"A Wizard's Companion" -Chapter 8
CHAPTER 8: LAW OF REFLECTION
“The universe is within us and without us.”
There’s a reason he’s here.
San Francisco had been a dismal failure. Oh he’d found Tom’s father all right. Only to upset him and his wife terribly with his interrogations. They’d never had a son. They couldn’t conceive. How dare he come here demanding such questions be answered?
Carl and Cecelia took the next flight home.
Now he’s desperate.
He’s standing in the deepest part of the forest in Central Park at midnight, with a flashlight, matches, four candles, an athame, a pentacle, a chalice, a wand, and a snow cleared circle 9 feet in diameter. The four candles represented the four directions and the four elements. The altar of makeshift wood he placed at north.
Carl’s last resort for finding Tom was to defer to what Tom called “witchcraft.” Tom, who had held an interest in these kinds of things, loved the looks of the rituals and the ways of the Wiccans or Witches. Tom had practically been a Pagan himself.
Carl didn’t know if it would work. But, like everything else he’d lost from his former Life, he’d lost his Manual too. So this was his only option.
He’d done his research, and the chances of this working were slim, but Carl hoped that since he was a previous Wizard, sort of-did the universe still know that?-he might get lucky.
He lights the candles. Then he puts the tools on the altar.
He takes the athame and starts to draw a barrier for protection, murmuring, “I conjure this Circle to serve as a guardian against The Lone One who would do me harm…”
Even though he obviously wasn’t Tom in his elegance with words, he went on to list the properties that he will require from the Circle.
In the midst of the incantations, he changes from athame to the chalice and walks the Circle’s edges.
“Lord of the Eastern Spirits…”
He picks up the wand and walks around the Circle again.
“Lord of the Southern Lights…”
He takes up the north candle and places it on the altar.
“Lord of the Western Spirits…”
Finally he takes up the other candles and one by one places them on the altar.
“Lord of the Northern Lights…”
Saying the last incantation, he picks up his athame and draws a pentacle.
“Witness my Rites… I am the Servant of the One!”
The Circle is complete and ready for his purpose: Summoning.
________________________________________________________________________
He’d done everything right...
He was sure of it!
He’d stated his parameters, given his request…
But apparently, No One was listening.
Nothing happened, except it started to rain.
In desperation and tears, Carl fell to his knees.
“TOM!” he yells to the sky, “What am I supposed to do now?”
Silence answered him.
Carl leaves his circle and his things and trudges away from his ritual in a daze.
About halfway through a light flashes.
And in the middle of Central Park, Manhattan, Carl Romeo collapses.
Carl still doesn’t know what it was that brought him back to Life.
And through the pain, he isn’t sure what he wants to do…
Could I find Tom in death? The thought whispers across his empty mind.
He barely registers the fact that a bird had landed atop him.
Pretty colors, is his last thought as everything else faded away.
________________________________________________________________________
Carl huddles as much as he can in the gurney in the furthest corner of the room.
Tubes are attached to painfully singed skin and, when he gingerly tries to move his fingers, he finds it excruciating.
And from the state of his arms that he can see, he can only imagine how hideous the rest of his body looks.
The room is white-washed, with just enough dashes of color-pink wardrobes and blue blankets-to keep it from being anything straight out of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The only door leading in was a big, thick slate of solid wood that spanned the length of nearly half the room, with metal coating on the bottom and a metal handle that locked only one way-from the outside.
Swallowing, he forces his gaze down to his shaking knees. Carl can’t stop trembling even if he wanted to. The stress of the day is finally over, yet keeps repeating itself over and over cruelly inside of his mind.
Carl can only remember sensations, nothing else. He knew though that, back then, he thought he was dying.
Maybe he had even hoped he was dying.
There was an all encompassing pain. His mind jumped to having a heart attack-except he was choking too, suffocating. His fingers and toes tingled, he was sweating even though he wasn’t hot, and he was off balance and dizzy.
Carl doesn’t remember the ambulance ride or the doctors. He doesn’t remember any of it until his admittance. He doubted he was even conscious.
Carl remembers some of this... interviewing with the intake; he’d stammered and stumbled over all his words through the pain. He hadn’t laid still, he couldn’t stop convulsing, and he tried to meet their eyes but couldn’t do that either. Eventually he somehow ground out the information they were looking for: his and his families’ medical backgrounds.
