The 13th Mage (15 page)

“Mom, I don’t think Sean was Owen’s brother after all,” Jennifer said reaching into her backpack for the folder, “unless this is one of those cases of swapped babies at birth.”

Her mother read the folder’s content with interest.

“There’s an address here, why don’t you write?”

“And say what? Dear Mr. O’Neil, you don’t know me but I am your nonexistent grandson’s girlfriend and I just had his baby, your great-
granddaughter, if you see him, could you please tell him to come back to me?”

“Jennifer, please.”

“Sorry mom, sorry.
It’s just that I can sense something terrible is happening, or has happened to Sean or to Owen, or to both of them, and I don’t know what to do.
It’s as though all this is a kind of front, a pretend situation to keep us happy and quiet.”

Esther was very worried.
Her fears were coming true.
Jennifer was definitely losing her mind.

“I am not losing my mind mom, this is strange, but I can sense something is not right.”

“There was always a psychic streak in our family dear, remember what I told you about the night your nana
died while I was here in England, I saw your late granddad light as day, standing there at the end of my bed, your mother’s died, he said, don’t worry, everything is okay, and he vanished.
I turned round and told your dad that my mother had just passed away.
The next day I got a phone call giving me the news.”

Jennifer poured the tea, “I have to find them mom, I am taking that money Mr. Johnson offered and I am going to find them.”

“
Brazil
?”

“It’s a start.”

“Just because you are a mother now doesn’t mean you can go gallivanting around the world on your own, without my permission.”

“Of course it does mom.”

A tremor shook the city, followed by several others.

Somewhere Owen’s body shook violently.

But no one could see him.

Heather started crying.

A black cloud covered the sun, the rainbows disappeared.

“Did you feel that?” Asked Jennifer, she looked around to see if anything had fallen.

“There is a cold draft coming in from somewhere, I’ll go and close the windows, I think there’s a storm on the way, you go and see to Heather,” Esther answered.

It wasn’t what Jennifer was referring to, but her mother was right, there seemed to be a storm on the way, the air was thick with it.
She wasn’t one for omens but the way she had felt something dark and powerful fly over the house had made the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. M
aybe she shouldn’t go to
Brazil
. M
aybe she should just go back to Skerries and forget all about the O’Neil
s
.

She went for Heather and found the baby girl wrapped up in the pink shawl Owen had sent her.
She had quieted down. Jennifer picked her up and asked her what was wrong.

Being able to understand her baby was something that had also taken Jennifer by surprise, but she put it down to female intuition.
She remembered quite clearly that when she was a baby she was able to speak perfectly but no adults could understand her, only a little girl down the road could.
She couldn’t remember how old she was herself, but she must have been very young.
The other girl would come over sometimes and act as translator for her.

The dark thing had scared Heather too, “don’t be frightened my love, mommy’s here,” she said hugging Heather close to her.

“Right, all done,” her mother said coming into the room.

Somewhere in the house a glass shattered and a door opened.

“What was that,” Jennifer whispered.

“I think it might be robbers, call the police,” Esther said reaching for the phone, it was disconnected.

“My mobile is in my bag,” said Jennifer, but realized her backpack was in the kitchen. “Right,” she said and stood up straight, “you take Heather and lock the door behind me, and I’ll go and see who it is.”

“No! Don’t go out there, lets lock the door and wait here until they leave, confronting robbers is the fastest way to get you killed or raped there is,” saying this Esther locked the bedroom door and put the key in her pocket.

They sat, waited, listened for the smallest of noises.

Three hours later Jennifer left the room carrying the large candleholder she had brought down from the attic, never thinking it would serve as a weapon.

She checked the service door then worked her way up the stairs to the hall, checking every room in turn, mobile in hand, trying to get through to the police.

She came to the study door and found it open, “Owen!” she shouted and ran in.
There was no one there.
She turned around quickly thinking there was someone behind her, but there was no one there either.

By the time the police arrived the women had checked every door and window, there were no signs of a break-in, no broken glass,
Jennifer explained that the study had been left locked by her employer when he left several months earlier and that there was no key that she knew of in the house that could open it.

They took their statements, told them they did the right thing, and to change the locks on both access doors as soon as possible.
Someone had obviously come in thinking the house was empty and
heard them, leaving the premises immediately.
They would be checking with the cleaning firm and solicitors to make sure all keys were accounted for.

“It’s a good explanation, the only explanation,” said Esther when the police left, “we’ll put chairs against the doorknobs tonight, to make sure they don’t come back and we’ll call the locksmith in the morning.”

That night Jennifer found sleep impossible, Owen’s study door had opened all on it
s own. There was no reason why
she could
not go in there now. It wasn't as if she had opened the door. S
he could search for clues.
It was in the early hours that she finally decided to search the study.
She went in quietly, carrying Heather in her carrycot with her, that way she would be able to feed her if she woke up, and her mother wouldn’t find out what she was up to.
She f
elt nervous about the intrusion. S
he
was so used to staying out of the office
that going in seemed like she was breaking Owen’s trust.
It took her a few minutes before she got up the courage to switch on the light.
The study reminded Jennifer of Owen, all new looking but radiating oldness and experience.

