Magic

by Audrey Niffenegger

  “I do value good manners, you see. Courtesy, common or otherwise. The little gestures.”

  “‘Manners maketh man’, and all that.”

  “A party-dress on an ape, that’s all they are, when everything is said and done. But since there’s no alternative, they simply have to do.”

  “Given it must’ve been God who deeded you to us in the first place, directly or in-, do you think perhaps we might be part of your Hell, Nanny?”

  “I often ask myself that very question, my lady.”

  “But to no avail?”

  “None, my lady.”

  “That’s prayer for you, Nanny.”

  “Yes, my lady.”

  Nanny Grey eddied forward with one long white hand on her breast, head bent down submissively. And when she looked up, eyes pleasantly crinkled, she smiled so wide that Bill could see how her teeth were packed together far too numerously for most human beings, bright as little red eyes in the wet darkness of her mouth. While her eyes, on the other hand, were white – white as real teeth, as salt, as a blank page upon which some unlucky person’s name had yet to be inscribed.

  “Little master,” she murmured. “You wished a tour, I believe, and no one knows this house better than I. Come with me, please.”

  “I don’t–”

  “Oh, it will be no trouble; what my lady orders, I do. For as she told you, this is the bargain between us – the terms of my employment.”

  “Yes, and I do hope you were finally paying attention, silly Billy. Because with so little time left, I’d hate to have to repeat myself.”

  Sessilie leant down then, pressing one ear to Bill’s chest, in a vile parody of post-coital relaxation. But when Nanny Grey laid one of those too-long hands on his forehead a moment later, he felt his heart lurch and stutter as though he were about to have a heart attack, pounding double, triple, quadruple-time. Sessilie must’ve heard it, for she gave yet another of those rippling laughs, and he wanted nothing more than to be able to rouse his limbs enough to tear her soft white throat open with his thumbs. She drew back and pouted.

  “I’m going to tell you something now, Billy,” she said, “because I actually quite like you, all things considered. One day, when I turn Nanny over to my daughter the way Mama turned her over to me, she will take me wherever she’s taking you – wherever she took my Mama, and hers before her, so on, etcetera. Back to the first of us, great Lady Alyce in her shit-filled cell. So there; that might help.”

  Bill swallowed hard, barely scraping enough air to whisper: “It... really... doesn’t.”

  “Mmm, s’pose not; shouldn’t think it would. But then, I did only say ‘might.’”

  He sank down further then, excruciatingly slow, into a deep, deep blackness. Only to hear them still arguing, as he went–

  “Do this, Nanny Grey; do that, Nanny Grey. Eat up, Nanny Grey. You’ll expect me to digest him completely as well, I’m sure, just to save you the trouble of having to cover up your own indiscretions.”

  “Well, I could simply take him away now, if you’d prefer – but what on earth would be the use of that, considering? There are limits to even your perversity, I’m sure.”

  “Really, it’s you Kytelers who are the lazy ones. Never doing anything for yourselves... what sort of example do you think that sets, for everyone else?”

  “Oh, pish-tosh, Nanny. Why should we have to make the effort, when we have you to do it for us?”

  “... crazy...” Bill told them both, through stiffening lips, to which Sessilie only smiled, as ever. While Nanny Grey raised a single perfectly-arched eyebrow, expressionless as a cast pewter mask, and murmured, in return: “I had wings once, little master. You’d be disappointed too, I’d venture, if you found yourself where I find myself now.”

  “Poor Nanny. Quite the come-down, wasn’t it?”

  “A fall, yes, both long and hard. And at the end of it–”

  “Me,” Sessilie supplied, brightly. “Wasn’t that nice?”

  A pause, infinite as some gigantic clock’s gears turning over, millennial, epochal. Deep time caught in the shallowest of all possible circuits, and only digging itself deeper. After which Bill heard the thing that called itself Nanny Grey reply, with truly terrible patience–

  “...even so, my lady.”

