by Tanith Lee
Her aunt led the girl about, introducing her like a flower. Everyone liked Jausande at once, it was one of her gifts, and she perpetuated it by being nice to everyone, but not so nice that they felt under an obligation. Of course, Jausande’s aunt did not introduce her to any but the most deserving. And beyond the pale, no doubt, was The Conjuror, that awful little man. No, he did not meet Jausande in the formal way.
The gas lamps were already lit, and burned up steadily as the windows went out. The long room in which the gathering mingled grew close. White wine was being drunk, and small unsatisfying foods eaten. In half an hour, the evening party would break up, unless something should happen.
“Now what about” – shouted the young man in the loud coat – “a game of some sort? Some charade –” He winked at Jausande across the crowd, and she did not notice. He added, to a ripple of encouragement, “What if we have some magical tricks?”
“Now, now,” said Jausande’s aunt, “Philippe, we mustn’t turn my drawing room into a bear garden.”
“The idea,” said loud Philippe. “But surely there’s someone here can give us a show?”
At that, some of the heads turned, looking for the drab figure of The Conjuror. There he was, between the windows, a shadow with a glass of wine in its bony hand, and something repellent to him, like a smell – but he smelled of nothing at all.
To become abruptly the center of the room’s gaze did not seem to trouble him. Nor did he bloom. He did nothing.
“Monsieur,” said Jausande’s aunt, who had forgotten his name into the bargain, “you must forgive Monsieur Philippe Labonne.”
It was very strange. It was as if (as with a spell) this silly outburst, drawing attention to the supposed origins of The Conjuror, which in fact had never even been verified, were all hearsay, called up some power. The creature himself was not imbued by anything apparent. He did not change, in looks or manner (which were rather those of a funeral assistant caught out at the wake). And yet the salon, so boring a moment earlier, took on a dangerous quality, like the air during a bitter quarrel when any terrible truth may be said.
“Madame,” said The Conjuror, quietly, and there was nothing of note either in his voice or his accent, accept that the latter had a slight tinge of the streets. And he gave a nasty graceless little bow.
“There now,” said the aunt of Jausande. “But perhaps you, darling, will play for us on the piano?”
Jausande did not wilt or beam. She played the piano as she did all things – nicely, effectively, not brilliantly. It gave her sometimes a quiet pleasure to play in private, none in public, nor any qualms. She would do what she must.
But it was as she took a step toward the piano that she saw The Conjuror looking at her. She saw, and she could not help but see and show that she had seen. And a flush, of a sort of ghastly shame, spread over her face and neck. There was something so awful in The Conjuror’s look, for it said everything that must, by such as he, never be said, and so very openly, and so very intently. I love you, said the look. I love you at first sight.
“Whatever –?” began Jausande’s aunt.
“I’m very warm,” said Jausande. “Will you excuse me if I don’t play for a moment?”
She had averted her eyes, but still, still, she felt the eyes of him clinging on to her. Here and there in the recent past indecorous outpourings had been made to her. Never in that way.
And now other people in the room became aware of it, both the intensity of The Conjuror, and its object, and tiny, barely audible sounds were breaking across the audience, the whispers of sneers and laughs.
Perhaps what made it so appalling was its mediocrity. Here, in this unimportant drawing room, the birth of an obsession. And if he had been grotesque, and she amazingly beautiful, there would have been to it the dignity of tragedy. But she was only rather pretty, and he – He was nothing on earth.
And then he spoke again. They all heard him.
“If you like, madame, I can offer my poor skills, a few of them. If the ladies won’t be alarmed.”
“Why – monsieur –” and Jausande’s aunt actually stammered, so instinctively startled she was. Every line of her corseted form revealed she wanted to deny him. But it was absurd – why not? In hopes of something like this she had asked him here. It would be a coup. Nowhere else, that she knew of, had he “entertained.”
