Spellbinders Collection

by Molly Cochran

"If you've been tampering with these cards, buddy . . ."

  "Look, butthead . . ."

  "You're on!" the producer rasped from the wings.

  Starr plastered a smile on his face and slapped Hal on the back, hard. "Well, folks," he said, "it looks like Hal here is on one heck of a roll, wouldn't you say?"

  There was some desultory clapping from the audience. A few people booed.

  "You've got three kee-rect answers. Two more, and you win an all-expenses paid trip to London, England!"

  He waited for an audience response, but there was none.

  "So what do you say, Hal? Dip that pole down into the Ole Fishing Hole and . . ." He waited.

  "Go fish," a few spectators said flatly.

  Hal poked the fishing rod into the receptacle, pulled up a green fish, and waited for Joe Starr to take it.

  "Just wondering, Hal," Starr asked as he fondled the envelope. "What happens if this is a question about rocket science?"

  "Then I guess you get to throw a pie in my face," Hal said.

  The audience cheered.

  "Oh, it'll be worse than that," Starr said with a grin. "Lordie, yes." He tore open the seal and took out the card. "Uh . . ."He tried a smile. "It's another question about medieval English history."

  The audience got to its feet, hissing and catcalling.

  "This show is fixed!" someone shouted.

  Joe Starr did his best to calm them down. "Whoa, there," he said with false heartiness. "Wait'll you hear this one, friends and neighbors. It's a doozy. Ready, Hal?"

  "Shoot."

  "Scam!" someone screeched.

  Starr wiggled his head confidently. "The Western world's first tragedy, Gorboduc . . ."He pronounced it Gore-bow-duck. "Hey, he sounds like the Russian version of Donald."

  He waited for the laugh, but there was not a sound from the audience.

  "Think he knows Mikhail Mouse?"

  Silence.

  Starr cleared his throat. "Okay, Hal, this play Gorboduc told the story of two ill-fated brothers. What were their names?"

  Hal grinned. He'd read Gorboduc as a freshman in college. "Ferrex and Porrex."

  "You got it," Starr said wanly.

  The sound technicians drove the level of the canned banjo music up to maximum in an effort to drown out the shouts from the audience, to no avail. The spectators were leaving their seats, marching up to the stage in protest. Daisy and Mae, en route to the contestant for their ritual kiss, suddenly turned and ran offstage, out of the way of the grim-faced army of advancing audience members being held at bay by the stage crew. The show's producer, with a telephone in his hand, motioned to Starr from the wings.

  "We're going to take a little break here, folks, and when we come back, we're gonna . . ." Joe Starr put his hand to his ear, beckoning the audience to shout the name of the show. "Go . . ." he prompted.

  "Go shit in your hat!" someone offered.

  The producer rushed onstage and huddled frantically with Starr. Afterward, he approached Hal.

  "Hi, Hal. Frank Morton. I'm the producer." He held out a clammy hand. "Look, we're going to switch to another contestant," he said, the sweat visible on his forehead. "The FCC's on its way."

  "Oh, Christ," Joe Starr moaned.

  Morton ignored him. "We've got a room where you can wait for them," he told Hal calmly.

  "What for?"

  "Because they think the game is rigged, you jerk," Starr blustered. "Oh, God. God."

  "Take it easy, Joe," Morton said.

  "Take it easy? Don't you understand? This is the frigging Sixty-Four Thousand Dollar Question all over again!" Starr said, referencing an early television game show that had sent most of the show’s personnel to jail.

  "No, it's not." The producer was struggling to keep his voice low. "This show is a hundred percent on the level, Joe, and you know that as well as I do."

  "Then how'd this guy answer those questions?"

  They both looked at Hal. "Just knew them," he said with a shrug.

  "Just knew them? Four in a row?"

  "Hey, it's a game, Jack. Somebody's got to win sometime."

  "Okay, that's enough." Morton took off his glasses and wiped his face. "I'm sure there's nothing to worry about. It's just that with a live show, there are bound to be glitches once in a while."

  "Glitches? This is my career, Frank!"

