The New Magic - The Revelation of Jonah McAllister

by Landon Wark

  "Can you just go back to being a good natured wall flower?" Carmen slumped back against the pillows.

  "Well, I think we should tell our supervisor about this," Jenny muttered. "How's that for being a wallflower?"

  "A bit much," Carmen said.

  "But we probably should," Clay agreed. "At least, we should tell Sandy. And let her tell the kid. 'Cause I ain't gonna tell him."

  Carmen tried to push herself even farther into the pillows and take whatever solace she could in the lack of migraines and nausea. The little relaxation that was allowed flowed into her fingertips and toes, dripping with the unease that came with Clay's reminder that she was still circling the drain, but now... with magic!

  "You two go ahead. Get everyone together. I... " she said slowly. "I want to lie here for a few more minutes."

  Jonah McAllister Socializes

  In the middle of writing notes in one of the famous blue notebooks, Jonah McAllister sat up and looked around him. The small cabin was quiet. Dreadfully so. A swift wind rustled the trees outside and clouds out the window foretold of a coming storm. But it was none of these things that caused him to look up from his note taking. It was the strange feeling in the pit of his stomach. At first unrecognizable, it gave itself voice in a rumbling sound that broke the quiet.

  He had put off eating for far too long. It had been since breakfast and his blood sugar had dropped to such a level that he was developing a hitherto unnoticed hypoglycemic headache.

  Jonah bit his lip and looked back down at the notebook. He had gone through all the food that he kept stored in the cabin and if he wanted to eat, outside was the only option. Someday soon he would be able to create his own, but not today.

  He looked down at the notebook, wondering if he would be able to remember where he left off when he came back.

  With a stroke of his pen he marked his place and got up to make the long journey towards the house.

  Jonah’s stomach rumbled grimly as he slammed the screen door shut behind him. The smell of food wafting through the mesh was enough to start his mouth watering. And made him forget that he was in the middle of a rare break in some important experimentation.

  The light of the refrigerator nearly blinded him as he swung it open. His face turned up into a grimace as he shuffled around leftovers covered in some kind of fungus he would have to go back to his biology 101 notes to identify. He quickly found the freshest plate and tossed it into a microwave that had mysteriously appeared on the counter since last time he had been in the house.

  Above the droning and rattling of the heating platter he could make out the sounds of people in one of the upstairs rooms. As the microwave beeped there was a roaring crescendo of laughter that caused him to raise an eyebrow. He rescued the pasta and grabbed a fork from out of the sink and commenced shovelling. The breeze blowing through the kitchen window cooled the food quickly and as he walked over to close it he caught sight of the orange sun sinking low over a rosy horizon. He paused in his shovelling for a moment to inhale the crisp evening air. The house was quiet for a calming, inspiring moment…

  And then another swell of noise from upstairs shattered it.

  Jonah put the plate and fork back in the sink and walked slowly up the stairway. He placed the sounds at one of the rooms at the end of the hall, the larger one that had been converted into a media room. Cable and DVDs only. He remembered the day the movers had brought in the equipment and, despite his objections, wired it up. He had had to hide several piles of money they had been storing in the room before they had arrived and kept a watchful eye on them for the entire two hours. Sandy might play fast and loose with the secrecy around here, but he had seen what that sort of lack of vigilance would get him.

  He brushed open the door to the large room, just enough to get a look inside. The laughter died down for a moment and he managed to catch hold of some of the words that were causing them.

  "If there's one thing I know, having lived in the South for so long, it's when someone is speaking in tongues. Well, that and when they're fake speaking in tongues." Paul’s voice was toned so low that at first he didn’t recognize it. "And if what we're doing here isn't speaking in tongues, and being heard, then I don't know what is."

  There were a couple of guffaws and he could hear the woman, Jenny, said something that sounded like an amen.

  "I think you're stretching things there, Paul," a second voice said.

  This was followed by a series of what might have boos or what might have been overly polite 'Welllllls'.

  "I don't know how you can look at an actual miracle and say 'I don't exactly know what's going on'. Trust your eyes. Trust your heart."

  "I can't. My heart is too... fallible," Clay replied. "And when Carmen gets here she'll tell you the same thing. It makes us too vulnerable to following crazy assholes."

  "Are you saying Jonah's a crazy asshole?" Sandy's voice challenged.

  "I've never been in the same room with him long enough to form an opinion," Clay replied.

  "I know this," Paul continued. "We need to figure out exactly what the source of these... miracles are. If we can do that... Think of what good proof of the divine would—"

  "I have to use the bathroom," Jenny's voice interrupted him.

  Jonah backed a step away. The darkness in the hall seemed to split in twain as Jenny Hernandez opened the door. The look of shock and embarrassment on her face was enough to tell him that he was never meant to intrude on what was happening inside.

  “Oh...” She was uncertain how much he had heard, that he could gather. “Jonah.”

  The room behind her fell quiet, as if the ghost of the departed had just walked in during the wake.

  “We were just...”

  “Yeah, I know,” he replied dourly.

  Each member of the congregated mass looked at each other nervously. Conversion was about as necessary as a candle on the surface of the sun. Paul's brow furrowed.

