by Holt, Tom
She didn’t react. ‘At the very least,’ she said, ‘you could’ve come and asked me for a book about it. There are several, you know. But instead, you think about it. And no doubt you’ve reached a conclusion.’
It took Paul a second or two to realise that she was asking him a question. ‘Well, sort of,’ he said. ‘Only now I’m pretty sure it’s wrong,’ he added.
‘Let me be the judge of that.’
So he explained, for the second time in sixty minutes, how he thought (had previously thought) magic worked. When he’d ground to a halt, the Countess looked at him for a moment, then went on as if he hadn’t said anything.
‘Magic,’ she said, ‘falls into two distinct categories. There is practical magic, and effective magic. So far, you’ve experienced a little practical magic. I’m concerned almost entirely with the other kind.’
Pause. Paul knew better now than to give in to the urge to fill these silences with inane chatter.
‘Practical magic,’ the Countess said, ‘is magic that does something. It cleans a dirty cup, for example, or shifts a mountain a metre to the left. Effective magic, by contrast, creates an effect. It makes you believe something that may not be true – like, for instance, a love potion. You’ll shortly come to learn that a great deal of magic which you believe is practical is in fact effective, for the simple reason that it’s often easier and cheaper to make someone believe something is true than actually to make it so; and we are, after all, in business to earn a living. Are you with me so far?’
To his surprise, he was. He nodded.
‘I’ll give you an example,’ she went on. ‘Imagine, if you will, a young and immature magical practitioner, who gets drunk and meets a policeman in the street. The policeman is about to arrest him, so he forces the policeman to eat his own truncheon. Would that be,’ she asked, vulture-eyed, ‘practical or effective magic?’
Practical, of course, since it was making someone do something. It was so obvious it had to be a trick question. ‘Effective,’ he said.
‘Very good. Why?’
Paul looked at her. ‘Don’t know,’ he confessed.
‘Clearly,’ the Countess said. ‘Effective, because the young magician, untutored and untrained, will not have mastered the exceptionally difficult and abstruse skills required to practice telekinesis on human nerves and muscle. It’d be very difficult. I could do it.’ Yes, Paul thought, I bet you could . ‘But I would find it difficult, and the effort involved would be out of all proportion to the benefits to be gained. Instead, the young magician would simply persuade the policeman that what he most wanted to do in all the world at that exact moment was take his truncheon and bite it as hard as he possibly could, until his teeth started to snap off. And that,’ she added casually, ‘is very easy. So easy, in fact, that humans with no talent whatsoever can sometimes be trained to do it. You’ve heard,’ she said, ‘of hypnotism.’
‘Yes.’
She dipped her head, as though acknowledging that he wasn’t completely stupid. ‘And of course you’ve heard of love.’
For a moment Paul assumed that she’d used a technical term taken from a foreign language. ‘Did you say love?’ he asked.
‘That’s right. Love is effective magic; but it’s so commonplace that nobody notices.’
‘Oh,’ Paul said. He thought for a moment. ‘Really magic, or just – well, song-lyric magic?’
‘Really magic,’ Countess Judy said. ‘Effective magic. Or, if you prefer, an optical illusion. Trompe l’æil.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘A French term,’ she explained patiently, ‘for a style of painting that tricks the eye into mistaking something false for something real. Love,’ she went on, ‘is much the same sort of thing; trompe le coeur, if you’d rather.’ She smiled thinly at her own joke, which slipped past Paul like a cheetah in a hurry. ‘You may care to think about it,’ she said. ‘Love is an optical illusion that makes you believe that the object of your affection is the most beautiful person in the world. You believe this; although you also know that it’s not true, because if you look at your girlfriend and then leaf through either the latest edition of Vogue or, depending on your personal standards, a Pirelli calendar, you’ll quickly see that she isn’t; there are more perfect lips than hers, more flawless complexions, more limpid eyes—’ She paused. ‘And, of course, bigger boobs. But your belief overrides the truth, and you see what you’re determined to see. And that’s magic. Effective magic.’
