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fakesurprise · 3 years ago

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A Jaymas Carol (2/5)

Stave Two: The First of the Jaymas Spirits

When Charlie awoke, it was so dark that the darkness seemed almost but not quite apologetic. She turned the light on on her phone, piercing the room with scowling eyes when the chimes of a neighbouring phone rang. Screams of, “Siri, no!” and “What?” filled the air in the other rooms but the rings from six to seven which ate night and reached twelve! 12! The clock was wrong. A hug must have got into the works. XII!

Charlie turned on the lights and checked her phone. “Why, it isn’t possible,” said Charlie, “that I can have slept through a whole day and far into another night.” She paused. “Because I would have missed too many adventures of my own!”

Honcho’s Ghost had vexed her exceedingly. Every time she resolved within herself, after mature inquiry, to not summon and yell at Jay, her mind flew back again to present the problem: “What was done?”

Charlie scowled in that state until three more chimes had gone and waited until one in grim silence.

She did not speak before the hour bell sounded, which it did with a deep, dull, hollow ring. Light flashed up in the room upon the instant, and the blinds of the bed became curtains and were drawn. Not drawn by an artist, I tell you, but by a hand!

It was a strangesome figure—like a child yet not so like a child as like a boy of ten, viewed over some shimmer of distance that gave him the appearance of having diminished from view, his eyes for a moment touching eternity before being just eyes as the boy grinned.

Oh! That grin! You had never thought to see one like it in all the words waking and dreaming: it was bright and effervescent, fresh as new-fallen snow and warm as the light of the Sun. The clothing the boy wore was plain save that none of it belonged together: the socks did not match, nor did either side of jeans and the boy wore a kilt over them and a scarf had been woven into a shirt of technical-colours that was a Cloak that the boy had yet to find and befriend.

A breath caught in Charlie’s throat and the night’s anger became something wholly Other in that moment.

“Are you the spirit, boy, whose coming was foretold?”

“I am,” the spirit said proudly. The voice was soft and gentle. Singularly low, as if instead of being so close beside her, it were at a hesitance.

“Who, and what are you?” Charlie asked, but gently.

The boy opened his mouth to speak and hesitated for but an instant. “I am a Jay of a Holiday Before!”

“No, you’re not.”

“I am too!”

“Jay.” And Charlie raised one eyebrow that had knowing the spirit could not hide from.

The spirit scowled and spoke again. “I am the Ghotht of Jaymath Patht.”

“Hey, kiddo.”

The spirit blushed happily. “I am thpothed to be being really thtern!”

“And you are,” Charlie says wisely.

“Good!” And the spirit hugged Charlie tightly for a moment before stepping back to look very sternly up at her, and they vanished in a swirl of energy to a point several hours ago, appearing in the hotel room before a different Jay and Charlie both.

“They are but an echo of a thing that had been. They have no knowledge of our being here,” the Spirit said.

“So they aren’t shadows?” Charlie asked.

“Nope,” the spirit replied firmly.

And they beheld Charlie, and a Jay who was not the Spirit but a boy of eleven who was unlike the boy of ten because he was eleven and taller and did not hesitate before speaking a single word.

“I told Jay he could only have forty adventures,” Charlie said, “sometime before breakfast.”

“Uh-huh,” the Spirit of Jaymas Past said.

“That may have been an oops,” she admitted.

The boy who was Jay at ten thought this over. His thinking was as deep as the sea but also as wide as the ocean so that it often did not appear deep at all. “Thometimeth a lot of oopses don’t theem like that becauthe they don’t say oops!”

“This is true,” Charlie said with quiet approval. “Can we go back to the start?”

The spirit grinned and even Time looked away and let that joy slide.

They appeared inside another hotel room, the power of the spirit pulling Charlie through Time as much as Space. The Charlie in this hotel was younger: seven years removed the grey from her hair entirely and she carried herself as if she knew a secret the world was not privy to. A god looked out of her eyes, all darkness and hungry shadows but it, too, did not see the travellers.

A boy entered. This is Jay who is newly ten and pale with power he has used to hide. He sees Charlie and hisses, revealing fangs which vanish as he dives to hide under a bed in terror! The fangs remain gone though the lisp lasts longer for the ways of bindings are mysterious and oft strange.

The magician walks in after. Honcho looks surprised because even then he had some idea of what Jay was and the bindings between them ran deep and powerful.

“Jay. It’s okay,” he said gently while Charlie was frozen in shock.

“I don’t want to be eaten,” Jay wailed because Charlie was an eater of gods and Jay had seen the depths of her power in a single moment without filters. We all spend our lives with filters, but a Jay does not!

“I won’t eat you,” past Charlie said.

“Promithe?” Past Jay asked and bindings ran between them too deep for words to show or even the eyes of spirits to know.

Charlie closed her eyes as past-Charlie makes a promise so deep it makes the air ring with a bell all its own.

“I’ve seen enough. Spirit: I’ve seen enough,” she said and

Charlie woke up in her bed. And waited in silence for the second bells.

(part one is here.)

#writing #prose #magician series #a jaymas carol

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