  “Jonah...” The older man looked forlorn. “I’m sorry but... I mean you have to admit... All the rest of us see miracles—”

  "Not all the rest of us," Clay muttered inaudibly.

  “You see what you want to see,” Jonah said sharply, any embarrassment at having walked in on the private gathering was driven away. “These are natural forces. They have predictable patterns and results.”

  “But you don’t know where they come from,” Paul stood his ground, though anyone could see the muscles in his legs tightening.

  Jonah swallowed and looked around at the assembly. “I... no.”

  “Uncle...” Sandy warned.

  “So they could have come from God.”

  Jonah shifted nervously, looking from one face to another. They were all expecting something from him.

  “It could be anything. It could be another universe with different rules intersecting with ours. It could be that the laws of physics are starting to wind down. I... I don’t have the—”

  “Evidence. We know,” Paul interjected. “So then it could be God.”

  "I'm warning you, Paul," Clay muttered. "That God is gonna get smaller."

  Jonah felt as if all the eyes in the world were upon him. He knew how to respond, but not whether he should respond. There were too many questions. Maybe he should just give up and…

  “At this point any theory is as good as any other,” he said. “Assumptions are dangerous.”

  From where she sat, next to the large television in the corner, Sandy glanced around at the others and then to Jonah. He looked as if he were about to break down and cry where he stood. She had never seen him like this before, but then again she had never seen him around this many people before.

  She thought back on the judging laughter of the women in the call centre and her heart twitched in her chest. A burst of sympathy for him welled up.

  “Who are you to tell him what’s going on?” she said. “How much time have you spent out in that shack trying to figure it out?”

  “Will he let
us try, is the question,” Clay asked, half wistful, half genuine.

  All eyes shifted back to Jonah as if they were watching a tennis match.

  “It’s for your safety,” he replied. “I’ve had some… accidents.”

  “Convenient,” Ezra grumbled.

  In the silence that followed, Clay said, "I mean, he's not wrong."

  Sandy stared around incredulously. "What is going on?"

  "It’s okay, Sandy," Jonah shuffled his feet back towards the hall. "I... I better get back to it. You can all believe whatever you want to believe."

  As he turned to beat a hasty retreat back to the tranquility of the cabin Jonah nearly barrelled over Carmen; rushing to inspect the standoff that was taking place in the room she had left minutes before. The syringe and the quarter sized plastic bag that she was in the process of stuffing into her pocket fell to the ground. The smooth cylinder skipped over to the wall while the yellowish mass stood out for the entire world to gaze at with their judgmental eyes.

  "What is that?" Jonah managed as he stumbled through a few words he was trying to get out.

  "I—" Carmen Carruthers looked as if the principal had just called her out on the first day of kindergarten.

  Despite his limited experience with such matters Jonah managed to infer exactly what the waxy yellowish substance was.

  "How did you get that in here?" he breathed.

  "I... well, um—"

  "She needs it, Jonah." Sandy tried to come to Carmen's defence. "For now. Until—"

  "Please tell me you didn't." Jonah took a half-step backwards toward the door.

  "Well, we—"

  "Tell me you didn't!" Jonah shouted.

  Everyone started.

  "Ohhhhhh. Shit," he muttered, his face turning a colour nearly identical to substance perched on the floor before Carmen. "Ohhhhhhh."

  Jonah stumbled back through the door. Even as Sandy tried to come after him, he was regaining his footing, rushing down the stairs. A word died on her lips as he burst through the door and was out into the night air once again. The silhouette of his thin figure marching down the path towards the cabin greeted her as Sandy managed to reach the bottom of the stairs.

  The door rocked on its hinges as he shoved it aside. Running his hand through his hair he marched an almost desperate pace along the floor of the cabin. He managed to hold off the worst of the old muttering habit that went along with his intermittent cursing.

  "Fuck. Fuck. Fuck!" He lashed out with a foot, sending his small waste basket flying across the room.

  The fact that he had forgotten to lock or even to close the door behind him grated over him as Sandy approached. For a moment he considered a hasty slamming of the door in her face, but found his legs were too weak to proceed and so he merely tried to wave her off. She ignored him.

  "This is bad, Sandy," he moaned slightly, head in his hands, supported by his elbows on the counter. "This is really bad."

  "We need her, Jonah," Sandy said cautiously as she put a hand on the green sofa along the window closest to the house. "Have you read some of the things she's written? Carmen half convinced me the Governor's a lizard person."

  "I—Are you okay?"

  "Yeah. Just a little light headed from running out here."

  "Do you know the kind of consequences that could come with us making goddamn heroin out here?" Jonah went back to pacing the floor. "That was heroin, right? I have no idea what heroin looks like."

  "Neither do I," Sandy replied. "We wanted the desperate people! Some of those people come with baggage, Jonah. If you try to convince a bunch of saints... you're probably going to have to put up with some more proselytizing."

  "I have to put up with that anyway," he grumbled. "One of them is making drugs, the other is trying to have us look for God."

  "Yeah, I didn't really think the analogy through," Sandy muttered. "I've seen Carmen go through withdrawal and it's not pretty. She's in pain."

