The Book of Magic

by George R. R. Martin

  “They are indeed lovely creatures,” said Pearleen, hoping she wasn’t in for a lecture about their behaviors, their care and feeding, and their natural history. Ghosts tended to stick close not only to one spot, but to one subject. She took a second look at the alpacas, though, because they seemed suddenly alert to something, craned their heads and looked up the tracks, up the slope. The two biggest ones, the leaders, separated themselves, trotted off separately, toward whatever it was they saw. The others moved farther down the hill, away from the fence.

  “They make excellent guardians of chickens, you know,” said Governor Thomas. His gaze and Pearleen’s followed that of the lead alpaca. “They can spot danger a mile away.”

  Now Pearleen heard it, too: a vibration like an oncoming train. They waited and waited, but there was no train, only the vibration that gained in intensity—not in the rails of the tracks themselves, as the 11:57 might have accomplished, but in the air above the tracks. The trees on the other side of the vibration began to shimmy, as they would if the tracks were on fire. As Pearleen stared and listened, the shimmy got more violent, and the vibration louder. It sounded like a high-pitched tuning fork. Pearleen winced and reached for one of her ears to shut it out. But Governor Thomas reacted not at all—and, more surprisingly, neither did the alpacas. They and their owner just looked up the tracks, as if curious.

  “Governor,” said Pearleen, “you don’t hear that?”

  “Hear what, child?” asked the governor.

  Underneath the keening, Pearleen now heard a faint, quavering voice:

  “Pearleen Sunday, oh Sunday, come talk to me fast!

  I’m brief as a sneeze. My time here can’t last!”

  Of course they didn’t hear it, Pearleen realized. It wasn’t meant for them.

  “Governor, you’ll have to excuse me,” said Pearleen. “Got to see a man about something.” Once she stepped onto the tracks, her clothes moved oddly—not billowing as in a breeze, but fluttering, as if pelted by things unseen. She faced downhill, braced herself, held her staff horizontal in both hands, and added, as a courtesy she nearly had forgotten, “Thank you again for Emancipation.”

  “You’re very welcome,” said the governor, pleased to be reminded of another favorite subject, “but I was merely the Lord’s instrument. Why Maryland had not already become a free state before the war, I will never under—”

  But he was alone, the vibrating whatever-it-was having already swept down the tracks and snatched Pearleen away. She was briefly visible, a hundred yards downhill, standing upright about a foot above the center of the tracks. She made no discernible lean into the curve as she rounded the bend and whipped out of sight.

  “Mmm mmm mmm,” said the alpacas, heads bobbing on their long necks. They thought they had seen it all, and now this. Governor Thomas’s ghost just sucked on his pipe, having already forgotten that Pearleen had been there in the first place. His oblivious presence was reassuring. The phantom alpacas gradually resumed their day, cropped living green grass that stayed intact, swallowed nothing into their transparent stomachs, then regurgitated it into the cud they would happily chew for a thousand years.

  * * *

  —

  It’s a mighty poor place that has only one name, and the nearby place where Pearleen was taken—on the far side of Allegany County, in a mountain hollow near the banks of the Potomac—had been called multiple names through the years. In the early nineteenth century it was called Hermit’s Abode, because only old Ovid McCrackin lived there; in the late twentieth century it was called Chimney Hollow, because the only part left of the McCrackin place was a huge two-story brick chimney with two dark square mouths, once fireplaces, on each floor. But alongside these and other names was a more ominous one, kept alive by generations of kids who defied their grownups by exploring the place at all hours.

  “Devil’s Alley,” said Pearleen aloud, still a little dizzy from her wild ride. She had flown just a foot above the B & O line (yes, she forced herself to admit, flown was the word) until she reached the Cumberland station, where no one seemed to pay her any attention at all—probably because she didn’t, in some sense, actually exist at that point, at least not in downtown Cumberland. Just as she looked likely to crash head-on into a locomotive headed for Frostburg, she jumped the tracks, passed over the taverns and/or whorehouses, and resumed her flight above the C & O Canal, its water so still she could have seen her inverted green self below her feet the whole way. But that nauseated her, so she looked forward instead.