Finally Carl was brought here, where he proceeded to lie in the furthest corner of the room next to the window, hooked up to more IVs and machines that he thought possible.
Needless to say, Carl was scared, more scared than he’d ever been in his life.
There’s a tap tap tap and a flurry of colors against the window.
But even more distracting was the strange man in his room.
He was good-looking, perhaps too much so. Reddish, fiery hair, eyes so dark you could swear they were black. He wore a white coat and stethoscope. Was he a doctor?
From somewhere outside he hears a bird scream shrilly. The tapping becomes more insistent.
Lazily, this doctor strolls over to the window and closes the blinds, leaving them completely in darkness. Carl finally notices that the lights are switched off.
“Carl, Carl, Carl… I’m doing you a favor, imagine that? Me? Taking pity on a mortal…”
Scratch the doctor getup, Carl realizes he was dealing with…
What exactly?
“Oh that’s right, silly me, I erased your mind before I got to ask my questions. Let me refresh your memory just the tiniest bit then. I can always re-erase it all later with, let’s say, a coma.”
That’s it, Carl was out of there. Only, he realizes too late, he couldn’t move. His body was no longer responding to him.
He stares at the other in growing horror and remembrance.
Lone One, Carl thinks with a shiver.
The Lone Power stiffens, the pacing stops, as he turns to look Carl directly in the eye and, no matter how much he wants to, Carl can’t turn away.
“You know me,” the Lone Power mutters, “No human on this planet is supposed to know me, beyond whatever naïve narratives they come up with.
“So first question,” the Lone Power raises his voice, “how do you know who I am?”
Greetings and defiance, Carl thinks at Him, knowing He is reading his thoughts.
“You talk like a Wizard, but without the Speech. You act like one. You seem to know so much-too much actually, but I'll take care of that briefly. How is this possible? At first I just thought you were crazy, like the rest of the Powers do. But you’re not, are you? Tell me your story.”
Never!
“Very well then,” for the first time since His arrival, the Lone Power looked bored. “I'll just have to extract it from you.”
You can’t, Carl tries to convince himself. But the reality is…
“Of course I can,” the grin that had been plastered on the Lone Power’s face since he arrived turned feral. “It was you who called for me…”
No.
“You who wanted to die…”
NO!
“I’m as much a part of you as I am all creation.”
No, no please! Carl begs. He couldn’t take the few memories of Tom he had left from him, he just couldn’t!
“And when we’re done you won’t remember a thing. Being struck by lightning tends to affect the brain you know. This could affect you…permanently.”
All that he had done to find Tom was finally ending. How can he hold out against That Which Created Death?
He feels his mind being taken over even as he fights against it. He feels every single memory he has of Tom fall into the Other’s grasp.
“For this?!” the Lone Power declares, baffled, “All this power, all this pain, for one man? This ‘Tom’ of yours… No, I know all of creation; I can assure you he doesn’t exist. I don’t believe your story. You’re simply a fool for making it all up-for chasing a dream that isn’t real.”
Tom exists, Carl grounds out, He exists because I know he exists.
“He doesn’t,” the Lone Power riles, “And what would it matter if he did? He’s just one man… why go through all of this for him?”
You may have my memories, but you can’t have my feelings. Of course you don’t understand. You can’t. Empathy-you lost that ability ages ago. The Fall has stripped you of much.
“Don’t make me mad Carl,” the Lone Power warns sternly, “You don’t want me mad. Remember, you have no power to protect yourself. In fact, that favor of mine. It’s already done.”
And with that it is. The machines beeped and buzzed as loudly as they could as Carl went into a seizure. Amongst all the new doctors and nurses slipping in, the Lone Power slipped out.
None of the usual medicines and treatments worked. Finally, to stop Carl from seizing and dying, the doctors put him in a chemical coma-just as the Lone One had predicted.
________________________________________________________________________
Carl is floating in nothingness, unaware of a macaw settling down next to his head, pressing up against him in the ‘real world.’
Instead, he sees a tiny speck of light.
The spec is the size of a star being looked at from earth and growing brighter and brighter…
…and appears to be racing towards him.
