Brooklyn Knight (20 page)

“It’s all right,” answered the redhead absently. Understanding her mood perfectly, the professor made a motion with his eyes toward her hand, commenting;

“You realize, no matter how much longer you slide that piece of shrimp around, I fear it’s not going to be able to absorb any more butter.”

“You don’t think so, eh?”

“My goodness,” exclaimed Knight in an exaggerated tone. “Bless all the tiny monkeys, is that the hint of a smile I see there, creeping over my ever-so-blue dinner companion’s thin but wildly attractive lips?”

“You, good sir, are a barrel of trouble.”

“Yes,” responded Knight, twirling a half-dozen strands of linguine around his fork. “That has been, for quite some time now, the popular opinion. But enough of this depression.” Popping the forkful of pasta into his mouth, only a few drops of white clam sauce dripping onto his chin, the professor announced as he chewed;

“Let’s get down to business.”

“Which business is that?”

“Well.” Smacking his lips in appreciation, realizing he had just
begun actually tasting his food for the first time that night, Knight set his fork down and began buttering a piece of bread as he said, “To start, we acknowledge we both had days best described as … now, what would the best, the most fitting, word in the world possibly be …”

“Crappy?”

“Why, yes—that’s an excellent choice. Yes—a marvelous word. A pair of crappy days we have just experienced, and now we need to put them behind us. And I do believe I know one way we could try to do so.”

“Thrill me, boss man.”

“Well, if I remember correctly, I owe you all sorts of explanations. To tell the truth, I’m frankly surprised we didn’t start chattering like mad folk in the car over them.”

“Didn’t feel like it,” admitted Bridget. “Danielle really did wring me out with the museum tour. And, before that, your harem left me a little speechless.”

“My ‘harem’?”

Bridget stared into the professor’s eyes, a trifled startled to discover that the curator seemed to have no idea to what she was referring. When the redhead hesitantly explained her comment, giving him hints of how the women in Human Resources had discussed him, she found herself growing both slightly amused at and embarrassed for Knight.

He genuinely did not appear to be aware of their feelings toward him.

Touching his chest with one hand, holding the other out before him in an imploring manner, he asked sincerely;

“Really? Moi?”

“Indeed. But, oh come on now. Are you telling me you had no idea of the effect you have on some women?”

“Well,” the professor answered, ducking his head slightly, “I’ve
never had a terrible amount of trouble finding a companion for the theater, or museum events, or whatever. But, you make them sound as if they were … I don’t know, fanning themselves as they spoke about me.”

“It was a spectacle,” answered Bridget with a giggle.

“Very well,” said Knight, unconsciously sitting a bit straighter. “I suppose from now on I’ll have to send anything needed from me by Human Resources via the mail room.”

“It might be for the best,” teased the redhead.

“Yes, well, anyway, on to explanations. I mentioned to you earlier that I had bugged our bozo friends—correct?” When his assistant agreed, the professor added;

“I shall explain. There is a powder employed by the fakirs of India when they want to share mystical journeys or visions. All that is done is they mix it in water, everyone to be involved in the experience drinks a portion, and for the next eighteen to thirty hours they basically all share one mind.” As Bridget merely stared at Knight, her own mind struggling to process yet another bit of the fantastic that had been presented to her as being nothing out of the ordinary, the professor added;

“Really.”

“And you can hear everything each of them is saying, or thinking—”

“Both.”

“And they can hear you?”

“No.” When Bridget returned to simply staring, waiting for an explanation, Knight obliged, telling her;

“I can hear them, because I know how to hear them. It comes from a number of things, really. I know the water was spiked; I know how to manipulate magical, or more precisely elemental, energies. What they will dismiss as ‘background noise,’ or a headache,
daydream, whathaveyou, I will, shall we say, turn up the volume on and listen in to whatever they are saying, or hearing. Or what they are thinking.”

“And you’re doing this now?”

