I took them with me into the closet with its temenos. It was small and narrow, but it held all of us, with the partners strung out in the narrow space behind me, and Phil at my shoulder with the video camera.
“You’re actually going to let us watch?” Phil said. “Will wonders never cease!”
“You’ll get the whole show,” I said. “For better or worse.”
“What should we ask for?” Haynes asked.
I shrugged. “Whatever you want.”
“A million dollars in gold sounds pretty good to me,” Phil said.
“You think the spirit or whatever it is can do that?” Jon asked.
“Magic can do anything,” I said. “The question is whether it wants to or not. If this works, the wished-for matter will appear before your very eyes, here in the space of the temenos”
“You always gave it overnight before,” Phil said.
“I’m in a hurry now.”
I turned to the temenos. I began my incantations and my gestures.
There’s no need to talk here about what I did. Phil’s friends have a complete record—if they dare look at it after what happened.
At the end of my ceremony, there was a growing darkness in the middle of the shrine. It started as a stillness, but there was a fury within that stillness. You could feel the presence of something malevolent and strange. A cold wind came up inside the closed dark room, and the partners began to edge away.
“What have you done?” Haynes asked.
“Merely asked for what you want.”
Now the darkness in the middle of the temenos was a spinning top of dark and luminous lines. It gave off a disturbed emanation, as though some creature had been called into being and didn’t like it at all.
The darkness formed up into a crouched, dark creature in the middle of the shrine, its luminous eyes slanted and strange.
“Who is calling me?” the dark creature said.
“It’s me,” I said. “My friends here would like a million dollars in gold.”
“You bother me for a trivial matter like that? Very well, they can have it. But it must be paid back.”
“Paid back?” Phil said. “I didn’t know it worked like that.”
“We have to get our investment back,” the dark creature told him. “Our resources are not without limit. But our terms are easy: five years to repay, no interest or carrying charges.”
Phil held a hasty consultation with his partners. It was obvious to them that they’d earn considerable interest on a million dollars over five years. It made this a paying proposition.
“Yes, sir,” Phil said to the creature. “We’d like to take you up on that. That would be very acceptable, sir.”
“Who will be personally responsible for repaying this debt?” the dark creature asked.
“My backers and I, sir.”
“Your backers?” the dark creature said scornfully. “To hell with that! I need one person! Who will hold himself personally responsible for this debt?”
“I will, sir,” Phil said.
“And who are you?”
“I’m Phil.”
“Fine. Then I’ll take you as collateral.”
“Hey, just a minute,” Phil said. “I didn’t intend—” Then he was pulled into the darkness so fast he was cut off in mid-scream. One moment he was there, the next moment he was gone.
“I’ll expect repayment in five years,” the darkness said. “Then you get Phil back. Or what’s left of him.”
Like a wisp of smoke, the dark creature was gone. But now there was a pile of gold in the shrine. A pile that looked like a million dollars worth.
The partners stared at it uneasily.
Finally Haynes said, “It’s a lot of money.”
“Sure,” Jon said, “but how about Phil?”
“Well, it was his idea.”
“But we can’t leave him wherever that thing has taken him. And certainly not for five years!”
“No, that wouldn’t be fair,” Haynes said thoughtfully. “But what do you think about thirty days?”
They looked at each other. Then Jon said, “Phil himself wanted to make a profit on this. And besides, what the hell, he’s there already.”
Haynes nodded. “Thirty days wherever he is can’t be so bad. I’m sure he’ll have quite a story to tell when he gets back.” He turned to me. “What do you think?”
“I’m finished with magic,” I said. “But I’ll be available when you need me to bring Phil back.”
“You get a share of this,” Haynes said, pointing to the gold.
“No thanks, I don’t want any.”
“Phil said you had some funny ideas. He’ll be amused by this when he gets back.”
“True. If you get him back alive.”
“Damn, that’s right,” Jon said.
“Sure hope he’s okay,” Haynes said. “Hey, where are you going?”
