Uncanny Tales

by Robert Sheckley

  Ahriman said, “Apparently you didn’t understand the gift. It’s not to be used for yourself. You give it to someone else. The gift to give is to be able to understand, not to be understood.”

  “You didn’t tell me that.”

  “You didn’t ask. You said you knew what to do.”

  “Why did you give it to me in the first place, among all the people you could have given it to? You must have known from the start that I was damaged.”

  “We can only give the parchment to the damaged ones,” he said. “Unfortunately, being damaged, they don’t use it correctly.”

  So that was the end of it. When I woke up in my bedroom, I could find no sign of the parchment, and luckily I had the sense to tell no one about it, until now, in the form of a fictitious story.

  I have never again heard from Ahriman.

  If I had it to do over, I think I’d start changing the minds of dictators. Adjusting their political and social attitudes seems an easier task than trying to solve those of the secrets of a human heart.

  Magic, Maples, and Maryanne

  A story about the two magics in the world—the one called “magic,” which really doesn’t help anyone, and the one called by many names, which is efficacious.

  A few years ago I was working at Sullivan’s department store in Manhattan. In the evenings, I returned to my one-room apartment on New York’s Lower East Side and practiced magic.

  Magic exists. But once you write down your methods, magic stops working. And once you start asking for specific things, instead of taking what magic is willing to give, you are letting yourself in for trouble. I kept my secrets to myself.

  It is not a utilitarian thing, this matter of magic. Once you enter it, you move into realms where things happen in accord with a logic that becomes clear only in retrospect. The elusiveness, the contrariness of magic explains what happened to those magicians of old who produced gold and counted kings among their patrons, rose to power and influence, only to be proven frauds and mountebanks and have everything taken away from them.

  But the best of them weren’t frauds. They had compromised their powers by revealing them to kings and learned men, and by asking for wealth for themselves. They had brought the inscrutable wrath of magic down on their heads.

  I had a sense of the purity of the matter, but I wasn’t completely convinced of it. That’s how I got the Donna Karan jackets.

  My job at Sullivan’s was to take yesterday’s old stuff off the racks and display dummies and put out the new stuff. My researches in magic were going well for me at that time. I had discovered the principle of the temenos, the importance of creating a sacred space. I learned for myself the words and combinations of words, sounds, and gestures that seemed to hold magical possibilities. And sometimes, things appeared overnight in my temenos, my sacred space.

  Once, magic gave me a small elephant carved in mellow old ivory. I was able to sell it to a curio shop for two hundred dollars, even without being able to say where it came from. The productions of magic provide no provenance. But mainly, my investigations didn’t bring me anything tangible.

  I wondered if I could specify something and ask magic to make me a copy of it, or bring me another one like it. That didn’t seem too much to ask.

  Working alone late one night, I set up a portion of the stock room as a sacred space. I drew the magical lines. I put in a Donna Karan jacket for the spirit to look over.

  Early next morning, I was gratified to find four copies of this jacket. That, plus the original, made five. I never knew which was the original. They were all identical, even down to the tiny flaw in an inner seam.

  I didn’t know at the time that magic had plans for me. I didn’t know I was being watched by no less a person than Phil, the floor manager.

  Phil walked in while I was putting away the extra jackets in my backpack. “What have we here?” he asked.

  “These four jackets are mine,” I told him.

  He smiled his superior smile. “Don’t happen to have a sales slip, do you?”

  “You don’t understand,” I said. “These jackets don’t belong to the store. I made them.”

  Phil looked at the jackets more closely. “I know this model. It’s what we have in the display space.”

  “That’s the original,” I said. “These others are my copies.”

  Phil looked them over, frowned, and said, “Well, let’s go to my office and straighten this out.”

  Phil had an office on the mezzanine above Sullivan’s main floor. After checking the floor model, he went to his computer and called up the item number. He was surprised to find it was one of a kind.

