Phyllis Wong and the Waking of the Wizard

by Geoffrey McSkimming

  ‘Ah, she’s got no taste. Never mind, I have to walk Daisy anyway.’

  ‘Give the Deebs a pat for me,’ said Clement. ‘See you tomorrow, okay?’ He turned and was already dawdling off when Phyllis called out goodbye to him.

  He waved his pince-nez over his shoulder at her.

  She waited, watching till he’d gone around the corner, and thinking about what he’d said. She was just about to turn and head up the stairs when someone shouted out to her from across the street.

  ‘Hey! Where’s your mother, Phyllis?’

  She looked around in time to see a big silver car moving off into the traffic. Behind one of the rear windows, as it was sliding up, she saw the unwelcome silhouette of Leizel Cunbrus.

  Mrs Zepple is astonished

  The Wallace Wong Building had been built in 1932 by Phyllis’s great-grandfather, when he was one of the most brilliant conjurors the world had ever seen.

  Way back then, really successful magicians could earn enough money out of a single stage performance to buy a new house. That was in the days before movies became big. The money Wallace Wong earned before he disappeared had enabled him to have this wonderful building designed and built to his fancies, and it had remained virtually untouched (though Phyllis’s grandfather and now her father, who owned the building, kept it restored to its original glory). It was still one of the most beautiful examples of the bold Art Deco style of buildings anywhere in the world.

  Phyllis loved living here. She and her dad and Daisy lived in an oversized penthouse apartment that took up the entire top floor. It had six bedrooms, a large entrance foyer, a spacious sitting room with a fireplace, a dining room that could seat twelve people (not that twelve people ever came for a meal), a state-of-the-art kitchen and—one of the things Phyllis liked the most—a private cinema, fully equipped for showing movies. The cinema was still in the original Art Deco style, with a high, domed ceiling that sparkled with electric stars when the house lights went down. It was the perfect place for Phyllis and her dad and Daisy to watch the movies that Wallace Wong had appeared in. (For Wallace Wong had been a clever man: he had seen the change that was happening to magic performances with the onslaught of the movies, and so he’d headed out to Hollywood to try his hand ‘in the pictures’. Had he not disappeared so mysteriously, he may have become a huge movie star.)

  The floor below Phyllis’s home and above the street-level shops was occupied by long-term tenants whom Phyllis and Daisy knew well: Chief Inspector Barry Inglis—an officer with the Fine Arts and Antiques Squad of the Metropolitan Police Force, and, in an apartment across the hallway from his, Minette Bulbolos, a professional belly dancer and singer.

  Below Lowerblast’s Antiques & Collectables Emporium and The Délicieux Café, under the street level and accessed by a special key which fitted the building’s old, shuddering elevator—a key which only Phyllis and her father Harvey had—was the basement. This was Phyllis’s private domain, a vast, cave-like place where all of Wallace Wong’s original props, tricks, costumes, scenery, mechanical marvels and everything else from the old days of magic were stored. All of these wonderful items now belonged to Phyllis.

  The basement was a place Phyllis used for rehearsals, and a place she retreated to when she needed to think or work things out.

  It was a place where bigger magic often began . . .

  Lately, Phyllis’s dad Harvey had been away a lot on business, and so he had hired a live-in housekeeper. Mrs Patsy Zepple was a big, enthusiastic, pink-cheeked woman with large eyes who wore her thick red hair piled high in a tight beehive style. She always had time to listen to Phyllis, and she didn’t mind indulging Phyllis’s love for chocolate. The only time Mrs Zepple wasn’t a hundred per cent enthusiastic about things was when Phyllis caught her off-guard with a magic trick. Mrs Zepple was one of those people who felt a bit squirmacious when it came to magic.

  ‘Och, our wanderers have returned,’ she greeted Phyllis and Daisy as they came back into the kitchen after their walk. The air was sweet with the aroma of a banana cake baking.

  ‘Hi, Mrs Z.’ Phyllis took off her gloves, unwound her scarf and plonked herself down on one of the kitchen chairs.

  ‘Pleasant walk?’

  ‘Pleasant enough.’

  ‘I think it’s turning a wee bit chilly out there,’ Mrs Zepple commented, looking out the windows at the grey clouds moving slowly across the sky above the nearby skyscrapers.

