11. A Darker Shade of Pale
"Well, if you ask me, there's something not quite right with the dude… I can't put my finger on it, but something is just… off, somehow." Giovanni had Circe and Garret nodding their head, as they walked behind Mr Wozniak, trying to keep up with him. Giovanni had asked what was going on, and Mr Wozniak hadn't answered yet. "He reminded me of Michael Jackson…"
"Look, he's a Professor of the School, so I don't wanna hear any disparaging comments about him, you hear? If we rushed in is because mister Johannsen's security system detected something hinky going on in the basement, alright?"
"Hinky, how?"
"Well, y'all should've appeared in his monitors wherever you were in the lodge and… Yes, miss Circe, those stories about kids getting lost are not true. Well, they are true, but we've always found them… eventually. Anyway, you four guys didn't quite register there for a while: you were kinda phasing in 'n' out, and the alarms went off. The alarms go off if there are any unauthorized or unrecognizable Acts of Magick. So Johannsen came and got me, and on the way to the basement we came across Agatha, and then we went together to check on you guys. Agatha was upset because we couldn't open the door for nuttin'! Not brute force, not Magick, nothing worked. And I gotta tell you, if anyone could open any door, that'd be Agatha. But she couldn't and she got kinda pissed off, I guess. But then it opened by itself, you guys are okay, everything's fine. That's it! End of story: Bye-bye."
"Wait a minute! You mean to tell me that you guys spy on us all the time?" Giovanni felt oppressed by Big Brother, already.
"We don't spy on you!" Mr Wozniak rolled his eyes as he said it. "We just track you around the lodge. What? You thought we were gonna let fifty teenagers run around loose in the house? I don't think so! Anyway, here we are: get in and find a seat." They had arrived to the Rune Room, as the Practicals classroom was known.
This time around, there were only another eight students from the other pods in there so they didn't have to squeeze in anywhere. They just plopped down at the front.
"Okay, then, we were reviewing some advanced concepts here. Giovanni, if you want to, go ahead and continue working on your homework while we all carry on here. This review we are having, you won't catch up with it until next week, so…"
"Mister Wozniak, sir!" Giovanni interrupted with a raised hand. "Please, may I try to perform an Act of Magick?"
"Erm… Well, why not? But try something easy, to begin with, alright?"
"Yes, sir!" Giovanni bounded up and went to stand by the bucket-full of flares. He stood there for a few seconds, frowning in concentration, and then whispered, "well, here goes nuttin'!"
Giovanni grabbed a flare from the bucket and lit it.
The other children laughed. Garret actually grabbed his ankles and rolled around on the floor, he was laughing so hard.
"Okay, now, quiet down children! Giovanni, you started at the last step! Look, first…"
But Giovanni still had that frown of utter concentration on his face, with the cords of his wrist standing out from the effort. Suddenly, with a flash of blue from in between his fingers, he opened his hand and, at the same moment, the flare went out and appeared as if it had never been lit.
"Wow!!" Circe got to her feet and came closer, with the rest of the children trailing right behind her, all of them with "ooh's" and "ahh's," and everyone asking, "hey, how'd he do that?" Even Garret was impressed.
But Mr Wozniak had closed his eyes to slits and asked in a dangerous voice, "Who taught you to do that? Tell me now!!"
"Chillax, dawg! I figured it out by myself: the circle, the triangle, and all that hocus-pocus is only to help you get psyched up. But if you concentrate hard enough, you can do all those steps in your mind!"
"First of all, you will address me as…" But Mr Wozniak didn't have time to put Giovanni in his place, because precisely at that moment all the flares lit up at once, making the metal bucket warp and making the stool and the blackboard catch on fire, too. "Holy fuck on wheels! Alright, kids, no screaming, and stand against the wall, I'll take care of this!"
Mr Wozniak grabbed a pendant he wore under his shirt and clasped it in his hands while he whispered several nonsense words, and then spread his hands towards the blaze. The fires went out as if someone had thrown a switch, but everything was charred and the smoke was thick all around them.
"Alright, then, all you kids: out the door and wait for me outside. Wingrove, not so fast: you come and help me open all the windows!"
Once they were all outside and the windows had been opened, Mr Wozniak and Giovanni rejoined the group.
