Fathomless (12 page)

“All right, then.”

Sean expected Daniel to fold. Instead he said, “I don't want to sound like an elitist jerk, Eddy, but you're not a magician. Neither's Marvell, not all the way. Until last week, I would've agreed with you, but now that I'm learning magic, there's no way I'd want to give it up. Sean, you know what I mean?”

Sean's memory of the summoning and dismissing spells had never lost its keenness. After watching Daniel touch the power, his longing for that rush had resurged. “Yeah, I feel that way, too.”

Eddy had glanced at Sean, but her eyes returned to Daniel's. “You make magic sound like an addiction.”

“Not an addiction—that's running away. Wanting to do magic is running toward something. It's what I feel like I have to do. Like, if you're a bird, do you fly?”

Sean got Daniel's point before Eddy did, or at least, he blurted it out first: “Sure you do, because you have the wings for it. Well, unless you're an ostrich, and your wings don't work anymore, but then you have killer strong legs, right?”

Daniel gave him a dubious look. Eddy sat chin down and brows knit. Finally she said, “Magic is wings for you and Sean.”

“And your wings are your superhero brain cells.”

“Or supervillain brain cells.” But Eddy smiled. “I can't hate you for wanting to help Sean. I guess if you're unbelievably careful, you can teach him a few things.
Minor
things.
Safe
things.”

Daniel couldn't appreciate how big a victory he'd scored. Sean, knowing, played the one Perfect Movie Moment worthy of it: “Dude, you are so my brother, my captain, my king.”

To judge by his deep bow, Daniel understood the honor Sean bestowed. “
Fellowship of the Ring,
” he said.

“Ten points.”

Of course, Eddy still had to do her Gandalf Stormcrow imitation. “If the Professor and Helen find out—”

“We'll be unbelievably careful not to let them,” Daniel said.

“Yeah, well. What magic were you doing, mind-moving that pencil stub? If Sean tries a trick like that, he might put your eye out.”

“Daniel can borrow goggles from the construction guys,” Sean said.

“Or a welding mask,” Daniel added.

“Go with the mask,” Eddy said. She headed for the door, calling back over her shoulder, “You guys better move if we're going to play any tennis before dinner.”

Sean trailed her as far as the basement stairs before realizing Daniel hadn't come along. He poked his head back into the kitchen. Daniel stood at the breakfast bar, spinning his pencil stub. With a finger, not with magic. “Hey,” he said. “That was really a great speech.”

Daniel didn't look up. “I meant it, Sean. About magic being our wings.”

“Right. You coming?”

“In a minute.”

Daniel sounded down. Maybe he was having a post-magic reaction, like a mini-hangover, and so Sean left him to spin it out in peace.

 

8

How
they decided Daniel should “tutor” Sean was this: Tuesdays and Thursdays, they'd grab an hour after theory class; Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays (Geldman days for Daniel), they'd grab an hour after dinner. Eddy was cooler about the unauthorized lessons than Sean had expected—the one additional warning she issued was not to use the library. Marvell or Helen could show up anytime, or other Order members looking to consult the Arkwright tomes.

Daniel and Sean ended up using Helen's fabled “dungeon,” which Eddy had discovered during a solo prowl of the unfinished basement. In the farthest, darkest corner a bulkhead opened onto stone steps that descended into a brick-lined half cylinder of a wine cellar. In Endecott Arkwright's day, its floor-to-ceiling racks must have held enough booze to get all of Arkham drunk, but now there was only the low reek of ancient vinegar and a few bottles so new, they hadn't even collected dust. The rest of the racks had become spider condos, fully occupied. Under a single dangling lightbulb, Daniel and Sean arranged a folding table and two rickety chairs borrowed from the upper basement, and they were all set for magic lessons.

Daniel said the dead-air silence of the cellar was perfect for gathering energy, and soon he was spinning whole pencils and levitating sheets of paper to the ceiling. All Sean spun were his wheels. The experts who said he was a potential magician, Marvell and Helen, Geldman, even Orne, they'd change their minds if they could see him struggling simply to access ambient energy, supposedly Azathoth's freaking bounty. After nine sessions with Daniel, he still hadn't come up with anything more productive than the Jedi hand-out-eyes-closed trick, which did zip for the (obviously) non-Jedi Sean.

