Night Magic (24 page)

He made a careful selection of the hexagram he would employ in his endeavor. Having no certain way of determining which one might be the correct one, he indulged himself in a bit of a psychic crapshoot, leaving the choice to fate, or to whatever he imagined might be fate.

Having made his selection, he copied it and taped the copy to the mirror over his bureau, then sat hunched on his bed, back to the wall, eyes fixed on the hexagram. When he could feel its elements like hot lines etched across his eyeballs, he closed his eyes and stamped the image on his brain, opening them again to check for accuracy, then shutting them and reproducing the lines inside his head once more. After he felt certain that he knew the symbol, he undertook the long journey from his third-floor room (“in the attic,” as the Wurlitzers said), down the private stairway that both he and his hosts considered an outstanding feature of their arrangement, along the basement passageway into the workroom and from there to the black door. He pulled up a chair and sat staring at this door, forcing his eyes to remain open until they watered, then shutting them and repicturing the door. Open; close. Door; door. He repeated this process several times, then went to the door and felt it with his hands, the metal sheathing, the hasp, the lock. He stuck out his tongue and pressed its tip to the metal, actually tasting it. He leaned against the door, shook it, rattled it, listening to its impermeableness rebuff his desire to penetrate. He slid it the mere half inch it would give on its rollers, listening to the sound. He even sniffed the door: an oily, metallic scent, equally unyielding. At last he returned to his room.

Ignoring the hexagram on the mirror, he sat on the bed and closed his eyes, gently rubbing his temples as the master had demonstrated, bringing into focus the symbol, then his vision of the door, symbol, door, until the two images were clear, the symbol superimposed on the painted metal. He knew enough now to relax and not try to force entry, but to let it happen, a little at a time, not pushing but easing himself into it, and when he felt this ease, accompanied by the knowledge that what he was doing could actually be done, he discovered that though he had no sense of having unfastened the lock it was sprung, the hasp was free, and the door was grating on its track and sliding aside as he moved toward it, and then he stepped through. He took up a pad and pencil and began to write.

This is me, here on the bed. I’m in my room on the bed. I’m here. At the same time I’m in the workshop. The black door isn’t locked, it has opened. I’m passing, not through the door but through the opening of the door. I’m in the room. It’s not at all as I imagined it. I see that it’s a room that isn’t a room. There is light, but without light. M’s things are here, his papers and books. There’s a desk, some chairs, a stool, filing cabinets. A coat stand in one corner. His green coat sweater hangs on a hook. I can smell his pipe tobacco. I will sit here in this chair and experience the room. Why did I imagine it differently? The alchemist’s laboratory? It’s just a room. I’ll sit here and wait.

In the room he sat and waited, while back in his own room he sat on the bed, writing, his consciousness in two places at once. Two trains on parallel tracks. This was now. Was it really now? Or something in the past, or in the future? Had he been here before, or would he come here again at some later time? Being here now seemed anchorless, lacking reality; he must search for some identifiable marker. A digital clock was on the desk, the aquamarine glow of its digits incongruous on this venerable and weighty antique, with its rolltop, its rusty drawer handles, its jumble of pigeonholes. The last two digits on the clock changed suddenly, making him jump: 3:30. He checked his wristwatch: 3:30.
A.M.
or
P.M
.? Some papers and drawings lay scattered about the writing surface of the desk, but the center had been cleared to make way for a dark velvet cushion, on which an object dully glittered. Two pious pictures hung above the desk. In one Jesus walked on the water, in the other he commanded the storm.

Michael moved closer to the desk, closer to the object on the velvet cushion. As he did so he seemed to pass into a part of the room where the air was first thinner and colder, then very thin and very cold. He was aware of his widening eyes, his accelerating heartbeat, the suddenly intaken breath probing his throat and lungs with a hundred little icy burrs. The object was drawing him, and part of its fascination was a steadily increasing component of terror. He stood over the desk, looking down, trying to bring into focus the frigid glimmering thing on the cushion. It was smooth and thin and flat, a piece of fired clay, its surface glazed with bright opaque colors. He stared down at it and saw a single, stylized eye, heavily outlined in black against an azure background. He recognized, without surprise, the stolen Eye of Horus; he was, however, totally unprepared for its effect. It returned but did not meet his helpless gaze, looking through him, past him, neither beckoning nor encroaching, not even waiting, simply
there,
the Eye of the inevitable abyss, cosmically indifferent and cosmically cold. It stared out of nothingness into nothingness; its element was utter negation.

