The Magicians Read online

  Satan, standing there majestically, his arms folded across his massive chest, accepted their homage. The frenzy of his worshipers grew into mania. They lifted the cross they had defiled and cast it into the flames. It stood upside down and blazed with an infernal light.

  “I prefer a less formal service,” I said.

  I felt something hot and sharp pressed against my back. I twitched, but I was not going to surrender myself to the game.

  “We shall conclude our ceremony,” Satan said, “with the customary orgy.” He turned to the aristocratic lady standing beside him and enfolded her body, shuddering with ecstasy and pain, within his arms and then within the cloak of his wings. The brutality with which he took her was as repulsively erotic as sadism. The rest of the witches and sorcerers and demons immediately fell upon each other and began to copulate like animals.

  “It will never catch on in Peoria,” I said.

  I felt the fiery prod in my back again pushing me toward the witch who looked like Ariel. She was standing alone amid the heaps of undulating flesh, looking lost and bewildered.

  “You, too,” the demon behind me said.

  “You're missing out on all the fun,” I said, but I winced as the hot points invaded my back.

  Under the levity I was ashamed that what was going on around me had aroused me, and that my condition was obvious to everyone who was interested. Orgy may have been the order of the day, but I refused to let myself be submerged in the steaming piles of human and inhuman bodies that lay everywhere around the clearing. It may have been only a dream, but one must maintain standards even in dreams. And even in a dream I felt that my decision was important, that if I allowed myself to be tempted I was doomed.

  “Go on,” the voice behind me said. “She's available. Everybody's doing it."

  The witch looked at me appealingly, but what she was appealing for I didn't know.

  “Get at it,” the demon said in my ear. “You want to, and wanting to is as bad as doing it. Besides, he who hesitates, you know.” And he began describing, in the lewdest terms imaginable, what I could do with the witch.

  I cut him off. I swung my arm around and hit him a solid blow to the head. “Never!” I said, and he reeled away, a look of surprise twisting his demonic face.

  “Then I shall!” Satan howled, and let the limp body of the lady fall to the ground. He turned to the witch who looked like Ariel. “Come, honey-sweet virgin,” he said in a mockery of tenderness. “Come, dear timid girl. Come, innocent. Come to your lover, your bridegroom, your lord..."

  As the hairy arms wrapped around her white body and the leathery wings enclosed them both in a horrible embrace, I noticed what I had not seen before—the remarkable resemblance of Satan to Solomon Magus. The hairy fur on the body was like evening clothes. The goatlike legs were like trousers. Even the face seemed less demonic and more like the Magus.

  Even while I was thinking this, I was charging forward in a quixotic attempt to rescue a dream witch from a nightmare Devil, but before I could take more than a few steps a pain like fire entered my body from behind. I felt myself lifted into the air and carried, as if by pitchfork, toward the giant fire. Bells began to ring around me as I was thrown toward the flames, and I held up my hands in front of my face to save it for one last moment....

  Chapter 9

  Now o'er the one half-world

  Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse

  The curtain'd sleep; witchcraft celebrates

  Pale Hecate's offerings; and wither'd murder

  Alarm'd by his sentinel, the wolf,

  Whose howl's his watch, thus with his stealthy pace,

  With Tarquin's ravishing strides, toward his design

  Moves like a ghost.

  - Shakespeare, Macbeth

  The insistent ringing of the telephone brought me out of my anguished sleep. I still felt the bite of a fiery pitchfork in my back and the scorch of the flames on my face as I fumbled for the instrument, knocked the handset out of the cradle, picked it up, got the mouthpiece to my ear, switched it around, and mumbled, “Hello? Hello?"

  An almost soundless whisper came to my ear. “There is danger.” Danger! Of course, and I've just been in it. “A message is in your box. It would be wise to act on it."

  “Hello? Hello?” I said.

  The line was silent, but I thought, half asleep as I was, that I could hear someone breathing. But that was probably me, still out of breath from my recent nightmare.

  “Who is this?” I asked.

