An Apple for the Creature

Hunter’s little friend, the boy in the cowboy boots, ran up to grab one of Ms. Yarnell’s apples and threw it squarely at another little boy, just as he’d seen her do.

Yells of anger. Tears.

Yeah, some things about school would never change.

Spellcaster 2.0 JONATHAN MABERRY

Jonathan Maberry is a New York Times bestselling author, multiple Bram Stoker Award winner, and Marvel Comics writer. He’s the author of a dozen novels in several genres and many nonfiction books on topics ranging from martial arts to supernatural folklore. Since 1978 he has sold more than twelve hundred magazine feature articles, three thousand columns, two plays, greeting cards, song lyrics, poetry, and textbooks. He founded the Writers Coffeehouse and cofounded the Liars Club, and is a frequent keynote speaker and guest of honor at major writers and genre conferences. Visit him online at jonathanmaberry.com and on Twitter (@jonathanmaberry) and Facebook.

—1—

“Username?”

“You’re going to laugh at me.”

Trey LaSalle turned to her but said nothing. He wore very hip, very expensive tortoiseshell glasses and he let them and his two-hundred-dollar haircut do his talking for him. The girl withered.

“It’s . . . obvious?” she said awkwardly, posing it as a question.

“Let me guess. It’s going to be a famous magician, right? Which one, I wonder? Won’t be Merlin because even you’re not that obvious, and it won’t be Nostradamus because I doubt you could spell it.”

“I can spell,” she said, but there was no emphasis to it.

“Hmm. StGermaine? No? Dumbledore? Gandalf?”

“It’s—”

He pursed his lips. “Girl, please don’t tell me it really is Merlin.”

Anthem blushed herself mute.

“Jesus save me.” Trey rubbed his eyes and typed in MERLIN with slow sarcasm, each keystroke separate and very sharp. By the fourth letter Anthem’s eyes were jumping.

Her name was really Anthem. Her parents were right-wing second gens of left-wing Boomers from the Village, a confusion of genetics and ideologies that resulted in a girl who was bait fish for everyone at the University of Pennsylvania with an IQ higher than their belt size. Though barely a palate cleanser for a shark like Trey. He sipped his pumpkin spice latte and sighed.

“Password?” he prompted.

“You’re going to make fun of me again.”

“There’s that chance,” he admitted. “Is it too cute, too personal or too stupid?” He carved off slices of each word and spread them out thin and cold. He was good at that. Back in high school his snarky tone would have earned him a beating—had, in fact, earned him several beatings; but then he conquered the cool crowd. Thereafter they kept him well-protected, well-appeased and well-stocked with a willing audience of masochists who had already begun to learn that anyone with a truly lethal wit was never—ever—to be mocked or harmed. In that environment, Trey LaSalle had flourished into the self-satisfied diva he now enjoyed being. Now, in his junior year at U of P, Trey owned the in-crowd and their hangers-on because he was able to work the sassy gay BFF role as if the trope were built for him. At the same time he could also play the get-it-done team leader when the chips were down.

Those chips were certainly down right now. Trey figured that Jonesy and Bird had gotten Anthem to call Trey for a bailout because she was so thoroughly a Bambi in the brights that even he wouldn’t actually slaughter her.

“Password?” He drew it into a hiss.

Anthem chewed a fingernail. Despite the fact that she painted her nails, they were all nibbled down to nubs. A couple of them even had blood caked along the sides from where she’d cannibalized herself a bit too aggressively, and there were faint chocolate-colored smears of it on the keyboard. Trey made a mental note to bathe in Purell when he got back to his room.

“Come on, girl,” he coaxed.

She blurted it. “Abracadabra.”

Trey stared at the screen and tried very hard not to close the laptop and club her to death with it. He typed it in. The display changed from the bland log-in screen to the landing page for The Spellcaster Project.

The project.

It sounded simple, but wasn’t. Over the course of the last eighteen months the group had collected, organized and committed to computer memory every evocation and conjuring spell known to the various beliefs of human culture, from phonetic interpretations of guttural verbal chants by remote Brazilian tribes to complex rituals in Latin and Greek. On the surface the project was a searchable database so thorough that it would be the go-to resource. A resource for which access could be leased, opening a cash flow for the folklore department. And, people would definitely pay. This database—nicknamed Spellcaster—was a researcher’s dream.

Trey found it all fascinating but considered it immensely silly at the same time. He was a scientist, or becoming one, and yet his field of study involved nothing that he believed in. Doctors at least believed in healing, but folklorists were a notoriously atheistic lot. Demons and gods, spells and sacred rituals. None of it was remotely real. All of it was an attempt to make sense of a world that could not be truly understood or defined, and certainly not controlled. Things just happened. Nobody was at the controls, and nobody was taking calls from the human race.

And yet with all that, it was fascinating, like watching a car wreck. You don’t want to be a part of it but you can’t look away. He even went to church sometimes, just to study the people, to mentally catalog the individual ways in which they interpreted the religion to which they ascribed. There was infinite variation within a species, just as within flowers in a field. And soon he would be making money from it, and that was something he could believe in.

The second aspect of the project was Spellcaster 2.0, which began as Trey’s idea but along the way had somehow become Professor Davidoff’s. In essence, once the thousands of spells were entered, a program would run through all of them to look for common elements. Developmental goals included a determination of how many common themes appeared in spells and what themes appeared in a majority, or at least a significant number of them. The end goal was to create a perfect generic spell. A spell that established that there were some aspects to magical conjuring that linked the disparate tribes and cultures of mankind.

Trey’s hypothesis was that anthropologists would be able to use that information, along with related linguistic models, to more accurately track the spread of humankind from its African origins. It might effectively prove that the spread of religion in all of its many forms stemmed from the same central source. Or—as he privately thought of it—mankind’s first big stupid mistake. In other words, the birth of prayer and organized religion.

Finding that would be a watershed moment in anthropology, folklore, sociology and history. It would be a Nobel Prize no-brainer, and it didn’t matter to Trey if he shared that prize, and all of the fame and—no doubt— fortune that went with it. Spellcaster was going to make them all rich.

“Okay,” Trey said, “why are we here?”

Anthem chewed her lip. She did it prettily, and even though she was the wrong cut of meat for Trey’s personal tastes, he had to admit that she was all that. She was an East Coast blonde with ice-pale skin, luminous green eyes, a figure that could make any kind of clothes look good and Scarlett Johansson lips. Shame that she was dumber than a cruller. He was considering bringing her into his circle; not the circle-jerk of grad students to which they both currently belonged, but the more elite group he went clubbing with. Arm candy like that worked for everyone, straight or gay. It was better than a puppy and it didn’t pee on the carpet. Though, with Anthem there was no real guarantee that she was housebroken.