Wildwood

by Farris, John

  "As the gods," Langford murmured, unabashedly envious.

  "Some of us may even be deserving," Travers said.

  Following dinner, it was Edgar Langford's turn to be the center of attention. He had prepared a magic show. He had, in fact, been working obsessively on his show for many weeks. In the years since he had performed for Sibby and her family in the Wanngs' Boston parlor, his skills had grown, his illusions were more complex to perform. He required a stage built to his specifications, and assistants, one of whom was Pamela, Sibby's maid. The other was a black man, lightless as soot, an Ethiopian named Taharqa, obtained by Edgar during a stopover in Cairo on his most recent journey to the Middle East. Taharqa was an enormous, glowering, tongueless man with splayed feet sheathed in callus thick enough to withstand the cold of Wildwood's frozen ground; he obviously had never worn even the most rudimentary of sandals. His narrow but powerful torso was scarred from vicious beatings. Under what circumstances he had been deprived of his tongue and otherwise mistreated was unknown. He could not communicate with anyone but Edgar, through some occult language of the eyes elaborated on with gestures, and had no real duties except to be instantly available when Edgar wanted him. He wore, typically, an ankle-length blue robe of flimsy cotton cloth with a braided silk belt, darker blue, from which hung amulets and a holstered hand ax of curved black Damascus steel. Taharqa slept, slave-like, on the floor outside Edgar's apartment, on a small Turkish carpet, wearing thin in places from the sharpness of his elbows. Perhaps Edgar kept him close to hand because he felt the need of a bodyguard of unquestioned loyalty. Or perhaps he merely regarded Taharqa as a pet, was amused by the dismay and fear which the ever-silent Ethiopian inspired in other servants and the many workmen on the premises. Edgar doted on the foreign, the unusual, the inexplicable.

  Pamela, who assisted him with props and played important roles in two of his newest illusions, was a sturdy auburn-haired Yorkshire girl, with a wide handsome face and eyes so brilliantly feline they shone in the dark. She had no education but was slick with her hands and worked in her spare time to perfect the elements of legerdemain she had been taught.

  Edgar had wanted as large an audience as possible for his exhaustively rehearsed show: therefore by nine-thirty the as yet unfinished Great Drawing Room of the chateau was filled. Nearly five hundred spectators in all. Every servant and workman in residence at Wildwood (another three hundred commuted by railroad from outlying communities almost every day) were on hand, with their wives and awed children. Most of them were required to stand, for there were only a limited number of chairs and stools; all were wearing coats, gloves, and mufflers, because the two huge Renaissance ceramic stoves in the drawing room raised the temperature only about ten degrees above freezing.

  The stage was a three-tiered affair, ringed below by footlights and above by theatrical lamps fixed to iron stanchions, all levels draped in folds of dark velvet that were decorated, in tingly silver, with symbols of the conjuror's art. Sibby, wearing a Russian sable coat, sat with her lover and Nikola Tesla in a small "royal" box on a diagonal thrust of the main stage and about four feet above the rough and dusty stone floor. It was also close to one of the antique stoves; their backs were warm, their noses numb. Travers felt rather foolish sitting there, waiting for rabbits to pop out of top hats: his store of childlike wonder had always been minuscule. They were attended by livened footmen and drinking port, for which Sibby had developed a fondness—one of her trifling vices, and not nearly so dangerous as her need to chloroform herself to sleep in those intervals when they were not trysting. Tonight the port had inspired in her a rather pathetic vivaciousness, an ingenuous desire to be found appealing by the inventor whose air of aloof genius had piqued more than one woman of wealth and accomplishment to mount an assault on his publicized celibacy.

  "It is beyond my c-comprehension, Mr. Tesla, how you have managed to remain unmarried all these years."

  His smile was barely noticeable, his parry so accomplished he must have repeated it countless times in similar circumstances.

  "An inventor has so intense a nature, with so much in it of wild, passionate quality, that in giving himself to a woman he might love, he would give everything, and so take everything from his chosen field."

