An Affair of Sorcerers

by George C. Chesbro

  There was no answer, and Garth started to reach out toward her. Madeline tensed and straightened to show us that the barrel of the gun was turned inward, pressed against her stomach. Garth slowly sank back down on his haunches.

  “That’s a .38 Police Special, Dr. Jones,” Garth continued in the same quiet, even voice. “If you shoot yourself like that, you’re going to put a big hole in yourself. But you may not die right away. Don’t do it; don’t gut-shoot yourself. You’ll suffer terrible pain, and there’ll be nothing we can do to help you.”

  “Please, let’s go, Dr. Jones,” April said. “Come back with us. This is a bad place. I feel it; you feel it.”

  Madeline looked at April for a long time. “It’s the right place, April,” she said at last.

  “Talk to us, Mad,” I said. “Get it out of your system.”

  “You talk,” she replied in a dark, stranger’s voice.

  “Can we go someplace out of the rain? We’re cold.”

  Madeline shook her head and seemed to tighten her grip on the gun.

  “I’ll talk, Mad,” I continued quickly. “I think you want me to.” I took a deep breath, wiped the water off my face and formed a shield over my eyes with my left hand. “You saved my life last night—for the second time. The first time was when I was floating in Smather’s fish tank. You also saved Kathy’s life—after you found out what had been done to her.”

  “I don’t understand, Robert,” April said in a shuddering tremolo. “If Dr. Jones is Esobus, wouldn’t she have known everything the coven was doing from the time they planned to do it?”

  “Knowing Mad as I do, I don’t think so,” I replied to April, at the same time watching Madeline carefully—very conscious of the gun in her hands. “In fact, I think that, of all the members of the coven, Madeline—or Esobus—knew the least like I said, she is a busy woman, traveling all over the world in her role as a leading researcher in cosmology. I think Mad began this coven business as some kind of experiment. One day she discovered it had all gotten out of hand, but she didn’t know what to do about it. Am I right, Mad?”

  Madeline said nothing; instead, she raised her face to the sky—as though she were looking or listening for something. She made no sound, and the rest of her body didn’t move; with all the water on her, it was impossible to tell for certain, but I was sure she was crying.

  “You see,” I continued, “Esobus’ image was an all-powerful, mystical and supersecretive inspiration. But Esobus was a leader only in name, not a person the other coven members could sit down and plan things with. The coven meetings Esobus attended probably consisted almost entirely of ritual—there was no practical business discussed. Besides, Esobus was a fraud—not a ceremonial magician at all. But only Madeline and Smathers knew that.”

  A giant chill squeezed me in its icy hand and shook me. April held me tightly until it had passed.

  “In Mad’s mind, she was probably conducting an experiment in witchcraft that would finally reveal some kind of truth about the occult to a very suspicious scientific community,” I continued, forcing the blurred words out through stiff lips that felt paralyzed. “These were the same people who’d laughed at her because of her ideas about astrology. Madeline’s obsessed with the occult; in setting this whole thing in motion, she saw herself as a kind of pioneer. She’s been looking for the lost Atlantis of the mind, if you will, but she found that she couldn’t control it. Maybe she couldn’t even decide if she should control it, considering the fact that it was an experiment; for a little while, she may have had trouble deciding whether to remain an aloof scientific observer, or intervene. Fortunately for Kathy and me, the human being in her won out over the dispassionate scientist. But right up until this morning, she was still trying to hedge her bets and get out of this whole.”

  The wind was rising again, as if the storm had regrouped its forces and was returning for another major assault.

  “I’m so sorry,” Madeline whispered softly. Incredibly, her voice could be heard clearly in the rising cacophony, as though her words had slipped through cracks in the wall of wind. “So sorry.”

  “A big question,” I said, raising my voice in order to be heard. “I doubt that you were originally interested in witchcraft. What’s the connection between you and Smathers? How did you find out that Smathers was a ceremonial magician, and how did you get him to set up the coven for you?”