“The Albatross Restaurant. I understand they have the best food available anywhere.” And I walked out the door.
It seemed to me that both the partners and I had profited. They had gotten a million dollars at the possible cost of Phil. I had maybe gotten a chance at a life with Maryanne. At what price I was still to learn.
The New Horla
Guy de Maupassant is one of my heroes, as well as one of my cautionary tales. When I got this story idea, his “The Horla” served both as a model and for a tribute.
“How deep it is, this mystery of the Invisible. We cannot plumb its depths with our wretched senses, with our eyes, which are incapable of perceiving things that are too small, things that are too big, things too far away, the inhabitants of a star—or the inhabitants of a drop of water… And our ears deceive us, because they convey to us vibrations in the air in the form of sounds—they are like fairies performing this miracle of changing movement into sound, and through this transformation they give birth to music, turning into melody the silent rhythms of nature… And what of our sense of smell, inferior to that possessed by a dog… and our sense of taste, which can scarcely detect the age of a wine!
“Ah! If only we had other sense-organs to work other miracles for us, who can tell how many other things we should discover in the world around us?”
—“Le Horla” by Guy de Maupassant
The train ride from Concord up into the White Mountains was spectacular. The snows were deep, with the tops of the trees poking through like stubble on a dead man’s cheek. We topped the range and came at last into Mountain Station. Here I got off, with my skis, my backpack, and my ski boots.
There was no one around to greet me. The little stationhouse was empty, though not locked. I went inside and got on my ski boots, put my shoes into my backpack, came out and strapped on my skis. Although I had told Edwin I’d ski down to his chalet without any difficulty, now that I was actually there the idea seemed less than brilliant. It was late in the day, after 4 p.m., and the sun was already lost in the white sky. We’d been held up almost an hour at Manchester, and hadn’t made up the time across New England. I took the sketch map from an inner pocket, smoothed it out, oriented myself, went over the way I’d go once again.
It had all seemed perfectly straightforward when I’d arranged with Edwin to use his family’s ski chalet for a few days. We had been roommates at Dartmouth and had remained friends afterward. He had often offered me the use of the chalet. This holiday I took him up on it.
Originally, I had meant to drive there, and Edwin had carefully laid out the route. But as it turned out, my car was back in the shop with miscellaneous electrical problems. With Edwin’s help, I had worked out a different route. I would take the train to Mountain Station, New Hampshire, and then ski down to the lodge.
Edwin had been more than a little dubious. “Are you quite sure? I don’t really recommend it.”
“It’s perfectly straightforward on the map,” I told him. The chalet was only a thousand or so feet below Mountain Station, which stood at the top of Standish Pass in the Whi
te Mountains. It was a short run and there were no obstructions.
“You’ve made the run yourself, so you told me.”
“Well, yes,” Edwin said, “I have, but I’m acquainted with the area. For a first time…”
“From what you’ve described, there’s nothing to it. Out of the station I face just west of north, with the spire of Stanley Church in sight just to my left, and it’s a straight run down to the dogleg. Then I go left around the construction site and the chalet—white with green trim—is in sight.”
“It’s just never a good idea, skiing in the mountains alone,” Edwin said.
“I’ll take it easy,” I assured him. “I’ll snowplow all the way down.” If only I had taken my own light-hearted promise seriously!
Orienting myself wasn’t difficult. Just to the left of the small stationhouse was a storage shed, painted black. Edwin had told me to use this as my takeoff point. I stood there in front of it for a moment, poised on my skis, checking out the slope. It was steep, but not too steep, a perfect white blanket untouched by any other skiers’ marks. There was a dark clump of trees to the right, about a hundred yards down, and beyond that, just out of sight from here, was the construction site I needed to ski around. I checked my bindings, adjusted my pack, pulled down my goggles and took off.
