The Magus

by John Fowles

  Behind and beneath everything there was the vile and unforgivable, the ultimate betrayal not just of me, but of all finer instincts, by Julie … Lily … whoever she was. I started to think of her as Lily again, perhaps because her first mask now seemed truer, more true because more obviously false, than the others. I tried to imagine what she really was – obviously a consummate young actress, and consummately immoral into the bargain. Only a prostitute could have behaved as she had; a pair of prostitutes, because I guessed that her sister, June, Rose, might well have been prepared to carry out that final abominable act. Probably they would have liked me to be thus doubly humiliated.

  All their stories had been lies; or groundbait. The letters were plainly forgeries – they could not make it so easy for me to trace them. In a grim flash I guessed: none of my post left or came to the island unread. From that I leapt to the grim realization that they must all along have known the truth about Alison. When Conchis had advised me to go back and marry her he must have known she was dead; Lily must have known she was dead. My mind plunged sickeningly, as if I had walked off the edge of the world. I had seen forged newspaper cuttings about the sisters, therefore if it was just a case of forging cuttings… I went to my jacket, where I had put Ami Taylor’s letter after ‘June’ had read it outside the school gates. It was still there. I stared at it and its attachments, searched for some sign that they were all invented … in vain. I remembered that other envelope that I had left in my room and not shown her, with its superscription in Alison’s own handwriting, the pathetic little tangle of withered flowers. Only she could have given them that.

  Alison.

  I stared into my own eyes in the mirror. Suddenly her honesty, her untreachery – her true death – was the last anchor left. If she too, if she … I was swept away. The whole of life became a conspiracy. I strained back through time to seize Alison, to be absolutely sure of her; to seize a quintessential Alison beyond all her powers of love or hate, beyond all their corrupting. For a while I let my mind wander into a bottomless madness. Supposing all my life that last year had been the very opposite of what Conchis so often said – so often, to trick me once again? – about life in general. That is, the very opposite of hazard. The flat in Russell Square … but I had got it by answering a chance advertisement in the New Statesman. Meeting Alison that very first evening … but I might so easily have not gone to the party, not have waited those few minutes … and Margaret, Ann Taylor, all of them … the hypothesis became top-heavy, and crashed.

  I stared at myself. They were trying to drive me mad, to brainwash me in some astounding way. But I clung to reality. I clung, too, to something in Alison, something like a tiny limpid crystal of eternal non-betrayal. Like a light in the darkest night. Like a teardrop. An eternal inability to be so cruel. And the tears that for a brief moment formed in my own eyes were a kind of bitter guarantee that she was indeed dead.

  They were not only tears for her, but also tears of rage at Conchis and Lily; at the certainty that they knew she was dead and were using this new doubt, this torturing possibility that could not be a possibility, to rack me. To perform on me, for some incomprehensible reason, a viciously cruel vivisection of the mind.

  As if they only wanted to punish me; and punish me; and punish me again. With no right; and no reason.

  I sat with my hands clenched against my head.

  Fragments of things they had said kept on coming back, with dreadful double meanings; a constant dramatic irony. Almost every line Conchis and Lily had spoken was ironic; right up to that last, transparently double-meaning dialogue with ‘June’.

  That blank weekend: of course they had cancelled it to give me reasonable time to receive the ‘letter of reference’ from the bank; holding me back only to hurl me faster down the slope.

  Again and again images of Lily, the Lily of the Julie phase, surged back; moments of passion, that last total surrender of her body – and other moments of gentleness, sincerity, spontaneous moments that could not have been rehearsed but could only have sprung out of a deep identification with the part she was playing. I even went back to that earlier theory I had had, that she was acting under hypnosis. But it wasn’t conceivable.

  I lit another Philip Morris. I tried to think of the present. But everything drove me back to the same anger, the same profound humiliation. Only one thing could ever give me relief. Some equal humiliation of Lily. It made me furious that I had not been more violent with her before. That was indeed the ultimate indignity: that my own small stock of decency had been used against me.

