By the time he was doing that, the first of the newly established fictionkin, the woman apparently called Kate, was waking up. He heard her groan, then say softly, “Doug? Doug? Are you all right?”
“He’ll wake up in about a minute,” Joshua told her. He looked over as he leapt to her feet and grabbed a nearby paper bag to wave as a weapon. “Don’t worry,” he said gently. “I mean you no harm.”
“Mean no harm?” she repeated dubiously, glancing about all the downed bodies. He noted her American accent.
“I regret what just happened,” he replied. “Though you may have difficulty believing this, the incident was in fact beyond my control. I am willing to help you with the aftermath, but you will need to be open with me. What is your name?”
“Kate Mosley. No, wait, sorry, Fitzwilliam Darcy. No, wait...”
“Well then, Ms. Mosley,” since that was obviously her real name, “What do you remember doing this morning, before I came in. You don’t need to talk out loud, just think. Then you will know which one of the two people you just named you are. I assume you are now remembering a number of things which did not happen to you.”
By the time he had finished saying this, the man named Doug had stirred. Joshua watched as he hastily ran his hands over his chest, then looked relieved. “I am a man,” he said out loud; he too was American, though Joshua hadn’t noticed earlier. “I am a man.” He then saw Joshua, glared, and said, “I do not suppose you would care to inform us what it is you have done to us?” Joshua wasn’t sure what was so funny about that question, but for some reason it made Kate Mosley burst out laughing.
“I will explain,” he himself said, “but it’s a long and complication explanation, and I’d like to deliver it to everyone at once, so we’ll have to wait until everyone wakes up.”
“I see you got the last of us too,” Mosley observed, her eyes falling on the man asleep in the chair.
“No, actually, I put him into a sleep to keep him from interfering. I will wake him up when we are done.”
“Interfering?” both of the other two demanded, as the old woman started to stir. Mosley hurried over to help her to her feet.
“Thank you, Mr. Darcy,” the woman murmured, “I fear I am truly am old man now.”
“Keep yourself-” Mosley started, and the man’s eyes flew wide at her sudden English accent, though to be fair, the old woman had been speaking in one too, albeit one slightly less aristocratic, and they were in Scotland. But then she stopped, and placed her hand over her mouth. “Odd,” she said when she had removed it, and her accent was now Scottish. “For a moment I thought I was him, and in that moment.”
“I’m afraid your behavior right now is not entirely predictable,” Joshua advised them. “Your case is actually rather unique.”
Mosley helped the old woman sit down, and said, “Her name is Betsy Weller. It is, Betsy, whatever other name you might think you have right now. And that’s my husband, Doug Dorsey. I don’t think he’ll care to say otherwise.”
By this time the blonde man was waking, and Dorsey added, “Well, I suppose George Fiddleson here will be a little less confused, whatever woman he thought he was before waking.”
“Huh?” George looked up. “Woman? What makes you think that?”
“You’re not all going to believe yourself to have been of the opposite gender,” Joshua said to Dorsey. “In fact,” he added, considering the nature of George’s speech under the spell, “I believe, sir, that you are quite certain you are a man, but are currently confused as to what your name is?”
“It’s...it is George Fiddleson.” The young man was clearly confirming this to himself.
“What? The chickens again?” Their attention was turned as the tall dark-haired girl woke and pulled herself up. She saw Joshua, and her eyes narrowed. “You. I am not a English snob. Please stop trying to convince me that I am one.”
It turned out to be something of a relief to the entire group that Nessa Ross, as her name turned out to be, woke with absolutely no real confusion as to whom she was. When Sheila Russo and Diamond MacAddie, as their names apparently were, woke, they both took nearly a minute to be convinced that they were Sheila Russo and Diamond MacAddie and not a pair of sisters named Elinor and Marianne. Even the obvious anatomical differences that should have helped the latter make the distinction proved of surprisingly little use at first.
The Russian girl, Natalia Markova, needed only a few moments, but she went into hysterics over the last man, whose name, Joshua learned from her, was Vitalin Prokofiev. Even when reassured over again that he’d wake with no harm done, she sat away from him and glared at him balefully, even more so than everyone else; certainly nobody was friendly.
The two youngsters, Rudy Klukov and Camille du Fayin, revived completely aware of who they were. Joshua found that surprising; he had been concerned that with fewer years worth of memories to counter a lifetime’s, he would have the most trouble with them. His surprise did not go unnoticed by Klukov, who asked about it, and on hearing it explained, said to him, “Had you truly no concern for what happened to any of us? I suspect you of malice, but this, I believe, might be worse.” Joshua gave no response to this; any response that would not have been hollow would have been dangerous.
