The Magicians

by James Gunn

  The leaves of the manuscript fluttered wildly and then tore themselves into small pieces and fell around the speaker like a paper snow. The glass rose in the air and poured its contents onto the rostrum.

  “Child's play,” Uriel snorted.

  “I ask simple courtesy for our speakers,” Solomon said, frowning. It was an obvious play to the audience considering what had happened to Uriel during the morning session. “What point do you wish to make in this disruptive fashion?"

  “I wish to register a protest against the trend of this ‘covention,’ as you insist on calling it. Covens. Familiars. Is this the type of research the society should approve? Where are your controls? Where is your evidence? What are your hypotheses and how do you propose to test them? Is what we have seen today the kind of investigation the society was set up to consider? I'm afraid it's little more than medieval superstition."

  A murmur ran through the audience. I couldn't tell whether it was approval or protest.

  “Then you do not believe in the spirit world?” Solomon asked with quiet malice.

  “No, sir,” Uriel said. “I do not. And I do not believe in slipshod investigations and wild surmises without the slightest shred of scientific evidence. I ask for a vote of disapproval."

  The audience was suddenly silent. Solomon looked out over Uriel's head with dark, cold eyes. “Is there a second?"

  The silence was broken by a single small voice, a voice I recognized. “I second,” someone said. It was Ariel.

  A brief smile twisted Solomon's thin lips. “All in favor say aye."

  Two voices were raised. I sat back, silent and afraid.

  “It seems,” Solomon said, smiling more broadly, “that the motion has failed."

  He returned to his seat with what may have been a more normal method of travel.

  Alexander Hamilton's corbie turned out to be a cat, and Hamilton an English witch, in Lothian. The speaker, a strikingly handsome woman, tall and slender with a silver streak across her black hair, used the corbie as a takeoff point for a general summary of divining and augury. Undaunted by his previous defeat, Uriel arose to protest against the unwarranted assumption that the future can be known and that the ideas of divining and augury had any validity.

  “If we can know the future,” Uriel said, “then the future must be fixed; but if the future is fixed, what good does it do us to know what is going to happen if we cannot change it? What good to know when we are going to die, if nothing can be altered? What good to know the ill fortune that lies ahead if we cannot avoid it?"

  “Ah!” the woman said, “but we can! That is the importance of augury and divining. We can change what we do not like."

  Uriel beamed as if she had fallen into his verbal trap. “If the future can be changed, then it is unreadable; there is no future to be read. And all your peering into the entrails of slaughtered animals, all your haruspicy, stichomancy, necromancy, cascinomancy, geomancy, lecanomancy, and crystallomancy are nothing but frauds or self-delusions. Present your proof. Your proof!"

  He sat down triumphantly, but Solomon appeared at the podium once more and thanked Uriel for his contribution. The audience chuckled. It was obvious that whatever prestige Uriel had enjoyed was vanishing under Solomon's treatment.

  “Now,” Solomon said, “perhaps in the next two demonstrations we can give Uriel some of the proof he has been demanding."

  I realized, with a shock, that the next speaker's subject was “Lycanthropy—a Demonstration.” He was a large, confident man with implausibly red hair. He brought props with him: some unusually shaped lights which were plugged in but not turned on, and a dark, frightened young man whom he installed in a chair at the back of the stage.

  After going through a historical discussion of the werewolf and the geographical distribution of recorded incidents, he described his exhaustive research into the facts which lay behind the reports. In one of his own classes he had found a subject who confessed to strange appetites and stranger dreams. One evening, by the light of the full moon, the speaker saw the subject change.

  In order to perform this demonstration at times which did not coincide with the proper phase of the moon, the speaker had duplicated with these lights the constituent part of the moonlight which stimulated the remarkable cell changes. He motioned the young man to the front of the stage. He came forward with the gait of a sleepwalker.

  “Watch carefully!” the speaker said. And he flicked on the lights.

  The young man was bathed in silver, and Uriel was on his feet, protesting the inhumanity of this kind of demonstration. But Solomon's voice was loud and implacable. “Uriel has been demanding proof. Now, it seems, he does not want it after all."

  Then the growing murmur of the audience drowned out both of them. The proof was in front of them: the young man was changing.

  His dark face grew darker and sharper. His jaw thrust forward horribly. As his arms and legs shriveled and shortened, he dropped to all fours. He was hairy. He shook himself free from the encumbering clothes, and the wide mouth in the pointed muzzle opened to let a long tongue loll out between sharp, white teeth. His eyes gleamed redly in the light. A growl started deep in his throat. He crouched.