  "I don't doubt it. I asked you to control the situation and..." She was right. He had asked her to find these people. But the amount of baggage coming with this particular lost soul—the stigmas and the guilt-by-association. His progress was a slow grind as it was.

  "It's just one more person for you to help," Sandy prodded.

  Jonah placed his hands on his bench and exhaled deeply. Things were starting to get out of hand. He was quickly losing control.

  "She's going to have to get in line."

  As she sat with the note-taking app of her phone open, a red error message informing her that anything she wrote would go unsynced, locked within the memory of the device, Carmen allowed the death grip she had on the normalcy of a recent fix to relax a little. She needed a little clarity and some memory.

  The experience of being directly in his path when the kid had freaked out was still fresh in her mind, but it was quickly being eroded by the crap flowing through her veins.

  It had been a powerful experience, if only because the kid, with all the power of the unknown, evoked an almost hysterical fear. Both in her and the others inside that room. None of them knew the full depths of what was going on in that shack next to the woods. In the aftermath of the scene she had glanced around the room, trying to gauge exactly what position everyone was taking on the matter. Clay had seemed more frustrated than anything, maybe hoping that something was actually going to come from the argument they had been having before she intruded. Ezra had been suspiciously silent and she guessed that he was trying to work the matter through. Paul and Jenny had seemed less willing to say anything, the former still worked up from his own rant and the latter just avoiding any conflict. There was an almost an air of incredulity with them

  Releasing a quick exhale she ran a finger over the screen of her phone.

  Afterwards, when they had all retreated to their rooms, all she had been left with was the knowledge that she had brought a terrible burden with her to the doorstep of this house. There might not be a whole lot she could do about that one burden, but there might be something she could do about another. She could convince them all to tow the line.

  You are not special...

  She left the ellipsis points for a moment, deleted them and then replaced them, tapping her fingers on the bedspread again. Was it better to state the point or let the reader's brain fill it in on their own?

  It was a good counterpoint to where she knew Paul was headed and she nodded in agreement with herself before adding:

  But you can learn.

  The words disappeared almost instantly and were replaced with:

  But if I can learn then so can you.

  Hemming and hawing for several moments Carmen decided to circle back to it later. Inspiration felt great when it flowed... magical even (if that was a word that held any metaphorical meaning anymore) but few people appreciated the sheer amount of hammering and wedging that was required sometimes after that flow dissolved.

  She thought back to the way they had discussed the matter at the fairgrounds and tried to dig up the motivations for why Clay and Paul were butting heads. As Jenny had articulated there was more... much more, and the kid holding it back was supremely frustrating. Carmen wanted to learn too, it was an exhilarating fount of possibilities. To think oneself chosen for this by a higher being and then to have someone, some... atheist, stand in the way.

  "You okay?" Clay's face appeared around her door frame.

  "Yup," she replied without looking up.

  Clayton was a good man, but overly worried about the feminine around him like any "good" man did. She couldn't fully understand if it was because she was a woman or because he was worried about her addiction... Or something else altogether. It was both annoying and endearing at the same time.

  "So... what do you think of that whole debacle?" he asked.

  "It wasn't entirely not my fault," she said without emotion. "But, if I could get by without doing the things I need to do, I would."

  "Yeah. Did you hear any of the row before you came
in? I don't know if we can get Paul to drop the—"

  "I'm kind of busy here," she cut him off. "Can we talk in the morning?"

  "Just wanted to bounce the opinion of you. I mean, I agree with him, but I'm not sure about forcing it on people like Paul and Jenny."

  "Forcing is always the wrong term," Carmen replied as her finger traced another sentence.

  Power requires learning. Learning requires growth. Growth requires admitting you don't know everything.

  "Alllll I need is a few days..." Her brain tried playing catch-up with her mouth as it devoted most of its resources to writing. "Annnnd forcing will no longer be necessary."

  Clay scoffed. "You think you can resolve all that in a few days?"

  "Bitch," she said, channelling some of the twitter conversations she had seen pop up around a couple of her articles, "I have at least three right wing terror incidents indirectly tied to my writing."

  She could hear Clay's brow furrowing. "So... that's a good thing?"

  Carmen's reply fell away as she scrawled over her phone's screen. After several moments, Clay grew frustrated and walked away, leaving her with the feeling of having finally accomplished something.

  The long night, the roll of the hours and the passing of the stars through the night sky was lost on Bill Hernandez as he moved like a ghost through the halls and rooms of the home he and his wife had once shared. Like a caged animal he paced around the confines of his self-imposed prison. Outside was too dangerous, with the fucking witches running wild. He felt the overpowering need to do something about it, to do anything that would get Jenny out of there, but that need was blunted by the inborn need for self-preservation. It was his goddamn duty as a husband, as a man to protect his wife... to protect his home.

  They had taken that responsibility from him.

  Jenny had taken his financial responsibility from him.

  And he had failed his son.

  He rubbed his black rimmed eyes in a futile attempt to force some sort of lucidity into his sleep deprived brain. A memory surfaced as it had been lately.

  We can take him to non-Catholic local place.