The professor nodded in response, finally taking a bite of his heavily buttered piece of hearty, sesame seed–encrusted bread. “It’s like background music. As long as they’re not saying or thinking anything important, my mind ignores all of it. If, however, something I would need to know comes up, then my conscious mind will start to pay attention. Sort of a transcendental-meditation version of that TiVo thing.”

“Okay,” responded Bridget, her head shaking and nodding at the same time. “And you can do this because, as you said, you ‘know how to manipulate elemental energies.’ That’s what you said—correct?” When the professor agreed with her quote, she added;

“That’s something I was wondering about. Ever since you let me hold the Disc of the Winds, what you said about it has bothered the back of my mind.”

“And what was that?”

“You said that all you had to do was expose it to the air and up you went. Yet, I was holding it, out exposed to the air, and I didn’t go floating out of my seat. Why’s that?”

Dipping another piece of bread into his white clam sauce, scooping up several large slices of clam with it, the professor took a dripping bite, then returned the bread to his plate so it could soak up more sauce while he said; “Well now, here we go. That is, as they used to say, the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. You’ve basically just asked me to explain how it is so-called magic works in our universe.”

“I have?”

“Oh yes indeed,” responded Knight. His hand up, signaling for a waiter, he said, “And you know what? As soon as we can get our dinners wrapped up for some imaginary dog, I think I’m just going to go ahead and show you.”

In less than twenty minutes, Professor Piers Knight and his new assistant were riding along through a lush and sprawling cemetery. They had been stopped at the large red sandstone main gate house, and by the attitude of the guard Bridget had been certain they would not be allowed entrance. After the man on duty went in to check his “Allowed Visitors” roster, he returned and waved Knight through without any further delay.

As the professor drove along one of the winding roads leading farther inside, he told his companion;

“Here’s a hopefully interesting fact. Green-Wood was among the first ‘rural’ cemeteries to be created within the city. By that I mean it was a business—a thing not attached to any particular church. The place covers nearly five hundred acres. Astounding to find something like this in the middle of a major city.”

“And we’re here because you need a cemetery to perform magic?” Bridget’s tone betrayed the slightest bit of
trepidation on the redhead’s part. “What? We’re going to be collecting graveyard dirt, or robbing tombs?”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” responded Knight. He did not look at his assistant as he spoke, for the roads within the cemetery were twisting affairs and, with the sun rapidly setting, it was best for any drivers there to keep their eyes focused on where they were going. Still, he told her;

“No, truthfully we could have gone to any of a hundred different places. I chose here because it’s private and quiet. For what we’re about to do we don’t need any spectators. Security—as I mentioned before.”

Finding the spot he wanted, the professor stopped his car, then hopped out quickly to move around to the other side and open Bridget’s door. He extended his hand to help the redhead from the car because he had been forced to park on an uphill grade and the angle would be a trifle tricky for one exiting from the passenger side of any vehicle. As they made their way carefully across the well-kept lawn covering most of the area, Knight said;

“This has been, as you might have guessed from the size and grandeur of some of the mausoleums, the place to be put to rest in Brooklyn for quite some time—almost one hundred and fifty years now, I believe. Many a famous sort under the sod here—the engravers Currier and Ives are here somewhere, Boss Tweed, Horace Greeley, oh, C. L. Tiffany, and his son, Louis. Oh, and the fantasy illustrator Roy Krenkel, the fellow whose paperback cover paintings were responsible for the big Edgar Rice Burroughs revival back in the fifties, he’s here. And then there’s—”

The professor broke off his lecture suddenly, however, as he came to a somewhat boxy tombstone, one carved as if to resemble a child’s idea of a house. In a circle carved into what would be the roof’s peak were three words: “Jane, My Wife.” Below, the bas-relief carved into the front of the headstone showed a man leaving his
home, presumably on his way to work, leaning on his gate. His gaze appeared to be directed toward a woman standing at the front door to the home, a small dog sitting on the steps to her left. After Bridget and Knight had stood silently before the headstone for a long moment, the redhead broke the silence.

“All right, this is what you wanted me to see, I’m guessing. Am I supposed to also guess why?”