  A woman screamed.

  The wolf sprang. He sprang straight for Uriel.

  In the midst of shouting and scurrying and the crash of upset chairs, people leaped aside. Uriel stood straight and unafraid, a small, white-haired figure, oddly epic and alone. He pointed a finger at the descending animal and muttered something I couldn't hear.

  The animal crashed into an invisible wall. It dropped among the chairs, tried to get up but failed, and lay among the splintered wood snarling at its left hind leg. The leg was obviously broken. The wolf whimpered as it touched the leg with its muzzle. It was a strange, pitiful sound.

  Uriel bent over the creature and marked a few symbols on the floor with a piece of chalk. Instantly, without transition, the wolf turned back into the young man. He was naked and white, and his face was twisted with pain.

  Crouching beside him, Uriel drew a broken line on the floor, marked out a mathematical formula, and joined the broken line with another chalk mark. A look of dazed relief spread across the young man's face. He felt his leg with a gesture of disbelief. It was no longer crooked.

  Uriel helped the young man to his feet, whispered a few words in his ear, patted him on the arm, and motioned toward the door. The young man turned, gathered up his clothing from the platform, and left, glancing back with distaste and defiance at the man who had been his professor.

  Uriel's face, as he turned it toward the stage, was stern. No one had moved during the entire episode, and his voice broke the silence. “Lycanthropy indeed! A psychological state associated with hysteria is more like it. In this case, abetted by hypnosis and sorcery. The Malays often induced lycanthropy in persons of extreme suggestibility; they were called latah. Well, these latter-day savages will torture that boy no more."

  The audience was shaken, but no one spoke. Uriel turned back toward the platform. Solomon was standing beside the podium, silent, perhaps disturbed, though it was difficult to tell. “What further dark demonstrations do you have for us?” Uriel asked.

  Solomon seemed to hesitate and then to make up his mind to push ahead. “The final demonstration,” he said, his voice calm and unmoved, “is the one held over from this morning's program. A practical proof of the presence of demons."

  I shivered, remembering the item from the morning's program. Possession.

  A young man came up to the platform followed by a girl of about eleven. The man was classically handsome. He had shiny dark eyes and white teeth, and he looked uncannily like that movie star of the thirties or forties, Tyrone—Tyrone Power. The girl was cute and pretty at the same time; she had brown hair and freckles and a turned-up nose, and she was wearing an attractive short blue dress as if she were going to school.

  The young man held the little girl by the hand and talked about demons and the w
ays in which they took possession of people. Sometimes they did it because the people were evil or had bargained their souls away, but sometimes they did it to anybody, innocent or guilty, capriciously. It seemed unfair to me, like the story about the man walking by the cemetery at night; he begins to feel nervous and imagines that a foul fiend is walking behind him, and then he consoles himself by saying that if the powers of darkness could work their will on a person like him, who was good and upright and God-fearing, why there wouldn't be any justice in the world. And a voice behind him says, “There isn't."

  Like the man in the story, I found that kind of injustice difficult to accept. Sure, Mephistopheles might drag off poor, protesting Doctor Faustus, but Faustus had sold his soul to the Devil and just wanted to back out of the deal. But I didn't want to think we lived in a world where innocence could be raped by evil and we could not protect ourselves. I never liked the story of Job, either.

  By the time I got back to listening, the speaker was talking about the devils of Loudun. He described how demons had taken possession of several nuns in the Convent of the Ursulines, including the Mother Prioress herself. With the little girl standing trustfully by his side, the young man described the pact with Satan that the priest of Loudun, Urbain Grandier, had written, which still could be viewed in the Bibliotheque Nationale, along with other documents relating to the celebrated case, including the remarkable deed written and signed by the demon Asmodeus when he was dislodged from the body of a nun by Father Jean Baptiste Gault. He went on to tell how the nuns confessed to intercourse and other unnatural acts they had been forced to commit with Grandier because the demons who possessed them had made them do so, and how the demons were exorcised by Reverend Père Surin. The demons who possessed the Mother Prioress, he said, were named Leviathan, Balam, Isacaron, and Behemoth, and Behemoth was the last one to be driven from the holy Mother's body.

  The story sounded vaguely familiar, but this time the telling was subtly different. I had the feeling that the speaker and his audience were on the side of the demons.

