The Magician’s Land by Lev Grossman Read Free Book Online Page A

in case one was underlined or hollowed out. Once in a while he thought he was picking up on something, a secret pattern or a code, but every time he did it dissolved again like fairy gold, back into random noise. What dark magicks could his father have been trafficking in, that he would have kept them this well hidden? That he would have leaned on his son, tried to stop him from drawing attention to himself? What sinister fate had Quentin avoided in Tarrytown? What did it mean that his father kept an old unstrung banjo in one corner? What was with his weird obsession with Jeff Goldblum?
    The longer he worked with no result, the more clearly he felt the ghostly presence of his father, his real father, his true father, as if he were in the room with him even now. Quentin booted up the computer and after a half hour of sweaty-palmed cryptomancy and educated guesswork he cracked the password
(thelostworld
—starring Jeff Goldblum!) and began casing file directories, one after the other.
    They were almost eerily clean. No diary, no poetry, no mistresses, no Ponzi schemes, nothing that wasn’t what it appeared to be. Not even any porn. Well, not much porn.
    Quentin was no hacker—he’d spent way too much time in the technological black hole of Brakebills to have any serious chops with computers—but he knew some electromagnetic sorcery. He cracked the case and went directly after the silicon, feeling with magical fingertips for anything weird, any walled-off caches of hidden electrons pregnant with meaning. All he could think was, this can’t be it. This cannot be everything. He must have left me something.
    Come on. Help me, Daddy. It was a word he hadn’t said or even thought in twenty years.
    He stopped and sat for a minute, his hands trembling, in the empty house, in the deep cold suburban winter silence. Where is it, Dad? It must be here. I can’t be alone. You must have left me something. Thiswas always how it worked: the distant, withholding father was always guarding a terrible secret, always keeping his son safe from it, able to pass on his legacy of power only in death.
    And then he found it. It was at the back of a closet: a nubbly red plastic carton of index cards scribbled on in pencil, shoved behind a box of obsolete electronics and mysterious cables that were too important-looking to throw away. He set the carton on the desk and flipped through the cards, one by one. Strange names, columns of numbers, pluses and minuses. It went on and on. It was a lot of data. A cipher like this could contain whole worlds of power, if he could break it. And he would. It was left here for him.
    He stared at the cards for it must have been ten minutes before the pattern solved itself all at once. It wasn’t a cipher at all. These were stats from his father’s old fantasy golf league. Quentin pushed the plastic box away from him violently, convulsively. The cards spilled out all over the rug. He left them there.
    There was no mystery to solve. What had come between him and his father wasn’t magic. The terrible truth about Quentin’s father was that he was exactly the person he seemed to be. He wasn’t a magician. He wasn’t even a good person. He was an ordinary man who hadn’t even loved his only son. The hard truth was that Quentin had never really had a father.
    And now he never would. Quentin put his head down on his father’s old desk and pounded his fist until his father’s crap old plastic keyboard jumped.
    “Daddy!” he sobbed, in a voice he barely recognized. “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!”
    —
    Quentin went back to Brakebills the day after the funeral. He didn’t like to leave his mother, but she was more comfortable with her friends than she was with him, and it was time for them to take over. He’d done his part.
    She drove him to the airport; he waited till she was out of sight beforehe walked away from the departure area to a parking garage that was still under construction. He took the elevator to the