A devastating sense of his own absurd futility occupied Michael’s entire consciousness like a giant wound. He felt himself yielding, sliding into the abyss, merging with the heatless dark, but a great cry burst from deep inside him, and the recoil sent him reeling away from the desk and from the Eye that lay upon it.

The room became darker. He was alone, more alone than ever before. That is, he
sensed
that he was alone—but he perceived that he was not. Someone was there with him. Affrighted, he looked around but saw no one. Nonetheless, someone, something was there. He could see it if he chose; he did not choose, willed himself not to choose. Yet he knew. If he wished, he could turn and see it. By his will, by his magic will, he had the power to choose what he saw; he would not see this. He whirled around suddenly and saw it, over there, hulking in the corner, yet beyond the corner. In the room and out of it. All right, then, he acknowledged its presence but would not look at it.

The whole room had grown cold. He would not look, would leave the room, the exercise was over. All at once his head jerked around and he was staring into the corner, through the corner, into a pair of huge, wild eyes, shot with streaks of bright red blood that vibrated against the bluish pallor of the surrounding skin. He had an impression of immensity, of horns, of infinite alienation. He began to shiver; the pencil snapped sharply in his hand. He rose and tried to leave the room but slipped and fell heavily against the wall, striking his elbow and his head. At once he started flailing and thrashing, desperate to pound his way through the wall and out of the room; in his terror he forgot to breathe, and his blood roared in his brain, demanding oxygen.

He rolled onto his stomach, then rose abruptly to his knees, smashing his head against the underside of the desk. This fresh impact sent him sprawling facedown on the floor, accompanied by a variety of unidentifiable objects that crashed and tinkled around him. He crawled for his life, felt his ankles grasped by a pair of enormous hands, kicked himself free and scrabbled in a frenzy of fear across the floor, rebounding off another solid object, ignoring the gouges in his arms and chest, at last over the grooved threshold to safety. He flipped onto his back and sat up, one hand clutching his knees and the other rubbing his skull, his breath coming in great searing sobs. He was outside the room, his room, and through the doorway he could see St. Francis, calmly exhorting the birds.

Later, when Wurlitzer took to wearing the Eye of Horus on a golden chain around his neck, Michael would shrink from the sight of it as from an icy hand on his spine. Yet the amulet fascinated him, drawing him in as it had drawn him when it lay glimmering on the desk in the room behind the locked black door.

Meanwhile the master proved a source of both amazement and frustration. First, there was the matter of his health, which as he himself had indicated was not of the best, a fact made obvious by his wan, drawn features, his rattling chest, the occasional, violent cough that sounded like a ghastly intensification of his cackling laugh and often concluded it, his trembling hands, his slightly plodding gait. With his glass eye and the unpredictable clumps of wild gray hair that clung to his bony cranium like grass to a rock, he often seemed ludicrously old and patched together, a rundown mechanism in need of winding to make him go. One of the many mysteries surrounding him was the existence of enormous reserves of energy stored somewhere in that failing frame, and the indefinable plastic resiliency that allowed him to swoop domineeringly into rooms from which he had last been seen exiting, drained and decrepit, as though tottering off to the nearest coffin. Exhausted by long rehearsals, the maestro would retire early, only to reappear the following morning crackling with animation, brisk and imperious, ready to attack the day.

Though seldom in what could be called a conversational mood, he often spoke with stifling fluency on a variety of topics, all of them somehow related to the world of magic and the magician’s endeavor. Many of his monologues ended in personal anecdotes or object lessons or sententious generalizations, but Michael soon accepted a certain bumptiousness as part of the old wizard’s style, certainly preferable to his flashes of temper or his mordant sarcasm, and listened closely to his words, hoping to find in them the instruction he sought.

Wurlitzer seemed fascinated by the subject of onstage deaths and often spoke of the beautiful Hungarian girl whose accidental demise he had witnessed in a theater in Budapest and of his acquaintance Chung Ling Soo, né William Ellsworth Robinson, who performed his famous Defying the Bullets act for nearly twenty years to great applause, until the evening in London when the shots rang out as usual and the stunned magician, still holding the china plate he used for a “bullet-catcher,” collapsed glassy-eyed to the stage, dying in his bloodstained silken robes.

