Phyllis Wong and the Return of the Conjuror

by Geoffrey McSkimming

  ‘I discovered the Pockets,’ said Wallace Wong. ‘The places that have enabled me to Transit.’

  Phyllis went totally still. She clasped her hands in her interlocking-of-thumb-and-little-finger formation and looked at him.

  ‘I discovered,’ he told her, ‘that all through this vast world of ours, there are what I have come to call the Pockets—places invisible to most people, places that are so aligned along the planet’s rind that if you are able to access them, you will be able to Transit. Not only Transit from one Time to another, but also from one place to the next!’

  Phyllis gasped. ‘What, you mean you can go to the other side of the world, into any Time you want?’

  ‘If you know what you are doing,’ he answered. ‘And if you have the necessary objects with you.’

  ‘And you’ve been using these . . . Pockets . . . to Transit all this time? Since that night in 1936?’

  ‘I have. My constant journey. Only recently have I started coming back, to your Time. But then I go again. I am always moving.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why do you stay away for so long?’

  ‘Ah. There is something I am looking for, Phyllis.’

  Phyllis heard his voice go softer when he told her that. It was as though he had spoken to her from behind a silky screen. ‘What?’ she asked.

  He smiled—a slightly weary smile, she thought. ‘Ah,’ he said gently. ‘The Time will come when I will divulge what that is to you. But that Time is not the Time of nowness, my dear.’

  Phyllis unclasped her hands and stroked Daisy’s folded-over ear thoughtfully.

  ‘And I like to keep moving. Always to stay on the go. In my search, I find that I need to keep moving about.’

  ‘Don’t you ever get lonely when you’re away?’ she asked Wallace Wong.

  ‘No, great-granddaughter. Never! How can I feel loneliness when I can be, at any Time, surrounded by crowds, or when I find myself propelled into new cities or places where there is much to discover in my searchings? No, Phyllis, loneliness is something I do not taste. To dwell on loneliness would be like living with one hand tied behind an aardvark’s back.’

  She gave him another look.

  ‘I know what I am meaning,’ he said quickly.

  It was then that Phyllis observed that his eyes were no longer glowing that strange green. ‘Your eyes,’ she commented, peering at them.

  He smiled. ‘Not pulsating any more?’ he asked.

  ‘The bright green has left them?’

  ‘Uh-huh. They look normal.’

  ‘That is because I have settled,’ he told her. ‘It is a hazard of Transiting the way I do, Phyllis. Sometimes I do not Transit very smoothly. When that happens, my eyes are affected in the green way, and sometimes also the way I speak and the way I move is affected. It is as if, when this happens, I am struggling to communicate from behind a thick, swirling curtain of matter. When I arrive in my new Time destination, it sometimes takes me a while to re-align myself; to settle again.’

  ‘Do you Transit smoothly very much?’

  He screwed up his nose, and the ends of his neat moustache pointed upwards. ‘I wish I could say I did. But the truth is, like a man who constantly gets seasick when on a ship, I suffer from the forces of the Transiting. For a little while at least. The smoothness of the journey and the amount of discombobulation suffered by a Transiter depends on the sort of Pocket the Transiter has entered.’

  ‘Discombobulation?’ Phyllis repeated, intrigued by the word.

  ‘Giddiness,’ explained Wallace Wong, smiling. ‘Wonkiness. Judderaciousness. Whoops-a-daisyness, for want of a better term.’

  Daisy, who had started falling asleep in the deep comfort of the old sofa, looked up at the sound of her name. Phyllis stroked the back of her head, and the little dog lowered her snout so that it was between her paws, gave a small marble-gargling sound and closed her eyes again.

  ‘Some Transiters fare better in their journeys than others,’ Wallace went on.

  Phyllis looked at him, and he answered her question before she had the chance to ask it.

  ‘Yes, great-granddaughter, there are other Transiters. Others who have stumbled upon the Pockets. Others who, for one reason or another and sometimes for very dubious reasons, have become my fellow wayfarers.’ He frowned. ‘Some use the Pockets for procurement, Phyllis. Some misuse the Pockets of Time.’

  Phyllis clasped her hands again, this time tightly, and rested them on the top of her hat in her lap. ‘How many other Transiters are there?’