‘Right,’ Paul said after a moment or so. ‘But everybody can do it.’
‘Quite so. It’s built into the human mechanism, because it’s necessary. Essential, for the survival of the species. Humans have got to love, Mr Carpenter, or they’d be extinct in no time. Think about it. Human young have a nine-month gestation period, towards the end of which the female is so grossly distorted that she can barely move; she can’t fend for herself, hunt or gather food. She needs to be provided for. Then follows a period of fifteen years, often longer, during which the child is too immature to be let out on its own. It needs, as well as the bare essentials of nourishment and warmth, the care and attention of two parents. In consequence, a substantial proportion of human life is sacrificed to the thankless task of rearing young. Other animals don’t put up with it; other animals are still only animals, as a result. But the task is thankless; it’s a sentence of hard labour, and humans are intelligent creatures, they know that there are so many other wonderful things they could be doing, if only they weren’t tied to a boring job and a school run and early-morning feeds. If it wasn’t for the magic, nothing would induce them to mate and procreate. But the magic forces them, Mr Carpenter, they’re enchanted, and they can’t see the reality, even though deep down they know it for what it is, a cruel confidence trick that they play on themselves.’ The Countess leaned forward a little. ‘The magic, of course, is beauty. What proverbs do you know about beauty, Mr Carpenter?’
‘Um,’ Paul said. His mind had, of course, gone blank. ‘Beauty and the Beast?’
‘I said proverbs, not animated films.’
He ran his memory through the mangle of concentration. ‘It’s only skin deep,’ he remembered. ‘And it’s in the eye of the beholder.’
‘Correct.’ Her cold grey eyes awarded him two notional marks. ‘It’s the eye of the beholder that creates beauty, because of course it doesn’t really exist. True, there are features that are traditionally considered beautiful; but that’s a misapprehension. Name three of them.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Name three things that make a woman beautiful.’
Oh God, Paul thought. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Um, nice eyes.’
‘And?’
‘Nice, er, skin?’
‘And?’
He could feel his face burning. ‘Well, sort of, a nice figure.’
‘Very good.’ One more mark, for effort. ‘Now, look at me.’
Paul didn’t have much choice in the matter; because Countess Judy changed. Or rather, she didn’t change at all. Her face stayed the same upside-down isosceles triangle, her eyes carried on being grey, her chin was just as sharply pointed. But suddenly he noticed for the first time how incredibly, bewilderingly lovely she was.
‘I said look at me, Mr Carpenter, I didn’t say salivate. Am I beautiful?’
Oh God. Oh God. ‘Yes,’ Paul squeaked.
‘Thank you. Why?’
‘What?’
She sighed. ‘Please explain to me,’ she said, ‘why I’m beautiful.’
‘I—’ He had no idea. ‘I don’t know,’ he said.
‘Really.’ She nodded again. ‘Well, let’s consider the three aspects we identified earlier. If you’d care to refresh my memory?’
Judy di Castel’Bianco was incredibly lovely, but also really annoying. ‘Nice eyes,’ Paul said.
‘Nice eyes,’ she repeated; and her eyes glowed like moonlight shining through mist. ‘Like this?’
‘Yes,’ Paul croaked.
> ‘Next.’
‘Nice skin,’ he said; and for a moment it was all he could do to stop himself reaching out and touching, because her skin was so very soft—
‘Very well. And the third aspect was—?’
‘Nice figure,’ said Paul, in a very small voice.
He tried very hard not to look. He succeeded for at least a sixtieth of a second.
‘Fine.’ It was as though the Countess had vanished and been replaced by a plain middle-aged woman who looked exactly like her. ‘Now, let’s see. The eyes were nice because they were—?’
‘Huge,’ Paul said dreamily, in spite of himself. ‘And shining.’
‘And the skin?’
‘Soft and smooth.’
‘And the figure?’
‘Sort of round and curvy and, um—’
‘Big.’
‘Yes,’ Paul admitted, his flesh crawling. ‘Big.’
‘I see,’ she said. ‘Like this.’