It was a beautiful day for a run. The sky was white, and there was an accumulation of dark clouds to the east, a promise of weather making up over toward the Atlantic coast. My skis slid smoothly on the surface, not going too rapidly over the somewhat wet snow, then picking up speed as the incline steepened. I leaned into it, enjoying that exhilaration that the first run of the season brings. It was an easy slope and I was in perfect balance going down it.
After a few minutes I caught sight of the obstruction. It was a mound of building materials, covered in last night’s fresh snow, with here and there a gleam of green canvas where the wind had blown away the cover. I was over too far to my right, and now I bent into a sharp turn that would take me below the building materials. The thrill of leaning into that first turn of the season caused me to cut it a little fine. I straightened out to give the mounded materials a sufficient berth, then crouched to build up speed. Perhaps I wasn’t paying sufficient attention to the terrain. But there was really nothing to see, since the fresh snow covered everything.
I knew I was in trouble when my skis started chattering on a series of long, slick, rounded objects just beneath the snow. They were like a corduroy road surface, only much higher.
Later I learned that I had crossed a pile of plastic pipes that had been unloaded only two or three days ago, and had been concealed by last night’s snow. They had been set down at the lower edge of the construction, and I was going right over them.
All would still have been well if I hadn’t been tucked into my turn. I went across those pipes at an angle. All I knew at the time was that I was crossing a hard, bumpy, unstable surface and my skis were sliding out from under me. The pipes were concealed under an inch or so of fresh snow, and they were frosty and slick. But they hadn’t been on the ground long enough to freeze to the ground, so they slid out from under me and I fell hard, my skis kicking into the air, and I was tumbling over them until at last I came to rest beyond the pipes, in soft snow.
It took me a while to pull myself together. It’s important not to underestimate the shock of a sudden unexpected fall. For a while I felt as though the mountain had exploded under me. I was numb from head to toe, and it was not unpleasant. But I knew, somewhere in the back of my mind, that when this numbness wore off, I was likely to find myself in a sorry state. It had really been quite a fall.
While I was still numb and feeling no pain, I determined to get to the chalet. It was only a few hundred yards away, down the slope. I tried to get to my feet, and found that my right leg would not support me. I got half way up and fell. Checking, I found that my right foot was twisted at an odd angle. I also noted various rips in my twill ski pants, and a slow welling of blood from what I took to be a wound in my shoulder, just above the shoulder blade, where the backpack hadn’t protected me.
I was not at all cold. Nor was I in much pain. But I knew I was not in a good way, and that I needed to get to shelter as soon as possible. Above all, I had to get my ski boots off before the swelling started.
My first thought was to carry my skis and poles with me and limp down the slope to the chalet, whose roof I could make out at the edge of the fall line. This proved impossible. I was unable to stand up. Nor did I have my skis, as I had first imagined. They were somewhere back up on the slope. All I had was one pole, and my knapsack was still strapped to my back.
I hobbled and crawled downhill toward the chalet, through snow that became increasingly deep as I descended. I felt all right when I began, but soon began to experience a deep fatigue. The day had grown very dark, and heavy clouds were boiling up over Mount Adams. My left ankle was beginning to ache abominably. And I noticed that I was leaving quite a trail of blood behind me. I couldn’t tell where on my person it came from—I was beginning to hurt in half a dozen places—and this seemed no time to stop and examine myself. I didn’t even have a first aid kit in my knapsack.
The forerunners of the storm arrived just as I got to the chalet, on my feet now, or rather, on one foot, with the other raised, supporting myself by my remaining ski pole. Overhead were long dark streaky clouds, what the old Scandinavians called the storm’s maidens—those long, thin wild clouds that come out in advance of the main body of wind, snow and rain. The wind was whipping around my head when I got to the chalet’s front door and searched for the key under the log pile to the left. Edwin had been as good as his word. The key was right where he’d said it would be, under a bit of seasoned oak, and I got the door open and dragged myself inside.
