The Magician's Society of Manhattan: A Handbook for Initiates

Cassandra's Entry

FROM THE VERY PRIVATE JOURNAL OF CASSANDRA WARREN IF YOU ARE READING THIS YOU REALLY SHOULD QUESTION YOUR MORAL FIBER.

(Or: In which he says "NO" & Opal can walk into Ocean waves and perish)

(So can Ackman, but I will think of a different type of ending for him.)

I'm sitting on my bed, in what Elaine used to call my impossibly windowed room that made her feel like she was being seen by a giant eye, on the 63rd floor penthouse apartment (it sounds highly obnoxious when I write this, but it's simply the truth), overlooking the vast and glorious expanse of Central Park. Last winter, when the park was barren with winter, Elaine said the trees looked like thousands of skeletal hands. But I, with the snow, thought it looked gloriously cozy. I suppose I should have seen this as a warning. And I, then, stayed and looked out at it, and I think I was about to see the skeletal hands, but then I stopped quickly, because I find this: when you see something, in that moment that your mind turns, switches, you can't unsee it.

But I don't want to talk about that right now.

Setting: this building so tall it moans when it bends in the winds, as well as has plumbing issues because of the gravitational force. So tall that oftentimes, at this height, it's in its own weather system. Like all of us, I imagine. For example, when Horvath is in a mood, it's like storm clouds have gathered and follow, and often stay on and linger when he's left, and then I use my reiki clearing signs to rid it of his negative energy. F used to say that I'm like that too, sometimes. Only my weather , lately, is ever-changing.

The journal I currently have chosen, and am writing in this moment, is a grained and granular leather type, the one, like Hermes that gets more valuable with time the color was this: burnt taupe. Which, when I first bought it at the bookstore, looked like it had an internal glow, and I even considered finding a lipstick in the color, but now, as I sit here, looks rather distressingly dull and I'm not sure how I ever saw that glow to begin. I'm wearing my cape (vintage McQueen) because it brings me some lift (internal). My platform combat boots are on, somehow the floors in this apartment are too cold. All the time. And it makes the internal winds threaten to arrive. This, at all costs, I need to avoid.

No one is here in the apartment currently, except Juan, our housekeeper and resident actor, who is bumping around in the living room, talking to someone - one of his thousands of friends -- on the phone. How he has so many friends, so many family members who he could be incessantly on the phone with hurts my mind to think on sometimes.

Anyway, I'll have you know that if you're reading this, the only reason I'm writing in this journal is to show Ms. Hyde that I am, indeed, "writing myself out, and not in," which I understand on one level, and not another. That is, if I think about it too hard, it evades me, so I must hold it lightly in my mind. But she insists it's a type of alchemy, because she knows my interest in refined types of magic through history. We were having lemon and honey tea, with cinnamon in her office, (the cinnamon, particularly, tricks you into relaxing and forgetting where you are) and we were chatting about particle physics because I just so have had happened to have been talking to Ms. Alsace and she was saying that particles rearrange themselves and shift the second they know they are being watched.

Thus, if you have somehow come across this journal, and are reading this, whoever you are, just know that the tiny particles that make up these words are actually made of mostly 99% space and dark matter, and are rearranging themselves into these letters you read, and they can't be trusted, and know that, resultingly, you are also reading about yourself. Your own deepest darkest secrets. All by way of saying this is pointing you to your very self, so don't judge me.

But she wanted me to tell my story, as she did also, I'm under the impression Rafe was asked, too, though I'm not sure he complied. Nat of course... I can't - no, I don't even want to talk, my entire seizes up as soon as I even think his name, because I-

But Ms. Hyde insists it will be healthy to write the story. To put it down.

And so I will.

Here is what happened:

(And if , by chance this is Opal reading this page right now, you can go and take your new taffeta dior and walk into the East Hampton waves, and note that taffeta in fact weighs a great deal under water... )

*

Tap, tap, tap-tap.

There was a tapping at the window, in my impossibly windowed room that morning. That morning that seemed to start it all. Because that was also the morning that I first saw her. The morning I also... well, we'll get to it.

Yes, the tapping. There it was again:

Tap, tap.

I lay in bed, scarce wanted to open my eyes, for something about it made me not want to open them, wanted to savor this moment when the world was still half-wake, half-sleep and anything in that space-time is possible, dreams can pervade with their quiet fingers into this realm. But then it was insistent: tap-tap-tap. As if saying, pay attention, now. Pay attention to the signs. Enough so that I didn't even have time to do the runes, or a tarot to see what they day may bring which I generally do immediately upon waking (I'm trying to stop myself and only allowing it once per day - today, for example, I have already completed them, and it has said my day will be full of learning and new life, which is fine with me I guess).

And this: at the window. A starling. Sturnis vulgaris.

Carefully, so as not to startle it, I slipped down to it, the city sprawled out just beyond my knees dizzyingly with the floor to ceiling windows, holding my breath, I kneeled before it. I lifted my nail-bitten finger, and I tapped back.

Tap, tap, tap.

The cheeky, naughty little bird, its feathers a pattern of startling iridescence if you look long enough, like you're looking into a galaxy: there it was, standing on the ledge, all the way up - 64 flights, likely the air is thinner here - and it's tapping on the window. Maybe it was light headed. Or maybe....

Tap. Tap. Tap-tap-tap.

With delicacy, like I might shatter it, I answered: Tap, tap, tap.

It cocked its head, looks at me, let out its cheeky, electric sound that somehow vibrates through your body, cocked its head the other way and looks at me with its bright, black bead of an eye, and taps against the window once again: tap, tap, tap-

I went to tap back again, in a strange sort of Morse code that I could later uncypher.

Behind me, the door slammed open, there was Juan, his earpods in, unaware I was home, the vacuum roaring, sucking everything living or inorganic into its maw. The starling flicked its wings open, exploded away, I looked back at Juan, a shard of anger in my middle, and then somehow with less air than I had before.