The Last Rule: "Magic is magic."

A week later, I found out why he had given me the silver knife. A woman walked into the bar and I felt a tingle in my arms that I remembered from that night. Jack wasn't here, so I knew it was real. I could do magic, I knew it.

All it required was blood.

Every time I saw the woman, I felt the urge, the urge to take the silver knife and slit her throat, to write arcane symbols with her blood, to feel the magic pulse within me.

I threw the knife away immediately. It reappeared the next day. Each day I would throw it away and each day it would reappear.

I can't tell of this is because it is a magic knife or if I'm simply insane. I've decided it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if Jack did something to my head or if I simply imagined the whole thing because I'm coo-coo for Cocoa Puffs.

I'm checking into a psychiatric hospital tomorrow. And I wrote all this down today, so that if I ever get the urge to leave the hospital, the urge to do magic of any kind, I can read everything I wrote here and just stop.

Magic is magic. That's what Jack told me. Magic is whatever it is. It can be whatever it wants to be. It doesn't have to be logical or make sense. It's completely mad. It doesn't care. It wants to be free and will take the shortest and quickest route - through blood, if necessary.

Jack visited me once more.

"Well?" he said. "You've lasted remarkably well. Last time I did this little trick, the poor man was carving up prostitutes in Whitechapel a week later."

"I'm not going to kill anybody," I said.

"Hmm," he said. "Oh well. Still, I'll leave the knife with you and see how much longer you can last. I've got loads of time." He smiled and disappeared.

That's when I decided to enter the psychiatric hospital.

The only thing I'm afraid of is that it won't be enough. That I might change my mind and try to do magic again. That I might hurt someone. That I might kill someone.

I'll try. I'll try to stop it. To stop thinking about it. To stop thinking about that night, swirling like a tornado in my head, with laughter echoing along with the first words Jack said to me:

Magic is alive.

Addendum to the First Rule: "Magic is dead."

"I suppose," I said, "you're also going to tell me those things you told me about, the Fears, they aren't real either."

"Oh no," Jack said, "they are as real as can be. Realer, even."

My head hurt. I felt like Jack was just toying with me, telling me anything he wanted in order to gauge my reaction. "I'm going home," I said.

"Home?" Jack said. "You can't go home yet. I haven't told you the first rule of magic."

"Yes, you did," I said. "In the bar. 'Magic is alive,' you said."

"Oh, yes," he said, "I suppose I did say that. And it was, you know. But there were some rule changes a way back, corrections and addendums and all that. The new first rule is this: magic is dead."

I looked at him with bleary eyes. "How is that possible?" I said. "We used magic today. I've seen-"

"Do we have to go on about sight again?" Jack said. "Do you know how easy it is to manipulate sight and sound? Did you remember looking for yourself or was I always there to lend you a hand?" I remembered: each time I saw, he had put his hands over my eyes. Like he was adjusting them. "And when your fingers glowed, do you remember the tingling? Was that before or after I grabbed your arm?" He grinned and knew he had got me.

"But you flew," I said. "You raised yourself in the air and you stabbed your hand."

"Of course, I can do that," Jack said. "I'm Jack. But you? You're just a failed magician, Tom. And magic is dead and buried. I killed it myself, strangled it as best I could. Oh, you can still do a trick or two with it, even dead things have their uses."

"I've stopped believing a word you say," I said. "Magic is real, magic is a sham, magic is madness, magic is dead. Everything you say contradicts itself."

"Of course it does," Jack said. "That's magic."

"Shut up," I said. "I don't care anymore. I just don't care."

I started to walk away, when I heard Jack. "Tom," he said. "The way to work magic is to be mad. The way to be mad is to realize that nothing makes sense. And when nothing makes sense, the world becomes a more exciting place. Where magic is alive and dead and real and fake." He walked towards me and took out his silver knife and, even though I thought he was going to stab me, I couldn't move an inch. "Magic is many things." He pulled my hand forward and placed the silver knife in it. "But foremost it is this: magic is magic."

"Goodbye," he said and snapped his fingers and I woke up with my head on the bar, a silver knife in my hand.

The Tenth Rule: "Magic is madness."

"Jack?" I said.