  "We'll talk later," Morton said. He motioned to the big guy with the ponytail to come take Hal away.

  "You're dead, shitface," Joe Starr muttered.

  Hal laughed. "You don't look so hot yourself." He waggled his head in a parody of the show host. "Old buddy."

  Somehow Starr had managed to get the audience to sit down. On the greenroom monitor, Hal watched a man being dumped from a crane into a vat of water balloons. The audience roared with delight. The contestant had missed a question dealing with astrophysics.

  Weird, Hal thought. There had to have been three or four thousand cards in that well. The odds of getting four questions in a row on the same subject were impossibly small.

  And yet it had happened. Four questions on the one subject he knew anything about.

  "That's not true," he said aloud. He knew other things. He knew automobile engines. He understood firearms, police procedure, a certain amount of law . . .

  Baloney. If somebody had asked you those questions a week ago, you couldn't have answered them.

  It was true. He had read Gorboduc, yes, but that had been more than twenty years ago. Ferrex and Porrex? Those names had been buried for two decades. Albania? Who was he kidding? He'd never even studied ancient Scotland. It might have been a footnote in a book he'd read somewhere along the line, something he'd researched for a junior high essay, maybe . . .

  You've never heard of any Albania outside of Eastern Europe, lunkhead.

  He ran his fingers through his hair. What had made him say Albania?

  And while you're being truthful, Hal, let's not forget to mention you don't know dick about any Yellow Plague.

  He reached over and turned off the television just as two men in suits entered the room.

  They identified themselves as investigators for the Federal Communications Commission.

  "Just a few questions, Mr . . ."

  "Woczniak."

  "All right. Do you realize that taking any part in the manipulation of results in a contest of this nature constitutes a federal offense?"

  They loomed over him. "Yes," he said. "The FBI explained it all to me once."

  Four hours later, when the two FCC men ran out of questions, Hal was permitted to leave the studio. Joe Starr and the producer of Go Fish! were on the stage with another pair of inquisitors, the contents of the Ole Fishing Hole spilled onto a table in front of them.

  CHAPTER SIX

  "We read every question in the barrel last night," the bleary-eyed producer told Hal the next day. "There were seven questions about medieval England in the entire shebang. You picked four of them." He shrugged. "It was a wild coincidence, but that's all it was."

  "I guess so," Hal said.

  "The FCC guys want to supervise the final drawing, but that'll be the end of it." He smiled in a weary, businesslike way. "Sorry if we've put you to any trouble. The show's live, you understand."

  "Sure," Hal said.

  "Good luck."

  Hal nodded.

  Morton was right, he told himself. Coincidence. That was all there was to it. A wild coincidence.

  And the wildest part was that you didn't know the answers until they came out of your mouth. But you didn't tell the FCC boys that part, did you, old buddy?

  He shook the thought away. When a man drank as much as Hal did, he reasoned, there was no telling what he did or didn't know. Things happened to your brain. You heard things, read things . . . For all he knew, he might have spent the past year reading up on medieval history after he'd drunk himself into a stupor at Benny's.

  Speaking of which, Hal figured some of the old gang had probably heard o
f his TV success by now. A snippet of tape from yesterday's show had appeared on the evening news. It showed a swarm of angry people leaving the studio. A smiling man declared confidently that the fix was in. An irate woman blamed the government. The same news item showed Hal, looking even more scroungy than he'd felt, pronouncing the names "Ferrex and Porrex."

  No wonder they think the game's crooked, he thought, appraising his own image. Not that it would make a whit of difference in his circle of acquaintances; the guys at Benny's would be delighted that Hal had found a new way to steal money.

  He could almost hear them all laughing around the bar, discussing Hal's relative indebtedness to each of them and the methods they would use to collect. He wouldn't have touched Benny's last night with a ten-foot pole.

  Or at least that was the reason he gave himself for not going for a drink. He hadn't had a drink in two days.