Besides, the mechanism was already in motion. As if at a signal, her guests were drawing back, leaving a broad space at the room’s far end into which The Conjuror propelled himself. He had discarded his wineglass. His hands were empty. He lifted them slightly. They were horribly bare, as if peeled.
“Look – nothing up his sleeve,” loudly said the loud Philippe.
And one of the others called, “Lower the gas!”
“No,” said The Conjuror, and from his position at their front, he had now taken some authority. “That won’t be necessary.”
And then the extraordinary did happen. He snapped his fingers (as the aunt of Jausande said afterward, for all the world like a grocer’s clerk) and each of the six gas fitments in the room was reduced to a smoky sublume. Contrastingly, the light in the area of The Conjuror was heightened. Its source was invisible.
Some of the ladies shrieked. Then there was chastened laughter.
Philippe said, “Been at the lamps – planted a helper in the basement –”
“Monsieur,” said The Conjuror, “please do yourself the kindness of becoming silent.”
This was nearly as dramatic as the trick of the lamps. It was so audacious, so frankly rude. It carried such weight. The stance of The Conjuror had changed, his voice had done so. This must be his stage presence, and as such, it was a good one.
“Now,” said The Conjuror. “Mesdames, messieurs. I must ask you all to remain as still as possible. Not to move about. To restrain your outcry. If you will do that, I can show you something, although very little. We are surrounded by wonders, kept from us only by a veil. You must understand,” he said, and now there was not a sound otherwise, “that I know how to twitch aside that veil, a fraction. To reveal more would be to endanger your sanity. You must trust me in this. You must trust me utterly. From this moment, your lives and hearts hang from my grip. I will not let you go. But your obedience is essential. How else can I protect you?”
The room was quiet as death. He had frightened and awed them. They would complain after they did not know how. But he was clever, give him that, he had done it. That common and unmusical voice had become an instrument by which he gained dominion over them. And the lamps burned low.
Then his pale hands darted out and seemed to lie there, suspended as if upon the surface of a pool.
A girl appeared. She appeared out of nothing, or the brocade wall, half transparent, ghostly, and then she grew quite solid, and was entirely there before them. She was no one they knew.
The girl was dressed in a long draped tunic with a diagonal pattern. Her hair was done up in a knot, with combs. She stretched to light a metal cup that apparently floated in the atmosphere. It blossomed out like a flower, and dimly at her back they saw the columns and cistern of a Roman atrium. Then she had turned, and the atrium was gone, rolled up with her into nothingness again.
The room was as it had been. Someone dared to speak, not Philippe Labonne. “Shadow play,” the man said, “images thrown up by a small projector.”
“Monsieur,” said The Conjuror, moving to look at him, but holding his arms still upward, the hands suspended, a position that should have been ridiculous, but was not, as if, now, he grasped gently by ropes two opposing forces, two great dogs, perhaps. “Monsieur, you must do as I asked. Or I can’t be responsible.”
“Devil take you,” said the guest.
“No, it is you he will take, monsieur. Be quiet, be quiet at once, or leave immediately.”
Jausande’s aunt said, rather tremulously, “Yes, do let’s all be obedient. This is so interesting.”
And somehow there was
silence again, awkward and unwilling for a moment, and more fraught and nearly frightened than ever.
A man walked up out of the floor. (A woman screamed and her scream was choked down.) The man, solid as the Roman girl, solid as anyone present, wore hose and tunic, and the rounded, color-slashed sleeves of an alchemic century. He climbed an unseen stair out of the floor, up across the room, and through the air, and vanished into the ceiling.
The Conjuror spoke to them. “What I show you here are only the pictures of the past, the things that have been, on this spot. But there are other things that coexist with us, in past ages as now.”
He spread his arms a little wider, as if allowing the two great dogs to pull forward and away.
There in the middle of the cleared space, where the light had been, was a globe of night. Stars shone over a garden made to the formal measure of three hundred years before, and a woman in a high-waisted gown and cap of silver wire moved among the statues and the sculpted trees. She spoke words from a book, but though the watching salon heard a murmur of her voice, her words, the accent, were so alien, they could not make them out.