"Okay, pay attention, kids! Apparently, mister Wingrove skipped a few pages in his handouts, because one of the first things you all learned was the principle of equivalent exchange, from Alchemy, remember?" Everyone nodded. Giovanni started going from pale because of the fright, to bright red. He didn't know if he felt chagrin at causing yet another weird accident in his long history of being the weird-accident-causer, or anger at being singled out by the teacher. "What mister Wingrove did wrong was to forget that he has to offer an exchange of energy for the Act. How much energy does one need to effect Magick?" He asked at no one in particular.
"A twentyfold exchange," ten children chorused at once.
"That's right. That's why we have charts of equivalences, to avoid what happened today. Mister Wingrove managed to produce a negative feedback: the Magick had no source to channel the energy needed, and so it grabbed it from whatever was handy. Luckily, this time there was only the fire, which will be cleaned up presently by mister Wingrove. But the recoil can be unpredictable, and the Magick could've taken hold of someone's lifeforce instead. It wouldna killed anyone for something so simple, like Wingrove's flare trick, but it woulda given some unlucky person at least a really bad headache! So, remember what you saw today, and always remember the basics! Now, mister Wingrove, at the next hallway, turn left and the first door to your right is a closet. There you'll find all the supplies needed to clean up my classroom. I'll be back for you in one hour. Let's go, kids, and finish our class outside. I hate the smell of burnt cushions! Every year someone always manages to light them up…"
Giovanni stood there for a few moments, and then went looking for a broom.
***
One hour later, most of the debris was neatly bagged against the wall, and Giovanni had swept the best he could, which wasn't saying much.
"Ooo, boy! Mrs. Staab is gonna love you for making her crew clean up this mess after you!" Mr Wozniak seemed to be in a much better mood. "Look, Giovanni, what we do in The School is to teach those who have the Magick that they must be always responsible in the way the use it. I have arranged for you to spend the rest of the evening with doctor Doe, so that you can get a better perspective of what is like to live a normal life and be part of the society, even though you have the Magick in you. C'mon, put the broom down and follow me, I'll take you to her classroom."
"Were you mad because I cheated and skipped some lessons?"
"No, no, not really! I was upset because usually it's the dark magic that uses many shortcuts. I thought you were going down the wrong path, and I wanted to know if a student had told you to do it in order to get you in trouble…" Mr Wozniak didn't have to name them, but it seemed to Giovanni that the Thompsons might be kids that would know some of those shortcuts. "Tell me: did you really figure it out by yourself, that you didn't need the circle and triangle?"
"Uh-huh! Well, actually, the whole idea came into my head when the Benoni guy was telling us stuff a while ago."
"You mean Professor Benoni," Mr Wozniak looked threatening again. "What was he talking about?"
"Well, since he asked us to keep it a secret, I guess I better tell you, then! He said that humans do not act by reason, but that their bodies control what reason tells them to do. So I thought that the whole thing about drawing lines and crazy doodles was not about having the right idea in your head, but about making your body act a certain way. And then your body would let your mind do whatever it wanted… Or something like that. I don't know, when I try to think it in words it kinda almost don't make no sense. But if I let my body do it, it's pretty simple, really… What? What I do now?" Giovanni looked alarmed to see Mr Wozniak looking at him through slitted eyes again.
"You did nothing wrong. But listen, this kind of thing we don't teach to our children, okay? In none of the teaching programs of The School we talk about this, to anyone at all. So I need you to promise me that you will not try again to short-circuit the Magick, alright? I want you to promise me, especially your most solemn promise, that you will not speak to the other children about this. I will let them all think that you had an unfortunate accident, and you will do likewise. Promise?"
"Fine…" Giovanni still hated secrecy, and now he seemed to be keeping secrets about one thing, but for two different reasons. So he didn't actually said the word 'promise'.
They arrived again at the hallway with no doors, but Mr Wozniak pressed a different plank this time. The same hidden door opened, but the stairs now went upwards. Giovanni was probably too lost in thought, so he didn't comment on such an odd event. Or, maybe he was finally coming to terms with the Magick. So he just climbed the stairs, lost in thought. They reached the top of the stairs, and Mr Wozniak was just about to knock on the door when Professor Benoni opened it suddenly, drawing yet another profane exclamation from Mr Wozniak.
"Professor Benoni! Sorry, but I was expecting doctor Doe to come to the door, is all!"