  I got no answer.

  I dropped the phone back into the cradle and rolled over and went back to sleep, and back to my dreams. This time the dream was different. This time I felt no sense of the supernatural, no feeling of hovering above a scene of medieval terror; instead I found myself walking along dark corridors toward some unseen, unknown, but horrible goal. The traditional nightmare: I didn't know where I was going, but I knew it was something that would scare me out of my wits.

  The sensations in this one, too, were very real. I felt carpets under my feet although I could not see them. I smelled a hint of wood smoke and perhaps a subtler odor of hot wax. But I walked in silence except for my own cautious breathing and the soft fall of shoe on carpet.

  I wanted to turn and go the other way, out of the darkness, away from the corridors, into the open and the light, but something pushed me on or drew me forward, the way it happens in nightmares. I kept expecting to come upon something dreadful, some slavering monster or some deadly pitfall, snakes rustling in the dark or spiders dropping from ceilings, or something subtler and more terrible, but nothing opened in front of me but unending corridors winding and turning, branching and coming together, until at last I decided I must be in some Minotaurish maze, and my fate was to be doomed to wander here until I starved—or woke up.

  At this thought I advanced more boldly, preferring to happen upon a physical threat rather than spend the whole nightmare fearing one. If something were drawing me on, it wasn't doing a very good job of guidance. I willed myself onward toward the ominous end. Sometimes people can do that in dreams. I read once that a primitive Malayan tribe, the Senoi, spends most of its time doing that; the children tell their dreams to their elders, and the elders sit around analyzing them like Freud himself, and they train their children to control their dreams so that they become the supreme rulers and masters of their own dream universes. They learn to control their dreams in a way that is seldom possible to Western man.

  I don't know if all this is true, but in my dream, at least, I found the path in front of me beginning to lighten. In a moment lighted candles appeared in wall-mounted sconces. By their flickering illumination I began to notice the carpets; they seemed to be woven of silk, in blue and red and green and yellow, like Oriental or Persian rugs. The walls were hung with pictures and tapestries; some of them seemed to be quite good, though old-fashioned. Antiques, perhaps.

  The corridors, however, had no doors in them or any apparent purpose except to lead me toward some point in time and space that I could not avoid, although I did not want to be there. By these signs I knew for certain that this was a dream. There are no real places like this; they exist only inside the head.

  I willed again that I might find whatever waited for me at the end of these corridors. Within a few moments the corridor brightened further. I saw a door ahead. The smell of wood smoke was stronger here, but there were other odors, too: chemicals, perfumes ... I could hear a voice or voices rising and falling rhythmically. As I got closer to the door, I realized that the sound was a voice chanting; it was coming from beyond the door, and it resembled the Catholic Mass in Latin.

  The door was well oiled for a dream door. It opened noiselessly, and I eased it away from me, cautious even in my dreams. Beyond was darkness, but the darkness was not complete. A fringe of light lay along the floor like gold lace. Some kind of curtains or tapestry covered the other side. I slipped into the room and gently pulled the door shut behind me. I turn
ed the handle a couple of times to make sure I could get out that way in a hurry if I had to. Carefully, then, I parted hangings and looked into a seventeenth-century French chapel. Well, I didn't know for sure it was seventeenth century, but it was old. I could tell it was French by the legends in the two stained-glass windows on either side of the room. And I knew it was a chapel because it had an altar in it.

  The altar was in the center of the room. Several easy chairs stood in front of it; cushions were placed on the floor for the comfort of the well-to-do family whose chapel this was. Asceticism was not one of the virtues their chaplain often preached about, I guessed. If their chaplain was the person presiding at the ceremony now, I could understand why.

  He was the ugliest priest I had ever seen. He was an old man who had lived a self-indulgent life. He was tall and fat in his ceremonial regalia. Blue veins stood out on his bloated, sensual face, and one of his eyes squinted malignly. He was the one who had been chanting.