Finally there came another dilemma, when Sergei Rubinstein would not wake up. Natalia Markova shook and slapped him, and Joshua tried all the wake-up spells and spell breakers he could think of, but all to no avail. “If you do not wake him,” Markova snarled at him, “I may promise that I will somehow force you to suffer great ill for it.”
Joshua ignored her, but noted she was not the only one in the room distressed more than the others. Sheila Russo was standing a little bit away, staring down at Sergei Rubinstein in a way that reminded him of Diamond MacAddie staring at the unconscious George Fiddleson(and the implications of that he was trying to ignore), and he remembered the tender tone of Rubinstein’s speech, and how Russo had identified herself as an “Elinor.”
“Miss Russo,” he called to her, “if you could come over here?”
She looked wary, but she came. Joshua took her hand and placed it in Rubinstein’s. “Listen,” he said, “I don’t know at all if this will work, but I don’t have too many ideas. I think whomever he’s identifying as, though, was in love with whomever you were identifying as. This might be a bit frightening, but I want you to relax, let Elinor take over, and speak to him.”
Looking past him at the young man’s face, Sheila Russo said to him, “Edward? Edward, wake up, the doctor’s here.”
Rubinstein at last opened his eyes and looked up at her, and smiled slightly. “You truly shouldn’t have bothered,” he said, and his voice was raspy.
“Edward, I cannot give up on you until you are actually dead.” Her voice was calm and firm, the voice of the kind of woman who never lost her cool.
“Okay, he’s awake, can we snap them out of it now?” Kate Mosley demanded. Joshua wasn’t sure why she sounded as angry as she did.
“I think the doctor is getting impatient anyway,” Russo continued, as if in response to her. “I’ll...”
“Sheila, snap out of it!” Mosley had taken matters into her own hands, and was shaking the girl vigorously.
Rubinstein had closed his eyes again, but now he opened them. “Ja...,” he started, confused.
“Okay, you’re Sergei Rubinstein,” Mosley snapped at him, “and you, miss...”
“My name is Sheila Russo, I know.”
“I am Sergei Rubinstein,” Sergei acknowledged.
“Okay,” Joshua cut in, “so everyone knows who they are. My name is Joshua. Everyone sit down over there, please. I have a lot to tell you all.”
Within a couple of minutes, they were all seated in a row, with him standing in front of them, trying not to pay attention to how George Fiddleson and Diamond MacAddie were sitting next to each other and holding hands. Joshua had lived a little too much in isolation to be sure, but weren’t the British supposed to not indulge in PDA like that?
“To start,” he began, then stopped. How was he to explain this? “I apologize, but I think I’m going to have to explain who I am.”
“Why’s that a problem?” Doug Dorsey interrupted. “I wouldn’t mind knowing who the hell you are.”
“Because it’s going to take a while to explain. But...basically, I’m a member of a group who call themselves the Disciples of the Two Marys.”
“Disciples of the Two Marys?” Camille du Fayin asked, sounding as if she recognized it.
“You’ve heard of us?”
Attention turned on the girl-she truly was young-and she suddenly looked very nervous for it. Rudy Klukov placed a reassuring hand on her shoulder, and she said, “I’ve heard it’s a cult. You people claim you can do magic, and that you’re taught by the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene, who came from heaven to prepare people for the end of the world.”
“Not quite,” Joshua replied. “We claimed that our leader, Gabriel Isaac, was taught by the two Marys, so he could teach the rest of us. Well, actually, he claimed it and the rest of us believed him. His magic was genuine, and I think once you’re absolutely certain that magic truly exists, you start believing whatever else you’re told. But he was in fact taught by a book, which looked to me as if it was written by people. They spoke English, or wrote in it at least, though I wasn’t able to tell anything else about them by looking at the book when I found it. He kept it hidden, of course. Isaac, I mean. But I was his right-hand man, I found it, and...”
“And you realized you’d been duped and left?” Dorsey supplied. “After stealing the book, maybe?”
“I didn’t steal the book,” said Joshua. “I wasn’t that much of a fool. I was in bad enough a position as it was. He’d enchanted the book so he’d know who’d read it, and that meant he’d find out that I was a threat to him and his power over all his followers. Now you really do have to heed what I say here, because this means we’re all in danger. He needs me to be dead.”