For a moment, Paul thought he was looking at a goblin. Countess Judy’s eyes were like fried eggs, and they were glowing with a creepy, Borg-like light. Her skin clung to her like cold, lumpy custard in a plastic bag. As for the rest of her – boiled down and refined into lamp oil, she’d have lit a large city for a week.
‘I haven’t changed, Mr Carpenter,’ she said; and suddenly she was back to how she’d been when he first walked into the room. ‘Do you understand what happened?’
Paul couldn’t speak, but his neck still worked. He shook his head.
‘The technical term,’ she said, ‘is glamour. Glamour is, if you like, an information virus; it affects the part of your brain that interprets the signal it receives from your eyes – and also,’ she added, in the sexiest voice he’d ever heard, ‘your ears, and the rest of your basic senses. The same data comes in, but your brain processes it differently. That’s all. Instead of decoding the numbers in base ten, it reads them as base eight, or base twelve. Because it’s so simple, it’s exceptionally effective; even a trained professional who knows what to expect and who’s had time to prepare has extreme difficulty resisting it. To the unsuspecting layman – well.’ She smiled bleakly. ‘You will appreciate,’ she said, ‘the industrial implications.’
Paul looked up, as though she’d suddenly started talking in Sanskrit. ‘The what?’
‘Multibillion-dollar business,’ she said. ‘The sale and purchase of human beauty. The process whereby a commonplace forty-year-old woman with limited intelligence, few talents and a debilitating alcohol- and substance-abuse problem can be passionately adored by millions of men – and women – who’ve never even met her, and never will. It’s glamour, Mr Carpenter, that makes movie stars and pop idols, supermodels and media personalities; women and men who you’d pass in the street without even noticing them, because they look like this – ’ she leaned two degrees forward. ‘ – but whose faces and bodies are insured for more than the value of an oil tanker because they look like this.’ She leaned back again, and Paul only just managed to stop himself crying out for pure love, because she was so beautiful, and so obviously the only girl in the world for him . . .
‘As you were, Mr Carpenter,’ she said; and he was looking at the normal Countess Judy – instinctively he’d thought of her as the real one, but that, he realised, was a totally unwarranted assumption. ‘Now, I trust, you understand. Why famous men and women, multinational corporations, even governments, are willing to pay very large sums of money for what we have to sell. Well?’
Paul nodded.
The Countess studied him for a moment; apparently he was satisfactory. ‘And that,’ she went on, ‘is just one small part of the science of effective magic. Put another way: if effective magic was mathematics, what you’ve just witnessed is learning how to do percentages. Easy, and trivial.’ She looked away. ‘For me, at any rate. For you, however—’
‘Yes?’
She looked back at him. ‘Impossible,’ she said. ‘Unless, of course, you have the aptitude.’
‘Oh.’
‘But.’ It was like trying to play tennis blindfold. ‘I have reason to believe that you may not be entirely devoid of that. The incident with the policeman, for example.’
‘Oh,’ Paul said. ‘That.’
‘Quite,’ she said. ‘Clearly, when you did that, you were making use of a latent natural ability. It seems most likely, for the reasons I mentioned, that you were using effective magic. It’s remotely possible, however, that you have a latent but extremely powerful natural talent for practical magic, and that you made the policeman eat his truncheon by exercising telekinetic control over his basic motor functions. What I have to do now,’ Countess Judy said, ‘is find out which it was.’
‘Oh,’ Paul said. ‘Um, right. Will it hurt?’
The look in her eyes was so deep, so far away, so remote that for a moment he was scared. ‘Mr Carpenter,’ she eventually said, ‘a truth that few people appreciate is that, at the root, everything hurts.’ She folded her hands on the desk in front of her. ‘There is only one way that a human like yourself could be able to do effective magic,’ she said. ‘It’s a matter of blood.’
Paul didn’t like the sound of that one teeny little bit. ‘Um,’ he said.
‘Not like that,’ she said impatiently. ‘If you prefer, it’s a matter of descent. Lineage. Ancestry. You see, effective magic – deliberate effective magic, which can be controlled and used – is a monopoly of my people, the Fey. And we,’ she added, rather superfluously, ‘aren’t human.’
