Among Others

And of course, the same goes for the others, really. Is it really a karass, if I used magic to make it happen? It’s like making the bus come, all those people, all those days, all those lives changed, just to make the bus be coming at the moment I want it. Only it’s more than that, making them like me. Making them be my karass.

I didn’t think this through enough. I was thinking about a karass in too abstract a way, I didn’t think enough about the people, about manipulating them. I didn’t even know them, and I was doing it.

Is this how she started? My mother, Liz?

I wish I could talk to Glorfindel about this, or somebody who would understand. I don’t know if he would or not, but he’s the most likely to. I don’t understand why the fairies here are so unfriendly—uncaring is more like it. They should be getting used to me by now. When I go home after Christmas, I’ll find him and talk to him no matter what.

Is using magic inherently bad? Is it if it’s for yourself? Am I supposed to leave myself totally vulnerable to her using it against me, then? Or was it only the karass magic that was bad, and the protection was okay? Or—always the trap with magic—was it all going to happen anyway and I only think the magic did it? No, look at the timing. It was my karass magic, and I think maybe it brought the whole book club (that’s been meeting for months) into existence. I never saw anything about it before, and I go to the library all the time. Maybe those people wouldn’t even exist. Maybe Harriet—who is the oldest—maybe her parents wouldn’t have had her, maybe her whole life, sixty years or more, exists just so there could be a book club and I could have a karass, so we could sit there discussing The Lathe of Heaven, which is the perfect book for this, and whether it’s like Dick.

Gosh I do hope it isn’t like Dick. Like Dick doesn’t bear thinking about.

I don’t want to be like her.

I won’t use magic any more, or anyway, just to protect myself and other people and the world. It’s better to be like George Orr than have her win. I don’t know what she’s doing. There have been no more dreams, and no more poisonous letters either. I’m sort of worried that this means she’s planning something worse.

What she really wants is to set herself up as a dark queen. I don’t know how that would have worked, but that’s what she wants. (She has read LOTR, and I don’t know if she read it identifying with all of the evil people and hoping the good ones wouldn’t resist their temptations, but I know she has read it because the first time I read it, it was her copy. This proves that just reading it isn’t enough. After all, the devil can quote scripture.) She wants everyone to love her and despair. That’s not a sane goal, but it’s what she wants. This is not what I want. What would be the point? It’s bad enough thinking about making Miss Carroll (who stopped shelving to smile at me when she saw me looking over at her) like me.

How could anyone want a world of puppets?

We were so right to stop her, and it really was worth it, worth dying, worth living on broken. If she’d done it, it would always have been the case that we’d loved our mother, that everyone did. I thought I knew how important it was, but I didn’t really.

Morally, magic is just indefensible.

I was going to say I wish I’d known that before, but I did really. I knew what happened after I threw the comb in the bog. I had thought about the bus. I knew about her. I should have applied that.

Saturday 8TH December 1979

Greg wasn’t in the library this morning, and only three books I’d ordered, none of them very exciting. It felt a bit flat. I walked down to the bookshop. It was spitting icy rain from a very low sky, the sort of rain that seems to come from all directions. An umbrella’s no use against it, not that I can use an umbrella anyway with a cane in one hand and a bag in the other. Going down the hill towards the bookshop and the little pond the wind was blowing directly into my face. It kept blowing my hat off. It wasn’t the sort of rain you can enjoy, you just have to squinch your face up and endure that kind of thing.

At the bookshop I saw the ginger-haired girl. She was looking at the children’s books. She saw me as soon as I came in, because the door banged in the wind and so of course she looked up. She was carrying a huge canvas bag over her shoulder, and clutching a pile of carrier bags as well. “Hi,” she said, taking a step towards me. “I saw you at the book club but I didn’t get your name.”

“Likewise,” I said, trying to smile and look friendly, trying not to think about what the magic might have done to her, to the world to make her like me. I could feel her looking at me and wondered what she thought about me. She didn’t look quite as awful with a black coat instead of the purple blazer. Her hair was still ginger, and very unruly, but it just looked like a bit of a mess instead of an explosion at a paint factory.

“I’m Janine,” she said.

“I’m Mori.”