"Oh yes," he said. "I've been nimble and I've been quick. I've killed giants and I've climbed beanstalks. I've built a house and eaten a pie and even worn springs on my heels. I've haunted lonely roads and robbed from the rich and paraded down the street wearing plants. I've been so many things to so many people, but I'm still just Jack." He grinned and it was like a shark standing before a minnow.

"And what do you want?" I asked.

"Oh, young Tom Keller asking me what I want?" he said. "How ironic. Young Tom Keller, who wanted to be a magician since he was six. Who wanted to be a magician so badly, but was never really any good at it. Who would put on magic shows that nobody would attend, who would try so hard to perform just one trick right and then get it all wrong. Who finally gave up one day and decided to be a bartender instead."

"How did you-" I almost asked before stopping myself. Stupid question.

He smiled and answered anyway: "Because I chose you, Tom. Because you are the perfect person to learn magic. Magic, as I've said before, requires a mind on the edge, a mind teetering, just waiting for a strong gust of wind to push it off the cliffs of insanity. Because magic is madness!"

"You're crazy," I said.

"Didn't I just say that?" Jack said. "What if I told you that everything you experience tonight wasn't real? That magic was just a sham?"

"I wouldn't believe you," I said. "Everything I've seen-"

"Everything you've seen?" Jack said. "Everything you've seen is nothing. Everything you've seen is a product of your fevered imagination. Just think: we've been talking for hours and hours, right?"

"Yes," I said.

"So why hasn't the sun come up?"

I looked up. The moon still shown brightly, no sign of the sun. But when I closed the bar, it was perhaps one am and now... I looked at my watch and found that it had stopped, stopped before the bar had closed. Perhaps it had stopped when I met Jack.

"Maybe it did," Jack said, reading my mind. "Or maybe you're in a rubber room somewhere, with your eyes tightly closed, imagining this whole scene."

"No," I said. "It's real. It happened. You can't trick me."

"Trick? Me?" Jack laughed. "Trick or treat. My trick was your treat. Didn't you enjoy it all? Didn't you love believing that magic was real?"

"It is real," I said.

"I never said it wasn't," Jack said. "But magic is fickle. Magic doesn't like being exposed. So, like any good magician, you can't tell anyone about it. They would lock you up in the looney bin! Because, of course, you are crazy. Talking about magic and everything."

"Why are you doing this?" I asked.

"To prove a point," he said. "Magic is madness. Only those who are mad can do magic. Because only they can see the magic, because the magic only exists to them. They see the world through a different eye. Don't you, Tom?"

"I'm not mad," I said.

"Oh," Jack said, "we're all mad here."

The Ninth Rule: "Magic is misdirection."

As we walked, Knave spoke about nearly everything. Every word out of his mouth was something new, something revelatory. He told me of all of the Fears; from the cunning and brutish Rake to the sadistic Wooden Girl; from the secret-seeking Black Dog to the pestiferous Plague Doctor; from the ever-changing Empty City to the imprisoned Brute and his Burning Bride.

I then asked him how these things could exist, how they could take our freedom away from us, how was there nothing to stop them?

"Stop them?" Knave said. "With what?"

"With magic," I said. "Surely someone knows enough magic to combat them."

"You can't do that," Knave said. "You can't fight with magic. Magic is slippery, even at the best of times. To control it, to channel it...you couldn't. You would have to move along with the magic, to use it in misdirection. That's what magic is good at: misdirection."

He waved one hand and then raised the other to show it held a group of flowers.

"I still don't understand," I said. "You've shown me the real world, you've shown me how to really look at things and use real magic. But you just keep talking about show magic, misdirection, like card tricks."

"Magic is misdirection," Knave said. He moved around behind me. "For example: everything I've said to you tonight has been true and false. I've completely misdirected you."

"I don't believe you," I said.

"Of course not," Knave said. "That's the beauty of a true misdirection - the victim never knows until it's shown to him. Come on, then, turn on your true sight, have another look at things." He covered me eyes again and then uncovered them and I saw the world the way it was, the way it should always look, again. "It's funny, isn't it?" he said.

"What is?" I asked, even as I marveled at the colors around me.

