MAGICATS II

by Gardner Dozoi

  And another voice, less familiar, but . . . familiar . . . said . . . asked, “ ‘Impossible’? Impossible for you to do it when two Emperors and one King have already done it?”

  There was D. Cosimo D., looking as though he would be away, and there was Mr. Mudge, looking as though he would not let him go. “I do not know other than nothing of it,” said Cosimo.

  Mudge said he would ‘explain the matter yet again.’ The briefly reigning King Amadeus of Spain had been pleased to give Mr. Mudge a gift of jewels. Louis Napoleon, Emperor of the French, had given him some other jewels. And a third such royal gift had come from Alexander, late Czar of all the Russians. “By the merest coincidence,” said Mudge, “they contained elements of the so-called Pasqualine Diamonds. That is to say, I now have them all. I can show you the Deeds of Gifts.”

  “I wish not to see them. Gifts!”

  “That is to say, all but the thumb-ring of Duke Pasquale. Without it, the set is incomplete. You may name a price. Money, lands; lands and money—whatever. I shall execute a will demising the jewels all to your noble house. I—”

  “I, sir. know nothing. Have nothing to sell. Desire nothing to obtain. Ah, my son”—to Eszterhazy—“You have heard? Am I not right?”

  And Eszterhazy said, “The King of the Single Sicily is right.”

  ###

  A week later, as Eszterhazy emerged from his club in Upper Hunyadi Street, a tall man seemed to uncoil from a bench, and, in an instant, stood before him. It was Melanchthon Mudge. Melanchthon Mudge was before him, the bench was alongside of him, a stone pillar of the colonnade was behind him. Only one way of passage remained, but he did not seek to take it. The man wished to do it so? well, let him do it so, then.

  “Be quick,” he said.

  “Dr. Eszterhazy,” said the tall, thin man, earnestly; “you have twice affronted me.” Eszterhazy looked at him with a face which was absolutely expressionless, and said absolutely nothing. Mudge seemed rather disconcerted at this; and, a moment having passed, he compressed his lips, something like a frown beginning to appear: this vanished almost at once. A smile replaced it; one might easily see how very many had regarded it as a charming smile. Very often. “You have, Doctor, twice affronted me, I say. But I cannot believe that you ever meant to do so. This being the case, you will take no affront when I explain to you what the affronts were”—and still, Eszterhazy did not move. He continued to gaze with motionless eyes.

  Mudge cleared his throat. Then he held up one finger of his left hand and he pressed upon it with one finger of his right. “To begin with, although perfectly aware of my perfect reasons for wishing to purchase the Pasqualine Ring, you urged its present owner not to part with it.” He paused. No reaction. No reply. A second finger came forward on the extended left hand, was pressed upon with the forefinger of the right. “You also, doubtless purely as a jape, counterfeited—by some species of parlor trick which in another and lesser man I should term ‘charlatanry’—counterfeited those great gifts which are mine as donatives of the Spirits. Now, sir, I do urge you, Dr. Eszterhazy, not to presume to affront me a third time. I am in process of taking a most important step in my personal life. It would mean that we would meet so very often that I should desire to be upon no terms with you save the very friendliest. But if you—”

  Eszterhazy’s eyes shifted suddenly, transfixed the other man with such a sort of look that the man winced. A brief cry, as of pain, was torn from his throat. “Wretch, rogue, and scoundrel,” Eszterhazy said; “I well know that you have it in your black mind to propose marriage to my cousin’s cousin, the Highlady Charlotte of Damrosch-Pensk. This, it does not lie within my power to prevent; that is, her mother being in something close to vassalage to you, we both know why, you may propose. I shall tell you what does lie within my power. By the terms of her late father’s will, the Highlady Charlotte is in effect a ward of the Emperor until her thirtieth year—unless she is lawfully married before that day. I have already seen to it that a full statement of your depraved behavior in other countries, your disgusting statements set by your own hand in writing in regard to another lady, and the abhorrent circumstances under which you became, first famous, and then rich—I have with a great and grim pleasure seen to it that the Lord President of the Privy Council now knows it all. The present Emperor will never give his assent without consulting the Lord President. And—”

  But this next sentence was scarcely begun when something unseen stuck Eszterhazy a blow and sent him with great force reeling against the pillar from where he had been standing several feet away. It was of course painful, it left him breathless and without power of speech: all his effort went into remaining upright; he clutched the pillar, backwards, with both his hands.

