The 13th Mage (8 page)

When she came to, Owen was fanning her face and asking her if she was alright.

“I heard a noise and came running, there you were on the floor,” he said.

She couldn’t remember fainting, it was more like a blackout, and more like time had been deleted from her memory.
She felt for the baby, her belly was quite large now and she was afraid she might have hurt it when she fell.

Owen gave her some water to drink and helped her onto the bed.

“A ghost,” she said, her eyes open wide, scanning the room.

“What did it look like?” he asked as a matter of fact.

“Like a ghost of course, what do you think? All see-through and very old, but strong I guess, like a kind of white light.”

“Interesting.”

Owen seemed to be taking mental notes for a few seconds, or confirming a theory to himself, “yes, that would an old butler who died here in the 1800´s, he was much in love with my great-grandmother, the woman my great-grandfather married after the tragic death of his lover, you can find a whole bunch of her things in the wardrobe of the second guestroom to the left, first floor.
This ghost was so in love with her that he has been the family ghost ever since, friendly chap, I wouldn’t worry about him at all if I were you.
If you see him again just ignore him, he’ll go away.”

“Family ghost?”

“Yes, friendly chap.”

“How come I hadn’t seen him before?”

“He’s... very shy, doesn’t show himself to just anyone.
He must like you, you can now consider yourself part of the family,” saying this Owen bowed and left the room.

Jennifer felt for her belly, her baby seemed none the worse for the experience.

No one had told her about ghosts.

Her mind wondered over to what Owen had said about his great-grandfather.
A bunch of Owen’s great-grandmother’s things were stuck in a wardrobe, but she had cleaned all the wardrobes out, she was sure of it, so he was obviously wrong.

“In a small trapdoor at the back of the wardrobe!” Owen shouted from the other room, “pull the … the… light bulb down and it opens up.”

There he was again, answering her thoughts before she said anything.
She was sure she had not said anything that time, besides, Owen wasn’t even in the room, so even if she had said something he wouldn’t have heard her.

She waited until she heard Owen going into his study then run up the stairs.
It was true, she pulled the light bulb inside the wardrobe a small trapdoor opened at the back of it and the area it revealed with stuffed with chests.
She opened the one on top. I
t was filled with clothes, shoes, a diary, photographs, and hats
. I
n short
,
everything it should be filled with.
It was perfect.

That evening she heard Owen walking around the house talking in a foreign language, she went out to see what was going on, he had simply looked at her and in a deep and strange voice said, “
forget
.”

“Forget what?” she answered, at which point Owen dropped a stick he was carrying and stared at her dumbfounded, “
forget
,” he repeated, and she felt wheezy, her memories were folding over, then snapped back.

“What was that!” she shouted at him, “was that some kind of hypnosis thing? Don’t you dare try to mess with my head like that again Owen O’Neil,” she said and stormed back into her room, slamming the door behind her. She was furious.

She thought about leaving, Owen seemed like a nice boy, but if he was dabbling into occult things or hypnosis there was no way she would hang around to be his guinea pig.
But then she thought about Sean.
The last time she had asked him about Sean he simply said he didn’t know where Sean was.
Then tried to rectify it by insisting he didn’t know anyone named Sean, lying was not one of Owen’s strong points.
She was sure he would tell her all about Sean soon, how to contact him.

The dreams began soon after that, they were very bright, colorful
dreams
. T
hey were like an enhanced version of reality.
Sean was in them, they would sit together among the trees or by a lake.
He would ask her about things, she told him about Owen and Sean was surprised to find out about his brother being alive.
He would ask her where she was living, but try as she might she couldn’t remember the address in her dreams.
All she could remember was that it was in
London
.

One of the things that most surprised her in the dreams was that she was not pregnant in them.
She was so shocked the first time that she woke up instantly, but as time went by she learned to move in and out of the dreams at will.

Most of the times she dreamed of Sean they simply held each other in silence. At other times Sean would ask about Owen, small things, like his routine, his attire, his interests, that kind of thing. Jennifer would then find herself watching Owen more closely than was polite. She would watch the way in which he would play with a non-existing beard while he read, the way in which a small wrinkle would appear as he struggled with a new thought or concept. Or the way in which he would stop to think while in the middle of a sentence or with the fork about to touch his lips, he could spend quite a few seconds like
that, completely still, until the thought was concluded and then would carry on as though nothing had occurred. Or the reaction he’d had when he found her “Strange Happenings, the newspaper of the unexplained” on the kitchen table. He was like a small child with a new toy, kept reading things out to her in complete awe and surprise and made more than one entry in his little notebook.

She would remember those little things and tell Sean about them, but after a while Sean started getting sad every time she spoke about Owen.

It was all fantasies of course, dreams to make things better, but they seemed so real to her that for a couple of hours after waking up she was still sure she had gone somewhere else, to a place that held Sean prisoner. Then the morning news, vacuum cleaning and getting the shopping snapped her out of it until the next time she moved into one of those dreams.

Owen hadn’t been the same after the hypnosis episode, he had apologized the next morning, said he had been trying out something he read in one of her newspapers, to get rid of the butler’s ghost, and had gotten carried away with it.