"You seeing the world for what it is," he said, "and yet you never turn and look at me."

I stopped. That was true. I had never seen Knave through this lens before. It hadn't even occurred to me.

"Go on then," I heard Knave said. "Take a good look."

I turned and looked at him.

He looked the same. Same mussed hair, same stubble, same stupid grin. The lines and colors that made up the world disappeared when they met him. He looked the same as before. He grinned.

"Why-" I started to say and then stopped, because he began to glow. A light surrounded him and infused him and then left, like a light bulb lighting up and then going dark. And when the glow surrounded him, something strange happened: his right arm twisted itself, it became blurry and changed shape and color, becoming a deep red. And when the light left him, it changed itself back to a normal hand and a normal arm, but I could still see the red it had exuded.

"What are you?" I asked.

"Oh, you finally figured it out," he said. "Took you long enough." He snapped his fingers and the world around him was drab again. "Enough of that. And as for your question: people have called me many things, but the name I prefer, actually, is Jack."

The Eighth Rule: "Magic is patterns."

"Patterns make up the world," Knave said. "The world and the solar system and the galaxy and the universe. Patterns within patterns within patterns. Fractals and tessellations and Euclidean and non-Euclidean patterns. It's the same with magic."

"How so?" I asked. We had moved on from the telephone poles to a different area, one lined with houses, all of them with darkened windows. Nobody awake at this hour.

"There was a story," he said, "that Aleister Crowley used to tell. He said he once started following a man, patterning his footsteps after the man until they were perfectly in sync. And then Crowley stepped out of sync and the man in front of him tripped."

"But that's not magic," I said. "That's just a trick."

Knave looked at me and laughed and his laughter echoed down the cul-de-sac. "Magic is trickery. Magic is legerdemain, sleight of the hand. Only instead of hiding the card up our sleeves, we're hiding the card in different dimensions. Magic isn't just blood and sight - it's knowing how to use them, having the ability to display your talent. Giving your audience a treat via a trick, you might say."

"But real magic-" I started to say.

Knave's smile vanished. "You don't know anything about real magic," he said. "Everything I've told you is like an adult explaining how the world works to a child. So simplistic, it might as well be lies."

I didn't say a word. This sudden outburst had surprised me - I hadn't seen Knave angry before. His anger simmered underneath, like it could erupt at any moment. Then he closed his eyes and the rage vanished and when he opened them, he smiled again.

"Come on," he said, "more to show and more to see."

The Seventh Rule: "Magic seeks freedom."

I followed Knave as he continued to walk in his usual zig-zag pattern and then he stopped. "There," he said and pointed up at some telephone lines. "Tell me what you see."

I looked. "Telephone lines," I said.

"And what's on them?" he asked.

I looked closer. "Birds," I said. "Is that all?"

"No," he said. "When I tell you to look closer, I want you to look closer." He covered my eyes again and then pulled his hands back and I saw the world again like it was before, with lines of light and waves of color.

And there, sitting on the telephone lines, were birds made up of complete and utter blackness. They sucked light in like black holes. They looked at me with beady eyes and I recoiled.

"What are they?" I asked.

"Right now, most call them the Convocation," Knave said. "Birds that aren't really birds at all, like the man who wasn't a man. Hidden in plain sight, for all the world to see."

"Why are they like...that?" I asked. Looking at them hurt my eyes, but I couldn't look away.

"Magic seeks freedom," Knave said, "but those things take freedom away from us. They hunt us down, they grab us and never let us go. They are what we fear, plain and simple, fear made flesh and set loose upon us."

"Why?" I asked.

"There are no whys," Knave said and covered my eyes again, taking away the beautiful world and the cruel darkness of the birds with it. "There are never any whys."

The Sixth Rule: "Magic reveals."

"So, really," I said, "what was that man in the park?"

"Do you really want to know?" Knave asked. We were sitting on a bus bench and I was trying to feel the tingle again in my arms, though it wasn't quite working out.

"Yes," I said. "Was he magic?"

Knave laughed. "No," he said. "A person can't be magic, they can do magic. But that man isn't a person and has no need for magic in the first place. And he has many names, most of them names that nobody remembers. The name most call him by now is simply 'the Slender Man.'"