  DUMB LUCY

  ROBERT SHEARMAN

  Shearman is a magician. I don’t mean in the traditional sense, but there is something about the way that Robert uses words and imagery that makes him quite unlike any other writer working today. ‘Dumb Lucy’ shows Shearman at his best: a poignant, heart-breaking tale that has hints of the work of Russell Hoban and Walter M. Miller Jr about it, but the magic is undoubtedly Shearman’s own.

  THERE WAS LITTLE magic left to those dark times. The world seemed cracked somehow, too weak for the magic to hold; latterly, as he’d performed his tricks, he’d begun to doubt they would work at all, he’d stood before his audience behind his patter and his sheen and a beaming smile that was well-oiled and ready practised, and he’d felt himself starting to sweat, he’d felt the fear take over – the magic wouldn’t hold, the magic would fail. Lucy never seemed to notice. Lucy never seemed to get nervous. And he supposed that if Lucy couldn’t see how frightened he was, then neither could anybody else. The magic had held. Still, it worried him.

  They hadn’t performed for a month. It would be better, he supposed, when they reached the town. The villagers wanted nothing to do with their conjuring. They had no coins to waste on such a thing. But he had strong arms, they said, he could work alongside them in the fields – and the little girl, she could join the other children, there were always berries that needed picking. Sometimes the coins they earned were enough to buy them shelter for the night, and sometimes not.

  And in the meantime they’d keep on walking, trying to keep ahead of the darkness. Because what choice did they have? He pulled the cart behind them. It would have been much quicker without the cart, but then they couldn’t have performed their magic. She walked by his side, and matched him step for step, and kept him company, though she never spoke.

  “Is this the town?” he said one day, and Lucy of course didn’t answer, and he knew already that this couldn’t be the town, it wasn’t big enough, it was little more than a street with a few houses either side. But maybe it might have grown into a town, one day, had the blackness not come.

  One of the houses was marked ‘inn’. He put down the cart, and beat upon the wooden door with his blistered hands. There was no reply, but he knew that someone was inside, he could hear breathing just an inch away, someone trying very hard to be quiet, someone scared.

  “Please,” he called. “We mean you no harm. We’re two travellers, we just want a room for the night.”

  “This is no inn,” a woman’s voice came back. “And the people who called it one are long since gone, or dead most like. There is no room for you here.”

  “If not for my sake, then for the little girl’s.” And at that, as if on cue, Lucy lifted her head and flared her dimples, and opened her eyes out wide and innocent. It was an expression she could pull at a moment’s notice, and it had been a useful trick in the old days, to gather about a sympathetic crowd, to persuade the crowd to part with coins. He saw no signs that anyone inside could see them; there must have been a secret window somewhere, or a crack in the wood, because next time the woman spoke her voice was softer.

  “D’ye have money?”

  “We are, at present, financially embarrassed,” confessed the man, but he puffed out his chest, and his voice became richer – somehow Lucy putting on her pose beside him gave him a little swagger too – “But we propose to pay you with a spectacle of our arts. We are magicians, conjurors, masters of the illusory and the bizarre. We have dazzled the crowned heads of three different empires with our legerdemain, the only limits to what we can surprise you with your own imagination. I am the Great Zinkiewicz, and this, my assistant, Lucy!” And at this he delivered a sweeping bow, d
irected at where he hoped his audience was watching him.

  There was silence for a few seconds.

  “You can come in anyway,” the woman said.

  The inn was dark and dirty, but welcoming for all of that, and warm. The woman showed them both to the fire, and the magicians stood before it, and baked in it, and the man hadn’t realised how cold he must have been. But now the heat was on his skin he realised there was a damp chill inside him it would take more than one night’s shelter to rid.

  “My cart?” he said.

  “It’s safe. No one will touch your cart.”

  “It contains everything we own.”

  “No one will touch your cart.”

