The Magicians

by James Gunn

  Whether that was Solomon's intention or not, he would never admit to anything else.

  “The question is,” he continued, “where do you stand in this conflict?"

  “Where I have always stood,” I said bravely.

  “Just who are you for?” La Voisin broke in.

  I looked at her and smiled for the first time. “For myself, of course."

  “Of course,” Solomon said, leaning lazily against the lectern, enjoying his superiority in height as well as knowledge. He gave La Voisin a quick, reproving glance, and she went into a shell of silence. “But in this case self-interest should ally you with the side that is certain to win. There can't be any doubt about that. At the risk of being ridiculously melodramatic, we must put the matter bluntly: we insist that all those who are not for us are against us."

  I shrugged, feeling better about my ability to hold my own, at least until he resorted to arcane powers. “That's understandable,” I said. “But in a situation like this, superior numbers do not always indicate superior forces. It seems to me that the issue is still uncertain."

  Solomon's eyes bored at my head. “Your name seems to place you on the side of the angels. But names have ceased to mean much any more. My admiration for your independence and your spirit would torment me if we were forced to strike blindly. Perhaps—permit me to suggest it—you might give us some reason to trust you."

  “Like what?"

  “Like, say,” he appeared to consider the matter, “like your real name."

  “Certainly,” I agreed. I studied the waiting faces of the group around me—the young man, the middle-aged man, the distinguished older man, the red-haired witch, and Solomon; I imagined them stripped of their clothing and their civilization dancing in a kind of religious frenzy around my paralyzed body while somewhere in the darkness that surrounded the terrifying scene lurked something awful and indescribable, waiting for the ceremony to end so that it could feed. And then the vision faded, and they were waiting for me, clothed, polite, but underneath their veneer as savage as hyenas. “Providing you give me the same reason to trust you,” I continued smoothly. “Starting with"—I let my eyes roam around the group—"starting with you, Magus."

  Solomon laughed. “You are a clever man, Gabriel—and a brave one. Speaking only for myself, I hope you choose the right side. It would be a pity to—lose you."

  I controlled a shiver. “Losing” was a euphemism I didn't like the sound of. “When the time comes,” I said, “you'll find me on the winning side."

  I nodded to them all, turned, and left. I walked quickly toward the door, feeling their eyes boring into my back like .38 slugs, expecting something strange to happen to me, like changing suddenly into a bat or a beetle or a blob, or suddenly ceasing to exist.

  “Gabriel,” someone said huskily behind me as I went through the doorway into the corridor beyond.

  I jumped and turned, shivers running up and down my spine as if some mad xylophonist was hitting my backbone with icy mallets. The red witch, Catherine La Voisin, was gliding toward me like the figurehead on a pirate ship.

  “Gabriel,” she repeated, giving each syllable a seductive value of its own. She stopped her progress toward me only when she was close enough to be behind me with another half-step. “You interest me, Gabriel. There is something very real and male about you."

  I tried to tell myself that she was the kind of person who would be interested in anything real and male, but it didn't work. She had focused the full warmth of her femaleness upon me, and I could feel myself drowning in it.

  “Could it be,” she began. “Are you—perhaps—undisguised?” She pressed closer.

  “I—I mean—that—wouldn't be—” I tried to get it out but couldn't. Two firm, oversized cones were trying to bore their way into my chest.

  “I like you, Gabriel,” she breathed. My eyes glazed, as if I were wearing glasses and she had fogged them. Her lips came toward mine.

  As they approached me like rippling red snakes, I stared at them, fixed like a frightened rabbit in frozen anticipation. The lips blurred. My gaze shifted upward to her eyes. They were bottomless, like dark blue lakes fading in the remote distance into black.

  Her lips met mine. They tingled as if they were charged with electricity. They moved. They parted and her perfumed breath entered my mouth. My arms automatically went around her. Her flesh was soft under my hands. I felt her hand work up the back of my neck into my hair, pressing me closer to her. After a moment I began struggling for breath.