Yet Wurlitzer was in his turn a good listener, producing that circumflex arch of the brow, digesting information, his eye flicking over Michael’s attentive features, then away, up, down, or inward to his own nose as if contemplating the long end of it. Any fact he discovered about Michael must be probed, details must be given. How did he sleep, did he dream? Who was Dazz, was he talented? What was Samir like? What had Michael done at his party? What were Michael’s plans for Samir’s Halloween/birthday party? Could Michael play a musical instrument? Did he enjoy music, attend the opera, ballet, plays? He questioned Michael’s use of words or why he had liked such and such a film. In time, the master seemed to be scrutinizing him at every moment, marking everything about him, the sound of his voice, the way he walked, his gestures, even the pattern of his thoughts.

Michael felt plumbed, prodded, analyzed, like a specimen of some sort. The interrogation might come at any moment, and if it seemed that he had said it all, that there was no more of himself to expose, Wurlitzer would find something else, his eye boring into the very depths of the young man’s brain. That single, delving orb, Michael thought, had an independent existence of its own: bright, shiny, gem-hard, containing both light and dark, and the extremes of fire and ice (for it could flash intermittently warm or cold), at times opaque, at times fulminating. Like a predator’s, it missed little, and it was rarely at rest.

Then there was the peculiar event with the bird. One morning Michael came up to Wurlitzer as he bent over to raise a window sash in the living room, and there was a little bird perched on the sill. Instead of flying away—the natural thing for it to have done—the bird remained stationary, then began to work its head from side to side. The old man stared at it, bringing his face steadily closer, while the bird ceased even the movement of its head and stared back. It remained in the same position, without moving, for some moments after the master had taken his chair and begun talking; then, as if struck by an afterthought, he glanced once at the bird and it winged away.

There was moreover the equally odd business of the group in the movie theater. One afternoon Wurlitzer amazed Michael by suggesting they take a break and go see a film over on Broadway. There were only a few people in the audience that day—the movie was nearing the end of a long run—but the old man insisted they sit upstairs, in the first row of the balcony. The only other people there, seated behind them, were two couples, fun seekers who from their conversation had driven in from New Jersey and were warming up for a night on the town. From the beginning they were annoying, obscuring the dialogue with rude remarks and inane jokes, as though they were home watching television. Michael twice asked them to be quiet, but they ignored him. He shifted forward in his seat, his ears intent on the soundtrack, and was only half aware that Wurlitzer had leaned back and was muttering a few words to those behind. After a brief period he turned again to the screen, and when Michael peeked over his shoulder the two couples were sitting there in frozen silence. Not another sound was heard from them during the movie. Later, when the lights came up and Wurlitzer rose and shuffled up the aisle, Michael took a good look. Immobile, eyes bugged, mouths agape, the four sat clutching half-eaten candy bars, half-empty popcorn boxes, watery drinks. He watched them from behind for a few moments; they still hadn’t moved when he turned away and hastened to catch up with the Great Wurlitzer, who was exiting past the concessions counter and the drink machines.

The greatest mystery, of course, was the old man himself. Undeniably, as a magician he possessed great powers, but his public performances exhibited an erratic unevenness that Michael sometimes found painful to watch. Onstage, Wurlitzer projected an indefinable sense of impending action, of an alarming surprise in store yet continually withheld, some unaccountable obscure immanent force waiting to manifest itself. Whatever it was, it failed to materialize, remaining like the signs of a storm in the distance, hints in the air, breezes stirring, a grumble of thunder, ticks of lightning, but no storm arriving: a false alarm, in other words, a fizzle. In his feats of prestidigitation he was adroit enough, even with his case of the shakes and impaired eyesight, but severely lacking in the style or panache of other older magicians Michael had seen, and compared to Michael himself he was a ham-handed tumbler. The first performances Michael witnessed were most ordinary, merely a conjuror doing tricks, and old ones at that. There were no cleverly conceived stage illusions, none of the breathtaking marvels Michael associated with magicians. He craved a stage peopled with fascinating and theatrically sinister types dressed in outrageous costumes of substance and authenticity; he wanted glitter and glamour and flourish; he conceived of a stage that was another world, bathed in the soft pink glow of footlights. He wanted painted scenery, no matter how old and cracked, something to create mood and evoke atmosphere—the sensuous gardens of the Alhambra, the disciplined fountains of Versailles, a Chinese torture chamber. He wanted mandarins in silver brocades and pretty girls in tights, with parasols; he wanted scarlet drama and black mystery, gilded romance and brilliance, if only on a small scale. And, naturally, he wanted something more…