Phyllis Wong and the Return of the Conjuror

by Geoffrey McSkimming

  Phyllis raised her eyebrows, hoping that he would elaborate on the thing that he was searching for. But he merely smiled more widely at her and shook his head slowly. ‘It is not the nowness for that,’ he told her gently. ‘I will tell you when the nowness is ready.’

  ‘Hmm,’ she said. She smiled back at him—the same smile that had travelled down between them through the generations. Then she thought of something. ‘Great-grandfather?’

  ‘Yes, my dear?’

  ‘How do you know what the names for the Pockets are? Did you come up with the names? Or are there signposts or something when you come across a Pocket that tell you what it is?’

  ‘No, no signposts. In fact, there is nothing to even tell you that a Pocket is there before you. But I find that I can often detect it because of my awareness . . . the same sort of awareness that you had when the cat scratched you at that lady’s house.’ He nodded. ‘The awareness is necessary to be able to know where the Pockets are.’

  ‘So you did name them?’

  ‘I did. They are merely names I invented to categorise each type of Pocket.’ He gave a small chuckle. ‘I have found, Phyllis, that the clearer your head is, especially when you are engaged in something so mind-stretching as Transiting, the easier it will be. I just thought that if I could give the Pockets names, I could get things clearer in my own head, and at least keep that part of the Transiting a little less confused.’

  Phyllis looked at the four slates spread before her. ‘So how did you come up with the names?’

  ‘Ah. It was simple. The middle part of each name is just something I already knew. A term from geology, to do with rocks. Or a word for a small cupboard or store-room. And then I merely split another word—a magical word, if you like—and put it at either end of the middle part.’

  Phyllis had been re-reading each Pocket name as he had been explaining this to her. She looked up at him.

  On the fifth slate he wrote a simple word:

  Anon

  ‘Anon,’ said Phyllis.

  ‘Such a beautiful word, when you stop to think about it. Soon.’ He stared up to the high ceiling of the basement. ‘So many possibilities, if only we know where to seek them . . .’

  Phyllis looked at all the slates on the floor in front of her. She read each name again, savouring each one of them as though they were her favourite chocolate confections that she was eating at The Délicieux Café. Anamygduleon. Andruseon. Anvugheon. Anaumbryon.

  The Pockets of Wallace Wong.

  She looked up and caught him smiling at her. ‘And now,’ he announced, rising to his feet (and being careful not to wake Daisy), ‘shall we go?’

  Phyllis stood. Her legs were shaky, and she took several deep breaths to try to steady herself. ‘Let’s do it!’ she whispered.

  ‘Now I shall show you how it is done. Where would you like to go?’ he asked her, taking her hand.

  ‘I want to go where you go. Anywhere you want to show me!’

  ‘Hmm,’ hmmed Wallace Wong. He studied her face for a moment. ‘You like History, yes?’

  ‘Sure.’ It was one of Phyllis’s favourite subjects at school, and she had even come first in it last year.

  ‘All righty.’ He let go of her hand and went off to one of the rows of shelves near to the stairs. ‘Most important: one needs to have something from the place one intends to visit. Some sort of object that came from that place. It acts, so I believe, as a sort of guiding signal. Some sort of passport, if you like.’

  Phyllis watched as he started rummaging around in the boxes and amongst the cylinders and silk production cabinets on the shelves. ‘What are you looking for?’ she asked. ‘Where are we going to Transit?’

  ‘You’ll see. Just be patient, my dear. Patience is a golden whisker that can never be twiddled.’

  This time he didn’t even turn around as he sensed the look that Phyllis was giving him. ‘I know what I am meaning,’ he muttered.

  Phyllis smiled. Her legs were still shaking a bit, but she didn’t feel scared—just exhilarated by the possibility of anon.

  While Wallace continued rummaging around for his object, Phyllis remembered something that Clement had said to her after they had visited Thundermallow’s, when he was decked out in his jumble of disguises. ‘I could go anywhere and they wouldn’t know me, not even my own mother,’ he had announced excitedly.

  Now, those very words took on a whole new meaning. Phyllis Wong realised that she could go anywhere and no one would ever know her. And she didn’t need cheap and strange disguises for that to happen. For some reason, she found that prospect exciting.

