All You Magicians, page 1
All You Magicians
Trent Jamieson
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2011 Trent Jamieson
All You Magicians
Table of Contents
Hardeen Reflects on the Dark Arts and his Wife
Tumble
Bounty
Persuasion
HARDEEN REFLECTS ON THE DARK ARTS AND HIS WIFE
Ten days after Hardeen's wife was in the ground, and he'd started selling the possessions that he could no longer bear to see around the house, the things that rang too deeply of her, he found a photo of them on their holiday at Hastings Beach when they'd rented a house for four whole weeks and he'd made love to her like they'd made love when then they'd first started dating, and this was a good decade and a half after that. There'd been much to regret by then, infidelities on both their parts, spells cast that had failed, spells cast that had been all too successful, and the craft being what it was those were often the worst. He put the photo down after such a brief perusal because it stung him, there she was, and there he was, both dressed for dinner and not a hint of death about them, though surely neither of them could have been so naïve to think, even then, that they would have forever.
He picked the photo up again, and found a dim pleasure in the pain, in the recollection, all those kisses, passionate, and stinging. He could see nothing that did not make him love her, and while he did not regret his presence in the photo, he resented the narcissism it revealed, that even in this moment, just two weeks from the last time he had ever spoken to his wife, or kissed her living flesh, feverish then all too swiftly cold, he still cringed at his own image, at the already thinning hair, the already widening belly, which he had done something about in his forties, but given up on in his fifties, focussing instead on his skills with the word and the way and the application of metaphors to reality.
He remembered driving back from his labours to her. He remembered her displeasure, at the worst of his castings, at his cruelties, so that in the end he had kept this aspect from her, where in all other parts of his life he had been totally honest.
He put down the photo and considered the mirror. Not liking what he saw, he gave up on reflection for the comfort of the fridge and another beer on the balcony.
The phone rang, twice, but by then he was too drunk to answer it.
Besides that's why you had a message bank. His wife had never liked answering the phone refused to do it when he was home, when he called her, he could sense her hesitation, it both frustrated and delighted him that someone so strong could have such a weakness, he could see her face, the creases, the tension that her muscles possessed in those eternal moments before she answered the phone, he knew that if he was ever going to find her, it would be then, in the pause between rings, and he wished that he did not possess all the power that he did, because he might find her then, it was possible, as much as it was wrong.
It had never seemed right that he should have such a great love, he who had yearned, who had ached, and regretted every lonely wank. And then it had become all about the power, and that was just a yearning too. They had met through a mutual friend, now long dead a victim of the internecine wars of the practitioners of dark and light, and the relationship had quickly escalated, physically and emotionally, and the first time they fucked he'd already known he was in love, in the dark, bound in their sweat, and he'd cried, so softly, so silently that he had thought he had gotten away with it without her noticing, but she had noticed.
She noticed everything in that way that people who love notice everything, even when they don't realise it, even if it is only expressed in the way they move or the sound of their breathing, which might come slow and deep or swift and harsh and her breathing had slowed, then quickened in those last hours, when he sat by her bed, as if he could call it her bed, her bed was here, not in that hospital, that bed was no-one's except perhaps death's because it had settled so many times there. He knew about death, he had sent it out, riding low over the hills, eating into the minds of his enemies, their children, he had blackened stars. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
But he couldn't save her from it, that was not where his skills lay, nor those of his allies, and he could not be made to change sides, not even for love, because he knew that way lay death as well, and he could cope with this grief, but he did not want to die, and he knew that she would not have wanted him to die, and it made him love her more, and him a little less, even though he realised that he could live with that, the deeper darker part of his brain, round which his heart was but an opaque shell, could deal with that.
His heart. He had given it to her.
Well.
Not literally. His heart was in a jar, in a chamber a thousand miles distant and deep beneath the earth. Safe. Well guarded, though not obviously so.
He cracked open another beer.
The phone rang, and once more, he imagined her hovering, haunted by (haunting) that ringing, by the possibility of talk, she hated small talk, though she made it appear effortless, she was loved by so many. But none had ever loved her more than him; none had ever been a better fit. He knew that, were he to live another thousand years -- and he just might, or even to the sun's ending, to the earth's engulfment or ejection, to the blackening of the sky the switching off of stars, click, click, click, like he had switched off the machines, once she was gone, they had let him do that, as though it was some prize some great gift, and he had let them, because maybe it was -- he would find no better fit.
That thought, and the beers drunk too swiftly, drove him to his feet, to the edge of the balcony where he swayed, making a small wet noise, a kind of racking sob. He would find no better fit.
He thought back, strayed back, his memory cast adrift, to his first dabbling in the dark arts. His first summoning of demons in the deserted streets of Logan, high on speed, when he could get it. He'd liked speed, but it took away his edge after a while, made him reckless, too swift to error. He'd lost a girlfriend that way.