  The man nodded at that, turned back to the fire, turned back to Lucy. Now that they were at rest, he realised once again what an incongruous couple they made. For all that he spoke like the gentleman, his clothes were ripped and mud-spattered, there were ugly patches in his grey beard and his face was bruised. Burly and broad shouldered, he stood nearly seven foot tall. Lucy, by his side, somehow still looked refined. The mud of the fields had never clung to her quite, and as ruddy as his face was, hers was as pale as milk. She seemed dwarfed next to him, she seemed small enough to be folded up and put away in a little box – exactly, in fact, as one of their tricks required.

  “There’s no food for you,” said the woman. “But there’s a room upstairs, just for the night; you and your daughter are welcome to it.” So, she thought Lucy was his daughter. Perhaps that was for the best.

  There was noise on the staircase, and the man looked up, and realised why the woman had taken pity on them. Grinning at them in wonder was a little girl, surely no older than Lucy. And she was a proper little girl too, the man could see that; she had somehow managed to keep her youth, unlike Lucy who just pretended. She was dressed in pink; there was some attempt still to curl her hair.

  “My daughter,” said the woman, and she said it gruffly enough, but the man could see she was trying to hide her affections, he could sense how she burned with love for the girl, he didn’t need his magic arts to tell. He was glad for them. He wondered if there was a father. He knew better than to ask.

  Her mother said, “We have guests, make up their bed.”

  The little girl’s eyes widened. “Like in the old days?”

  Her mother hesitated. “Yes,” she said. “Like in the old days.”

  The innkeeper and her daughter ate their bread and cheese. The innkeeper wouldn’t look at her visitors, but the daughter couldn’t help it, she kept stealing glances in their direction. The man knew not to make eye contact yet, not to ask for a single crumb of food. Lucy just stared into the flames, as if fascinated by something she saw there.

  “What’s your name?” the little girl suddenly asked her.

  “She’s called Lucy,” said the man.

  “How old is she?”

  “How old are you?”

  “I’m seven.”

  “Then Lucy’s seven too.”

  The little girl liked that. And the magician looked at her directly, and held her gaze, just for a few seconds, and he caused his eyes to twinkle. Lucy never looked up from the fire.

  “The magic you perform,” said the mother. “It’s an entertainment?”

  The man nodded gravely. “Madam, many have told us so.”

  “But it’s not real magic? I wouldn’t have real magic in my house.”

  “I assure you, it is nothing but tricks and sleight of hand. There is a rational explanation for everything that we do.” The woman nodded at that, slowly. “We would be happy to give you a demonstration.”

  At this the little girl became quite excited. “Oh, please, Mama!”

  The woman looked doubtful. “But what good can it do?”

  “It cheers the soul somewhat. It amuses the eyes. If nothing else, it makes the night pass that little bit faster.”

  “Please, mama!” The little girl was bouncing up and down now. “I do so want the night to go faster!”

  “No magic,” promised the man. “Just a little trick. So simple, your child will see through it. I give you my word.”

  Words counted for nothing in those days, but the woman chose to forget that. “All right, if it’s just the one.” And then she smiled wide, and the man could see how beautiful she was when she did that, and how much younger she looked, and how like her daughter, and how she wasn’t that much older than her daughter, not really, nor so different either.

  Lucy rose from the fireplace, stood as if to attention. The man said, “We’ll get changed into our costumes.” The woman told him there was no need for that. The man said, “Please, madam, you must allow us to present ourselves properly, presentation is what it’s all about!”

  The magicians went outside to the cart. They changed into costume. No one was in the street to see, and besides, there was no moon that night, it was pitch black.

  When they went back to the inn, the little girl clapped her hands at the sight of them, and her mother’s smile widened even further. What a pair they looked! The Great Zinkiewicz wasn’t a tramp, how ever could they have thought him so! – he was a lord in a long black evening coat, and his blistered hands were hidden beneath white gloves, and the top hat made him taller still, my, he towered over the room! And he looked smoother, softer, he was charming. Lucy was in a dress of a thousand sequins, and when she moved even the slightest muscle the sequins seemed to ripple in the firelight.

