I wonder if I am talking this much because of the yellow-dress woman, but Aylee says that enchantment stopped back in the ER. No matter. I keep talking and talking, as if I am still under a spell, like all of it is crucial.
Six years later, Aylee is mad at me because another nurse has quit. I point out that I was hired at the hospital to make these corrections. Things can’t be done the way they have always been done, and it is my job to bring best medical practices to Grievance County.
Aylee says I sound like I am reading a news release, and that I don’t have to be such an asshole.
I know there are better ways of saying things, to Aylee and to the nurses, but no one seems to care that the fired nurse injected the wrong medication into a patient’s spine. She was a new graduate who misread a label, and after she left my office, she sat in her car in the lake-size parking lot, smoking a pack of cigarettes and crying through the heavy makeup so many of these young women wear. Standing at my desk, I could watch her through the narrow slit window that collects dust in its bottom curve no matter how often housekeeping cleans.
“Everyone at the hospital is trying to do the right thing,” Aylee says. “There’s not a long line of ‘better’ doctors and nurses just waiting for you to hire them. Not everyone can be persuaded to live in ‘the middle of nowhere.’ That’s what you call it, right? Maybe you regret being here?”
I have said “no” so many times. I am sorry the nurse cried, and I know she didn’t mean to potentially paralyze a nineteen-year-old brand new mother who lives in a trailer and works at Dairy Queen. I just get so frustrated.
This morning Aylee hurries around the grounds of the plantation, greeting the guests with a smile she won’t give me. It is the day of the reunion, so I am trying to make things up to her by keeping our son James distracted and happy.
The plantation house rooms are full, and there are tents and RV’s and even newly conjured houses along the front driveway, temporary pastel bungalows tucked neatly into the spaces between the oaks that canopy the road. On the backside of the house are two hundred guests on the main lawn alone.
A three-acre sheet of blazing green grass runs from the slight sag of the porches down to the river marsh and the docks. Everyone is dressed as though they were attending a horserace, with floppy hats and cravats and the caterers all in black tie. I have settled for khakis and an oxford cloth shirt, and the July heat is almost unbearable.
The reunion lasts all day, from midnight to midnight, and there are hundreds of small traditions and ceremonies that occur with a precision I will never achieve at the medical center. This year it is Aylee’s job to supervise the non-magical tasks—the barbecue and the disposable plates and the red plastic cups of lemonade, the constant need for towels and napkins, the unending generation of garbage. One of the magicians will vanish it all before he leaves, but until then there is a growing pile of green trash bags and horseflies in the muddy flat behind the garage.
James is three years old, and he runs on the grass from spell to spell, taking in as much magic as he can. Xavius has gotten a group of squirrels to come down out of the mossy oak branches and act out Hamlet, complete with English accents and costumes. I stop to watch them change clothes between scenes, the gray rodents buttoning tiny vests and pulling on patent-leather boots.
The French sisters are levitating our dirty white minivan, giving the smaller children flights over the grounds and the wetlands. It will horrify Aylee when she notices because she will wish we had gone to the car wash first. James asks if the sisters will levitate him without the van, but I know his mother would never allow it.
I keep trying to steer him back to Thomas Hart, a seventy-year-old Floridian who walks with a constant joyful bounce and a smile that seems to swivel his neck from side to side. Hart is conjuring bright round bubbles out of a silver pot of boiling liquid that shimmers like metal. Aloft, the bubbles look like soap, and they float along the border between the green lawn and the forest.
One broke wetly on my arm when I wasn’t paying attention and I was filled for a full minute with giddy, overwhelming joy. I couldn’t hold in the laughter that seemed to well up from my toes, and once I stopped laughing I only wanted more. James is uninterested in the bubbles, perhaps because he is already that happy.
“Come, Daddy,” he says, and we chase the other children through twenty different impossible things. The sky is cloudless thin blue, and the glinting bubbles have risen too far away for me to reach.
There are only forty-two of the great magicians still alive, but the ones who can travel always come to reunion. Their children and grandchildren are invited, but as Aylee once told me, none of my generation possesses more than a single spell. Our own children seem bereft of magic entirely.
For many years, the reunion offered a chance to try and teach us new skills, but the pidgin words never worked in our mouths and all the effort just made everyone sad. Now, the reunion has become a party for grandparents to impress and delight their grandchildren.
Tommy is here somewhere, and I saw both of his girls chatting up some shirtless blond boy from Australia. Susan is sitting on the dock, trying not to get too smitten with a randy South African cardiologist who can make his hands glow.
The plantation belongs to Elise, and it will inherit to Aylee and me eventually. Neither of us wants to think about that—we talk as though Elise will live forever. Aylee and I live in a large guesthouse down a path by the river, with its own dock and a shiny red canoe that James and I use to go fishing.
It is eleven in the morning, and my clothes are soaked in sweat. I convince James to ride in the minivan just so I can sit. I want to ride with him because the air conditioning is on, but he says, “No, Daddy, I do it by myself,” and climbs up into his car seat without me.
