by James Gunn
Ariel! My face flushed warmly as I remembered the beauty of her face and the warm sweetness of her lips and the fire of her body, a perfect blend of youthful firmness and womanly softness. And the wonder of it all — the abiding wonder — was Ariel herself, an understanding, gentle, delightful —
To the showers, Casey!
“Showers?”
A cold, cold shower is what you need. Icy, in fact.
“Really, now. What’s the harm — ?”
Just because you’re in love with a nice girl and you think she’s in love with you —
“What do you mean, ‘think’”?
All right. And a nice girl’s in love with you, don’t forget that you’re not one step closer to finding out Solomon’s identity. And until you’ve found that out, you’re not walking on clouds. You’re walking on quicksand.
The water was icy. I stood it as long as I could, puffing and blowing and gasping, and then reached blindly for the towel. And as I reached I remembered the feeling of uneasiness that had met me as I entered the bathroom. I knew the reason for it now. When I left, the towels had been used and disarranged. When I entered, everything had been straightened up. Someone had been in the room since I had left; someone had been in the bathroom.
But it was too late; the towel had slipped through my fingers. It coiled itself around my neck. It tightened with the irresistible strength of a boa constrictor. I stumbled out of the shower, tugging at it with both hands, struggling for breath.
I staggered and slipped across the tile floor, my eyes beginning to bulge, the room beginning to turn a little red, the need for air a frantic burning in my chest. It was useless to struggle with this bewitched thing, but I could not give up. I had too much to live for.
Fool! Fool! Half an hour, you told her, and it hasn’t been fifteen minutes. And if she should arrive early, the door is locked and chained. Better to be stupid than half-smart!
The redness darkened. I staggered and almost fell.
You can’t fight magic with ordinary strength, Casey! Think, man, think! There has to be a counterspell. Think!
But I couldn’t think. The darkness was invading my mind inexorably, and as it closed in I thought of Ariel, I thought of her sorrow and despair when she saw my body.
And the last light went out.
“Well, young man,” someone said, “are you going to wake up or do I have to drown you?”
I opened my eyes, spluttering, and breathed deeply. The air went into my lungs like live steam. I raised my hands and massaged my throat, wincing. It was wet, like my face.
“Ah,” said the voice, “that’s better.” It was a woman’s voice. I knew that I should recognize it.
I turned my head over. “You!” I said. It came out in a hoarse croak. She was standing beside the bed, an empty water glass in her hand.
It was Mrs. Peabody. Her gray curls bobbed as she nodded vigorously. “And a lucky thing for you that it was. Another minute and you’d have been beyond caring.”
I turned my head back and forth, wondering if it were going to fall off. Apparently it wasn’t. My circumstances began to interest me a little more.
I was lying on the bed. I was cold. I was also naked, except for the deadly towel, which was lying across me, lifeless but strategic.
She chuckled. “Is this the way you greet all your female guests? Well, don’t lie there lewd and naked all day. Go get some clothes on.”
I sat up, clutching the towel. She turned her back as I slipped shakily back into my clothes.
“How did you get in?” I asked hoarsely. “I’m not complaining, you understand,” I added quickly.
“Same way your other visitors got in,” she said. “You may have had your door locked, but you left another doorway wide open.” She pointed to the center of the rug.
There was the circle I had drawn last night, in which Ariel had appeared and disappeared twice, one arc of it scuffed out by someone’s foot.
“You’re a very careless young man,” the little old lady said, turning around abruptly. I turned my back to her and hastily zipped up my pants. “Carelessness is never profitable,” she went on, “but when you get to fooling around with magic and witchcraft, it becomes downright foolhardy. Well, what have you found out?”
The question caught me flatfooted. I blinked. “Nothing,” I said.
“Wasted my money, did I?” She nodded as if she had expected it all along.
“Hold on,” I objected. “I’ve only been on the case for a little over twenty-four hours.”
“Long enough,” she said. She stamped around the room.