  Even as he felt himself stagger, he saw the medium, face set for one fearful second into a rictus of rage, go striding away and down the steps. His cloak flew almost level with the ground. There was another voice echoing in Eszterhazy’s ears, very faint it was, very faintly echoing. There are spirits of light, sir; and there are spirits of darkness. That one’s gifts never came from the light . . .

  ###

  Eszterhazy, coming up the slum stairs to where the old couple lived, was not at first surprised to hear the sounds of altercation. The place was, after all, a slum, and slum-dwellers tend when angered not merely to speak out but to shout. What surprised him was to hear the old noblewoman’s voice raised, even briefly. What could—Ah. Ahah. The local muckman was trying to collect garbage fees. So. True, that the work was damnably hard. True that in the South Ward the fees were often damnably hard to collect. True, that it was hard to imagine the old couple’s scanty diet producing enough garbage to be worth feeing. And, true, bullying was a time-established way of collecting the fees. Or trying to.

  A fat, foul smell, filthy and greasy, announced its owner even before the sight of the fat, foul body on the landing by the door—fat, foul, smelly, greasy—voice coarse, loud, hectoring. “—wants me entitles!” the voice shouted. “Wants me ten copperkas!” Fat, smeary shoulders thrusting at partially closed door. “ ’r I takes the tea-pot off the cloth and the cloth off the table and—” The third take was never mentioned, the door flew open wider, there stood the dauntless little ‘Queen,’ something glinted, something flashed. The muckman gave a hoarse howl and fell back, struggling for balance. The door closed. The muckman whirled around, flesh quivering; flesh, where a hand fell for a moment away, flesh bleeding. Scratches on the rank, besmeared arm. Made by—made by what? “That she-cat,” grumbled the man, fear giving way to mere astonishment and dull defeated rage—made by small embroidery shears? or—

  “That she-cat has claws,” said the muckman, and stumped away down. The rank smell of him alone remained.

  Inside, a moment later, there was of course no mention of it all. They seemed a bit more haggard, a bit more harried than usual. He asked if there were not, was there not? something wrong. They looked at him with wasted eyes. “The ring. Duke Pasquale’s ring. The ring. He shall never have it. Never.”

  * * *

  “Cosimo, I saw a very curious thing.”

  “And what was that, my dear one?”

  “I saw a leopard, Cosimo, leaping from roof to roof, till it was out of sight. Was that not curious?”

  “Indeed, my dear one, that was curious indeed. Not many people are vouchsafed to see visions. By and by, perhaps, we will understand. The soup is now very warm. Let me feed you, as I already have our spoon.”

  ###

  If this were a nightmare, thought Eszterhazy, then he would presently shout himself awake, and . . . “If this were a nightmare”! And suppose this were not? But these thoughts were all peripheral. He felt things he had never felt before, sensed that for which he knew no terms of sensation. Impressions immensely deep, and immensely unfamiliar. And then some sort of barrier was broken, and he felt it break, and things ceased to be immeasurably alien; but he was not comforted by this, not at all, for everything which was now at all
familiar was very horribly so: he heard very ugly sounds made by things he could not see and he saw (if only fleetingly or on the periphery of vision) very ugly things doing things he could not hear. In so far as it resembled anything it resembled the grotesque paintings of the Lowlander Jan Bos: but mostly it resembled nothing. Fire bubbled in his brain like lava. To breathe was to be tortured by his own body. Terror was a solid thing sucking marrow from his bones. He caught sight of a certain known face and on the face, its mouth slightly parted and wet yellow teeth exposed, was an expression of lust and glee.

  ###

  Who was this, suddenly seizing his arm, face now a chalky mask with charcoal smudges under the eyes? “My son, he will not grant it, he will not grant it! I said to his secretary, ‘Father, forget that I am the rightful King of the Single Sicily and consider only that I am a child faithful to Mother Church and with a wife who is sick. Father, sick!’ But he will not grant it! Marón!”

  What Cosimo Damiano was doing in the Mutton Market of the Tartar Section, Eszterhazy did not know; but then he did not know at all what he himself was doing there. And if he himself had, in a state of confusion of mind, wandered far—why then, why not his old tutor? “Sir. Who will not grant what?”—though, already, he had begun to guess.

