Son of the Keeper: Book 1: Principles of Magic Read online

  Son of the Keeper

  Book 1

  “Principles of Magic”

  R S Merritt

  Text Copyright © 2018 Randall Scott Merritt

  All Rights Reserved

  As with all that is my life, this book is dedicated to my family and most especially to my beautiful wife.

  Table of Contents

  Preface

  Chapter 1: Late for the Bus

  Chapter 2: Let’s Talk About Your Feelings…

  Chapter 3: Take Me Out to the Ballgame

  Chapter 4: A Dreadful Day of Discovery

  Chapter 5: Long Live the King

  Chapter 6: Once Upon a Time

  Chapter 7: Laid to Rest

  Chapter 8: That Explains all Those Missing Ships and Planes

  Chapter 9: The Hallowed Halls

  Chapter 10: Early to Rise

  Chapter 11: If at First You Don’t Succeed

  Chapter 12: Ignoring the Counsel

  Chapter 13: The Message

  Chapter 14: Life Goes On

  Chapter 15: Guard Duty

  Chapter 16: Reunions

  Chapter 17: No Atheists in a Fox Hole

  Chapter 18: The Not So Secret Library

  Chapter 19: The Hunt

  Chapter 20: The Right Questions

  Chapter 21: The Library Life

  Chapter 22: The Counsel of The Council

  Chapter 23: It’s the Size of the Fight in The Dog

  Chapter 24: The Wyrm from Another World

  Chapter 25: Next

  Chapter 26: The Yellow Brick Road

  Chapter 27: The Only Easy Day Was Yesterday

  Chapter 28: The Final Trial

  Chapter 29: Extra Credit

  Chapter 30: Coronation Day

  Authors Note

  Preface

  Two thousand years ago the last surviving members of the house of royals on the planet Xandia were forced to retreat through a portal to escape an army led by dark sorcerers. Xandia had experienced eons of peace and prosperity before the coming of the dark ones. A portal requires both physics and magic to be opened. At a high enough level the two are often indistinguishable. It requires a scientist or group of scientists and mathematicians with genius running through them to pull it off. The Mayans of the planet Earth had the scientific chops and the Xandian royals had no problem with the magical component.

  Members of the royal family along with nobles and castle folk were able to get a portal open and escape through it. Many knights and wizards died so that the others could escape. The final defenders stood with their king on the walls defending against the onslaught of tens of thousands of the advancing horde. Once the escaping royals were through they hurried to close the portal but were stymied by the Mayans. The Mayans had accumulated great wealth by opening portals and exploiting those on the other side. They thought they could do the same with this portal and these people.

  The Mayans had not expected the flood of thousands of Xandians who emerged from the portal. The Xandians overflowed onto the stairs of the great temple. The Mayan high priest called for more warriors and soon the Xandians were surrounded by fierce Mayan warriors. As the Mayans moved in they were ironically saved by the arrival on the scene of the horde. The dark ones came through the portal in force. As the dark ones engaged the Mayans the Xandians fled down the stairs and into the surrounding jungle. Many of the Xandians fell battling their way forward through the Mayans while trying to protect against attacks hurled at their backs from the horde.

  The royals who had been using their powers to keep the portal open dropped their focus and let it collapse behind them. They knew it would only be a temporary respite as the dark ones would never let them escape. With heavy hearts they set off to make their way in this new world. They scattered across the globe to try and ensure a single attack would not wipe out the remaining members of the royal family.

  The dark ones continued to come after them. They came through Egypt. They were let into this world via famous mathematicians throughout history. Most earthly mathematicians were too weak at their craft to open a portal as large as the one opened by the Mayans but they were good enough for the dark ones to open smaller portals and slip through assassins and demons. Newton, Einstein, Turing and others scratched at the surface with their calculations and curiosity until the dark wizards on the other side felt it and opened portals. The portals just had to be wide enough for them to slither their dark forces through one at a time.

  After running and fighting for nearly two millennia the royal family had been culled down substantially. A last stand on a dark hill in the foothills of the Swiss Alps left the queen on the run with only a small escort of bloodied knights to try and deliver her infant son to safety. She boarded a luxury yacht in the port of Switzerland and was reinforced there by a powerful mage and several more knights. They set a course for New England. The infant heir to the crown of Xandia lay in a crib with satin sheets in the hold while the ship made its way through a late winter squall.

  The queen and her advisors whispered and planned throughout the journey. When they finally made landfall the infant boy was whisked away by a grizzled old knight whose loyalty and devotion to the royal family was beyond any doubt. Tears streaming quietly down her face the queen ordered the ship back to sea. Her long brown locks blowing in the wind she whispered spells of forgetfulness. Before long neither herself nor the crew had the slightest idea of where they had put the boy and knight ashore.

