The Magicians Read online

  “Mrs.” she said. “Mrs. Peabody. You won't.” She hopped spryly to her feet. “I'll get in touch with you.” I got a final faded-blue flash of twinkling eyes as she swept out the door and was gone. I never heard the outer door open or close, but by the time I leaped to my feet and reached the door and tore it open, the outer office was empty. And beyond that the corridor was empty, too. I had wanted to ask her something. I had wanted to ask the name the man was going under, his alias. Mrs. Peabody had really hired herself a detective.

  Casey—

  “Oh, shut up!” I snarled.

  I went back to the desk and studied the bill for a long time. I almost didn't make it to the bank. The bill was genuine all right.

  Chapter 3

  Oh! My name is John Wellington Wells,

  I'm a dealer in magic and spells.

  - Sir William Gilbert, The Sorcerer

  Solomon. That was his name. So what? It wasn't enough to satisfy Mrs. Peabody. There were lots of people named Solomon. I knew one myself. Sol the Tailor. But Sol the Tailor had a last name. I didn't know it, but he'd tell me if I asked him, I'm sure. What's your last name, Sol? So who wants to know? Just curious. So it's Levi; maybe that makes your day? But already I had the feeling I didn't want to walk up to this tall, slim man dressed like a magician in a tuxedo and ask him for his last name.

  But how do you go around without a last name? You don't go up to a person and say, “I'm Solomon.” Not unless you want the other person to reply, “And I'm the Queen of Sheba."

  Somewhere his last name was recorded.

  I looked down at the program. It had a shiny black cover.

  Across the top, in letters dropped out of the black and then overprinted in red, it said:

  THIRTEENTH ANNUAL

  COVENTION OF THE MAGI

  October 30 and 31

  In the middle of the cover, left white, was a seal. It was an odd-looking thing with two concentric circles enclosing what looked like the plan for an Egyptian burial pyramid. Not the pyramid itself, but the corridors and hidden chambers and transepts, or whatever they're called. To hide the body and its treasures from the grave robbers. The scent of the grave, of something musty and rotting, seemed to drift upward from the program. In the corridors and between the two circles were printed letters in a foreign alphabet. I thought it was Hebrew.

  There was something familiar about the seal. Then I remembered. I looked at my name card. The same seal.

  I leafed through the program quickly looking for names. There weren't any. Usually the officers are listed somewhere in a program booklet—the president, the program chairman, the people who get the complaints when things go wrong—but there were no such lists in the booklet. Apparently this was so close-knit a society that everybody knew everybody else. At least by their first names.

  But like all programs this booklet had advertising. There is something about advertising that is more revealing than all an organization's statements of purpose, as if what someone thinks the members want to buy says more than what the members think they do. But I must admit that the ads puzzled me.

  One ad was illustrated with all sorts of engraved five-pointed stars, crudely drawn stars, stars in double circles with cryptic lettering, and some circles with no stars at all. The message said: “PENTACLES OF GUARANTEED EFFICACY. Consecrated. Guaranteed. Satisfaction or your money back. P.O. Box 2217...” Some of the pentacles were described as “pentacles to gain love,” “pentacles to influence good spirits favorably,” “the Great Pentacle,” and “talismanic pentacles."

  Another ad touted a book entitled One Hundred Spells for All Occasions. Revised, with Mathematical and Verbal Equivalents Printed Side by Side for Easy Reference. “Every spell,” it said, “has been tested under laboratory conditions and has been proved effective.” This ad not only offered money back but consulting services “at cost."

  Pentacles? Spells?