Then the black flees altogether and Carl can only see pure white light, blinding as surely as pure darkness.
From within the light, eventually, Carl manages to spot something. A golden Door. Idly, he wonders if this is the gateway to heaven.
Has he died then?
Abruptly he is in front of the Door and, as he examines it closer, he can tell there are strange inscriptions on it-in a language he doesn’t understand. In fact, the Door itself doesn’t look earthly.
Carl starts puzzling over it, trying to scrutinize from every angle what the Door is trying to convey.
He reaches for the knob, only to find a growling dog suddenly in his way.
Carl starts and stumbles back.
The darkness returns.
“Carl!” Somebody calls out to him. Someone familiar…
“Ma?” he asks confused and surprised at the hoarseness of his own voice. He blinks away the bright light that bombards him only to find his mother, and the rest of his family, standing around his hospital bed.
“Oh thank God!” Carl’s mother crosses herself with the hand that isn’t holding onto his.
“Ma, what’s going on?”
“You were struck by lightning.” Cecilia responds for her. She looks on the verge of tears.
“Honey, don’t cry.” The endearment ‘honey’ was correct, he’d called her that many times over before, yet this time it seemed foreign to his lips. Carl reaches out for her with his other hand, despite the pain. She takes it and sinks to her knees next to him. “Everything is going to be alright.” Carl continues comforting.
“We almost lost you!” she sobs, “what were you doing at Central Park in the middle of the night?”
The rest of his family awaited his answer as well.
He scrunches up his brow, trying hard to think of a reason for being there…
“I don’t know.”
A little while later they leave him for some peace and quiet. The need for sleep was imminent. The nurse brings in some medication for his throbbing headache that will supposedly knock him out and he’s not complaining. It has been a bizarre day.
He really can’t remember why he was in the middle of central park, but the doctor says temporary amnesia is common. He just wonders how ‘temporary’ it’s going to be…
It’s painful but he rolls over-he’s never been one to sleep well on his back-and reaches behind his pillow only to find something there.
He pulls it out.
A blue feather.
How odd, he thinks, looking around. There was no other trace of a bird in sight.
“The universe is within us and without us.”
There’s a reason he’s here.
San Francisco had been a dismal failure. Oh he’d found Tom’s father all right. Only to upset him and his wife terribly with his interrogations. They’d never had a son. They couldn’t conceive. How dare he come here demanding such questions be answered?
Carl and Cecelia took the next flight home.
Now he’s desperate.
He’s standing in the deepest part of the forest in Central Park at midnight, with a flashlight, matches, four candles, an athame, a pentacle, a chalice, a wand, and a snow cleared circle 9 feet in diameter. The four candles represented the four directions and the four elements. The altar of makeshift wood he placed at north.
Carl’s last resort for finding Tom was to defer to what Tom called “witchcraft.” Tom, who had held an interest in these kinds of things, loved the looks of the rituals and the ways of the Wiccans or Witches. Tom had practically been a Pagan himself.
Carl didn’t know if it would work. But, like everything else he’d lost from his former Life, he’d lost his Manual too. So this was his only option.
He’d done his research, and the chances of this working were slim, but Carl hoped that since he was a previous Wizard, sort of-did the universe still know that?-he might get lucky.
He lights the candles. Then he puts the tools on the altar.
He takes the athame and starts to draw a barrier for protection, murmuring, “I conjure this Circle to serve as a guardian against The Lone One who would do me harm…”
Even though he obviously wasn’t Tom in his elegance with words, he went on to list the properties that he will require from the Circle.
In the midst of the incantations, he changes from athame to the chalice and walks the Circle’s edges.
“Lord of the Eastern Spirits…”
He picks up the wand and walks around the Circle again.
“Lord of the Southern Lights…”
He takes up the north candle and places it on the altar.
“Lord of the Western Spirits…”
Finally he takes up the other candles and one by one places them on the altar.
“Lord of the Northern Lights…”
Saying the last incantation, he picks up his athame and draws a pentacle.
“Witness my Rites… I am the Servant of the One!”
The Circle is complete and ready for his purpose: Summoning.
________________________________________________________________________
He’d done everything right...
He was sure of it!