  “That must be wrong,” he said. “We must have ordered five of these.”

  But a phone call to our distributor told him he had indeed ordered only one. The other four could not be accounted for.

  “I really don’t understand,” Phil said.

  “It’s my fault,” I said.

  “You? How could that be?”

  “I did it,” I told him. “I’m sorry about this, sir. I don’t want to cause any trouble. I need this job. Look, you can have the jackets. I promise I won’t do it again.”

  “Let me try to follow your reasoning. How did you do it?”

  “I just did it,” I said, still not wanting to tell him about the magic.

  “But what did you do, specifically? You must have done something. These jackets didn’t just fall out of the air.”

  “As a matter of fact, that’s exactly what happened. Or so I believe. I didn’t see it myself. We’re not supposed to.”

  “We?”

  “Magicians, sir.” I knew I’d have to come out with it sooner or later.

  Phil looked at me, his eyes narrowed, brows wrinkled. “Explain.”

  “I do magic,” I told him.

  “I see,” Phil said.

  “I do it in a temenos, a sacred space,” I babbled, as if that would make it all clear.

  Phil stared at me and frowned and looked like he was going to fire me on the spot. Then his face took on a thoughtful look, and he stared at the jackets for a while. At last he said, “Can you make something appear here on the table in front of me?”

  “Oh, no! Magic doesn’t work in the open. It doesn’t like anyone watching. It’s not like science, you know. It’s magic, it loves to hide.”

  “So what do you do if you want to get something?”

  “I do the magic, in the temenos. But usually I don’t wish for anything specific. I don’t think magic likes that.”

  “Okay, sure, whatever. But when you do this magic of yours, something always turns up in your sacred space?”

  “Not every time. But surprisingly often.”

  Phil stared at me for a long time. Finally he said, “This is crazy, you know.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “But I’m interested. I’d like you to demonstrate for me.”

  “I could do that,” I said, “but not here in the store. I don’t think magic liked me doing that. But in my own apartment.”

  “Sure. I don’t care where you do it. I just want to see it.”

  We met two nights later. Phil was good enough not to sneer outright at my small, cramped, slummy apartment. But I knew what he was thinking: This guy can do magic? I must be crazy to be here.

  Still, here he was. He had brought something for me to duplicate. A very small gold coin. Phil said it wasn’t worth much—just twenty dollars.

  “It’s not a good idea to ask magic for any particular thing,” I said.

  “Then how do we know it works?” he said.

  I couldn’t answer that.

  “I’ll want it back,” he said, handing me the coin. “Hopefully, with a couple of others like it.”

  “You’ll probably get it back. As for getting more, we’ll have to see what magic decides.”

  I put the coin in the sacred space I had created in my closet. I asked Phil to stay in the front room while I did the formulas and gestu
res. I don’t like people to see me doing magic. I think it works against the success of the enterprise.

  Phil sat down on the bed while I went into the closet and closed the door. In magic, moments are not all alike. You have to guess which kind of Power you’re working with, and what its mood is. I did what I thought would work for that particular moment.

  When I came out, Phil asked, “So what happens now?”

  “Tomorrow night at this same time,” I said, “I open the door to the temenos.”

  “You mean the closet?”

  “For now, it’s a temenos.”

  “Couldn’t we take a peek now? Maybe whatever it’s sending is there already.”

  I shook my head. “I won’t open that door until tomorrow evening. Impatience is very bad form when you’re dealing with magic. You can’t rush the Powers. Twenty-four hours is a minimum time. A couple of days would be better.”

  Phil looked like he had a few things to say about that, but finally he shrugged and said, “See you here tomorrow,” and left.

  Next evening, after Phil arrived, I opened the closet door, and there were seven gold coins in the temenos. They all looked the same.

  I handed them to Phil. “I think this is what the Power or the spirits or magic or whatever wanted you to have.”

  “I thought you said the spirits don’t like to be asked for anything specific.”

