I Learned Magic for All the Wrong Reasons

Dante backed to the kitchen counter and grabbed a frying pan without taking his eyes off the stairs. He returned to the front door, checked it would open, and texted his mom: Somebody’s inside. Wait outside and call me. Then he started recording.

”Stay there,” he called. ”Who are you, and how the hell did you get in?”

The stair creaked beneath the invisible weight. The woman from the interview spoke from the empty air above it. ”We need to test whether you can be moved safely, Dante. Return to your bedroom chair and place both hands on the desk.”

Mom’s reply said to get outside and call her. Dante reached for the door, but the footsteps turned back toward his bedroom, and a drawer scraped open beside his computer.

The drawer held private things he had no intention of showing a stranger, but the thought that really got him moving was his mom returning to a house where someone was still searching their rooms.

His phone showed Mom calling. He silenced it and raised the pan, choosing to confront the intruder instead of taking the open door. It was a bad choice, and some part of him knew it even as he made it. He wanted to be the person who could deal with this before she got home.

”Stay away from the desk, and get out of our house,” Dante called as he climbed the stairs. He kept his phone recording in one hand and the frying pan in the other, hoping the pan made him look less scared than he felt.

His bedroom chair turned to face him. Nobody sat in it, but the cushion sank beneath invisible buttocks and two dents pressed into the armrests.

Dante swung, missed the entire chair, and cracked the pan against the doorframe. Pain shot through his wrist, but he held his face still for the camera.

His wrist hurt and the intruder had not moved. He had spent years imagining how calmly he would face a monster, but his first real attempt had damaged the house instead.

”You entered my territory without permission,” he said, using the voice he practiced when nobody was home. ”Before you take another step, consider whether you’re prepared for what comes next.”

”Are you declining the examination?” the woman asked.

Dante looked from the chair to the dent in the doorframe. ”I tried to hit you with cookware. What part of that looked like consent?”

The armrest sank a little farther while she waited for a proper answer.

”Yes, I’m declining, and I want you to leave.” He pointed the pan downstairs, then brought it back when he realized he had just lowered his only defense to provide directions. ”You don’t have permission to examine anybody else here either.”

The cushion rose. Footprints pressed into the carpet, one after another, coming straight at him while Dante backed against the hallway wall.

A wooden click sounded downstairs, and the pressure vanished from the carpet. In the kitchen, the box had shut itself, its latch fastened and a notification waiting on Dante’s phone.

The message said the home test was paused until Friday. If he missed his appointment at Blackwell, it claimed the visitor could return. Dante saved a picture of the threat. He had refused the test, and they were trying to make that sound like a delay instead of an answer.

Mom knocked instead of coming in. Dante showed her the recording, and she took him onto the front step before calling the application number.

Nobody answered. The online contact confirmed that the cleaner would take the sealed box, so she saved the address and copied the footage while Dante held the takeout bag between his knees. He still had the pan.

”We can report this, and it doesn’t have to sound sensible,” she said. ”Somebody got into our house, or made us think they did, and neither is your fault.”

He nearly argued that he had opened the box, but she passed him a fork and sat beside him. When she took the frying pan so he could eat, she did it without mentioning that her adult son had threatened a chair.

They agreed that he would return the box at the listed shop on Friday, call before going anywhere else, and keep his phone. Mom copied the evidence while he put a mixing bowl over the box. It was not much of a defense, but he slept better knowing his mom had believed him instead of telling him to stop making things up.

On Friday he carried it to the bus in a tote containing his mom’s jacket, which needed cleaning. She reminded him that he owed these people nothing, then fixed his collar because being stalked by furniture was apparently no excuse to look unemployed.

Dante shared his location with a friend and entered the shop. Behind the counter, an old man steamed a shirt beneath a CARD MACHINE BROKEN sign. Remote haunting apparently had a cash discount.

”If you’re here about the wedding dress, she collected it,” the man said, keeping the steamer pointed away as Dante set down the tote. ”Please tell me you aren’t another relative.”

”This came with a job interview, and something climbed out of it.” Dante placed the invitation beside the box and left the camera running. ”I need a receipt, because I’m not paying damages if it gets into somebody’s pants.”

The man put down the steamer and pulled on thick gloves. ”Keep the lid shut and step back from the counter,” he told Dante, then called for Martin to bring a case through the blue door.

The door shook before a huge gray man squeezed through with a delivery cart, his blunt tusks catching his lip as he apologized. Behind him stretched a bright university hall with glass elevators, occupied classrooms, and far more floors than the building outside possessed.

A student folded feathered wings through the doorway, brushing Dante’s sleeve as he passed. The feathers moved on their own. Beyond him, a sign above reception read BLACKWELL, the same name as the school offer. The shop was an entrance to the university, although Dante could not see how a whole campus could fit behind a laundry counter.

Dante lowered his phone to check that the hallway existed outside its screen. Students walked past reception with coffee and laptop bags. They looked busy, bored, late for class, and entirely used to the winged man trying to get through the door. For a moment Dante wanted to follow them, because this was the first place he had seen where the strange thing about someone did not seem to be everybody else’s business.

”Is that the university on this?” He lifted his invitation, keeping the counter between himself and the box.

”That’s Blackwell,” Martin said, turning his cart toward the counter. ”Let us get this secured before you go near the entrance.”

”I haven’t agreed to go anywhere.” Dante shifted toward the shop door, but the box announced his arrival in the bedroom voice, and every light above the blue doorway turned red.

”The box should be asleep while it’s being returned,” Martin said. He abandoned his cart and lifted the metal case onto the counter. ”Step back, please, and let us put it away.”

Something scraped inside the wood. The brass latch slid free with the click Dante remembered from home, and the lid began to rise. Before either man could grab it, the whole box lifted off the counter.