I was beginning to be a little annoyed. “I’ve got a few complaints myself. You threw me into this situation without a word of explanation. You — ”
“Would you have believed me if I’d told you?”
“Well, no,” I admitted. “But you let me blunder my way around, nearly getting killed two or three times, and — ”
“Told you there’d be danger.”
“Not this kind of danger.” I motioned to the towel.
“You didn’t think of that when you were looking at that bill.” She chuckled. “Want to give it back?”
I hesitated and made up my mind. “All right. Deducting a day’s work and expenses.” I pulled out my billfold.
She held up a pale, thin hand. “Now, wait a minute. I haven’t said I wanted it back. You can’t quit a job that easy. What have you found out?”
“I told you,” I said. “Nothing.” I started taking out the remains of a thousand dollars. Luckily I hadn’t used too much of it.
“Didn’t find out his name?”
“Solomon,” I said. “Solomon Magus.” I kept counting.
“Nonsense,” she said impatiently. “I mean his real name.”
“No.” I counted out nine hundred and seventy-six dollars on the bureau top, extracted one-hundred and twenty-six dollars to make it one hundred dollars for the day and fifty dollars expenses, and I shoved the rest toward her.
“No clues?” she asked. “Is that all I get for my money?”
“Well,” I said reluctantly, “I found a return-trip ticket to Washington, D.C.”
“Ah,” she said significantly.
“But I’m not even sure it belongs to him. There’s your money. Take it”
Her faded blue eyes looked me over shrewdly. “You’re too eager. Why? Got another client, have you?”
“Maybe,” I admitted.
“Who is it?”
“That,” I said pointedly, “is none of your business.”
“Paying you as well as I am?” she asked quizzically. “Bet not. Bet it’s a girl. Paying you in kisses, I bet. You look like the kind of young fool who’d rather have kisses than money.”
I flushed. “Maybe you’re right,” I said. “Good-by.”
“Don’t rush me, young man!” she snapped. “I’ll go when I’m ready. I’m not sure I want to call you off this thing. A bargain’s a bargain.”
“Only when it’s made in good faith,” I said. “You misled me about the case.”
“You’re an ungrateful young man,” she said, shaking her head. “Here I save your life, and now you’re tossing me out of your room without even a thank-you.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, and I was. “Thanks.”
“That’s better,” she said. “Now. Tell me. Does this new job conflict with what I paid you to do? Eh?”
“Well — ” I said, hesitating.
“Then,” she said triumphantly, “why not do both jobs at once? I guess you’re not allergic to money.”
I thought about it for a moment and shook my head. “I’m sorry again. I can’t take anybody as a client if I don’t know their real name.”
“Know the girl’s name, eh?” She chuckled as I got red again. “All right, young man. If that’s the way you want it.”
“You won’t tell me your real name?” I asked.
She shook her head decisively, picked up the money from the burea
u and walked toward the door. As she unhooked the chain, she turned back. “You can tell that girl for me,” she said, “that she’s a very lucky woman.”
I smiled and looked aside, and was turned to stone. Somehow the black mirror that bad been leaning against the wall had been turned around so that it faced into the room. The little old lady should have been reflected in it, but it wasn’t the little old lady I saw.
Darkly, glimmering up at me through the mists of night, was the face of Ariel.
She turned her head, and I looked into the mirrored eyes of a frightened angel. Dark angel. I looked back and forth between the night-ridden image of youth and beauty and the reality of withered age. Angel? Witch. And I loved the one in the black mirror.
“Ariel?” I groaned. “Why? And which one is you?”
She took a step toward me, her hand half-raised, and just then the door swung open. Uriel walked into the room calmly and stopped, glancing quickly around. He grasped the situation almost instantly.
Uriel was only an inch or two taller than the old lady, and his white hair went well with her gray, perky curls. They made a jolly old couple. But where did that leave me? In love with a phantom in a dark glass?