  "Ready, Hal?" The guy with the ponytail escorted him backstage as banjo music played. While Hal waited to go on, Joe Starr explained the presence of the FCC men onstage, although everyone in the country knew by now that this episode of Go Fish! would be under close scrutiny. "Revenooers," Joe called the two intimidating men who stood behind him like pieces of scenery.

  Starr had objected strenuously at first to being monitored by Feds on the air, but after learning that the television audience for Go Fish! would be the largest in the show's history, he acquiesced. After all, Frank Morton told him, the news stories about yesterday's near-riot had boosted the show's visibility by a thousand percent.

  "Are you ready for Hal?" Starr shouted.

  The audience sounded as if it were assembled to watch a football game. There were cheers and boos, pneumatic horns, whistles, banners proclaiming Hal a genius, and others calling for his arrest.

  "Come on out, old buddy!"

  The FCC men scowled as the contestant walked past them. On their instructions, Hal was dressed in a short-sleeve shirt and plain trousers with no belt.

  "What do you think I'm going to do, hang myself on TV?" he had asked. The Feds had not cracked a smile.

  Joe Starr, too, made little attempt to hide his dislike for the unpersonable contestant who had jeopardized his show and his career with a bizarre streak of luck.

  "Now, Hal," he said in his lazy, down-on-the-farm voice, "How'd a guy like you get so interested in medieval times, anyway?"

  He shrugged again. "Just liked it."

  Behind him, the two FCC men regarded one another.

  "Well, I got to be truthful with you, Hal. Our friends the Revenooers have gone through every question in the Ole Fishing Hole, and they tell me there are only three cards left that have anything to do with medieval English history. So it's not likely you're going to get one of them, is it?"

  "Guess not."

  "Think you can answer a question on another subject?"

  "Fixing cars, maybe."

  Joe Starr chuckled.

  "Then I sincerely hope you draw a question about fixing cars, Hal." His eyes glinted malevolently above dark circles. "Because if you don't give me this one last kee-rect answer, I got a mighty special treat for you here on the show."

  The audience cheered.

  "Oh, one more thing, Hal."

  Daisy and Mae came onstage, carrying a length of black silk between them. Starr waved it with a flourish. "This here's a blindfold. Care to check it, gentlemen?"

  One of the FCC men ran his hands along it, held it to the light to check its opacity, then handed it back with a nod.

  "Just to show our good friends the Revenooers and our studio audience that there's no way on God's earth you could be reading the answers some kinda way, we want you to put this on, Hal. That okay by you?"

  "Guess so."

  The two women tied the cloth around Hal's eyes.

  "See anything?"

  "No."

  "Good enough. Are you ready, Hal?" Starr shouted.

  Hal nodded.

  "GO FISH!" the command from the audience was thunderous. As Hal blindly thrust the end of the fishing pole into the container, the FCC men approached to stand on either side of him. The plastic fish he selected was immediately snatched out of his hand by one of the "Revenooers," who opened and read the card inside before handing it hesitantly to Joe Starr.

  "Ready for the question, Hal?"

  "Guess so."

  Starr took the card from the FCC man, who looked strangely ashen.

  "In medieval times . . ." Starr's arm dropped. He closed his eyes. "This just can't be," he said softly, his accent forgotten.

  The audience exploded. The FCC men looked at each other. One made a helpless gesture of defeat.

  "Should I read this?" Starr asked them.

  After a short hesitation, one of them spoke. "Yes, sir," he said quietly.

  It took two minutes plus a commercial break to calm the audience.

  "Now, listen up, folks. The Revenooers say it was a fair draw, and I'm here to tell you they're right."

  The FCC men were roundly booed.

  Joe Starr waggled his head ferociously. "Man, oh, man, Hal, all I got to say is you are one lucky son of a gun."

  "Just read the question," Hal said impatiently.

  Froth formed at the corners of Starr's lips. "Oh, I'm going to read it, all right. But then you got to answer it."

  A threatening clamor rose up from the spectators.

  "In medieval times, legends spoke of a silk-like substance that often appeared magically in connection with extraordinary events. What was the name ascribed to this unusual and now lost fabric?"

