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.