At the opposite end of the bell curve, Daniel had devised what Geldman called an access metaphor: a way of visualizing ambient energy so that he could absorb it. The irony was that ocean-phobic Daniel visualized energy as these deep-sea brine pools he'd read about. They were saltier than the surrounding water—so densely salty, a submarine would float on them! What if that heavy brine (ambient energy) flowed through the lighter ocean (the rest of the world) in streams, and what if Daniel could swim down and let his hands float on the heavy water, so its salt diffused into his palms? Bingo, access metaphor! He just had to visualize the swimming as intensely as possible, which was why his shoulders rotated—swam—when he was in collection mode.

But the more Daniel practiced, the less his shoulders moved. His process was becoming internal, invisible, which was the goal. Around nonmagicals, an energy-gathering magician didn't want to look like he had a movement disorder. Around other magicians, to broadcast gathering could invite a preemptive strike. But even without a physical “tell,” it was hard to fool keen magicians, who could sense when others tapped into ambient energy.

That last tidbit of Geldman lore gave Sean hope, because he
did
know every time Daniel gathered energy. The air thickened as before a storm, and he felt the change of pressure in his ears. When Daniel spent energy, the object that received it would brighten, like Mom's paintings and the glass crow her ghost had somehow influenced, but the glow Daniel created was a minute flicker in comparison, then gone.

Sean got that his own access metaphor had to grow out of some innate quality of his magic. The problem was that his magic didn't seem to
have
any innate qualities. Geldman said most magicians, including Source-users, found effective symbolism in the elements. And so Sean had tried Water and Earth, Fire and Air. Water, Daniel's inspiration, did nothing for him. With Earth, he envisioned quakes, drifting sand, mudslides, all big nopes. Fire gave him a mild tingle of connection when he imagined lava zigzagging through the cracks in volcanic rock. Air, again a mild tingle when he imagined it as heated gusts.

But the tingles weren't enough, because they left ambient energy too vague for Sean to grasp. Daniel wouldn't let him give up. If Sean kept trying new visualizations, he'd eventually hit the right metaphor. Easy for Daniel to say. He'd found his way in already.

One day, when the Order would be meeting in the library all afternoon, Daniel persuaded Sean over lunch to hit the dungeon for an extra-long session. Sean had agreed—how could he not when Daniel was so willing to put in the time?—but considering how unlikely he was to have a magical breakthrough, it seemed too bad to waste an afternoon like the one speeding by outside the kitchen windows. Even the guys hustling drywall into the carriage house looked energized by the rare summer combo of bright sun and low humidity. Drywall meant the interior framing was done, and the plumbing, and the electrical work: The building's skeleton and arteries were finally in place, its wire nerves taut. Throw the main circuit breaker. The Order's new headquarters would light up. It would live.

The image of wire nerves struck Sean as one of those quirky jerks his brain generally took on its stumble from No Idea to Got It. A second jerk came when Daniel flipped the switch at the bottom of the wine cellar steps. A retina-searing flash exploded from the dangling lightbulb before blackness reasserted itself. “Shit,” Daniel said.

It was so
not
shit. Lightning—

“Sean, you okay?”

Lightning strike! That was what it felt like when he'd stepped into the summoning pentagram and Nyarlathotep's energy had surged into him. “Sure,” he said. “Bulb just popped.”

“I'll go get another one.”

Daniel fumbled up the steps. Sean stayed put, his back to the weak illumination of the main basement, his face to the wine cellar darkness. The tingles of energy he'd struggled to harvest so far had come from the image of white-hot lava zigzagging through rock. Lightning was white. Lightning zigzagged. And the almost useful images of hot air? Lightning made the air it traversed expand, bang, thunder.

Lightning was electricity in its flashiest form, but electricity was everywhere. You could generate it by shuffling across a carpet. It hummed in the wire nerves of the Arkwright House and in the battery of his cell phone. If ancient people had known more about it, wouldn't they have added electricity to their list of elements?

