Can You Feel The Magic?

All book shops are magical.

This is an incontrovertible fact that is often discarded in a ditch, on the road to ignorance. Books contain worlds. Books contain life, but not always as we know it. They also contain a whole lot of stuff as yet undiscovered, even by the authors who vomited the words down on the pages in a frenzied fit of creativity that possessed them for as long as it took for the story to come alive and enter this world of ours, and our world expands in exciting and unpredictable ways every time a new book is born.

The universe really is constantly expanding.

And so it was that Dave found himself in a book shop and he found magic. Well, that’s what he thought happened, but as with so very much of human experience, he got it back to front and a little topsy turvy for good measure, and no wonder, as the wonder of magic discovered Dave and greeted him as he browsed the pages of books that took his fancy, even as magic took a fancy to him.

Dave blinked.

This blink of Dave’s was a blink exaggerated and theatrical. He blinked as though he had a small rubber duck in his eye and he wanted to dislodge it. He blinked as though his very life depended on it, but there was nothing in his eye at all, it was what was passing through his eye that was his cause for concern, so really, what Dave was doing was attempting to distract himself from what he had seen. Dave was in effect, attempting an act of unseeing and even as an aged mage he would never wield the sort of power that unseeing takes. Besides, unseeing is incredibly dangerous. There is a delete button that does much the same job in this universe, but no one would be crazy enough to use it. That is why it lays unforgotten in a cupboard, in a vestry, in a small and draughty church in a small and draughty corner of a small and draughty country called England, or gods’ country as those in the know refer to it.

He had opened the book somewhere around a third in. He did this often, even though he knew it was a tad disrespectful. He wasn’t sure who exactly it was disrespectful to, it wasn’t as though the author would ever find out, and he wasn’t tearing out the final page of a whodunnit so that a poor sap would read nearly four hundred scintillating pages of build-up, growing ever more pent up with anticipation only for that anticipation to transform itself into rage imbued frustration as the final denouement revealed itself to be that the end was missing, not who actually did it. Sadly, whenever a book is defiled in such a brutal and ignoble way there can never be a satisfactory resolution. Either the slighted reader will never know who it was that done it, and that includes the identity of the evil page snatcher, or upon discovering the intended end of the book, the spell of the previous three hundred and ninety nine pages will be broken and the killer will be a cop out and none of the loose ends will be tied up.

Despite this risky book sampling venture and Dave having an instinctive feel for the order of things, even before the magic came to him and made itself known, he would go right ahead and open the book at a random page and read for a bit. This he did in order to discern the voice of the book and to ascertain whether that voice was pleasing to him. He wanted to hear a few bars of the books song and if he found himself humming along, then he would buy the book. Later in life, in his capacity as a Magical Safety Officer, he would deploy this technique to establish the nature of a book’s magic, all books being magical, but some containing dangerously high levels of dangerous sorts of magic. It’s a very bad idea to read a dangerously dangerous magical book from the beginning. Right now, in the book shop, Dave sampled the wares of the relatively tame book he held in his hand:

…Carter cleared his throat, the sound was broken bricks wrestling with each other in a vat of gravel. The tension in the basement was cold butter and that butter put everyone on edge because there was no… 

HELLO

…knife to spread it with and so the butter sat there, large, yellow and ominous…

DAVE!

This was when Dave blinked his dramatic blink in a failed bid to rid himself of those two words:

HELLO DAVE!

Post-blink, there was no sign of the words, but having seen them, he knew they were there. There was no unseeing them and a good job Dave didn’t inadvertently pull off that unseeing as that would have been deeply unpleasant for all of us, in a life ceasing and world ending spell of unpleasantness sort of way. The words were there just the same as the woodland folk were there, once they’d made their introductions and then merged again with the trees of the forest you always knew they were there because they had proved their existence to you, and that was that and have no doubt about it. 

Incidentally, Dave would not encounter the woodland folk until a week on Tuesday. That encounter was destined to slow his ten day long canter away from magic and his destiny as a Man of Magic. Strictly speaking, Dave was a Magic Man, but he would never settle into a comfortable state of affairs with that label, it felt a little nineteen seventies glam rock and walking the path of magical destiny in those platform shoes was never going to work. 

Yes, in ten days’ time Dave was going to run into a forest, that was really only a copse, so that he could hide from the magic. This pursuit of escape was foolhardy because the magic was inside Dave and always had been. The magic was not out in the world as he would rather believe it to be, and so Dave was running from his very self, and yet he was not getting very far at all, which is not at all surprising to anyone other than Dave. The other rich seam of foolhardiness was that trees are magical conductors and anywhere that trees gather is naturally a place of magic. It is no accident that books are made from trees and that true and avid readers prefer the company of a good old book over an electric screen. There is a natural order to things and a few very bright types in California are not going to change that, however hard they may try.

Right now, Dave was in the book shop and he was staring at a page of words that looked very much like any other page of words, only no two pages of words are ever the same, those pages are like snowflakes, only more interesting and as we have established, magical. Dave stared at the open pages and noted that the words were not moving. This non-movement of words on a page is common place. What was not common place was the way the words, just a few moments ago, had trembled and tremored and then burst into a swirling flurry, very much akin to a tunnel of snowflakes. From the tunnel had emerged HELLO, and then, having merged with the other swirling words, HELLO had made way for DAVE with the addition of an exclamation mark.

