The Last Magician

Part 2 - Others. Chapter 11 - Epicentre

The village was no less despairing or unnerving than the first time Jack had walked through it.

Jack stood on the street outside the ruined shell of his house. Amanda stood beside him, her eyes straying down the street. The sun watched over them with its naked eye, bathing them in an odd and terrible heat that seemed to crawl on their skin.

The dusty road seemed much longer than he remembered it, though he also knew the tricks his eyes had played on him those last few moments before his collapse. Judging its true distance had been an impossible task but now he had the opportunity to view it with fresh eyes.

”Where do we go from here?” Amanda asked.

Jack continued to stare down the road, lost in his own thoughts. It could almost have been named The Lost Highway. The neglected route could have been untouched for years, decades even. It brought home his earlier realisation that he had no way of determining what year this was. He was in a time where time had ceased to exist.
”Jack?”
”What? Oh, this way first. I came in the other way and saw nothing except...”


He allowed the sentence to trail into silence. He had seen one living thing on his zombie-like traipse from the village green to the house. The fungus. That sickly yellow coloured, hungry organism that seemed to hunger to draw him into its carnivorous grasp.

”Except what?” Amanda pressed, her curiosity wildly apparent in her tone.

”Have you noticed any...growths?” Jack asked her, his face hard and serious for a moment. ”Some kind of yellow fungus?”

He glanced over Amanda’s shoulder at the wrecked windowsills of his home. The fungus had been there when he had awakened. He could recall catching a glimpse of it through the dirty windows, yet from the street he could see no trace of it ever being there.

”Yes. Why?”

“I take it you didn’t look too closely,” Jack said.

”As close as I needed to.”

”Oh I got a little bit more intimate than that. Let’s just say it isn’t exactly your averagee mushroom.”

“What’s wrong with it?” Amanda asked.

”You’re better off not knowing.”
Amanda opened her mouth to push for an answer, but he lifted a hand to ward off her questions. She took the sign to mean the discussion ended there, for the moment at least.


The rugged, broken road crunched underfoot, and Jack was consciously aware that they were announcing their presence anyone else hiding in the decrepit shells around them. The hollow homes and dehydrated ground echoed the empty sound of their footfalls, adding to the ever deepening sense of desperation.

The street reached its end sooner than he could have hoped, though the unchanging surroundings of the road had twice made him feel they were making no progress at all. It was not a refreshing change that awaited them beyond the last house, but it was change all the same.

The road had led them straight into what appeared to be the centre of the village. The open area stretched out before them as a vast wasteland of cracked, raised concrete and the skeleton of a small shopping area. It was like the epicentre of a major earthquake. Jack refused to believe that any natural disaster lay at the root of the mystery, but he was almost sure of one thing. It had started here; this had been the epicentre of the apocalypse.

”What the hell happened here?” Amanda said quietly, her eyes wide with horrified amazement.

”Something big,” Jack replied distantly. ”Something really big”

He gazed out over the dirty, dead stubble of lawn, beyond the broken pavement and torn road. Three large metal frames were all that remained of the glass shop windows, while all around were the burned out remains of what could have been a fair-sized shop. There were no traces of a name or the true purpose of the building, but Jack did not need to see them. The sight before him was enough to once again trigger his lost memories.


A supermarket. That’s what it had been. He could recall the huge windows burning with the glare of the sun, a modest sign above the door welcoming shoppers.

The memory did not return from the abyss alone. There had been a Police Station, a pub, other shops all around the same area.

Jack turned.

The pub stood off to his left, partially collapsed and inhabitable. He would not have estimated how long it would be before the remaining walls also fell. Jack smiled when he noticed the blackened sign still hanging over the dark hole that had once been a door.

Alongside, the ruins of smaller buildings confirmed his returning recollections. The state of the structures made it impossible to tell what they had been, but Jack was happy to accept these were the remnants of the businesses he remembered.

Then finally, set back from the devastated businesses, he found the last of his expectations; the Police Station.

Compared to many of the other buildings it had fared well. The windows were gone and a section of the roof had fallen either off or in, but there had been no severe structural damage. It seemed the other buildings had provided a shield, protecting the building containing those who chose to protect.