Instead, I grab a Coke from one of the ice-filled coolers and rest in the shade of a magnolia. A group of the old-timers shout happily, waving at us from down by the marsh where they are doing something complicated with the fish. I wave back but keep my seat.
The minivan floats into the sky above me, inelegant and slow even when enchanted. I look back down, disappointed, and I find Elise sitting beside me, levitating just an inch over the jumble of roots between us. “Come on, honey,” she says, taking my hand. “It’s time for the competition.” She nods toward the sisters, who curtsy in return. “They’ll bring James when he’s done.”
The competition dates back to the death of my father, two years after his heart attack. After his hospitalization we still went to see him but for much shorter visits. Most of the contempt was wrung out of him, and he would contemplate us sadly while sipping a beer. When he died we brought him to the plantation, thinking that even his remains might have the potential for mischief.
He is buried a quarter mile into the forest, on a small hill above a black water creek.
When we put him into the ground the soil was carpeted in kudzu and jasmine, but three weeks after the interment it was all blasted to red clay and sticks. Now nothing grows. Each year the great magicians try to conjure some plant that can survive in the soil. The closest anyone has come is Tommy, who summoned a rosebush that flowered but then turned to black glass.
Midwinter a dead pine tree fell across the obsidian and shattered everything to the ground. I cleaned up the shards so that no one would get cut, and I used a chainsaw to take down the ring of dead pines. Now the pine trees farther away from the grave are turning an unhealthy brown.
Elise and I arrive just as they begin, and I sit on top of a tree stump. Elsevier and Freddy are working as a team, circling their arms on either side of the headstone. A bright pink mist forms in the air between them, then settles at their feet. Once it reaches the soil, it crackles electrically, and we watch as a thin mat of grass pushes out of the ground.
Another magician cheers, but then the blades begin to launch themselves into the air like rockets. They fly up o
ver our heads, then float down to the clay, already brittle and brown.
Freddy smiles, shaking his head, and he and Elsevier embrace in a one-armed hug. “Good try, good try,” someone says, and then Temo Gowdry steps up to take her turn.
The series of spells that unfold over the next hour are stunning. The magicians spend months planning for this, and they do things of such complexity and beauty that I already feel nostalgic for the moment I am watching right now.
I am afraid for them to succeed. It feels as if that will end things, and then they will never come back, and it will only be us children remembering everything that used to be possible.
In the end it doesn’t matter. By the time the French sisters arrive, the magicians of the competition have all been defeated.
James has gotten his wish so that he floats in the air just ahead of them, his dirty sneakers dangling two feet above the trail. He giggles and stretches his hands out for me, and after a moment’s thought I take him into my arms and then walk smirking onto Dad’s grave. I place James firmly on top of it and together we raise our fists in triumph. Even the most frustrated of the contestants laugh. A few take turns coming up to tousle his hair.
Most of the magicians fly back to the grounds, but Elise takes the time to walk with me. I put James onto my shoulders and the three of us set out.
“So what have you done this time?” Elise asks.
I tell her about the nurse and she laughs. “You’re so earnest,” she says, squeezing my hand and swinging it slightly between us. “Always trying to fix things. You think if you had more spells, you could make the world better. That’s sweet, but it’s not how magic works.” She waves her free hand and two ice cream cones appear in the air, floating just ahead of us as we move down the path.
James leans over my head to reach one, crushing my neck downward. I sit him back up, and he dribbles the first drops of ice cream into my hair.
“You have to stop trying so hard,” Elise says. “Magic is about the ephemeral, the things that come and go. Nothing changes with magic. It doesn’t save lives. It makes you giggle. It makes a floating ice cream cone.”
We come around the broad curve of an oak and back out onto the lawn. Elise considers the party with a grin so wide it finds a few small lines at the corners of her mouth. “Get yours before it melts, honey. You’ll be fine when we’re gone.” She pats my arm firmly, then steps away into the crowd.
Out on the grass, everyone is happy. James twists above me, digging his legs deeper into my shoulders as he searches the crowd for Aylee.
We find her at one of the picnic tables, with her back to us and watching the party. She has pulled her hair up, tied it into a knot and run it though with pencils. She is bright in a blue sundress, holding an icy cup of lemonade to her forehead and smiling at the chaos around her.
I take a bite of my ice cream and I can feel the cold in my skin. Goosebumps lift on my arms as if the chill were in the air.
At first I think I am enchanted, but then I am sure I am not. I take another bite and, almost shivering, I blow my wife a kiss until a stream of white snowflakes tumbles past my lips.
They float through the hot air until each one lands, wet and icy, on the curve of her neck. Aylee jumps up and yells, and when she sees that it is us she tilts her head, puzzled and rubbing the cold water from her skin. “How?” she asks.
The only answer is that I have finally figured out my spell.
I blow more snowflakes up into the air and a half-acre blizzard settles around us, melting to rain at its edges. James, who has never seen snow, swings his arms about wildly, trying to catch as many flakes as he can. They come down so thick that I can no longer see the house or the marsh. Even the sound of the party is muffled.
Standing in the quiet cold, I know that I could cover the whole reunion with a snowstorm they would talk about for years. Instead, I walk toward my wife, and for the first time in days she gives me a lopsided smile.
