The New Magic - The Revelation of Jonah McAllister Landon Wark (free e books to read .txt) 📖

to the car and was shuffling through a pile of bills some of which she handed to the driver with a couple of instructions too quiet to hear properly. The kid adjusted his hat and then leaned back into the car, starting the engine.

"Hey! Wait!" Clay called impotently as the small hatchback sped away down the dirt road.

"Shit," he muttered. "This is how I'm going to get axe murdered, isn't it?"

"Nah, you're gonna be oh-fucking-kay," the woman leaning on him said. "My fat friend says we're gonna learn some magic!"

"Maybe tomorrow. One of us is a little too out of it tonight." Sandy folded up the pile of bills and handed them to Clay. He stared at them for a moment.

"For your time," she said. "Isn't capitalism wonderful?"

"Yup. Axe murdered. Totally." Clay whispered as he started lugging the woman towards the manor house.

The Strange Case of the Conjoined Quarters

Impenetrable darkness surrounded him, keeping a distance of three feet as if it were as intimidated by him as he was by it. He shook his head and tried to remember if there was a way for him to drive the darkness back a little further, but he found his memories oddly inaccessible. Every once in a while a shape would brush through the small circle of dim light around him and he would recognize the edge of a hand or a shoulder or a foot. All were passing out of his vision in the same direction and when he turned toward that direction he could make out a lessening in the darkness. After a moment of thought he started to walk along with them, placing foot after leaden foot upon the greyish ground beneath him. The figures encroaching on his small circle of the world increased in frequency as they walked, never visible as complete people, more silhouettes with vague human shapes. And as he plodded along beside them he could make out current as they flowed slightly to the right.

Then, ahead, as the darkness broke into more of the dim grey he could make out a sloping of the ground, down into the well of what he imagined was the source of the light, a disk of illumination around a great black spot, an open maw in the fabric of the world. And as he stopped to gaze and marvel at it, the other shadowy figures around him trudged almost dutifully into the sloping well, circling down towards the disk and ultimately into the abyss that was its source.

He got as close as he dared to the edge of the slope without setting foot onto it for fear that a single step might start him off on an inescapable suicide course. The figures around him didn't seem to mind.

Almost on a whim he reached out a hand and tried to pull one of them away from the edge of the well. His fingers slipped through the shadowy flesh and whatever the creature was continued along on its trudge.

He called out to the ones around him, but they seemed not to hear, but in between his own words he could make out others. A single moment of searching and he fixed on the great black hole in the world. Within it there was sound. Pieces of sounds that, if he cocked his head exactly the right way, might be mistaken for speech. His brow furrowed and he stepped along the edge of the well, trying to get a look past the disk of light, but every way he turned all he could make out was black.

His vision managed to pierce the blackness and within... It was him.

Not quite him. A reflection he thought, but... It was not a reflection he could see, not a reflection of the light, more of a reflection of feeling. As he stood witness to the spiralling silhouettes making their way to the bottom of the well, he just knew. There was something in there.

Some sort of Jonah-thing.

And as Jonah McAllister, his mind clouded in the remnants of a dream that desperately clung to its own existence, looked upon it, it began to speak.

He awoke with a start, unsure of exactly where it was he found himself. For a moment he was in between that small apartment where he had nearly killed himself while going to university and the small single bed he had slept in as a child.

The screen door to his cabin slammed and he was cognizant that it was the opening of the door that had broken the sleep that had held him in its fragile thrall.

"Morning," Sandy was standing over his work table, holding a travel mug and a cluster of books. "Your textbooks were at the P.O. box when I swung by there."

As her gaze drifted to the cluster of loose sheets covering the bench in between some of the plants, their parts grafted securely together, he rose protectively, rushing over to gather them up.

Embarrassed that he had been doing little more than muttering things that might be words and writing down the sparse results he hurried the papers over to the sofa where he had been lying and shoved them under the mattress.

"It's been going slow?" Sandy placed the mug and books on the now barren table. "Maybe if you'd use the internet instead of drilling through these old tomes... that's the word we're gonna use, right?"

"No internet!" he snapped.

Jonah stretched out his hand and uttered a few syllables. The mug lifted from its resting place and drifted through the air towards his hand. It struck with a little more force than he intended, sloshing hot liquid out through the slit in the top and over his hand. He cursed, nearly dropping the mug onto the wooden floor.

"Yeah. It's going slow," he muttered in defeat. "We've got duplication of a few metals, a bit of fire