  ‘Ah! Found it!’ Wallace came back to her.

  Daisy opened one eye, checked that Phyllis and he were still there, and then closed her eye again, returning to her happy dreams of tigers who needed chasing and rounding up.

  ‘What’ve you got?’ Phyllis asked her great-grandfather, trying to see what he was concealing in his palm.

  He held out his hand and opened his fingers. Phyllis saw a small object: a lapis lazuli stone that had been carved in the shape of a beetle.

  ‘A scarab,’ said Wallace. ‘It’s from Egypt, from the Khan el-Khalili, the biggest souk in Cairo.’

  ‘Souk?’ repeated Phyllis.

  ‘The bazaar. The biggest bazaar district in Cairo. The man who sold it to me told me that it was ancient, over four thousand years old, and so I paid a lot of money for it. That was back in 1930, when I went to Egypt to buy some fabrics and furniture I could use in an act I’d designed—Prestidigitations of the Pyramids!’ He turned the scarab over and frowned. ‘I’ve always wanted to find out its exact age. Hopefully we shall be able to Transit back to when it was made.’

  He handed her the scarab. Her palm was glistening.

  ‘Ready?’ he asked, his eyes gleaming.

  ‘Yep.’ She curled her fingers around the scarab. ‘Oh, what about Daisy?’

  Wallace glanced over at the small dog sleeping by Phyllis’s top hat. Her chest was rising and falling so gently that he had to watch her for a few moments to see if she was still breathing. ‘Oh, I think we should leave her be. Let us follow the robust cliché and let the sleeping pup lie, yes? Besides, when we return, she will still be there. In fact, she will only have slept for a few seconds, no matter how long we are away.’

  ‘Wow,’ said Phyllis.

  ‘So,’ Wallace said, taking her by her hand again. ‘Off to Cairo?’

  ‘Off to Cairo.’ Phyllis was tingling all over, and she could feel her stomach becoming strangely lighter.

  He led her to the stairs and positioned her so that she was standing in front of him. ‘Hold on tightly to the scarab,’ he told her. ‘Do not let it go, no matter what happens.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Now,’ he said, peering ahead, ‘look carefully. Up there. Concentrate hard on what will emerge, and divest yourself of all other thoughts. Think of nothing.’

  Phyllis looked at the dimness on the stairs in front of her. She half-closed her eyes and tried to empty her mind and her memory and her imagination of everything that had been in there.

  ‘Ah!’ she gasped. ‘I see . . . it’s . . .’

  ‘Your first Pocket,’ whispered her great-grandfather. He held her shoulders firmly.

  ‘My first TimePocket,’ Phyllis said.

  ‘Let us move forward.’

  Together, slowly, flowingly, they moved ahead.

  Phyllis almost stopped breathing as they stepped towards what appeared to be a cavity, blurred around the edges with a faint green glow, and twinkling with out-of-focus beads of brightness. Beyond it was a dense darkness, through which no light shone.

  ‘Steady, my dear,’ said Wallace Wong.

  Now they were right on the threshold of this deep, dark place. The twinkling beads of brightness were above them and beside them. Things were getting blurrier. Things were becoming thick . . .

  ‘Oh, yes, Phyllis,’ came Wallace’s voice in her ear, muffled and drawn-out and de
ep like a ship’s horn, ‘I almost forgot. There is one thing more I have not told you!’

  ‘What?’ she yelled as a huge roar of wind engulfed them.

  ‘The Pockets are always hidden on staircases!’

  Bizarre bazaar

  Everything stretched before her, as though all that existed, and all that had ever existed, was being pulled and twisted and extended—wobblingly, ever-onwards, into the distance of all Times jumbled.

  Phyllis shut her eyes as the blurriness whizzed past her and her great-grandfather. But even with her eyelids closed, scrunched tight, she detected changes in the lightness through which she and Wallace were Transiting: now everything was dark, pitch-black, and then things seemed to be lightening, glowing brighter, before fading down to dimness again.

