down at a tree stump with a deck of cards and within five minutes some would show up and tell you to put your five on your six," Paul said. "I like that. And I find the modern world disorienting sometimes. Besides, no cell signal out here to play anything else by yourself."

  "Are you always preaching something?" Ezra cocked an eyebrow.

  "Umm. I like sharing the little nuggets of wisdom that people come up with," he replied. "Sorry if it sounds like preaching."

  "Don't worry about it. I guess I'm just the old cynic around here."

  Ezra reached into the plastic bag and pulled out a long cribbage board.

  "Can you handle an opponent?"

  Paul finished shuffling the cards, placed the deck between them and cut up a seven. Ezra cut a five and dealt slowly with his thick fingers.

  "The rest of us had a talk yesterday, up at the carnival grounds," Paul said after the first hand was counted. "Clay and Jenny think that the secrets the kid is keeping are not... healthy."

  Ezra frowned. "How do you know he's keeping secrets?"

  "You saw the lightning. And that's just what he's willing to bring out of that cabin."

  "Huhn. What do they want to do?"

  "Jenny wants to help people. Clay wants to bring in more people."

  "We definitely should not be doing that," Ezra pitched two cards into the crib. "The, um, economic shock would cause riots."

  "And giving that kind of power to people would be disastrous," Paul inserted. "At least, with some people."

  "Agreed." Ezra moved his peg ahead two holes. "What about you? What do you think?"

  Paul managed a three count while thinking of a response. "In the bible, God chooses worthy people to receive miracles. I'm not sure seeing everyday miracles is necessarily a good thing for everyone."

  "You think we are worthy?"

  Paul mused. "Well... It's kind of a circular argument, isn't it? We have miracles, therefore we must be worthy, but I have to admit that when I think of righteous people a twenty year old atheist hermit is not one of them."

  Ezra counted his hand and moved his peg twenty holes. "Maybe that's why you're here," he said.

  Paul frowned, moving his own peg a paltry six holes.

  "All flocks need a shepherd. Even sheep that have learned to bend the laws of nature."

  Running his fingers over his fading hair Paul scooped up the cards and began shuffling.

  "'For you should wage war with sound guidance—victory comes with many counsellors'," Ezra said.

  "Proverbs," Paul replied. "You think we're waging war?"

  "I think that with new power comes conflict. Especially with the amount of power that we saw yesterday afternoon. We're all going to have to rely on our own morality. And some of us could use some... girding of our morality."

  Paul spread the cards of his hand, selecting two from its ranks and tossing them on the table. He had shared living quarters with more than a few others during seminary, but he had never really felt much of a kinship with them. Those people had their own paths already laid out. But this place was a different story. These people needed something. Miracles were one thing, but they would need to be supported by righteous actions. Regardless of who provided them, miracles required God. Lightning bolts from the sky chief among them.

  "You might just be right, Ezra," Paul said, cautiously playing an ace.

  "Go," Ezra replied.

  Clay, Jenny and Carmen sat in a triangle on the bed in the latter's bedroom. In between them sat a crumple of plastic wrap containing a yellowish powder that Jenny was eyeing like it was a rattlesnake having a leisurely nap on the bedspread. Clay inhaled, carefully in case any of the powder somehow wafted off the plastic and slipped into his nose.

  "Can you both stop looking like we're about to sacrifice a baby?" Carmen said into the silence of the room.

  "Well, the implications are pretty big," Jenny replied.

  "I know about the implications."

  Clayton drummed his fingers on his knee. "Irregardless—"

  "Ugh," Carmen groaned.

  "This isn't going to solve the problem. It's a band aid at best. Your tolerance is going to keep growing and you're going to need more to get the same effect."

  "And having access to infinite amounts of temptation to use too much to recapture the old highs is going to be huge. Thanks, big guy, you've summarized the situation admirably."

  "Just making sure you appreciate the consequences.

  "Then why does it feel like you're holding something back?" Carmen asked.

  "It's just an idea. More of a 'what if' really. I need to know a lot more."

  "I'm thinking I... would really father not be here," Jenny said.

  "You're the best of us at the pronunciations," Clay replied. "We need to give this the best shot of working."

  As he looked over at where Jenny was nervously clutching at the folds of the bedspread Clay thought that she might bolt from the room at any moment. She tucked some loose hair behind her ear and exhaled slowly. Having next to no experience with the world of underground narcotics himself the whole thing rebelled against the sensibilities that had (perhaps unknowingly) been pounded into him by his father.r />
  You better not come back from that school a junkie! Whether or not he had said that while sucking on a cigarette, Clay couldn't remember.

  What he could remember was that junkies were perhaps the worst people that existed, worse even than Commie Millennials. He had learned a little empathy in his time away from home, or at least that he should feel empathy, but the thoughts that an addict was ultimately a shitty person was never far from the surface, that they could get well if they just smartened up. But Carmen was smart. She wasn't a bad person. It... it just all came down to how vulnerable your chemistry was, he decided.

  "You know, I kind of thought, when I first came up here, that I was going to end up selling drugs," Jenny said nervously.

  "I was more of a 'shaved head, harvesting pinto beans'." Clay replied. "Possibly axe murdered... At first."

  "I don't know what you two are talking about." Carmen smiled weakly. "Everything about this place screamed: Twenty-somethings learning actual magic."

  And it was swam in her veins. It was not pleasant, but it was not horrible. At first she thought she felt an itch working its way up from the puncture site, but dismissed it as psychosomatic. After a few seconds she was far more concerned that the two of them had seen the collapsed black and blue veins running up and down her arms. She pulled the bedspread up and over her lower body so that only above her shoulders were visible as the shadow that had once been a bliss settled over her. It had been a bliss, now it was just shame. Shame and a knowledge that she had put off the inevitable one more time.

  After a few moments she was aware that Clay and Jenny were staring at her.

  "Sorry you had to watch that." She slurred the first part of the sentence a little. Maybe there was a little bit left of the old euphoria in her still.

  "Better than if we hadn't," Clay said.

  "Thanks for letting me be your lab rat."

  "So, do you always attack the people who want to give you some help rather than admit you need it?"

  "I..."

  "Fair question," Jenny chimed in.