Adramelech
written by
Sean Hazlett
illustrated by
Aituar Manas
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sean Patrick Hazlett is an Army veteran living with his wife and three children in the San Francisco Bay area, where he works at a cybersecurity company. His short stories have appeared in publications such as Galaxy’s Edge, Abyss & Apex, Grimdark Magazine, and Sci Phi Journal, among others. He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, a master’s in public policy from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and bachelor’s degrees in history and electrical engineering from Stanford University. Before graduate school, he served as an Armored Cavalry officer at the Army’s National Training Center in Fort Irwin, California, where he trained US forces for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
He considers writing as therapy that pays for itself. This tale is his seventeenth submission to Writers of the Future, proving that stubborn determination and persistence will win out in the end.
ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR
Aituar Manas is also the illustrator for “Obsidian Spire” in this volume. For more information about Aituar, please see his bio here.
Adramelech
I dreamt of a peacock. Not the majestic fowl in all its pomp and beauty, but a twisted and perverted chimera. Blackened, burnt and torn plumage radiated from its serpentine form. Jaundiced eyes, both human and animal, infested its spotted feathers. Each eye shone with what struck me as a keen and malevolent intelligence.
I woke to find myself scribbling arcane symbols in my daily ledger—strange, indecipherable glyphs. Though executed by my own hand, the writing was more precise and beautiful than mine. It was so small, I considered using a magnifying glass to make out the wedge-shaped marks. My phantom hand had filled all two hundred pages with this inscrutable script in the course of one night.
As I turned the pages to marvel at this prodigious effort, I stumbled upon several revolting illustrations. Children boiling in kettle pots, inverted crucifixions, and the dismemberment of babes—these were but a few of the horrors I witnessed on the ledger’s sacrilegious sheets.
As I leafed through the tome, a crushing sense of melancholy suffocated me. It was as if a sickly film of somber gray had occluded my vision. After turning the book’s profane pages, it took all the energy I had to rise from my bed.
I should’ve burnt the accursed book on the spot, but its artisanal quality was unrivaled. Despite its corruption, it had a dark beauty that made it impossible for me to feed it to the flame.
The urge to destroy the blasphemous text waned, while my curiosity about its contents waxed. So I wrapped the book in burlap and brought it to my dear friend, Alastair Moorcock, Professor of Hebrew and Semitic Languages at the University of Glasgow.
A Christ-fearing man, I had never resorted to outright deception before, but I feared Moorcock would name me a madman if I’d told him the truth. So instead, I concocted a story about how I’d uncovered the ledger in some flea-bitten apothecary shop in West London.
Surrounded by dusty books lining his walls or arranged on the floor in haphazard piles, Moorcock cultivated an aura of aristocratic intellectualism. With a keen eye and a strong sentimentality for the past, he refused modern conveniences, preferring the illumination of candlelight to one of Edison’s incandescent light bulbs.
“Where did you really find this?” he demanded, his waxed whiskers vibrating as he stared intensely at me from his cramped study.
“What do you mean?” I said, playing coy.
“This text is written in Sumerian cuneiform, in ink, and on a modern ledger, not chiseled on a stone tablet.”
“That is rather unnerving,” I admitted.
“If I may ask,” Moorcock continued, “which apothecary shop sold you this forgery? I should very much like to meet the shopkeeper. He seems to be an exceptionally well-educated man. Only a handful of academics poss
ess the scholarship to identify these glyphs; even fewer know enough to translate, let alone write them.”
I lowered my head, embarrassed. If I continued this charade, Moorcock would summarily expose my lie. Then I’d get no help from him at all. So I confessed. “My deepest apologies, Professor Moorcock. I didn’t find this at an apothecary shop. I composed it last night. The truth is so preposterous I reasoned you’d more likely accept the lie. Regardless of the text’s origin, I very much require your expertise.”
His eyebrow arched. His jaw tightened. “Mr. Brooks, how is it you’re incapable of reading something you wrote?”
He had a point. So I tried a different approach. “It matters not how this ledger came to be in my possession. What’s important is that we decipher its contents. You’re the first and only person I’ve sought for guidance, because I’m convinced that your curiosity will outweigh your concerns about how I acquired this book.”
Moorcock cupped his chin in his hand in what appeared to be a moment of consideration. “You didn’t steal it, did you?” he asked in a manner suggesting that’s exactly how he thought I’d come by it.
I smiled and shook my head. “Of course not.”
“Very well then. Let’s have a look,” he said, rolling up his sleeves. He opened the tome and squinted at the first page.
“Here,” I said, handing him my magnifying glass.
He took it without saying a word and began his examination. He traced his index finger across the page in a steady hand. As he read, his eyes widened.
Then they rolled back into his head until I saw nothing but their whites. He raised his head, turning away from the ledger. He smiled in a most unsettling manner.
“And so it begins,” he cackled. “For your assistance in this life and for your eternal servitude once you pass beyond death’s veil, I will grant you the power to inhabit the bodies of others. What say you to my offer?”