The Magnus Institute

Yeah, I see you not touching them. Smart. But gloves aren’t going to be any protection if your hand slips and they go clattering across the table. I’d put them in that box real careful, because let me tell you, those babies are due for some serious bad luck.

So yeah, I tell you all about them, how I got them, all that crap and you just… You take them away, right? You accept them.

Good. I think. I’m pretty sure that’s how it works. It’s how it worked for me, at least. Put them in whatever vault you like, bury them, drop them in the ocean for all I care. All that matters is that they’re yours now.

It was Gary who roped me into all this. He was one of those hardcore nerd types, and right from when we were at school together he’d try to get me to play in his stupid games. I mean, Advanced Dungeons and Dragons was the big new thing, but I never saw the appeal. I tried it once to shut him up, but you just sat around saying stuff that’s not real. Where’s the game in that? And after school me and Gary drifted apart. No surprise, it happens, right?

But then last year, Carl leaves me. It wasn’t a huge deal. It’s not like we were engaged or anything and we’d barely seen each other since he moved to Doncaster, but it still hurt, y’know? So when Gary contacts me out of the blue, begging me to join his group, I think screw it, why not? Gary wasn’t that bad – at least, I thought so – and god knows I needed a pick-me-up. A bit of harmless fun.

So I turn up at his apartment and I realize Gary has been doing seriously well since school. He’s got this sweet place over in West Didsbury. That said, when he invites me in, I notice he’s looking kind of haggard. He’s wearing this obviously expensive long-sleeved turtleneck but he’s got bags under his eyes, his trousers are torn and he’s walking with a limp.

I ask if he’s okay and he mumbles something about a mugging so I leave it alone, but I do notice that a bunch of the bulbs have blown, and there’s a huge leak over his massive sound system. I don’t say anything though. I mean, it’s not like my tiny rented studio was any better. That said, I do notice a slight stain on his wall that I think might be blood.

There’s no-one else there yet, just me and him, and I’m feeling pretty awkward. Then he starts talking about this game we’re apparently going to be playing and I feel an entirely different kind of awkward, ‘cause I have no idea what he’s on about. Then he says to me that he assumes I don’t have any dice of my own, and I tell him no – I’ll have to use his.

That puts a smile on his face. I know why now, of course.

I was expecting him to give me a bunch of those cheap little plastic dice with all the different points, but instead he reaches into his pocket and pulls out a pair of normal ones. Six sides, off white, little black dots, you know what dice look like. I mean, you’re looking at them right now. I ask him if we need, you know, weird dice, and he shakes his head, saying this game just uses “two dee six.” He holds them out for me to take them, so I do. God, they felt heavy.

It’s been a while since I played the tables, but I’ve used enough dice to know they were too heavy… And there was something else too. From that point on, I own those dice. And I know it.

Gary doesn’t bother waiting after that. He immediately claims he got a call from someone else in the group. They can’t make it, game’s cancelled, sorry you came all this way, blah, blah, blah. And just like that I’m back outside, waiting on a taxi to get me home.

Do I really need to give you the whole lowdown on the next bit? I mean, you said you’re specifically looking for, what was it, “supernaturally active items,” right? I feel like when I tell you I’m giving you a pair of cursed dice you can probably put the pieces together.

Look, long story short, I start rolling them, and notice that they make stuff happen. I roll high, good things happen: job offers, free coffees from hot baristas, tax refund. I roll low, bad things happen: broken tech, lost money, bad moods all around. And when I roll really low… Well, you’ve seen the scars.

The thing is, though, I still don’t really know if they ever made me roll them. I mean, I did. A lot. And I knew that the risks probably outweighed the rewards, but I don’t think I ever felt them like, “calling” to me or anything, y’know? It always felt like my choice. Even if it was a shitty choice. Besides, I’ve never gotten anything good in my life except by blind chance, so why should this be any different?

After a while, though, I did notice that… it’s not actually random. You get a few high rolls, your next one is probably going to be low. And if you’ve gotten all the bad luck out, you’ve got good things coming. I know, I know, that’s meant to be superstition but I’m telling you, I kept track, and I’ve got enough maths in me to be sure of the odds. They’re not random, it all balances out eventually. So that’s when I get to thinking. What if the person rolling doesn’t matter, just as long as the rolls balance out overall?