He’d stated his parameters, given his request…
But apparently, No One was listening.
Nothing happened, except it started to rain.
In desperation and tears, Carl fell to his knees.
“TOM!” he yells to the sky, “What am I supposed to do now?”
Silence answered him.
Carl leaves his circle and his things and trudges away from his ritual in a daze.
About halfway through a light flashes.
And in the middle of Central Park, Manhattan, Carl Romeo collapses.
Carl still doesn’t know what it was that brought him back to Life.
And through the pain, he isn’t sure what he wants to do…
Could I find Tom in death? The thought whispers across his empty mind.
He barely registers the fact that a bird had landed atop him.
Pretty colors, is his last thought as everything else faded away.
________________________________________________________________________
Carl huddles as much as he can in the gurney in the furthest corner of the room.
Tubes are attached to painfully singed skin and, when he gingerly tries to move his fingers, he finds it excruciating.
And from the state of his arms that he can see, he can only imagine how hideous the rest of his body looks.
The room is white-washed, with just enough dashes of color-pink wardrobes and blue blankets-to keep it from being anything straight out of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The only door leading in was a big, thick slate of solid wood that spanned the length of nearly half the room, with metal coating on the bottom and a metal handle that locked only one way-from the outside.
Swallowing, he forces his gaze down to his shaking knees. Carl can’t stop trembling even if he wanted to. The stress of the day is finally over, yet keeps repeating itself over and over cruelly inside of his mind.
Carl can only remember sensations, nothing else. He knew though that, back then, he thought he was dying.
Maybe he had even hoped he was dying.
There was an all encompassing pain. His mind jumped to having a heart attack-except he was choking too, suffocating. His fingers and toes tingled, he was sweating even though he wasn’t hot, and he was off balance and dizzy.
Carl doesn’t remember the ambulance ride or the doctors. He doesn’t remember any of it until his admittance. He doubted he was even conscious.
Carl remembers some of this... interviewing with the intake; he’d stammered and stumbled over all his words through the pain. He hadn’t laid still, he couldn’t stop convulsing, and he tried to meet their eyes but couldn’t do that either. Eventually he somehow ground out the information they were looking for: his and his families’ medical backgrounds.
Finally Carl was brought here, where he proceeded to lie in the furthest corner of the room next to the window, hooked up to more IVs and machines that he thought possible.
Needless to say, Carl was scared, more scared than he’d ever been in his life.
There’s a tap tap tap and a flurry of colors against the window.
But even more distracting was the strange man in his room.
He was good-looking, perhaps too much so. Reddish, fiery hair, eyes so dark you could swear they were black. He wore a white coat and stethoscope. Was he a doctor?
From somewhere outside he hears a bird scream shrilly. The tapping becomes more insistent.
Lazily, this doctor strolls over to the window and closes the blinds, leaving them completely in darkness. Carl finally notices that the lights are switched off.
“Carl, Carl, Carl… I’m doing you a favor, imagine that? Me? Taking pity on a mortal…”
Scratch the doctor getup, Carl realizes he was dealing with…
What exactly?
“Oh that’s right, silly me, I erased your mind before I got to ask my questions. Let me refresh your memory just the tiniest bit then. I can always re-erase it all later with, let’s say, a coma.”
That’s it, Carl was out of there. Only, he realizes too late, he couldn’t move. His body was no longer responding to him.
He stares at the other in growing horror and remembrance.
Lone One, Carl thinks with a shiver.
The Lone Power stiffens, the pacing stops, as he turns to look Carl directly in the eye and, no matter how much he wants to, Carl can’t turn away.
“You know me,” the Lone Power mutters, “No human on this planet is supposed to know me, beyond whatever naïve narratives they come up with.
“So first question,” the Lone Power raises his voice, “how do you know who I am?”
Greetings and defiance, Carl thinks at Him, knowing He is reading his thoughts.
“You talk like a Wizard, but without the Speech. You act like one. You seem to know so much-too much actually, but I'll take care of that briefly. How is this possible? At first I just thought you were crazy, like the rest of the Powers do. But you’re not, are you? Tell me your story.”
Never!
“Very well then,” for the first time since His arrival, the Lone Power looked bored. “I'll just have to extract it from you.”