  The Thaumaturgical Book Shop advertised a long list of books which could be purchased at prices ranging upward from one hundred dollars. All were listed as manuscript copies. I let my eyes travel down the column of titles:

  The Grand Grimoire

  The Constitution of Pope Honorius

  The Black Raven

  D. Joh. Faust's Geister und Hollenzwang

  Der Grosse und Gewaltige Hollenzwang

  Le Dragon rouge, ou l'art de commander les esprits célestes, aériens, terrestres, infernaux

  Farther down the list shifted into Latin:

  Magia Naturalis et Innaturalis

  Sigillum Solomonis

  Schemhamphoras Solomonis Regis

  De Officio Spirituum

  Lemegeton

  At the bottom, all by itself, was Clavicula Solomonis. “The true Key of Solomon. In his own hand.” That was priced at ten thousand dollars. At that it was dirt cheap. These people were in the wrong business, whatever that business was. A manuscript copy of a book written by Solomon himself would bring millions in the rare book market. I shook my head. These were obvious fakes, but they all took themselves so seriously. Either it was all the most straight-faced put-on I had ever seen, or everybody in the society was mad.

  I skipped over the page of the day's program, saving that for later, and continued looking through the ads. You never realize the fantastic things you can buy until you chance upon a specialized booklet like this. I once stayed at a hotel that was having a convention of beer-can collectors, and I was told that a rare, old can sold for one hundred fifty dollars. Empty.

  magic wands (cut from virgin hazel with one blow of a new sword)

  quill pens (from the third feather of the right wing of a male goose)

  arthames (tempered in mole blood)

  black hens and hares (for haruspicy and spells)

  nails (from the coffin of an executed criminal)

  bat's blood

  tail of newt

  candles made of human fat

  hands of glory

  hemlock, henbane, black hellebore, Indian hemp

  coriander, liquor of black poppy, fennel, sandalwood

  aconite, belladonna, peyote, virgin papyrus, mercury

  magic sieves (for coscinomancy)

  The list went on and on like the offerings of a chemist's shop or an old-fashioned country store located in Transylvania. Maybe, I told myself comfortingly, these people were illusionists, and the ads were a kind of extended practical joke, tracing the ancestry of these prestidigitators back to their medieval predecessors, the alchemists, the sorcerers, the witches and warlocks.... This was a professional organization for stage magicians. The names they used were their stage names. That was what it was, I told myself. That was what it had to be.

  But I didn't like the explanation. It didn't explain too many things.

  I turned back to the list of the day's activities. Something was wrong with it, but I couldn't figure out what it was. Then I realized. It was a two-day meeting, but the program covered only one page, and it was headed October 30. Where was the program for October 31? I searched through the booklet in vain for another page before I decided that my booklet must have been defective.

  I read the list of the day's activities:

  OCTOBER 30

  10:30 SPELL and GREETINGS by the MAGUS

  10:45 WITCHCRAFT—A DERIVATION

  10:50 SAFETY IN NUMBERS: THE COVEN

  11:00 CONTAGION—WHY SPELLS ARE CATCHING

  11:30 IMITATION—THE SINCEREST FORM OF SORCERY

  12:00 CALCULUS: THE HIGH ROAD TO BETTER FORMULAE

  12:30 POSSESSION—NINE POINTS OF THE LORE

  1:00 Recess

  3:00 PRACTICAL USES FOR FAMILIARS

  3:30 THE ELEMENTS OF THE ART (with examples)

  4:00 ALEXANDER HAMILTON'S CORBIE

  4:30 LYNCATHROPY—A DEMONSTRATION

  The item about lycanthropy stopped me. Sweat was dripping down my sides and the sweat was cold. I knew what lycanthropy was. It was people turning into werewolves. And these people wer
e going to demonstrate it. They were crazy, all of them, and the sooner I was out of this place the happier I was going to be.

  “You don't belong here,” someone said softly into my left ear.

  I looked around. Ariel was sitting beside me, her head close to mine. In other circumstances I might have enjoyed it. Now I drew back a little. “You're telling me!” I said, and then quickly changed it to, “I mean, why do you say that?"

  “It doesn't take genius to figure that out. You didn't know Solomon, our Magus. You walk around staring at everything as if you had never seen it before. And I happen to know that Gabriel is dead."

