No, this isn't the start of a new novel. I just cut my teeth on urban fantasy in the early days. Every once in a while, my imagination wants to take me back there. So, here's a chapter where I purge that urge for the next six months, and free up some RAM in my brain for other things. But, I kind of like it. So, I'm sharing. Enjoy! ~Eric
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“While there is life, there is hope,” said the gnarled, stopped figure sitting across from me in the diner booth. “Cicero said that.”
“Did he?” I asked.
I didn’t actually care. I asked because you’re supposed to ask things like that. It’s polite.
“Probably not,” admitted the old man. “Well, not that exactly.”
“I see.”
A lot of my conversations start with this kind of randomness. People aren’t sure what to say to me, so they blurt out whatever comes to mind. Most people talk about their jobs, or their kids, or their pets. Familiar, comforting subjects. One guy even spent fifteen minutes talking to me about stamp collecting of all things. Did you know that there’s a stamp from 1918 with an upside-down plane on it called the Inverted Jenny? I sure didn’t. Turns out that it’s stupidly rare. It’s also worth about two million bucks, give or take. Proof positive that value really is in the eye of the beholder, I guess. For pure randomness, though, an ancient Roman politician was probably the new high-water mark.
While I waited for the old man to decide he was ready to talk about more serious matters, I picked up my coffee and took a sip. I like diner mugs. The ceramic always has a nice heft to it. Although, those things needed to endure the gods alone knew how many washings. It only made sense that they’d make them sturdy. Diner coffee, on the other hand, tended to be hit or miss. This particular coffee was leaning hard into the miss category. It was too bitter and acidic. Very nearly guaranteed to give people heartburn. Probably Columbian, instead of arabica, I decided.
Another helping of sugar from the…I blanked out. What the hell were those things called? They couldn’t be called sugar pourers, could they? That just felt too on-the-nose. Shrugging it off, I added some sugar to my coffee, followed up by another tiny, single-serve creamer cup. The spoon made a slight clinking noise as it did little rotations inside the mug. Finally prepared to try again, I took a sip. My efforts had been in vain. Now the coffee just tasted bitter, acidic, and somehow too sweet.
Giving up on the coffee, I picked up a piece of toast and nibbled on it. Getting a meal wasn’t a normal part of these meetings, but it was late, and I’d already had a full day. More importantly, the yogurt I’d had for breakfast twelve or fifteen hours earlier wasn’t holding up well. Half of the scrambled eggs and all of the little sausage links were gone before the old man seemed to shake himself free from brooding thoughts.
“Do you believe in evil, Mr. Shaw?” he asked, his eyes fixing me with a penetrating stare.
“I see the news. Hard to not believe in it with all the terrible things people do to each other,” I answered, playing dumb.
It was obvious what he was getting at, but I needed him to say it.
“I don’t mean man’s inhumanity to man, Mr. Shaw. I mean literal evil. Nightmares given flesh. Things that go bump in the night before they steal away with someone’s soul. Curses and demons.”
Putting down the fork, I nodded.
I locked gazes with him and said, “I do.”
The old man closed his eyes and let out a shuddering breath. It was almost as though he’d thought that I wouldn’t believe him. That was strange. People don’t find me for the sort of mundane problems that the police or a good social services worker can manage. If those sorts of services could deal with their problems, people never even learned my name. By the time someone was sitting across from me, it was clear that they needed help of the more arcane variety. That was my specialty. Actually, no. It wasn’t my specialty. That suggested a level of skill that I don’t possess. I was just at the top of an exceedingly short list of people within about eight hundred miles who dealt with these things at all.
In the old days, magical problem solvers were fairly common. There were wise women, witches, hedge wizards, sorcerers, and alchemists. Odds were good that someone in one of those groups could fix your average supernatural trouble. Most of them were even community-minded enough not to overcharge. Poverty isn’t a new thing, after all. If you were backed into a corner, there were churches and holy knights. That was an act of true desperation, though. Their solutions to supernatural problems tended to lean hard on a scorched earth approach. They might fix the issue. But there was a good chance that you were going to end up fixed right out of being alive in the process.
The long march of inquisitions, the Enlightenment, and mass communication tools like television and the internet had very nearly brought about the extinction of all such problem solvers. Old wisdom has been lost, stamped out, or burned at the stake. Reason had displaced folklore and superstition to both society’s benefit and detriment. Then, distraction had displaced reason as humanity’s go-to drug of choice. It was much, much easier to simply ignore the inexplicable and go back to your video games. If you happened to find the supernatural online, most people chalked it up as AI fakery. Unfortunately, none of that encouraged people to learn about just what it was that went bump in the night.