  “Why, license for an exorcism! Our parish priest reminds me that he himself, though willing, cannot do so without a faculty from the bishop . . . in this case the archbishop . . . that is, the Prince-Patriarch of Bella. I begged the secretary, ‘Father,’ I said—But it doesn’t matter what I said. Away he went with his head to one side and back he came with his head to the other side, and he shook his head. His Eminence will not grant it . . .”

  Ancient custom, having the force of canon law, decreed that the Archbishop and Prince-Patriarch of Bella be called “His Eminence” just as though he were a cardinal; and His Eminence’s secretary was Monsignor (not merely “Father”) Macgillicuddy. Msgr. Macgillicuddy was descended from those Erse warlords whose departure from their afflicted Island has been compared to the flight of the wild geese: unlike the nonmetaphorical ones, those wild geese never flew back, but drifted slowly from one Catholic kingdom to another. Msgr. Macgillicuddy had been 200 years out of Ireland and no one still in Ireland looked as exquisitely Irish as did Msgr. Macgillicuddy. Perhaps it was a shame that there was no Gaelic monarch at whose court he might be serving instead, and perhaps he did not think so. He belonged to no order, he was attached to no ethnic faction of the Empire or the Church, and if he said that the Prince-Patriarch-Archbishop would allow no exorcism, then that—absolutely—as Eszterhazy well knew—was that.

  To one side a bow-legged Tartar made a sudden dive at a scaping ram, bucked it shoulder to shoulder, slipped arm and hand between the beast’s forelegs, seized a hind leg and pulled forward; the ram went backward, the Tartar swiveled around and, having dropped the leg, from behind seized the animal’s shoulders. The ram sat upright, and could not move. Along came the butcher’s men with their ropes. Escape had been short-lived. A covey of quaint figures, the old Tartar women of the Section, huddled into shawls and veils and skirts and pantaloons, began to gather, each intent on the fresh mutton for the evening’s shashliks. Escape had been very short-lived. For a while the ram had been king of the mountains, defending his meadow of grass and wild thyme and his harem of ewes. But that was over now.

  As to why Cosimo Damiano wanted a faculty for his parish priest to perform an exorcism, the old man would be anything but specific. His cracked old brain was cracking wider now under the strain of—of what? Of something bad, of bad things, things which were very, very bad: and happening to him. And to his sick old wife. Charms were not enough, amulets and talismans not enough, holy water and prayers and Latin Psalms: not enough. Any more. Cornuto, usually efficacious against the strega? Not enough.

  “But . . . Sir . . . do give me an example?—a single sample?”

  Almost as though not so much obeying or answering his former pupil as being made a thrall by something else, in a second the body of the old man twisted and the face of the old man twisted and the voice of the old man changed . . . swift, sudden: movement, sound: frightful . . . Eszterhazy tottered back. Another second and the old man was as before, and trembling with terror. With a stifled croaking wail he scuttled off.

  The aged females of the Tartar Section were wending their ways to their homes, each with a portion of mutton-meat wrapped in a huge cabbage-leaf. Eszterhazy paid no attention. In the face of the old man a moment ago, in the body of the old man then, in the grum, grim voice, he had for one second, but for a significant one, recognized and been horribly reminded of the same frightful features of his own recent nightmare . . . if such they were . . . the phrase psychic assault came to his mind. What was there in his clean, well-furnished laboratory to help them all against this? Eszterhazy muttered, “Anoint thee, Satan.” And he spat three times.

  And all these . . . these assaults . . . against himself, against the old man and the old wife . . . why? Merely affront and pride? Because, come down to common denominators, what were they! What was it? It was the ring of Duke Pasquale, that antique family heirloom with which the aged couple would not part. Was it indeed because he coveted the jewel as part of a set otherwise incomplete, that the current enemy was setting these waves of almost more than merely metaphysical assault? Could he not obtain, with his own wealth, a replica of real silver, real gold, real diamond? And . . . yet . . . if that was not why he wanted the Pasqualine Ring . . . then why did he want the Pasqualine Ring?

  As long as he lived, Eszterhazy was never to be entirely sure. But he was to become sure enough.

  ###

  And still the assaults continued.

