A weeping schoolmarm might ask: “But what about the realms of the blessed? the Elysian fields? the laurel groves?”
“For such consolations, madam, one must consult canvases other than mine. And here we have the writhing Pandaemonium of pleasure, where all noble and spiritual aims are forgotten in the base fog of sensation and lust. Next is the great—”
“Hey, buddy, could we have a little more light on that there Pandaemonium of pleasure?”
“This is the family show, friend, come back at ten. Here is the great winepress in which hundreds of the damned are crushed together until they burst. Here are the filthy, verminous infants of ingratitude, which spit venom even as they are hoisted with tongs over the fire. Note, ladies and gentlemen, that throughout this dreadful panorama, the plants in view are all thorny and rank, the creatures all fanged and poisonous, the very stones misshapen and worthless, the men and women all sick, feeble, wracked, and forgotten, their only music Hell’s Unutterable Lament! Where all suffer horrid torments not for one minute, not for one day, not for one age, not for two ages, not for a hundred ages, not for ten thousand millions of ages, but forever and ever without end, and never to be delivered! Mind your step at the door, next show two thirty, gratuities welcome.”
That was Professor Van Der Ast’s side of the canvas, the public side. I told no one what I saw on my side: the patches and the stains, the backward paintings, the different tricks played by the light. I could see pictures, too, but only half-glimpsed, like those in clouds and treetops in leafy summertime. The pictures on my side were not horrible. I saw a man wrestling a lightning rod in a storm; and a great river catfish that sang to the crew in the gondola of a low-flying balloon; and a bespectacled woman pushing a single wheel down the road; and a ballroom full of dancing ghosts; and a man with a hand of iron who beckoned me with hinged fingers; and a farmer who waved good-bye to his happy family on the porch before vanishing, then, reappearing, waved hello to them again; and an angry face looking out of a boot; and a giant woman with a mustache throwing a man over the side of a riverboat; and a smiling man going over Niagara Falls in a barrel while around him bobbed a hundred hoodoo bottles, each with a rolled-up message for Marie Laveaux; and a hound dog with a pistol who was robbing a train; and a one-eyed man who lived in a gator hole; and a beggar presenting a peepshow to the Queen of Sheba; and a gorilla in a boater hat sitting in a deck chair watching a diorama of the Mississippi scroll past; and a thousand other wonders to behold. My Infernal Regions were a lot more interesting than Professor Van Der Ast’s, and sometimes they lighted up and moved without my having to do a thing.
My only other knowledge of magic at the time was thanks to Wendell Farethewell, the Wizard of the Blue Ridge, a magician from Yandro Mountain, North Carolina, who performed at Professor Van Der Ast’s for three weeks each summer. I never had the chance to see his act because, as the Professor liked to remind us, we were being paid to entertain and not to be entertained, but I was told that at the climax he caught in his teeth a bullet fired through a crystal pitcher of lemonade, and I believe it was so because sometimes when a pinhead was not available, the Professor asked me to go onstage after the show and mop up the lemonade and pick up the sharp splinters of glass.
The tricks I saw the wizard Farethewell perform were done after hours, when all the residents of the museum went to the basement for drinks and cold-meat sandwiches and more drinks. I squirmed my way into the front of the crowd around a wobbly table made of splinters and watched as he pulled the Queen of Hearts out of the air and walked coins across his knuckles and floated dollar bills. “Just like the government,” he always said when he floated a dollar bill, and we always laughed. He showed us fifty-seven ways to shuffle a deck of cards and seventeen of the ways to draw an ace off the top whenever one was needed, even five times in a row. “Do this in a gambling hall,” he said, “and you’ll get yourself shot. Do it among you good people, and it’s just a pleasant diversion, something to make Little Britches smile.”
That was what Farethewell called me, Little Britches. He was the only one who called me that. Big Fred, who played our What-Is-It?, tried it once, and I busted his nose.
