Chapter 4 Magellan
Magellan
The next morning when the man from the Morgan Museum called she let it go to voicemail.
He left a message asking if she had contacted the Liron Institute yet and what she wanted to do about the diary.
She had yet to look up the institute and call to talk to someone.
She could not imagine why they had sent the diary to her.
Her only thought was if it could be connected to her birth parents.
Just this year, she had listed her name in the state registry to find them.
She hadn’t told her parents she’d done it, not wanting to hurt their feelings.
But she yearned to know. Maybe her birth parents had sent the diary to her, like a family heirloom.
Or maybe the diary was from Garesh. Maybe he was connected to the Liron Institute. But then why hadn’t he included a card?
Absently twisting the ring on her finger, she wondered where he was now and what he thought about the aurora borealis. How she would have loved to play for him what she had been composing.
The song would be an epic symphony one day.
She could feel it in her bones. She just needed to be patient.
It had taken Brahms twenty-one years to compose his first symphony.
She didn’t have to compete with Mozart, Rossini, or Schubert’s record timing.
She had yet to even write down the opening and commit the notes to paper.
That morning she didn’t feel like sitting at the piano sifting melodies, and she had to get ready for a wedding.
Today the festivities were Halloween-themed, and guests were coming in costume.
Technically she wouldn’t be in costume, although her dress could pass as one.
It was the dress Crystal always had her wear: a long, lavender Renaissance-esque designer gown made of heavy silk.
“That’s the one!” Crystal had exclaimed when Magellan stepped out of the dressing room wearing it for the first time. “You look drop-dead gorgeous. Trust me, in that dress, I’ll be planning your wedding in three months.”
Magellan knew Crystal was just being Crystal.
There was nothing drop-dead gorgeous about her.
She considered herself passably pretty. Brown hair.
Pert nose. Her eyes were her best feature.
Her eye color often changed from greenish brown to deep green depending on her mood.
She was on the shorter side with a few curves, but she did not have a wow factor—except when she played music.
When she played music, people often told her she was beautiful.
And she wanted to tell them it was the music that was beautiful, not her.
But she agreed the dress did make her look very much “the harpist” in the romantic sense and was perfect for a wedding.
Her only jewelry was Garesh’s ring, which she always changed to her left-hand ring finger whenever she worked.
Doing so deterred flirty groomsmen and drunk wedding guests from hitting on her, because she did tend to get hit on a lot.
When everyone had had too much to drink, the love songs coming from her fingertips and filling the air were potent.
Today Crystal had given her a wreath of flowers for her hair made of tiny silk rosettes to match the bridesmaids. Magellan put it on and laughed at her reflection. The look was definitely over the top.
Checking the time, she threw everything she might need into her bag and carefully stowed her harp into its towering aluminum travel case on wheels and rolled the monstrosity into the elevator.
Downstairs the SUV was already waiting with Crystal in the back, and the driver loaded the harp.
Then they were on their way to Lower Manhattan.
Crystal blew her an air kiss while rapid-firing instructions to the caterer on the phone. “I want the chocolate fountain free-flowing like Willy Wonka. And double strawberries.” Crystal covered the phone and asked Magellan, “Did you eat?”
Crystal had a sixth sense, because Magellan had forgotten.
She usually always had breakfast before a performance due to her hypoglycemia, but today she’d been distracted.
Berating herself, she dug out a pack of trail mix from her bag and an apple juice.
She had trouble opening the bag because her hands were starting to shake.
Fortunately, Crystal wasn’t paying attention, having wrapped up the call with the caterer and now was talking to someone else, listening to whatever they were saying until she cut them off.
“Darren, wait! You’re talking way too fast. The Earth’s magnetic what is collapsing?”
Magellan paused eating the trail mix. She and the driver met each other’s eyes in the rearview mirror as they waited to hear more.
“You’re seriously saying the North and South Pole are about to flip? Can that really happen?” Crystal listened and cut him off again. “I don’t care what happened hundreds of thousands of years ago. I’m talking about right now.”
Magellan could hear the man’s raised voice. “Yes! I’m telling you it’s happening! You need to get somewhere safe. I’ll call you later if I can.” He hung up and Crystal stared at her phone in shock.
The car pulled up to the corner of Broadway and Fulton at St. Paul’s Chapel.
Everyone sat in silence until Crystal finally spoke.
“My first husband, Darren, works at one of the observatories on Long Island. He said the North Pole has been moving for years, and it sped up today—like a lot—and is going to cause the poles to flip. It could be in weeks. It could be days.” She went on in a quiet voice.
Magellan had never heard her sound so grave.
“As soon as this hits the news there’s going to be a panic. He thinks we need to leave the city.”
“Leave the city?” Magellan asked in disbelief.
“If the poles flip, he said it’s the end of the world as we know it.”
Magellan looked out the window, her thoughts in a whirl. What kind of end? The kind where no one survived?
Crystal rushed on, clearly floundering, “Look, I know it’s crazy and I don’t know—he could be wrong. I hope he’s wrong.”
“What if he’s not?” Magellan studied the sky. Suddenly the aurora borealis didn’t look so beautiful.
The driver asked, “What do you want to do? We can’t sit here forever.”
Crystal hesitated, her eyes on the church. “Could we just go inside there and give the wedding party a few hours of joy? Pretend like I didn’t get this crazy call yet from my ex-husband? Please?” Crystal was practically begging her and about to cry.
Unable to say no, Magellan nodded. She would play the wedding and then head straight to her parents. She’d call Wren and have her meet her there. They would figure out what to do together.
