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The first part of chapter one. ninja
According to their rules the loser always set up the game. For the past three years straight Atticus upheld the title of loser, or as he sometimes preferred to be called Grand Master Loser, so it was he who had the honor of preparing the board, and he adhered to Joe’s rules for the setting of the pieces to exact measures.
The pawns had to be lined up from right to left, the black pieces first (Atticus always played black). No white pieces could be set until the first side of the board was compleate. After the pawns were set in place Atticus added the rooks, knights, and bishops. Only then could the queen be placed and only after that could the king touch the board, for the kings always had to be set last. The rules for the white pieces were slightly different. For instance, as Joe and Atticus knew, white horses generate bad luck and should be handled with care. So before setting the white knights in their place Atticus was required to knock on wood three times for each horse, and as usual the queen took her seat before the king and everything set up from right to left.
Chess is a game of strategy, not luck. As Joe said these precautions were taken to ensure that the axis of fate continued to spin in balance, for few people can appreciate how the most seemingly insignificant mishaps—such as setting a king before a queen in chess—can change the destiny of millions.
“The Mona Lisa falls off the wall of an art museum in New York, two days later there’s an earthquake in Italy. You can’t dismiss the impact of good and bad luck,” he used to say, always speaking in even numbered sentences. Atticus figured after forty years Joe didn’t need to count his words. Of course that never stopped Atticus from trying to catch him. He’d tried everything from calling him up at three am for an engaging philosophical discussion to buying him enough rounds of beer to make a man believe two plus two equals fifteen, but even slurred and incoherent Joe’s sentences were always divisible by two.
“A butterfly flaps its wings in Kansas and a tidal wave wipes out Japan. Damn the butterflies!” Atticus would reply and slam his fist on the table. “Billions of dollars in damages, millions of lives lost, families separated, economic chaos. The way you put it we should kill off all the butterflies.”
Then Joe would shake his head, from right to left, naturally. “To kill a butterfly brings bad luck, they carry the souls of unbaptized children. You, a necromancer, should know that. If you see an animal that carries bad luck you should never try to kill it. Fate cannot work on only good luck, see? For example the first butterfly of the season may bring good luck, if it is white. If that butterfly is brown, however, this is a sign of misfortune. Often good luck and bad luck are merely different sides of the same coin.”
And then, usually exasperated by this point, Atticus would reply with something like, “You live, you learn, you die, and that’s all there is to it.”
Joe had once said that Atticus was an old soul. Throughout the ages magic has been in the hands of men who died and were born again many times, men who were wise beyond their own knowledge of wisdom, men who heard the whispers of the stars and grit their teeth at the push and pull of good and evil on the universe. Specifically Joe saw that Atticus had lived and died a hundred and six times for over three thousand years, granting him the magical knowledge denied to souls that linger, trembling in the spirit world, afraid of another life with the promise of death and re-birth. “The dead come to you because they know you like a friend,” Joe had said. “You have been to their realm many times and they respect you, that is why you were born a necromancer. You entered the world without fear of it, because it was the place you knew and had known many times before, and you’ll leave it just the same.”
Although he was thirty-one years old Atticus dressed in the warm colors of autumn, favoring the dusty look of a nineteen-forties detective with his trusty fedora and rimless spectacles always present; he took pride in his appearance and walked with the echo of fine shoes and the flap of well ironed pants. His hair contained traces of ancient bark and his eyes shined with green mysteries in a deep, dark forest. “My mother had green eyes,” Atticus would say. “And my dad was a lawyer. He wouldn’t let me wear anything but nice clothes, especially since my school had such a strict dress code. Oh, I believe you, Joe, about old souls and knowing the world before you arrive. I never knew how to describe it before, I guess I’ve always felt as though I were going through life to rediscover things I’d already learned.” And then he had smiled.
That was seven lucky years ago. In those days Joe could spot a fly on the wall from over six feet away without his glasses, providing of course that the fly was well fed and decently lit. He had a lucrative carrier as both a fortune teller and writer for the local newspaper that earned him the prettiest used Toyota Camry in town. For a man who believed salt could alter the course of the universe he had been absolutely the most irresponsible driver Atticus had ever had the thrill of meeting. Skating across the blade of death at ninety-eight miles per hour, peeling the rubber from his tires with thirty-five mile an hour turns, and on the first occasion Atticus had ridden with him Joe ran a stop sign, pulled a u-turn at forty, spun out, car shrieking like a banshee, then calmly righted himself and accelerated down the road with a casual, “I’m sorry about that.” Four words, damn him.