  ‘That I do not know. Every now and then I come across someone who is in Transit. Sometimes that person is easy to identify—they may not be Transiting smoothly, and I can detect it in their eyes or in their manner of movement or speech. Other times, it is difficult to identify the Transiter. Especially if they are not suffering any ill-effects from their journey through a Pocket.’

  ‘You keep talking about these Pockets,’ Phyllis said, turning on the sofa so she was directly facing Wallace. ‘What are they?’

  ‘Do you really want to know?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes!’ The answer shot out of her so loudly that Daisy opened her eyes and gave a short, sharp yap.

  Wallace Wong laughed. ‘Then, know you shall. But, my dear girl, you must keep this knowledge to yourself. You must try never to reveal what I am about to tell you to another soul. Only if you think it absolutely essential must you share the knowledge. We cannot have too many people cluttering up the Pockets.’

  ‘I’m a magician,’ she said, smiling. ‘I’ve had a bit of practice in keeping secrets.’

  He winked at her. ‘Which is one of the reasons why I am about to reveal some of the greatest secrets there are to you.’

  He stood and smoothed down his sticking-up hair (but he missed the hair on the top of his head, which still looked like forty thousand volts of electricity had just passed through him). Then he went to one of the tall cupboards behind the sofas and started looking for something.

  ‘It is nice to see that you have kept things, by and large, how I left them,’ he muttered over his shoulder. ‘It is good when the order of things remains. At least somewhere . . . ah! Here it is!’

  Phyllis watched as he slid out a set of five square blackboard slates and a stick of chalk. She recognised the slates as Thayer’s Famous ‘Dr Q’ Spirit Slates—props used for mind-reading tricks back in the 1930s.

  ‘For today,’ Wallace said as he came back to the sofa with them, ‘we will not use these for the Spirit Slate Writing Mystery. I merely want them to write on.’ He winked at her, raised the tails of his coat, and sat beside her and Daisy.

  ‘Now concentrate, Phyllis, for the information I am about to impart will be of great use to you if you are to—’

  He stopped and looked at her. Something had occurred to him, something that he had not anticipated. Sharing the secrets was one thing, but . . . living them . . .

  The seconds ticked by, silently, stretchingly, in that enormous basement filled with secret things, as he considered this.

  Finally Phyllis spoke. ‘If I’m to what?’

  ‘Phyllis, my dear girl,’ said Wallace. ‘I think you possess what it takes. I know how you perceive things. But I want to ask you something, and I want you to think carefully, to remember as hard as you can. If you are able to find a memory such as this, then it will all be possible.’

  Phyllis’s heart was beating quicker. She wasn’t sure what he meant. ‘Ask me,’ she said.

  Wallace Wong reached across and held her hand. ‘Have you ever, in all your life, been in a situation, or a place, where you have thought that the bounds of your reality have shifted at all? Where things have seemed to become—even for the briefest of an instant—a sort of dream? Where you have glimpsed a different place to that where you were at that particular point in Time? And where this different place, this sort of dream, has been almost real? Think,’ said Wallace Wong. ‘Remember. Recall. Cast y
ourself into your past memories . . .’

  Phyllis shut her eyes and concentrated. She cast her mind back, far back, as far back as she could remember.

  A different place. A sort of dream. An instant.

  Where the bounds of reality had shifted . . .

  She turned the phrases over in her head, letting them mingle with her memory, letting them ride her thoughts as though they were cresting the waves of her mind. Then, slowly, as if a soft light was being shone on a scene on a stage somewhere, she saw something in the darkness behind her eyelids . . .

  . . . a moment that had happened when she was younger. A moment that she had all but forgotten about; that she had never recalled until now.

  ‘Yes,’ she answered, opening her eyes and staring wide-eyed at her great-grandfather. ‘There was a time. There was a moment. When I was little.’

  Wallace Wong smiled. ‘Tell me,’ he whispered.

  Daisy gave a soft, feathery snore between them.

  ‘I must’ve been about five or six,’ said Phyllis. ‘Dad had taken me to visit an old lady he was doing some business for. We went to her house—a big old place. We were inside, in this big sitting room, and Dad was going through all this paperwork with her and I was sitting on the floor, playing with her cat.’

