Magic or Madness (29 page)

“What does Esmeralda do to you, Tom?” I asked, amazed that I could get the words out. The sound was louder, higher pitched; my brain was melting. The ground seemed to be dissolving, the crust falling away, revealing the solid mantle, rippling, glowing hot and red. The buildings around us should be crumbling; we should have melted. No one saw it but me. Was this something to do with my magic? With numbers? Fibs?

“She doesn’t
do
anything to me. She teaches me about . . .” He glanced at Danny. “About, you know. How to be safe, use only the tiniest amounts. Live longer. Not go nuts. There’s no drinking. She won’t even let me have a glass of wine with dinner.”

“She’s never once tried to drain it from you?” Jay-Tee asked.

Tom shook his head. “Drain what? I don’t understand.”

“What if she’s just fattening him up?” I said, forcing myself to concentrate on my friends, not the strange illusions around me. “Like the witch in the story.” I thought about Hansel and Gretel. Esmeralda’s house wasn’t made of lollies and chocolate, but there were other temptations there.

The ground was getting steadily hotter.

“Jay-Tee,” Danny said. “Let’s go.”

“I can’t, Danny. I have to stay with Reason.”

I took a deep breath. “Danny, you’ve still got the ammonite?” I didn’t have to ask. I could feel it. “The stone I gave you?”

“Sure.” He pulled it out of his pocket. “Ow!” he said, startled. I took the burning stone from him; spirals went spinning out from the stone in my hand, and the sound coming from Esmeralda and Jason Blake got even louder. I recoiled. My feet moved, suddenly unstuck.

“You okay?”

I nodded, though I wasn’t. “Are you really sure about her, Tom?” I made myself ask.

“Completely,” he said, nodding earnestly. “I trust her completely.”

“Tom believes he’s telling the truth,” Jay-Tee said. “Remember what
he
said to us? He said we had to make a choice. What if your grandmother really can teach us. Properly?”

“She can,” Tom said. “She saved me. She wants to save you too, Reason. We have to help her.”

The four of us stared at the two figures dusted with snow. I could see the cells that made up their skin and hair, the whirring of the blood through their veins, the movement of their organs. It all moved in waves like the swirling ground beneath them, yet they didn’t look any different, stock-still, eyes unblinking. The noise was blasting my head open, the air was crackling, the footpath underneath us growing even hotter.

I didn’t want to save Esmeralda. What about the teeth I’d found? The cat? What about everything Sarafina had ever told me? Stealing men’s vital energies, sacrificing animals, eating human babies? Everything she taught me to protect myself from magic—that had all been true. As far as I knew, Sarafina’s only lie was that magic didn’t exist. “We could just go with Danny.”

Danny nodded. “Of course. Both of you.”

“And if there are others like
him
out there?” Jay-Tee asked me. “How will we protect ourselves not knowing anything? You said it, Reason, we need to know. If she turns out to be just like him, we’ll run away again. We’re good at that.”

Danny started to talk, and Tom. The noise was so bad now it was doing my head in. I couldn’t stand it. I concentrated, thought of the stars above, just as Sarafina had taught me. I took a step towards the two statues and then another. The footpath supported me. I didn’t fall through to the earth’s core. The other three followed, only Danny with ease.

“All right,” I said, holding out my hand, not entirely sure what I was doing. Tom grabbed it, and Jay-Tee grabbed his other wrist. Danny grabbed her waist. I wondered what he thought was happening.

Feeling sick to my stomach, I reached forward and took hold of Esmeralda’s hand with my ammonite between our palms. White heat. Colours. The whirring was deep inside me, pumping through my veins, pushed along by my heart, in my blood now and up my arm and into the ammonite. It didn’t hurt anymore. I had stopped it hurting me. It felt good.

I saw spirals, but not Fibonaccis. These spirals were different. More erratic, slower. They swirled around me. In and out, like the petals of a flower. I looked for the pattern, but every time I thought I had it, the spirals changed, tighter, longer, then sharper, wider.

Both their patterns, Esmeralda’s and Blake’s, were so clear to me. I could taste the magic in them, metallic but somehow rusty on my tongue. It smelled like tobacco before it’s lit. A smell of earth, not metal. I could see it too, both sharp and hazy, woven into their skin and hair, their muscles, their blood, part of every cell.