“Wait a minute,” Mosley interrupted. “You shouldn’t be telling us this. You’re putting us in more danger.”
“I can’t put you in any more danger than I’ve done so already. Out first rule is that noone outside the group is allowed to witness our magic and remember it. If there’s an irreversible spell put on someone where the effects are such that just erasing their memory isn’t an option, that person either has to either join the cult or die.”
His words sunk in with several gasps, and Natalia Markova demanded angrily, “Then why did you ever cast this....this thing on us?!”
“I didn’t mean to. They sent a pair of people after me-that blond woman’s one of them. To save my own life, I was forced to perform a very powerful and unpredictable spell. What happened to you was a side effect of it.”
“A side-effect?” repeated an enraged Dorsey as Mosley asked, more calmly, “Where’s the other person?”
“Dead. The spell killed him. She, by the way, will sleep indefinitely, and buy us some safety that way, because Isaac can tell whether his two followers are dead or alive, but nothing else about them, so for a while he’ll assume her to still be chasing me.”
“I still want to know exactly what it is you’ve done to us,” said Betsy Weller. “Why do I suddenly seemed to have a lifetime’s worth of memories that would seem to belong to a character from Jane Austen?”
Joshua found himself groping for several moments over this part of the story. “To understand this,” he finally said, “I’m going to have to explain a few other things. First of all, the Disciples ended up being the kind of group that attracted people with very strange beliefs, some of which were surprising for a Fundamentalist Christian group, but they came to us. Amoung them were people who called themselves ‘soul-bonders’ or ‘fictionkin,’ who believed themselves to be the reincarnation of popular fictional characters.”
He didn’t bother to go on immediately, giving a moment or so for his audience’s incredulous reactions. Dorsey summed it up: “Don’t you have to actually exist to be reincarnated?”
“Well, they relied on a legitimate scientific theory for that bit. Apparently some scientist had a theory that everything that anyone could ever imagine happening does indeed happen in an alternate universe; I think the term used was ‘alternate quantum reality.’ So apparently you can get reincarnated across universes. Though the interesting thing is that most of these ‘fictionkin’ people, because they exist outside the cult too, they believe that, oh I don’t know, that there’s some sort of vitally significant reason that they were reincarnated across universes, as well, I’m sure, that there are supposedly fictional depictions of the people they were reincarnated as in our own universe, and some supernatural force mysteriously awakes them, or...”
“No or!” Nessa Ross suddenly cut him off. “Continue along that vein, Mr. Joshua, and we’ll all get headaches!”
“Okay, okay. My point is, the general belief amoung these people is that you know if you’re one of them from a young age. But there is a minority, that far as I can tell, actually developed their philosophy within our ranks, that now claim that everyone’s got fictional characters somewhere in their reincarnation history, and that certain kinds of spells, like the spell I did, can bring about their Awakening, to use their official term, if done in...a particular way...” He didn’t need to tell them the details, he told himself. After all, the Disciples publically claimed to be able to do magic; they merely never performed it or specified what they could do.
“Why only fictional characters?” asked Sheila Russo. “Why not people from our own quantum reality?”
“Sheila, do you really want to ask more questions?” George Fiddleson asked her. “We’re all risking headaches here as it is.”
Joshua was tempted not the answer the question, but almost as if in reaction to his discomfort, all the others were now staring him down and making him feel like squirming. Well, except for Rudy Klukov and Camille du Fayin, who were for some reason looking at each other.
“There was a collection of Jane Austen involved,” he finally explained. “You don’t need to know details and I won’t tell them.”
“But that would be an extraordinary coincidence,” Mosley said skeptically, “that in a world as big as this one, the reincarnations of all the Austen characters should be so conveniently close. How do we know you’re not bewitching us and telling us lies about it, all for your own ends?”
“To answer your first question,” said Joshua, who had to admit to himself he had no way to answer her second, “you’re assuming that all these characters only exist in one universe out there. But remember, all possibilities happen. There are infinite versions of these characters in infinite universes to choose from.”
“But surely,” Russo countered, “if it came a from a collection of Jane Austen, then the spell had to refer to the alternate quantum reality where things occurred in the manner in which Jane Austen wrote of them happening. Or is that not true?”