  “He was my … lover,” Madeline said in a voice that was suddenly strangled. “I was his mistress for months before I found out about … the other things. Then I became intrigued with the question of what would happen if a coven of ceremonial magicians was formed—and with the problem of how I could become a part of it. Vincent was … amused by the idea; we planned the Esobus thing together. You’ve guessed the rest Vincent took care of all the planning. I really didn’t know about …” Her voice trailed off.

  “Smathers was a madman,” I said, making no attempt to hide the disgust I felt. “And he was a pervert. How could you ever get involved with a man like that?”

  “Powerful,” Mad said distantly, her voice still mysteriously overriding the wind. “Vincent was … so strange and powerful. You wouldn’t understand, Mongo.”

  But I thought I did. The darkness beyond the light of science, the void of night that Mad had been trying to explore, had finally swallowed her up.

  Madeline slowly rose to her feet, and we rose with her. For a moment I thought—hoped—that it was finished, that a catharsis had been achieved and Madeline was ready to give up the gun and come with us. It was a false hope. She still held the gun in a reverse position, its barrel pressed even more tightly into her stomach, one thumb resting against the trigger. Again she raised her face to the sky and cocked her head, as though listening to voices in the storm that only she could hear.

  “I’ve seen a lot of things in the past few weeks, Mad,” I said quickly, driven by a sudden, terrible need to fill the space between us with words, as if I could filibuster away the dreaded sound of a gunshot muffled by Madeline’s flesh. “Maybe most of the things I’ve witnessed are beyond scientific measurement. People like you and Krowl have strange talents, and most of us don’t know how to deal with them. But some of these things bite if you don’t handle them correctly, and you finally came to realize that. As much as you kept telling yourself you were simply being a scientist by keeping a foot in both camps, you wanted out; you wanted to be saved from the coven you’d created. You had a nervous breakdown because of your guilt—right after you’d made the recording that saved Kathy’s life. My God, you’ve been dropping clues on me all along with those references to the Wizard of Oz. You once told me you were interested in the pursuit of knowledge, not personal power; it started to come together for me when I saw that sign in Esobus’ cubicle. But you were never willing to come all the way out. You kept hoping right up to the end that you could run around putting Band-Aids on something that had to be amputated.”

  “Shut up, Mongo,” Garth snapped. “You’re being too hard on her. She’s also helped a lot of people.”

  Madeline shuddered with cold, slowly shook her head. “No. Let Mongo finish. He knows I … need to hear it all.”

  The catharsis would come, I thought, and felt immense relief. That was what Mad seemed to be telling me: say it all, get it out in the open, and she would come back with us.

  “You ran back to the cubicle in the factory building because you had to retrieve the tape you’d put on to cover your movement to the other end of the catwalk.” I smiled tentatively and tried to establish eye contact, but Mad’s gaze kept slipping away. I considered trying to knock the gun away, but rejected the idea. I couldn’t assume that risk. “You took the tape off and threw it away somewhere into the darkness. A fleeing man might have stuck a knife into you, but it’s highly unlikely he’d take the time—or be accurate enough—to carve a perfect cross on your forehead. No, Mad. The cross is your own, self-inflicted, mark of Cain: disfigurement as a form of expiation. It isn’
t enough, Mad; it’s dues time for the Wizard of Oz.”

  “I couldn’t live with it any longer, Mongo,” Mad said evenly.

  “I know. Now you don’t have to. And Garth will tell you there are extenuating circumstances. You’ve saved lives.”

  I began to seriously doubt the old chestnut about a man’s entire past flashing before his eyes at the moment of sudden, violent death. Or perhaps I wasn’t really dying, because it wasn’t that way at all. Quite the opposite. I was seeing things that had not yet happened, as though the thunderous explosion had blown my own book of shadows open to pages that had not yet been written.

  Now Mad looked at me directly. She smiled as she said something, but she had lost control of the wind, and her words were lost. I watched her lips and thought she said, “Thank you,” or “I love you”; or it may have been simply “Goodbye, Mongo.”

  Garth was with April, Kathy and me at the zoo, laughing at the orangutan. Ironically, Garth—the biggest and strongest—seemed to be the only one who had sustained a lasting injury. He was hobbling around with his right foot and ankle in a walking cast.