He had it well organized, one corner filled with computers and gadgets, some of which she had never even heard of.
Two walls were covered in bookshelves, most of the volumes in languages she couldn’t work out.
In the middle of the room a couch which looked a couple of centuries old.
There was also a
large desk,
some
shelves with all sorts of strange artifacts and a half finished plate of food growing an interesting variety of fauna.

She tried the computers but they were all password protected.

“Hmmm,” she thought and typed ‘mage’ then ‘MAGE’, then ‘witch’, ‘WITCH’.

Try Jennifer
, she thought,
no way, that’s not it
, she replied
to
herself.

After half an hour she switched off the computers and started on the books, the draws, the shelves, the top of the furniture,
and
everywhere
else
.

She’d left Heather’s carrycot on the desk and reached over to move it to the sofa when she noticed Heather was suckling on a small, black notebook.

“No, dirty,” Jennifer said taking the notebook off the baby’s hands and replacing it with a dummy, “play with that.”

The notebook was well worn. It
was
filled with strange characters and what appeared to be
words made out of
a mixture of
hieroglyphics, numbers and letters.

“Coded,” she thought, and put it down beside her.

You can read it.
She thought very loudly to herself, taking herself quite by surprise.

“Dear God, I am hearing voices now,” she said and picked up the notebook again.
She opened it slowly, but the soup of characters looked the same as before.
She stared very hard, word by word, slowly.

Staff
must be in 4taf
skffiwnd

She looked closer at the jumbled letters. They seemed to move. She
flicked a few more pages.

Shawl, baby, rebirth?

She read through the night, occasionally having to stop to feed Heather or change her nappy.
It was like a huge puzzle.
They seemed to be notes about finding something called The
Staff
, about a pink shawl, about
Spain
.
The last few pages contained her name, Heather’s and Sean’s followed by a few pages of abduction and hybrid data.

Aliens?

Jennife
r put the notebook down smiling.
Owen knew about Heather, he had written about her in his notebook.

Her heart sank, she was so silly, for hours now she had been reading the notebook like it was some sort of real life quest Owen was following, and now she realized it was no more than shorthand for a novel.

Aliens, hybrids, jumping dimensions, Owen was a writer after all, she decided.
And he had planned putting her and Sean in his novel as well as their baby.

Sean abducted by aliens, what an imagination Owen had.
He had obviously been reading too much of “Strange Happenings”.

She took the carrycot with baby and went to bed.

She slept through the next morning, Esther took care of the baby and changed their tickets for the weekend, her plan was that a few days in the house would make Jennifer see how well they could all live there together, a week away from the shop wouldn’t hurt, not at this time of year, besides the fact that the small pension Owen had left for Jennifer was more than the shop turned over in a month.

Jennifer wasn’t too pleased about the change of plans but could see her mother’s point of view, why live in a small townhouse struggling for every penny when they could live in a huge house in one of the most beautiful parts of
London
and be paid a regular income for the trouble?

She took Heather for her afternoon walk, there was a small square nearby where she used to go and sit whilst pregnant.
She stopped in the kiosk for “Strange Happenings” first and was shocked by that week’s headline.

GIRL ABDUCTED BY ALIENS, “I was abducted by aliens,” declares Sinead, a twenty three year old from Skerries,
Ireland
.

“Sinead, my God.”

She had gone shopping with Sinead only a few days back.

She looked at the ph
otograph on the newspaper cover.
Sinead looked back at her scary eyed and serious.

“A relative of yours?” asked the kiosk attendant.

“Just a friend,” she replied absentmindedly.

She paid for the paper and went back home.

The article reported on the latest UFO hotspot, a small town north of
Dublin
, the reporter had traveled there every weekend for the past year to record sightings as well as witness reports.

“I was walking home from work, when I saw this ligh
t coming toward me from the sky. I
t was spherical with several smaller lights around it.
Everything seemed to stop, people around me stopped in their tracks, even birds in the sky.
The light stopped right in front of me and it sucked me in.
The next thing I knew is I was back where I started, in the street, but my watch was off by five hours.”

The report went on to say medical tests had shown the girl to have an unusual amount of radioactive energy, not enough to be a danger, but slightly above the norm for the area she lived in.

Jennifer had grown up with the X-Files and knew of conspiracy theories as well as the reasons for abduction believed by thousands of people around the world.
At any other time she would have read the story and gone to visit Sinead to ask her if it was all true, but after having read Owen’s notes, she wasn’t very sure what to think.

She had no idea there had been UFO sightings in Skerries, but there again she had been away for a very long time, and when she returned she had other things in mind.
She wondered why the local media hadn’t reported it, why her friends, the ones that still talked to her, hadn’t told her about it.
She went back to Owen’s notebook, this time with pen and paper and an open mind, at least as open as she could have it taking into account the subject matter.