A Dozen Secrets: Twelve Tales of Hidden Magic Read online

  Copyright ©2017 Angel Wedge

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, duplicated, inebriated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means except by permission of the author.

  The right of Angel Wedge to be identified as the author of this work is asserted by him in accordance with the 1988 Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act.

  All characters in this book are entirely fictitious, and any similarity to real persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.

  * * *

  Cover image Book with magic powers, by Johan Swanepoel

  Cover fonts FogLihten №07 and №04, from Gluk Fonts.

  Dedication

  This book is for all the friends and family who've encouraged me to get this far, and to everyone who's pushed me to keep on trying. And especially to those who've helped out by reading my books, reviewing, and resharing even if it might not be the kind of thing you'd normally read. That's what keeps me going.

  A Dozen Secrets

  How many secrets can one mind imagine? How many hidden factions could be hiding beneath the veneer of a normal world? One author set out to write a story every day for more than a year, and these are some of the most intriguing; a selection of stories about the myths, magic, and monsters that could hide in the modern world without anyone knowing they were there…

  Violation

  The Chain

  Unorthodox Measures

  Buyer Beware

  Artifact NEC-20021b-7-224

  Unlocked

  Concerto

  Sephiroth

  Box of Bliss

  Nine Lights

  A Business Traveller

  Spiders

  The Quiet Girl

  And if a dozen stories isn't enough for you, maybe you could check out some of the earlier collections in this series:

  A Dozen Curiosities

  A Dozen Nightmares

  Violation

  Lisette was wearing a thin dress of white cotton, probably better suited to a walk on the beach than to climbing a fence. Her calf-length imitation leather boots would have been better suited to a catwalk, and certainly wouldn’t be easy to clean after traipsing over the layers of mud on the potholed path. Even her hair was immaculately styled, and she dreaded to think about the task of washing it if she came into contact with the vines, lianas or whatever they were, dangling from the wild trees beyond the barrier.

  The sign on the gate said “NO TRESPASSING” in bold capitals, a clear statement to casual visitors that they weren’t supposed to be anywhere beyond this point. But despite all the signs she’d already passed, and the clear unsuitability of her attire, Lisette knew that this was exactly where she was supposed to be. Her whole life so far had led up to this point. She’d seen it coming for a while, if only through vague and enigmatic clues. As she rattled the chains that held the gate closed, her mind drifted back to the first time she’d got herself involved in a real mystery.

  She’d just been a child, though old enough not to think of herself as such. Old enough to wish people would take her seriously, old enough to be angry when people didn’t realise she was as smart as them, but not mature enough to realise they might be right. She’d been bored, hunting around in the attic for something to do, when she had come across a couple of newspaper clippings that caught her interest immediately. They’d been yellowed with age, and brittle enough that pieces flaked off the edges when she touched them, but she’d known immediately that they were left for her to find.

  A body had been found at a mine on the outskirts of town, the clippings had said. A young woman, who should certainly not have been near the mine. Nobody knew how she’d got past security, how she could have passed all the men working without anyone noticing. A man carrying a rifle down there would have been suspect. A young woman without a uniform and hard hat even harder to hide. There was the possibility that the killer had brought the body there afterwards, but some investigator said that the bullets that killed her had been found embedded in the wall, with blood splatter to suggest the crime had been committed there.

  For all Lisette had been able to find, that case had never been solved. It was just a mystery, and any documents related to it had been swept under the rug or lost following the mine’s closure a few years before she was born. That was the first mystery that had caught her attention, though. Many others came later. Most of them followed the pattern of the first, finding a newspaper clipping or some other document. Some of them were a century old, and some of them only a few weeks. For a while she wondered who was leaving them for her to find, because she couldn’t imagine it was chance that every time she had some important rite of passage in her life, a news story would turn up that taught her precisely what she needed to understand in order to deal with it. Whether it was jealousy, or fending off an unwelcome admirer, or having the courage to tell a friend they were making a mistake, the mysteries she investigated had always seemed to contain a lesson that was helpful to her.

  Sometimes she could solve the mystery, and shed light on a case that everyone else seemed to have given up on. Sometimes the clues were all there in the newspapers, while other times she’d have to go searching for the facts herself. When she was younger, it just made her angry that nobody would listen even after she found the solution, but eventually she came to prefer investigating from the shadows, dropping subtle or not so subtle hints to those who actually had the job of investigating.

  Dropping hints became so much easier when she found out why notes were disappearing from her briefcase. The answer had been right under her nose all along, but it wasn’t until she compared a particular mystery to her own life that she realised the truth. She had a supernatural power all of her own. Not something outrageous like Superman; those kind of abilities were only suitable for the realms of fiction. But a discreet, careful power that still managed to find no compatibility with the accepted laws of physics. Her power obeyed laws, but they were rules of its own. She found that she could send messages to anyone, anywhere. A note from her file, a newspaper clipping or a memo. She could simply drop a note behind her desk, and it would eventually show up on the desk of a professional news reporter or someone in the police, exactly where it needed to be. That wasn’t all there was to her power, but it was all she knew about for a while.