  Daisy trotted over to the oven and sat in front of it, sniffing. The little brown-and-white dog loved it when cakes were being baked, when there was the promise of crumbs that might fall on the floor.

  Phyllis put her elbows on the table and cupped her chin in her hands. She stared out the window at the darkening skyline.

  Mrs Zepple noticed that the young conjuror was a bit quiet. Usually, if a cake was baking, Phyllis was interested in what it was.

  The housekeeper went to the fridge and took out a big jug of freshly squeezed lemonade. She set it in front of Phyllis, along with two glasses. Then she sat and poured the lemonade. ‘Everything okay in your world, lassie?’

  ‘Fine, thanks.’

  Mrs Zepple pushed one of the glasses towards Phyllis. ‘You sure?’

  ‘I’m sure,’ she answered distractedly.

  Mrs Zepple thought otherwise. ‘Are you missing your dad, my dear?’

  Phyllis stared at her lemonade. ‘A bit.’

  ‘Och, he’ll be back in a few days. As soon as he ties up that business in Hong Kong. He said it shouldn’t take long.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Daisy, realising that the banana cake wasn’t coming out of the oven any time soon, came over to Phyllis and stood up on her back legs. Insistently she patted Phyllis’s leg with her front paws.

  ‘C’mon, you,’ said Phyllis, letting the little dog jump up onto her lap.

  Daisy turned around three times on Phyllis’s lap, then settled herself into a small furry ball and started grooming herself, licking one of her front paws and then rubbing the paw across her snout.

  ‘Like a wee cat, she is,’ smiled Mrs Zepple.

  Phyllis stroked Daisy’s back. ‘Things aren’t always what they seem,’ she said. ‘We think she grew up with cats.’

  ‘Aye, that’s the thing about rescue dogs,’ Mrs Zepple commented. ‘You can never be sure of their history.’

  Phyllis nodded and kept patting Daisy.

  ‘But then again,’ Mrs Zepple said, ‘you can never be sure of a lot of things when it comes tae history. Things tend tae get forgotten if people don’t mind the facts. Facts are very important things, I think. I’m sure your friend Chief Inspector Inglis would agree with me about that. Why, Phyllis, I’ll tell you something odd. Many people, even when they are told facts, even when the facts are staring them in the face, refuse tae believe them! And it’s so easy for things tae get muddled, or misremembered, or thought of skew-whiff, if facts are brushed under the carpet all the time.’

  Phyllis listened. Sometimes Mrs Zepple went off on strange tangents with her thoughts.

  ‘Aye, facts are important things, and not tae be meddled with.’

  The young conjuror gave a small smile—an inscrutable sort of smile that held the possibility of great secrets, and which also meant she had some magic up her sleeve (or not up her sleeve, in actual fact). ‘But sometimes facts are hard to pin down,’ she said. ‘Look, I’ll show you.’

  She picked up the sugar bowl from the centre of the table. Holding the bowl up, she curled the fingers of her other hand to form a fist, leaving her top fingers more widely apart than her bottom fingers. Then she slowly tipped the sugar bowl towards her fist, pouring the clean white sugar into the little cave made by her curled fingers.

  Mrs Zepple watched this with her big eyes, and squirmed.

  Daisy lifted her snout, watched this with her small, dark brown eyes, and sniffed.

  ‘See?’ Phyllis said. ‘I’m pouring the sugar into my hand. Fact.’

  ‘A
ye,’ said Mrs Zepple. ‘That I cannae deny.’

  The sugar kept pouring out, in a neat and steady flow. Barely a speck fell on the table.

  Mrs Zepple felt her palms getting clammy. Something weird was going on, she just knew it.

  The flow of sugar slowly dwindled, getting smaller and smaller until the bowl was empty. Phyllis put the bowl back on the table and held her fist closer to Mrs Zepple.

  Mrs Zepple watched, wide-eyed.

  ‘Now, my good Mrs Zepple,’ Phyllis said, her voice low. ‘When I utter some of the most powerful words in magic, you will behold a fact disappearing!’ With a shivery voice she proclaimed: ‘Hocus pocus!’ In a flash, she threw her fist into the air, opening it wide. All the sugar had vanished!