Several of the others cast her resentful looks, all the more so when the first words next out of Joshua’s mouth were, “Actually, soul-bonding theory provides enough of an answer to that. The key here lies in the idea that all these universes are either generated by the writer and then the readers, or they somehow slip themselves into the writer’s mind and there’s no such thing as creative thought....and I don’t think we need to get into that debate. The point remains that their existence is tied to not only the writer, but the readers of what the writer writes, because let’s face it, no two readers perceive a work the exact same way, or exactly the way the writer intended it. So when you take an author like Jane Austen, who has been popular for a good two centuries, there are so many universes, tied to the minds of her readers, that book could have tapped into, that when I cast that spell it isn’t really that surprising that I was able to find the eleven of you so quickly.”
“Okay, that’s it,” said Nessa Ross impatiently. “I’m sure we all have headaches after that one. Can you just forget all the philosophy and tell us the practical consequences of all this? We already know a bunch of people we don’t know are now going to try to kill us. Anything else?”
Perhaps they should have just started with that immediately, Joshua thought. “For the side effects of the spell itself, aside from your confusion right now, and some probable deja vu and such you may go through, I’m fairly certain you’ll all have very intense dreams. From what I’ve gathered, all fictionkin have them. You might want to talk to each other freely about this; I know fictionkin find it great comfort when they believe they aren’t alone. I assume nobody’s going to be trying to explain any of this to anyone outside this room. I ask that you not try to explain it to Mr. Prokofiev either.”
“What? No!” The protest came from Markova, of course. But then Rubinstein leaned in and said something to her quietly in Russian, and she calmed. Joshua felt relieved. He didn’t want to have to force their silence.
“Now keeping her asleep,” he nodded towards Perpetua, though he tried not to look at her, “will, as I said, buy us all some time. Until the end of the year, perhaps. By then, I think I will have to teach you all enough magic so that you’re able to possibly defend yourselves.”
He hadn’t at all expected the vehement protests that erupted from the eight mouths of the young people. He looked at them in confusion. Never in his life had imagined that kind of response to an offer to teach magic.
Mosley sighed, and said, “Haven’t you noticed by now that they’re all involved in competitive skating?”
Joshua didn’t see what that had to do with it, and said so.
“It’s a high-pressure sport riddled with accusations of cheating. I don’t know if I can speak for the other four, but I know all four of my students,” she indicated Russo, MacAddie, du Fayin, and Klukov, “would never want an unfair advantage. Can you imagine the temptation being able to do magic would force upon them? You can’t ask them to be able to resist that kind of temptation. No, I understand completely why they wouldn’t want to learn.”
“Then they are fools, and will be murdered.”
“Better that than the alternative,” replied Markova, and the others all nodded.
“Look,” said Dorsey, “Maybe you could just teach the three of us. Or better yet, explain the problem with the cult to him,” he gestured to Prokofiev, “and teach the four of us.”
“I am not explain this to any more people than is strictly necessary. You don’t know how much I hate that I had to tell the eleven of you.” But Joshua did start sizing up the three of them mentally. All old, unfortunatly, but they just might be able to learn enough.
“Why?” Russo. “It is fairly clear to me that you are mostly indifferent to our fates, and also to our thoughts and feelings. What would it matter to you if we did not believe you? And how likely would that be, when we are seeking an explanation for our new memories?”
Now they were all staring intently at him again, and this time Joshua was sure they were merely trying to make him uncomfortable. He grew angry. “I don’t have to answer that. I’ve done you a favor, telling you what you need to know. You all seem very ungrateful.”
“Oh don’t even start,” growled George Fiddleson. “Just don’t you dare. I don’t care if you really didn’t mean to do this to us. You still did it. I would say that you’re responsible for helping us out now. You ought to tell Mr. Prokofiev everything, especially because if you even try to say this doesn’t put him in danger as well...”
“You don’t need to pass judgements on me,” Joshua shot back at him. Then he looked at the way Fiddleson now had his arm wrapped around MacAddie and was stroking his hand, and found himself adding, “Especially when you’re groping your little boytoy right in front of me when you know perfectly well none of us want to see that!”
Joshua never quite saw the young man get to his feet before Fiddleson’s large fist slammed across his face. He stumbled back clutching at nose and mouth both. He heard MacAddie’s distressed, “George!” and Nessa Ross’ disdainful reply, “Don’t stop him, Diamond. Asshole had it coming to him.”
“Kindly remember, sir...” Fiddleson started.
“ENOUGH!” When Mosley yelled, attention turned towards her. “George, this is not of any use. The brutal fact of the matter is that we need his help. Though I believe he may need ours also. Tell me, sir, do you have any resources? You look as if you haven’t eaten in days.”
