Casey returned around noon on Tuesday, bringing in a load of groceries he’d bought on the way back, and greeted him cheerfully. Elijah helped him carry in and put away the groceries, and ate lunch with him, then returned to cataloguing books until suppertime. That evening in his bedroom, he took a paperback copy of Huckleberry Finn from the shelf – he hadn’t read it since high school – and tried casting the search spell. “Where is the passage where Huck disguises himself as a girl?”
Information spells required making a series of hand gestures, rather than tracing symbols on part of one’s body or speaking aloud. At first he wasn’t sure if he could interpret the diagrams in the book correctly; he’d tried to learn ASL from a book one time and failed dismally until he had a chance to take a class on it at church. But somehow once he started trying to practice, he felt pretty confident that he was making at least approximately the right gestures. This one, he managed to cast successfully on the fifth try. But it wasn’t a showy spell. He just suddenly knew what to do; he picked up the book, opened it a little more than halfway through, and his eyes fell on the exact paragraph:
Next morning I said it was getting slow and dull, and I wanted to get a stirring up some way. I said I reckoned I would slip over the river and find out what was going on. Jim liked that notion; but he said I must go in the dark and look sharp. Then he studied it over and said, couldn’t I put on some of them old things and dress up like a girl? That was a good notion, too. So we shortened up one of the calico gowns, and I turned up my trouser-legs to my knees and got into it. Jim hitched it behind with the hooks, and it was a fair fit. I put on the sun-bonnet and tied it under my chin, and then for a body to look in and see my face was like looking down a joint of stove- pipe. Jim said nobody would know me, even in the daytime, hardly. I practiced around all day to get the hang of the things, and by and by I could do pretty well in them, only Jim said I didn’t walk like a girl; and he said I must quit pulling up my gown to get at my britches-pocket. I took notice, and done better.
That was a nifty spell that he’d be using a lot in the future, he could tell. But it was no use for demonstrating to Casey, so for the next couple of hours until he went to bed, he practiced the light spell until he could cast it four times out of five. By Thursday evening, he could cast it right five times out of five; he had an assortment of glowing coins, keys, books, and knick-knacks on his bedside table, collectively bright enough to read small print by, and had to stuff them all into a drawer to make it dark enough to get to sleep.
Friday morning at breakfast, he was going to tell Casey about the book and the spells, but hesitated, and decided to give it one more evening of spell practice before telling him on Saturday morning. After another day of cataloguing, he went back to his bedroom and cast the light spell on a coin, then on another, and another, then on each of the keys on his key-ring…
There was a rap at the bedroom door. Elijah hastily swept all the glowing objects off the bedside table into the drawer, closed it, and went to open the door.
“Phone for you,” Casey said. “Your girlfriend, I think. Sorry, fiancee.”
“Oh, right,” Elijah said, and went to the kitchen to pick up the receiver, feeling guilty. He hadn’t called Monica in almost a week; he’d been so obsessed with the book and the spells. “Hi, sweetie,” he said. “Sorry I haven’t called…”
After he got off the phone forty-five minutes later, he thought about going straight to bed, but decided to cast the light spell a few more times. By the time he’d cast it four more times, he had a headache, so he took a couple of Tylenol before going to bed. He’d definitely tell Casey about it tomorrow.
“So,” he said to Casey the next morning as they cleaned up the breakfast dishes, “I have something to show you. It’s related to an unusual book I found…”
“Unusual how? Rare or what?” During their shared mealtimes, Elijah had several times told him about his latest discoveries – first editions, autographed books, books unusual for their content or format.
“Very rare, but also unusual in its subject matter. Give me a minute, I’ll go get it.” He could cast the light spell from memory now, but he wanted to have the book open in front of him just in case.
“I’ll meet you in the living room,” Casey said, putting the last bowl in the dishwasher.
Elijah entered the living room a couple of minutes later, his heart pounding. In his pocket he had some of the coins he’d been casting the light spell on. First, he showed the book to Casey, who took it carefully and looked at the spine and cover. “It doesn’t look that old… What language is – Oh, wait, is it that language nobody could identify? Did you finally find out what it is?”
“I found out what it is,” Elijah said. “You can’t read it? It looks like some language written in a strange alphabet?”
“Uh, yeah… what are you talking about?”
“When I first picked it up, it looked like it was in that language nobody could identify. And like most of the other books in that language, it looked like it was at least eighty years old, based on the type of binding and the typeface…”
He went on to tell Casey about his discovery, how the book had changed in his hands so the cover, title page, introduction and first chapter were in English, and then about the contents of those pages.
“And have you already tried casting the spells?” Casey asked eagerly.
“The first chapter said I’d probably have to cast them a number of times before I got any results. So I didn’t want to show it to you right away before I tried them… I practiced each of them until I could cast it at least once, and one of them, I kept practicing until I could cast it every time. Here.” He took the book back from Casey, took a nickel out of his pocket, turned to the exercises at the end of chapter one, and read the spell aloud, making the coin glow.
“It’s, uh, a bit more impressive with the lights out,” he said. “I can cast another one, but I’m not sure I can get it right on the first try, and it’s a little embarrassing… and the third one isn’t very impressive. It doesn’t look like magic at all, it just helps you remember something.”
“Can you cast it on me and make me remember something I’ve forgotten?” Casey said, getting up, closing the curtains, and turning off the light. He stared at the glowing nickel sitting on top of one of the stacks of books on the coffee table.
“No, at least not yet. It only works on me, as far as I can tell.”