  There was noise outside, and the door opened. The crew-cut blond sailor came in; behind him was one of the other men, in the same black trousers, black shirt, black gym shoes. And behind him came Anton. He was in a doctor’s collarlcss white overall. A pocket with pens. A bright German-accented voice; as if on his rounds. And he had no limp now.

  ‘How are you feeling?’

  I stared at him; controlled myself.

  ‘Wonderful. Enjoying every minute of it.’

  He looked at the breakfast tray. ‘You would like more coffee?’

  I nodded. He gestured to the second man, who took the tray out. Anton sat on the chair by the table, and the young sailor leaned easily against the door. Beyond appeared a long corridor, and right at the end steps leading up to daylight. It was much too big a cistern for a private house. Anton watched me. I refused to speak, and we sat there in silence for some time.

  ‘I am a doctor. I come to examine you.’ He studied me. ‘You feel … not too bad?’

  I leant back against the wall; stared at him.

  He waved his finger reprovingly. ‘Please to answer.’

  ‘I love being humiliated. I love having a girl I like trampling over every human decency. Every time that stupid old bugger tells me another lie I feel thrills of ecstasy run down my spine.’ I shouted. ‘Now where the hell am I?’

  He gave me the impression that my words were meaningless; it was my manner he was watching.

  He said slowly, ‘Good. You have woken up.’ He sat with his legs crossed, leaning back a little; a very fair imitation of a doctor in his consulting room.

  ‘Where’s that little tart?’ He seemed not to understand. ‘Lily. Julie. “Whatever her name is.’

  He smiled. ‘ “Tart” means bad woman?’

  I shut my eyes. My head was beginning to ache. I had to keep cool. The man in the door turned; the second man appeared down the distant steps with a tray and came and put it on the table. Anton poured out a cup for me and one for himself. The sailor passed me mine. Anton swallowed his quickly.

  ‘My friend, you are wrong. She is a good girl. Very intelligent. Very brave. Oh yes.’ He contradicted my sneer. ‘Very brave.’

  ‘All I have to say to you is that when I get out of here I am going to create such bloody fucking hell for all of you that you’ll wish to Christ you – ‘

  He raised his hand, calmingly, forgivingly. ‘Your mind is not well. We have given you many drugs these last days.’

  I took a breath.

  ‘How many days?’

  ‘It is Sunday.’

  Three totally missing days: I remembered the wretched exam papers. The boys, the other masters … the whole school could not be in league with Conchis. It was the enormity of the abuse that bewildered me, far more than the aftermath of the drug; that they could crash through law, through my job, through respect for the dead, through everything that made the world customary and habitable and orientated. And it was not only a denial of my world; it was a denial of what I had come to understand was Conchis’s world.

  I stared at Anton.

  ‘I suppose this is all good homely fun to you Germans.’

  ‘I am Swiss. And my mother is Jewish. By the way.’

  His eyebrows were very heavy, charcoal tufts, his eyes amused. I swilled the last of the coffee in my cup, then threw it in his face. It stained his white coat. He pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his face and said
something to the man beside him. He did not look angry; merely shrugged, then glanced at his watch.

  ‘The time is ten thirty- … eight. Today we have the trial and you must be awoke. So good.’ He touched his coat. ‘I think you are awoke.’

  He stood up.

  ‘Trial?’

  ‘Very soon we shall go and you will judge us.’

  ‘Judge you!’

  ‘Yes. You think this is like a prison. Not at all. It is like … how call you the room where the judge lives?’

  ‘Chambers.’

  ‘Ah so. Chambers. So perhaps you would like to … ‘ He gestured round his chin.

  ‘Christ!’

  ‘There will be many people there.’ I stared incredulously at him. ‘It will look better.’ He gave up. ‘Very well. Adam’ – he nodded at the blond head, stressing the name on the second syllable – ‘he will return in twenty minutes to prepare you.’