  Black candles were lighted in twin candelabra that stood behind him. A mattress had been placed on the altar, and a woman lay crossways on the mattress, facing the priest. It wasn't just any woman. It was a naked woman. She was face up, her legs dangling over the edge of the mattress, and she was Catherine La Voisin, her hair as bright on the pillow as the fire that burned in the fireplace at the far end of the room, and her body was as spectacularly female as it had appeared clothed in the Crystal Room.

  Her arms were stretched out in the form of a cross, though her fists were clenched. Just beyond her hands black candles burned. A cross was upside down between her breasts, and a chalice rested uneasily upon her belly.

  I was some twenty feet from the altar and I didn't dare separate the hangings enough to get a good view, so I didn't see everything that was going on. But I saw more than I wanted to see. The chalice on La Voisin's belly was dripping with some kind of dark-red fluid. I hoped it was grape juice or wine, but I had no confidence in that, because I thought I saw a tiny human foot extended still and pale beyond the edge of the altar, and the stains around the mouths of La Voisin and the priest were more rust-colored than purple.

  The chanting went on, interrupted only by various ceremonial actions. The priest, for instance, kissed La Voisin's naked body a lot, lifted and lowered a small black wafer which both he and La Voisin tasted, and did much other lewdness that I was glad was hidden from me. I should have turned away, but I couldn't move. That's the way it is with dreams.

  It was all done with ritual significance and devout belief, and it should have sickened me, even in my dream. It did, in a way. But it affected me in another way as well. La Voisin's female characteristics were a caricature of what men are supposed to find irresistible in a woman, and they didn't attract me. Not really. Well, maybe in a kind of symbolic sense, as a caricature, like a men's magazine cartoon. And yet I found myself aroused, as I had been at the witches’ Sabbath, in spite of my best intentions. Except this time it was focused on the naked body and abundant flesh of La Voisin.

  I saw her head turn toward the hangings behind which I looked out upon the sacrilegious scene. I saw her eyes widen with surprise and her lips curl with delight. I didn't understand how she could see anything, or recognize anyone she might glimpse, and then I realized that I was no longer behind the hangings, I was in front of them, and I was walking toward the altar, walking toward the perverted priest and the desecrated altar, walking toward the naked body of La Voisin with the single intention of consummating upon the altar the terrible thing that had been going on here in this room.

  La Voisin removed the chalice from her belly like any practical woman, and held out her arms to me. I saw a few blond hairs fall from one hand, and I moved toward her arms, forgetful of everything and everyone but the aching need for her....

  And I woke with the feeling that the telephone had been ringing just before I wakened. Now it was still. Had I dreamed it? Or had the recent dream all happened in the instant after I had hung up the telephone? If that telephone message had been real and not a dream...

  I still remembered the lust I had felt for the red witch. My body still remembered, and I wondered about the sanity of my subconscious. Was I perverted enough to really, subconsciously, desire such an encounter? Were my conscious censors suppressing the real me? Was I really a monster? I hadn't resisted the way I did in the previous dream.

  Maybe both dreams were the natural result of too much incredible experience and too much reading in strange books before I fell asleep. After all, a person isn't responsible for the lewdness of his dreams, is he? I had the sickening feeling that I was. Because I still lusted for the red witch, inexplicably, against reason, knowing that her touch was, perhaps, truly a fate worse than death.

  Maybe, I thought, the dreams were attempts by my subconscious to warn me about my weaknesses, about the danger they might place me in.

  Danger! That's what the telephone call had said. Danger, all right. I still felt the places where the nightmare pitchfork had pierced my back and my face still remembered the flames.

  I looked at the telephone. Had that happened? I was beginning to doubt everything. I picked up the handset and dialed 0.

  “This is the operator,” a woman's voice said. I didn't recognize it. Why should I recognize it? I was beginning to think that everything was something else in disguise. “What can I do for you?"

  What, indeed? An answer? A word of sanity? “Could you tell me if I received a telephone call this morning?” I asked.

  “Room number, please?"

  “Seven oh seven."

  “There have been no incoming messages,” she said.