If the night wore on and Farethewell drank too much, he got moody and talked about the war, and about his friend, an older man he never named. “The 26th North Carolina mustered up in Raleigh, and I couldn’t sleep that first night, without no mountains around to hold me, so I mashed my face into my bedroll and cried. I ain’t ashamed of it, neither. The others laughed or told me to hush, but this man, he said, ‘Boy, you want to see a trick?’ Now, what boy don’t want to see a trick? And after he’s seen it, what boy don’t want to know how it’s done?” As he talked he stared into space, but his hands kept doing tricks, as if they were independent of the rest of him. “At New Bern he taught me the back palm, the finger palm, the thumb palm; at the Wilderness the Hindu Shuffle and the Stodart Egg; at Spotsylvania the Biseaute flourish, the Miser’s Dream, the Torn and Restored. I learned the Scotch and Soda and the Gin and Tonic before I drank either one; and all through the war, every day, I worked on the Three Major Vanishes: take, put, and pinch.” As he said that, three coins disappeared from his hand, one by one. “So that was our war. It kept my mind off things, and maybe kept his mind off things, too. He had the tuberculosis pretty bad, toward the end. The last thing he taught me was the bullet catch, in the stockade at Appomattox, just before he died. I got one of his boots. The rest, they burned. When they turned out his pockets, it was just coins and cards and flash paper. It didn’t look like magic no more. It just looked…It looked like trash. The magic went when he went, except the little he left to me.”
Someone asked, “What’d you learn at Gettysburg?” and Farethewell replied:
“What I learned at Gettysburg, I will teach no man. But one day, living or dead, I will hold the Devil to account for what I learned.”
Then he began doing tricks with a knife, and I went upstairs to bed.
My in-between summer came to an end after the last viewing of a Saturday night. As I cranked the diorama back into place, I heard the Professor talking to someone, a customer? Then the other voice got louder: “You ain’t nothing but an old woman. She’ll do just fine, you watch.”
I could hear no more over the winding spool, and I did not want to stop it for fear of being caught eavesdropping. Then the Professor and the wizard Farethewell were behind the diorama with me.
“Shut off that engine, Little Britches. You can do that later. Right now, you got to help me.” He had something in his hand, a tangle that glittered in the lamplight. He thrust it at me. “Go on, take it. Showtime was five minutes ago.”
“What are you talking about?” It was a little sparkly dress with feathers, and a hat, and slippers with heels. I looked at Farethewell, who was drinking from a flask, and at the Professor, who was stroking his silver beard.
“Pearl, please mind Mr. Farethewell, that’s a good girl. Just run along and put that on, and meet us in the theater, backstage.” I held the costume up to the light: what there was of the light, and what there was of the costume. “Sukie can’t help Mr. Farethewell with the ten o’clock show. She’s sick.”
“Dead drunk, you mean,” Farethewell roared, and lifted his flask. The Professor snatched it away. Something spattered my cheek and burned.
“Get as drunk as you like at eleven,” the Professor said. “Pearl, it’ll be easy. All you have to do is wave to the crowd, climb into the box, and lie there. Mr. Farethewell will do the rest.”
“The blades won’t come nowhere near you, Little Britches. The box is rigged, and besides, you ain’t no bigger’n nothing. You won’t even have to twist.”
“But,” I said.
“Pearl,” said the Professor, like there were fifteen R’s in my name. So I ran upstairs.
“What’s wrong with you?” Sally Ann cried when I burst in.
I told her while she helped me out of my coveralls and my blue denims and into the turkey
suit. “What in the world are they thinking?” Sally Ann said. “Hold still, Pearl, if I don’t cinch this, you’ll walk plumb out of it.”
“My legs are cold!” I yelled.
The hat was nothing I would have called a hat. In a rainstorm it would have been no cover at all. I finally snuggled it down over my hair and got the ostrich plume out of my face. Sally Ann was looking at me funny.
“Oh, my,” she said.
“What?”
“Nothing. Come on, let’s go. I want to see this. Clothes do make a difference, don’t they?”
“Not to me,” I said, and would have fallen down the stairs if she hadn’t grabbed me. “Who can walk in any such shoes as this?”
There’s no dark like the dark backstage in a theater, but Sally Ann managed to guide me through all the ropes and sandbags without disaster. I carried the shoes. Just inside the backdrop curtain, the Professor made a hurry-up motion. I hopped one-legged to get the shoes back on and peered through the slit in the curtain, but was blinded by the lamps shining onto the stage.
