Fiction River: Fantasy Adrift (26 page)

Reese’s face was a blank mask. “Yes. Albus.”

“That’s it, Albus,” Mrs. Hawley said. “A sweet dog, that one.”

“Well,” Claudia said, trying to recover, “if you see another big white dog in the area, thank it for me. And thank you again.”

Reese didn’t say anything as she shouldered her pack and followed him out to his truck. Her breath misted in the air as she climbed in, dropped the pack at her feet. He turned up the heat, but it took a few minutes for the blowing air to shift from cold to warm, and by that time they were down the driveway.

The truck bumped along the lane. Why were trucks always louder than cars inside? She’d arrived in silence, and was leaving in sound, and while in many ways she preferred the silence, she didn’t like not hearing Reese’s voice.

If she were honest with herself, though, she didn’t feel much like talking, either. She didn’t want the time to end, not just yet.

They arrived at the station, parked in the tiny lot, which was mostly empty except for two other cars, one of which was half-covered with snow. The station itself was small, too, just a white clapboard building with a “witch’s hat” roof, steeply pointed but still covered with snow, and an additional covered waiting area with the same type of roof.

Claudia reached for the door handle, but stopped before she opened the door. Reese had shut off the truck but made no move to open his door, and even though he was just dropping her off and didn’t need to come with her, something stayed her hand. Intuition, again.

He finally spoke. “Tell me about the dog,” he said, looking at the slowly fogging windshield instead of her.

So she told him about being lost, and the dog coming out of the woods, and then leading her to the lodge before bounding off behind it. “Why?” she finished.

“Like Mrs. Hawley said, when I lived here as a kid, I had a White German Shepherd. One time I was walking home and the snow was so thick I lost my sense of direction, and he found me and led me home through the woods.” He finally turned and looked at her, blue eyes intent. “I’ve never told anyone that. Not even Mrs. Hawley.”

“Well,” Claudia said, feeling a curious sense of warmth, like something melting beneath her breastbone, “perhaps that means we’ve found the ghost after all. I believe, truly, that it was Albus who found me and led me to the lodge.”

A slow smile touched Reese’s lips. “I’d like to think that’s true. He had good instincts, Albus did.”

“Who knows,” Claudia said, “maybe he’s been doing it for years.”

“Or maybe he just helps people I’m supposed to meet.”

Claudia smiled, too, at that. “Well, isn’t that lucky for me. In a lot of ways.” Reluctantly, she added, “My train should be here any minute now.”

“Then let’s go,” Reese said.

She exited the truck, the cold briefly sucking the air out of her lungs. She supposed if she lived here all the time, she’d complain, but right now it felt exhilarating. She heaved her pack onto her shoulders, and Reese walked with her. They were the only ones there.

The snow began drifting down, fat, languid, dancing flakes.

Once they were on the wooden platform, he turned to her and said, “You know, I have some time off in January after I finish my current project. Maybe…I could visit you in LA?”

Claudia felt a warm flicker in her chest, like a growing flame. “I’d like that very much.”

In the distance came the faint whistle of a train, mournful and yet expectant, inviting her to another adventure. It reminded her that she loved to travel, even if she didn’t want to leave just yet.

Reese cradled her face in his hands, bent to kiss her again.

With the snow swirling around them, she felt as if they were in their own snow globe, the world existing only for the two of them, the moment locked in time.

And she knew she had a new holiday ritual, one she’d start in January this year.

She’d leave a candle burning in the window.

Introduction to “
The Magic Man”

We began this issue of
Fiction River
in a dark historical place, and end in an even darker one.

“The Magic Man” marks JC Andrijeski’s third appearance in
Fiction River
. It also marks her third genre, trading in mystery and literary science fiction for historical fantasy. Her novels are just as diverse. She writes a science fiction series called
The Slave Girl Chronicles
and a mixed genre series about a shape-shifting alien and a tough-girl PI from Seattle called
Gateshifter
. Her fantasy series,
Allie’s War
, will appeal to readers who like this story.

“The Magic Man” is set in a place that most fantasy stories fear to tread, making the fantastic real, and the real more vivid than any history book could.

The Magic Man

JC Andrijeski

It arose solely due to the fact that Master D’Alendria had a somewhat inquisitive and superstitious nature, that I came to be at the bedside of his new, young, French bride, Giselle D’Alendria, on the day she gave birth to what many termed in their minds as an abomination and a monstrosity.

The fact of my maleness did not come into account, no more than that of the magic man whom I assisted, even though Master D’Alendria himself had been banished from the birthing chambers for reasons of decency.

Certainly, the birth shocked all in the small township of Christo de Mar more than any had, perhaps since the town’s very inception, close to eighty years prior.

Master D’Alendria had requested the magic man be present.

Perhaps the master had even felt a primal sort of desperation at that point, unable to stand the sound of his wife’s screams in the heat of that afternoon, where the sun’s determination had been such that, even with every imported shutter locked in the small, upstairs room, the air still smelled of burnt sugar and blooming flowers, mixed in with the competing scents of blood and lye and burning candles and the sweat of all present.

The birthing room, despite its prettier trappings, evoked feelings in me reminiscent of the shed out back, where they hung dead animal carcasses.

The differences were relatively subtle to the naked eye, however.