Joshua hadn’t; he’d been replacing both food and sleep with his bursts of energy, and it wasn’t a good idea to subsist on those much longer. “No,” he said. “I need food and shelter.”
“He’s not getting it from George and me,” Ross stubbornly declared.
“Oh, I’ll take him in,” said Betsy Weller. “I’ve got plenty of room now.”
“You’re willing to put up with him?”
“I now have memories of putting up with worse. And I think it would be a good idea for him to stay with one of the three of us, if we have to learn how to do magic from him. Plus there’s room in my house for the girl as well. We can’t just leave her here, can we?”
“No, we can’t do that,” Mosley agreed. “Though do we have to do anything to keep her wasting away?”
“I can keep her alive by magical means, on my own,” Joshua assured them. “Just find a safe place with enough oxygen, and leave the rest to me.”
“Corpse,” they heard Rudy Klukov murmur, but noone else had the heart to respond to the accusation.
Mosley moved them on: “So that’s taken care of; are you sure we won’t tell Mr. Prokofiev?”
“It is my decided opinion that we should not.” Rubinstein. “There is a particular reason the temptation might be too much for him.”
“What?” asked several of the other skaters.
“No, I am sorry, we are not saying,” replied Markova, and there were several sighs, but no vocal protests. Joshua made a mental note, however, that he had to be open to the possibility of having to press them about it. There was no telling what might prove relevant to their protection in the months to come.
“Anything else you want to talk about before I wake Mr. Prokofiev up?”
“Let’s just find out who everyone is,” said Weller. “Out of curiousity, have any of the rest of you read Austen?”
“I’ve read her,” replied Mosley. “Except I’ve never read Mansfield Park.”
“I’ve read Pride and Prejudice,” replied Fiddleson , and Russo and MacAddie voiced a pair of “Me too”s.
“Me four,” said Ross. “And I’ve read Emma. And I seem to be her.”
“Shall we start a list then?” asked Weller. “Anyone have any paper? Where’s my bag?”
Mosley glanced around as well, but it was Dorsey who produced one first. In short order, Weller had written down everyone’s names and next to Nessa Ross she had added Emma Woodhouse.
“Actually, Emma Knightly might be more appropriate,” Ross said to her. “Let’s face it, most of us ladies spent the majority of our lives answering to our married names, even if the reader thought of us by our maiden ones.”
Weller corrected the name, then next to her own wrote Thomas Bennett. “That’s what I remember my first name being,” she noted, “though of course he wasn’t given one in the novel. I suppose it had to be something. What’s yours, George?”
“Christopher Brandon.”
“Christopher? That was the name he had in the 1995 movie. I think our universe must have been generated in the mind of someone possibly still alive!” She wrote it down. “Meanwhile obviously Diamond’s Marianne, Sheila’s Elinor, and Mr. Rubinstein is Edward, and Kate, correct me if I’m wrong, but you sounded like my son-in-law.”
Mosley confirmed that she was, and Dorsey, “And I’m your daughter, Elizabeth.”
“Oh, lucky you! I think most of us would love to be Elizabeth!” laughed Ross.
“You’re kidding, right?” asked an unhappy Dorsey.
“No, she is not,” Weller informed him, as she wrote down all the names. “Miss Markova?”
“Anne Wentworth.”
“And I’m Edmund Betram, and Camille here is Fanny,” added Rudy Klukov.
“Yes, that would explain a good deal.” She finished up with the names. “Now, I don’t know about the rest of you, but I really do have a headache, and my mind is quite confused, and maybe it would be best if we took the rest of the day and possibly the weekend off.”
“Can’t without explaining it to him,” replied Markova, glancing at Prokofiev.
“If they aren’t taking off,” said MacAddie to Mosley, “we aren’t either.”
“No of course you aren’t,” she muttered, and she seemed a touch long-suffering. “But Betsy’s right.” She turned to her other two students. “You two don’t mind leaving me alone until Monday? I’m sorry, but...”
“No, that’s perfectly understandable,” said Klukov, and Camille Du Fayin nodded her own agreement.
“Well,” said Ross, “I’ll help you move the woman to your house. Poor woman.” Joshua made a point of ignoring her subsequent glare at him.
“Well, I can’t take the day off,” noted Dorsey. “I still have that blasted interview. Though that’s one good thing to come out of all this; that accent won’t be any more problem.”