  Of course. There would be no record of messages dialed within the hotel. So the answer meant nothing. “Thanks,” I said and eased the phone down.

  I looked at my watch. It was not quite eight, but I was wide awake. No use trying to get back to sleep, even if I wanted to. I rubbed my face. I didn't think I wanted to.

  I thought of Ariel and smiled. I felt warm inside when I thought about her. It wasn't like my dream about La Voisin, but nicer in a way. She was a sweet kid—well, not exactly a kid, I amended as I remembered how she had looked in this room—and she was caught in a worse mess than I was. I was just on the fringes, but she was in the middle of it, and there was no way out for her. It was unfair. She was just a poor, frightened girl, and, by everything I held sacred, I would get her out of this and then—and then—

  I caught myself. Poor, frightened girl? Don't kid yourself, Casey! She's a witch, a real, honest-to-goodness witch, and she makes things happen that no normal person can do. Casey Kingman to the rescue, my aching back! Watch your romantic notions, boy!

  But what a witch! I mused.

  Come off it, Casey! I told myself sternly. What's the matter with you? Do you think you're in love with this girl, a girl who won't level with you, a girl who won't even give you her right name? Old footloose, love-'em-and-leave-'em Casey?

  I nodded. And that sat me straight up in bed. Could I be in love with Ariel? I had to admit that I could.

  Well, I thought, worse things could happen to a man. Like being mated to a witch on an altar or being pitchforked into a fire by a demon.

  I looked at the telephone again. A note in my box? I picked up the handset and dialed the desk. Charlie answered.

  “How did you get registered here?” he asked indignantly.

  “Never mind that!” I snapped, and I thought of a story I could tell him that would make his few remaining hairs stand on end. Charlie and his precious hotel! “Is there a message for me—room seven oh seven?"

  “Just a minute,” he snapped back.

  I waited.

  “As a matter of fact, there is. Want me to read it to you?"

  “Isn't it sealed?"

  “Just a slip of paper. Not even folded."

  “Don't you put messages in envelopes?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said impatiently, “we put messages in envelopes, but whoever put this message in you
r box didn't put it in an envelope. Do you want me to read it or not?"

  “All right. What does it say?"

  “On one side it says ‘seven oh seven.’”

  “Okay, okay. That's me."

  “On the other it says ‘eleven eleven.’ What is this, Casey?

  Are you playing games again?"

  “Not me,” I protested. “How do you know the message isn't ‘seven oh seven’ for ‘eleven eleven'?"

  “How should I know? I didn't put it there."

  “Who did?"

  “The night clerk, I guess."

  “You're a big help,” I told him, and hung up.

  So there was a message, and maybe someone in the hotel had left it for me and had called me to tell me about it. But how had they known my room number? They could have called the desk. But how had they known my name? Or maybe this magic business had a recoil to it. Maybe my subconscious reached out to gather that information, cryptic as it was, and then put in a call to my conscious mind.

  “Hello, Conscious. Are you there?"

  “Just barely. Right now I'm about to be tossed from a pitchfork into a fire. Who is this?"

  “This is your Subconscious."

  “Well, well, Subconscious. Imagine hearing from you. How the hell are things down there?"

  “Cluttered, boy. Pretty messy. You've really got to do something about all these nasty things lying around all over. I trip over something new every time I try to move around. Somebody's got to get busy in here with a shovel or a fire hose or something—"

  “Did you call me at a time like this just to complain about—?"

  “Sorry, Conscious, but if you had to live in conditions like this maybe you'd—All right, all right. You've got to wake up. You're in danger, and I just learned there's a message for you downstairs. So get off that nightmare and get on your horse, boy!"

  And then, of course, the conscious mind rolls back over and goes back to sleep. How does that sound? I thought it sounded lousy. Maybe it was coincidence. Or maybe somebody had called me. With the wild talents running loose around this hotel, it should be a simple matter to put in a call to a person going under the name of Gabriel. Or, for that matter, I thought with sudden comfort, it could have been Ariel calling; she knew my room number.