Then one of Clay’s guests clinked a glass on the back of a deck chair, and the moment was broken. The doe froze, eyes and ears on alert, legs crouched slightly to permit a quick getaway. A second later she sprung forward, towards us in one arcing leap, then completing a tight turn with quick strides to dart back into the brush.
“Nice going, Jamar.” Several of the guests razzed him, while Willis punched him in the arm. Seemed others had shared the moment with us, though it had felt as though we were alone in the world.
The three of us remained in place, content to be together as one family. It was a good reminder that magic is around us every day. We just needed to slow down, and look.
CHAPTER 16
Much as I would have been delighted to spend the entire day drinking beer on the back deck, it seemed events were conspiring to eliminate that possibility. A short while after everyone had finished brunch, Harper gathered the guests for a toast to Clay’s health. As the group dispersed, Harper took the opportunity to introduce me to Sol Irving, who I had never formally met, despite our many phone conversations.
I had a vision of the Professor, borne of my own experiences in college. As it turned out, Sol looked more like a retired businessman then my image of a Religious Studies lecturer. His meticulous white moustache and beard stood out against his deep tan and bald forehead, giving the impression he spent his winters playing golf in the Caribbean. Age lines, but more from the sun than stress. He wore a buttoned down long-sleeve dress shirt in a black gingham check, simple olive chinos, and black penny loafers. He could have fit in at any restaurant in Palm Beach as easily as he did at Clay Jarvis’ place. Hard to believe he had a PhD in Theology from Yale, and taught such esoteric subjects as “Native Americans — Myth and Oral Histories”.
Sol proved a fascinating guy to talk to, at least for a big-time geek like myself. He was also one of my few windows into the new world I was learning about.
I suppose I have always been open to the idea of magic. Certainly after sitting through a quantum mechanics seminar in Physics 101, I remember thinking that it sounded like magic. After all, if reality itself is determined by our perception of it, how can anyone say what is possible or not? Then years later I saw a show on the Discovery Channel about a woman with synesthesia, whose neural wiring had been crossed at birth. When she heard a sound, she would also see a color. Others tasted certain flavors when they heard music.
To my simple mind, synesthesia raised a whole host of questions. If the woman saw black when she heard bass, did that mean the “color” of bass was black? Were the rest of us simply unable to see it? Maybe if we could use this portion of the brain that none of us seem to access, then all things could be interpreted by all senses. Colors would have tones and tastes, textures would have smells. And if that was true, how could anyone truly say there was no such thing as magic? After all, what is magic but something unexplained? A TV remote would have seemed magical to Archimedes (as would TV, for that matter). That didn’t make it any less real.
But believing something may be possible, and seeing it with your very own eyes are two completely different things. Believing the Maple Leafs will win the Stanley Cup again, and seeing it in real life… well, maybe that would be magic.
In the past few weeks, I had come to believe that there was such a thing as magic. Having a fridge thrown at you by an elderly woman tends to put a different spin on your views of the world.
Why these things happened was still an open question in my mind. Whether or not science would ultimately explain all of the so-called supernatural, I had seen things happen which were real.
So talking with Sol helped me understand how this new world operated.
“When the average person thinks of the occult, they think ‘abracadabra’. Ritual magic with a wand and a magic phrase. Harry Potter. But that’s a massive oversimplification. Most of them read their horoscopes, that’s astrology. Some may have had their palms read — palmistry. Both are forms of divination, an attempt to divine, or discover, information using so-called ‘magic’.”
I nodded, feeling like I should be sitting at a desk taking notes. We had spoken about the nature of the package Clay and I had picked up from Sun Consulting on the day of the robbery. The Sun folks had apparently opened up a bit about the stolen item, and revealed it was a pendulum with a special stand, that operated like a Ouija board. He thought it might be mounted over maps or photographs. That seemed to ring true with the snippets I had mined from Helen Findlay.
“Beyond those you have alchemy — the old ‘lead into gold’. Voodoo. Try visiting a backwoods town in Louisiana and telling people there’s no such thing as magic. And countless other forms of worship, dating back to the earliest days of man. Shamanism, Wicca, even Satanism, the favorite of Hollywood producers and the authors of cheap horror stories.”
“Hey, that’s my taste in reading that you’re putting down.”
“Ha! Mine too, if the truth be told. My point is, we have lumped this vast collection of religions, beliefs, practices, habits, all of them into the ‘occult’. But there are as many variations in the occult world as there are outside it.”
“What I don’t understand is why we don’t hear more about this. I mean, I had never heard of most of our clients before.”
Sol scooped another shrimp, dipping it into the seafood sauce then wolfing it down. I loved shrimp, but the sauce was too heavy on the horseradish for my taste. I start sweating at the slightest hint of spicy. Love it, but it eats me alive from the inside out.
“I can’t say for sure, but I see two obstacles. The first is mankind’s naive perspective on the world. I would wager that the average person on the street believes we know everything there is to know about this planet of ours. But there are tens of thousands of new species discovered every year. There are still tribes of people living on this planet that have never been seen by a white man, or examined by modern scientists. For goodness sake, we haven’t even cured the common cold. So why we would believe we know all there is to know? It mystifies me. Second, you have to look to history. Society does not treat these people well. Man has always attacked that which is different. You don’t need to be Jewish, or Islamic, or black, or Native American, to recognize that. Tell me, you’ve heard of the Salem witch trials?”
I nodded, crunching away on a carrot. Kara had ambled up during our conversation, and I had a tendency to become a health food fanatic around pretty ladies.
“How about the trials in Bury St. Edmunds? Or the Basque?”
I’m not sure I could even say what countries they were in. I shook my head.
“Kara?”
“I think I’ve heard something about the Basque.”
“OK. How about witch hunts? Were you aware that the term ‘witch hunt’ originated with actual hunts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? Mob hysteria, lynching.”
Made sense.
“So, how many people do you think were killed during the witch hunts and trials?”
This one I might be able to figure out. My interest in horror fiction was paying off.
“Well, I seem to recall there were twenty witches killed in Salem.” The Professor nodded for me to continue, so I figured I was close enough. “So, assuming there were ten, even twenty towns worldwide where they held trials… that works out to about four hundred. Let’s be wacky and, I don’t know, quadruple it to take into account hunts and the like. Say, two thousand?” The number seemed big to me, a bit overblown. But I sensed the Professor had a big number in mind, and I didn’t want to insult his sensibilities.