  A clock began ticking loudly. Hal took a deep breath. His mind was a blank.

  It was a relief, in a way, not to know the answer. For the past three days he had lived in an agony of uncertainty, knowing things without knowing them, wondering how information utterly alien to him had somehow leapt into his mind like magic. Now, at least, he knew he wasn't crazy. And he was four hundred dollars to the good. Four hundred dollars, plus one pie in the face, and it was filled with pheasant, pheasant pie with bread. . . .

  The cooking smells of pheasant filled the great hall, along with the music of the singer and the barking of dogs. It was strange to hear the bird then, above all the other noise, but its song was so pure and sweet that Hal looked up, and then the bird flew in the open casement . . . my God, this is a memory . . . with its wild song bursting out of it and it came to rest on . . . someone else's memory, not mine . . . it came to rest on a man's finger, someone whose face Hal could no longer see, a man who gave the bird a piece of bread. And then the cup appeared, floating above the table.

  Hal gasped. Stop it! This is not my memory! I never saw any cup.

  All of them saw it. The cup, floating in air, reminding the knights that their work was not done. Hal's knife fell noisily to the table at the sight of it, but the bird did not stir from the long finger which had become its perch. It, too, watched the cup, the Grail, appear like a rainbow in mist, draped in Samite, shimmering like water . . .

  "You got an answer for us, Hal?" Joe Starr barked.

  The vision fell away like a broken wall.

  "Draped in Samite," Hal whispered.

  "Say what?"

  "Samite," Hal said, feeling inexplicably on the verge of tears.

  "Kee-rect! You win a trip to London!"

  The audience screamed. Banjo music began to play. Hal heard only a few notes before he fainted.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The man who called himself Saladin squinted against the bright afternoon sun streaming through the windows in Dr. Coles' office. It was the first time in Doctor Coles' entire tenure at Maplebrook that the prisoner had been out from behind the bars of his basement cell.

  "Please sit down," Coles said, gesturing to an armchair upholstered in imitation leather.

  The inmate sniffed in disdain. He lifted his patrician head, making the straitjacket that encased him look like an unnecessary barbarism.

  "Are my new quarters ready?" he asked sof
tly.

  "Yes." The doctor smiled. "There was no room vacant, but then during the night one of our other patients died in his sleep. A curious coincidence," Coles said.

  "It is of no interest to me," Saladin said. "I would like to move into my room."

  "I thought we might talk for a while first," Coles said.

  "A session of soul-searching before I'm allowed into the cell, is that it?"

  Coles fidgeted uncomfortably. "Something like that." Even with a distance of several feet between them, the doctor's neck felt the effects of staring up at Saladin's imposing height.

  "This garment is humiliating. Please remove it."

  "I can't do that."

  "Bring an orderly. If I attempt anything untoward, you can have me maced and beaten before sending me back to the basement."

  Coles knew the drill. His predecessor had assured him that chemical spray combined with a stiff stick was the most effective method in treating the criminally insane. Coles had hated the man from that moment.

  "I've abolished the use of mace here," he said.

  "How humane, Dr. Coles." There was a glint of merriment in Saladin's dark eyes.

  "Cruelty is not necessary."

  "Not even if a patient tries to kill you?"

  "I don't believe you'll do that."

  "Then take off the straitjacket."

  Coles blew a noisy stream of air through his nose, thinking.

  "That enlightened manner of yours is really no more than a sham, isn't it, Doctor? For all your protestations, you're scared to death of me."

  "Nonsense. Now suppose we chat about something else."

  Saladin laughed, a deep and rolling laugh, a sound like music. Howard Keel in Kiss Me Kate came to the doctor's mind. "Of course." He coiled himself into the chair gracefully. "What would you like to know?"

  Coles picked up a yellow tablet and balanced it on his knee as he leaned against his desk. He was looking down on his patient now and enjoyed the vantage point. "Oh, whatever comes to mind. Your name, perhaps."

  "You know that."

  "I meant your full name."

  "Saladin is the only name I have ever known."

  "Your mother called you Saladin?"