MAGICATS II

by Gardner Dozoi

  Eating the roast beef, for a few moments, speaking English between mouthfuls, Eszterhazy could think himself in England. And then the stewards came carrying round the slabs of black bread and the pots of goose grease. And he knew that he was exactly where he now thought he was: in Bella, the sometimes beautiful and sometimes squalid capital of the Triune Monarchy of Scythia-Pannonia-Transbalkania.

  Fourth largest empire in Europe.

  The Turks were fifth.

  ###

  The gaslights in the great salon in the town-house of old Colonel Count Cruttz were famous gaslights. Cast in red bronze, they were in the form of mermaids, each the length of a tall man’s arm, and each clasping in cupped hands the actual jets for the gas flames as they, the mermaids, faced each other in a great circle: with mouths slightly open, they might be imagined as singing each to each. This was perhaps a high point of a sort in illumination, here in Bella. Well-dried reeds were used to soak up mutton-tallow or other kitchen grease, and these formed the old-fashioned rush lights which the old-fashioned (or the poor) still used at night. They smelled vile. But they were cheap. Their flickering, spurting light was not good to read by. But they were cheap. They were very, very cheap. Tallow-candles. Whale-oil. Colza-oil, allegedly stolen here and there by Tartars to dress their coleslaw. Coal-oil, also called paraffin or kerosene. Gas-lamps. From each pair of red-gold hands the red-gold flames leaped high, soughing and soaring. Often attempts had been made to employ the new experimental gas mantles. But Colonel Count Cruttz always shot them away with his revolver-pistol.

  Colonel Count Cruttz looked sober enough tonight; of course, that was subject to change, although it was customary for nothing but champagne to be served at such soirees, and it was not in accordance with his reputation to become shooting-drunk (even gas-mantle-shooting drunk) on such a ladies’ drink as champagne. Still. If a bullet from a revolver-pistol, or two or three, could solve a certain problem of which signs were likely to be shown tonight—if so, gladly would Doctor Eszterhazy ply Colonel Count Cruttz with brandy, vodka, rum, gin, schnapps, and whiskey. Or, for that matter, alcohol absolutus. As, however, it was not to be more than thought of, he would have to . . . what would he have to do?

  . . . something else.

  In one half of the great salon, the soiree looked like any and every other soiree in Bella: that is, an imitation of a soiree in Vienna, which in turn would be an imitation of one in Paris. Few things bored Eszterhazy more than a Bellanese soiree, though they were, barring boredom, harmless. The other half of the great salon, under the soaring gaslights, was not in the least like every other soiree in Bella, for everyone in that half of the room was gathered around one sole person: a breach of good manners indeed. One might give a ‘reception’ for a particular person and that person might be lionized, surrounded; this was to be expected. But a soiree was not a reception, at least it was not intended to be, and it was good manners neither in those gathered round one person nor for that one person to allow it. But—allow it?

  Mr. Mudge reveled in it.

  Those in the other half of the room strolled around for the most part by ones and twos, now and then uttering polite words to those they walked with or to those they encountered. What was going to happen? By now Doctor Eszterhazy knew. Someone would give a polite hand-clap. Others would fall silent. Someone would say what good luck they all had. Someone would speak, obliquely, of the Spirits which—or who—had ‘crossed over,’ and how, for reasons not only not made clear but never mentioned, they sometimes were pleased to make use of the “the justly famous Mr. Mudge” as the medium of their attempts to contact the living. Eszterhazy had, he hoped, a most open mind: the received opinion of thousands of years to the contrary, the spirits of the dead were not where they could neither reach nor be reached? Very well. Let the evidence be presented, and he would form . . . perhaps . . . an opinion. But he knew no evidence that any of the so-called spirits had passed their time, whilst living, in tipping tables or sounding very tatty-looking trumpets or ringing lots of little bells; and so he did not think they would do so, now that they were dead, as a means of proving that they were not really entirely dead after all. Mr. Mudge did it (assuming it to be Mr. Mudge who did it); Mr. Mudge did it all very well.

