The Last Magician

From The Mouth Of Dylan

“He’s asleep,” Amanda said, closing the door of the sitting room behind her. ”I made him lie on the sofa. It’s not great but it’s better than where he wanted to sleep.”

“The floor,” Jack said.

The words fell as a statement but Amanda answered as though they were a question. “Yes. He really didn’t want to lie anywhere except the floor. My God, how long has he been awake, Jack? How long has he been running around here scared out of his mind?”

“I don’t know,” Jack said, the phrase haunting them once again. “I’m sure it can’t have been much longer than us. I wonder if he knows anything. If he’s like us he will probably be struggling to remember who he is let alone anything useful.”

“His name is Dylan,” Amanda said.

“Well give the lady a first class ticket to the Interrogation Unit,” Kurt said from the staircase.

Jack and Amanda turned in unison, eyebrows raised.

“Ok, that’s freaking me out,” Kurt complained. “Quit it. I’ll keep my comments to myself. Now stop looking at me like that.”

The pair looked at each other, diverting their attention from Kurt, much to his relief.

“Did he tell you anything else?” Jack asked.

“A little.”

Amanda moved nervously from side to side.

“What is it?” Jack asked.

“It’s just…well…,” Amanda waited a breath, lining up the words in her head. “Ok, children have wild imaginations and tend to be almost as good as writers at making things up, yeah? That doesn’t really apply here though, does it? Not now, not in all that out there. We’re walking in something that should only be in a book or on TV.”

“Amanda,” Jack said, firm but without raising his voice. “What did he tell you?”

Amanda paused again, then sat down with her back against the wall.

“He asked me if I’d seen the Magician.”

Jack looked momentarily vacant. He hadn’t expected that one.

“The Magician?” he asked.

“That’s what he said. He doesn’t know how long he’s been here – awake, you know – and he hasn’t strayed much from the house. He did follow us when we left though.”

So that’s what it was, Jack though. They were the eyes we felt.

“Then he asked me if I’d seen the Magician. I asked him what Magician and he said there is a Magician nearby.”

“So he’s seen him?”

“No. That’s what makes this all so far fetched. He told me that he’s only seen him in his sleep. That this man talks to him when he is asleep.”

“So you’re saying the kid was dreaming,” Kurt said.

“That’s what I thought,” Amanda said, “but then he said that this vision told him we would be coming.”

Kurt looked from Amanda to Jack and back again.

“I don’t have any suggestions about that,” Kurt said, holding his hands up.

“I don’t either,” Jack said as he rubbed his temple. “If we accept the kid, Dylan, is right, why would this Magician do it to him and not one of us?”

“Maybe because we wouldn’t believe it,” Amanda said. “Look what we’ve just done now. The old adult fear of being childish and believing in something that can’t possibly exist in the real world.”

“What is the real world though?” Jack reflected. “There isn’t a line saying everything on this side is right and everything on that side is wrong. I think we’ve already agreed that we don’t know what to expect out there, so maybe he’s right. Maybe there is this Magician out there. How can we know for certain either way?”

Amanda opened her mouth then closed it again.

“What else?”

She looked at him sheepishly. “I never was any good at keeping things from people. Dylan said he thought you would know about the Magician.”

It was Jack’s turn to look unsure. “Why does he think that? I don’t…”

Jack stopped, his mind falling back to the moment he had known someone was inside the Police Station. The voice in his head that instructed him to not pass the building without investigating further. Could that have been…?

“Maybe,” he said almost to himself.

“There was one other thing he mentioned,” Amanda said. “Something just as he was drifting off but I don’t know what he meant.

“He said something about not running from the Big Gun Man anymore.”

“This kid is just a whole damn circus of conundrums,” Kurt said, speaking Jack’s immediate thought. “At least before you spoke to him it sounded like he was the only mystery around here. Now we’ve got magicians and gunmen and fuck knows what’s going to come next.”

No one spoke immediately. Silence drifted around them as lazily as the dust in the air. Amanda was first to break the still.

“He could have been talking about you,” Amanda said to Jack. “You’ve been carrying the air rifle with you for quite a while now.”

Jack wasn’t listening to her. He had already made a connection of his own; the shotgun. Since they raided the house and he found the vacant housing for the gun alongside the air rifle his instinct told him someone had beaten them to it. It seemed, to Jack at least, that there was at least one other person in the village with them. The Magician could still turn out to be a figment of Dylan’s young imagination, but he suspected the Big Gun Man was real and somewhere out there.

“Jack?”

He broke free from his thoughts.

“Sorry, I was just thinking. I probably did give him a scare. At least he knows we don’t mean him any harm now.”

Jack felt the burden of his lie burning inside. He knew Dylan hadn’t been talking about him but he did not want to unload the possibility of another unknown danger ahead of them. It seemed Amanda was satisfied with her own conclusion and did not press the matter.

She picked up what appeared to be an old wooden spoon from their bounty.

“Do we know how much of this is actually of any use yet?”

Kurt walked across the hall. “Well everything on that pile is just shit.”

“We had another look through while you were with Dylan. Those few things over there seem like they could have a use, but as Kurt says, the rest of it is worthless.”

Amanda considered Jack for a moment. “This is it, isn’t it? Once we go this time…”

The sentence trailed off into an ominous silence. None of them needed her to finish. They would be ready to leave when Dylan wakened. Night was drawing in, but there were other places to shelter when the darkness came.

“Come on,” Jack said. “Let’s start packing.”