Farethewell was yelling to make himself heard over what sounded like a theater full of drunken men. “And now, my lovely assistant will demonstrate that no cutlass ever forged can cut her, that she can dodge the blade of any cavalryman, whether he be a veteran of the Grand Army of the Republic—”
The crowd booed and hissed.
“—or whether he fought for Tennessee under the great Nathan Bedford Forrest!”
The crowd whooped and stomped its approval.
“Here she is,” muttered the Professor, as he held the curtain open.
I blinked in the light, still blinded. Farethewell’s big callused hand grabbed mine and led me forward. “Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Aphrodite, the Pearl of the Cumberland!”
I stood frozen.
The crowd continued to roar.
Lying on a table in front of us was a long box like a coffin, open at the top. A pile of swords lay beside it.
“Lie down in the box, honey,” Farethewell murmured. He wore a long blue robe and a pointed hat, and his face was slick with sweat.
I walked to the box like a puppet and looked down at the dirty pillow, the tatty blanket inside.
“And if you don’t believe me when I tell you how amazingly nimble Aphrodite is, why when I am done shoving cutlasses into the box, those of you willing to pay an additional fifty cents can line up here, on the stage, and look down into the box and see for yourself that this young woman has suffered no injury whatsoever, save perhaps to her costume.”
The crowd screamed with laughter. Blinking back tears, I leaned over the box, stepped out of the shoes: first left, then right. I looked up and into the face of a fat man in the front row. He winked.
In my head I heard the Professor say: “This is the family show, friend, come back at ten.”
I turned and ran.
The noise of the crowd pushed me through the curtains, past Sally Ann and the Professor. In the sudden darkness I tripped over a sandbag, fell and skinned my knees, then stood and flailed my way to the door and into the corridor beyond.
“Pearl! Come back!”
My cheeks burned with shame and anger at myself and the crowd and Farethewell and the Professor and Sally Ann and those stupid, stupid shoes; I vowed as I ran barefoot like a monkey through the back corridors that I would never wear their like again. I ran as fast as I could—not upstairs, not to the room I slept in, but to the one place in the museum I felt was mine.
I slammed the door behind me and stood, panting, behind the Diorama of the Infernal Regions.
Someone, probably the Professor, had done part of my job for me, and shut down all the lamps. It was the job I liked least, snuffing the lights one by one like candles on a cake. But the Professor had not finished rolling up the canvas. It was backstage dark, but up there on the canvas, at eye level, was a little patch of light, flickering.
I’m sure that when I went missing, my friends thought I had run away, but they were wrong. I was running away from nothing. I was running to something, though I did not know what it was. Running to what is the rest of my story—is all my story, I reckon.
I walked right up to the flickering spot on my side of the canvas. The tip of my nose was an inch from the paint. When I breathed in, I smelled sawdust and walnuts. When I breathed out, the bright patch brightened just a little. If you blow gently on a flame, it does not go out, but flares up; that’s how the canvas was. I almost could see a room through the canvas, a paneled room. Behind me, a woman’s voice called my name, but in front of me, I almost heard music, organ music.
I closed my eyes and focused not on the canvas, but on the room beyond.
I stepped forward.
Have you ever stepped through a cobweb? That’s how I stepped out of Professor Van Der Ast’s Mammoth Cosmopolitan Musée and Pavilion of Science and Art and into a place without a ticket booth, into my own canvas, my own Infernal Regions.
NOT a funeral, a ball. The organist was playing a waltz.
I opened my eyes.
I was in a ballroom full of ghosts.
I reached behind to feel the canvas, to feel anything familiar and certain. Instead I felt a cold hard surface: a magnificent stained-glass window that ran the length of the wall, depicting mermaids and magicians and a girl at the lever of an infernal engine. Window and room spun around me. My knees buckled, and I sank onto a beautifully inlaid wooden floor.