  She could feel Wallace’s hands gripping her shoulders as she and he moved forward. Forward and backward, she thought, as she felt her hair whipping around her shoulders and into his face. She heard him gasping, half-coughing, as he copped a mouthful of her long, dark locks, and she sensed him moving his head quickly to one side to try to avoid another mouthful.

  And she heard something else: a soft, vibrating, high hum. It travelled with them as they sped along, swooping all around them, gently cocooning her with its reassuring tone. Phyllis had heard a similar sound sometimes when she had caught ferries, late at night in the city, when she’d been coming home with her father after an excursion to the amusement park by the wharves. She had always imagined, whenever she’d heard that sound on the ferries as they glided across the harbour, that it was the sound made by invisible wings in the cool night air . . .

  Her stomach lurched, as if it were a single solitary sock trapped in a spin dryer, flinging around on full cycle. Phyllis gulped, as she felt something rise up in her throat. She felt like she was about to be sick. She pushed the thing back down, and took a deep breath, opening her mouth wide. But that wasn’t the best thing to do; the wind shot into her mouth like an invisible cannonball, and her cheeks blew out into balloons of fleshiness, and her whole face felt like it was being flattened against an unseen wall. Struggling, she managed to get her mouth closed again. She wouldn’t try that any time she was Transiting, she decided.

  But it did manage to keep whatever was rising from her stomach at bay, and she found that, if she concentrated and breathed steadily through her nostrils, she could manage some sort of control over her insides.

  She could feel nothing beneath her feet, or anywhere around her, except for Wallace’s hands on her shoulders. She felt weightless, and tiny, and she felt like she was being warped—squeezed and pulled and whirled, all at the same time. She was giddy and zingly and a bit nauseous. She was a bit scared. But above all, she was excited. It was an excitement she had never felt; an excitement that seemed to electrify her, that almost made her forget who she was and where she had come from. It was an extraordinary sensation.

  Presently she sensed that they were slowing down. The lightness and darkness and glowingness began to even out, until a steady, soft brightness warmed her closed eyelids. She felt her stomach settling, and Wallace’s grip on her shoulders relaxing. Her hair had stopped billowing about in all directions. And she felt something firm beneath her shoes.

  ‘We’re here,’ Wallace said in her ear. ‘We have arrived.’

  Phyllis opened her eyes. Wallace turned her around to face him and let go of her shoulders. He squinted and looked her quickly up and down. ‘Ah, you seem dandy,’ he said, smiling. ‘Please, open your eyes wide for me.’

  She did so, making herself look suddenly surprised.

  He laughed, and then he pinched her cheek (she pulled away at that). ‘You have Transited well,’ he said to her. ‘I detect no signs of turbulence coming from within.’

  ‘Oh, you should be glad you weren’t my stomach,’ Phyllis said. ‘I felt like I was going to throw up back there.’

  ‘But you did not. You came through. With flying colours, great-granddaughter. I am very proud of you.’

  Phyllis saw the greenness creeping back into his eyes. He put his hand to his forehead and shook his head. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I am glad to see that you do not succumb to Transitaciousness as I do. It is reassuring to know that it does not run in the family.’

  He straightened up his midnight-blue tail coat and pulled down his waistcoat. Then he did something that made Phyllis giggle: he extended his right leg straight out, to the side, and gave it a vigorous shake. He lowered his leg and repeated the action with his left leg. Then he lowered that leg and rubbed his hands together in a business-like fashion. ‘That was an Andruseon, I am sure of it.’

  ‘Ah,’ Phyllis said.

  ‘If it were a lesser Pocket, I would probably not be feeling so much of these effects,’ Wallace added. ‘Now, the scarab?’

  Phyllis opened her fingers and handed the scarab to him.

  ‘Thank you, my dear.’

  ‘You’re welcome,’ she said. Then, for the first time, she began to become aware of where they were. It was as if a heavy veil was being lifted, and sounds and smells and light started seeping all around her . . .