Then there was something else. Something…he could feel.

Jack squinted against the sun, staring at the station. He was drawn to the building, pulled to the idea that if they didn’t take a closer look they would be missing something vitally important. The strength of the notion was his greatest since he had known about the Floor Dweller. The building was calling to him for a reason.

“Do you feel that?”

Amanda’s voice startled him from his thoughts. Her words were directed at him but her gaze travelled beyond his face to the source of his own wonder.

”I feel something,” he said. He waited a short moment before voicing his true belief. “I feel someone.”

“That’s what I was thinking,’ Amanda said absentmindedly. ”How can we though? I mean, that’s just…”

“Not possible,” Jack finished. “Like everything else.”

“We have to go over there don’t we?”


Jack looked down at her as she turned to meet his eyes. She was afraid, he could see it. There was more though, she was not really asking a question of him, she was demanding the answer she knew had to be given.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes we do.”

The air had become a living presence, a beating heart of expectancy encased within a sticky body of humid heat. The sense of its imposing power, that which had crucified Jack on his initial wakening, had been absent during their walk to the centre but had now returned.

Jack was forced to wipe large rolling beads of sweat from his brow. Every pore in his body had been coaxed into spreading wide, revealing itself in the soaring heat, while they bathed him in wetness around his arms and across the ridges of his back. He could feel the energy draining out of him and looking at Amanda he could see she was also feeling it.

That “High Noon” sensation was lodged firmly in Jack’s mind, the area around him appearing to be closer to a Western movie set the further through it he moved. Before him reared a holographic image of the Hard Ridge Saloon in a vacant lot ahead. He could almost smell the beer, hear the hearty laughter and the ringing sounds of gunshots. He was walking through gunslinger country; where many years ago, or perhaps many years ahead, the last gunslinger had moved on with the world.


Then he was gazing at nothing but a gap in the buildings, a patch of wasted dry land where nothing grew and no structures had been erected. For a short moment it had existed as though the barriers between reality and imagination had been breached and his fantasy had crossed over.

It was nothing but fantasy of course. Even under the scorching glare of the sun, Jack knew that what lay in his mind and what lay at his feet would never stand side by side. In so many ways he was pleased to be so certain of something Perhaps for the loons who had spent their lives proclaiming that the world would end in a rain of fire that kind of thing was acceptable, but not..

Jack hooked himself onto his train of thought, clambering from carriage to carriage, observing the passengers of knowledge, the commuters of notion. They somehow did not quite sit firmly in their seats as they had once. The further back he marched, the figures he witnessed grew transparent and faded into their surroundings; shadows of thoughts that no longer held viability in their current when.

The dawning of what he was seeing in his minds eye was slow in coming, but it finally arrived puffing steam at the central station of his mind. He was dismissing the fantastic when in truth it surrounded him everywhere he turned. Each stubby blade of dead, scorched grass hammered home the realisation. He was walking on dead earth, earth that produced such abominations as the giant slug that had been in his house, nesting in his house. Then there was the fungus.

Jack shivered inwardly, a chill passing through his gut, at the image of those nasty, sharp teeth that had ravenously gaped for him. It threw open the doors of scepticism and offered all unbelievers to take a look at the wares beyond its sturdy frame. Jack had passed through that doorway already, though he had not known it until now. He had crossed the deceptively manufactured threshold at the very moment he had opened his eyes on the blasted grass of the village green.


He was unable to doubt, unable to disbelieve any irrationality or alien occurrence out of hand as he once had. The world had moved on, and though he did not understand the true meaning of the phrase, or its origin, he found that the words held an undeniable truth regardless. There were no limitations, no rules to the living realm. Only the boundaries of imagination remained intact and they too were likely not unbreakable.

Jack continued to toil with the change in his mental state. He was aware that the revelation did not affect his current situation, nor the world he had once known. Only inside the confines of his skull had change occurred, and the daunting prospect that what they had confronted recently could only be the beginning had swelled to encompass all rational thought.

Together Jack and Amanda took their first steps towards the Police House, both wondering what awaited them inside. Neither expected a welcome party.

It seemed that impossibility did still have a minor role to play in what remained of the world after all. Jack could not resist a small smile.