  Devil’s Alley was to Pearleen only a set of names and a chimney she had passed once or twice, rather than a place where she knew anyone. To her knowledge, old Ovid McCrackin haunted some other spot, if he was anyplace. So she walked past the homeplace, her back to the river, and entered deeper into the hollow, along the bed of a long-gone rail spur that probably led, as most Appalachian spurs did, to the entrance of a played-out mine.

  This turned out to be the case, and pacing in the mouth of the mine, just inside the shade, was a rangy and familiar figure, his hands clasped together at the small of his back. He wore knee-high boots and the tailcoat of an earlier era. Someone who didn’t know him to be an ancient scoundrel and penniless flimflam artist with connections would have thought him a young and handsome antebellum man of means, perhaps a free man of color from Baltimore—and Pearleen, who knew him all too well, was willing to grant the handsome part, anyway. As she approached, she heard him mutter:

  “Pearleen Sunday, oh Sunday, please let me in.

  I’m weary of devils and shackles and sin.”

  She started yelling well before she reached him, and he whirled at the sound, with an embarrassing look of elation.

  “What you mean, Petey Wheatstraw? Calling me like I was a saint, or a dog?”

  “Pearleen! You’re here!” He ran to meet her as if to hug her to his chest and twirl her three times around, but her glare stopped him a couple of feet away. He stood there, two heads taller than her, and quivered. No two buttons on his fine checked waistcoat matched. “Thank you for coming, Pearleen!—for not ignoring your old friend Petey. Thank you, thank you, thank you!” He clasped his hands before him and shook them over his head, like he had won a fight.

  “It ain’t like I had a choice,” Pearleen said. “That spell of yours scooped me up like I was a pile of mine tailings, and dumped me here.”

  “Oh, come off it,” Petey said. His manner changed instantly. “Don’t play naïve with me. You could have stepped out of the way, when you heard it coming, and you know it.”

  “And I would have, had I known it was you,” Pearleen lied. Corrupted already, she realized. Just by his presence!

  “Besides, it was sheer luck you happened to be in the vicinity,” Petey said. “That spell ain’t good for more’n a hundred miles, even if you don’t get interference from temperature inversions and fault tremors and off-year elections.”

  “But why bring me here at all, to this…nowhere place?” Pearleen hated to criticize any spot of human habitation, given that she had spent years of happy childhood among the freaks and wonders of a Chattanooga dime museum, but she had to admit, as she surveyed the gray rocks and gray weeds and gray dirt, that Petey normally frequented more happening places.

  In reply, Petey thrust three extended fingers at the sky, the knuckles of his trembling hand in her face. He held it there so long, and looked so angry, that she thought it might be an obscene gesture, and was too busy shuffling through possibilities to be offended. “Three times!” Petey cried. “This is my third go-round to this place. And whenever I try to walk out of the hollow, BLIM! I get knocked back on my tailbone. All’s I can do is curse the rocks and the railbed, and wait to be moved to the next place.” To Pearleen’s shock and dismay, a single tear rolled out of Petey’s left eye and down his cheek. “At least here, I don’t get my ass kicked,” he said, “or get shot at
by Union artillery, or have to saw wood, or mill corn, or some other work for the white man. Did you know the air percussion can kill you, just as the shell passes by?”

  Pearleen spent a few seconds not processing any of this, then said: “Petey, this is a monologue already in progress. You’ll have to back up a ways, really you will.”

  “You’re right,” Petey said. He sighed and ran his hands through his close-cropped hair. “Oh, where to start? Pull up a soft rock over there, Pearleen, and I’ll tell you.”

  Then, with many interruptions and backtracks, Petey told an only somewhat garbled version of his many repetitious travels and adventures over recent days, from California to New Orleans to New England and back again.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Pearleen said, forgetting for a moment who she was talking to. “You’re under a loconautic spell, repetitions and all.”

  “A loco-what? Talk English, girl.”