  Phyllis and her great-grandfather were standing at the top of a tall, but not enormous, slightly dusty marble staircase. They were overlooking a vast maze of market stalls and awnings—some of them brightly striped, others tatty and faded by the sun. For as far as she could see, under the awnings and between the crowds of people, there were benches and tables and shop counters, piled with all manner of merchandise: heavy carpets and rugs; gleaming copper lanterns, old tarnished lamps and fancy coloured-glass lightshades; mountains of ancient, leather-bound books; antique crystal chandeliers; birdcages imprisoning beautiful scarlet and yellow-and-blue macaws and other bright green-and-orange parrots; vast bins full to the brim with rich and intensely coloured spices—cumin, turmeric, paprika, saffron; big tubs and bowls filled with fish and crabs and lobsters; piles of papyrus sheets, decorated for the tourist market with paintings of the pyramids and the Nile and scenes from the ancient Book of the Dead; ornate glass hookahs and water pipes; and other, strange-looking objects that Phyllis had never seen before.

  Above everything, towering and spearing elegantly upwards, was a series of beautiful stone arches which fed into a network of huge, vaulted ceilings that, here and there, were opened to the skies. The ceilings appeared to stretch on for miles. Phyllis gasped as she beheld the bold, mighty archways . . . they beckoned her mind towards higher places, places that she had never contemplated, places suggesting the promise of mystery and the unknown . . .

  She brought her gaze down to earth again. Between the stalls and shops were small alcoves where a few tables and chairs had been set up.

  Men were sitting at some of these tables, smoking hookahs and playing dominoes, or drinking glasses of what looked like tar-black tea. Most of the men were dressed in the traditional galabiyya—the long, flowing, cool cotton garment popular in Egypt. Phyllis had seen pictures of these garments when she had done a project for school a few years ago.

  The sounds of the souk were now all around her: shouting coming from a far corner; loud conversations near the foot of the staircase; some high-pitched music wafting through from a quarter over to the right. Angry voices swelled from somewhere, then disappeared as quickly as they had started; she heard laughter—deep, hearty laughter of maybe a dozen people. They all sounded like men.

  Snortings, too, she heard, and loud, deep bellowings. She saw, by a big marble archway, about two dozen camels, kneeling by a wall. Phyllis smiled as she realised how Daisy knelt in almost exactly the same way as these larger, placidlooking beasts who were busy chewing their cuds or spitting at hapless tourists who were passing by too close to them.

  Phyllis took a deep breath. The bazaar smelled of all things: the spices, including the pungent aroma of cloves; the dust; the heat coming off the animals and the ground; the sweat and the sickly sweet perfumes which were also on sale (the perfumes, not the sweat, were for sale—althou
gh, as Phyllis beheld the vast array of offerings here at the Khan el-Khalili, she wouldn’t have been surprised if you could buy small bottles of human perspiration. It seemed that everything under the sun was available here for a price).

  She put her hand on the cool marble balustrade of the stairs, and she saw that it was impregnated with a fine and beautiful design of mosaic work—bright blue lapis lazuli diamond shapes and vivid golden stones forming a snake-scale pattern that ran along the length of the balustrade. She smiled and ran a finger across the stones.

  ‘This is a beautiful TimePocket, to use your word,’ Wallace said. ‘I am glad you had such a one for your first experience. Take it from me, Phyllis, they are not all as pleasant as this. Why, sometimes I have emerged onto such ramshackle and putrid stairs that they look like they have been brought forth from the final days of the Earth . . .’ He shuddered and shook his head at the memory.

  Phyllis was tingling. She had always been fascinated with Egypt, and now here she was, standing on a beautiful staircase in the heart of the Khan el-Khalili. She was smiling so much her ears were sticking out.

  Wallace asked, ‘Do you know the poem “Antigonish”?’

  Phyllis thought for a moment. ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Goes like this:

  ‘Yesterday, upon the stair,

  I met a man who wasn’t there

  He wasn’t there again today

  I wish, I wish he’d go away . . .’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Phyllis. ‘We read it at school. I like it. It’s weird. I never really knew exactly what it’s about—whether it’s about someone strange or if it’s just nonsense. I think that’s why I like it.’

  ‘That’s just the beginning of the poem,’ Wallace said. ‘I know the man who wrote it. William Mearns. A gentle chap. He’s a Transiter too, you know.’