That had been his first death, the first directly attributable to him. The demon had snatched her away, and three days later her body, well most of it, was found, bound up under the expressway. He'd never forgiven himself for that. He'd hunted the beast, three times round the world, once into that great dark in the sky, and there, in that dark, which he realised was as much himself as the beast which he fought, he tore the demon asunder with flame, and words of bleak undoing so dark that, on it's last breath, he had fallen from the sky again, and lain sobbing on the still cold shore of some place, not of this world, but close enough that he could enter it again at last when he had found the strength.
He had never done that for anyone else, not even his wife. But then, such rage wasn't about love. And oh, how he thought he'd loved her, and he had, as much as sixteen year old could, in that love that is merely a facsimile of love, because love is a lightning bolt and a lifetime, a layering of loves, and a fracturing, and he'd only known her four months.
Still he'd become a somewhat austere figure after that. More focused.
It was that almost responsible darkness that his wife had been drawn to, and, let's face it, he could be charming (he allowed himself a smile at that). They'd shared a love of Faulkner, and Salinger, both sorcerers in their own way. They understood the power of words, and what was the craft, but a forceful narrative, a lucid rendering of matter?
He had shut down stars with the force of his mind, he had battled his enemies in the dark and light places, tasted their fear and his own. That he had become so vast, so powerful in some ways and so compromised in others, did not surprise him, but it did irritate. She would have laughed. She had laughed, at his pomposity, his strict adherence to the rules of engagement in his war and craft. He was old school casting, even when he had been poor and hungry; he had always been old school.
You do not find the craft. It finds you, instructs you, is its own mentor. He had not lost the craft. Just her.
The phone rang again, and he regarded that space between the phone and him, he thought of her.
Now that she was gone he found he thought of her more often, and he realised that he had not thought of her nearly as often when she was still alive, even dying, he supposed that you did not think of air, or to breathe, until there was no air.
The phone rang its assigned rings then stopped.
He hurled the bottle into the dark, watched its arcing jettison of beer. It landed with a heavy thud in the grass, somewhere a dog barked, because of the beer or some other stimulus, he didn't know. It set them all off. He could silence them all in an instant, a click of the fingers. But that wasn't who he was.
He turned off the lights in the house let the urban dark contain him, the dim glow of the city. He had a clear view of it from the second storey, but here was all lawn, the spider-webbed branches of trees. It was nice enough place he supposed, but nothing truly remarkable.
This had been her home. She had stamped herself so thoroughly into every inch of it that he knew a lifetime would not be enough to remove that presence, just as he knew that he too was marked by her and permanently. He could no more remove her from him, then he could untangle the experiences that had made him who he was. To do so would make him something else. But would that be so bad. There was luminosity to that possibility, a purity born of its own symmetry.
He was a man of potency; still, he hadn't withered and died. He retained his vigour.
He was suddenly very thirsty.
The craft is transformative, and nothing more so tha
n the black arts. Love is transformative too. He had been a good husband. But that man was no longer required. They had never had children. He regretted that, a little. But children were a lottery, a parade of potential betrayals. He had seen it in subordinates – the senseless deaths, the poisonings, and daggers in the dark. The charm of children would have not held. She would have liked them.
They'd argued about this thing frequently, he had at one stage feared that she would leave him, but she had changed her mind. Perhaps realising it was too late.
He opened another beer.
The dogs were barking again.
This world, this damn world of marriages and brevity – nothing was fixed, not even the stars. That was the lure of the dark and of his craft. Power was ultimately about the quiet, the constant. Love was not, which is why it did not last.
He had loved, but he would not love again. That was it for him. Part of him was ruined by that. Part of him liberated. The balance, was just that, a balance, bound by rules as old as time, sacrosanct. But he didn't care any more.
He finished this beer.
The phone started ringing. He thought of her waiting.
The dogs were barking.
He snapped his fingers and the dogs stopped.
The phone kept on ringing. He hesitated. She was there waiting. So was madness.
He set his bottle down, and in the empty quiet. In the house with all its photos, its art procured by her, the books and diaries, he acknowledged that he remembered her, that he still loved her. He clicked his fingers and cut her from his mind, and they were just photos, and they were just books and objects to be scrutinised, but meaningless beyond their appearance.
Hardeen was happier then, only he didn't know why.
TUMBLE
i
"My Daniel's out there." Mother Beet crossed her stick-thin legs, lit a cigarillo, then offered me one. I shook my head, staring into the black hollows where her eyes should be. Black hollows that held my measure, nonetheless, and stared back. Tiny brown cockroaches nested in the right orbit. They bubbled and hissed, irritated by the smoke perhaps. "I can feel him, sure's the memory of spittin' the bastard, bloody and blind-eyed, out of me womb."
I sat, and her smoke-bound mutterings washed against me. Folk like that, their words are weighty. You listen and not without fear.
The plastic chair of her hospitality dug into my legs, and the cave's stale air closed round me, stung my failing eyes - the nubs of my cataracts burned. I'd seen too much, and this day lacked any assurance that such sights were done with me. I hungered for my city, grand old Wish, and that bone-cruel hunger cut deeper than any centuries-hardened chair.