  Phyllis could almost see the scene before her as she was describing it.

  ‘And the cat was rolling over on the rug and I was tickling its tummy—and then, really suddenly, it rolled over, almost snapped back at me, like a furry rubber band. And it scratched me. It hissed and scratched me, slash, right across the inside of my wrist! It drew blood.

  ‘Dark red on my wrist, bright, quick. But I didn’t cry out. No, because in the very same moment the blood appeared there, I saw something. Out of the corner of my eye.’

  ‘What did you see?’ asked Wallace, leaning towards her.

  ‘It . . . it was as if a mist had spread in front of me, and through the mist I saw rooftops, lots of rooftops. It was like I was looking out from the window of a high-floor room somewhere. The rooftops weren’t modern—there weren’t any skyscrapers or anything. They were all tiled, the rooftops, dark tiles and steep, and there were little chimneys sticking up at all these strange angles. And the windows under the rooftops that I could see were all narrow, with small panes of glass . . . and the sky in the distance was all sort of cloudy and orange, and I could see some sort of tower there . . .’

  Her voice trailed off, and she blinked heavily.

  ‘Had you ever seen this place before?’

  Phyllis shook her head. ‘It was nowhere I’d ever seen.’ She bit her lip, then she remembered another detail. ‘I was only young, but for some reason I thought it was Paris.’

  ‘Ah. And you had never been there.’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘What happened then?’ asked Wallace.

  ‘Then, after I don’t know how long—it can’t have been more than a few moments, but it seemed to be longer because I can still see the scene clearly, now that it’s come back to me—I saw the blood on my wrist again, and I cried out. And Dad came over and scooped me up and put his handkerchief around my arm, and the cat had run away somewhere.’

  Wallace Wong looked like he was about to erupt with uncontainable happiness. ‘You have been shown,’ he said, holding her hand firmly. ‘You have the awareness.’

  Phyllis blinked again. ‘Huh?’

  ‘You have the openness. You had it in that moment. You have the gift. And so, my great-granddaughter, I will ask you: would you like to become a Transiter?’

  She gasped. From somewhere inside her, it was as if a brilliant golden ball had emerged instantaneously and was bouncing wildly around within her ribcage.

  ‘Did Houdini ever get in a milk bottle?’ she blurted.

  ‘Ah, strange man, that Houdini,’ said Wallace Wong. ‘He wore the most peculiar socks—’

  ‘Yes! Yes, yes, yes, yes!’ Phyllis jumped to her feet, unable to stay still. ‘I want to become a Transiter!’

  Daisy woke up, leapt off the sofa and started dancing around Phyllis’s ankles, springing up and running around the young prestidigitator.

  ‘Then,’ said Wallace Wong, clearly delighted at her response, ‘I shall reveal to you the Pockets.’

  Pockets revealed

  Phyllis knelt on the rug in front of the sofa, waiting. Daisy, opting for somewhere more comfortable, jumped back up onto the sofa, next to Wallace Wong, and snuggled down by Phyllis’s black hat.

  Wallace picked up one of the Thayer’s blackboard slates and the stick of chalk. ‘Now, my dear girl,’ he said quietly, ‘I have, in the course of my Transits, so far found that there are four sorts of Pockets. Some of these Pockets are big—very big—and others are smaller. The bigger Pockets, I have been finding, allow one to move great distances, not only through Time, but also through the world. Right across to the other side of the planet, even. The smaller Pockets are little more than blemishes, or tiny holes perhaps, or even dimples, in the fabric of Time. Through these smaller Pockets one can only Transit to the same place that one has left, but to that same place at another point in Time.’

  Phyllis listened carefully. ‘How do you know what sort of Pocket you’re entering?’ she asked.

  ‘Ah.’ Wallace Wong was about to write on the first slate, but he stopped, the chalk poised in mid-air. ‘Oftentimes, you do not. The only time you can hope to know what sort of Pocket you enter is if you have entered that Pocket at that location before. And even then, things change. Time, you see, is a never-ending oscillation . . . of uncertainty. But, I have found that usually, if you Transit through the same Pocket more than once, you will have the same sort of experience. The Time where you end up is dependent on something different . . .’