“Thank you, you’re the best.” Crystal took a steady breath and forcibly put on a bright smile. She hopped out of the car and hurried inside the church, leaving Magellan overwhelmed and sick to her stomach.
The driver unloaded her harp for her with an I’m out of here look, and Magellan forced herself to go inside and get set up, placing her harp near the altar where Crystal wanted her.
She sat down on her stool, tuned the harp’s strings, and then played the designated thirty-minute pre-wedding set on autopilot as the guests began to arrive.
Right now, she was simply powering through “Over the Rainbow,” “A Thousand Years,” “All of Me,” “Endless Love,” and other wedding playlist classics from Debussy, Mozart, and Chopin.
She ignored everyone and simply played to calm her nerves, trying not to think about how Crystal’s ex had just told them the world might be ending.
Suddenly her whole short life felt wasted.
Why hadn’t she traveled yet? Why hadn’t she composed anything magnificent?
Why hadn’t she fallen in love? Put herself out there more and taken risks?
Why was she wearing Garesh’s ring like a fake wedding ring on her finger when she wasn’t even married?
Yes, she was introverted, full of anxiety, and usually lost in her own daydreams with music, but this was her life and she had yet to fully live it.
She’d always assumed she’d have more time. Now suddenly she was running out of it.
As her fingers instinctively flew over the strings, she took a good look at the guests filling up the church.
They were outlandish in their costumes. A motley crew of superheroes, Star Wars characters, priests, pirates, vampires, butterflies, and fairies.
Someone clanged up the aisle in real knight’s armor.
A trio of enchanting mermaids sat in one aisle with an inflatable Tyrannosaurus rex towering over them in the next.
The knight raised the visor on his helmet when he walked by her and winked. He would probably hit on her at the reception. Today she would let him.
If they lived that long.
If the planet’s magnetic field didn’t break before the bride and groom said “I do.” Because if what Darren had said was true, the poles could flip at any moment.
Yet here she was getting a stern nod from a stressed-out Crystal to start playing Pachelbel’s Canon in D.
The flower-wreathed bridesmaids began walking down the aisle with beaming smiles.
When all six had made their way to the front, Magellan performed a graceful transition to the traditional Bridal Chorus, compliments of Wagner.
The bride and groom were dressed like a king and queen from some bygone era. Darth Vader, the bride’s father, gave his daughter away. There were happy tears as the ceremony got underway.
Until halfway through, when everyone’s cell phones started vibrating and lighting up. Soon phones were in people’s hands, and the crowd was looking at something more riveting than the couple saying their vows.
Magellan knew it had to be the news. Darren’s news. The poles’ flip was really happening and had become public knowledge.
Then came the panic.
Someone started crying, and the whole wedding went to hell as everyone began acting like actors do in disaster movies when they discover they’re all about to die.
People rushed in every direction for an exit, jumping over pews to get out.
Someone tripped over the decorative ribbons and a flower arrangement went down.
As if on cue, an ominous crack of thunder rumbled outside, followed by the sound of pounding rain.
The storm came out of nowhere. Less than an hour ago the sky had been clear.
Today’s weather forecast had been for “sunny skies and an aurora borealis.” Now it sounded as if a hurricane was thrashing at the church doors.
Magellan sat poised at her instrument, in shock and unable to move while she watched the pandemonium as the church emptied. Even the priest went running out with his robe flying.
“Magellan, sit tight!” Crystal yelled at her across the stampede. “I’m going to try to get our driver to come back for us.” Magellan nodded, still frozen.
Astraphobia was the fear of thunderstorms, which unfortunately she had in spades. Instead of serotonin, her body produced adrenaline during a storm, and the only way to get through one was to distract herself.
With a well of pure panic rising in her chest, she looked up to the balcony. If the sky was really falling and they were all going to die, then she was going to die playing music. Something epic and grand, and what better instrument to play it on than a pipe organ.
She hurried upstairs to the balcony and sat down at the bench. The organ towered above her, silent and majestic with its 5,300 pipes. She planned to use every single one.
Taking a breath, she laid her hands on the keys. Like a car revving to life, the instrument responded to her touch as she launched into Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, filling the church with all its power.
Toccata meant “to touch” and fugue allowed the pianist to embellish notes within the progression in an open invitation from Bach to join him in the song.
So Magellan did. If this was going to be the last song she ever played, then she would be the storm raging.
Her feet danced over the foot pedals as she played the progressions harder and faster than Bach could have imagined.
She closed her eyes, feeling the music surround her, filling her up and making her whole body—even the metal of her ring—feel warm.
She didn’t see the ring begin to glow in an ethereal light, the metal lit from within, or see the symbols turn blue like the center of a flame.
She didn’t know St. Paul’s Chapel was the oldest church in Manhattan and had been built on an ancient Ley Line.
She didn’t know yet what a Ley Line was.
If she had, she would have understood the power her song was wielding, the door it was opening.
She would have known Ley Lines were the magnetic currents circling the Earth, and the geomagnetic storm underway with the poles was wreaking havoc on those lines and opening dimensional doorways that had been closed long ago.
Magellan didn’t know the key to opening such a door was sound.
As the song reached its pinnacle, Bach’s mathematical perfection of notes turned that forgotten key, and Magellan fell into a spiraling light.
The momentum felt like plummeting a great distance, as if she were a comet falling to Earth—and Magellan, named after the first explorer who masterminded how to circumvent the world once over, traveled across the world as well, to another time and place.