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

"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 the 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.