Dave had felt the words as much as seen them. These words were a greeting, and an enthusiastic greeting at that. Something or someone was pleased to see Dave. Slowly and carefully, Dave closed the book with the gentlest of efforts in order not to squash any of those words. Then he gingerly placed the book back in its place on the shelf. He did a little more staring, both to ensure he knew exactly where that book was, but also daring it to do something else weird, strange or downright odd. It was a good job that the book didn’t fly off the shelf and hit him square in the forehead. That was a possibility, but not in this case, for the magic loved Dave, and once Dave got over himself, he would in turn love the magic. Loving one’s self is one of the first important steps in this thing we call life and this form of self-love facilitates a lot more life, so it’s a pretty good thing to partake of.

Not really having a clue as to what was happening, nor any idea as to the outcome of these happenings, Dave wasted time and effort in hoping that this funny turn of his was a one off. He turned his back on that book and espied another set of shelves in the book shop that he would like to explore. 

All credit to Dave, he didn’t try to escape the confines of the book shop itself. That would have gone badly for him and would have been fairly traumatic for the lady who ran the book shop and her three other book loving customers.

Once he was at the alternative set of shelves, Dave did that thing that perusers of books do. He gazed upon the spines of the books seeking inspiration from the titles. This is an apparently vague and haphazard way to choose a tome, but when all that is available is the view of a book’s side, then it will have to do.

Dave was in the horror section, a section that almost always incorporates the supernatural and it certainly did in this book shop. Many of the horror titles were short and sweet, but with the promise of an enthrallingly dark and frightening journey…

The Fog.

The Pipe.

It.

The Stand.

The familiarity of the titles and their conventions helped relax Dave after his odd spell over on the other side of the shop. He was just about to retrieve a book from the shelf when, next to the book he’d spotted, a book called The Village, a book he’d heard of and had had recommended to him several times due to his like of all things vampire, he espied a title that did not belong…

Can You Feel the Magic?

Dave’s blood ran cold and the plummeting temperature of the liquid pumping around his system made him shiver. What made it worse was that the book was by an author called Dave Mage. Dave Mage just happened to be Dave’s own name and this was all getting just a bit too much. 

Dave looked around him. No one was paying any attention whatsoever. This had to be a practical joke. Surely he was on film being wound up and any minute now someone would reveal themselves and a relieved Dave would laugh it all off. Eventually.

Dave had another, more desperate look around him. There was a pleading quality to the way he was behaving now. Surely someone, anyone, it didn’t matter who, would put him out of his misery?

No angel of mercy descended as Dave lifted his eyes to the ceiling. There was no one dangling on a rope about to abseil down and rescue Dave from the demonic books that were, even now, taking the proverbial out of him.

He turned back to the book, hoping and expecting that it would have a different, more mundane title, but it remained steadfast in both title and author. So, he raised his hand cautiously to pluck the book forth and bravely examine it further. The eager book, upon seeing Dave’s gesture, leapt forth and joined his hand in mid-air.

Dave yelped.

Dave had never yelped before, but this was a yelping moment and that yelp would not be denied.

The trigger for Dave’s yelp was not the book launching itself through the air, it was the impact of the book against his hand and the feeling that followed it. There was something electric about that moment. Dave felt an energy enter him and that energy instantly altered him.

Dave would never be the same again.

This was Dave’s awakening. Often, the tales of awakenings are gentle. There is a subtle ebb and flow and slowly, ever so slowly, a person becomes aware of something life changing. There are gentle caresses and a seduction that lead to the possession of fulfilling and exhilarating knowledge. Dave’s awakening was not quite as lovely as that, his was more like waking up to the chime of Big Ben and then falling down flight after flight of stairs and alighting in a large bramble bush, filled with angry badgers.

It took him ten days to recover from that rude awakening and he would never faithfully recall what it was that he did over that ten day period as he did his very best to run away from himself. 

He would remember the book with the spine Can You Feel The Magic? Even in his panicked stupor, he managed to purchase that book. Sometime later, when he picked the book up and examined it, it still sported that title, but he was disappointed to discover that it was a mundane book that had been misplaced in the horror section, and to Dave’s horror he realised that, for the first time in his life, he had bought a sweet romance novel. When he looked up the author, Dave Mage, his research gleaned very little. The name was probably a pen name as was the wont of many a sweet romance author, anonymity allowing them to move amongst us with no fuss, recriminations or nonsense involving snow storms, car accidents and broken legs.

Sadly, Dave judged that book by its cover and didn’t open its pages for another three months. Dave may have ceased his mad dash from the inevitability of his existence after ten days, but it was not until he opened the pages of Can You Feel The Magic that he really did feel the magic for what it truly was, and that was when his life took a turn for the better and not just because he quit his job as an accountant and did something much less grey with his life. 

A life on the open seas of magic awaited Dave Mage the Magic Man, or Man of Magic as he would have it. A life that he was awakened to when a seemingly innocuous detective novel playfully splashed his face with magic and bade him to come on in, no need to dip his toe…

So, next time you pick up a book, remember it is magic that you hold right there in your hand. Books contain all manner of magic and there is only one way to find out what magic there is between those pages…

…probably best to open the book at a random place, around a third of the way in should do the trick, and sample the magic of the book to ensure it’s safe enough to take the plunge. 

If in doubt about the magic, give Dave Mage a tinkle, as in phone call, he’s your man when it comes to magical books!