Joe still had his job at the paper, and had been working as a seer for twenty-five years, but even his sundial sized glasses were useless against his degrading eyesight. Cataracts had already consumed his left eye and the right had acquired a slight glaze, bad news if Atticus had ever seen it. The stubborn fool fought for his car right up to the last second. “I have to keep my car,” he’d said three years ago on the day of the driver’s test. Atticus recalled the desperation and bleakness of Joe’s voice, and how he had worried that he would burst into tears while they were still waiting in the DMV. “Ride the bus, me?” he’d choked. “I hate people, I hate every last person in the world, Attie. I see the evil deeds written on those smug faces, I smell the death that seeps from their every pore. They think they’re so damned important. And me. Do you know what they’d do to me, a common witch in their eyes?”
Well Joe took his drivers test that day, ran over three cones, and ended it all in thirty seconds. Since then Atticus had chaperoned for Joe whenever he needed it. However after the revoking of his license Joe became a hermit, he paid his bills via the internet, even considered having his groceries delivered to him, although he retained enough vision to navigate the isles of the super mart with a cane. Even when he had his license Joe worked from home, writing his horoscopes on the computer in his bed room, telling fortunes from his living room, and rarely going outside, so perhaps the loss of his car had simply pushed him over the edge.
And thus the chess games began. Every Saturday morning at nine am, Atticus chaperoned Joe to the park and they set up their game on the farthest picnic table, and each Saturday Atticus tasted defeat at the hands of his best friend.
Joe was the modern Nostrodamas of Hattiesburg, Mississippi. From his youth Joe had been blessed—afflicted, take your pick—with prophetic dreams. Recently he’d described a dream he’d had taking place in revolutionary France. Time is a tapestry, many seers born with their gift have as many dreams of the past as they do of the future, unfortunate for no one is ever interested in the past. Anyway the funny thing is that for that entire day Joe spoke nothing but fluent French. This wasn’t the first time he’d had this result from a dream taking place in another nation, although it was certainly one of the most amusing. Joe’s ‘Frenchitus’ as Atticus called it wore off the other day; the entirety of the French language simply slipped from his mind.
With Joe’s advantageous abilities the games had little to do with wins and losses, although Atticus jested that they did. They had stopped playing by the clock years ago when the clock ran out three times in a row on Atticus, who always failed to play a reserved game of chess.
Joe leaned over the board and selected a pawn. “Halloween’s here.”
“I’m as giddy as a school girl,” Atticus joked. He moved a pawn, so did Joe. Joe played chess with the hand of a semi-automatic machine gun, Atticus suspected Joe started cheating in the hopes that he would become discouraged with losing and quit the games. If Joe had bothered to look into the future then he’d have known Atticus was far too foolish to quit on anything, no matter how many times he was humiliated.
“We’re going to the cemetery tonight. Midnight, sharp,” Joe prophesized.
“You guessed it. Won’t be late, will I?”
“Smooth roads await you. The weather will be clear and warm, stars fill the sky, the moon will be large and yellow.”
Pawns tap danced onto the board. Atticus purposefully moved at random when the game began, hoping a drunken monkey style would throw Joe’s future-o-meter off target.
“Do you think I’ll have a good turn out for tonight’s haunt?” Atticus ran a kind of supernatural museum in his great grandmother’s old antebellum house. Among the attractions were black and white photographs of famous haunted houses all around America, from Worchester in California to New York’s New Amsterdam theater, and four resident ghosts, including three civil war spirits called Chester, Rob, and Willy, who marched through the house in military formation with Rob and Willy in the back and Chester pounding his confederate drum in the lead, giving the guests quite a spook. The fourth ghost belonged to his grandmother, Lucy Wolfgang, who despite handing ownership of the war house down to her grandson Atticus in her will still controlled the household with an iron fist. She once levitated the couch and dumped Atticus on the floor in the middle of his afternoon nap because his room mate Skyla was cooking with garlic. In life Lucy Wolfgang had been allergic to garlic. At the time Atticus joked that her allergy came from being a vampire, but he wouldn’t dare it now lest her unbound spirit set something on fire.
“Large crowds, like every year before. Except that…” His finger rested on the pawn’s head, prepared to strike down one of Attie’s pieces. If pawns could speak they would have booed Atticus for his disconcern for their lives and the grieving widows they would leave behind. For all the years he’d known him Joe’s prophecies had sustained a 99% success rate of predicting the future. When Joe paused the world too trembled in anticipation.
“… there will be trouble. Someone will come, and many people will be made afraid.” Joe exchanged worried glances with Atticus.
“Will there be ambulances?” Attie’s thoughts turned to one grim October evening when a thirteen year old boy collapsed on the foyer floor—the tour had yet to begin—and his little body convulsed and spoke in tongues, later passing out. Ambulances arrived shortly. Fortunately the boy made it out alright, the doctors diagnosed him with epilepsy and put him on medication, but leave it to good old Mississippians to pin it on the devil worshiping necromancer.