  He smiled and winked at her. Then, as Daisy began to snore feather-quietly next to him, he put the chalk to the blackboard slate and wrote. Phyllis saw his hand moving elegantly across the slate.

  When he had finished he turned the slate around and presented it to her. With her heart beating loudly, she took it from him and read the single word he had written in his beautiful flowing script:

  Anamygduleon

  ‘Anamygduleon,’ she read aloud.

  ‘The Anamygduleon,’ Wallace told her, ‘is the most powerful Pocket I have so far discovered. It was the type of Pocket I disappeared into in Venezuela in 1936; beneath that stage, in that theatre, I found my first Anamygduleon! Anamygduleons are huge, Phyllis, my dear, and they are the hardest to Transit through. I am thinking, as I go about my searching, that Anamygduleons lead you to places where events of enormous depth and meaning for the world have taken place. Places where there is great historical resonance. Where things still reverberate, like the trembling sounds of a bell after it has been rung. Places where Time has had, and still has, a precarious and shaky hold.’

  Phyllis was scarcely breathing as she listened to her great-grandfather and stared at the word in front of her.

  ‘And I find,’ he continued, ‘that on those rare occasions when I Transit through an Anamygduleon, my eyes and my speech and my movements take ages and ages to become re-equilibrialised. Until I return to normal, I am as giddy as a drunken crab with its shell filled with custard.’

  Phyllis glanced up from the slate.

  ‘Oh, I know what I am meaning,’ he said quickly. ‘Now, for the second type of Pocket.’ He put his chalk to the next slate and once again he wrote.

  When he’d finished, he handed the slate to Phyllis. Once more she read the word he had written, neatly and with a flourish:

  Andruseon

  ‘The Andruseon,’ Wallace said, ‘is another big Pocket. Not as vast, or with such strength, as the Anamygduleon, but big enough in its own right. I still suffer from Transitaciousness when I go through an Andruseon, but the effects are not as severe as when I use the Anamygduleons. I have found that an Andruseon Pocket will enable me to Transit a long distance in both Space and Time.’

  ‘How far?’ Phylli
s asked.

  ‘Ah, my dear, it all depends on where you are trying to go. And, as I mentioned before, that all depends on what objects you have with you.’

  Phyllis put the second slate on the floor, next to the first. She watched as Wallace wrote on the next small blackboard.

  ‘And so they get smaller, these Pockets,’ he said, turning the slate around and handing it to her. There, before her eyes, was the word:

  Anvugheon

  ‘I find that I do much of my Transiting through Anvugheon Pockets,’ Wallace informed her. ‘I think that perhaps that is because there are more of them around. Anvugheons are quick passages, Phyllis. Not much turbulence or fuss by the time you get to the other end. Smooth is the flow through an Anvugheon, and that is the way I like it.’

  ‘So,’ Phyllis said, ‘you can’t Transit as far through an Anvugheon as you can through an Anamygduleon or an Andruseon?’

  ‘That is correct. But an Anvugheon is very useful, nonetheless. Say, for example, if I have left my wallet somewhere and I discover the loss a few days later. An Anvugheon Pocket will enable me to return swiftly to the place where my forgetfulness occurred.’

  ‘Wow.’ Phyllis’s mind started racing away with all the possibilities. To be able to return to a Time and place where something had gone wrong . . .

  ‘And the fourth Pocket,’ said Wallace Wong. He had written on the fourth slate and he leant down and gave it to Phyllis.

  She turned it around and saw the word:

  Anaumbryon

  ‘An Anaumbryon is the simplest of the Pockets I have so far encountered,’ Wallace said. ‘I like to think of it as a blemish on the skin of Time, a place where one can slip through easily and come back again, just as easily. Whenever I have Transited through an Anaumbryon, I have always ended up in the exact same spot from where I had left, and the Time difference is minimal—sometimes only an hour before I had left. Sometimes, Phyllis, I go to the same place only minutes before I had left!’

  ‘This is fantastic,’ Phyllis muttered.

  ‘Ah, that is so. That is how it seems. But I have been doing it now for nearly a century, so to me it has become a way of life. A way of being.’ He smiled, and Phyllis saw a great peacefulness and calm in his face. ‘I love the way I am being, Phyllis, my dear. I will love this way of being all the way until I find that for which I am searching . . .’