"If he's not a person," I said, "what is he?"

"You've seen beneath the thin skin of reality," Knave said, "but this goes deeper. This goes much deeper."

"I want to know," I said.

"Alright," Knave said and jumped up. "Let's go."

"Go where?" I asked.

"Magic will reveal all," he said. "That's what magic does: it reveals. So come along now." He started walking, then turned and walked in the opposite direction.

I followed.

The Fifth Rule: "Magic is a science."

"So now that I've seen," I said, "how do I begin to use magic?"

"How do you use magic?" Knave asked mockingly. "How do you use a flashlight?"

"You just...turn it on," I said.

"But how does it work?" Knave asked.

"The batteries, um, send a current through to the bulb," I said. I didn't have the best knowledge on how things worked. "Look, I'm a bartender. I could tell you how to make a Harvey Wallbanger, but not a flashlight."

"Of course not," Knave said. "But it's the same principle. Magic is a science, though, of course, not literally, as it really subverts most, if not all, of science. But the way science creates light and the way magic creates light-" He lifted up one hand and suddenly there was a glow in the palm of his hand. "-are very similar." The glow disappeared. "For a light bulb, electricity is run through a filament until it glows. In this scenerio, the electricity is magic and the filament is us."

He stepped forward and grabbed my hand. "Feel the pulse," he said. "Feel it." I could feel something, a dull throb at the back of my head giving me a headache, and then there was a tingling sensation down my arm and into my hand. "Grab a hold of that," Knave said, "grab a hold and then pull, pull until you draw it into yourself, into your hand."

I did. I pulled, somehow, and I felt the tingling sensation increase until my whole arm felt like it was going to go numb and then I saw that my fingertips were glowing, just slightly, but there they were.

Knave looked on approvingly. "Good," he said. "Perhaps this won't be such a waste after all." He clapped his hands, like he was applauding a performance.

The Fourth Rule: "Magic is hidden."

"So now that you have had the scales removed from your eyes, what do you see?" Knave asked me.

I looked around. We were standing in a parking lot of a 7-11. "It looks...pretty much the same," I said.

"You're still only seeing the surface," Knave said. "You need to look deeper. You've saw that man back there-"

"And what was he?" I asked. "Was he some sort of ghost?"

"No no no," Knave said. "Ghosts are echoes, the leftover light of things. Stone tapes and faded recordings. If the universe was a map pinned to a wall, a ghost would be the half-erased pencil marks."

"And that man?"

"That man," Knave said, grinning, "would be a pen."

"I don't get it," I said.

"Of course not," he said. "You're still not seeing. Magic is hidden, you see, so to find out how to work it, you must first uncover it. Have you ever heard of mystery cults? Little religions that sprang up in Greece and Rome, people who worshiped their gods in private, with ceremonies and rituals that only they knew. Those people knew the secret power of the hidden, of the obscure, of the occult."

He stepped behind me and put both his hands over my eyes. "You need to look at what's really there. When I take away my hands, you are going to concentrate, like you did before with the man, and you are going to see."

I felt silly, like we were playing some sort of game of hide and seek. But Knave dutifully counted to three and then removed his hands.

And the world around me exploded into light and color. The hidden was revealed to me, the strange underpinnings of reality were visible, the strings that not only hold us together, but keep us apart. I saw waves of electricity, weirdly visible to me, as if I was in the middle of an ocean of light.

"Telluric currents," Knave said. "They are everywhere and yet we never see them. And those-" He pointed to lines of vivid color which I cannot even begin to describe. "-those are songlines, dreaming tracks. By singing the right songs, you could transverse across the songlines and end up at any part of the world."

I was in awe. My brain couldn't handle all the information it was receiving. My eyes were watering, yet they refused to blink, not wanting to give up all this information they were seeing even for a second.

And then blackness descended. Knave had covered my eyes again and when he took away his hands, the world was back to being dark and drab.

"You can't look all the time," he said, "or else it wouldn't be hidden, now would it?"

He gave me another grin and I got the distinct impression that he was messing with me. I did not care. Right then and there, I would have given anything to see the world like that again.