  But did any of it need to be done at all? Eszterhazy could not think so. He was not altogether alone.

  “Engli, need we got to have all this?” asked a man, no longer at all young, with a weather-beaten and worn . . . worn? eroded! . . . face, stopping as he strolled.

  “Not if you do not wish it had, Count.”

  The Count almost doubled over in an agony of conviction. “I don’t! I don’t! Oh, I thought nothing when Olga Pensk asked it of me, that was a month ago, always have had a soft spot in me heart for her, lovely young girl her daughter is—But oh I’ve heard such a lot in that month. And I can’t get back to talk to Olga about it. She won’t see me. She’s become that creature’s creature. Look at her, doesn’t take her eyes off him, let me tell you what I have heard.”

  But Eszterhazy, saying that perhaps he had heard it, too, urged that this be put off to another time.

  “Do something, do something, do something,” begged the Count and Colonel. “I know what I’d love to do, and would do, hadn’t all of us in the Corps of Officers given our solemn vow and oath to his Royal and Imperial Majesty neither to fight duels nor commit homicides; wish I hadn’t. Engli. Engli. You’re a learned chap. You lived how many a month was it with the Old Men of the Mountains, didn’t you learn—”

  But Eszterhazy was lightly clapping his hands.

  ###

  Afterwards, he had brief misgivings. Had he been right to have done it at all? To have done it the way he had done? That Melanchthon Mudge thought this-or-that about it: on this he did not need to waste thought. The Sovereign Princess of Damrosch-Pensk, would she ever forgive him? Too bad, if she would not. But suppose that collegium of white wizards, the Old Men of the Mountains, to hear of it; what would they think? Well, well, he had not depended on what they had taught him for everything he’d done in the great salon of Colonel Count Cruttz’s townhouse. Even the common sorcerers of the Hyperborean High Lands dearly loved the rude, the bawdy, the buffoon; they did not rank with the Old Men, but he had taken some pains to learn from them, too.

  And though he told himself that he did not need think about Mr. Mudge, think about Mr. Mudge he did. If he had denounced Mr. Mudge as a heretic; a heresiarch, satanist, and diabolist; if he had made him seem black and scarlet with infamously classical sins? Why, certainly the man would have loved it. Swelled with pride. Naturally. But he, Eszterhazy, had not done it. Nothing of the sort. He had parodied the usual ritual of the séance. He had reduced the introductory words to gibberish and, worse by far than merely that, to funny gibberish. He had made the table tip, totter, fall back, to the audible imitation of an off-color street-song, as though accompanied on, not one trumpet, but a chorus of trumpets, as played by a chorus of flatulent demons. He had done something similar with his summoning-up, in mockery, of the spirit bells. Was it not enough to show how others could do it? Did he have to have them ring in accompaniment to the naughty (recognizable—but who would admit it?) song on the ‘trumpet’?

  Well, ‘need.’ Need makes the old dame trot, went the proverb.

  He had done it.

  The whole doing was a mere five minutes long; but it had, of course, made it utterly impossible for Mudge, with or without others, to give his own performance. Absolutely impossible, right afterwards. And who knows for how long impossible, subsequently? He had lost the best part of his audience, for certainly the effect was ruined. If he would indeed try a repetition, elsewhere, a week, a fortnight, even a month, months later, he would hardly dare do so in the presence of any who had been there then. A single guffaw would have meant death.

  And eloquent of death was the man’s face as his eyes met Eszterhazy’s. It was but for a moment; then the face changed. No hot emotion showed as he came up to E
szterhazy, the Colonel Count rather hastily stepping up to be ready, in case of need, to step between them. But no. “Very amusing, Doctor,” said Mr. Mudge. He bowed and said a few courteous words to the host. Then he left. Leaving with him, her own face as though carved in ice, was the Sovereign Princess Olga Helena. Not icy, but perhaps rather confused, was the face of her daughter, the Highlady Charlotte, own cousin to Eszterhazy’s own cousin. Had she, too, believed? Well, it were better she should now doubt. That there were sincere people in the ranks of the spiritualists, the doctor did not doubt. That some were not alone sincere, but, also, even, good, he was prepared to admit. But Mr. Mudge was something else, and if indeed he were sincere, it was in the sincerity of evil.