  “The Great Zinkiewicz will ask his beautiful assistant to give him a pack of playing cards.” His beautiful assistant did that very thing. Zinkiewicz held the pack between his thumb and forefinger. “I shall now ask a member of the audience to confirm these are just ordinary playing cards. You, little madam? Would you do me the honour? Would you be so kind? Would you tell everyone, we have never met before?”

  The little girl giggled. She inspected the cards. She confirmed they were very ordinary indeed.

  “I shall now ask you to pick a card. But don’t let me see it. Don’t let my assistant see it. Trust neither of us, keep it secret from us. Yes? Good. That’s good. Now, put it back in the pack. Anywhere you like, good.”

  He handed the pack to Lucy. Lucy fanned the cards in her hand, held them out. The Great Zinkiewicz produced a wand, and tapped at the deck once, twice, three times. “Abracadabra,” he said.

  “What does that mean?” asked the girl.

  “I’m glad you asked me that. I don’t know. No one knows. That’s what’s makes it magic.”

  “All right,” said the girl. She seemed unconvinced by that, so he winked at her.

  He took back the cards from Lucy. He shuffled them. He removed one. “Now,” he said. “Is this your card?”

  “No.”

  “Oh.” Zinkiewicz pulled a face. He looked at Lucy. Lucy pulled a face back. It was so perfect an imitation, and was so unexpected, those blank passive features suddenly contorting like that, really, you had to smile. “Oh. Well. I’ll try again. Hmph. Is this your card?”

  “No!”

  “This one, then?”

  “No!”

  “Then this one!”

  “No!” She laughed, she could see something good was coming.

  “Well then,” said Zinkiewicz. “Well, I’m stumped. Lucy, do you have any idea?”

  And Lucy sighed, a big mock sigh, why was she saddled with such a dunce for a partner? She walked up to the little girl. She reached behind the girl’s ear. She seemed to tug at it, gave a little grunt of exertion. And then out she pulled a piece of card, and it was all rolled up tight like a straw. She opened it, presented it to Zinkiewicz.

  And, as if taking credit for the magic himself, Zinkiewicz then presented it to the little girl, with a bow and a flourish.

  “Yes! Yes, that’s the one!” She clapped, so did her mother.

  There were a few more tricks performed, for as long as it took for the fire to burn out. And, at length, the innkeeper offered the magicians some bread and cheese. Zinki
ewicz thanked her, and they ate.

  “I know how you did the trick,” said the little girl.

  “Oho! Do you, indeed?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, we have to keep these things secret. You better whisper it in my ear.”

  The little girl laughed, looked at her mother for permission, and the mother nodded, laughed too. So the man got down on his knees, and the girl bent close, putting her lips right up to his ear, and whispering softly, and covering her mouth with her hand so no one could see. She told him the secret, and the man rolled his eyes, slow and despairing.

  “You’ve seen right through me!” he wailed. “You’ll become a magician too, I’ll be bound, like my Lucy!”

  But the little girl had got it wrong. The man had broken his promise. There had been real magic tonight, he had felt it flow right through him, he had felt the old confidence back, and it had been good. There had been no fear at all, it had been so very good. And the innkeeper and his daughter need never know. Lucy would know, but she’d never say.

  “Does she ever say anything?” said the woman suddenly. “Is it just part of the act, or...?”

  The man shook his head, put his finger to his lips, as if it were something mysterious he wasn’t allowed to divulge. But the truth was, he had no idea.

  THEY SAT UP late that night, into the small hours, the magician and the innkeeper. The children had gone to bed. The woman fetched an old bottle of Madeira wine, she said she’d been saving it for a special occasion. Maybe this was one.

  He said to her, “Aren’t you going to run away?” And then he blushed bright red, because he supposed that would sound like an invitation to accompany him, her and her kid, and he didn’t want that.

  “We’re going to stay,” she said. “We’ve decided. We’re happy here. There’s nowhere out there that’s better. And maybe, maybe they’ll leave us be.”