These days, the people capable of handling those matters were few and far between. Usually, they were direct descendants of one of those witches, wizards, or alchemists. People who came from an unbroken tradition of knowledge being passed from parent to child. Of course, that meant that said ancestor had to have the means to survive all of things that could have killed them. Hence, you could usually find those descendants living on expansive, old-money estates on the coasts if you were in the US. They lived in actual castles and had titles in parts of Europe, or so I’ve heard. I’ve never been there to find out for myself.
And, then there was me. Magnus Shaw. No, that’s not a joke. My mother actually named me Magnus for reasons beyond understanding. That made for a charming elementary and high school experience, let me tell you. I’m the redheaded stepchild of the magical community for a few very important reasons. One, I was not brought up in one of those unbroken magical traditions. Two, I’m poor. Not worried about eviction poor, but not really in a position to buy a new car either. Three, and probably most importantly, I’m the jack of all magics. I know a little bit about a lot.
I like to think it makes me versatile, which it does. However, it’s a fact that my lack of depth makes me weaker in every area when you put me up against a specialist. Something they seem unwilling to forgive, but will always make a point to tell me. Fortunately, I don’t usually cross paths with them, and neither do people like the old man sitting across from me.
“Mr. Barnes,” I said. “Why don’t you tell me what’s troubling you?”
The old man reached out and grabbed his cane. It was a custom thing. He might well have made it himself. It looked more like a heavy branch with a burl for a handle than it did like a cane. He gripped the burl like he meant to draw strength from it. Maybe he even did in some subtle way. Not all magic is obvious or easy to see. If it was, well, there’d probably be a cable channel devoted to it. Not the Magic Channel, because that would make sense. No, since it’s cable, it’d have to be something not obvious, like The Knitting Channel. They’d have started doing reality TV shows about magic as a last-ditch ratings grab. Then, like a cancer growing, they’d have slowly replaced all the knitting with stuff like The Elemental Bounty Hunter and The Next Top Witch Model.
“It’s my granddaughter,” said the old man, his face twisting with pain. “I think she’s been cursed.”
“And why do you think that?”
“Because she got mixed up with some strange people a while back. I try not to judge. The world’s a different place now than it was when I was young. But these people were… I can’t explain it properly. They were just wrong. Now, all of sudden, my Emma is dying, and nobody can explain why. She’s been to every doctor, every specialist, even a psychologist. The only thing they know is that she’s dying.”
I drummed my fingers against my leg beneath the table. What he was describing was the kind of thing that happened to people who were cursed, but it was pretty circumstantial. People dying for reasons doctors couldn’t figure out wasn’t any newer than poverty. Sometimes, people just got sick. Something went wrong in their body and that flaw kept chipping away at their health until that body gave out. But, sometimes, it really was a curse. I hated these situations that could go either way, especially when they came to me secondhand. Just because his granddaughter hadn’t told him what was wrong, it didn’t mean that she didn’t know. Embarrassment can make people hide things. Worse, if I started poking around, I could end up giving false hope to someone who was dying of something perfectly mundane. That’s a sort of cruelty that I try to avoid whenever possible.
“You don’t believe me,” said Barnes, looking crestfallen.
“I believe that your granddaughter is sick. But sickness isn’t my area, as a rule, and not every sickness is a magical curse.”
“If it’s about the money—” started the old man as he reached for a pocket.
“It’s not,” I assured him. “It’s about not being sure what the best thing to do here is.”
“Please,” said Barnes, and I could almost feel him willing me to bend. “Please, just go and meet her. Maybe look around at her house for something that’s off. That’s all I’m asking. If you tell me there’s nothing to it, I’ll believe you.”
I hesitated. It wouldn’t be that hard to go and have a short conversation. Maybe peek at her backyard for a curse tablet or some other object of sympathetic magic. I could do enough to set the old man’s mind at ease, if nothing else. Not that any of it was particularly appealing. It would probably be best to just say no. Maybe the old man could read my face better than I expected, because he spoke before I could.
“She doesn’t have long. A few weeks, according to the doctors. I just need to know that I did everything I could.”
Well, fuck me, I thought. That’s practically a last request.
“Alright,” I said. “I’ll have chat with your granddaughter.”