It was a modern small ski chalet, bright birch and cedar. An A-frame with two guest rooms, a good-sized living room, bathroom and kitchen in the rear. I got my boots off and turned the power switch near the door. Even though it gave a satisfying click, it brought no power. Edwin had promised to have the electricity turned on by the time I got there, but apparently he had forgotten, or hadn’t succeeded.
I was in better luck with the propane. The chalet ran on its own tank. I made sure the pilot was on, found the valve and turned it, and soon had the living room heaters going nicely. Then and only then did I feel secure enough to look to myself.
There was no telephone. I had known that beforehand.
I wanted to get out of my ski clothes. My elasticized twill pants didn’t want to stretch over my swollen ankle, and I decided not to press the issue. I could keep my pants on for a while. My clothing was torn up enough to make it no difficulty to find where I had been abraded.
The cuts and scrapes on my sides and legs were painful but not serious, not even especially disabling. It was my ankle that was the problem, that and a puncture wound beneath my right shoulder blade, made by a tree branch, perhaps. Touching it gently, I found it was as big as the small end of a pool cue, and it was oozing blood. Not in a great stream, but steadily.
For a long time I just lay on the living room carpet in the growing gloom of the early evening. I may have dozed for a little while. It was almost dark when I determined to pull myself together.
Negotiating the living room made it seem a very big place indeed. I was quite weak. I had the feeling that I had injured myself worse than I’d first thought. That deep gouge in my back wouldn’t stop bleeding. Finally I gave all my attention to trying to do something about it.
I made a pad with a small pillow and bound it in place on my back with a sheet I found in one of the drawers under the picture window. That slowed the blood loss some, but it didn’t stop it. Blood continued to leak out of me and whenever I moved the pillow slipped off. I began to wonder how many pints of blood I could lose without passing out or going into shock. No matter what I did, the pillow wouldn’t stay in place. I couldn’t seem to get enough pressure on it, and finally discar
ded it.
The heaters soon took the chill off the chalet. I found two candles in the kitchen and brought them out to the living room. I put them in an ashtray and lighted them. By this small dancing light, I saw the shadows of evening gathering swiftly as the storm struck. There commenced a rattle of windows like the devil’s own tattoo. That’s the way my thoughts were trending. I was wounded and depressed and wallowing in my own feeling of stupidity, my embarrassment over this stupid accident with the pipes. It made me feel incompetent. And I was worried about the wound in my back. The flow of blood was slow, but it was steady. How much could I lose before I was in trouble?
The wind began gusting up and driving tree branches against the windows. Those trees should have been cut back. I was sure it was only a matter of time before a branch broke through. There seemed nothing I could do about it. There were wooden shutters, but I’d have to go outside to get at them, and I doubted my present ability to do that. I just lay there on the floor beside the couch, and felt the hollowness in my stomach, because I hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast early that morning in Hanfield Station. I lay there and waited to see if the window would hold.
It held, as it turned out. But something strange happened. There was a sharp crack and something came through the picture window. It didn’t shatter it. It bored through it like a rifle bullet. But it was bigger than a rifle bullet, to judge by the starred hole it left behind. And unlike a rifle bullet, it didn’t spend itself in the room. Like some sort of living thing, it buzzed and danced around the room.
I just cowered there on the floor watching it darting around and thinking to myself, “Well, this really is too much.” I mean, not only had I been hurt, now I was being forced to take part in some sort of weird, perhaps supernatural matter. For what else could this thing be?
“Stop that,” I told it irritably as it buzzed around my head. But if the thing, whatever it was, heard, it showed no signs of it. I don’t know what it had been when it came through the window, but now it was a sphere about the size of a baseball, and sparkling with many colors. It was spinning furiously and darting around the room like a large angry hornet. It dodged around and slammed into a wall, and changed shape, going all misshapen for a moment, before popping out again into a sphere. I couldn’t decide whether something was really happening or if I was having a hallucination. I was rooting for the hallucination because the supernatural or the supernormal, or whatever it was, was exactly what I didn’t want.
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