  ‘Prepare me?’

  ‘It is nothing. We have a small ritual. It is nothing for you. For us.’

  ‘“Us”?’

  ‘Very soon – you will understand all.’

  I wished I had saved the coffee to throw till then.

  He smiled, bowed, and went out. The other two closed the door, and a bolt was shot. I stared at the skeleton at the wall. And in his necromantic way he seemed to say the same: very soon, you will understand. All.

  61

  I rewound my watch; and in precisely twenty minutes the same two men as before came back into the cell. The black clothes made them look more aggressive, more fascist, than they were; there was nothing particularly brutal about their faces. The blond Adam stood in front of me; in his hand he carried an incongruous small grip.

  ‘Please … not fight.’

  He set the grip on the table and fished inside it; came up with two pairs of handcuffs. I held out my wrists contemptuously and allowed myself to be linked to the other two beside me. Now he produced a curious black rubber mouth-mask; concave, with a thick projection that one had to bite.

  ‘Please … I put this on. No hurt.’

  We both hesitated a moment. I had determined that I wouldn’t fight, that it would be better to keep cool and wait until a time when I could hurt someone I really wanted to hurt. He cautiously held out the rubber gag, and I shrugged. I took its black tongue between my teeth; a taste of disinfectant. Adam expertly fastened the straps behind. Then he went back to the case for some wide black adhesive, and taped the edges of the gag against my skin. I began to wish I had shaved.

  The next move took me by surprise. Adam knelt and pushed my right trouser-leg up to above the knee, and fastened it there with an elastic garter. Then I was made to stand again. With a warning gesture that I was not to be alarmed, he pulled my sweater back over my head and forced it down till it hung from my wrists behind me. Then he unbuttoned my shirt to the bottom and forced the left side back until the shoulder was bare. Next he produced two inch-wide white ribbons, each with a blood-red rosette attached, from the grip. He tied one round the top of my right calf, another under my armpit and over the bare shoulder. Next, a black circle, some two inches in diameter and cut in adhesive tape, was fixed like a huge patch on the middle of my forehead. Finally with one last domesticating gesture he put a loose-fitting black bag over my head. I was more and more inclined to struggle; but I had missed my chance. We moved off. I had a hand on each arm.

  They stopped me at the end of the corridor and Adam said, ‘Slow, we go upstairs.’ I wondered if ‘upstairs’ meant ‘into the house’; or was just bad English.

  I toed forward and we climbed into the sun. I could feel it on my bare skin, though the bag occluded all but the thinnest glints of light. We must have walked some two or three hundred yards. I thought I could smell the sea, I wasn’t sure. I half expected to feel a wall against my back, to find myself facing a firing squad. But then once again they halted me and a voice said, ‘Downstairs now.’ They gave me plenty of time to manoeuvre the steps; more than those leading to my cell, and the air grew cool. We went round a corner and down yet more steps and then I could hear by the resonance of the sounds we made that we had entered a large room. There was also a mysterious, ominous smell of burning wood and acrid tar. I was stopped, someone pulled the bag from my head.

  I had expected to see people. But I and my two guards were alone. We were at one end of a huge underground room, the kind of enormous cistern, the size of a small church, that is found under some of the old Venetian-Turkish castles that are crumbling away in the Peloponnesus. I remembered having seen one very like it that winter at Pylos. I looked up and saw two telltale chimney-like openings; they would be the blocked—off necks at ground level.

  At the far end there was a small dais and on the dais a throne. Facing the throne was a table, or rather three long tables put end to end in a flat crescent and draped in black cloth. Behind the table were twelve black chairs and an empty thirteenth place in the middle.

  The walls had been whitewashed up to a height of fifteen feet or so, and over the throne was painted an eight-spoked wheel. Between table and throne, against the wall to the right, was a small tiered bank of benches, like a jury box.