Shaky and without my fix of Wish, I still managed a smile when she finished.
Mother Beet pursed her lips. "What the hell you think's funny?"
I shrugged.
She snorted and swatted, claw-like at my knees. "Got the cancer scares in ya? Frightened of this witch's ganga?"
A shudder ran through me, at the touch of her fingers against my knees, but I held her gaze. "Maybe I am. But then again, maybe I'm not."
"Mother Beet knows you are. Killed plenty of men, but you're scared of an old Lady. I know it, just like I know Daniel's still out there."
I bowed my head a little. "I'm respectful of the old ways. I know which Powers to fear, and my city's more miles from here than I care to think of. Here a man should be afraid."
"But not too much, eh? Too much can eat your heart. Like it swallowed my boy's," she said pointedly. "Mr. Grieve, Daniel ain't no man any more."
"We both know that."
ii
I drove the car down that winding mountain road, Mother Beet's laughter ringing still in my ears. "You better be careful, Mr. Grieve. Better be damn careful."
She hadn't laughed after that. Didn't scream, though. Most of them scream. She'd just stared, the cockroaches hissing, till the piss had run down her legs and her breath rattled in her throat.
I felt sick; my hands shook. I had never wanted to kill any of them. But I'd made my deals. Wish had me now. And I did what the grand metrop demanded.
Such a long way from the city, and the further from Wish the more terrible it grew: the shivers, the craving that's all burn and emptiness. There's ways of settling that hunger, or if not settling, then reducing it. All of them are worse — cost too much spiritually, physically. But I'd got what I'd come for — a piece of Daniel's caul. I could race back across the shattered land.
Every mile homeward was a salve to my ache and a whip stroke across my back.
My nose burned with the old woman's reek, and the smell of her death. Cloves and tar. Her lungs must be ash; her skin knitted together with spider webs and nicotine stains. That eye socket boiling with hissing cockroaches.
Hardly human herself, but her son. He scared me.
Daniel was a killer; all he was good at was wrapped in death and blood. But there were many like that, in city and out. I'd only gotten involved when he ate a nun's still beating heart in Gaskel. That kind of thing has too much power. Gets the city involved because Wish holds its power to itself jealously. Daniel had finished his tucker, then torched Gaskel's convent, burnt it to the ground, and shot anyone who tried to escape or help the screaming folk caught inside.
I drove up from Wish a week later, the devastation everywhere. Not just the buildings, but in the people's eyes.
Daniel had grown bored. Done with his killing, he'd just upped and left. Does a community no good to know they couldn't have done a thing to stop him. The Sheriff and one of his deputies were dead. The other, a thin, reliable man, if a trifle cowardly, told me what happened.
"Daniel took two bullets to the skull, Mr. Grieve. I put one there myself; he just shook them off and shot Sheriff James in the eye. I thought it was time to get distant then myself." He grimaced. "You know, not all folks are like you. Not all of us can face the bleak ones, and I'm all that's left of the law round here. I'll most probably be suckin' Death's teat 'fore the year's done."
I shrugged. "You did all right. You'd be sucking Death's teat right now if you'd done otherwise. Now stop that shit, I ain't your counsellor."
The erstwhile deputy, now sheriff, regarded me sourly. "My counsellor's dead. Half Gaskel's rotting in the ground. You gotta find him. Find him and kill him."
I nodded my head, distracted, and waved the sheriff away. My time here was done. Wish called, nay she screamed and howled, and I was set to answer it with my presence.
#
I am an addict, yes. But a peripatetic one. Suitcase and sweats. I could still travel, despite its agonies. Those that can leave the city find themselves its agents and guns. Better suited to anything else, I'd become a lawman, because Wish demanded it, and I hungered for her.
I'd scarred myself in all the right places, and to the right gods, and was afraid enough to dance with the right devils and to worship the appropriate Wrongs.
And I got by.
iii
Icabus picked his teeth and farted through the window at the clamouring city. His black corpse-eyes considered me from above a terrible grinning mouth. He pointed after the sun. "West is where you'll find him, past the shattered mountains, past the Heave." The demonkin's tiny hand shook. "Round Gunneda. Have you cartography?"
I took the caul back from him. "I know the area. I was raised out there."
Icabus shook his head. "Ha, I would have never taken you for a country boy. You stink of Wish, city addict."
"There are more things about me that you do not know than there are stars in the heavens," I said and blew smoke in the demonkin's face. For a moment Icabus wavered on the air, his existence grew all tenuous, then steadied as the smoke thinned.
Icabus glared at me. "Once, Mr. Grieve, long ago, before cities made addicts of folk, that would have been a considerable number of things, for there were indeed, many, many stars. Now but Seventy grace the sky. Makes horoscopes easier, though." He nodded heavenwards, squinted, and intoned, "He's gonna eat you up, because you're already weighted with Death. It's put a bend in your spine and painted shadows on your eyes. Those cataracts keep tumblin' and soon you'll be blind or washed up on Death's shore, and it's a bleak coast for the likes of you."