  ###

  It made of course no difference to the chemistry of Glauber’s Salts what name was given them or who had first discovered them. But it was a hobby-horse of Eszterhazy’s, one which he so far trusted himself never to ride along the nearer paths which lead to lunacy, that the pursuit of inorganic cathartics marked the real watershed between alchemy and chemistry. The ‘philosopher’ who, turning away from the glorious dreams of transmuting dross to gold, sought instead a means of moving the sluggish bowels of the mass of mankind and womankind, had taken his head out of the clouds and brought it very close to the earth indeed. Quaere: How did the dates of Ezekkiel Yahnosh compare with those of Johann Glauber? Responsum: Go and look them up. That the figures in the common books were unreliable, E.E. knew very well. He had also known (he now recalled) that there was a memorial to the great seventeenth-century Scythian savant somewhere in the back of the Great Central Reformed Tabernacle, commonly called the Calvinchurch, from the days when it—or its predecessor—was the only one of that faith in Bella.

  Q.: Why might he not go right now and copy it? R.: Why not?—unless it were closed this hour on Sunday night. But this caveat little recked with the zeal of Predicant Prush, even now ascending into the pulpit, as Eszterhazy tried to collect his information as unobtrusively as possible from the marble plaque set in the wall. “My text, dear and beloved trustworthy brothers and sisters,” boomed the Preacher from beneath the sounding-board, “is Jeremiah, V. 6. Wherefore a lion out of the forest shall slay them, and a wolf of the evening shall spoil them, a leopard shall watch over their cities: everyone that goeth out shall be torn to pieces: because their transgressions are many, and their backslidings are increased. Miserable sinners, there is nevertheless hope in repentance!” cried out the Predicant in a plenitude of Christian comfort. And went on to demonstrate that the animals mentioned in the text were types, which is to say, foreshadowings, with the lion signifying the Church of Rome, the wolf implying Luther; and the leopard, recalcitrant paganism. As for transgressions and backsliding, Dr. Prush gave them quite a number for exempla, ranging from Immodest Attire to Neglect Of Paying Tithes. “Woe! Woe!” he cried, smiting the lectern.

  But Eszterhazy was not concentrating on the sermon. There rang incessantly in his ear, as though being chanted into it by something sitting upon his shoulder, only the words a leopard shall watch over their cities . . .

  And, when back at home, he examined his scant notes for the dates of Ezekkiel Yahnosh, he found that, really, all that he had written in their place was Jeremiah, V. 6.

  ###

  Many a set of hoopshirts worn in Bella in their time, many a crinoline worn in Bella in its time, many a bustle worn in Bella (around about then or not a long span later being their time) had been fashioned in the ever-fashionable establishment of Mademoiselle Sophie, Couturière Parisienne. Mlle. Sophie was a native of a canton perhaps better known for its cuckoo-clocks than its haute couture, but she had nevertheless plied a needle and thread in Paris. She had plied it chiefly in replacing buttons in a basement tailor-shop until her vast commonsense told her to get up and go out of the basement into the light and air. She hadn’t stopped going until she reached Bella, and if her trip and her beginnings in business had indeed been ‘under the protection’ of a local textile merchant who sometimes visited Paris on business, why, whose affair was that? That is, who else’s affair? Nevertheless, most of the women’s garments in Bella owed nothing to the fact that Mlle. Sophie gained her bread by the pricks of her needle; and perhaps a slight majority of the women’s garments in Bella owed nothing at all to what was worn in Paris. Even as Eszterhazy paused to throw down and step upon a segar, several woman—evidently sisters—passed by dressed in the eminently respectable old high burger style: costly cloth stiff with many a winter day’s embroidery, the bodices laced with gold-tipped laces, each stiff petticoat of bright color slightly shorter than the one underneath. No one else even much noticed.