A sob broke from the old lady’s throat. It was strangely incongruous. “Don’t you know?” she said, and it was Ariel’s voice.
“How can I?” I groaned. It was getting to be a habit. “Everybody’s someone else. Nobody’s themselves. How do I know what to believe? Who are you?”
She broke into tears and sank down into a chair, sobbing. “You don’t love me,” she said brokenly.
“Look in the mirror, son!” Uriel said firmly.
I looked. Uriel was mirrored there. Uriel himself, not someone else. “What is that supposed to tell me?” I asked. “That you’re not disguised?”
“Exactly,” Uriel said. He walked quickly to the mirror, keeping to one side of it so that he did not see his own reflection, and turned it to the wall. “And that means that the mirror shows people as they are, not as they aren’t.” He inspected the letters around the edges. “Interesting,” he mused and became engrossed.
I turned to Ariel — and it was Ariel. Mrs. Peabody was gone. Ariel’s eyes were wet with tears as she looked up at me.
“How old are you?” I asked sternly, unable to keep my doubts from spilling over.
“Twenty-two,” she said, her voice breaking.
“Really?”
“Well,” she said, “twenty-three.”
I sighed. That had the real ring of truth. And, after my experiences of the last couple of days, it had the added flavor of novelty. “Why?” I asked. “Why did you do it?”
“Oh, think, Gabriel!” she said, and a hint of impatience was creeping into her voice. “I didn’t want anyone to know that I was investigating Solomon. And I certainly had no way of knowing I could trust you.”
“Not at first, maybe,” I said doggedly, “but you had plenty of chances to tell me later.”
She blushed. “I was going to tell you, Gabriel. I was going to tell you when I came down here. And then when I knocked and couldn’t get an answer, and I had to materialize inside the room and saw you with your face all red — I decided it would be better for Mrs. Peabody to save you. You would never have to know that I had deceived you, and Mrs. Peabody could just fade away.”
“And you had to make one last test to be sure you could trust me,” I added, scowling.
“If I’d known you were going to act like this, Gabriel, I’d never have bothered,” she retorted, her chin up stubbornly, with supreme illogic.
“And for God’s sake!” I shouted. “Stop calling me Gabriel! You know my name — ”
Her eyes grew big with alarm. “Sh-h-h!” she said. “Don’t say it!”
I went toward her with some high-class illogic of my own, my arms outstretched. “Then you do care,” I sighed.
The next thing I knew, I was sitting in the chair and she was curled up in my lap, her head on my shoulder, whispering things in my ear, and Uriel was coughing, having spent as much time inspecting the mirror as he could find excuse for.
“Children,” he said. “There is work to do. And I must say, Ariel, that you’re growing very careless about your spells.”
“Goodness,” Ariel said, sitting up and looking down at her dress — Mrs. Peabody’s dress, that is. “This lavender and lace doesn’t do a thing for me, either. You’ll have to excuse me for a moment.”
She dashed to the circle and disappeared. Uriel and I stared blankly at each other, shaking our heads. Ten minutes later she was back in a sleek black dress that did a great deal for her, but Uriel and I, under a gentleman’s agreement, ignored her appearance and continued our discussion of the books he had noticed on the desk. He cleared up a number of my vaguer conceptions about the principles of magic.
Ariel sat down on the edge of a chair, looking hopefully back and forth between us, like a little girl trying not to be heard, but seen. At last she gave up. “I’m back,” she said.
I turned to her. “Tell me. Who was Gabriel?”
She sighed heavily. I forced back a smile. “He was Father’s prot≥g≥, a graduate student who was really quite an adept. Uriel thought that Gabriel was almost as good as he was himself. We were hoping that he could help us with Solomon. And then he was killed in a traffic accident.”
“That was no accident,” I said, and I told them about La Voisin’s slip.
“The murderers!” Ariel said angrily.
“Was he in love with you?” I asked.
Ariel was thoughtful. “Maybe. But I didn’t — I mean he was just a nice boy.”