“No,” answered Knight quietly. “Jane and Charles Griffith are buried here. The sculpture represents the last time Charles saw his wife alive. When he returned home that evening after work, he discovered his bride had died of heart disease. He had this monument erected, and then proceeded to visit her every week for the next quarter of a century until his own death, in the early 1880s, I believe, at which point he was interred here next to her.”

“Touching, but the importance of all this is … ?”

Knight involuntarily dropped his head several inches, taking a deep breath at the same time. Although he had honestly meant to go through with revealing the secret behind his abilities to the young woman, a part of him reached out, flogging him with hesitation, throwing up all the familiar warning beacons it had at hand. It reminded him of the disasters he had created for himself in the past on those occasions when he had done with others as he was about to do with Bridget.

Calming his paranoid streak, reminding himself that there had been tremendous successes as well when he had done such over the years, he reached out and touched the tombstone, beginning his explanation as he did so.

“The first thing anyone must realize is that there is a vast difference between ‘knowing’ that magic is real—actually understanding it—and ‘believing’ it is real. My easiest example would be yourself. You now ‘know’ magic, what most people would label as magic, actually does exist. You’ve seen it in operation. But, even though you
know magic is possible, deep inside you there is a part of you that still keeps you from really believing it.”

Continuing to touch the tombstone, Knight closed his eyes. Although it was obvious he was attempting to keep his voice steady, his tone clear and unemotional, it was equally obvious that something was happening to him. As his assistant watched him, the professor seemed to grow straighter, taller, stronger. His entire body appeared to be vibrating, not the jerking, uncontrolled spasms of someone attempting to stay awake all night from ingesting too many energy drinks, but instead the steady, humming vibration of a well-oiled machine.

“As I said earlier, we can both handle the same objects, speak the same words, perform the identical rituals, whatever, and I will be able to produce a result whereas you will not. Even though we do everything exactly the same, even though you know that magic works because you’ve seen it with your own eyes, you will not be able to make anything work.”

Releasing the tombstone, taking a backward step at the same time, Knight opened his eyes once more. His face was split apart in a full and infectious smile, one that appeared to have planted itself upon him of its own volition. Brimming with a sudden vitality, he announced;

“This is what has protected those we have labeled as magicians throughout history. We know a secret the rest of you do not. This is the reason the grand majority of people can read spell books, play with Ouija boards and the such, and nothing happens. It takes energy to perform magic, just as it does to do anything else.”

“But not the kind generated by steam power, or electricity, I’m guessing.”

“Correct.” Taking Bridget’s hand, Knight pulled her down to the ground as he himself suddenly sat down, his back coming to rest
against the Griffiths’ headstone. As Bridget settled herself against it as well, the professor continued, telling her;

“No. It takes human energy, emotional energy—elemental energy. The Empire State Building, to give us a familiar point of reference for instance, fills up with the stuff all the time. Can’t help it. Millions of people every day, they look at it, they think, ‘Tallest building in the city.’ As they do, their awe, their respect, their fear of heights, admiration for accomplishment, love of art deco design—all of it—it pours into the building, waiting for some magician or another to come along and drain it out.”

“I guess you did so yesterday?”

“Well, one always checks, but that’s the problem with big, splashy landmarks. All the wannabes, the amateurs, the slop artists, they’re constantly hovering over such sites, gorging themselves, fighting over the crumbs. The World Trade Center memorial site, or the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, Times Square, the vultures haunt these places. But something like this,” he said, patting the gravestone gently, “these are the places that get overlooked. The story of the Griffiths is well-known, appears in plenty of the guidebooks. Green-Wood is itself a tourist attraction, but not the kind that attracts the sorts of erstwhile magicians who can only think of unlimited power.”

Then, pulling the Disc of the Winds from a pocket on the inside of his sport coat, the professor held it out between himself and Bridget, telling her softly, “It’s the kind I prefer, softer, quieter—pure. Undiluted. And, when gathered properly, it’s, well …”