  “My, my, a magic term even Petey Wheatstraw don’t know. That must be arcane. Well, your ignorance ain’t too surprising, I guess. All’s I know about loconautics, myself, is the definition. See, loconautics enables a wizard to travel from place to place by skipping around. You board a train in Cumberland because you want to get to Baltimore, but you got to go through Hancock and Hagerstown and a lot of other places you don’t care about. Well, loconautics avoids everything that ain’t where the wizard wants to be.”

  “But all us wizards go where we please, normally,” Petey said. “I mean, sure, you walk every step of your path, ’cause you’re stuck on that I-must-walk-the-Earth thing—but you don’t have to. You don’t even need the train or the tracks. So how’s this loco-whatsis different?”

  “It sort of does need a track, but the track ain’t anything you can map with a compass. It’s a track the wizard lays down, independent of the surface features of the Earth. The track is based on other things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like how many dogs live in a place, and how many of them are happy, or sad. You could make you a track, for example, that connected the places with at least a hundred and thirteen happy dogs, or the places where at least one person is aged exactly nineteen years, three months and six days, or all the places in North America where Roman coins have been dug out of the Earth. Or you could just do it the easy way, by place name. That’s the track you’ve set yourself, Petey. You’re on the way to visiting every place named after the Devil himself. It’s the longest and oldest and crookedest track there is.”

  “Now wait a minute! This ain’t my doing, I tell you. I ain’t no, what-do-you-call-’em, loconauticator.”

  “Loconaut. It’s like the old song says:

  “My lover is a loconaut,

  She moves through space and time.

  Her travels take her far from me,

  But her heart is always mine.

  Some days a girl in pigtails,

  Some days she’s old and gray.

  I wonder who has aged her,

  In those lands far away.

  She brings me ice in summer sun

  And roses in the snow.

  How I wish that I could go along

  Wherever she does go.”

  “Huh,” Petey said. “That’s right pretty—the way you sing it, anyway—but I never heard that song before.”

  “Oh, you probably heard an earlier version. You know how the old songs change topics, and shake themselves, and bleed one into the other, and take on new words with time. This one, when I first heard it, was about an aeronaut, but loconaut scans just as well, don’t you think?”

  “Uh-huh. Since when did that song get a loconaut in it?”

  “Why, I just now put it there, come to think of it. Because what’s happening to you ought to be real, and nothing is real until there’s a song about it. But Petey, you’re right about this being none of your doing. To build a track for someone else to ride on, and to be stuck on for the rest of their days, that would take a powerful loconaut indeed—and I mean powerful like a high tide, or a baby’s smile, or a volcano. Only the one who gave you that ticket can take it away, Petey, and until they do, you’ll ride that ride till you drop. But who put you on that Old Crooked Track, I cannot say. I don’t know anyone that powerful.”

  “You don’t, huh? Well, I sure do. And you already met him, once, I believe.”

  Pearleen looked blank, which is hard for a wise woman to do.

  “When you were just a girl,” Petey continued. “In the front yard of the Winchester House. Only you were a lot bigger than him, at the time.”

  “Oh, my Lord!” Pearleen said, though that oath was precisely the opposite of who she had in mind. “You mean your father-in-law!”

  “Yes, my infernal majesty father-in-law, who you last saw trapped in a Civil War soldier’s old boot,” Petey said. “I figured that shoe would drop directly, pardon the pun. A girl don’t meet the Devil every day.”

  “You don’t know much about girls, then, but Petey, what did you do to make the Devil so mad at you? Did you run around on his daughter? Steal from the cashbox? Bargain for souls one-on-one, and cut out the Old Man?”

  Petey looked fidgety from the beginning of the recitation, and more so by the end. “I wouldn’t put it quite that-away,” he finally said. “It’s not stealing if you intend to pay it back…and bargaining don’t enter into a straight-up offer of trade, take it or leave it…And as for what you good girls call ‘running around,’ well, I prefer to think of it as spreading the seed of corruption, which is my job, after all. Besides, that wife of mine done ‘run around’ farther than the entire staff of the House of Blue Lights—and having met that house’s entire staff, I know whereof I speak. Not that I criticize her, mind you. Why, I admire her gumption. A girl ought to see the world before she settles down, especially if she ain’t never gone settle down…eh, Pearleen?”