  Madeline suddenly stiffened, as though an invisible metal rod had risen from the ground and skewered her. She flipped the gun around so that it was facing away from her, then raised both arms above her head. She slid up on the skewer, balancing on her toes, extending her arms even higher, bowing her head until her chin rested on her chest.

  Now the camera began to grind in ultra-slow motion. Madeline’s body had become a ramrod-straight, steel-tipped spear thrusting itself up into the air. She was offering herself, and I knew she was going to be taken.

  My brother knew too. Garth and I leaped as one toward April.

  But we were moving so slowly, divers straining every muscle to trudge along the bottom of the sea.

  April and I had finished making love while Kathy napped. We lay in each other’s arms, watching snow gather on evergreens outside some mountain lodge. It struck me that months had passed, and we were still together.

  I desperately hoped it was more than death’s anesthetic dream.

  Straining, but still moving in slow motion. Garth grabbed one of April’s arms; I grabbed the other, and we dived.

  There was an exquisite sensation of floating, totally out of control and thus free of the terrible responsibility of thinking and making decisions. There was nothing to do but ride.

  As I slowly flipped over in the air, I saw the bolt of lightning poke its sharp head from its black home. It seemed to hesitate, looking around. Finally it saw Madeline and began to drift lazily down a jagged route toward the gun in her hand.

  I wanted to shout a warning to my friend, tell her to throw the gun to one side and float with us away from the lightning. There was time; everything was happening so unbelievably slowly. But when I tried to yell, my voice was no more than a deep rumble, like sounds from a record being played at very slow speed. I could see the words come out of my mouth, explode and stick to my face.

  Beyond my horror was a childlike fascination with how pretty everything was—the way the lightning passed through the air, firing the surrounding molecules into a lovely, shimmering white glow. The smell of ozone was pleasant in my nostrils, something like burning leaves on a cold fall afternoon.

  But I was losing sight of the spectacle as I rotated in the air. Garth and I bumped into each other, then drifted apart again as we both tried to protect April with our bodies.

  I was actually auditioning for an orchestra—but not the New Jersey Symphony. Too bad. It was a pickup group of extremely talented Juilliard students interested in playing modern music. There was plenty of Boulez and Messiaen, but no Tchaikovsky. The incredibly complex rhythms were driving me crazy, but I was having a perfectly marvelous time. April was sitting in the first row of the auditorium, smiling broadly at me while Kathy excitedly pounded her mother’s thigh.

  Garth was in the back of the auditorium, grudgingly—very grudgingly—nodding his appreciation.

  At least, the bone-cracking, wet cold was gone. It had been supplanted by a sharp, tingling sensation that hurt my joints, but had an overall warming, liquid feel. The electricity coursing through my body was oddly invigorating, and made me feel as though I could run for hours without getting tired.

  If only I could stop floating and get my feet on the ground.

  I’d lost sight of Mad during one half turn. Now, as I came out of a slow spin, I could see that the lightning had completed its journey to the barrel of the gun. Mad was softly aglow, like a fluorescent bulb; she would have been beautiful, except for the way the electricity made her hair stand out from her head, each individual strand vibrating like a sliver-thin tuning fork.

  Then Madeline began to burn, and I didn’t want to look anymore. I didn’t want to remember her that way.

  I closed my eyes. Holding tight to both April and Garth, I let myself float away into the velvet darkness behind my eyes.

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Mongo Series

  1.

  An August Sunday, so hot you couldn’t tell sweat from tears. It was an expensive funeral, costing more than I suspected my sister and her husband could easily afford, in a bargain basement family plot inside a rummage sale cemetery. Somebody had sold my sister the Deluxe Package, silk-lined mahogany casket and an acre or two of flowers that served only to magnify the decrepitude of the small village cemetery. The rusting back-hoe that had dug and would refill the grave was visible a hundred yards away, parked beside a rotting maintenance shack. The backhoe’s unshaven operator was sitting in its cab, chewing the stub of yesterday’s cigar and reading last month’s magazine.