The rose-colored rugs remained on the floors, the tarrow candles and brass oil lamps still decorated jungle-wood tables with their many-colored bits of glass in the shapes of flowers and birds tinting the light. The headboard to the giant bed itself, with its columns of dark grain polished to the texture of burnished metal hovered with the same, perfect solemnity around the previously white sheets, providing a tent-like structure for the tied up mosquito curtains and hanging velvet curtains at the wall’s end. The massive mirror opposite the bed itself still had those fancy etchings at the corners, small and hair-thin in parts, despite a few subtle speckles of blood that made their way to the lower half of the polished surface in the worst thrashings of the woman in her pain.

Candlelight threw the horror into abstraction, but perhaps my imagination is better than most. Or perhaps I can see more than I want, even when my eyes are closed, and that sight is more a curse than a blessing at such times.

That inborn sight has always been an issue for me, and one I have worked hard to hide. It was better all around that I remain invisible via my skin color and position in this most human of human worlds. I still had some hope to make it out of this deplorable condition of slavery before being found out as something not quite as I appeared, and hopefully with all of my senses and accouterments intact.

My role at that bedside was ambiguous at best—to myself, at least—and well apart from my maleness and other incongruities. I was small enough, physically, that is, that most of those others present scarcely seemed to remember I was there at all. So perhaps the nerves that rose in me came more from a kind of excited anticipation of all that might unfold, now that events had been fully placed in motion.

I had noted, well before this time, the propensity of the white men, the
Inglés,
in particular, to look past me when I happened to occupy a room. Of course, their wives would coo and fuss over me on occasion, and not only for the reasons they gave when asked—that my supposed father had been a house servant since long before my birth, which afforded me a pet-like status not given to all of the young slaves on the plantation, certainly not the males, even when I appeared to be in my teens and twenties.

Whatever the true reason, the white women felt they could spoil me with impunity under the guise of training me for a future role as a loyal house slave, like that undertaken by the African man who raised me.

Luckily for me, that role was one which a certain amount of contact with my betters might well explain, as well as the ability to converse with them pleasingly. I kept the bulk of my knowledge to myself, of course, but I let them know I could sound out some letters, that I knew snippets of the more formal cadences of their discourse, without ever letting them know the extent of it.

I had been told by my surrogate mother, also a slave and an African, as she teased me with a full-lipped smile, that I cast a spell on females of both species, in part from the intensity of color contained in my eyes—which were a kind of ‘tiger yellow,’ according to the white mistress, this same Giselle D’Alendria that now suffered in this very birthing room.

Both my surrogate mother and my white mistress described my eyes compelling to stare at, if only for their unusual tint.

The magic man perhaps singled me out for this very reason.

Well, I had thought that in the beginning, at least.

Ironically or not, I was fated to a life of magic, whether I chose to exert that same power over the females of the species or not. I could not stop people from seeing small hints of who I am, no matter how much I shuffle my feet and pretend to know nothing of what they speak.

It is inevitable, I suppose, that we all find people who see us.

Through no fault of my own, and over the vehement protests of my aforementioned surrogate father, I had been named assistant to the
Ndi-obeah, or
magic-man, less than a year prior. The magic man announced that his advancing age and the portents he’d read—likely in chicken innards and cast stones and other such highly stylized showmanships—required that he obtain a full-time apprentice with whom he could impart the greater part of his wisdom, so that the plantation would not be left without a traditional “doctor” when he died.

I was so named, although the naming did not please me, either.

Truly, it felt like a death sentence in some ways. Magic men, from what I knew, had a somewhat colorful legacy in the islands. Their notoriety did not make them immune to the noose any more than the next man, either, and likely marked them for it more often than most.

Whether the old magic man truly had some claim to the vision or it simply came of ill chance on my part, I could not be certain. I could only succumb to my fate, which he wisely announced publicly during a religious festival of the slaves and tolerated by Master D’Alendria—likely to brook no dissent from me, as he doubtless did not expect it from others. Well, apart from perhaps the “parents” who had taken care of me since I landed on these shores.

Even so, some part of me must have seen the rest of it coming.

Certainly, the naming felt more like an end to me than a beginning. Then again, as I now know, that timing was not at all coincidental to what later occurred, either...for the magic man had seen something in me, too.

Whatever of these thoughts made their way through my head on
this
day, however, already occurred too late.

Now, I could only witness.

Whatever pieces had been set in motion, it was too late to stop them.

The birthing room smelled of death to me, even before that unfortunate child came to be born. The metallic taste of blood lived at the back of my throat, along with the sick smell of burnt skin from the hot stones the magic man placed on the white mistress’s skin, trying to drive away the spirits that would try to take her in her birthing, and the child, too.

Despite the lavish trappings of the room, the flickering candles and the chanting of the magic man gave it an ominous feel, like nightmares I suffered after eating rich food from the table scraps of my betters...or the one time my African father filled a tin cup with French wine and fed it to me with a grin and a wink not to tell Mother.

I felt sick in that gloom, and uneasy with what would come after.

Things could unravel so quickly in this turbulent humanity.

The English doctor didn’t want the magic man there, either.

I heard the English doctor mutter under his breath, glaring at the tattooed and scarred magic man as he attempted to assist in the birth. The English doctor’s hard, blue-stone eyes shone out below a slightly-askew wig and the powder running down his cheeks in rivulets from the unrelenting heat and exertion from his attempts to save Master D’Alendria’s young bride.