David Grace - The Accidental Magician

"What, exactly, has the guy done?"

"Oh, more or less the usual in this sort of a case – watches her house, follows her around, leaves little things on her doorstep. At first it was gifts, a box of candy, a cheap bracelet, an unsigned card. Then the… deposits became more problematic. The last one was a dead rat."

"Is there any proof that the culprit is the boyfriend?"

"Ex-boyfriend. And no, nothing that would hold up in court. We tried a surveillance camera but he was skilled enough to avoid leaving an identifiable image. Just an adult male in a bulky jacket, a turned-up collar and a baseball cap."

"Have you gotten a restraining order?"

Willoughby frowned.

"Without evidence I'm loath to file an action against a serving member of the police. Again, I was hoping that a friendly talk with one of his own might convince him that the lady is sincerely uninterested in resuming the relationship."

I stared blankly at the wall behind Willoughby's shoulder, then picked up my pen.

"Okay, what's his name?"

"Officer Victor Manchuko. I believe he serves in the Northeast Division."

"Description?"

"Caucasian, almost six feet tall, mustache, no glasses. Brown hair, brown eyes. About thirty-five. He told her he was divorced but, well…" Willoughby let the sentence hang.

"What's the client's name?"

"Carolyn Simpson, 5691 Fortis Avenue. You can call her on her cell, 410-555-6739. She doesn't want anyone at work to know about her personal problems."

"When can I meet her?"

"Is that really necessary? I'm fully authorized to act on her behalf."

"I never take a case without meeting the client."

Willoughby gave me a long stare then a little shrug.

"Of course. I told her to be available in case you might call."

I punched in the number. The phone was answered on the second ring.

"Ms. Simpson? This is Raphael LaFontaine. I'm here with your attorney, Mr. Willoughby."

"Yes, Mr. LaFontaine. Thank you for taking my case."

"I haven't taken it yet. I'll need to talk with you directly before I can start any real work on your problem."

"I was hoping that you could handle all this with my lawyer."

"No, I can't. Where are you right now? If you could come to my office, the three of us--"

"No, that's impossible. I'm working a split shift. I won't be free until after ten."

"What about sometime tomorrow?"

"Uhh, that's not good either. Could we meet later tonight, someplace public? A restaurant or something? Maybe around ten-thirty?"

I paused and studied Willoughby's pudgy face.

"I usually collect a retainer before I start a new case."

Willoughby pulled a pile of bills from his inside pocket and counted out ten one-hundred dollar notes on the edge of the desk.

"All right, ten-thirty tonight at La Boehme Cafe on Franklin. We can have coffee on the terrace. Ask for me at the hostess station. Do you want directions?"

"No, I'll find it."

The line went dead.

"I'll give you a receipt," I told Willoughby and picked up the bills, counting them a second time.

I left my apartment a little after ten and headed for the gravel parking lot behind the building. There was barely a sliver of a moon and I negotiated the stepping stones by memory. As I emerged from the path I sensed an onrushing presence and jumped to my left. A blinding pain seared across my ribs. Already falling I flailed at my attacker and a second man grabbed me from behind and then the world vanished in a thick, black fog.

For most of my early life I didn't realize that my dreams were not like those of normal people. I thought that when people dreamt they saw colors, felt textures and experienced an alternate existence almost as real as that of their waking life. It was only when my father, Remy LaFontaine, began training me to concoct dream potions and cast dream jinxes that I became interested enough in the topic to borrow a psychology primer from the school library. The chapter on human dreaming was a revelation. Most people had no sense of touch or smell in dreams? Some rarely dreamt in color? And the content of their dreams – vague, disjointed events that upon waking vanished like mist on the water? By comparison my dreams were a study in order and precision. Each was a little play, some from my past, some depicting things that might have been, and a few portraying events that might yet come to be.

With increasing frustration I had flipped the psychology text from page to page looking for explanations of dreams like those that I experienced. Eventually, I realized that I was different from "normal" people in many fundamental ways. During my years on the run, living out of flea-bag hotels and squatting in abandoned buildings, I would pass the dreary, solitary hours by reading books I had picked up at garage sales and a swap meets. Often my studies were little more than an attempt to understand myself. It's a work in progress.

The logical part of my mind told me that the herbs and infusions, the teas and potions that my father and mother had both imbibed before and after I was conceived had altered me in some fundamental way, cracked the chains of my DNA and warped my glands until my own peculiar hormonal soup was contaminated beyond repair. But then I thought about my brother, Zion, whose name my father claimed was ordained in a vision from the Spirit Gael, and I wondered if hoodoo and magic, demons, spirits and spells might have some reality of their own.

My father, a light-skinned Redbone named Remy LaFontaine, claimed to be the seventh son of a seventh son. My mother, Malina Elise, a coal-black beauty with a Caribbean accent and murky past, told various stories of her history. In some she was a hoodoo priestess from Jamaica; in others her home had been someplace between Bimini and St. Barts, Trinidad and the Caicos.

I often had visions, the extreme ones I called 'spells.' Perhaps a psychiatrist would label them 'visual hallucinations' but I didn't think that was correct. I am not psychotic or schizophrenic. Sometimes, more and more often of late, I just see on the outside more of what people are on the inside, their cruelty or passion warping their faces, their emotions haloing their heads like a colored fog. It's disturbing but often useful in my business. As I said, both a gift and a curse. Is all that from the hoodoo herbs, potions and infusions? Perhaps as the first born son of parents like Remy and Malina it was inevitable that I would be irretrievably different from what I came to think of as "normal" people.

Or maybe the real explanation for my peculiarities is a little of both. Despite the persona I struggled to present to the world, I knew that I wasn't really human, but something different, a fake human, a changeling, someone who always needed to be in disguise lest the normals discover my true nature and cage me like some animal in a zoo. As I slept under the combined effects of high voltage electricity and an ether-soaked rag, I dreamed.

I was back in the cabin near the banks of Pig Run Creek, a tiny stream that meandered west until it joined the Sabine River near the Texas border. A boy again, I awoke in my narrow bed to the calls of the jays and woodpeckers and the croaking of the big frogs. Crisp dawn light peeked through the cracks in the plank walls and by its color and the smell of pine trees and slow-flowing water I knew that I was dreaming, but it was a dream that I could no more ignore than I could disregard a tiger leaping for my throat.

I threw off the covers and pulled on clean underwear, jeans and a black t-shirt. I felt the laces tighten my sneakers across my feet. I knew this dream by heart. I knew that this was the day that had shattered my life and that I was powerless to change a single instant of it.