Despite the exhaustive effort of one of the finest Catholic schools in Kansas Atticus left high school a pure and simple agnostic. He believed in an unnamable universal consciousness, the power of magic, preferring to listen to what his grandfather and uncle taught him rather than the version of truth supported by the church. Worshiping the devil failed to appeal to one who didn’t believe in the devil in the first place.
The truth of the matter aside, the well meaning religious masses converged on his house periodically over the next month, said many hail Marys, tacked innumerable flyers to his front door, flooded his e-mail, and one person threw a brick through his window. In the end a few arrests were made, several restraining orders were filed (the court denied Atticus a restraining order against the Catholic church, because according to them one man could not file a restraining order against an entire religion, despite his insistence that it would be much easier that way), and both sides enjoyed ample media attention and publicity. The dispute finally cooled when the boy and his family formally thanked Atticus for being the only person on the scene who knew the proper first-aid to assist a seizure victim.
Joe shook his head in response to Attie’s question of the ambulance and promptly knocked off Attie’s pawn. “No ambulances. If you have someone to watch your front yard you'll be safe. Be on your toes.”
Atticus nodded and turned his attention to the board. It was like looking down on a scene from the first half of the Revolutionary War. Joe’s pieces were arranged by divinity to strike him down at every square. In a few turns there would be little left of his first line of defense, he imagined Joe carving a white blazing path through the blackie’s ranks while the king and queen jeered at their incompetent general.
Well let them complain. Nobody ever got beheaded for treason against a monarchy of plastic.
“I’ll remember that,” said Atticus, avenging his fallen pawn with a knight. The black ranks celebrated his victory, only to be interrupted by the white bishop flying across the board and incapacitating the black knight with a swing of his oversized hat.
“Damn, I thought I had you there. Those bishops are always sneaking up on me.”
“You have to be mindful of your pieces. Did you ever consider that, perhaps, I can’t see into the future at all?” Joe leaned over the table, squinting his good eye.
Atticus took a pawn and spun it between his thumb and fore finger. “You predicted every hurricane last year, except for Katrina, and you predicted Cowboy Bob would win the election in 2001, and you said gas prices would rise again. Oh, and The Da Vinchi Code. What was it you said to me? ‘All your favorite History Channel programs will be replaced with lame conspiracy plots’, something like that.” He stammered, unable to latch on to the correct quote. “You said ‘Dan Brown is writing a book that’ll piss you off, Attie’.”
“I never said you’d be upset by it. Actually I told Ellen to invest in it.”
“She still says it’s the best advice you’ve ever given her. Are you sure you didn’t…?”
Joe shrugged. “I might have said you would be irritated by the hype but not the book.”
“Well you were a hundred and ten percent right about that. I can’t stand when everybody’s talking about a book I’ve never read, you know? I actually brought it too and I can’t get past the first paragraph the writing is so bland.” He spun the pawn, biting his lip. “What were we talking about? Oh, oh, the future. Of course you can, everybody in Hattiesburg knows you can. Even before 9/11 you were telling people to stay out of New York. You really saved some people’s lives there.”
Joe shook his head modestly. “I didn’t predict 9/11. Before 9/11 thousands of psychics and seers across America predicted plane crashes. I never saw planes. The number 911 came up in a few of my readings, but I thought it meant the police.”
“So major disasters aren’t your thing. I mean, you didn’t predict Katrina either, but you still told people to stay out of New Orleans.”
“I hate New Orleans, I always tell people to stay away from that crooked town, see? Attie do you know you’re eating your pawn?”
“Hum?” Atticus pulled the pawn from his mouth. Tooth marks were etched into the head of the pawn and Atticus quickly wiped off his saliva with a handkerchief while the remainder of his infantry stared transfixed in horror and Atticus imagined shouts of “We’re doomed!” would soon break out amongst the ranks. “Sorry about that.”
“They’re your chess pieces, eat them if you want to,” said Joe carelessly.
Atticus set the brain damaged pawn back where it came from, and then realized it was still his turn. This time he checked the path for soldiers before he moved. “Why do you ask?”
Joe frowned. “Healthy skepticism is a worthy priority.”
“And good for business,” added Atticus with a wicked grin. He thrived off skeptics on Halloween. They challenged the beliefs of the faithful ones and drove them to him in herds without realizing the free publicity they’d been generating, and a few of them even had the backwards sensibility to show up on his doorstep to ‘refute’ his bogus claims in person, after paying admission of course. One of the dumbest skeptics he’d ever met broadcast his haunted tour on live television, thus recruiting hundreds of new fans for his haunted museum.
The best skeptics are the ones who don’t feed the fire. While Atticus respected their strength of will he wished they’d open their mouths once in a while to help him sell some tickets. Joe made his next move. Atticus stared at the position of the white knight on the board. That seemed like a strange move to make when Joe’s bishop was right in line to take out the remaining of his knights. Scratching his stubbly chin, Atticus moved the knight of harms way. “I finally have a taxidermist lined up for Senior Francisco.”