Well, you see where I’m going with this.

The weirdest thing: nobody ever said no. Some stranger approaches you, slides a pair of dice over to you, and tells you to roll them, you say no, right? But they always did. Sure, they’d give me weird looks, tell me to get lost, treat me like the creep I absolutely was, but they still rolled them. And sure, I know better than most everyone loves rolling dice, but it does make me wonder how much control I ever really had…

I did spread good luck as well as bad. After all, even when you stacked the odds, plenty of people got high numbers and then a letter arrives right there and then with welcome news. I hated them for it though. Those stupid damn grins as they robbed me of my good luck.

But when they rolled low, when you could see the misfortune dropping over them like a shadow, or better yet – when they rolled real low and you could be certain that the next throw would be a good one. There was a dark joy to that, I’ll admit.

And my system worked. It wasn’t perfect, I’d still get a few dud rolls here and there: a broken down car, a missed payment, once I even went through a plate glass window. But for the most part I’d really turned stuff around for myself, offloading all the crap to someone else for a change. Clearly something that idiot Gary had never even thought to try.

And then it started to change and the luck was… different. Not in whether it was good or bad, but in how it was good or bad. At first, it had all been pretty normal stuff, sometimes even predictable, but gradually it started becoming more… I don’t know, abstract. Like it used to be getting an extra hash brown or whatever, and then it became just being in a good mood, and then finally you couldn’t even pin down what had happened, you just knew something had.

And as my luck kept getting better and better, I started to feel less and less… connected to the world. Like I was a lucky ghost or something, walking with normal people but not really one of them anymore. I was just this figure stepping into their lives long enough to gift them fortune or, more often, misery before moving on.

I started to enjoy that more than the luck. I was rolling for myself less and less, focusing more on being some… mysterious stranger. I even began dressing for the part: I got hold of this long dark coat, a wide-brimmed hat, grew a proper goatee, the works.

This was up until about a week ago. That’s when I see Gary, sat at a coffee shop just down the road from the fancy uptown flat I’m living in (thank you double-six). And he looks normal. Not happy, exactly, but certainly not the miserable shell he’d been when I saw him last.

And a vicious little idea comes to me. So I walk up to him, and I say hello.

You should have seen his face. Guilt at first, sure, but then it slides into confusion when he sees the outfit. He starts to stammer out some half-baked apology when I hold up my hand to stop him. I put on “the voice” and tell my old friend thank you so much for the gift, and that I want to pay him back. He knows what’s coming then, even before I take them out and place them on the table between us.

He doesn’t want to roll them. He wants to be anywhere that isn’t sat across from me in that grotty little cafe. But he picks them up anyway, and grimly throws them.

I’d never seen snake eyes come up before. Never in all the thousands of times I’d seen them rolled, clattering across someone’s future. Maybe they’d been saving themselves for a special occasion, an honor for an unworthy keeper. Or maybe Gary was just really, really unlucky. Either way, there’s this moment of silence as we both stare at the table, and the dice stare back.

When the truck barrels through the wall, it isn’t the grill that hits Gary first. It’s the bricks that are crushed in front of it. Half of one slams into his jaw, ripping it from the top of his face and spraying me with a clatter of dislodged teeth. Another hits the side of his head, collapsing his eye socket and opening his skull, like an overripe grape. Maybe that’s what kills him. I hope so. Because I don’t want to think about what it must have felt like as the wheels of the massive vehicle roll over him and ground his body into the lino.

Apparently the driver was asleep at the wheel. The building is wrecked, but – somehow nobody else was hurt except for Gary. Just unlucky, I guess.

I stagger out of there before the police and ambulance arrive, and I throw up. I don’t know what I expected to happen, what – satisfaction I thought I might get from seeing Gary get screwed over by the dice, but that… it’s too much, and I know I can’t keep them.

And that brings us about up to date. They’re yours now, and I never want to see them again. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a blow, but… I’m just not the right guy to carry them. Besides, I’ve seen how they treat people who give them away.

It’s a damn shame, though.

Well… maybe just once more. For old time’s sake.