The Law of Nines

But how could such a story be true? How could he even consider believing such a story about visitors from other worlds? It simply wasn’t possible.

Yet his mother had warned him of some of the very same things Jax had tried to warn him about. He couldn’t make that add up. How could he not take such a thing seriously?

Jax was the key to finding the truth. More than that, even, it felt to him like she was somehow the key to his life.

He felt drawn to her in a way he’d never been drawn to anyone else. She was a mesmerizing woman. For Alex, her insight and intelligence amplified her beauty. Despite all of her mystery and the strange things she had to say, he felt comfortable with her, more comfortable than he had ever felt with anyone. She had the same inner spark—some way of looking at the world—that he had. He could see it in her eyes. He almost felt as if he could look into her eyes and see her soul laid bare to him.

Gloom crushed him for having driven her away.

In his mind, he again ran through a speech he would like to make. He would like to ask her to imagine how she would feel if he were to abruptly show up in her world and tell her that he talked into a metal device and people anywhere in the world could hear him. How would she have taken the news if he told her that people in his world flew in metal tubes tens of thousands of feet in the air? He couldn’t stop his racing mind from coming up with examples of technology that she would surely find impossible to believe. If he had come to her in the way she had come to him, would she have believed him?

It troubled him somewhat that even thinking of what he might say to her might be taking her story too seriously and falling into some kind of con game.

He wanted to tell her so much, to find out so much. Some of the things she’d said were just flat too eerily correct to discount, but at the same time her story was beyond hard to swallow. Other worlds. Who was she trying to fool? There were no other worlds.

Did she expect him to believe that some sorcerers had boiled up a magic brew and somehow beamed her to the Regent Center? And that yet others had placed a call to his phone from a different universe, or planet, or dimension, or something?

He wondered why, if her story was so hard to swallow, he had smashed his cell phone.

He realized that he needed to talk to her more than any other person in the world. Or in both worlds, if it really was true.

But if it wasn’t true, then what had he seen? What about the things she knew, the things she could tell him that she shouldn’t be able to know. How in the world could she know that he didn’t remember his dreams? That was just plain creepy. Was she simply taking a wild stab in the dark? Guessing? After all, a lot of people probably didn’t remember their dreams.

Or did she really know?

Yet again he worried that the whole thing could be some kind of elaborate trick. There were stage magicians, after all, who could make a woman, an elephant, or even a plane disappear. Even though they made it look completely convincing he knew that such things weren’t real, knew it was all a trick.

Alex didn’t like being tricked by magicians. It always struck him as a form of dishonesty about the nature of reality. Maybe that was why he didn’t like magic tricks—and magic, real magic, simply didn’t exist. He’d always felt that reality was better than magical; it was wondrous. That was part of the reason he never tired of painting the beauty of the world.

But why would Jax try to trick him? What reason would she have for doing such a thing? What was there for her to gain?

The fifty thousand acres came to mind.

He couldn’t stop wondering if it could be some kind of trick to con him out of the inheritance. That much land was worth a fortune.

She claimed to have watched through a mirror as someone had gone into the gallery and defaced his paintings, but wouldn’t it make more sense that it had been done by someone working with her? It seemed like a lot of money for a con, but if she was really after the land, the cost of the paintings would be a pittance in comparison to what they stood to gain if they could somehow trick him out of a fortune likely to be worth millions.

Such a motive easily made more sense than that she had come from some distant world, that she was a different kind of human, a sorceress with magical abilities. Who was she kidding? A sorceress. What kind of fool did she take him for? Did she really expect him to believe her?

But he did.

Against everything, he did. He couldn’t explain why, but he believed her. There was something about her that struck him as not only sincere but desperate.

Either she had to be the best con artist ever born, or she really was a different kind of human from a different world. He couldn’t imagine how it could be anything other than a trick or the truth. It came down to one of those two choices, and that was what was driving him crazy.