Sorcerer on the Street

Case 12: What Came Before

"You can hear me?" I asked, after a pause that seemed to last forever.

"I certainly hope so," Mrs Kendrick answered. "Or else I'm losing my mind. I don't think we've been introduced, however."

"I'm so sorry," John said. "Mrs Kendrick, this is my mentor, Isaac. He's been teaching me a little about magic."

"I see," she responded thoughtfully. "Then I'm pleased to meet you, Isaac. I suppose a handshake would be out of the question."

"Unfortunately," I answered. "I don't have any hands to shake now."

"You used to? Then I guess you're a ghost, rather than some ethereal guide." She approached the strange situation as calmly as any of the questions we had asked before, and I wondered if that was just a consequence of her belief in the supernatural.

"I was alive once," I answered. "I worked out a spell that I thought might preserve my essence. If you're taking this as more evidence that your husband might still be here, please don't. I have no idea whether or not a ghost can exist without magical assistance. What happens after death is unknown even to wizards, unless something has changed in the last seventy years."

"That sounds like an honest answer," Ellen answered me. "Admitting that you don't know can be hard for some, and I appreciate you leaving the option open. So your particular... status? That's something that only a wizard can do?"

"Yes. And in the form I devised the spell, I could only do it for myself. Using it on someone else would have been beyond me."

"But I can keep on hoping. That's all I ever had. You know, I've seen things my whole life that people told me couldn't be real. Fairies at the bottom of the garden, or lights from the corner of my eye that could have been. Never anything I could be sure about, you know? But I learned pretty soon that most people would laugh at me if I said anything. But you're not laughing now. That was one of the things that made it so easy to spend time with Robert, in a way. He never laughed, and he never told me I was wrong, crazy, or imagining things. He didn't want to talk about it, and sometimes I got the impression that he didn't want to know about anything like that, but he never put me down for it. Not once, even when I pushed him to make a wish on a rock that seemed special somehow. He just... It was like there was a part of him that wanted to believe, but he was worried that people might mock me again if he let me get too confident about those things. He was never a bad man, no matter what."

"I never saw anything like that," John answered before I could come up with the right words. "I think you were lucky, in a way. But since I was young, I had a kind of instinct about certain things. I wanted to touch them, and I didn't know why. I thought it was just me being young and stupid, like my family always told me. They yelled at me if I trusted my instincts at all, and told me that I'm not allowed to touch those things. Like, I'm just a kid so my instincts are always wrong. Then last week, I walked into a museum. There were three items there that I was drawn to, and Isaac tells me I knew the three enchanted artefacts in the place. Now I'm learning to use them, doing magic of my own, and it feels like this was what I was always meant to do."

"I felt the same when my kids smiled at me," Ellen said wistfully. "Those were the best days of my life. But now Allen's moved to Cambridge, and Sarah is so serious all the time. I don't want to make her worry, but I can't deny what I see. It seems there's no easy answer here. So, these things I used to see... You think they could be real?"

"In a way," I answered this time. "It's hard to tell, but I think you must have the gift. Not a wizard, probably. You can see things that the mundanes might miss. You might be able to sense there is something special about an artefact if you hold it, and for simple artefacts you could make them serve their purpose. But not everything you see is necessarily real, and it might not be what it seems. Only you can work out what's real and what isn't."