  ‘Ergh!’ exclaimed Mrs Zepple, wiping her clammy hands on her apron. She was most unnerved. ‘Well, I’ll be jiggered!’

  Daisy barked three times, loudly.

  ‘That . . . that was most impressive,’ Mrs Zepple said. ‘Very well done.’ She patted her high hairdo, and her eyes swivelled to the empty bowl. ‘Ooh dear me, I suppose I’ll have tae go and buy some more sugar noo . . .’

  Phyllis smiled. ‘Don’t worry. More will come.’ She made a quick fist with her other hand. She held the fist over the bowl and intoned the words: ‘Pocus Hocus!’

  A neat, gushing stream of sugar cascaded out of her fist and back into the bowl!

  ‘Astonishing,’ Mrs Zepple gasped. Phyllis thought she saw her give a little shudder.

  ‘See, Mrs Zepple, in magic, facts are there to be distorted. That’s what we do.’

  The housekeeper shook her head and smiled nervously. ‘Och, you’re a one-off, you are, my dear.’ Phyllis sighed. ‘I think I might go downstairs for a while.’

  ‘Where downstairs?’ asked Mrs Zepple, looking at her watch.

  ‘Just my basement.’

  ‘Hmm. Well, I’ll be serving dinner soon. Baked Scottish salmon tonight, fresh from the fishmonger.’

  Phyllis lifted Daisy out of her lap and stood. ‘I won’t miss it. Thanks for the lemonade.’

  ‘Thanks for the sugar-shifting,’ winked Mrs Zepple.

  Phyllis carried Daisy out of their apartment and to the elevator. She pressed the button and she and her little friend heard the juddering of the old steel and chromium box as it stirred into life in the lobby below. As the elevator rose slowly to her floor, Phyllis heard something else in her mind—Leizel Cunbrus’s parting words . . .

  On the other side of the city, deep underground, a subway platform was crowded with a shuffling, rippling tide of people.

  This was the usual weekday rush-hour pattern. Thousands of people who had been in the city that day were leaving the metropolis, returning to wherever it was they were going to spend their evening. The platform was becoming more and more crowded as more and more people spilled down the stairs and escalators.

  Soon, shoulders were rubbing against shoulders, and people were trying not to tread on each other’s toes as space became tighter and tighter. Glum faces stared straight ahead at the billboard ads that showed young women with dazzling white smiles and eyes that were far brighter and more enthusiastic than the eyes of anyone squashed on the platform.

  Then an announcement came from the loudspeakers: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, due to an earlier incident on the eastern line, trains this evening are delayed by up to thirty minutes. The city rail network apologises for any inconvenience.’

  Some people groaned at the news. Others shook their heads and muttered sharply, but most just took it quietly. This sort of thing was happening all too frequently lately.

  In the midst of the packed throng, one man with a thick thatch of ginger hair and a full beard stood motionless. His broad shoulders seemed to act as a barrier to those around him, and his height—he was a remarkably tall man, almost six-and-a-half feet—enabled him to see over the heads of almost everyone else on the platform. He thrust his wide, strong jaw out and grimaced as he looked at the mouth of the tunnel, trying to see if there was a train coming.

  There was none; the tunnel yawned back at him, dark and empty.

  At the man’s feet, carefully placed between his polished black shoes, sat a large crocodile-skin overnight bag. It was festooned with luggage tags and old-looking hotel labels and colourful stickers from some of the larger shipping lines.

  It was a good thing that the man was so formidable in appearance, for it meant that those around him didn’t come too close, and therefore his overnight bag was in little danger of being bumped or jostled. If that were to happen, the man would have been most displeased.

  People pulled their scarves tighter around their necks as a nippy breeze blew along the tracks. The tall man with the broad shoulders and the thick beard wore no scarf, but he turned up the lapels of the astrakhan collar on his overcoat, so that his collar sat closer to his ears. He hated it when his earlobes got chilly.

  He hated that more than almost anything.

  That, and being surrounded by people.