Perhaps it was ventriloquism, for The Conjuror too moved his lips, but not it seemed in the same rhythm as the woman.
The woman stopped, facing out into the salon and not seeing it. She closed the book together on a jeweled finger and her cold eyes glared. Then the ground cracked at her feet. It opened into a chasm. And the woman looked into it, not stepping back, nor seemingly dismayed. And something shouldered up from the chasm, pitch dark as the night, putting out all the stars. It had no proper form, yet it was there. And leaning to the woman it made a thin, sweet sound, like distant music. But she answered angrily in wild, ornamented words, what might have been a name. Then the creature from the pit flowed and lowered and compressed itself. It made itself over. And on the grass it alighted, and with a ratlike shake, it assumed the form of the woman, even to her dress and her silver cap, and to the book in her hand. Then she gave a cry of laughter or terror – it was impossible to tell which – a sort of sneezing derision or panic, and whirled into a hundred bits like a shattered vase, and these fell down into the crack, which then healed over. And the monster that had taken human form walked away between the statues.
There was something so horrible in this scene that the silence The Conjuror had induced was now augmented by a second silence, far deeper and less negotiable.
But the garden and the night went out. And The Conjuror pointed upward, and they looked, and saw a great glowing cloud hanging in the ceiling. It lay over the whole of the drawing room, sending down soft rays of light, and a sudden mild rain, which fell among them, moist and fragrant. There came a muted exclamation, another, and these were stifled at once. But the cloud brought a feeling of hope, of possibility. There was nothing fearful to it, until there began to be glimpsed in it an exquisite angelic face with pitiless eyes, looking at them as the other apparitions or demons had not.
And it was as if they thought, I hate this, it is too beautiful, it asks too much.
And Jausande Marguerite thought quite clearly, These things shouldn’t be shown. Make it go away.
At which, as if The Conjuror read her mind, it did. It dissolved like a warm ember.
A third change had come on the salon of Jausande’s aunt. There was a restlessness, an anger that had nothing to do with the petty anger of before. Throats began to clear themselves, women’s dresses rustled. There were faint muffled inquiries. And Jausande’s aunt, the hapless hostess, said, “Do you think, monsieur –?”
Then through the brocade wallpaper something burst like a bomb.
It was black, racing, lunging, roaring – there were cries and shouts – it was a carriage with six horses going full tilt. It tore into the room, into the crowd of evening guests, who fell and tumbled in front of it.
Jausande glimpsed the savage gaping mouths of horses pulled wide on reins, felt the wind of passage graze her and saw a man flung sideways from the impact. The stink of animal sweat and fear, heat and thunder. Hoofs like iron and wheels from which white sparks sprayed off. The carriage rushed headlong through the room and out, into some tunnel of the dimensions, and the walls were whole behind it.
The guests had scattered with the furniture, where they had thrown themselves or, as it seemed, been thrown. Women sobbed and men with sick faces ranted. Two of them had seized The Conjuror, that ineffectual little man.
“You must let go,” he said. “Do it, before I make you.”
And they let go of him, stepping back, offering him verbal violence instead. But he only shrugged.
Jausande’s aunt whispered, “Someone make him leave quickly, for heaven’s sake,” and pressed her handkerchief to her mouth.
It seemed to Jausande she stood on an island in the jumbled, tumbled room, she was quite alone, as if deserted by midnight in a waste. And to her, over the elaborate carpet that was the sea of sand and rock, he moved. He stood about three feet from her and said, quietly, “You will come to me.”
Jausande was unnerved but not afraid. She said, “How dare you? You don’t know what you’re saying.”
But she realized that no one else had heard, and that though there were men enough to throw him out of a window, not one would lay a finger on his dingy sleeve. She looked, and saw his insignificance. She imagined his fusty, pointless life, cramped in his little rooms by the Observatory, an area fallen into disfavor, a place she would never visit.