  Still, someone laughed, and it was not a nice laugh. Eszterhazy did not move his head, but his eyes slightly moved. Just across the narrow street was Melanchthon Mudge, clad in fur-coat and fur-hat whose gloss must have represented a fortune in sable and other prime pelts: what was he laughing at? Slowly approaching was a woman by herself. She moved with difficulty. She had been limping with a side-to-side motion which caused her short and heavy body to rock in a manner that allowed little dignity. Nothing about her was rich, and certainly not the rusty black cloth coat which covered the upper part of her dingy black dress: truth to tell it was not even over-clean. Her face was not young and it was not comely and it seemed fuddled with effort. Such things as gallantry and pity aside, if one thought the grotesque laughable, then one would understandably laugh at the sight of her. But such laughter, merely the concomitant of a country culture which laughed at cripples and stammerers, was more puzzling when it came from Mudge. The woman clearly heard the laugh, was clearly not indifferent to it. She tried to walk on more swiftly, rocked and swayed more heavily; there was another laugh; abruptly Mudge walked off.

  On the poor woman’s head was a bonnet of the sort which had been favored, perhaps a generation ago, by fashion in the North American provinces. So, on the spur of the moment, Eszterhazy, lifting his own hat, addressed her in English.

  “You don’t have such picturesque native costume,” the slightest inclination of his head towards the wearers of the local picturesque costume, “in your own country, I believe, ma’am.”

  She slowly rocked to a stop and looked at him with, at first, some doubt. “No, sir,” she said, “we don’t, and that’s a fact. We haven’t had the time to develop it. Utility has been our motto. Maybe too much so. You don’t know who I am, do you? No. But I know you, Mr. Estherhazy, if only by sight, for you’ve been pointed out to me. Reverend Ella May Butcher, European Mission, First Spiritualist Church, Buffalo, New York.” She extended her hand, he—automatically—had begun to stoop to kiss it—she gave a firm shake—he did not stoop. “My late husband was very well acquainted with President Fillmore. But you don’t know President Fillmore here.” She was in this correct. Neither Eszterhazy personally nor the entire Triune Monarchy had known President Fillmore: there . . . or anywhere.

  “I’ve come to show those deep in sorrow that their beloved ones have been saved from the power of the shadow of death. It ain’t for me to say why the spirits of those who’ve passed over are sometimes pleased to use me as their medium, Mr. Estherhazy. We have settings on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays, the Good Lord willing, at eight o’clock p.m. in the room at the head of the stairs in the old Scottish Rite hall. No admission charge is ever made; love offering only.” If Reverend Ella May Butcher was offered much such love, there was nothing to show it. The flat level of her voice did not vary as she asked, “Do you know that man who laughed at me just now?”

  The shouting of the teamsters and the clash of hooves on the stone blocks obliged him to raise his voice. “We have met,” he said.

  Widow Butcher looked at him with her muddy eyes. “There are spirits of light, sir; and there are spirits of darkness. That one’s gifts never came from the light. I have to go on now. I hope to see you at one of our settings. Thank you for your kindness.” He bowed slightly, lifted his hat, she lifted her s
kirts as high as was proper for a lady to lift them (a bit higher than would have been proper perhaps in London, but surely not too high for Bella and doubtless not too high for Buffalo, New York, where her late husband had been very well acquainted with President Fillmore), and prepared to cross the broader street. At this signal the filthy scarecrow which was the crossing-sweeper leaned both hands on the stick of his horrid broom and plowed her a way through the horse-dung. Eszterhazy watched as she poked in her purse for a coin; then a knot of vans and wagons went toiling by, laden high with barrels of goose-fat and rye meal and white lard and yellow lard. And when they had gone, so had she.

  ###

  He had not expected to meet Mr. Mudge within the week, but he had not expected to be in the South Ward within the week, either. Someone had reported to him that a certain item of horse-furniture was in a certain popular pawnshop there, and someone had said that—not having been redeemed when the loan expired—the item (it was a mere ornament, but then, too, perhaps the horse which first had borne it had also borne the last Byzantine Emperor) was now for sale.

  “Impossible,” said a familiar voice outside the pawnship.