  After an eon, she moved slowly hack, her eyes heavy lidded and sleepy as if she had just awakened. I drew in a deep, harsh breath.

  “What was that?” I gasped.

  She was walking away from me down the corridor. Her head turned to look back over her shoulder. “That,” she said, smiling confidently, “was a preview."

  An elevator door opened in front of her as if she had summoned it, and she stepped into the car. As the doors closed she was still looking at me, and her smile was strangely and disturbingly triumphant.

  Chapter 6

  The universe is full of all kinds of energies. Matter is energy—the most resistant and uncompromising kind of energy. And if life has succeeded in achieving some degree of conquest of matter, is it absurd to suppose that it has not succeeded with more malleable forms of energy?

  - Colin Wilson, The Occult

  I breathed deeply again, gradually freeing myself from the spell—natural or unnatural—she had thrown over me. Before, in spite of myself, I had been overwhelmed. If there had been a bed handy, I would have tumbled into it in spite of something screaming within me that I would hate myself after it all was over. Now I felt unclean. I pulled out my handkerchief and scrubbed my lips with it. The three men who had been with Solomon passed me, smirking. I glared at them. When I took the handkerchief away, it was stained with orange smears, and the three men were gone.

  I waited a few minutes more, but Solomon didn't come out. Uneasily, a bit timidly, I glanced into the Crystal Room. It was empty. Very empty. The room felt hollow. The chandeliers had stopped tinkling. I wondered if the experiences I had undergone in the past few hours had begun to develop in me a kind of psychic sensitivity, or whether I was, at last, gaining the awareness that every private detective needs if he is going to succeed.

  In spite of my confidence, I walked uneasily through the Crystal Room toward the only other door. It was in back of the platform, and it was closed. I hesitated in front of it and then slowly, silently, turned the handle and eased the door toward me. I stiffened myself for a shock, but the little room beyond was empty too. An ice-making machine muttered to itself and suddenly showered a tinkling of crystals into its bin. Opposite the door in which I was standing another doorway, with swinging doors, opened into a large central kitchen and serving area. I went to the doors and looked in. The kitchen was empty; the stainless steel was sterile; only the vague memories of old banquets remained. From the kitchen naked stairs led down to other floors.

  I turned back to the little room with the ice-making machine. I couldn't see the elegant Solomon trotting down the serving stairs. But he hadn't come out the main door either. Not unless he had come through disguised as the invisible man. He had either gone through here or—but speculation like this was futile. I decided that it was time I stopped playing someone else's game—magic—and started playing my own—detection—such as it was.

  I looked around the little room. Solomon had been here. Maybe some of the others, too. They had waited here before they came onto the stage, maybe discussing the program, their findings, their strategy. There should be some evidence of their presence. Besides the ice maker, the only object in the room was a coat rack. It was empty. Bare metal hangers, battered refugees from too many closet encounters, hung from a bar from which olive-green paint had been scratched. The floor was bare plastic tile, a weary, mottled yellow. Idly, I moved the coat rack a few inches and noticed a small, rectangular piece of paper on the floor. I p
icked it up. It was a ticket on the airline shuttle to Washington, D.C. It was dated day before yesterday, but it hadn't been used. It was still good.

  I shrugged. Maybe, maybe not. I slipped the ticket into my coat pocket and searched the rest of the room carefully. I even looked into the bin of the ice-making machine, but there was nothing in it but ice. I took out a cylindrical piece and stuck it in my mouth. It was cold and real.

  I went back into the Crystal Room and looked on the platform and around it. Just as I was going to give up, I noticed a small, yellow triangle sticking out from under the black drapes behind the platform. I pulled it out. It was the corner of a piece of yellow typewriter paper. It was bound together with about seventy-five other sheets of paper by a black binder. It was a manuscript, and someone had written on it, in a precise, readable script. But I couldn't read it. Most of it was mathematics.