"Ah, yes! The good doctor stepped out for a moment and will be back presently. Allow me to take young Wingrove into the room, and I will remain here until wonderful Jane returns, yes?"
"Erm… Ah, well, I mean to say, after what happened a couple hours ago, I don't know if Agatha will be okay with me leaving the kid here and…"
"Yes, all is quite well, rest assured!" While they had this interchange, professor Benoni had managed to pull Giovanni into the room by the arm, and was slowly, but decidedly closing the door on Mr Wozniak. "Not to worry, I'm sure our doctor will make her appearance in a matter of moments! No, my good man, do not fret! Thank you! Will see you at supper!"
The door was closed already, and Giovanni finally noticed that he was quite alone with Benoni, and that once again the lighting in the room did not quite match the time of the day. It looked exactly like the Theory classroom. Benoni took a step closer to Giovanni and started talking.
"While we wait, allow me to ask you this: What if humans evolved their capacity for Magick as a kind of last resort against the cruel world? What if the primitive brains of the proto-humans couldn't deal with reality as it is, and developed Magick to avoid having to look at the Universe right smack in the face? What if the Magick was gone, what would we see? What do you think the world really looks like? Very well, I'll see you next week. Good-bye, for now!"
Giovanni's eyes suddenly watered and he blinked hard. When he opened his eyes again after a moment, he found himself standing in a completely different room which looked like a nice and cozy attic, and a very short woman in her late thirties, with short, straight hair and an elfin face was standing at the opposite end of the room, by the only window.
"Thank you for coming, I am doctor Jane Doe, your Social Integration teacher. Did you come here by yourself? Anyway, please knock on the door next time, instead of just letting yourself in, like you just did. Please, come and sit down, we have much to talk about."
Giovanni had never been so afraid in his life: What if he had gone insane, and all this was happening only inside his head? Or, maybe Drill Sargeant Doakes from his most recent military academy had finally got so fed up with Giovanni's attitude that had shot him on the head, like he kept threatening to do for the past month, and all this had been a hallucination while his brain waited to run out of oxygen and finally die. Or, maybe…
Giovanni was afraid because maybe this was really real, and it was actually happening.
"Well, if you ask me, there's something not quite right with the dude… I can't put my finger on it, but something is just… off, somehow." Giovanni had Circe and Garret nodding their head, as they walked behind Mr Wozniak, trying to keep up with him. Giovanni had asked what was going on, and Mr Wozniak hadn't answered yet. "He reminded me of Michael Jackson…"
"Look, he's a Professor of the School, so I don't wanna hear any disparaging comments about him, you hear? If we rushed in is because mister Johannsen's security system detected something hinky going on in the basement, alright?"
"Hinky, how?"
"Well, y'all should've appeared in his monitors wherever you were in the lodge and… Yes, miss Circe, those stories about kids getting lost are not true. Well, they are true, but we've always found them… eventually. Anyway, you four guys didn't quite register there for a while: you were kinda phasing in 'n' out, and the alarms went off. The alarms go off if there are any unauthorized or unrecognizable Acts of Magick. So Johannsen came and got me, and on the way to the basement we came across Agatha, and then we went together to check on you guys. Agatha was upset because we couldn't open the door for nuttin'! Not brute force, not Magick, nothing worked. And I gotta tell you, if anyone could open any door, that'd be Agatha. But she couldn't and she got kinda pissed off, I guess. But then it opened by itself, you guys are okay, everything's fine. That's it! End of story: Bye-bye."
"Wait a minute! You mean to tell me that you guys spy on us all the time?" Giovanni felt oppressed by Big Brother, already.
"We don't spy on you!" Mr Wozniak rolled his eyes as he said it. "We just track you around the lodge. What? You thought we were gonna let fifty teenagers run around loose in the house? I don't think so! Anyway, here we are: get in and find a seat." They had arrived to the Rune Room, as the Practicals classroom was known.
This time around, there were only another eight students from the other pods in there so they didn't have to squeeze in anywhere. They just plopped down at the front.
"Okay, then, we were reviewing some advanced concepts here. Giovanni, if you want to, go ahead and continue working on your homework while we all carry on here. This review we are having, you won't catch up with it until next week, so…"
"Mister Wozniak, sir!" Giovanni interrupted with a raised hand. "Please, may I try to perform an Act of Magick?"