  About ten a.m. and there was Colonel Count Cruttz. Unusual. For one thing; for another, what was it the older man was muttering to himself? It sounded like Saint Vitus. An invocation? Perhaps. Perhaps not. In Bella—

  The Hospice of Saint Vitus in Bella at the time of its founding had been just that—a hospice for pilgrims seeking cure for what might have been (in modern terms) chorea, cerebral palsy, ergot poisoning, certain sorts of lunacy, or . . . many things indeed. By and by most people had learned not to bake bread from moldy rye, and the rushing torrents of the pilgrimages had slowed to trickles; still, the prolongedly lunatic had to be lodged somewhere, it being no longer fashionable to lose them in the forest or lock them in a closet: and so, by the time of King Ignats Salvador (the Empire did not yet exist), the Hospice had become the Madhouse and St. Vitus’s Shrine its chapel. It was quite true that besides the common enclosures there was a secluded cloister for insane nuns and, far on the other side, one for mad monks and priests; it was not true, common reports notwithstanding, that there was also one for barmy bishops.

  “Good mid-morning to you, Colonel Count Cruttz; very well, then: Fritsli.”

  “Mi’ morning, Engli. Say, you are a gaffer at St. Vitus, ain’t you?”

  “I am one of the Board of Governors, yes.”

  “Well, I want a ticket. Morits. One of my footmen.” The colonel-count looked haggard.

  Dr. Eszterhazy reached out from a pigeon-hold a dreaded “yellow ticket,” a Form For Examination Prior to Commitment: sighed. “Poor Morits. Well, this should get him seen to, promptly;” he signed it large. And, did he not, “poor Morits” indeed might gibber and howl for hours in the public corridors, waiting his turn on standby. “What has happened to him? Morits, mmm. Pale chap, isn’t he?”

  Master confirmed that man was indeed a pale chap. That was him. What had happened! Man had gone mad, was what happened. In the night, not long before dawn. Screams had rocked the house—and it was an old house with thick walls, too. Insane with terror, Morits. “Mostly he just screamed and tried to hide himself in his own armpits, but when you could make out what he was saying while screaming, why, it was always the same thing. Always the same thing. Always.” Cruttz turned his haggard gaze on Eszterhazy.

  Who asked, “And what was that? This
. . .‘the same thing’ . . . ?”

  Cruttz wet his lips. Repeated, “ ‘On the ceiling! On the ceiling! The witch-man! On the ceiling!’ ”

  “The . . . ‘witch-man’? Who and what was that?”

  Heavily: “That is who and what and which the people call this Hell-hound, Melanchthon Mudge.”

  Silence. Then, “Very well, then. One understands ‘the witch-man.’ But. What and what does he mean by ‘on the ceiling’?”

  A shrug. “I am damned if I know. And I feel that just by knowing the fiend I might be damned. And so poor Morits has been screaming, struggling, be pissing himself for hours now, and brandy hasn’t helped and neither has holy water nor holy oil and so I’ve come for the yellow ticket. See?”

  Eszterhazy saw only scantly. “Had the man . . . Morits . . . ever before showed signs of—?”

  Reluctantly: “Well . . . yes . . . sort of. Nervous type of chap, always was. Which is all that keeps me from shooting down that swine like a mad dog with my revolver-pistol.” That, and—the Emperor having indicated a keen dislike for having people shot down like mad dogs with revolver-pistols—that and the likelihood of such an action’s being surely followed by a ten-year exile to the remote wilderness of Little Byzantia, where the company of the lynx, the bear, and the wild boar might not suffice for the loss of more cosmopolitan company.

  Colonel Count Cruttz took up the “yellow ticket” and as he was doing so and murmuring some words of thanks and farewell, his eyes met Eszterhazy’s. The latter felt certain that the same thought was in both their minds: was Mudge punishing the house in which he had been humiliated? Was Mudge doing this? Was Mudge not doing this? And, if so, what might Mudge not do next?

  One was soon enough to learn.

  ###

  Quite late that morning as he was being examined in St. Vitus by the Admitting Physician, pale Morits not only ceased struggling, but—upon being instructed to do so—had stood up. Quietly. Dr. Smitts applied the stethoscope. And Morits, pale Morits, gave a great scream, blood gushed from his nose and mouth, and—“I caught him in my arms. The stethoscope was pulled from my ears as he fell, but I had heard enough,” said Dr. Smitts.