  Sometimes, she didn’t need to tell anyone she’d solved a case. When she went digging for clues, she would find that a criminal had been brought to justice decades earlier, or that the mystery suitor had finally gathered the courage to propose to Lisette’s great-grandmother. But she had to solve the mystery before she could look in the right place to find the answer, so those cases presented just as much challenge to her, and she still felt she learned something from investigating them, whether it was a moral or a practical lesson.

  Sometimes, she had no idea if someone else had solved the mystery or not. Because those were newspaper clippings from papers that wouldn’t be printed yet. She would get a story of a terrible accident, try to look up more details, and then find nothing. She couldn’t even tell whether the story was recent or years old because no newspaper seemed to have the story she was looking at. And then while she was hunting for more details, the events would unfold right in front of her. Her own comments were even in the article she’d read, a quotation from ‘an anonymous bystander’, and that was when she’d come to realise that her purpose was much more significant than catching criminals, and her power was more than just sending messages to other places.

  She must have sent more than a dozen messages to the police. Newspaper clippings bundled together, with notes in pen pointing out the connecti
ons they’d missed, or photographs, or even a memo written on a restaurant napkin. From what she’d heard, after she dropped a message down the back of her desk, it appeared on a detective’s desk the next day, and nobody ever saw how it got there. But when they arrived, the notes were always blackened by dust and grime, newsprint faded as if by great age. It was that quality which had persuaded them to actually look at the first one she sent, rather than throw it away.

  Then her parents had died, still young. While Lisette was clearing out her house ready to move, she found all those notes in the crawl space, where a floorboard that didn’t quite reach the wall had for years been letting them fall through. They were thick with dust, some nibbled by rats, and she started to question what her power was. Her messages clearly hadn’t been sent to the police, if they were still here. But they had received them all the same.

  So she started to experiment, to try to understand this mysterious power. With practise she found it amazingly easy to send something into the future an hour or a day. Letters disappeared and then reappeared. Or once she tried, she found she could send something into the past as well. She concentrated on a slip of paper in her hand, while she stood out in the woods, and once it disappeared she would search and find it under the morning’s snowfall, right where she’d dropped it.

  It wasn’t long before she realised she couldn’t send messages to another place at all; just another time. That asked more questions than it answered. Then the Centennial Park was built, and the detectives of the Eastchester Police were moved to new offices on the top floor of the police centre as their old building was demolished. On the day the park opened, she knew she had to be there with all those old letters, to send back to people long gone. At first, she had been surprised to find that she still knew where each letter should go. Sometimes the time she sent it to wasn’t precise, she couldn’t choose an exact day. But that didn’t matter, because she already knew that they had arrived exactly when and where they had needed to go.

  There must be others with this power as well, she knew. Her ancestors? Her children? She’d found several notes written to her by others, exactly when she needed them. And newspaper clippings from a century before, she was sure someone must have sent those. But as time went on, following her instincts it seemed she had to write cryptic notes to herself sometimes. She slowly became more receptive to the instincts that told her where she must go and when, in order to fulfill the results she had already seen. Still, she was sure that she hadn’t written all the messages she received.

  Maybe she could call for things from the past or future, as well as send them? That was one thing she’d never been able to test, because the few times she’d tried summoning a note, the one she received was one she’d later found herself sending. Did that mean that her instincts were the mechanism for fulfilling her earlier wishes, or that calling for an item actually made no difference?

  Well, she could try it now. She needed to get through these gates, onto a battered and worn out road surface beyond. It was where she was supposed to be, but the rusted chain was still much stronger than she could break, and the gate swayed too much for her to have any confidence at climbing over it. She held out one hand, and tried to imagine a key, or a bolt cutter, or anything that could help her. It wasn’t likely, she’d never managed to send anything that wasn’t some kind of written message, but she knew that she had to try.

  Her friends would probably be worrying about her by now, if any of them were sober enough to wonder where she’d got to. She had been out on the town with a few workmates, helping Sandra celebrate her engagement, when she had suddenly realised there was somewhere she needed to be. She’d just ducked out and got on her bike, and ten minutes later she was facing a high chain-link fence in the middle of nowhere, trying to get into a place with no idea where she was or why.

  A scrap of paper tumbled into her hand. She looked at it for a second, her eyes wide in surprise. She remembered it, from when she’d first started investigating and didn’t really understand why. It had appeared beside her bed one day, and she’d carried it around in her purse for more than a month as the page got more and more tattered, never being able to extract any sense from the mess of names and numerals around the edges. In the end, frustrated, she’d sent it away as one of her first tests of her powers. A year later, she’d seen it again.