"Erm… Well, why not? But try something easy, to begin with, alright?"
"Yes, sir!" Giovanni bounded up and went to stand by the bucket-full of flares. He stood there for a few seconds, frowning in concentration, and then whispered, "well, here goes nuttin'!"
Giovanni grabbed a flare from the bucket and lit it.
The other children laughed. Garret actually grabbed his ankles and rolled around on the floor, he was laughing so hard.
"Okay, now, quiet down children! Giovanni, you started at the last step! Look, first…"
But Giovanni still had that frown of utter concentration on his face, with the cords of his wrist standing out from the effort. Suddenly, with a flash of blue from in between his fingers, he opened his hand and, at the same moment, the flare went out and appeared as if it had never been lit.
"Wow!!" Circe got to her feet and came closer, with the rest of the children trailing right behind her, all of them with "ooh's" and "ahh's," and everyone asking, "hey, how'd he do that?" Even Garret was impressed.
But Mr Wozniak had closed his eyes to slits and asked in a dangerous voice, "Who taught you to do that? Tell me now!!"
"Chillax, dawg! I figured it out by myself: the circle, the triangle, and all that hocus-pocus is only to help you get psyched up. But if you concentrate hard enough, you can do all those steps in your mind!"
"First of all, you will address me as…" But Mr Wozniak didn't have time to put Giovanni in his place, because precisely at that moment all the flares lit up at once, making the metal bucket warp and making the stool and the blackboard catch on fire, too. "Holy fuck on wheels! Alright, kids, no screaming, and stand against the wall, I'll take care of this!"
Mr Wozniak grabbed a pendant he wore under his shirt and clasped it in his hands while he whispered several nonsense words, and then spread his hands towards the blaze. The fires went out as if someone had thrown a switch, but everything was charred and the smoke was thick all around them.
"Alright, then, all you kids: out the door and wait for me outside. Wingrove, not so fast: you come and help me open all the windows!"
Once they were all outside and the windows had been opened, Mr Wozniak and Giovanni rejoined the group.
"Okay, pay attention, kids! Apparently, mister Wingrove skipped a few pages in his handouts, because one of the first things you all learned was the principle of equivalent exchange, from Alchemy, remember?" Everyone nodded. Giovanni started going from pale because of the fright, to bright red. He didn't know if he felt chagrin at causing yet another weird accident in his long history of being the weird-accident-causer, or anger at being singled out by the teacher. "What mister Wingrove did wrong was to forget that he has to offer an exchange of energy for the Act. How much energy does one need to effect Magick?" He asked at no one in particular.
"A twentyfold exchange," ten children chorused at once.
"That's right. That's why we have charts of equivalences, to avoid what happened today. Mister Wingrove managed to produce a negative feedback: the Magick had no source to channel the energy needed, and so it grabbed it from whatever was handy. Luckily, this time there was only the fire, which will be cleaned up presently by mister Wingrove. But the recoil can be unpredictable, and the Magick could've taken hold of someone's lifeforce instead. It wouldna killed anyone for something so simple, like Wingrove's flare trick, but it woulda given some unlucky person at least a really bad headache! So, remember what you saw today, and always remember the basics! Now, mister Wingrove, at the next hallway, turn left and the first door to your right is a closet. There you'll find all the supplies needed to clean up my classroom. I'll be back for you in one hour. Let's go, kids, and finish our class outside. I hate the smell of burnt cushions! Every year someone always manages to light them up…"
Giovanni stood there for a few moments, and then went looking for a broom.
***
One hour later, most of the debris was neatly bagged against the wall, and Giovanni had swept the best he could, which wasn't saying much.
"Ooo, boy! Mrs. Staab is gonna love you for making her crew clean up this mess after you!" Mr Wozniak seemed to be in a much better mood. "Look, Giovanni, what we do in The School is to teach those who have the Magick that they must be always responsible in the way the use it. I have arranged for you to spend the rest of the evening with doctor Doe, so that you can get a better perspective of what is like to live a normal life and be part of the society, even though you have the Magick in you. C'mon, put the broom down and follow me, I'll take you to her classroom."
"Were you mad because I cheated and skipped some lessons?"