And something else, something familiar. Something of my mother. In both of them. Suddenly I knew that he really was my grandfather. I recognised his pattern.

This
was my magic.

Someone screamed. A man’s scream.

My head tilted up, met Blake’s eyes: saw his confusion, his pain. No spirals in there, no patterns, just chaos.

We all staggered. Blake had collapsed, holding his head. “You,” he said, not looking up. “You.”

Esmeralda was the first to recover. “Thank you,” she said, stepping past him, opening the door. Tom, Jay-Tee, Danny, and I followed. But Danny wasn’t with us when we stepped into my grandmother’s kitchen.

I was in Sydney again. I stumbled forward until I found the kitchen sink and then I threw up.

We sat around the kitchen
table, drinking tea, water, orange juice. Only this time it was night and there were no pastries, no cinnamon rolls to tempt me. Esmeralda looked pale, but not as terrible as I had expected. Of the four of us I was the only one who seemed close to dropping.

Esmeralda insisted I keep ice wrapped in a washer pressed against my forehead and nose. It actually made the hotness go away, lessened the throbbing, but did nothing for my fatigue. Before long it started melting down my face. That felt good too.

I couldn’t keep my eyes from the door, as big and wooden on this side as the other but no stained glass rising sun above it and, of course, no sad-faced, droopy-moustached man. Instead of just Esmeralda’s coat, the door now held all our winter coats, gloves, scarves, and hats—a towel lay on the floor absorbing the snow melting from them. That was the only sign that New York City and winter lay on the other side. I hoped I would never have to return—then I thought of Danny. . . .

“Is Danny okay?” I forced myself to ask. Even with the horrible whirry noise gone, my head throbbed. He hadn’t come through the door. Where was he? I slid my hand into my pocket, feeling for the reassurance of the ammonite. It wasn’t there. Not in my left pocket either.

“I imagine so,” Esmeralda said with the same fake comforting voice she’d used when she picked me up at the airport. A week ago? “He’s not like us,” Esmeralda continued. “He couldn’t come through the door. For him it was locked. He’s still back there.”

“But so’s
he,
” Jay-Tee said. “What if he hurts Danny?”

“Will he?” I asked.

“Your grandfather is in no condition to do anything to anyone,” Esmeralda said. Her tired smile said that she knew that I’d already learned who he was, and I wondered how.

Tom’s mouth dropped open.

Most of the windows were open. The warm air smelled faintly of flying fox and jasmine. I thought I heard some squeaks coming from the tree, but my ears still tingled. I could’ve just been hearing what I wanted to hear. Outside, it was slowly getting lighter. Dawn was arriving though just a few minutes ago it had been early afternoon and New York City.
What day is it?
I wondered.

“Tom says you can help,” I said, because they seemed to be waiting for me to speak again. All I wanted to do was sleep. “Teach us about magic. But you won’t take it from us like Jason Blake did.”

Esmeralda sipped her tea and looked at the three of us. “Who are you?” she asked Jay-Tee.

“Jay-Tee,” she said. “I’m a friend of Reason’s.” She looked at me and I made the corners of my mouth turn up. It hurt. “I’d like to learn more about magic too.”

Esmeralda nodded. “Of course.”

“So you won’t take it from us?” Jay-Tee asked.

“I’ll answer that question,” Esmeralda said, looking at Jay-Tee and then at me, “but first I need to know what you both know.”

“About magic?” Jay-Tee asked.

Esmeralda nodded.

Tom was watching us, eyes big but not saying a word. Jay-Tee kept looking around the kitchen and was now staring at the fruit bowl. I could see her wondering what the weird hairy fruits were. I still had no idea. In the morning, I decided, I’d try one. What would be the harm? Esmeralda had me now, might as well eat her food. There were three big mangoes too. They smelled ripe.

Jay-Tee peered out the window at Filomena, leaves shining palely in the moonlight. I wondered if they had fig trees like that in New York City. All the trees I’d seen had been more like skeletons.

“That it’s dangerous,” I said at last, wondering that I had the energy to coordinate tongue and lips. “That everyone seems to want more than they have. That it’s genetic, like being left-handed. That when I lose my temper . . .” I paused. “That it’s dangerous.”

Jay-Tee nodded. “That it’s a curse.”