“Do you?”
Senior Francisco del Muerto de Puerto Rico y Capistrano, Senior Francisco for short was an adult South American macaw Ellen had found lying on the sidewalk outside her book shop. The poor creature had been attacked by a dog and even all the charm and sweetness of an old grandmother like Ellen couldn’t save the macaw as he passed away shortly after she’d taken him inside. Atticus and Joe regularly played cards in the back of the book shop with the other wizards and witches of Hattiesburg, and when Atticus arrived Ellen pleaded with him to use his magic to bring the macaw back to life.
“He’s such a beautiful bird, I’d feel terrible if his owners had to see him like this,” she’d said, her dark, gypsy eyes forlorn. Unfortunately there was nothing Atticus could do. Life requires life, a sacrifice would be needed to restore the macaw, and resurrection is one part of necromancy that has always been frowned upon, even by other necromancers. Since there were no flyers in town asking for a missing macaw and neither the police station nor animal control said anything of it they assumed the macaw must have flown in from out of state. Atticus named the bird Senior Francisco del Muerto de Puerto Rico y Capistrano and offered to have it taxadermined for Ellen’s shop. Ellen, who felt saddened by the idea of the beautiful macaw forgotten in an unmarked shoebox grave, hesitantly agreed.
Getting back to the conversation: Atticus nodded and took Joe’s pawns. “His name is Milford Fin. His shop is a ways out of town but he does great work. Before I, uh, immortalize him I thought I’d take advantage of that pirate costume I was planning on this Halloween.”
Joe’s eyes widened. “I thought you said that would be immoral.”
“Well, not immoral if I’m just using the corpse. I won’t try to restore life, that’s too much work, and Senior Francisco’s soul is free. I’ll just fill up the empty space with something else. Kind of like a taxidermist.”
“You’re a little sick in the head, Attie.”
“Ah, nobody will know the difference. Birds have those creepy black eyes, even when they’re alive they look back at you as if they’re dead. You know as well as I do that the body is just a temporary vessel, useless without the soul, flesh and bone have no importance. The soul is eternal. Flesh is just a fad.”
“If you go around wearing dead birds on your shoulder you’ll catch avian flu,” Joe turned his lip in disgust.
Atticus smiled whimsically. “Is that a prediction or just advice?”
“You’re better off wondering.”
As the game progressed more and more white pieces turned up in the graveyard. Atticus concentrated on the conversation more than he did the game, the conversation which included everything from current events to deep religious and philosophical discussions, candy for the frontal lobe. By the time he noticed the difference his black army had unwittingly decimated half the board, victory stood tippy-toes on their door step. Obviously it had to be a trap. “You know, it looks like you’re losing,” he accused.
Joe hesitantly glanced at the board. He smiled, his face held together by beams of insincerity. “It looks like you’re winning, then.”
“No I’m not. I’ve been playing you for three years and I’ve never won before, even when I’m actually paying attention to what I’m doing,” a condition that occurred once in a blue moon and lasted half as long. “I’ve never come this close. You don’t have to throw a game for me, Joe, I like that you’re honest enough to beat the crap out of me; you should kill me while you have the chance.”
“Attie, you don’t give a damn about chess and you’ve never actually tried to win a game in your life.” The words sputtered from his mouth rapid fire like a computer spitting out a data sheet.
“What’s your point? You’re a seer, you’d beat me hands down even if I tried. Besides the conversation’s more fun than the game.”
Joe sighed. “It is. I always enjoy talking to you. But I’m tired of being thought of as a cheat. I’ve never used my gift to defeat you. Maybe if you paid more attention to the game you’d realize that I’m no better at chess than you are.”
“Well not when you play like this,” he chuckled. “Anyway it’s getting late, I have to get ready. Like you said, big crowds tonight. Best be prepared. I’m gonna need a few more bags of candy, some new lights to replace the ones that burnt out last night, oh, and I need a few more things for my costume. I figure a few plastic rings and Marti-Graz beads, some of those prosthetic teeth, a cutlass and I’ll look like the real thing. Hey, I’ll tell you what. How about tomorrow noonish you and I get together for a re-match. I’ll be serious this time, why I’ll run you into the ground, I’ll beat you so bad you’ll wish you’d never tried to play fairly in the first place.”
Joe smiled wryly. “We’ll see. I won’t let you off so easy then.”
EDIT: I'm linking the conversation Latkes and I had about Atticus in the Eleventyone here, because I don't have anywhere else to put it and I don't want to lose it either. Link!
Sergeant Sargent · Sun Jun 25, 2006 @ 06:12am · 2 Comments |
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