  “The spirits are unpredictable,” I said.

  Phil jingled the coins in his hands. Then he held out one to me. “You might as well get something out of this.”

  “No thanks,” I said.

  “Suit yourself.” Phil put the coins in his pocket. He was thinking hard. Finally he said, “Might you be open to a business proposition?”

  “I’d have to hear it first.”

  “I’ll get back to you,” Phil said, and left.

  About a week later, Phil asked me to meet him and a couple of friends at an expensive restaurant not far from Sullivan’s. He indicated that they had talked the previous night and had a proposition to put to me.

  I could imagine how his meeting with his friends had gone. I could hear Phil saying, “I don’t want you fellows to laugh at me, but I know we’re all interested in far-out investments.”

  “Sure,” Jon said. “What have you got?”

  “I’ve got a guy who does magic, or some damned thing.”

  And he would have explained what happened. He would have said, “Hey, I don’t know what he’s doing, but it looks good enough to invest a few bucks in.”

  So we sat in the restaurant in a comfortable haze of smoke and beer smell and dim golden lights and hurrying waitresses with twinkling legs, and we had drinks and they all stared at me.

  Finally, one of them, a fat, complacent-looking guy named Haynes, said to me, “So what exactly do you do in this magical closet of yours?”

  “It’s not the closet that’s magical, it’s the temenos, the sacred space I create within it.”

  “And what do you do with this sacred place?”

  “I perform certain procedures.”

  “Such as?”

  “I can’t tell you. Telling destroys the magic.”

  “Convenient, if you want to keep your secret.”

  I shook my head. “Necessary, strictly necessary.”

  I didn’t tell him how I had deduced that magicians in the past like Cagliostro and the Comte de St. Germain had grown rich and famous, but finally their powers had deserted them and they ended badly. I think their downfall came from telling, and from demanding too much.

  They held a whispered consultation. Then Jon, a tall, thin, balding guy in a three-piece business suit, said to me, “Okay, we’re interested.”

  “It’s a far-out kind of thing,” I told him.

  “We’re not scared of far-out investments,” Phil said. “We’ve got a share in a shaman’s school in Arizona. Is that far enough out for you?”

  “How could you invest in me?” I asked.

  “Oh, we weren’t thinking of anything fancy. But we could set you up with a place to practice your magic. A place where you wouldn’t be disturbed. We’d supply your food and pocket money. You could give up that lousy day job at Sullivan’s. You could live on your magic.”

  I said, “Looks like there’s a lot you could do for me. But what could I do for you?”

  “Split the take with us fifty-fifty.”

  “Take?”

  “Whatever you produce in that sacred space of yours.”

  “But that might be nothing.”

  Phil said, “Then we’re stuck with fifty percent of nothing. But we like a gamble. We can get this facility in Jersey for free. Feeding you for a couple weeks won’t cost much. And we can drive out and see how you’re doing.”

  “Interesting,” I said.

  “And don’t forget,” Haynes put in, “you get to keep fifty percent of what you wish for.”

  It struck me as a pretty good deal at the time.

  Phil had rented this place in northern Jersey to use as a software lab. But then the bottom went out of that business. Or they found it wouldn’t be profitable under present conditions. They still had a couple months’ rent paid for, so they set me up in the place. It was a small, isolated facility with a two-room apartment in back. I moved in, and Phil drove out from New York every few days with some frozen dinners.

  I lived alone, saw no one—the nearest town was two miles away, I didn’t have a car, and besides, what would I do there? I had books to read when I wasn’t working on magic. I had a collection of Marsilio Ficino’s letters. His nobility made me ashamed of myself. I knew I was being too self-seeking. But I went on anyhow. I figured, what’s the sense of being a magician if you can’t work at it?

