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.