  “If you dare to wink at me, Petey Wheatstraw, I will turn my back on you this instant and every instant to come, forever.”

  Frozen in a half-wink for a second or two, Petey got out of it by flexing his face grotesquely, as if for jaw exercise, though he was careful to shut neither eye. “Excuse me, ma’am,” Petey said and rubbed his cheek. “I get a little tic there, when I’m tired. The muscles seize up.”

  “I’ll seize something,” Pearleen said. “Well, if it’s Old Scratch who’s loconauted you, you are slap out of luck. You’ll just have to throw yourself on his mercy, to get out of it one day.”

  “Oh, believe me, if I could get in the same place as him, even for one skinny minute, I’d put an end to this business, all right. I got a plan for that. But Pearleen, I can’t even talk to him! As long as he stays off the track I’m on, I’ll never see him again. No, what I need, you see, is someone to intercede on my behalf.” He gave her a look that was half exhilaration and half nausea, which Pearleen had learned through painful experience was meant to convey abject supplication.

  “Oh, no,” Pearleen said.

  “Someone who can go wherever they please…”

  “Oh, no,” Pearleen said again.

  “…and track down the Devil, wherever he may be…and, ideally, someone the Devil already sort of, kind of, owes a favor to.”

  “You can go to hell and wait on that,” Pearleen blurted, then stomped her foot in dismay. Among the countless frustrations of conversation with Petey, his daily existence put so many of her favorite oaths into a terrible new register of literality. “Dammit,” she said unhappily, and knew that Petey had done again what he did so often and so well: talked her into something that she just knew was a bad idea.

  * * *

  —

  Meeting at a crossroads was, of course, expected, but the one in the Mississippi Delta, the famous one, had been burned long ago. Tourists!

  So Pearleen went instead to Saluda County, South Carolina, where US
378 and State Highway 391 come together in a roundabout three hundred feet across, so unusual at the time it was built that all the neighbors just called it “the traffic circle,” as if it were the only one. National Guard pilots used to bomb it with sandbags, for practice, because from above it looked like a target, as so many things do.

  Pearleen hoped she looked like one, as she stood ramrod straight in the middle of the new-mown grass at the center of the circle at noon. She didn’t appreciate being in the hot, but for a proper meet-up, the clock had to say twelve—everyone knew that—and she certainly did not want to attract the attention of Old You-Know-Who at the other end of the day, in the black dark.

  To make sure she was visible to him, she made herself invisible to everyone else. Well, not so much invisible—that never worked out too well—as just beneath everyone’s notice, so none of the troopers in patrol cars and young’uns in school buses and commuters in station wagons who drove around her would pay the least bit of attention to the girl-woman in heavy boots who stood in the grassy midpoint of the traffic circle with a cardboard sign that said, in red Sharpie, “HAIL SATAN.”

  Through the decades, she had accumulated countless reasons to suspect that she had the old man’s attention already. But this was the first time she had tested her suspicion.

  She stood there and stood there in the heat of the day, until everything she’d eaten for lunch at the Circle Diner—a fried-baloney sandwich with cheese, with pigskins and pimiento on the side and a big carton of Hickory Hill chocolate milk—started to wear off, except maybe for the pigskins that would be with her always, and she wished she’d brought some bonus baloney with her. But whenever she checked her cathead pocketwatch, she saw that it was still noon, and that was a good sign.

  Finally, all the traffic in the circle drove away in all directions, toward Saluda or Batesburg or Prosperity or the lake, and was replaced by no traffic at all. At the moment she realized this, she also registered that the breeze had died, that the leaves in the trees were still, that all the visible businesses, the diner and Buddy’s Marine and the VFD, now looked deserted, as no one came in or out. A squirrel in the edge of the nearby grass was frozen in place in midair, as if arrested in midjump, and she felt sorry for it. But she knew the squirrel didn’t have long to wait, because she could hear the Devil’s car a-coming, from the direction of Batesburg.