Read Online Aurelius and I by Benjamin James Barnard - Free Book Online

by hundreds of large bushes, each one filled with an abundance of berries, the likes of which I had never seen before. Some were bright pink, others were an almost luminous yellow and others still were silver with white polka dots. Aurelius stopped.
    “Here we are, the perfect spot. You take these,” he said, handing me two, small, woven pouches from inside his enormous jacket. “Put the pink berries in the yellow bag, and the yellow berries in the pink bag.”
    “Why the yellow in the pink bag?” I asked.
    “You’ve got to have a system, Charlie,” Aurelius replied, “otherwise they’d all get mixed up, and that simply wouldn’t do.”
    I wasn’t sure whether Aurelius had deliberately missed the point of my question, but I decided to ask another rather than pursue the issue.
    “What should I do with the silver, spotty ones?”
    “Never pick the silver ones – they’re strictly fairy food only and they might put a curse on you if they catch you taking any.”
    “Fairies? So all the stories I was told as a child are true then? Magic really is real?”
    First ogres, now fairies, it had been a very strange day and I couldn’t help but ask the question, even though I knew what Aurelius’s answer would be. I felt like I needed to hear it spoken though, just to confirm that I wasn’t going crazy, or that this wasn’t all some elaborate prank.
    “Well of course magic’s real, Charlie, my dear boy. I mean, how on earth would the world work without magic?”
    “What do you mean?” I asked. “Most things in the world work with no help from magic at all. In fact, I’ve never even seen anything magical happen outside of this forest.”
    “Oh dear, dear, Charlie. I am sorry, I have assumed that you know more than you do. Silly old Aurelius, always jumping ahead,” he chided himself. “I suppose it is about time that you learned how the world really works. You see, Charlie, everything works because of magic.”
    “Everything?”
    “ Everything . Well almost everything. Some old clocks work because of clockwork, and windmills work because of the wind, but, aside from these and one or two other notable exceptions, yes, everything in this world works because of magic.”
    “But how?” I asked.
    “Well that’s different for different things,” replied Aurelius. “I mean, take your video recorder for instance. That only works because of tiny, elf-like creatures called gullivals who run really fast in the wheels on the inside to make the tape go round.”
    “But I thought it worked because of electricity.”
    At that remark, my velvet-clad guide laughed harder than I had seen anybody laugh for a very long time. He laughed a proper belly-laugh, inappropriately loud and bent over double, tears running down his cheeks.
    “Electricity indeed,” he gasped when he was finally able to speak again. “Next you’ll be telling me that your smoke alarm works because of the battery you put in it.”
    “You mean it doesn’t?”
    “Well of course it doesn’t! How on earth would a battery ever be able to tell if there was a fire? I mean, they don’t even have any nostrils! No, my boy, you see inside every smoke alarm is a tiny leprechaun, and whenever he or she smells smoke, they pick up their little hammer and bang as loudly as they can on a big bell. I thought everybody knew that.”
    “But, how come they don’t die from the smoke?” I asked, suspicious of Aurelius’s tale.
    “They wear a protective mask of course. My dear boy, for somebody who was born to protect magic, you really don’t know a whole lot about it,” Aurelius exclaimed as if I was the one who was acting strangely.
    “Okay,” I whispered, talking more to myself than to Aurelius. “ Magic is real, I have magical powers, and I’m picking berries in the middle of an enchanted forest with some nutter I barely know. Fine. That’s fine. Slightly unusual perhaps, but no need to panic.”
    “What was that?” Aurelius asked from the other