  Travers, who was getting slowly and sourly drunk and to the point of not caring what he said, commented, "I believe it was St. Jerome, who, desiring to live all of his earthly years in perfection of his soul, solved the problem of the disturbing flesh by unmanning himself."

  Sibby gasped delicately, a hand to her throat, and looked at Travers with widening eyes, perhaps assuming his mood had turned pathologically to thoughts of self-mutilation as punishment for getting her with child.

  Tesla smiled, this time more sincerely and with a hint of amusement.

  "There is a source of energy which is, of course, uniquely masculine, that I think must not be tampered with, if one aspires to more than a lifetime of quiet contemplation—or the perfection of a pure bel canto voice."

  Sibby gasped again and then began to giggle, rather out of control; fortunately her outburst was lost in a clashing of cymbals nearby as the temporary lights of the drawing room were abruptly lowered and the magician's helpers appeared onstage. The tall Taharqa in a scarlet robe and a rather absurd turban with a pale jewel as its centerpiece. And Pamela in a short pleated skirt and ballerina's leotards that revealed, fully, beautiful legs, although she was too short-waisted and too wide in the shoulders to have a truly outstanding figure.

  Travers, as the lights went down, seized one of Sibby's hands and squeezed to stall her hysterical mirth; she gulped and breathed hard and stared at Pamela and whispered, "Look at h-her. She m-might as well be nude."

  "Very fetching," Tesla said, steepling his hands, staring at Pamela, whose face was petrified in an expression that might have been stage fright, or deep concentration. Taharqa had much the same uplifted, starry daze in his yolk-yellow eyes, and Travers wondered if they were mesmerized—another, hitherto unknown talent of Edgar Langford's? Their breaths were luminously visible against the dark backdrop.

  Travers did not release Sibby's hand until she tugged insistently. Then he reached for the glass of port that was kept filled to within an inch of the brim by one of the unseen footmen discreetly stationed outside their privileged enclosure. Unseen but all-seeing, and how much gossip would there be tomorrow, because he imprudently had taken Sibby's hand in his own? For that matter, did they have any secrets left? Had they been as simple as children, blissfully deluded in their passion for each other, believing they could conceal the brilliance of love fulfilled from eyes that were alert, in this hermetical society, for any enlivening spark of cynical entertainment?

  To the accompaniment of gramophone music the magic show began.

  Pamela clapped her hands and a footman approached with two crystal wineglasses and a bottle of port on a silver tray. Pamela unsealed and uncorked the bottle, poured one glass full of the dark amber spirits. She began to fill the second glass. Suddenly the port stopped flowing, as if the bottle had run dry. Puzzled, Pamela shook the bottle, then upended it: not another drop of wine appeared. She tapped one hand smartly on the bottom of the bottle, then quickly held it upright and aloft: a bouquet of red carnations blossomed from the neck. She gathered the bouquet and tossed it toward the enclosure: fresh carnations fell across the table. Sibby picked one up and smiled delightedly. "It's real!" she called out. Applause and laughter; Sibby was popular at Wildwood. As her husband was not. Travers, hearing the applause, as much for Sibby as for clever Pamela, felt his tension easing. Yes, there surely had been gossip; but perhaps not all of it was unkind.

  Taharqa had wheeled out a tall lacquered Chinese cabinet from behind the curtains. He opened the hinged door of the topmost compartment. It was an empty cube. Pamela handed the Ethiopian a cigar, and lighted it for him. Taharqa drew on the cigar until it glowed, then exhaled a cloud of smoke, thick and blue in the spotlight. Turning to the open compart
ment of the cabinet, he puffed and blew smoke until it was cigar-foggy inside, then closed the door. He walked away and stood, out of the spotlight, with arms folded.

  After a few graceful flourishes Pamela opened the compartment once more and took out a snowy fluttering dove, which she exhibited in her two hands. Then she quickly replaced the dove inside the compartment. Almost immediately a loud knocking resounded through the drawing room. Startled, Pamela looked into the compartment. The dove was gone; in its place was the head of Edgar Langford. He was smiling. The illusion was unsettling, the applause it elicited nervous and jerky.

  "Good h-heavens!" Sibby exclaimed, and looked away.