  I shivered. I had assumed the name of a dead man, and I felt as if someone had measured me for a coffin. “Did he waste away?” I asked. My voice was shaky.

  “No, he was hit by a car while he was crossing a street.” She looked as if she were concerned about my welfare. “But you don't need to be alarmed. I don't think anybody else knows about his death. It only happened two days ago."

  “That isn't what I was alarmed about,” I said. I was wearing a dead man's card; maybe it wasn't unlucky but I wasn't going to wait around to find out. “That does it,” I said, standing up. “I'm getting out of here."

  She yanked me back into my seat by my coattail. “Sit down,” she whispered, looking at the people sitting around us. “You'll attract attention, and that could be dangerous. Don't try to leave now. They'd get suspicious. And they don't take chances. I won't give you away. Wait until the recess, and then you can walk out inconspicuously along with everybody else."

  I pointed a shaky finger at the program. “But this is—this is—"

  She looked at me, and her eyes were wide and blue and innocent. “It's only magic."

  “Magic! Real, honest-to-God magic?"

  “Of course. What did you think it was?"

  Magic? No, that was impossible. I couldn't accept that. Madness was more like it. And for me the only question was who was crazy: Ariel, the others, or me? She didn't look crazy. The rest of them didn't look crazy. They looked like handsome, intelligent people gathered together to discuss their profession. Whatever it was. Not magic. Not in the 21st century. Not in a big metropolitan hotel surrounded by the everyday details of transient life, by bellhops and maids and waiters and people coming and going. Not with the sun shining and cars in a traffic jam outside and people working and eating and sleeping and going to football games and watching television and making love.

  Spells and magic wands and graveyard dust. Witchcraft and formulae and sorcery.

  “Ouch!” I said.

  “What's the matter?” Ariel asked.

  I rubbed my thigh. I was awake, all right. That was bad news. If I wasn't asleep and they weren't crazy, then I was the one who had gone round the bend.

  But I didn't feel crazy, just baffled and bewildered.

  And then the man called Solomon the Magus was on his feet, standing behind the lectern. Solomon the Magus. Not Solomon Magus. I began to understand a little more. Magus was his title, and the Magi were the society. He was the Magician of the magicians, like the Shah of shahs. Magus was the singular form of magi. Magicians all.

  Everyone was seated. All the seats were filled. It was strange, I thought. Nobody was absent because of illness or the press of business or any of the other reasons which kept people away. Not even death, I thought, remembering Gabriel. Maybe nobody dared to be absent. Something might happen while they were gone; something might happen to them if they were gone.

  Against the black drape Solomon's face and triangular expanse of shirt front floated unsupported in space, and his disembodied hands hovered in the air for silence. Silence fell.

  He began to speak. His voice was low and resonant and clear, and I couldn't understand a word he said. His fluttering hands gestured a strange accompaniment like pale butterflies in a mating dance. He finished, smiled, and then launched into a general welcoming speech to the society that I understood perfectly and wished I hadn't. It could have been repeated word for word to any professional gathering anywhere in the country.

  Ariel leaned toward me. “The first thing he did was an Egyptian spell,” she whispered. “A standard thing—asking that we be blessed every day."

  “Damned decent of him,” I growled, but the sarcasm was to hide the fact that I did feel happier. Well, not happier exactly. There was a better word for it, but I didn't want to use it. Blessed.

  The first four speakers on the program were as dry as only the learned can be when they are discussing their specialties in front of other specialists and wanted to be careful not to appear unsophisticated and unprofessional. Even the audience of initiates grew restless as the speakers expounded their technicalities and quibbled over minutiae.

  All except me. I sat in a state of shock. They were being dull about magic. They were being pedantic about sorcery. Behind everything they said, justifying their dullness and their pedantry, lay a pragmatic belief in the existence of magic as a physical, usable force. It was like a seventeenth-century man walking into a meeting of electrical engineers or an early-twentieth-century man listening to the discussions of scientists talking about getting power from the atom.

