Phyllis Wong and the Waking of the Wizard

by Geoffrey McSkimming

  ‘It’s . . . a plaque,’ she said, holding up a large piece of flat bronze.

  ‘Ah!’ Harvey sat up, and Daisy slid off his legs onto the sofa.

  ‘Arf!’ barked the terrier.

  ‘So that’s where it’s been all these years,’ Harvey said.

  ‘What’s it for?’ Phyllis asked, feeling the cold heaviness of the bronze in her hands and admiring the fine, Art Deco lettering sculpted onto it.

  ‘Well, when your great-grandfather had this place built—the whole building, I mean—he’d intended to name it. The story goes that he took ages to make up his mind what to christen the building, and he finally decided on a name, just before he went off to perform that engagement in Venezuela in 1936, when he disappeared.’

  Harvey looked down at the bronze plaque. ‘It seems Wallace Wong got as far as having this made, but he never had it fixed to the outside of the building. This must’ve arrived after his disappearance, and someone must’ve just put it down here with all his other stuff.’

  Harvey watched his daughter as she ran her fingers across the raised letters. Daisy poked her snout down and sniffed the plaque’s edges.

  ‘Myrddin,’ Phyllis read aloud. ‘He was going to call the Wallace Wong Building Myrddin.’

  Harvey smiled. ‘Myrddin,’ he repeated curiously. ‘It seems the past comes a little more alive.’

  ‘It sure does,’ beamed Phyllis. ‘Oh, you’ve got no idea, Dad.’

  Harvey raised an eyebrow at her, but she just gave him her inscrutable smile and said nothing.

  ‘Myrddin,’ Harvey said again. ‘I wonder why he chose that name?’

  ‘I wonder,’ Phyllis said.

  She smiled, looking forward to being able to tell Wallace Wong all about her discovery, the next time—whenever that would be—that she’d meet up with him on a flight of stairs somewhere in the wide, wondrous world through which they wandered in their own magical way.

  Endword

  Much of what we know about Myrddin comes from several sources, as Wallace Wong explains to Phyllis early on in this story. Amongst them, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, written in the twelfth century; Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, penned in the fifteenth century; and Robert de Boron’s poem Merlin, probably from the early thirteenth century, all present different versions of the wizard. The illustration of Myrddin being helped by a giant to build Stonehenge is from a twelfth-century manuscript of a history of Britain by the poet Wace, which is kept in the British Library.

  Nearly all of the magic that Phyllis performs in this story has at one time or another been performed for me by my favourite magician. Indeed, the feather trick Phyllis performs for Myrddin in his belvedere was invented by this prestidigitator, and I’ve dedicated this tale to her. She has generously helped me with many of the technical details regarding the tricks and illusions that Phyllis uses, without giving away any secrets behind the magic.

  As Phyllis discovers, the Standing Stones at Callanish in Scotland is very much a magical place. I was lucky that whenever I visited the stones the site was deserted and I was able to wander in their midst undisturbed. The pool of water is there, as Phyllis, Daisy and Clement find it, and it is of the darkest, deepest colour. If ever you can get to Callanish, breathe in the stillness and the mystery. I hope you will find the ancient place as timeless as I do.

  Finally, readers may be relieved to know that, to my knowledge, a ventriloquist the likes of Alexander Sturdy has never lived, let alone practised the fine and noble art of ventriloquism. (Having said that, I admit that the world is a very big place, and Times converge across it constantly and fleetingly—and so my knowledge of such things is incomplete . . .)

  Go carefully up any stairs you come across, and remember: we all need mysteries in our lives, no matter who we are.

  G. McS.

  Sydney and Cawdor

  The author

  Find out more about Phyllis Wong at

  phylliswong.com