The Third Rule: "Magic is seeing."

I closed up the bar, shivered in my coat, and turned around to face Knave. "Alright," I said. "Teach me."

"I can't just teach you," he said, as he cleaned the blood off of his knife. I was half afraid that he would stab me with it, but instead, he slipped it into his pocket. "Magic taught is useless. The only magic you can learn is that which you teach yourself."

"And how can I teach myself something that I don't know?" I asked.

"You have to see first," he said.

"See what?"

"The world!" He turned with a flourish and started walking. "The real world! Not that tiny little worldview you have, but the world that lives underneath your perceptions, the world that lives on the thin line between hope and despair, between life and death. Magic is seeing, so you must first see before you do."

I followed him. "And how do I see?" I asked.

He turned and grinned. "Let's go," he said.

I followed him, going on a byzantine path, through alleyways and parking lots, until finally we reached a park. It was dark and the trees looked foreboding, most of their leaves having already fallen off and made a bed of red and yellow on the ground.

"Look," he said and pointed at one of the trees.

"What?" I said. "It's a tree."

"Look closer," he said.

I looked at the tree and squinted. It was a tree. It looked like a tree. Tall, with thin branches, the bark looking quite black at night, and a large white spot near the top and was that a face?

As I watched, I realized that the tree wasn't a tree. I didn't know how I had thought it was a tree in the first place, but now I knew it could never have been a tree.

It was a man. A tall man wearing a business suit. His face was blank and white as the moon.

"And now you see," Knave whispered into my ear. "Let's go."

As we left, I looked back and saw the tall man was still standing there, looking right at us. Right at me.

The Second Rule: "Magic requires blood."

The man said his name was Knave and our first lesson had already begun. He showed me the knife he had stabbed his hand with and said, "You see the blood? Magic requires blood."

"I don't understand," I said.

He raised his hands upward, gesturing to the sky. I was glad all the other patrons had already left or else they might think he was some madman (although, he probably was a madman). "The universe has laws, my boy! Why can't you fly? Because gravity keeps you down. Magic is all about breaking those laws and the universe doesn't like that, no sirree."

He lowered his hands and raised the silver, bloody knife again. "So to operate magic, you need to sacrifice. To escape the gravitational pull of the earth, you need to excel to a speed where the kinetic energy plus the gravitational potential energy is zero - but with magic, all you need is blood."

He licked the knife and then spit the blood onto the floor.

"Hey," I said, "I have to clean that up."

"Watch!" He stepped on the bloody spit and then floated into the air.

I stared, slack-jawed, as he floated to the ceiling and then downward. "You see," he said, "magic is like the cheat code to the universe. A sleight of the hand-" He waved his hand and he was lowered onto the floor. "-and physics becomes your bitch."

"How can I do that?" I asked, condemning myself without knowing.

Knave's eyes lit up and he said, "I'll show you."

The First Rule: "Magic is alive."

That's what the man claimed. He told me, "Magic is alive. You can feel its pulse every time you use it."

"I think you've had enough," I said as I wiped down the counter.

"We've all had enough," he said, "but we all want more. That's what magic is about: want. What do you want? What do you desire? Do you have the power to take it? The power to grab a hold of something and just..." He paused and placed one hand on the counter. "The power to grab hold and cut!" He brought forth his other hand and I saw a silver knife just before he arced it downward and stabbed it straight through his other hand, going all the way through into the wood of the counter.

"Fuck!" I said and moved backward. "You're fucking insane!"

"Well, you'd have to be," the man said, grinning maniacally, not even wincing at his skewered hand. "Magic requires a certain instability of the mind, a mind that stands on the edge, just daring itself to jump!" He grabbed the handle of the knife and pulled it out, the blade coated with blood. Then he raised his hand - and I could see the indentation the knife had made on the counter - and with a flourish, the bloody wound on it disappeared.

"Shit," I said. "How did you do that?"

"You're a magician," he said. "You tell me."

"I'm an amateur magician," I said, "and full-time bartender. And if I knew how to do that, I would get a lot more gigs. Just...tell me, okay?"

"Of course," he said. "The first rule is this: magic is alive."

And that's how my journey to hell started.