  The knocking again. Langford rolled his disembodied head, eyeing Pamela. He looked down, where the rest of him should be. She nodded and opened the large compartment below. But it was empty. Pamela demonstrated just how empty with her hands, then stood back, hands on hips, feigning perplexity. Edgar Langford looked disgruntled. There were nervous titters in the drawing room. Pamela turned the cabinet on small casters, and found more secretly hinged doors to open. Edgar Langford's head appeared again and again, once upside down, in newly discovered compartments.

  Suddenly, unexpectedly, it was Taharqa's head they saw: and a second spotlight picked out the figure standing in near darkness at the far side of the stage, which everyone had all but forgotten about but assumed was the dour Ethiop. The figure turned slowly to the audience. It was Edgar Langford, wearing a robe and turban like Taharqa's.

  There was an enthusiastic wave of applause, an outpouring of admiration; even Nikola Tesla joined in.

  "How very clever. Worthy of my friend Houdini at his best."

  "I h-had no idea he could d-do these things," Sibby said, more dismayed than entertained.

  Edgar Langford could do many wonderful and baffling things, and proceeded to show them.

  He levitated Pamela, tilted her this way and that on an invisible axis, then caused her to revolve in the air while passing hoops of steel from her feet to her head, proving beyond a doubt that she was not somehow suspended from the ceiling on thin wires.

  He stood, weighted and shackled with forty pounds of chains, in a cabinet made of glass and steel that was filled with a rose-tinted water. To the tip of his broad stake-bearded chin. To the bridge of his nose. At last the water closed over his head. The top of the cabinet was then locked with a big padlock. Expressionless, further chilling an already cold crowd, Langford gazed out at them while a curtain was drawn completely around the cabinet.

  Sibby grasped her throat with one hand.

  A very long minute passed.

  Pamela, trying to maintain a confident smile, began to fidget, looking around at the curtain.

  Two minutes.

  Sibby rose to her feet prepared to scream. At the same instant Taharqa sprang toward the curtains with ax in hand, as if he were about to smash the cabinet glass and attempt to rescue the unfortunate illusionist. But before he could touch them the curtains were whisked high and away and Edgar Langford was revealed, standing, still shackled, on the outside of the glass cabinet, glowing with a drowned pallor but obviously alive. Sibby swayed and Travers quickly lowered her into her seat. The level of the water in the cabinet had fallen appropriately but was motionless, not agitated as it should have been if Langford had just left the cabinet. Pamela seized the padlock and tugged. It was still in place, still locked.

  He bowed slightly and gravely to their applause, then hobbled crookedly offstage to be unchained and change clothes while Pamela entertained with milder magic. Sibby made an attempt to recover her composure with another glass of port. It only made her slump, as if she had been robbed (more sleight of hand) of a vital bone or two. Travers had never seen her so demoralized.

  "I must admit, I cannot devise an explanation," Tesla said after pondering the illusion.

  But Edgar's finale was stranger still.

  He reappeared in an unadorned black robe and cowl. A circular stairway of glass eight feet high had been positioned onstage. It was brightly lit. There was, seemingly, no place for him to go as he mounted the staircase one slow step at a time like a monk on his way to the belfry to toll for Matins.

  His audience, some shivering, others fatigued, were nevertheless riveted by his methodical progress. What next?

  At the top of the glass stairs he slowly and reverently withdrew a single red rose from one voluminous sleeve of his robe and showed it to them. It was a fancy large rose, with a foot-long stem green as a garter snake, pronounced thorns like the wide-apart fangs of a deadlier specimen. He held the rose in both hands, high, higher, above his head; his eyes lifted in contemplation of its beauty. Then he turned his back on them and just as slowly brought the rose down until it could no longer be seen because of the spread of his cowl, and nothing of Edgar himself was visible inside the sack-like robe.

  He shrugged, almost a convulsion. The robe fell away from his body, like a heavy cloud, fell all the way to the stage floor.

  But they never saw his body. Because even as the robe was falling, Edgar Langford had disappeared, in a hot spotlight, a glare of glass at the top of a transparent flight of stairs.

  Taharqa picked up the discarded robe. He and Pamela left the stage.