"No, no, not really! I was upset because usually it's the dark magic that uses many shortcuts. I thought you were going down the wrong path, and I wanted to know if a student had told you to do it in order to get you in trouble…" Mr Wozniak didn't have to name them, but it seemed to Giovanni that the Thompsons might be kids that would know some of those shortcuts. "Tell me: did you really figure it out by yourself, that you didn't need the circle and triangle?"
"Uh-huh! Well, actually, the whole idea came into my head when the Benoni guy was telling us stuff a while ago."
"You mean Professor Benoni," Mr Wozniak looked threatening again. "What was he talking about?"
"Well, since he asked us to keep it a secret, I guess I better tell you, then! He said that humans do not act by reason, but that their bodies control what reason tells them to do. So I thought that the whole thing about drawing lines and crazy doodles was not about having the right idea in your head, but about making your body act a certain way. And then your body would let your mind do whatever it wanted… Or something like that. I don't know, when I try to think it in words it kinda almost don't make no sense. But if I let my body do it, it's pretty simple, really… What? What I do now?" Giovanni looked alarmed to see Mr Wozniak looking at him through slitted eyes again.
"You did nothing wrong. But listen, this kind of thing we don't teach to our children, okay? In none of the teaching programs of The School we talk about this, to anyone at all. So I need you to promise me that you will not try again to short-circuit the Magick, alright? I want you to promise me, especially your most solemn promise, that you will not speak to the other children about this. I will let them all think that you had an unfortunate accident, and you will do likewise. Promise?"
"Fine…" Giovanni still hated secrecy, and now he seemed to be keeping secrets about one thing, but for two different reasons. So he didn't actually said the word 'promise'.
They arrived again at the hallway with no doors, but Mr Wozniak pressed a different plank this time. The same hidden door opened, but the stairs now went upwards. Giovanni was probably too lost in thought, so he didn't comment on such an odd event. Or, maybe he was finally coming to terms with the Magick. So he just climbed the stairs, lost in thought. They reached the top of the stairs, and Mr Wozniak was just about to knock on the door when Professor Benoni opened it suddenly, drawing yet another profane exclamation from Mr Wozniak.
"Professor Benoni! Sorry, but I was expecting doctor Doe to come to the door, is all!"
"Ah, yes! The good doctor stepped out for a moment and will be back presently. Allow me to take young Wingrove into the room, and I will remain here until wonderful Jane returns, yes?"
"Erm… Ah, well, I mean to say, after what happened a couple hours ago, I don't know if Agatha will be okay with me leaving the kid here and…"
"Yes, all is quite well, rest assured!" While they had this interchange, professor Benoni had managed to pull Giovanni into the room by the arm, and was slowly, but decidedly closing the door on Mr Wozniak. "Not to worry, I'm sure our doctor will make her appearance in a matter of moments! No, my good man, do not fret! Thank you! Will see you at supper!"
The door was closed already, and Giovanni finally noticed that he was quite alone with Benoni, and that once again the lighting in the room did not quite match the time of the day. It looked exactly like the Theory classroom. Benoni took a step closer to Giovanni and started talking.
"While we wait, allow me to ask you this: What if humans evolved their capacity for Magick as a kind of last resort against the cruel world? What if the primitive brains of the proto-humans couldn't deal with reality as it is, and developed Magick to avoid having to look at the Universe right smack in the face? What if the Magick was gone, what would we see? What do you think the world really looks like? Very well, I'll see you next week. Good-bye, for now!"
Giovanni's eyes suddenly watered and he blinked hard. When he opened his eyes again after a moment, he found himself standing in a completely different room which looked like a nice and cozy attic, and a very short woman in her late thirties, with short, straight hair and an elfin face was standing at the opposite end of the room, by the only window.
"Thank you for coming, I am doctor Jane Doe, your Social Integration teacher. Did you come here by yourself? Anyway, please knock on the door next time, instead of just letting yourself in, like you just did. Please, come and sit down, we have much to talk about."
Giovanni had never been so afraid in his life: What if he had gone insane, and all this was happening only inside his head? Or, maybe Drill Sargeant Doakes from his most recent military academy had finally got so fed up with Giovanni's attitude that had shot him on the head, like he kept threatening to do for the past month, and all this had been a hallucination while his brain waited to run out of oxygen and finally die. Or, maybe…
Giovanni was afraid because maybe this was really real, and it was actually happening.
To Be Continued…
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