Whatever he had tried hadn’t worked, she saw the old man again three times, once in the living room, once staring at her from one of the paintings in the attic and once walking into Owen’s study, while he was in there.
She ran to the door and tried to open it, it was locked.
She knocked and asked Owen if he was alright, he came to the door looking pale and drowsy, could hardly speak.

“The old butler,” she said, “he walked right into your study.”

“Don’t disturb me in my study, I told you about that rule,” he managed to mumble out and banged the door closed.

A girl
on
her
street
had become a drug addict the previous
year. J
ennifer remembered how she looked when she was drugged. Owen looked like that, but worse, more like the time when she’d seen the
girl in
Dublin
after she’d been thrown out of her parent’s house.
She could hardly speak, was grey and shaky. So thin.

A drug addict.
Owen must be a drug addict.
She felt panic, how could she stay in the same house as a drug addict with a baby on the way?
All this time she’d thought Owen was some kind of computer programmer or writer or something, locking himself away like that day after day, with all those computers and books.

No wonder that room was completely out of bounds to her.
He probably didn’t want her to find his drugs.

“I am no drug addict,” he said walking into her in the kitchen and frightening the daylights out of her.

“I… I never said you were, I just…”

“You were thinking it, and you were thinking it very loudly indeed.
You think everything too loud and one can’t get a thought edgeways in this place,” he said and sat down.

He looked completely normal, although a few moments earlier he had looked completely out of it.

“Think… too loud?” She asked.
Maybe she hadn’t heard right.

“Oh, you heard right all right.
You think too loud and you poke your nose where it doesn’t belong. And you don’t behave like a normal mortal, so you better tell me what the hell is going on here.”

“Me? Me not behave like a normal mortal?
Have you looked at yourself lately?
Do you think you are a normal mortal? I have never met anyone like you before, you are strange Owen, very strange,” she hissed the last words and felt him shiver.

He was going to do that forget trick on her now, and she knew it before he opened his mouth.

“Don’t you dare,” she said pointing her finger at him, “you try that hypnosis thing again and I am out of here, and you can tell Sean that as well.”

He went pale as he stared at the end of her finger in horror, “I wasn’t,” he ventured.

“Yes you were, you know you were, I can tell by…” she said and realized she didn’t know how but she could tell what he was about to do or say, “by the look on your face.”

He looked away, his face red with anger, or embarrassment, or a mixture of both.

There were a few minutes of tense silence, then he said, “yes,” before Jennifer asked if he wanted his tea now.

They ate in polite silence, she got up to put things away after they finished, but Owen didn’t leave the kitchen this time.
He sat and waited until she had finished cleaning up.

“Okay,” they said as she sat down.

“You first,” she said.

“No, you first, ladies first,” he answered.

There was so much she wanted to ask him, about the old butler, about his own life, about reading people’s thoughts.

“Where do you go at night time?” He asked before she had time to get her thoughts in order.

In normal circumstances she would have said, “I go to bed,” but she knew Owen meant the dreams, the times she used to leave this reality and go to visit Sean.
She took a deep breath and began to tell him all about the lake, the trees, the mountains, the streams, the
flowers, birds and butterflies, then, last of all, she told him about Sean.

She felt bad about telling Owen she visited Sean in her dreams, but didn’t know why she felt bad.
She didn’t tell him of the hours they spent together, holding each other, looking at the stars or the sunsets.
She didn’t tell him the dreams were less frequent now, she didn’t tell him that even when she felt Sean calling her she didn’t want to leave reality to be with him.

Owen wanted to know about his brother, he asked her what Sean’s believes were, his thoughts about life, what his thoughts were about the place he lived in, what his abilities were, could he read minds?
She told him about the way Sean’s hair moved when the wind blew and the way he held his chin while he listened to her speak.

“A bit like you are doing now,” she added, and then blushed for no reason.

There was a forced silence, they both felt embarrassed even though there was no reason at all why they should.

“It’s your turn,” she said.

What he then told her she wouldn’t have believed, except she could tell if he had tried to lie, but that didn’t mean he told her the whole truth either.

“So you mean we live in a kind of quantum world, filled with all these other dimensions where other beings live, and that when I saw the old butler it was one of those being crossing over to our side?” She asked when he finished.

“Yes?”

“Well, actually I did a paper on quantum physics on my last year at school and my conclusion was that there very well could be parallel worlds as well as multiple possible outcomes, but of course if you
mixed them both then you would have just about anything you could think of, which would of course make a theory, like magic, quite possible, but too slow to be a viable option for everyday use.
Unless you could have access to some sort of accelerator, something which would make chaos theory work backwards even, so by the time you thought ‘I want such and such in my hand’, like say, a million pounds, then sometime in the past you would have placed the order for that happening now, like the butterfly wing and the storm thing.”

They both looked at their hands.

“It’s a good theory,” Owen said.

She could tell he was impressed. H
e probably wasn’t used to girls being clever, what with his mother dying at childbirth and not having any sisters.

“So you are not a drug addict, devil worshiper or anything like that then?
Just some sort of witch?”

“Well, not a witch exactly, a mage, an elder, a long time ago there were only what you might call mages, then a group of them found another source of magic, based on thought more than herbs and chants, and decided to start a new order.
When a person who is… psychic, comes to their powers they are often attracted to the type of magic that suits them best, Witches or Elders.
Witches are what the ones following the
Old Ways
call themselves.”