  She’d doodled without thinking while in the middle of a long and complex phone call while two school friends both wanted her help to sort out their love lives. Names, crossed out, people’s numbers, and other jottings that had already been on her doodle pad, with no semblance of order. In the middle she’d doodled as she thought, a big heart made of barbed wire. Then she’d tried to turn it into a spade, a different symbol from the deck of cards because she didn’t want love to be on her mind at that time. It hadn’t looked anything like one, but she’d recognised it from the earlier experiment and decided to keep it until she could figure out why it looked so familiar. Sending it back had been the last thing she did before leaving her parents’ house, once she was just barely adult enough to have all the troubles of adulthood thrust on her.

  Now it was here again. It was probably useful after all. If she could remember what she’d been looking into when she sent it, then she would at least have some idea where she was. But those memories didn’t come. She looked at the symbol again, surrounded by names or phone numbers of friends she’d lost touch with and crushes she wished she could forget so easily. It had been supposed to be a spade symbol originally, made of barbed wire in some ironic, stylish way. It didn’t look like one. When she’d first found it, she’d thought it was a direction arrow.

  Well, even something sent by chance could have meaning. Lisette turned to her right and started walking along the fence, in the direction the arrow had seemed to be pointing when it appeared. She almost couldn’t believe it when she found a tree branch had torn the fence away from one of its posts. A car must have hit the tree, maybe, knocking it down, and the upper branches had hit the fence. It hadn’t made a complete gap, but climbing onto an almost-horizontal tree trunk made it a whole lot easier to clamber over into this place, whatever it was supposed to be.

  She walked slowly down the path. She didn’t like being here, this wasn’t like her. She’d only ever come to the scene of a crime when she thought it was a long time in the past, but here she was without even knowing why. The instinct had come on suddenly, telling her there was somewhere she needed to be, and she had just followed it like an idiot. She had assumed she’d have to send something back that she’d already received in the past, that was normally what that urge meant. She had no idea what would happen if she didn’t send something once she’d already seen it, but she was pretty sure it would be bad. But in a case like this, when she had no idea where she was or why, all she had was those instincts to keep her on track.

  Maybe when she had sent that note with the arrow on forward, she had gone into the place and received something as well. Whatever it could have been, she would have to trust that she had it with her now. She followed the path, tripping where the asphalt was cracked and pitted by years of neglect. Then she saw the lake, and realised where she was. This must be Petersen’s Flash; kids had played here when she was younger, until the council decided it was too dangerous and put fences all around. The pit in the middle had almost sheer sides, dangerous rocky outcrops where the boys had loved to explore. It was some kind of subsidence, she’d heard, turned into a lake when it filled up with rainwater and there was nowhere for it to flow away.

  She wouldn’t have come here so late in the evening. Her night out had started pretty early, and there was still a trace of summer twilight illuminating the sky, but she knew just how easily you could lose your way in a place like this if you weren’t familiar with which bits of the cliffs could be scrambled up. But… she was supposed to be here, and she couldn’t turn back now. She just hoped that once the instincts stopped pulling her along on a leash, it would be easy enough to
find her way back.

  She walked down to the edge of the water. The way the rocks had sunk, there was a cave here descending into the cliff face. It went below the water level, but it wasn’t submerged. As she proceeded down, she could see drips forcing their way through hairline fractures in the rock, tiny rivulets flowing down ahead of her. She wished her research had at some point included a little more practical geology, then at least she might have some idea how safe it was to be down here. Or maybe that would be worse, because if she knew it was liable to flood or collapse at any time, she still wouldn’t be able to turn back until her task was complete.

  She was in an underground passageway now, almost level. No light came in behind her, so she got out her cellphone and used the glow from its screen to light the path ahead. It was amazing how regular this cave was, just large enough to walk comfortably, and just wide enough that she couldn’t keep a hand on both walls at the same time.

  She knew there was someone else ahead when she saw light. She realised where she was when she saw wooden props supporting the ceiling. Presumably some of them had decayed enough for part of the old mine tunnels to collapse, creating the flash above. The man in front of her was holding a lantern in one hand, bright white light leaving black shadows. He had a weapon in his other hand.

  “I knew I’d find you here sooner or later,” he said, “I already read about it. I’ve got a message to send to your granny, you know.”

  She just nodded. She didn’t know Grandma had ever got a message from this guy, but it wasn’t down to her to say no. If the instincts had brought her here, then this message must have arrived, and on some subconscious level maybe she’d seen something to let her know that. She had to send the messages back once they’d arrived, there was simply no other option.

  “What’s the message?” It was the only question she felt was appropriate to ask. It wouldn’t do to question his motives when he had a rifle over his shoulder to ensure compliance.