Nolan leaned against the door and stared out his window. Basil had turned on the radio and they were listening to something slow and melancholy that he didn't recognize. It wrong, listening to such a song, on a day like that. It would have been more at home on gray, rainy September afternoon. But Basil seemed like he might being enjoying it so Nolan said nothing.
Nolan was not, as he would have expected, all that unnerved by the events of the day. Strange things had happened, sure, but once the initial shock of it all had worn off he found he was more curious than anything else. This concerned him. It didn't feel right to be taking it all so easily. He half worried that he might be in some kind of fugue that would eventually break, leaving him shaken and frightened, though it didn't seem likely. He supposed that he ought to be glad that he was taking everything on board so readily but it just felt too fast to be normal.
Basil put his thumb to the volume knob and turned the music low. He hadn't said anything since they'd left the apartment building. “So how are you feeling?”
“Like someone who's walked in on the middle of a movie.”
Basil let out a short laugh. “Yeah. That's the hard part, you can eventually get used to the weirdness of it all, but that feeling never really goes away.”
“Never?”
“Nope. And I think that's the part that really gets to some people. All that uncertainty. Going out into a world where you know, not just suspect but genuinely know, that there's no real way of telling what might happen next.”
Basil rubbed at the space behind his ear as he talked. There were several deep blue lines that ran down his neck from his ear and disappeared under the collar of his coat. Nolan had noticed them before and mistook them for veins but upon closer inspection, as Basil rubbed them, he saw them shift around beneath his skin.
“When it gets to be too much that's when most people snap. I've been fortunate not to have too many of those but I have had a few. It isn't pretty. There's not much that can be done for someone in that state except put them some place where they can't hurt themselves.”
Again Nolan pondered the ease with which he had accepted everything. It couldn't really be helped. He couldn't force himself to find things more difficult to deal with then he did. So he let it go. If he was going to snap then he would and there probably wasn't much he could do to stop it.
Nolan nodded. “So... magic is a thing then?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“Real, capital 'M', 'Magic'? Wizards, magic wands, the whole thing?”
Basil chuckled a little. “No, at least not like you mean. The term 'magic', it's kind of a catch-all for things that defy the conventional view of what is 'possible'.”
“You lost me.”
“Look at it like this: if you took a cellphone back in time a few hundred years and showed it the people there, what would they call it?”
“You mean before or after they burned you at the stake?”
“Exactly. They'd call it 'magic' or 'witchcraft' or whatever. But you and I know it's not. To us, here and now, it's science. You may not be able to explain exactly how a cellphone works but you do know there's a perfectly acceptable explanation behind it. So when I say 'magic' I'm referring to something that doesn't have such an acceptable explanation. Hell, most of the time I couldn't tell you why what I'm doing works, I just know that it does. The point is that there's really no such thing as 'magic', meaning there's no such thing as being able to defy the laws of reality, it's all just doing stuff that doesn't fit in with what we understand.”
“So when you say 'magic' you really just mean 'science that no one understands'.”
Basil shot Nolan with a finger gun. “Spot on. There are energies at work in the world that can be manipulated in ways that seem 'magical' but it's really no more so than flipping a switch and having the lights come on.”
“So what's the trick? What makes someone able to do that sort thing?”
“The trick to magic,” Basil said nonchalantly, as if instead of “magic” he’d said “poker” or “omelets”, “is that there isn’t any trick at all. Which is to say, some people have it and some people don't, but just about anyone can do it to some degree.”
Nolan looked at him skeptically. The idea seemed simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying.
“Let’s say you like to draw, right? You can study and practice and you might even get pretty good. But there’s always going to be those annoying bastards who will make your work look like shit without even trying, and usually without near as much practice. Some people just have it.”
Basil wheeled the car around a sharp corner without, Nolan suspected, bothering with the brakes at all. Nolan was becoming to accustomed to this and braced himself accordingly. Basil hardly seemed to notice and often seemed to hardly be watching the road at all.
“Now in my case,” he continued, “I come by my talents by virtue of not being entirely human and I even a few unique abilities that are fairly rare.”
Again Nolan felt that feeling of accepting something that should have thrown him. It wasn't even that much of a surprise. He'd noticed several physical abnormalities in Basil, like the blue lines behind his ear, and him not being completely human seemed as likely an explanation as anything. In fact, it somehow made the whole situation seem even more plausible.