“But you’ll come to me,” he said again, “when I’m ready. Then.”
“You’re mad,” she said. She could not see his eyes. It was as if he had none. As if he had no physical shape at all.
And then he was gone, and in the distance over the desert her aunt was entreating her for sympathy, while round about, under the lonely mysterious howls of hyenas, ladies swooned and gentlemen swore vengeance.
At first from an embarrassment, presently from the reassembly of common sense, Jausande told no one what The Conjuror had said to her. Half an hour after his departure from the salon and her life, she had returned to earth and dismissed him as what he was, a fool and charlatan with a cunning line in tricks. It was his essential inferiority that drove him to attempt to distress the gathering. She was merely another intended victim. Some abrupt thought she had had of repairing to her father with the story was soon forgotten. The father of Jausande was elderly and bookish, and her mother long dead. Her uncle, meanwhile, was away on business in foreign climes.
Long after the curious and unpleasant evening, however, Jausande remained glad that no one had heard the invitation – the order – that The Conjuror had issued to her.
She did not believe in ghosts and demons. Her image even of God was that of a just, stern magistrate.
If she had turned a hair, then she plucked it out.
The year passed with a great chrysanthemum of summer, an autumnal pause, a snowy winter of festivals and feasts.
By the coming of spring, the flowers piercing the parks with their needles, the snowdrops, the showers that turned the building of the avenues to amazing edifices of wet newsprint, by then no rumors of The Conjuror were any longer heard. He had gone down again into his mouse hole under the boards of the City. Spring was not the time for him. It was as if he had been papered over, and the flowers grew out where he had stood.
And by then, anyway, she had truly forgotten.
Jausande Marguerite sat down before a window. It was late in the afternoon; the slanting champagne light looked sensational, as if new, as if the sun had never shone in this way, although it had in fact, since the dawning afternoon of time.… Jausande glanced at the light, where it invaded the stout trees of the Labonne garden. She felt middle-aged, the young girl, because she had seen through the wiles of sunfall. She had found it out: It promised nothing, neither adventure nor romance. In token, she was betrothed, to – of all people – the elder brother of Philippe Labonne. She had resigned herself to life.
For here was what lif
e was, such long, quite pleasant, tiring, and tiresome mornings and evenings; the luncheon, the game of cards, the prospect of dinner, of more cards, of the male discussion of finance and politics.
Her fiancé was a good-looking and smart young man, who worked in his wealthy father’s business. It was Jausande’s aunt who had introduced them. Paul was “superior” to the rest of his family. But no, his family were in themselves perfectly delightful. It had come to be said more and more often. And Jausande had told it to herself over and over. Madame Labonne was not irritating, ignorant and saccharine. She was a good woman, full of kindness. And Philippe … well, Philippe might improve as he grew older. But Paul was elegantly mannered, and had impressed that upon Jausande from the start: his manners, financial expectations, and his looks, of which last he was a little secretly vain, but you could not tease him about it, for then he became stiff, reproachful. Jausande’s future would be, as her past had always been, a method of pleasing others, which she did so easily and so well. She would make an excellent wife. She would be weightless and charming, serious when required, firm with her children, fanciful prettily and properly within the fences of decorum and finesse. She had liked Paul at first, had almost been glad, almost excited at the first prospects of their meetings. But then she could not deceive herself quite so much. Paul, provided he was never openly crossed, always subtly praised, pampered, and respected, could make the ideal husband. “And Paul likes his books laid out just so, one must never touch. You must be sure the servant burnished the glasses. How he abhors a dusty goblet!” Such helpful hints Paul’s mother gave her. “Oh, he’s a stickler. What a boy!” Sometimes Jausande played the piano, at Madame Labonne’s request. Then Madame Labonne would doze, and minuscule snores would issue from her. Waking, she would say, as she said now, “Such a lovely piece. Such cleverness!” Today she added, “Paul should be here quite soon. And his father, I hope, but the hours that man works, why, a general on a battlefield couldn’t work harder.”