Casey turned the light back on and looked at the open book, at the text that was legibly printed English to Elijah but apparently unreadable to him. “Read some of it aloud,” he urged. “Something interesting.”
So Elijah turned back to the introduction and read part of it, skipping the “Miss Hudnall” part, which was too embarrassing even if it was just a ridiculous error on the part of the mysterious “editors.” But he need not have bothered. “You’re not making sense,” Casey said. “It sounds like you’re speaking a foreign language.”
“Huh,” Elijah said. “I don’t know how this works. Maybe if I paraphrase it instead of just reading aloud?”
“Do you think if I pick up one of the other books in that language, it will turn into English for me?” he asked.
“I have no idea. I’ve told you pretty much everything I know.”
“Show me the other spells, please.”
So Elijah cast the growth spell, tracing the spell-symbols on the back of his left hand, and on the third try he got his nails to grow half an inch. After clipping them, he looked around the shelves in the living room and saw a copy of The Emerald City of Oz, which wasn’t with the other Oz books in one of the guest bedrooms, for some reason.
“Okay,” he said, taking the book from the shelf, “I haven’t read this in several years, and I vaguely remember that Dorothy visited some town where the people were like 3D jigsaw puzzles? But I don’t remember where in the book it was. Anyway, if I had an ebook, I could search for the word ‘jigsaw’ and probably find it, but with a paper book I’ve already read, I can cast this…” He made the spell gestures; it took two tries, but it didn’t seem like Casey knew where one attempt left off and the next began. He immediately opened the book to the exact page, and showed it to Casey.
“Nifty!” he said. “None of those spells are all that impressive in themselves, but just the fact that magic exists… and Uncle Eugene apparently owned – how many books did you say he had in that language?”
“There were thirteen in my office, and then I found this one in my bedroom. I guess there could be others scattered around the house.”
“Find out. That’s your first priority, ahead of cataloguing any other books; search all the shelves and piles of books, and see if there are any others like it. And show me the ones you know about.”
They went to Elijah’s office, and Casey handled each of them for a couple of minutes – longer than Elijah had held his when he was taking it to the office to reshelve it – but none of them changed for him. Elijah thought he was growing increasingly frustrated with each book he held that didn’t change for him, though he was trying not to show it.
None of the books changed for Elijah, either. He had a feeling he’d have to master all the spells in his beginner book before he would be able to read the others.
“I think maybe this explains some things about Uncle Eugene,” Casey said as he cradled the seventh of those presumably magic books in his hands, waiting in vain for it to change or unveil itself. “Like how he got so lucky with his investments. You said one of those branches of magic deals with information and knowledge; maybe he could predict what stocks were going to do? Or just get insider information that nobody outside the company would normally know?”
“I don’t know much about what else that kind of magic can do,” Elijah said. “I’ll let you know when I find out. But I wanted to ask you… can I buy this book from you? Since, uh, you know, I can read it – at least part of it – and you can’t…”
Casey was silent for a moment, setting down the book he’d been holding and picking up the next one, slowly turning the pages. “Yeah. I mean, no. I’ll give it to you, on a couple of conditions.”
“What conditions?” Elijah asked, dreading the answer.
“Promise to try to figure out how I can use magic, too. And if you learn some more practical spells later on, things that would apply to some of my problems, promise you’ll use them to help me? I’ll pay you for your time, and for your travel expenses if you’ve moved somewhere else by the time you learn some spell I can see a use for.”
“As for helping you learn magic, I barely know where to start,” Elijah said. "But… I promise I’ll think about it and do my best to figure it out. I’ll probably have to learn a lot more than what’s in the first chapter to have any chance of helping you. Or even to know if it’s possible.
“And for helping you with spells I haven’t learned yet… I don’t know if I can make a blanket promise when I don’t know what spells might come along later or what you might ask me to use them for? I won’t do anything immoral or illegal. What if the book wants to teach me a mind control spell or something like that?”
“I promise I won’t ask you for anything immoral or illegal,” Casey said. “At least as I see it – if we see things differently, we’ll have to talk it over when that point arrives. Just keep in touch, and keep me informed of what new spells you’ve learned, even after you leave here when the cataloguing is finished.”
“What kind of things are you thinking of?”
Casey looked at him carefully. “Oh, like if you get a spell for controlling plants, maybe you could help me tame the garden. Or a spell for helping someone learn foreign languages easily – that’d be nice, with all these books I can’t read lying around.” He laughed, but something told Elijah that that was an evasive answer – there was something else he wanted more than those things, and he wasn’t ready to talk about it. Elijah hoped they wouldn’t come into conflict over something Casey wanted and Elijah thought was wrong.
Elijah hoped they wouldn’t come into conflict over something Casey wanted and Elijah thought was wrong.
Don't worry... I get the impression it's the same thing you want.
I hope so!
hehehe
“Where is the passage where Huck disguises himself as a girl?”
hehe, the strangest scenes stick in people's memories sometimes... obviously no rhyme or reason to it
Thanks for the chapter :)
hmm well it's not nail growth. Wonder what it could be
Remember that the version in chapter one of the spellbook only works on the caster, and how Casey seemed disappointed about that.
@TrismegistusShandy
???
Casey's reaction to that spell in particular doesn't seem to be described at all... is that in a future chapter or something you edited away, maybe?
@foxoftheasterisk Hmm, maybe. It's been a good few months since I edited the final draft of this. (I schedule the chapters to appear on Scribblehub way ahead of time.)