The room wasn’t spinning, but the dancers were. Fifty couples whirled through the room, the silver chandeliers and mahogany paneling and gold-leaf wallpaper visible through their transparent bodies. I never had seen such a beautiful room. The dancers were old and young, richly and poorly dressed, white and black and Indian. Some wore wigs and knee breeches, others buckskins and fur caps, others evening gowns or tailcoats. They didn’t look like show people. All moved faster than their actual steps. No feet quite touched the floor. The dancers were waltzing in the air.
Against the far wall was a pump organ, and sitting at the bench with her back to me was a tiny gray-haired lady, shoulders swaying with the force of her fingers on the keys, her feet on the pedals. I tried to see the sheet music through her but could not. She was no ghost; she was substantial. I looked at my hand and saw through it the interlocking diamond pattern of the floor. That’s when I screamed.
The music stopped.
The dancing stopped.
The old lady spun on her bench and stared at me.
Everyone stared at me.
Then the dancers gasped and stepped—no, floated—backward in the air, away from me. There was movement beside me. I looked up to see a skinny girl in a feathered costume step out of the stained-glass window. I screamed again, and she jumped and screamed, too.
She was me, and she also was becoming transparent.
“Five minutes break, please, everyone,” trilled a little-old-lady voice. “When we return, we’ll do the Virginia Reel.”
The second Pearl had slumped onto the floor beside me. A third Pearl stepped out of the stained glass just as the old lady reached us. She wore an elaborate black mourning-dress, with the veil thrown back to reveal chubby, ruddy cheeks and big gray eyes. “There, there,” she said. “This won’t do at all. The first rule of psychic transport is to maintain integrity, to hold oneself together.” A fourth Pearl stepped from the glass as the old lady seized my hand and the second Pearl’s hand and brought them together, palm to palm. It was like pressing my hand into butter; my hand began to sink into hers, and hers into mine. We both screamed and tried to pull back, but the old lady held our wrists in a grip like iron.
“Best to close your eyes, dear,” the old lady said.
My eyes immediately shut tight not of my own doing but as if some unseen hand had yanked them down like window shades. The old lady’s grip tightened, and I feared my wrist would break. My whole body got warmer, from the wrist onward, and I began to feel better—not just calmer, but somehow fuller, more complete.
>
Finally, the old lady released my wrist, and said, “You can open your eyes now, dear.”
I did, and it was my own doing this time. I stared at my hands, with their lines and calluses and gnawed-to-the-quick nails, and they were so familiar and so solid that I started to cry.
The ballroom was empty but for me—one of me—and the old lady kneeling beside me, and a single ghost bobbing just behind her, a little ferret-faced mustached man in a bowler hat and a checked waistcoat that might have been colorful once, but now was gray checked with gray.
“Beautifully done,” said the floater. “You have the hands of a surgeon.”
“The hands are the least of it, Mr. Dellafave, but you are too kind. Goodness, child, you gave me a fright. Six of you stranded in the glass. Good thing I was here to set things right. But I forget my manners. My name is Sarah Pardee Winchester, widow of the late William Wirt Winchester, and this is my friend Mr. Dellafave.” She eyed my costume, reached over, and tugged on my ostrich plume. “Too young to be a showgirl,” she said, “almost.”
I shuddered and wiped my nose with the back of my wonderful old-friend hand and asked: “Am I…Are you…Please, is this Heaven or Hell?”
The old lady and the bowler-hatted man both laughed. His laugh sounded like steam escaping, but hers was throaty and loud, like a much younger, much larger woman.
“Opinions differ,” the old lady said. “We think of it simply as California.”
SHE called the place Llanada Villa, which she said was Spanish for “Flatland House.” I had never lived in a house before the widow took me in, so you might call Flatland House my introduction to the whole principle of houses. And what an introduction it was! No house I’ve seen since has been a patch on it.
There was the size, to start with. The house covered six acres. Counting the rooms that had been walled off and made unreachable except by ghosts, but not counting the rooms that had been demolished or merged into larger spaces, the house had 150 rooms, mostly bedrooms, give or take a dozen. “I’ve slept in only seventy or eighty of them myself,” the widow told me, “but that’s enough to get the general idea.”
Wizards: Magical Tales from the Masters of Modern Fantasy Page 25