Daniel brushed by Sean with a lit flashlight—an ordinary battery-powered one. Detective O'Conaghan had a flashlight that ran off magical energy. Magical energy behaving not like water or earth, fire or air—

Light refilled the wine cellar. Daniel tucked the spent bulb into a rack slot. “That's better.”

“I think I've got it,” Sean said.

Daniel brushed a web and its spinner off his chair. “Got what? One of these Shelobs?”

If there was a spider on Sean's chair, it was squashed meat—he'd crashed down without checking. “An idea.”

He'd tried to keep excitement out of his voice, but from the way Daniel leaned across the table, he'd picked up on it. “For your access metaphor?”

“Maybe. Give me some room.”

Daniel leaned back and locked in, arms crooked behind his chair.

Sean looked up at the lightbulb, but the juice zipping through its filaments wasn't the magical energy he needed—actual electricity could only help him as an image. He left his face tilted to the glare but closed his eyes.

“That's right,” Daniel said. “You want to start with black space, a blank. Now put whatever you want into it.”

Sean imagined lightning first. No tingle. Maybe the bolts were too sporadic. He tried a Tesla coil that veined his black space with its violet discharge. No tingle, but the image felt more … appropriate? A better match for the ambient energy in the wine cellar? Geldman had taught Daniel it was crucial to match the intensity of the metaphor to the intensity of the available energy. At first Daniel had thought too big: waterfalls, flooding rivers, tsunamis. He'd had to scale back to the heavy-brine streams. It made sense. At this distance from the cosmic center, filtered through every interdimensional barrier between it and the Arkwright House, Azathoth's output was background radiation. The trick, then, would be to scale back electricity to approximate it.

He stared at the lightbulb again. Glass shell, vacuum, a filament heated by electrical current until it glowed. Reflecting its glow were the threads of a spiderweb spun between the fixture cord and the ceiling.

Filaments.

Threads.

Spider-line made of energy instead of silk. Electric webbing, with Azathoth as the spider that had cast it all the way from ultimate chaos. Picture the Outer God as a mindless but busy creature with infinite spinnerets. It spurted strands that arced in every direction and tangled without pattern. Nyarlathotep was the clever spider who'd weave portions of the tangle into orderly webs, but forget about Nyarlathotep. For now Sean had to keep his mind on the raw electric silk until his mind's eye saw it clearly.

Between one breath and the next, it saw.

It saw, and he realized the difference between his clumsier imaginings and the one that could work for him. A gossamer web shot through black space, its strands radiating from innumerable points beyond his darkness. Where he'd messed up was picturing ambient energy as tangled; though the strands crossed each other at every angle, no one strand touched another. What he couldn't figure out was how an innumerable number of the innumerable strands pierced him through and kept going without imparting their energy. He should have been filled to the brim with magic.

Sean grabbed at the silk with the imagined hands of his imagined pincushion body, but they passed through the strands without changing their course or absorbing more of a tingle than his discarded metaphors had yielded. He opened his eyes and lost the whole damn symbolic complex, as Geldman would say. Minus the damn.

Daniel still pinioned himself to his chair. “So?”

Sean groaned. “The way that bulb blew? It made me think of lightning, and that made me think of trying electricity as a metaphor. I got as far as this electric spiderweb shooting at me from everywhere. Going right through me, too, but it didn't leave its energy. I should've gotten enough juice to put the whole house in orbit!”

“That's okay. Ambient energy's always passing through us, but we can't hold on to it until we consciously claim it.”

“I was trying. You know, grabbing for it.”

“You just have to figure out the next part of the metaphor. Like, I was trying to dive into my streams at first. Geldman said, be more subtle.”

How subtle did you have to be to grab web? Hold on, though. Spider silk wasn't his real access metaphor—electricity was. A matrix of electricity kind of
like
spider silk, so call it silk lightning. And to catch lightning—

You used a lightning rod.

A lightbulb must have appeared over Sean's head, because Daniel said, “You've got another idea?”

“Maybe.”

“All right, but go easy.” Daniel's laugh was short, a little anxious. “Like I said, I don't dive. I just touch the surface of the heavier water. You, trying an electricity metaphor? Talk about a scary combination.”