  The spotlight on the staircase dimmed. The lights of the drawing room came up.

  In the audience they looked around, a little dazed, disappointed, and began to murmur.

  Travers heard Sibby breathing heavily through her mouth. She was trembling.

  There was a sudden loud knocking that startled everyone. A child began to wail. Then the ten-foot double doors at the entrance to the drawing room were thrown open.

  Edgar Langford stood in the broad doorway, casting a long shadow. He had put on one of his patrician togas.

  "Thank you for coming, and good evening," he said. Then he turned and walked away as scattered applause built to an ovation.

  A wineglass shattered on the table at which Travers was sitting with Sibby and Nikola Tesla. Sibby's left fist had done it, in an erratic swing, bursting harmlessly the frail bell, which contained only a dram or two of port. In her right hand she was holding, stiffly, a rose of the approximate size and shape as the one Edgar Langford had taken from his full sleeve at the top of the glass staircase.

  The petals of this rose, however, were black from frost. The stem looked withered and long-dead. Only the thorns remained stubbornly sharp, and a bright drop of blood had appeared on the pricked ball of Sibby's thumb.

  She stared at her lover.

  "It w-w-w-was in my lap," she explained. "Eh-Edgar put it there. I f-f-f-felt him w-when he w-walked b-b-b-b-b—"

  Her lips curled upward in a funny, stunned smile. Her blue eyes quickly paled to the pustular whiteness of blisters. The blighted rose dropped from her hand, shedding petals, and her head fell stonily forward, facedown and with a little horrid thump against the lace-covered table.

  The audience was milling, applauding, leaving. James B. Travers looked quickly from the stage to the doorway where Edgar Langford had dramatically reappeared for his brief good night, and then at the desolate rose, the remains of which lay on the table beside Sibby's still head; and he understood, with the particular clarity of the newly condemned, what he had this evening been carefully led to understand: it was not magic that Edgar Langford possessed, it was sorcery.

  Chapter Twenty

  April 1958

  It was late in the afternoon when Faren and Terry, slowly making their way one behind the other up the gorge of the Cat Brier, found the locomotive that was lying on one side and half swamped by the silver river torrent.

  For more than half an hour they hadn't spoken, because the down surge of the forty-foot-wide river through its mountainous channel made normal conversation difficult, and because they were both tired from their long hike and needed all their breath just to keep moving, struggling, upward. When Faren stopped abruptly on a flat pitch of shale covered by the delicate evergreen walking fern cal
led "sore eye," Terry, intent on his footing, bumped into her and nearly sent her headlong into the water—like a plume of sculpted glass—six feet below. He grabbed her in time. Faren recovered her balance and helped him up beside her; she pointed. The angled locomotive was about thirty yards upstream, blocky, blacker than the shadows that covered it except for a shaft of sun glancing off one silver-dollar-perfect rim of a forward driver wheel.

  "How did that get there?"

  "I don't know," she said. "Looks like a wreck."

  "Yeah. But—didn't you say—"

  "I know. The railroad up to Tormentil washed out more than forty years ago."

  "Well, that engine doesn't look like it's been there forty years."

  "Terry," Faren said, sounding cross, "it's just an old wreck, what else can it be?"

  She cast aside the mattock they had been using alternately to cut tough rhododendron branches from their path along the slippery river bank and sank down into the dampened fern. The webbing of her right hand and thumb showed hot blisters; she bit and sucked at one of them.

  "I just can't push on anymore. My legs ache."

  "Okay." Terry set his pack down. "I'll be back in a few minutes. I want to take a look at that wreck."

  "Don't go climbing on it, it's probably all but rusted through in places."

  He said in a deliberately high voice, "I'll be real careful, Auntie Faren."

  She soundly smacked the seat of his pants with her left hand, shrugged off her own backpack, and lay flat in driplocks of gorgeous fern, released from trekking as if from chains, gazing vacantly at some olive-sided flycatchers who flew like small arrows from a faint rainbow drawn across the river channel, nicking the metaled air with birdsound. Her eyes closed with the third deep breath she took. She was dozing when Terry came back and shook her.