Black Magic Page 9

  Perhaps there was more this ring could do. He pressed the ring against the bedpost.

  “Bakshokah shuey.”

  He closed his eyes and pushed. The ring passed through the bedpost like a knife through butter. He opened his eyes and it was linked to the bed’s frame.

  “Awesome.”

  He pulled it back through as slowly as he could. He closed his eyes again. His fingertips tingled as the ring moved through the bedpost. He could feel the atoms shuffle themselves and then realign. He stopped the ring halfway through and let go. It remained embedded in the bedpost. He grabbed it again and extracted it.

  “Wicked cool,” he whispered. This little trick had to be good for something.

  He got up and flipped the lock on his bedroom door. He pressed the ring against the wood at the base of the knob. He closed his eyes and pushed. The ring started to pass through the door. He stopped it midway. In his mind he saw the ring pass through the lock cylinder, filling the space between the tumblers. He let his control of that part weaken and it went solid. He twisted the ring to the right. The lock popped open.

  That opened his eyes to a world of possibilities. Suddenly nothing was off-limits. And the coolest off-limits item in the house was…

  Zach entered his parents’ bedroom and pulled a shoebox-sized gray metal lockbox from under their bed. A dust bunny rolled off the top. He put one ring against the lock cylinder and said the magic phrase. The ring phased into the cylinder and he gave it a nudge to the right. The lock clicked open. Zach extracted the ring.

  He flipped open the lid. Inside was his father’s pride and joy, a sleek black Beretta 9 mm pistol. Perforated cans littered the backyard where his dad had put the gun into service. Of course Zach wasn’t allowed to even touch the thing. Not until he was “a man” according to his father. Well, fourteen and able to diffuse solid matter seemed man enough.

  He picked the gun up from the lockbox. It was cold. And heavy. Cops in the movies swung these things around like they were weightless. He wrapped both hands around the grip and leveled the gun at a picture of some flowers on the wall. He lined the sights up on one petal.

  “Bam,” he said and jerked the gun back in mock recoil. Oh, yeah. The fun was just beginning.

  A car crunched up into the driveway outside the house. Zach dropped the pistol back into the lockbox, slammed the lid and slid it back under the bed. Now wasn’t the time to reveal the secret of his access. But soon, his father’s little friend would come in handy.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Paco had the power back. The list of crap he was going to make vanish was long and he needed to get to work before the energy ebbed away again.

  Ritalin was top of the list and he went straight to his mother’s bathroom. The evil little pills had cheated death once, but a second time was not going to happen. He set the bottle on the edge of the sink. One chant, one tap, and poof, no meds.

  The little flash and pop made him tingle. Inspiration hit and he went to the carport. Next to the lawnmower sat its red plastic gas can. Now if a bottle of pills made a flash, what would a can of gasoline do?

  Paco’s eyes lit up in excitement. Visions of red fireballs danced in his head. He grabbed the gas can. It was at least half full.

  “Jackpot.”

  He took the can around to the backyard and dropped it on one of the many sandy spots. He’d caught the house on fire once and wasn’t about to live through a beating like that again. This would be far enough away and no one was home in the neighborhood to witness the display. Perfect.

  Sunlight flickered off the can’s glossy red surface. The sides had a slight bulge from the pressure of the expanding fuel. Even better. He could not stop grinning.

  He pulled the wand from his pocket and snapped it around so the white tip faced away. He sat as far from the can as he could and put the tip to its surface.

  “Bakshokah korami.”

  He barely had the words out of his mouth when the can vanished in a flash of light. But this time there was a palpable rumble along the ground. An orange ball of flame blossomed from the center of the flash and moved outward in all directions. Heat washed over him in a brief, beautiful, searing wave.

  The flames evaporated and left a charred circle on the ground. An acrid smell of burnt gas and sulfur filled the air. The fine hairs on Paco’s arms were singed into black little coils. His skin felt thick and he wiped at his face. Soot covered his fingertips.

  In this perfect, glorious, wondrous moment, Paco lay back flat on the ground, stared up at the blue sky and laughed. And the laughter bounced back and forth within him and multiplied. What came out was a high-pitched uncontrolled cackle that any passerby would no doubt judge insane.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  “Barry!” Judy Leopold banged on her son’s bedroom door with her fist. She had on her Burger World uniform. It was a size too small but all they had was a large. “What are you doing in there?”

  Her commanding tone belied the fear that gripped her. What could he, a teenage boy, be doing for hours in there that she would want to find out about? Drugs. Sicko video games. Internet porn. Masturbation? God, if she walked in on him with his pants down, she would die of embarrassment before he did. But she needed to find out what went on in her house, even if she hated knowing it.

  Books rustled and drawers slammed within Barry’s room. She twisted the knob again in vain. Her face went flush with anger. Locked doors were forbidden in the house. She pounded again. The flabby skin on her arm swung like a pendulum with each pass.

  “Open this door now!”

  The door opened a crack. She shoved. Barry had already retreated in anticipation of the onslaught. He looked guilty as hell.

  “What are you doing in here?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Why did you lock the door?”

  “I don’t know…just some privacy, I guess.”