“That’s what makes this game so difficult and dangerous. There’s no rhyme or reason to anything, in spite of how much effort people have put in trying to find some, so you never know what your going to come up against. There’s the usual stuff, the sorts of things you might read books about or find people teaching, but then all of a sudden you’ll run into some shit no one’s ever seen before. That’s when it gets interesting.”
Basil gave Nolan a sarcastically toothy grin and Nolan noticed, not for the first time, the faint glimmer of madness lurking quietly behind that expression. He didn't think Basil was crazy but he definitely had a reckless approach to things that was disquieting.
“If it's not too personal a question,” Nolan asked carefully, “um, what are you?”
Basil laughed hard. “Half human, half... something else.”
“You don't know?”
“Nope. My mother was human, I know that. As for my father, who can say? 'Unknown Extra-dimensional DNA', that's what my file says.”
“Your mother never told you who, or what, your father was?”
“I never knew my mother. She died before I was born.”
Nolan almost glossed over that last bit, strange as the conversation was, and it took him a second to process the idea.
“Wait, did you say 'before' you were born?”
Basil's hesitated for moment as if deciding whether or not to continue. They were coming into the downtown area of the city and he briefly turned his attention to the traffic around them. A shadow fell over his face as he contemplated what were clearly unpleasant thoughts.
“According to her medical records, my mother tried on no less than six separate occasions to abort her pregnancy with me. Every one failed. Equipment failures, strange power outages, once the attending physician had a heart attack in the middle of the procedure. Eventually, about six months along, she killed herself, almost certainly hoping to take me along with her. I was still alive when they found her, four hours later. So I think it's safe to say she had at least some idea of what she was carrying around inside her. But if she knew for certain who or what put it there, she never told anyone.”
Nolan tried to think of some response and came up empty. What does a person say to something like that?
Basil gave him a careless smile “I know it sounds pretty awful. I'll admit that when I first read the files I was in a bit of a state. What can you do? You either learn to live with your past or you let it drag you down.”
“And for the record,” Basil continued, “I am not the Anti-Christ.”
“Thanks for not making me ask,” replied Nolan, “though that does bring to mind another question...”
“All religions are bullshit,” Basil said flatly.
“All of them?”
“Every last one.”
“So you know for a fact that there's no God?”
“I didn't say that. I don't know if there's a God, though personally I don't see how there could be, but I do know that all organized religions are nonsense.”
“How can you be so sure though?”
“Because we've been at this for a very long time. The history of our organization goes back further than any currently practiced religion. In other words, we were there when they made this stuff up, so we know the actual origins of all their mythologies. Every major religion has its beginnings in various inter-dimensional phenomena that some bunch of nutballs in the past decided to turn into a way of life.”
“I suppose that makes sense, when you think about it.”
“Damn right it does.”
Basil pulled the car over to the curb and cut off the engine. They were in a part of downtown Nolan didn't recognize at all. The street was a single lane of cracked concrete with barely enough room for parking. All the buildings looked old. There were no businesses that he could see, no storefronts, just two rows of dull, brick structures separated by narrow alleys. A few pedestrians hustled along the sidewalks, clearly feeling no desire to linger in the area any longer than they had to.
“Q & A will have to put on hold for now. We're here.”
“Where is this? I thought I knew pretty much every street in the city but I'm sure I've never been down here before.”
“You wouldn't have. This is the sort of place you can't find unless you have specific business here.”
“You mean like that hidden door?”
“Sort of but not exactly. It's not hidden, you just don't notice it. You could drive past this street a dozen times and never realize that it was here.”
Basil led Nolan down an alley and around to the back of one of the buildings. The area behind the building was a small courtyard surround on all sides by a high, wooden fence. Discarded machines and rusting metal hulks created a precarious, waist high maze of jagged edges. Nolan felt like he needed a tetanus shot just looking at it. The narrow paths led up to the back of the building where a poorly constructed wooden staircase zigzagged up the wall and terminated in front of a black door.
“Follow me and touch nothing. The man we're going to see does not like people touching his things. To be honest he hates visitors in general, so try to keep quiet and follow my lead. And if he asks you a question, no matter what it is, under absolutely no circumstances should you answer it.”
“Why not?”
“Because this man is not the sort of person you want knowing anything about you. He is not a pleasant man and he is not nearly as harmless, or stupid, as he may appear. He is a reprehensible little scum bag and you should keep that in mind at all times.”
As Basil led Nolan through the crumbling labyrinth the stained curtains behind a clouded window overlooking the courtyard parted. From behind the curtains two beady, yellow eyes carefully tracked their progress.
No comments:
Post a Comment