Esmeralda smiled sadly. “I’ll tell you both what I told Tom. What I was told by my mother when I was young. Magic is in everyone. When someone hears a phone ring and knows who it is before they’ve answered, that’s a kind of magic. When people know they’re being stared at, even though the person is behind them, that’s magic too. Low level: the kind that everyone can do. In cities the air crackles with it. Certain objects, like this door, become imbued with it.”

I thought of my ammonite, hoped I had dropped it on the other side of the door, that Danny had picked it up. I couldn’t feel it now, thousands of kilometres and a day away, but I could remember how it had felt those few moments in my hand, burning with magic. And at the same time, the feel of it had been mixed with the feel of Danny.

“There are no coincidences,” continued Esmeralda, “only a great deal of magic. Not all of it low level. Some of us are as talented with magic as a top athlete is at running or a musician with their chosen instrument. It’s possible to be good without practice, but never as good or as controlled as you are with discipline and knowledge.

“Unlike music and athletics, magic is finite; there’s an end to it, and at the same time it takes from you as much as you take from it. Magic sucks you dry. The more you make and the stronger it is, the shorter your life. You saw our family’s monument, Reason.”

She looked at me, but I was too exhausted to speak or even nod. “Many of us don’t make it much past twenty-five. For us, living to the age of
forty
is extraordinary. I am forty-five, Reason; every day I live, I am grateful. If I make it to fifty, it will be a miracle.”

“Why aren’t we exhausted?” Jay-Tee cut in. “I mean, except for Reason. That was a big-ass magic fight between you and him. How come we’re not all dropping right now?”

“Good question,” Esmeralda said. “Because neither he nor I will ever use more magic than we have to. The battle was pitched low. It takes time, but eventually you know who’s stronger, who’s won. The three of you tipped the balance but lost almost no magic doing it. How do you feel?”

“Not too bad,” Tom answered. “Not nearly as bad as when we did that magic together looking for Ree.”

“Tired, but not magic-gone tired,” Jay-Tee said. Those last words described exactly how I felt: magic-gone exhausted. Much worse than when he’d taken that small amount from me at the champagne restaurant. I wanted to sleep forever and ever. I had to force my eyes to stay open, my brain to function.

“Then why does Ree look so bad?” Tom asked.

“She tried to kill someone with magic,” Jay-Tee said. “She’s lucky she’s still alive.”

Tom opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again.

“Your grandfather?” Esmeralda asked.

Jay-Tee nodded for me.

I didn’t want to talk about what had happened. Not yet. “So if you don’t want to die, why use your magic at all?” I asked instead, but I knew what the answer would be before the words were out of my mouth.

“Like your mother? Like Tom’s mother? If you’re born with the talent for magic and don’t use it, you go insane.”

I knew it. Sarafina had taught me small magics, tricks like casting out with the Fib spiral, but nothing new for years now. She had stopped using hers, and now she was insane, doped to the eyeballs out at Kalder Park. I longed to see her again, but I was scared of it too. Not using magic had turned her into someone I didn’t recognise.

I wished I was asleep already. I didn’t want to hear any more. I’d killed a boy, tried to kill Jason Blake. How much longer was I going to live? How long did Jay-Tee have, conjuring money out of nothing every day?

“That’s why Blake drank from you both. Drinking from someone who agrees to it requires little magic. You don’t go mad because you’re using a tiny amount of your own to make it work, and you live longer because you’ve gained more. None of us wants to die. Most of us don’t want to go mad.”

She took another sip of her tea and regarded the three of us looking back at her. “That’s why I can’t promise I won’t try to drink from you.” She looked at me, her brown eyes just like my mother’s. “That’s part of why Sarafina ran. I never lied to her. I told her how it might be. After all, my own mother tried to take it from me.

“Sarafina couldn’t bear the idea of any of it. That’s why she raised you as she did. She wanted magic not to exist, for there to be no possibility of me preying on her or her ever preying on you.”

Tom gasped, but Jay-Tee’s expression didn’t change.

“I don’t want to die either,” Esmeralda continued. “I loathe your grandfather for what he’s become, but I understand it. I’ll do everything I can to arm the three of you against him or anyone like him. But I may be teaching you to protect yourselves against me. You have to remember that.”