The New Magic - The Revelation of Jonah McAllister - Landon Wark (bill gates best books TXT) 📗

he would have told her she had the wrong room. But he imagined he had looked the same way after he had found out.

“How did you do it?” she demanded.

He imagined a more charismatic man would have played coy or maybe closed the door for a moment, but he was nervous. His first thought was that he had just made a huge mistake. He had chosen the wrong person; let the cat out of the bag too early. If she panicked and told anyone about this, there was no telling what he had just unleashed on the world.

“It worked?”

She shoved her hand under his face. Most of the fingers appeared normal, if swollen, but there was a large orange splotch over the thumb, all the way down to the knuckle where the stain traced a semi-circle.

His eyes widened. “It’s not supposed to work on skin.”

In an instant he was pawing through the notebooks, rummaging absently for a pen in the folds of the unmade bed.

“Am I going to get cancer?” she bawled.

“No, of—” Jonah stopped in mid-sentence. Was she going to get cancer? “I don’t think so.”

“You don’t think so?”

“I don’t know. It’s not supposed to work on skin.”

“You don’t know?!”

Jonah marched over to a desk drawer and pulled out a small sound recorder. “Here. Say it exactly like you did before.”

She shoved the recorder away. “Not on your life!”

Tears started to run down her fat, blubbering cheeks. Jonah shied away and went back to pawing through the notebooks. He knew he had a way to counteract this. He had written it down along with the original words a month and a half ago on the bus down from Chicago. He could remember writing it down… he just couldn’t remember exactly where.

Did that one work on skin too?

“I know how to handle this,” he said with all the confidence he could muster.

She sat down on one of the chairs filled with paper, hand to her temple and began to cry. The legs of the chair groaned under her weight.

“Get up!” he yelled.

Shakily she complied and he tore the papers down from the chair, rummaging through them at break-wrist speed. Within his mind’s eye he could see the exact paper he had written it on, but couldn’t remember where he had put it.

“I have to go to the hospital,” she muttered through sobs.

“No you don’t,” he replied frantically.

He was livid. If ever there was a reason why he should not have given her that word, this was it. He had trusted the wrong person and now he was going to pay for it. If she went to the hospital, if she told them what had happened, if the police got wind of it and came looking for him…

He threw half the papers across the room.

If he could just find the one he was looking for.

The sound of the door opening tore him from his search and he held out a hand as the woman set one of her timber-sized legs out onto the concrete walk outside.

“Close that door!” he shouted.

She looked back at him with terrified eyes. He could not honestly say that he was any less terrified, but he knew he could not let her out of that door and let her compromise that which he had worked on for so long, that he had given up his life for. And no one, no matter how large, or how scared was going to destroy it.

“Under no circumstances are you going out that door!”

The hospital was a bad cliché.

Its waiting room was clogged to overflowing with outdated magazines, dripping off the plastic tables with all the zeal of a molasses water park. It didn’t really matter. All the waiting patients were staring at phones anyway. A child scooped wooden beads on a toy in the corner from their resting place, spun them around the thick wires of the device and returned them to rest on the other side. The boy had been at it for about fifteen minutes, never seeming to tire of revolving the small coloured orbs and cubes around the wires. He seemed to prefer the longer wires, looping their convoluted path around the toy. The child pushed them up and smiled as they slid down a curve in the wire, coming to rest in a limbo between ends. Every few minutes or so a bleary announcement would sound over the PA about a car that was parked in the ambulance area.

The receptionist at the front desk leafed through a magazine and yawned.

It had all the urgency of a small town hospital.

Jonah leaned back in his chair and stared blankly at the ceiling, his eye drifting towards the outdated security camera in the corner. Every so often a thin glimmer of hope would make him blink his eyes, the sharp idea that perhaps nothing would happen, that he would be allowed to continue on with his work uninterrupted, only the thinnest sliver of it reaching the light of day, a smoke and mirrors trick of the smallest order. Alternating with that was the idea that he should just run. It was a brash cudgel of a notion that nearly knocked him out of his seat and sent him toward the exit. But each of these ideas was lost in the knowledge that he had failed, that he had always failed and that he would keep failing now matter what he did. He was relegated to knowing he had discovered the most spectacular force in the universe and would never be able to see it be used.

He looked over at the sound of the child clapping; one of the beads had fallen into place at the end of the wire track.

A large form moved down at the end of the hall, blocking out enough light