  In a lighthouse on a small peninsula jutting out into Martha’s Vineyard the keeper was out in the workshop grabbing the chemicals he’d use to clean off the lenses. It was a chore that he did every day as part of the preventative maintenance for the lighthouse he was charged with maintaining. He was an older man with short black hair and a full beard that was laced with white and grey streaks. The kind of hair color people politely refer to as salt and pepper. He had clear blue eyes and an alert look about him. His skin was tan and weathered from years at sea.

  He felt a strange sensation between his shoulder blades and spun around to see who was there. He saw a man standing behind him then he didn’t. Shaking his head to clear it he gazed all around and still didn’t see anything. Wondering if he should go see a doctor he gathered up the cleaning materials and wandered over to the door that opened to the stairs leading to the top of the tower. As he walked over towards the tower he heard the sound of a baby crying. He set the cleaning supplies on the ground and walked briskly over to the heavy locked door.

  He unlocked the door and found a crying baby lying on the cold floor of the tower wrapped in a silk blanket. Looking around the base of the tower he didn’t see anyone nor did he see any way the boy could have been put inside the locked tower. He had already forgotten the weird sensation he had experienced earlier and the glimpse he had caught of the strangely solid looking man in the workshop. He gathered the baby up in his arms and took him inside to his wife. He knew she’d know the right thing to do.

  Chapter 1: Late for the Bus

  “Chris! Hurry up or you’re going to miss the bus!” Glenda yelled down the hall in the general direction of her young son’s room. Glenda looked more the part of grandmother than mother to the young boy who came bouncing down the hallway trying to put his pants on while simultaneously shoving books into his backpack. Sighing, Glenda moved forward and helped the boy get his books in his bag while he worked on getting his pants snapped.

  “Ready to go?” An older man walked into the hallway and asked Chris. Chuck had aged well in the nine years since he had first found the boy at the bottom of the tower. His hair may be slightly more salt than pepper at this
point but he still had a youthful sense of humor about him. Chuck looked a little closer at Chris and asked him if it was ‘no shoe’ day at school or something. Chris smiled and looked down at his feet then the smile faded and a panicked look swept across his face as he turned and ran for his bedroom to grab his shoes.

  “I swear that boy is going to have full blown Alzheimer’s before either of us.” Glenda said to Chuck while they waited patiently for Chris to figure out where he left his shoes. Glenda stood straight and tall and her hair was as auburn as the day Chuck had surprised her in bed with a baby from out of nowhere. They had always wanted children and it had just never happened for them so the young boy being left in the tower had been a complete a blessing for them. They had slid into the foster parent role over the weeks and months the police and social services tried to figure out where the boy had come from. Eventually they had fallen in love with him and they had become a family. A judge had made it official exactly one year to the day Chuck had found the baby crying in the tower.

  Chuck suspected the fiery auburn hair his wife had was due more to the monthly visits to the hair salon than to the good genetics she maintained was the reason for her youthful appearance. He kept his mouth shut though as the fiery red headed temperament was in no way fake about her. He also loved her so much that sometimes he thought his heart would break when she did something simple like pass him the salt or pour him a glass of milk. Love has a way of sneaking up on you like that when you least expect it.

  “He was up all night reading. If he was playing video games or something it’d be a lot easier to make him go to bed. It’s pretty rough walking in and yelling at someone to get their nose out of that book and hit the rack though. He’s just not a normal kid. I feel like sometimes I need to threaten him that I won’t let him do his homework until he goes outside and plays for fifteen minutes. His birthday is coming up. I think I’ll get him a glove and a bat and teach him how to play ball. Get him on one of those kids teams the banks sponsor so he can make some friends.” Chuck stopped talking as he realized Chris was standing right there in front of him.

  “I’m ready to go if you are?” Chris spoke up once Chuck had trailed off. They took turns giving Glenda a quick kiss goodbye as she shoved a paper sack full of food into Chris’s backpack. Chris waved goodbye to the lobster in the large aquarium sitting by the door in an age old inside joke on the way out the door. Then he and Chuck walked outside to the old blue pickup truck and jumped in for the drive down the long driveway to the bus stop. Chris was excited about his upcoming birthday and wanted to know more about what he had just overheard.

  “Is baseball hard to learn?” He asked his dad.

  “Nope. Not if you have a knack for it. I’ll get you a glove and a bat and we’ll get some balls for your birthday and I’ll let you try it out and see if you like it before we get you signed up. You know why you try something out first before you commit to it right?”

  “Because once I commit to something I have to see it through.” Chris answered immediately. Chuck reached over and ruffled the young boy’s dirty blond hair.

  “That’s right. If you didn’t dabble a little bit first you wouldn’t know if you liked it or not and then you could get stuck doing something you hate. It’s a good lesson to learn young because as you get older you’ll see there are choices you can make that can take the rest of your life to unravel if you get them wrong.”