  A week later, on a late afternoon on a golden day in late October, the maples were just starting to turn colors. I could see birds overhead, flying south, away from the dark winter that was waiting for me. The little lawn in front of the facility was set back from the road. No one ever came by here, but she came. She came with an easel and a folding chair and a big straw purse in which she had watercolors and a bicycle bottle filled with water. She was sitting on my front lawn.

  I came outside, and she got up hastily. “I didn’t know anyone lived here. I hope I’m not trespassing.”

  “Not at all. I live here, but I don’t own the place.”

  “But I’m intruding on your privacy.”

  “A welcome intrusion.”

  She seemed relieved. She sat down again in front of her easel.

  “I’m a painter,” she said. “A watercolorist. Some say that’s not real painting, but it pleases me. I noticed this place a long time ago. I wanted to paint it, but I wanted to wait until the maples were in just the stage of bloom they’re in now.”

  “Are they at their peak?” I asked.

  “No, they’re still one or two weeks from their full color. But I like them as they are right now, with the brilliant reds and oranges just showing, but merging with the green leaves. It’s a time of change, very fragile, and very precious. Anyone can paint a tree in full autumn foliage. But it’s something else to paint one just before it explodes from cool green to hot red.”

  “And after that comes winter,” I said.

  “Exactly.”

  “You’re very welcome to paint my trees or anything else. Perhaps it would be better if I went inside and left you undisturbed?”

  “It doesn’t bother me if you want to stay,” she said.

  “I’m Maryanne Johnson, by the way.”

  Maryanne set up her brushes and set to work. She sketched in the tree in hard pencil, mixed her washes, and began. She worked very quickly. Her painting was like a dance. I enjoyed watching her work. And I liked looking at her. She was not pretty, but her features were delicate, and I already knew she saw more than I did. She was a small, comfortable woman, about the same age as I, maybe a year or so younger. We talked about painting and trees and magic. At the end of two hours, the pai
nting was done.

  “I just need to give it a few minutes to dry,” she said. “Then I’ll spray it with an acrylic fixative and I’m out of your hair.”

  “Do you really have to go?”

  “It’s time for me to go,” she said, not answering me directly.

  “All right,” I said. “I told you that I do magic.”

  “Yes. It sounds wonderful.”

  “Let’s go in and see if the temenos has anything for you.”

  “I really don’t think I should go in,” Maryanne said.

  “Then I’ll run in and see if it’s left you anything.”

  She hesitated, then said, “Never mind, I’ll go in with you. I’d like to see where you live.”

  Inside we walked quickly through the cold, polished laboratory space, to the closet. I opened the door. In the shrine, under the red light, there was something oval-shaped and made of metal. I picked it up. It appeared to be of silver.

  I led her outside into the fading afternoon light and said, “I think it’s a pendant of some sort. Magic meant it for you. Please accept the gift.”

  Gravely Maryanne took it and turned it over and over in her fingers.

  “Well,” she said, “I didn’t expect the day to turn out like this.”

  “Nor did I. May I see you again?”

  “You know the Albatross Restaurant in town? I’m a hostess there.”

  And then she was gone and the gloom of my laboratory closed in on me. I walked up and down the silent room, between the workstations, with the last light of the late afternoon sun slanting in. It was quiet in here, always quiet, a sort of concrete tomb. And I had put myself into it.

  I thought about magic and its practitioners. What kind of lives had they had? Lonely, boring, and dangerous. The only happily married magic-worker from the past I could think of was Nicholas Flamel and his precious Perrenelle. And he was very much the exception. In my rush to join the ranks of magicians, to be counted among them, I hadn’t really considered what I was getting into.

  Suddenly magic seemed to me a poor enterprise indeed, one that excluded the human dimension. At that moment, I made up my mind.

  That evening, in response to my telephone calls, they all assembled at the facility. There was Phil and Jon, and Haynes, and two others I hadn’t met before. They had cassette recorders with them, and even a video camera. I felt strangely calm. I knew this was going to be the last act, good or bad, fair or foul.