imagination had learned how difficult it was to discover anything truly fantastic in the world that could live up to the stranger’s description. There was no need for him to rush, like a foolish child, to that water’s edge.
The early minutes passed, and John thought it a cunning ploy on part of the performer to have his spectator tie those chains. A spectator would not know how to make them strong.
Yet in the middle moments that followed, John wondered if perhaps he underestimated his ability to create shackles. Knots certainly seemed a technique his conservative father may have tried to teach him. There would have been little fun in devoting a weekend to such a goal, and John wondered if he had perhaps forgotten such a lesson. Maybe he owned that knowledge after all, and maybe that was enough to give the stranger more of a challenge than John may have first supposed.
And then the latter moments trudged tortuously forward, and a panic came to cloud John’s brain like a thick, choking fog. The idea that he knew anything about tying knots suddenly felt absurd. He was only a dull, young man who still found it difficult to shrug aside childish wants, a man who had no logical argument for knowing the first thing about properly manipulating chains. Perhaps he had unknowingly created a knot that was too strong. Perhaps he had rashly ignored the dangers of his ignorance. Perhaps at that moment the stranger was drowning an anguished death, violently shaking against some inexplicably strong knot tied into the chains by the hands of a fool. Perhaps at that moment, the corpse was beginning to swell at the bottom of the pool, a victim of a trick ruined by the fingers of the ignorant.
John surprised himself by reacting so quickly, leaping head-first into the cold water with his sneakers still securely tied to his feet. The chlorine stung at his eyes, and the deep water intensified the night’s darkness, refusing to allow John’s eyes to find the missing magician. John waved his arms. His lungs burned. He lasted longer beneath the surface than he suspected he could, but John relented and clawed to the surface, resigned to face whatever consequence would be heaped atop a fool who dared to think he knew how to tie proper knots into a magician's bundle of chain.
“Bravo!” Applause echoed through John’s soggy ears. “You stayed under longer than I thought you would. Might have a bit of the magic man inside of you.”
John blinked the lingering chlorine out of his eyes, but the stranger’s form remained staring upon him. The stranger sat cross-legged on the high dive’s plank and laughed at the soaked boy who had jumped into the waters with the thought to rescue something made more of smoke than of bone.
The stranger winked. “That last part of the trick is my favorite.”
“You asshole,” water drooled from between John’s teeth.
The stranger took little offense. “Oh, I so love it when you all take the plunge. I wonder how long it will take you to realize how deep a body of water you just jumped into.”
John pounded at his ear to bring out a trapped drop. “You just waited until I jumped in myself. I don’t believe it.”
But John quickly regretted his words. The moonlight passed between the clouds, and the details came more clearly into sight. John had not been in the water for long, but somehow the stranger had slipped back into his clean clothes without a sign of dampness. John gazed around the pool to find the chains, and he had begun to assume they had sunk to the pool’s bottom before he saw a dark thing slither toward him. Alarmed, he yelped and kicked toward the side of the pool. Amazed, John watched the bundle he swore was a serpent transform into winding set of iron chains that miraculously floated atop the water despite the most basic physics John had ever learned. The chains stopped just before they reached him, and the iron bounced atop the ripples for a magical moment before they accepted the rule of water and succumbed to the deep.
“I don’t believe it.” In a heartbeat, John became one of the converted.
The stranger shook his head. “But didn’t I tell you before I jumped that it was your job to believe?”
“I still don’t believe it.” John stared at the stranger who looked upon him from the high dive.
The stranger shrugged. “And that is why the magician never earns any lasting power. In the end, mankind so seldom chooses to, truly, believe.”
Thus John Johnson became hooked on the tricks of the chain. The magic surrounding the knots felt childish, but the danger of the water was certainly adult. Sneaking late into his bedroom window that night to such an average home, John Johnson failed to find any dreamy repose. Instead, he waited for the morning, imagining how light the chains might one day feel around his ankles and wrists. At morning he took the new name Nikolo Woosely. He knew that his new name would forever be a charlatan and fake, one that likely sounded too thin to be an anchor for a family bloodline of his own. But he thought it sounded both Slavic and sly, and that combination seemed to him good enough for a magician. He skipped his senior finals before the next weekend, and hopped aboard a freight train in pursuit of the stranger who, through the elements of earth, wind, fire, and water, turned him into an addict.
Nikolo Woosely never found that stranger, but he learned how to earn a meal with simple card tricks he picked up on the search. He learned the best places along the road to find sleep. This too Nikolo considered good training for a magician, and many months passed to turn him into a rakish and darkly tanned man very familiar with the needed means of survival to continue his chase of a dream.
By the time Nikolo Woosely approached Harry Harvishier for tutelage, he was nearly invisible, hardly a man anything more than a shade. Harry heard that young man’s plea and recognized the addiction that Nikolo Woosely would have to forever onward face.
Harry recognized it in Nikolo’s haggard eyes, as he had recognized it so often before, when the influence of diabolical creatures was far more than a dream to mortal mankind. Harry recognized it and knew he could not deny another pupil.
For ill or for good, Harry offered that almost invisible young man his instruction with a phrase he always regretted having to say.
“Damn it, boy. I see someone’s let the genie back out of the bottle.”
Blaine Woosely has cleansed his blood's addiction to keep a bargain, and his efforts are surprised with the gift of an empty home isolated amid the wide acres of the flatland. Keeping the blood clean proves difficult. Blaine lacks meaningful endeavor to pump through his veins. Long living in shadow, the sunlight burns his sensitive skin. With little family or friends, Blaine's isolation gives easy opportunity for the craving to again clutch his heart.
Danger compounds Blaine's challenge. A custodian of the dark world Blaine chooses to escape lurks within the vast landscape surrounding the new home, determined to prevent a return to the bright realm of the living. A ruthless creature of the sharp teeth, he will stop at nothing to pull Blaine back into the shadows to preserve the secrets of such darkness.
Unknown to Blaine, an ancestral history of tragedy and compassion still resides in the home, manifested in the parlor that gathers no dust, in the shuffling scratching beyond the ceiling, in a music box that chimes though no fingers wind its mechanism. Blaine knows no details of his family s past, but the heredity of his blood contains a needed hope.
And one remains who remembers Blaine s bloodline. For Blaine's ancestors once made the sacrifice of a bountiful feast with no expectation of payment, and the smoke of such an offering charmed an ancient man of magic.
It is this ancient magician who knocks upon Blaine's threshold to call Blaine's attention to the cords that bind him. Fate summons the old visitor to those lonely acres to teach the home's new master the trick of the chain, and the gift of bundled iron might provide the power to keep Blaine living in the light.
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About the Writer
Brian S. Wheeler calls Hillsboro, Illinois home, a town of roughly 6,000 in the middle of the flatland. He grew up in Carlyle, Illinois, a community less than an hour away from Hillsboro, where he spent a good amount of his childhood playing wiffle ball and tinkering on his computer. The rural Midwest inspires much of Brian's work, and he hopes any connections readers might make between his fiction and the places and peoples he has had the pleasure to know are positive.
Brian earned a degree in English from Eastern Illinois University in Charleston, Illinois. He has taught high school English and courses in composition and creative writing. Imagination has been