  Chris nodded along with his dad. He knew what he was talking about. One thing his dad had never done was lie to him or try to talk down to him. Chris loved the way Chuck spoke to him like a man even while he showed his affection by doing stuff like rubbing his head or carrying him around on his back or the frequent tickle battle royals the whole family would get into. Chris noticed the curtains shift around in the apartment above where his family lived and he gave a wave to the man who rented it. A retired stock market millionaire who had rented the place for the last few years so he could fish and read to his heart’s content. According to his mom and dads whispered conversations the man also spent a good amount of time trying to reach the bottom of a bottle.

  The lighthouse had been automated two years after Chuck had discovered Chris. The government had relinquished ownership of the property to a trust setup to maintain the lighthouse. The fog horn and light had been completely automated and no longer needed a keeper. The workshop was turned into a museum. The bottom level of the lighthouse was to have been rented out but an anonymous benefactor had put up the money to allow for Chuck and Glenda to live there for as long as they liked on the condition they kept up the grounds in exchange for living rent free. The top level of the house attached to the tower supporting the light was rented out at an exorbitant rate that more than made up for Glenda and Chuck not paying anything.

  Chuck looked over at Chris and saw he was slouching in his seat and looked like he may fall asleep on the short ride to the bus stop. He coughed real loud and reached over and poked Chris in the stomach. Chris jumped up with wide eyes staring all around and screamed. Chuck had not expected that much of a reaction. He started to laugh it off but something in Chris’s demeanor caught his attention.

  “Why are you going to bed so late?” Chuck asked a Chris who was already looking tired and slouching in his seat again. Chris did not immediately respond and as they rolled around the last curve of the long driveway they both saw the large yellow bus starting to pull away. Chris jumped out of the truck and yelled his good byes to his dad while sprinting for the bus. The bus driver stopped and opened the door and sat there waiting patiently on Chris to jog up and into the big yellow vehicle. With a jaunty wave to Chuck the bus driver closed the door to the bus and eased the big machine back into gear to get the kids to school on time.

  Chris sat alone up near the front of the bus. He was a handsome young boy and likable enough but the other kids seemed to think something was a little off about him. He had enjoyed a momentary spike in popularity when the kids from his class had come to tour his house on a field trip. That had been a remarkable day for him that he had looked forward to for weeks. The big reveal happening when he got to show his room off to all the kids in his class. He still liked to think about it and day dream about his class coming out another time so he’d have some kids around to play with. He’d never said a word to his parents but living in a lighthouse was definitely lonely for a young boy.

  For the ride to school he let his eyes close and leaned back into the bus seat to take a nap. He hadn’t been sleeping well for months now thanks to a recurring nightmare. He dreamed that something was scratching at his window. When he got up to look out there was never anything there but as soon as he went back to sleep it would start up again. He hadn’t said anything to his dad or mom since he didn’t want to come across as a little kid who was scared of the dark. He’d long ago turned his superman nightlight off for good. The scratching noise just kept coming for no reason and it terrified him. He kept expecting to see something staring at him through the glass when he got up the courage to look. So far there had been nothing but darkness and his own reflection staring back at him whenever he put together the courage to take a look.

  He drifted off to sleep on the bus and dreamed he was hovering above the lighthouse. It was night and looking down he could see the light and the garage outside his room. It was a white detached garage that formed a courtyard with the sides of the house. In his dream, he looked down into that courtyard and saw something moving. He willed himself to move so as to be able to get a better look at it. No matter where he moved himself to in the sky above the courtyard he was not able to find a better spot to observe from. All he kept seeing was some sort of darkness that would shift and move towards his bedroom window then back off. He thought that he may be able to see it better if he went down to the ground level but he was worried it would be able to see him if he did that. He knew he didn’t want whatever it was he was seeing to be aware he could see it.

  He was still locked in an internal strugg
le over whether to go to the ground level or not when something grabbed his shoulder. He jerked awake and grabbed the man’s hand standing over him. He shoved as hard as he could and the bus driver went flying backwards into the seat on the other side of the bus. He landed and struck his head on the window with a loud crack. Chris rushed over to help the man up. He gushed out apologies as he saw the man’s head was bleeding. He realized he did not even know the guy’s name. He’d been riding this bus since he started school and this had always been the bus driver but he’d never heard anyone use his name. When the driver still did not move Chris rushed out of the bus and into the front of the school yelling for someone to come help him. The vice principal who had bus duty that morning came rushing over and asked what was wrong. Chris told him the bus driver had hit his head on the window and wasn’t moving.

  Chris stood there staring with wide eyes as the principal ran onto the bus then came running back out barking orders into his walkie talkie. Soon there were police cars and a fire truck and an ambulance pulled into the school parking lot. The EMTs carried the driver into the ambulance on a stretcher and sped away. One of the police officers went over and spoke to the vice principal then walked towards Chris. Chris kept still, he had been largely ignored up to this point and he was good with that. He willed himself to be invisible so the policeman would not notice him and would just walk right by.