  There was one completely incongruous thing in this strange courtroom. The light I saw it by came from a series of brands that were burning along the side walls. But in each of the corners behind the throne was a battery of projectors trained on the crescent-shaped table. They were not on; but their cables and serried lenses added a vaguely sinister air of the interrogation room to the already alarming Ku Klux Klan ambience. It did not look like a court of justice; but a court of injustice; a Star Chamber, an inquisitorial committee.

  I was made to go forward. We marched down one side of the room, past the crescent table and up towards the throne. I suddenly realized that I was to sit there. They paused for me to step up on to the dais. There were four or five steps leading to a little platform at the top, on which stood the throne. Like the roughly carpentered dais, it was not a real throne, simply a bit of stage property, painted black, with armrests, a pointed back and columns on either side. In the middle of the solid black panel was a white eye, like those that Mediterranean fishermen paint on the bows of their boats to ward off evil. A flat crimson cushion; I was made to sit.

  As soon as I had done so, my guards’ ends of the handcuffs were unlocked, then immediately snapped on to the armrests. I looked down. The throne was secured to the dais by strong brackets. I mumbled through the gag, but Adam shook his head. I was to watch, not to speak. The other two guards took up positions behind the throne, on the lowest step of the dais, against the wall. Adam, like some mad valet, checked the handcuffs, pulled away the shirt I had tried to shrug back on to my left shoulder, then went down the steps to the ground. There he turned, as if to the altar in a church, and made a slight bow; after which he went round the table and out through the door at the end. I was left sitting with the silent pair behind me and the faint crackle of the burning torches.

  I looked round the room; forced myself to observe it dispassionately. There were other cabbalistic emblems. On the wall to my right a black cross – not the Christian cross, because the top of the upright was swollen, an inverted pearshape; to the left, facing the cross, was a deep-red rose, the only patch of colour in the black-and-white room. At the far end, over the one large door, was painted in black a huge left hand cut off at the wrist, with the forefinger and little finger pointing up and the two middle fingers holding down the thumb. The room stank of ritual; and I have always loathed rituals of any kind. I kept repeating the same phrase to myself: keep dignity, keep dignity, keep dignity. I knew I must look ridiculous with the black cyclops eye on my forehead and the white ribbons and the rosettes. But I somehow had to contrive not to be ridiculous.

  Then my heart jolted.

  A terrifying figure.

  Suddenly and silently in the doorway at the far end, Herne the Hunter. A neolithic god; a spirit of darkness, of northern forest, of a time
before kings, as black and chilling as the touch of iron.

  A man with the head of a stag that filled the arched door; who stood silhouetted, giant, unforgettable image, against the dimly lit whitewashed wall of the corridor behind. The antlers were enormous, as black as almond branches, many-tined. And the man was in black from head to foot, with only the eyes and the nostril-ends marked in white. He imposed his presence on me, then came slowly down the room to the table; stood centrally and regally behind it for another long moment, then moved to the extreme left end. By that time I had noted the black gloves, the black shoes beneath the narrow soutane-like smock he wore; that he had to move slowly because the mask was slightly precarious, being so large.

  The fear I felt was the same old fear; not of the appearance, but of the reason behind the appearance. It was not the mask I was afraid of, because in our century we are too inured by science fiction and too sure of science reality ever to be terrified of the supernatural again; but of what lay behind the mask. The eternal source of all fear, all horror, all real evil, man himself.

  Another figure appeared, and paused, as they were all to do, in the archway.

  This time it was a woman. She was dressed in traditional English witch costume; a brimmed black-peaked hat, long white hair, red apron, black cloak, and a malevolent mask; a beaked nose. She hobbled, bent backed, to the right end of the table and set the cat she was carrying on it. It was dead, stuffed in a sitting position. The cat’s glass eyes were on me. Her black-and-white eyes. And the stag-man’s.