  “Amen,” the young, fresh-faced minister intoned as he finished a prayer. He sprinkled a handful of dirt over the lowered casket, wiped his hands.

  “Shit,” Garth murmured. We were standing a few yards apart from the rest of the family—our mother and father, Janet and her husband, assorted cousins, nieces and nephews, uncles and aunts. There were a lot of Fredericksons in Peru County, Nebraska.

  “Yeah.”

  “How are you holding up?”

  The sun was directly behind my brother’s hand, forming a shimmering penumbra around thinning, wheat-colored hair that waved like a shredded, sad banner in the gentle, hot breeze that blew through this wasteland of weeds and pitted grave markers. “Why ask me? Tommy was your nephew, too.”

  “You know what I mean. We’ve been here two days now, and I thought you might be feeling the effects.”

  “I’m all right.”

  It wasn’t true. Although I loved my parents dearly, wrote regularly, and had, over the years, managed to coax members of my immediate family into visiting me in New York City, home for me represented nothing so much as a long nightmare that had taken a lot of time and shrink money to kick into submission. I hadn’t been back to Peru County in seventeen years, and the fragility of the scars remaining on my psyche amazed me. I felt porous, like something filled with stale air that was compacting under pressure of memory so fierce it was threatening to squeeze away and pop my center. Only something like the death of a favorite nephew could have brought me back to Peru. I knew it was a silly and unbecoming way to feel in the face of the awesome peace Tommy Dernhelm had found, but people preoccupied with questions of self-worth are easily smothered by the trivial. The me that had been constructed and nurtured far from this place was gasping for breath, desperate for escape.

  It was finished. We all gathered around Janet and stood in silence for a few moments, as though sheer numbers were a poultice that could absorb some of her pain. Then we started slowly back along the dusty path leading out of the cemetery. Unconsciously, like a marionette still controlled by rotten strings implanted in its soft center a long time ago, I found myself walking apart from the other members of the family, as if I were something disgusting that could only add to the shame surrounding Tommy’s death. Garth, as he had always done, walked with me.

  Growing up a dwarf is a rea
l pain in the mind; you’re always a foot or two, and a lot of poundage, behind the inevitable tormenters. Also, in fairness to the fun group that had tossed me around like a medicine ball in an alley behind the local movie theater one night, I wasn’t exactly the mellowest kid in the neighborhood; I’d never suffered anybody, much less loudmouthed fools, gladly. My brain had always been quick enough, and I’d been able to out-insult any gang of ten in the school. The problem, as I’d quickly learned, was that a sharp tongue was no defense against a punch in the mouth. The fact that Garth always thumped on the people who thumped on me wasn’t enough. I hadn’t needed an avatar so much as I’d needed to find my own means of self-defense and feelings of self-worth in a world of bigger things and bigger people where I’d always felt in imminent danger of being crushed, physically and spiritually.

  The love of my family, combined with Garth’s muscle, had carried me through childhood and adolescence; I’d known that I was going to have to make it as a whole, if undersized, adult on my own.

  I’d escaped from Peru County by means of an academic scholarship to New York University. In New York, a state of mind as well as a geographical location where just about all things great and small would be considered freaky by Peru County standards, I’d immediately felt at home, and had begun to escape from the terrible, debilitating preoccupation with my dwarfism. I’d majored in criminology, probably out of a perverse fascination with freaks of a different dimension, graduated with honors, an invitation to graduate school, and the offer of a post as a research assistant.

  I’d succeeded in school—but then, I’d always succeeded in school. I had other, more pressing, hungers—other things to prove. Nature, in her infinite irony, had made me a dwarf, but with maturation I discovered that I had also been endowed with considerable, if improbable, physical skills—excellent reflexes, coordination, and speed. Being a somewhat unusual dwarf—a redundancy, if ever there was one—in need of a means of livelihood, I pursued the only logical course of action: I joined the circus, in this case one owned by a gentleman named Phil Statler—the ugliest and kindest human being I’ve ever known.