  I recognized that much, anyway. It was part of the calculus which Newton and Leibnitz had invented, independently, to deal with problems concerning rate of change. This particular formula had to do with the “derivative,” an abstract limit. I remembered that much from my college courses and the occasional ones I had taught in high school, mostly as a substitute. If I thought about it, more would come back. I didn't know what the manuscript was trying to say, but I knew whose it was. It belonged to Uriel.

  There was nothing else under the platform or in the room except a couple of rolled programs and some assorted debris. I went out into the corridor with the manuscript under my arm and waited ten minutes for an elevator. It would be months before I could trust stairs again. I wasn't too sure about elevators, either. They could go down faster and farther than stairs, I supposed, but I knew about stairs, and the elevator descended the normal distance in the normal time and I stepped out into the lobby. At least, I thought it was the lobby. The way the normal things of life were changing around, I couldn't be sure. I wondered if this was how the world was going to be from now on.

  Charlie was off duty, and the clerk at the desk was an obliging young man with a full head of dark hair, which may have been his own, and an unsuspicious nature. He registered me in a normal manner. I would have signed a phony name if I had thought quickly enough, but he asked for a credit card and I couldn't think of any reason to refuse. Maybe it didn't matter. Solomon had me spotted, and it wouldn't do me any good to run, even if I wanted to. I couldn't escape the long arm of the magician. But it was time I learned the rules of the game if I was going to play—or else I would be the shuttlecock batted from one side of the net to the other.

  “Say,” I said, turning back to the desk as if on impulse, “have you got a girl registered here? Nice-looking girl with blue eyes and dark hair? Named Ariel?"

  “Ariel who?” he asked.

  No imagination. I shrugged and put on a sly, man-to-man smile. “Hell, I didn't catch her last name."

  He shuffled through the recent cards. “Not today,” he said.

  “Well,” I tried again, “what about a white-haired old boy named Uriel?"

  He stopped being so obliging. “Ariel? Uriel? What's the game?"

  “Well,” I said desperately, “what about a little old lady named Mrs. Peabody?"

  But he turned away, his opinion of the human race hardening into the typical desk clerk's cynicism. I was sorry to have been a party to it, but sorrier still that I was no better informed than I was when I started.

  I trudged toward the elevator with my coded room card in my hand. I felt like I was sitting in a poker game and had just discovered that everything was wild except what I was holding. I rode the elevator up to the seventh floor. It stopped all right. It didn't keep going up into the stratosphere. The floor was the seventh according to the elevator and the numbers on the doors, and I walked down the hall on the anonymous hotel carpet until I reached room 707. I fumbled the key into the lock and opened the door and stepped into a bottomless black pit through which I went falling, falling, falling...

  I was spinning, my arms and legs reaching desperately for handholds and footholds in the formless night. I cart-wheeled madly through the lightless void, lost and alone and terrified, and I thought to myself that if I could only get out of this eternal dark pit, I would give it all up. I would give up the search for Solomon; I would give up the case; I would give up the agency; I would go back to the classroom; and I would never meddle again in things that didn't concern me, in other people's trouble.

  I braced myself for the impact of my body on some unyielding bottom to this pit, but it never came. This isn't real, I told myself, but the thought was twisted away from me by a cold, rushing wind. Illusion! I screamed, but my voice was lost in the nothingness that enveloped me.

  Panic tried to force sound past the tightening muscles of my throat. Tension was growing into rigidity. Soon I would be beyond desperation, beyond saving, and I pushed one sane thought through the gathering block: If this is illusion, if I am not really falling, if this is a trap like the stairs, then I am standing just inside the door and the light switch is where the light switch always is—to my right against the wall.

  It's a lie, said my reeling senses that knew they were falling. But I hugged the thought to me, and I reached out with my flailing hand where the light switch would be if I were not falling, and—

  The lights came on. I was standing just inside the door. I was looking into an ordinary hotel room. A double bed was in front of me flanked by imitation walnut end tables. On the far side of the room, next to a window, was an imitation oak table and two imitation captain's chairs on rollers. A closet was to my right, a bathroom to my left, and I wondered if I was going mad.