‘Ah,’ Paul said.
‘But,’ the Countess went on, ‘from time to time, we have crossed humans with our kind, and bred specimens who have some of our abilities. It’s possible that you are descended from just such a hybrid; in which case, you may have the knack.’ She opened a desk drawer and took out a blank sheet of A4 and a Biro. ‘Write down the names and dates of birth of the last twelve generations of your family.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Your family tree,’ Countess Judy explained, saying the words loudly and clearly, as though he was a foreigner or something. ‘Write it out for me, please.’
‘But—’ He shrugged. ‘I can do as far back as my grandparents,’ he said. ‘Not dates of birth, though, because I’m rubbish at remembering birthdays. Apart from them—’
Her eyes scoured his face like sandpaper. ‘I see,’ she said. ‘That’s rather inconvenient, but it’s all right, I can find out for myself. Until then—’ She shrugged. ‘I suggest you go back to your office and find something to occupy your time until I send for you. Good afternoon.’
Before he realised that he was doing it, Paul had stood up and started towards the door. He stopped himself. It took a distinct effort. ‘Er,’ he said.
She looked up, faintly surprised that he was still in the room. ‘Well?’
Deep breath, not that it ever seemed to help. ‘Can I, um, ask you something?’
‘Of course.’ Straight off, no hesitation. ‘What’s on your mind?’
‘Goblins,’ he said. ‘When they change shape, is that effective magic? Only you said—’
She shook her head. ‘Practical,’ she said. ‘Their bodies dissolve for a split second into their component molecules, and then recombine in the required shape. It’s horrendously difficult, but they can do it by light of nature. Of course, they have no idea how they do it.’
‘I see,’ Paul said, thinking about Mr Tanner’s mum. ‘Well, that was all, thanks. I’d better—’
‘Good afternoon.’
The door slammed in his face. It was three whole seconds before he remembered that it’d been him who’d closed it.
Find something to occupy your time, Countess Judy had said. As Paul traipsed through the tortuous corridors towards his office, he tried to think of something he could do for two and a half hours, until it was legal to go home. The only thing that came to mind was the office-procedures manual; perhaps it had a section on glamour and beauty and all that stuff the Countess had been w
affling on about.
Waffling . . . While he’d been in there with her, of course, it had all made perfect sense. Once he was away from those piercing grey eyes, however, he had real problems remembering what had been so convincing about it all. There’d been some rather lame biology, some stuff about movie stars; but it was slipping away fast, like those wonderful ideas for new inventions that you get in dreams, ideas which evaporate ten seconds after you wake up.
There was indeed a section in the procedures manual; in fact, there were six chapters about effective magic, four pages of one of which he was able to read before his eyes refused to stay open any longer. He leaned back a little in his chair; at some point, he felt the book slip from his fingers, and heard it go thump on the floor. No matter; he’d pick it up in a moment—
Paul was, he realised, back at school, in the playground at Laburnum Grove primary. It took him a moment to remember that this was, of course, where he was supposed to be, given that he was only eight years old. Then something cracked across his knuckles, and he looked up. He and Melze were playing conkers.
‘Ow,’ he complained. ‘That was my hand.’
She glared at him. ‘Keep still,’ she said. ‘We can’t play if you don’t keep still.’
‘All right,’ he replied grumpily. ‘But watch what you’re doing.’
‘Wimp,’ she said, squinting carefully down the line of the string. ‘Three, two, one, and—’ His conker shattered into half a dozen chunks, leaving one small yellow nugget dangling sadly from the string. ‘I win!’ Melze yelled, holding her hands high in the air. ‘Beat you,’ she added, just in case there was any lingering ambiguity.
‘Cheater,’ Paul muttered. ‘I know what you did. You soaked it in superglue – that’s why it’s so hard.’
‘Did not,’ she replied blandly. ‘Go on, say it. You promised you’d say it if you won.’
‘No,’ he growled. ‘It wasn’t fair, you cheated.’
