The Magic Circle by Katherine Neville (top 10 books of all time txt) 📕

messages as the Indians had always done: by smoke signals or flashing mirrors against the sun. Now that it was nearly dark these talents were useless. Or were they?

I gulped back my sobs and peered through my tears at the bicycling reflector strips on my little backpack. Wiping my eyes with my hand, my nose with my sleeve, I stood on wobbly legs and looked around.

Through the darkening forest mist I saw that the sun was not yet gone. But it soon would be. If I could get up high enough before the last beams departed, I’d be able to see a great distance. I could scan the hilltops for the kind of place, the high place, that I knew Sam himself must reach before sunset: the magic circle. It was a wild scheme, but it seemed the only chance I might have to reflect a message from the last light, to send my code into the heart of the magic circle. Forgetting how tired and frightened I was—forgetting that Sam had told me it was more dangerous above timberline at night than here in the protection of the wood—I raced on my little legs uphill, high into the rocky crags that rose above timberline. I raced against the setting sun.

In the dream, I hear the sounds of the forest closing around me as I scramble frantically over rocks, cut by twigs and grasses, the crunch of something large moving behind a tree. In the dream, the forest grows darker and darker, but at last I reach the high ground and clamber to the very top of the highest point. I flatten myself to crawl to the edge, and I peer out across the mountain peaks below.

And there on a mountaintop beneath me, across a wide abyss, is the magic circle. At its very center is Sam. In the dream, he sits on the ground in his fringed buckskins, his hair tumbling loose about his shoulders, his legs and arms folded in meditation—but his back is to me! He is facing the setting sun. He can’t see my signal.

So I shout his name aloud, over and over, hoping an echo will bring it back to him. And then the shout turns into a scream. But he is too far, too far.…

Olivier was shaking me by the shoulders. I could see light coming through the high windows of my dungeon, which meant that some of the snow covering the windows had melted. Just how late in the day was it? My head was pounding. Why was Olivier shaking me up and down?

“Are you all right?” he said when he saw my eyes were open. He looked frightened. “You were screaming, you know. I heard it all the way upstairs. The little argonaut crawled under my refrigerator when he heard you.”

“Screaming?” I said. “It was just a dream. I haven’t had it in years. Besides—it didn’t really happen that way.”

“Happen what way?” said Olivier, looking puzzled.

But then it suddenly dawned on me that Sam was really dead. The only way I could see him again was in a dream, so even if the dream was an incorrect memory, that was all I had. Shit. I felt as if I’d been kicked in the head by the mule of karma.

“The pancake batter’s all ready,” Olivier told me. “I’m making you buttermilk flapjacks, with gallons of chicory coffee and some of those cute, disgusting little pig sausages—enough cholesterol to plug your pipes permanently—and just for good measure, eggs over tenderly—”

“Over easy,” I corrected Olivier’s Yankee slang, a pastiche of patois. “Exactly what time is it, landlord?”

“Time for brunch, not breakfast,” said Olivier. “I waited to give you a ride to work. I’m afraid that your car has been buried by the snowplow.”

I decided to put on some warm clothes and thick gloves after brunch and dig out my car before checking in for work. I needed physical exercise after two days of driving. And sometimes, after a melt like this one, we’d have a deep freeze, which would mean a month of hacking at automobile glace. But also, I needed the time to be alone, to make the mental transition from funeral to factory.

So I dragged out my “ghetto blaster” portable radio and took it outside where, surrounded by sparkly snow dunes and icicle-tinseled houses, I hand-dug the slush from my little Honda to the rhythm of Bob Seger cranking out The Fire Down Below. And I thought about the various kinds of tissues we choose from which to weave our dreams and our realities.

The truth was, I never had found Sam in those woods, he had found me. In the real story—not the dream—I got up above timber-line, where the air was too thin for trees to survive and where no animal, so they say, ever chooses to sleep. There was a full moon and I stood atop a rock, bathed in the bright white light. The sun had long gone, and the sky was a purple-black spangled with stars. Thick, dark forest circled me below on every side.

I don’t think I’ve ever known terror like that, standing alone in that milky white light, staring up at the whole universe. I was too terrified to remember my pangs of hunger. Too terrified to cry. I have no idea how long I stood unable to move, knowing that—whatever the danger to a small animal like me, being exposed and defenseless up here—any move I made would be a move closer to that black and impenetrable forest full of night sounds from which I’d just escaped.

Then he came through the wood, in the dead of night, to find me. At first, when I saw a movement at the forest fringe, I backed away in fear. But when I saw the flash of Sam’s white buckskins, I raced across the vast space and threw myself into his arms and wept with relief.

“Okay, hotshot,” Sam said, pulling me away to look at me with eyes