  I stepped forward and looked back. On the floor was a piece of shiny black glass, about three feet square. I leaned over and dug a finger between the glass and the beige carpet and picked it up. I looked into it.

  It wasn't black glass after all. It was a mirror, but it wasn't silvered. Where the silver should have been, the back was painted a shiny black. My face, square and craggy, looked back at me as if I were staring out of another world, as if that were another person in that world, blank-eyed, ghost-ridden, doomed, and then I realized that the image I saw wasn't all imagination. That was me. Through a glass darkly, yes, but me still, the way I was, the way I felt.

  I shuddered and turned the piece of glass over. Scratched in the paint around the edge was an endless string of cabalistic letters, similar to the ones I had noticed on the seal: I felt sure now that they were Hebrew. I pulled the program out of my pocket and compared the two. They were the same letters, but they weren't in the same order. I wished, for the first time in my life, that I could read Hebrew. But this made as much sense as anything else that had happened to me this crazy day.

  I walked to the far wall with the square of glass and leaned it carefully against the wall, the mirror face turned away from me. After a few minutes I stopped shaking and walked wearily toward a chair. I slumped into it, letting waves of fatigue sweep up my body from my feet. This was as tired as I could ever remember being, and I hadn't done anything. I must have sat there through the entire program, my body tensed in wait for the terrible and the inexplicable.

  I let the day's happenings pass in review inside my puzzled head. Every time disbelief grew too great, I glanced at the black square leaning against the wall.

  I was enmeshed in a crazy, fantastic cobwebbery of magic and witchcraft. Nameless, faceless things crouched like obscene spiders in every corner and waited for unwary flies to twitch the web. Gaily, unthinking, unbelieving, I had buzzed in. I was caught. Loops of sticky silk were being wrapped around me until, cocooned, I would lie helplessly awaiting someone's dark pleasure. The only way to save myself was to find out who the spiders were and where they hid. Maybe then they would find that they had a wasp in their web, with a stinger in his tail, who would tear their flimsy strands into worthless pieces and threaten them with death if they tried any funny stuff.

  Who was Mrs. Peabody, the little old lady who had dr
awn me into this deadly game with a crisp, green lure? Was she working against Solomon, or with him? Or was she merely seeking protection? Did Ariel and Uriel have an unknown ally? Was she one of Solomon's own confederates? Was she trying to take his place? Or had it been only a trick by Solomon, safe in his anonymity, to use me against an undetermined third party, or to divert suspicion from himself?

  Who was the red witch, Catherine La Voisin, and what plans did she have for me?

  Who was Ariel? Who was Uriel? Could I trust them to be as frank and honest as they seemed? What were they, after all, but a witch and a sorcerer? Were they using me? Were they controlling my actions with little twitches of my emotional strings?

  But surely I was too unimportant for that. Who cared about me?

  And, above all, who was Solomon and what dark deeds did he plan?

  If it hadn't been so serious I would have laughed at it as poor melodrama, but melodrama, good or bad, doesn't seem funny when some very nasty possibilities lie in the future.

  I was fighting against shadows. I was the blind man in a terminal game of blindman's buff. If I could only tear aside the blinders for a moment and see a face—

  What had been the purpose of the black mirror? Had it been another warning? Had it said, more pointedly than words, Be careful or something really deadly may happen to you? Or had it been an attempt that failed? That was hard to believe. I didn't know enough to get out of traps.

  I'd had enough of traps. I'd had enough of stumbling around in the dark. “More light!” said Goethe. That's what I needed: light. Knowledge. And then I swallowed hard. I had just remembered when Goethe had called for light.

  I pulled the bound manuscript out of my pocket, took off my coat and tossed it on the bed, unstrapped my shoulder holster and hung it over the back of the chair, where the butt was within easy reach of my hand, stripped off my tie, and settled back in one of the imitation captain's chairs.