  “Well, you can have privacy when you are an adult on your own,” Judy said. “Sit down.”

  He parked himself on the bed. She marched over to his computer and punched up the browser history. The first piece of good news was that it wasn’t deleted. The second was that she recognized all the sites and they were porn-free.

  Something was still up in here. She rummaged through his desk drawers. No skin magazines, no drug paraphernalia. Oh, she’d been to the PTA meeting and knew just what to look for. The drawers were clean.

  She glanced at his dresser. A sock poked out of one drawer. Barry winced. Bull’s-eye. She yanked open the drawer. She pulled out a black silk disk.

  “What in the world?”

  “It’s just a hat,” Barry said. “A top hat.”

  Judy looked at it like it was from Mars. “Who are you now, Fred Astaire?”

  “It’s from the Magic Shop. A prop. Abracadabra, that kind of stuff.”

  Judy passed her hand into the hat. Barry’s eyes went wide. She popped the hat open and put her hand inside. When she pulled it out, Barry finally exhaled.

  “And this is what you were messing around with? You have to do that in secret?”

  “You have to practice to get good,” he said. “I’m not good yet.”

  This didn’t add up. “So you’re going to pull things out of a hat?”

  “It’ll look that way.”

  She tucked her short brown hair behind her ears and bored into him with her maternal truth detector. The reading wasn’t good.

  “Well, if you think I’m letting a rabbit live in the house, forget about it now.” She popped the hat closed and tossed it on his bed like a Frisbee. “Get your homework done before you mess around with that, Houdini.”

  She made an event out of leaving his bedroom door wide open against the springy doorstop and headed for her car. She had the night shift at Burger World. Her husband was out on his two-month stint on the oil rigs. Two jobs kept a roof over their heads, but did not leave the time to know what went on under the roof. The American Dream.

  That Magic
Shop gave her the willies, and it wasn’t just her. Several other church members thought something unholy was going on within its walls. Her husband was going to have to get to the bottom of it when he came home next month.

  Barry followed his mother’s departure from his room with a sigh of relief. He dreaded that she was going to take the hat with her when she left. If she’d known its power, she surely would have.

  As soon as he heard her pull out of the driveway, he popped the hat open and took a seat at his desk. He slid open his bedroom window a few inches. He draped a handkerchief over the hat. He held the gold coin in his left hand this time. The lining of his pants pockets dampened the warm thrum of power after the incantation, and Barry wanted to feel every bit of it.

  “Bakshokah apnoah.”

  The coin practically danced against his closed palm. The rush of exhilarating power coursed through him with every pump of his heart. It felt like sparks exploding inside his head. He reached in and pulled a tawny field mouse from the hat. It blinked its big black eyes at him and sniffed the air with a twitch of its whiskers. Barry stuck his hand out the window and dropped the mouse to the ground to follow the trails of its dozen brethren who had preceded it.

  Barry slumped back in his chair to savor the moment, the sweet afterglow of the rush of creation. He’d never experienced anything so…completing.

  This was the time of day he usually grabbed a snack, something nice and sugary in the snack cake family. His stomach called in a reminder, but his brain sent it to voicemail. The hat beckoned. One more trick. Just a little lizard. No effort at all.

  An hour later he’d set seven of them free.

  While Barry’s drama unfolded, Ricky made his cards do wonders. He had the house to himself as his father had Angela with him doing errands. He sat at the kitchen table and propelled the magic cards through the air and around the room with casual flips of his fingers. The gold coin hummed warm and happy in his pocket. The cards returned to the table and formed into the shape of a circle. A few cards slid to the center in the shape of a star.

  Ricky paused. The power, the pleasure, which thrummed through every muscle in his body, left him in a state of euphoric exhaustion. He gathered the cards in his hands and clutched them to his chest. Had he really let the Reverend’s paranoia worry him about accepting these? He rolled his head back against the top of the chair and sighed.

  From under his house, and three others in town, energy traced the water pipes of Citrus Glade. Not flashes and flickers like before, but steady streams as the boys peeled away magic from the world around them. It coursed over the network of pipes, coalesced in town, then ran hard and fast through the main line to the Apex sugar plant.

  Under the plant, the limestone cavern glowed half full.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The abandoned Apex plant moaned as the wind blew by, the kind of groaning noise an old man makes when he battles gravity to stand erect. Loose corrugated steel slapped the building’s side and the breeze whistled through the smattering of broken windows in the upper floors. Rats skittered within the walls in search of shelter.

  Lyle stood alone in the vast, vacant main processing room. Creditors had torn out all the salvageable equipment and left rough potholes in the concrete floor. Electrical power streamed to the tower outside to power cell phone transmissions, cable TV and the NSA’s search for terrorists, but the plant buildings weren’t connected. Instead, a set of twin torches lit the area in a figure eight of flickering yellow light.

  Lyle stood at the center of a five-pointed star within a circle spray painted on the floor, a cruder copy of the one in the back room of the Magic Shop. With the second circle complete, his teleportation spell could send him from the shop to here and back. And he was about to begin frequenting the plant far more often.