  His dark eyes sleered to the right, then to the left. He saw that nearly all the people around him were looking at small hand-held devices: cell phones, webPads, musicPods. People scrolling through information. People with their phones clamped to their ears, jabbering away loudly, far too loudly for the man’s liking, especially when everyone was ensconced so jam-packedly in this public location. People organising their humdrum lives; people gossiping about the nothings, the fripperies, the unimportances that took up their time; people watching video clips on their miniature screens, their ears plugged by small plastic buds of white or blue or crimson or purple.

  People wasting everything, the man thought. He shuddered—if only he could find some stairs and get away from this place. But the sort of stairs he needed were nowhere near this station, he already knew that.

  I will, will, will change this, he thought. Not tonight, maybe not tomorrow, but I will change this. When I have the assistance I need, things will be different, different, different, and the world will reel.

  These thoughts rose up in him with the same overwhelming desire he always had whenever he resolved to change things. Whenever he resolved to bring the world to its knees.

  And, as always happened whenever he was consumed with this desire, another urge filled him. It flooded him with a longing he could almost taste.

  He looked straight ahead. He was only a few feet from the front of the platform. There were merely four rows of technology-addicted human beings between him and the edge . . .

  But no. He took a deep breath and swallowed the urge. He had already pushed someone onto the tracks today. It would be too obvious to try it a second time. To repeat the act so soon, even though it had given him so much pleasure, even though it always gave him so much pleasure, would be a foolish thing . . .

  . . . and this formidable man with the ginger hair and beard was anything but a fool.

  A welcome appearance

  The elevator doors opened onto thick, velvety darkness.

  Phyllis carried Daisy out onto the landing of the basement, flicked on the light switch and set her down. Instantaneously, the vast underground place was flooded with brightness.

  Daisy scampered down the stairs and jumped onto her favourite sofa, in a small area Phyllis had cleared in the middle of the enormous jungle of props and tricks that crammed the basement. Phyllis reached into the elevator, removed her special key from the control panel, shut the elevator doors and pressed a button by her elbow, sending the cage back up to the lobby. The only way to gain access to the basement using the elevator was with her special elevator key, or with the duplicate key her father had on his key ring.

  The young prestidigitator went down the stairs and over to join Daisy, who was busily licking her paws in a hurry up and come and settle here with me sort of way. Out of habit, Phyllis picked up her favourite top hat—the one she always wore when she was rehearsing down here—and plonked it on her head, pulling her fringe down under the brim so the hat sa
t right.

  She joined Daisy on the sofa and absentmindedly began rubbing Daisy’s ear, the one that was permanently folded over.

  Usually when Phyllis came down into her basement she started practising a trick or a card move or some new sleight-of-hand she was learning. But not today. This evening, Phyllis didn’t feel like rehearsing or exploring the yet-to-be-discovered props and apparatus and magic books and theatrical wonders of her great-grandfather’s that lay stored down here.

  This evening, Phyllis was thinking about her mother.

  Mostly, Phyllis didn’t think too much about her. It was only occasionally, when something reminded Phyllis that she wasn’t around (like Leizel Cunbrus’s taunting earlier that afternoon), that Phyllis felt the full weight of her mum’s absence. It was as if, when Phyllis wasn’t thinking about her mum, all the longings for her got saved in some hidden place inside Phyllis, and then when something happened to break that place open, they spilled out in a huge torrent, as though a riverbank had burst, and Phyllis was flooded with heaviness.

  Phyllis sat there, patting Daisy. The little terrier could sense that Phyllis was feeling low, and she gave Phyllis’s hand a quick, gentle lick before resuming the grooming of her own paws.

  Everything was still, apart from the patting and Daisy’s tongue darting in and out. The basement felt quiet . . . calm . . . almost timeless . . . and so absorbed was Phyllis in her thoughts, and Daisy in her paw-licking, that they didn’t notice the sudden glow of bright green light emanating from a place near the top of the stairs.

  The light grew more intense, and it swelled, wider and higher, until it formed the shape of a giant, shimmering almond. The edges of this bright, hazy shape wafted tremblingly on the air.

  And then, from the midst of the swirling green vapour, a man stepped out, treading lightly onto the stairs.

  He was a youngish man, about the same age as Phyllis’s dad, and he stood tall and slender. He was dressed in a sleek tail coat of midnight-blue silk with matching trousers, a low-cut white silk waistcoat, a white wing-collared shirt and white bow tie.