“That makes two murders, then. Gabriel and your father.”
“If Prospero’s death was murder,” Uriel said, shaking his head. “I didn’t realize anything was wrong until too late — he didn’t tell me.
But I can’t believe that even Solomon would stoop to all the foul, disgusting nonsense involved in the Mass, the ruined church, the black host, the water from the well in which an unbaptized infant has been drowned and all the rest.”
“He’s already made two attempts on Gabri — on his life,” Ariel said. “That black mirror and an ensorcled towel that almost strangled him. The only thing Solomon cares about is power, and the only way he can be sure of that is to kill all of us.”
“And I understand that you haven’t been feeling well,” I said, turning to Uriel while I massaged my throat reminiscently.
“Nonsense,” Uriel said stoutly. “Never felt better in my life.” He started coughing. It had a hollow sound. For the first time I noticed that Uriel’s rosy appearance of health was an illusion. His red cheeks were rouged. Ariel and I exchanged worried glances.
“Let’s get to work,” Ariel said. “Tell him about the clue, Gabri — ”
She stopped and stared at the expression on my face. Something had just occurred to me.
“You might as well call me ‘Casey,’” I said. “I just remembered. I signed the hotel register with my own name.”
They stared at me aghast.
I shook my head remorsefully. “I’m afraid I’m a bust at this business. Ill never remember all the rules. I suppose they know your name,” I said to Uriel.
“I’m afraid so. Since Professor Reeves and I founded the society, we had little opportunity for deception. Many early members knew us, and our preliminary researches attracted a little publicity. Anyone could have learned our names without much more than asking.”
“Professor Reeves was Prospero?” I asked. “Ariel’s father?”
“Yes,” Ariel said.
“And what about you?” I asked, turning to her. “Do they know now your name?”
“Yes,” she said, “but they don’t know it.”
“Eh?” I said blankly. “Go through that once more. ‘They know it but they don’t know it?’”
She shook her head. “It isn’t a good thing to talk about.”
“But what is this name business?” I
asked. “Does it have to be all your names, or just your first name or last name, or what?”
“Your real name,” Uriel said. “The name that is you. In most cases, that is your Christian name, although in many primitive tribes all over the world, the child was given a secret or sacred name which was known only to himself or his parents.”
“That’s me.” I chuckled. “I’m not so bad off after all. Casey isn’t my real name. And I don’t think anyone has used anything else since I was christened.”
“Thank God!” Ariel breathed.
I took her hand and squeezed it.
“You said you had a clue?” Uriel said quickly. Maybe he wanted to forestall another outburst of affection.
I fished out the ticket again. It was getting a little battered. “Maybe. But I don’t know what good it can do us.”
Uriel looked it over carefully. He balanced it on his fingertips and muttered a few words. The ticket fluttered. “It fits,” Uriel said, looking up. “I’m almost sure Solomon held this in his hand at one time. And, now that I think about it, it’s natural that he should be from Washington.”
“Washington?” I echoed. “Why?”
“That’s where the power is,” Ariel supplied. “And he’s the most ambitious man I’ve ever known.”
“Washington,” I mused. “That narrows it down some, but not much. He could be anyone from a public figure to a man behind the throne that nobody knows.”
Ariel’s face fell.
“But it isn’t hopeless,” I said. “Hold everything.”
I picked up the telephone, asked for long distance and then for Jack Duncan at the Associated Press Washington newsroom. I turned to smile at Ariel. She and Uriel were watching me blankly.
“Jack?” I said. “Casey. Fine, fine. Business. Tell me, who’s gone from Washington?”
“Oh, man, you’ve started drinking early in the morning,” Jack said sarcastically.
“You know what I mean. Who important?”
“Everybody, boy. Nobody hangs around here over the weekend but us wage slaves.”
I was silent for a moment, thinking just how to phrase the question that had occurred to me. “Answer me this, then. Who’s the luckiest man in Washington?”