  One of the speakers demonstrated, etymologically, that witchcraft, though long derided and denigrated, is the art or craft of the wise. Another pointed out the significance of the medieval satanist groups of thirteen, which were called “covens,” and why their annual meeting had been named as it was this year. And he called their attention to the fact that the room held thirteen rows of chairs and that each row had thirteen chairs in it and that the number of people in attendance was exactly one hundred and sixty-nine—a coven of covens.

  The audience murmured about that. Neighbor looked at neighbor. Ariel stirred beside me. “I don't like this,” she said. “I was afraid this might happen."

  She was afraid. If she was afraid, what must I be feeling? I felt it.

  If I had not been dazed by a continual bombardment of the impossible, I might have come out of the meeting with a liberal education in the theory and practice of magic. The next two speakers went into it thoroughly.

  The layman's concept of magic as mystic symbols and arcane language as a means of controlling unseen, sometimes demonic, forces was at best an oversimplification. Actually the magician's view of the world was the poet's view: they both saw things in terms of metaphor and image and analogy and inner logic. All the universe is implicit in every piece of it, they both said. Blake wrote:

  To see a world in a grain of sand

  And a heaven in a wild flower,

  Hold infinity in the palm of your hand

  And eternity in an hour.

  And the scientist has said, “Give me a molecule and I will predict the universe.” So the magician says, “Everywhere things are alike. The universe is mirrored here on earth. We can learn about God's plans for man by studying the simplest expressions of his intentions. Or by studying the movement of the stars and the planets we can predict events that will happen to individuals."

  And since man is made in God's image, we can learn about God by studying man. That was the goal of the alchemist: not just to turn base metals into gold, or to discover the elixir of life, but to know God.

  “As above, so below.” This was the enduring theory of magic. As things were in the skies, so they were on the earth. And similarly, “As below, so above.” What one could learn on earth applied to the spiritual realm and the whole universe.

  Thus spells worked on two principles, by contagion and by imitation. Contagion associated ideas by contiguity in space or time. Objects that once had been in contact with others always were in contact with each other, like hair and nail clippings, which retained an association with the person on whom they once had grown. What was done to them was done to the person.

  Imitation associated ideas by similarity. An effect could be produced by imitating it. If you wished to make rain you sprinkled water in the dust. Pope Urban VIII had a magician make
him a little universe with lamps and torches inside a sealed-off room in order to avoid an eclipse the Pope feared would signal his death. An image—a wax doll, a mommet—would transmit to the person with whom it was identified whatever was done to the image.

  But while it was going on, the picture was not that clear. Terms swirled in my head. Demonstrations went on in front of my eyes. Spells, rites, the condition of the performer. Faith and works. The reservoir of psychic powers. The doctrine of opposites and the Mysterious One which unites them. Sexual vigor. Cleansing rites. The names of power. Spirits, demons, and the magic circle.

  Twisting columns of smoke ascended from the platform and assumed subhuman faces—the faces of demons, the speaker said—with hateful, leering expressions. A beautiful girl without a wisp of clothing materialized out of the air and posed for the audience before disappearing. One speaker looked around for a drink of water and when none was available snapped his fingers and a tall, cool drink appeared on the lectern.

  At times it was all I could do to hold onto my seat with both hands.

  The next to the last speaker on the morning program climbed slowly to the stage from the floor. For some reason he had not been given a seat with the rest of the speakers. He was a little man with rosy cheeks and a fringe of white hair encircling a bald spot that gleamed pinkly from the stage as he bent over a thick, bound manuscript.

  He looked out over the audience hopefully, nodding to the smattering of applause, and read a few introductory paragraphs in a high, sprightly voice. His thesis was that developments in higher mathematics had made psychic phenomena truly controllable for the first time in history. He implied that the society had been founded on this theory, that its purpose had been to develop the theory into a workable science, and he suggested that these things had been allowed to slip overboard—if they had not been purposefully jettisoned for something darker and less significant.