You can’t, Carl tries to convince himself. But the reality is…
“Of course I can,” the grin that had been plastered on the Lone Power’s face since he arrived turned feral. “It was you who called for me…”
No.
“You who wanted to die…”
NO!
“I’m as much a part of you as I am all creation.”
No, no please! Carl begs. He couldn’t take the few memories of Tom he had left from him, he just couldn’t!
“And when we’re done you won’t remember a thing. Being struck by lightning tends to affect the brain you know. This could affect you…permanently.”
All that he had done to find Tom was finally ending. How can he hold out against That Which Created Death?
He feels his mind being taken over even as he fights against it. He feels every single memory he has of Tom fall into the Other’s grasp.
“For this?!” the Lone Power declares, baffled, “All this power, all this pain, for one man? This ‘Tom’ of yours… No, I know all of creation; I can assure you he doesn’t exist. I don’t believe your story. You’re simply a fool for making it all up-for chasing a dream that isn’t real.”
Tom exists, Carl grounds out, He exists because I know he exists.
“He doesn’t,” the Lone Power riles, “And what would it matter if he did? He’s just one man… why go through all of this for him?”
You may have my memories, but you can’t have my feelings. Of course you don’t understand. You can’t. Empathy-you lost that ability ages ago. The Fall has stripped you of much.
“Don’t make me mad Carl,” the Lone Power warns sternly, “You don’t want me mad. Remember, you have no power to protect yourself. In fact, that favor of mine. It’s already done.”
And with that it is. The machines beeped and buzzed as loudly as they could as Carl went into a seizure. Amongst all the new doctors and nurses slipping in, the Lone Power slipped out.
None of the usual medicines and treatments worked. Finally, to stop Carl from seizing and dying, the doctors put him in a chemical coma-just as the Lone One had predicted.
________________________________________________________________________
Carl is floating in nothingness, unaware of a macaw settling down next to his head, pressing up against him in the ‘real world.’
Instead, he sees a tiny speck of light.
The spec is the size of a star being looked at from earth and growing brighter and brighter…
…and appears to be racing towards him.
Then the black flees altogether and Carl can only see pure white light, blinding as surely as pure darkness.
From within the light, eventually, Carl manages to spot something. A golden Door. Idly, he wonders if this is the gateway to heaven.
Has he died then?
Abruptly he is in front of the Door and, as he examines it closer, he can tell there are strange inscriptions on it-in a language he doesn’t understand. In fact, the Door itself doesn’t look earthly.
Carl starts puzzling over it, trying to scrutinize from every angle what the Door is trying to convey.
He reaches for the knob, only to find a growling dog suddenly in his way.
Carl starts and stumbles back.
The darkness returns.
“Carl!” Somebody calls out to him. Someone familiar…
“Ma?” he asks confused and surprised at the hoarseness of his own voice. He blinks away the bright light that bombards him only to find his mother, and the rest of his family, standing around his hospital bed.
“Oh thank God!” Carl’s mother crosses herself with the hand that isn’t holding onto his.
“Ma, what’s going on?”
“You were struck by lightning.” Cecilia responds for her. She looks on the verge of tears.
“Honey, don’t cry.” The endearment ‘honey’ was correct, he’d called her that many times over before, yet this time it seemed foreign to his lips. Carl reaches out for her with his other hand, despite the pain. She takes it and sinks to her knees next to him. “Everything is going to be alright.” Carl continues comforting.
“We almost lost you!” she sobs, “what were you doing at Central Park in the middle of the night?”
The rest of his family awaited his answer as well.
He scrunches up his brow, trying hard to think of a reason for being there…
“I don’t know.”
A little while later they leave him for some peace and quiet. The need for sleep was imminent. The nurse brings in some medication for his throbbing headache that will supposedly knock him out and he’s not complaining. It has been a bizarre day.
He really can’t remember why he was in the middle of central park, but the doctor says temporary amnesia is common. He just wonders how ‘temporary’ it’s going to be…
It’s painful but he rolls over-he’s never been one to sleep well on his back-and reaches behind his pillow only to find something there.
He pulls it out.
A blue feather.
How odd, he thinks, looking around. There was no other trace of a bird in sight.