Unsympathetic Magic - Laura Resnick [25]
I took another hearty swallow of coffee and thought this over. “Max, I have no idea what you’ve just said.”
“That’s understandable, since I’m finding it difficult to explain it adequately.”
Nelli watched with mournful longing as I finished my bagel.
I said to Max, “Well, I know that you can sense things that mundanes can’t—such as supernatural disturbances in this dimension.”
“Strictly speaking, the word ‘supernatural’ is inaccurate. Virtually all phenomena are natural, but some are mystical and some are not.”
“Yes. Whatever.” We had talked about this before. “What I mean is, I realize that you’re sensitive to phenomena that others don’t even know exist.”
Max’s ability to sense mystical changes or imbalances in his environment had saved me from a fate worse than bad reviews. We first met when he had prevented me from becoming the next victim in a series of mysterious disappearances. He had sensed a disturbance in the fabric of this dimension when performers began involuntarily vanishing during disappearing acts onstage, and this had led him to me—right before I would have become the next disappearee.
So if Max was again experiencing a sensation that he identified as a disturbance in the mystical energy of this dimension, then I took it seriously. Even more so if he thought it related to what I had seen last night. So I urged him to take another stab at explaining it.
“Picture the energy of life,” he said, “as a river that flows steadily in one direction, ever onward, from its source to the sea. It may become a dangerous torrent in spring, it may dry up during a drought and nearly disappear, it may swell and flood the surrounding landscape after heavy rains, but it always continues flowing in the same direction.”
Unable to withstand the burden of Nelli’s longing gaze, I slipped her a bagel as I said to Max, “Go on.”
“Now imagine that while boating on the river, or fishing in it, or while wading through it at a ford, you notice that certain portions of the river, against all experience and logic, are suddenly moving in the opposite direction. From the sea to the source, as it were.”
Nelli finished gulping down her bagel, wagged her tail, and gazed hopefully at me. “No,” I said to her. And then to Max: “Okay. I get it. If this is happening to the river of life-energy, so to speak, then that means . . . Um, what does that mean?”
“Instead of a consistent flow of energy traveling, as it should, from birth to life to death, some energy lately seems to be moving in the reverse direction.”
I frowned. “From death to life?”
“Yes. I cannot explain it or account for it. But that is what I sense.”
“And then last night . . .” I shuddered as a sudden chill passed over me. “I spoke with a man who has supposedly been dead for three weeks.”
“Hence my suspicion,” Max said, “that your strange experience may be related to this mysterious mystical matter, and that Detective Lopez, though an undeniably astute young man, is quite possibly mistaken when he characterizes last night’s events as a prank.”
“You think the man I saw last night was really dead?” I said with dread. “Even though he was, you know, moving around and talking?”
“No, my dear, I don’t think he was really dead.”
I sighed with relief. “Thank goodness.” I found the idea too disturbing.
“Not anymore.”
“Huh?”
“I suspect it would be more accurate,” Max said, “to classify him as reanimated.”
“What?” I was disturbed all over again.
“Or perhaps resurrected? Though that word has religious overtones which it would perhaps be best to avoid. I had a most unpleasant encounter, you know, with the Spanish Inquisition in Sicily. It was still relatively early in the eighteenth century, not long after I realized that I was aging at an unusually slow rate and, though in my seventies, I still looked like a young man. And the experiences which I endured in Palermo have made me