  Incense smoldered in conical tarnished bronze censers at each of that star’s points. But the smell wasn’t the sweet floral fragrance incense usually delivered. The aromatics of the censers smelled of char and seared fat, for the offerings Lyle made to tap into the great magic were dried entrails and organs. A rank haze filled the room.

  Lyle might not have needed so retro a setting for his incantations. But his master taught him sorcery this way two thousand years ago on the Mesopotamian floodplains. To pull in the magic power of nature, Lyle felt he had to be closer to it, without the insulation of technology. Perhaps the spells would still work using microwaved meat and halogen floodlights, but he was certain that it worked without.

  For this true start of his Grand Adventure, Lyle wore the Sacred Stole. Wide as one’s hand, it wrapped around the back of his neck and hung down across his chest in two parallel strips that ended just past his waist. The stole clinked with each of Lyle’s movements, for the vestment wasn’t made of cloth, but of bones, threaded with tendons dried centuries ago.

  Torchlight danced across the bones, polished by the handling of ten thousand rituals. The oldest bones at the top were of creatures long gone; the canines of great saber-toothed cats, molar chips of wooly mammoths, spiraled horns of beasts forgotten to man save in myths. Other, less exotic animals completed the stole’s center, adding their power to the sorcerer’s own. The tips of the stole were finished in tips themselves, a delicate fringe of human finger bones, the bones of the sorcerer master who sired Lyle’s entrance into the black arts. The master’s noble, involuntary sacrifice to add his whapna to the ancestral garment had bought Lyle his immortality.

  A cast-iron bookstand stood before Lyle and on it rested the thick tome of collected incantations, another posthumous donation from his former master. The parchment pages were open to the spell Lyle needed, one so infrequently used, and so specific in nature, that he did not have it memorized. Years had faded the thick, black-inked proto-Aramaic lettering to a washed-out gray.

  “Leshanoa, baklah devopah,” Lyle began.

  As he read the text aloud, the torchlight flared. It began to burn sideways instead of upward and then reset into a rising, counterclockwise swirl. The smoke from the censers puffed thicker and followed the torchlight’s lead.

  With each line of text he recited, the earth beneath him began to tremble. The great cavern below him, emptied of the water that created it, now hummed with the energy released by the magic in town. Lyle’s incantation focused these random flashes into a single, cohesive energy mass that began to mirror the counterclockwise rotation of the growing haze above Lyle’s head.

  He chanted in a slow, rhythmic fashion, focused on forming each word with perfection. So long ago, this was the language of millions, now only he understood it, he and the magic that surrounded the world. Certainly, he taught his four apprentices some phrases, but did they know each one of them chanted their own portion of darkness falls, darkness enlightens, darkness enriches, darkness frees? Hardly. But they understood the impact, felt the power, comprehended in some way that the door they opened went somewhere man should not go. That was plenty for them to know.

  The power churned below him and rose to a level demanding release. Right now, he was the path of least resistance to the rest of the world, a position he would never survive.

  “Seelak gorshna eridatu,” he said and stretched his hands toward the communications tower in the parking lot.

  The spinning, glowing mass below him sent a runner out to the tower. It bounced along a power cable conduit until it hit the tower’s base. Then it sent a surge up the superstructure like radiant blue creeping vines. They wrapped around the tower’s tip and bloomed like a flower in the sky. Threads of azure energy snapped and sparkled from the tower’s peak, the powerful byproduct of the apprentices’ magic.

  Inside the plant, the incense in the censers vaporized in a puff of black smoke and a flash of neon blue. The ground went still.

  “Let the games begin,” Lyle said.

  No one notices the fall of an avalanche’s first grain of sand.

  At Miami International, the barometric pressure had been on a slow, steady rise after
a weak front passed through and was at 30.55 inches. The forecast called for a continued increase as high pressure rolled in from the north. Instead, the needle paused, wavered, and nudged back to 30.54.

  Lyle’s Grand Adventure was on.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  It was the strangest thing.

  Big rectangles of mildewed concrete paved the old DPW parking area. Time had widened the expansion gaps between the slabs. The department’s few vehicles, the pickup, a street sweeper, a light-duty tractor and the long-idled garbage truck, each had their own parking space and that still left room galore within the chain-link fence.

  All summer, the lot had been a flat gray desert. But last week, weeds had sprouted along the expansion gap in the center of the lot. These unwanted volunteers hadn’t just poked their heads through the crack. Almost overnight, they shot up a half foot and kept growing. A few were palm fronds and several were budding pin oaks.

  The oddest thing was that the strip of green did not go straight across the lot. Two-thirds of the way through, it took a right angle along another expansion joint and headed west toward Memorial Park. The rest of the joints remained barren as desert dunes.

  Andy was used to spraying the lot once or twice a year in response to a few stray sprigs of green. But this profusion of plant life was unheard of. This Wednesday morning, he was giving it a double-strength shot of poison. That had to kill it.

  He sprayed around the tires of the dump truck, big tires that stood well past his waist. He did not like the feel of being next to them. The big wheels reminded him of the trucks he drove years ago in Afghanistan and the fewer memories he reviewed about that place the better.