  For one moment the schoolgirl was standing beside the speaker at the podium, neat and demure, and the next moment she had changed into something else, something terrible and revolting. Her body contorted itself into inhuman shapes. Her arms waved like snakes, and her head twisted itself on her body. Some horrid creature stared boldly out through her face, shouting obscenities at the audience in hoarse bellows that could not have come from that small throat. When the coarse, masculine voice stopped for a moment, vomit spewed from the girl's mouth, and then the obscenities began again.

  Suddenly I believed in demons.

  “Get a priest!” someone shouted.

  “Asmodeus!” the young man called out. “Are you there? Speak to us! Tell us about the demon world! Tell us about spirits and the underworld and the great mysteries—"

  “Isn't someone going to help that poor girl?” I heard someone scream from the rear of the audience. I thought it was Ariel.

  “Speak to us, Asmodeus!” the young man repeated. “Say something to prove that it is you!"

  Uriel was standing in the front of the platform. He was writing rapidly on a piece of paper braced against his left hand.

  “I—AM—AS-MO-DE-US!” the girl said in a deep, impossible voice. “The cow is mine."

  Uriel had finished writing. He held up the piece of paper, waving it as if to attract attention, and then set fire to the paper with a cigarette lighter in his right hand.

  “This bitch will do as I order—” the voice that called itself Asmodeus began and suddenly began to scream as if it had been set aflame.

  The girl fell silent. She looked around at the audience with frightened eyes, as if she was aware of where she was but she didn't know how she had come there. But I knew, and everyone knew, that the demon was gone.

  The audience seemed to emit a collective sigh. And then everyone looked at the young man who had led the girl to the platform, who had called upon Asmodeus to communicate. Now he was silent, but he seemed as if he had clamped his lips shut over a terrible compulsion to speak. His face reddened, his eyes bulged, and then a great, terrible shout of pain and terror burst from his mouth, and he leaped from the stage and ran, staggering and bumping into chairs and walls with strange fury, until he reached the closed glass doors of the Crystal Room. He burst through them. The glass fell in pulverized fragments behind him, and he disappeared, bleeding and screaming, down the distant hall.

  “There are no demons,” Uriel said softly, but his voice seemed to fill the room. “There are only delusions and deluded men. The source of the Power is neutral. Electricity is neutral; it can provide light or warmth, or it can project pornography and kill."

  He turned to the audience. “Will you approve this wanton display of vileness and cruelty, too?"

  The audience moved uneasily, but no one spoke. Most of the people glanced toward the stage, where Solomon leaned against the lectern. They seemed to expect a response from him, but Solomon stared down calmly, undisturbed.

  Uriel swung back to the platform, a finger pointing at Solomon. The Magus straightened quickly. Uriel laughed.

  “You needn't worry. I won't use my power against my fellow man except in self-defense.” Uriel gave the last words peculiar emphasis. “You think you are wise. You are foolish. You think you know everything. You know nothing. As the surviving co-founder of this society, I disavow the leadership. I disavow the society. And I leave you this thought to consider: I will not permit the Art to be used for evil!"

  He turned and stalked from the room, small and defiant and somehow wonderfully courageous. Following him was Ariel. She was leading the frightened little girl, an arm comfortingly around her shoulder, whispering into her ear.

  At the door Ariel turned. “You cowards!” she said at all of them. Including me. And yet, just before she and the little girl hurried after the little mathematician, I thought her eyes met mine with an unspoken appeal.

  What did she want of me? That I find out the name of the mysterious Solomon? Or something more?

  While I puzzled over it, the meeting broke up. Some of the members walked toward the door. They were in little groups, some sheepish and silent, others talking excitedly. A few gathered around the stage, around Solomon. The redheaded La Voisin was among them. Her figure was as magnificent as ever; her hair was striking; her face was exquisite; everything about her promised gratification. But she no longer appealed to me. Something inside me was comparing her with a girl who was only pretty but who had something La Voisin lacked—not just those indefinable qualities of goodness or purity but something more indefinable, a kind of reality.

  Too late, I noticed that I was sitting all alone in the room except for the group at the platform. It was too late because Solomon's intense black eyes that looked as if they could bore holes through armor plate were fixed on me even while he was talking to the others. What a great detective I had turned out to be! Not only did I not make myself unobtrusive, I was as obvious as possible.

  Solomon broke off his conversation. “Sir,” he said, not raising his voice but projecting it at me so that it seemed to come from a few feet away. Some skilled public speakers have that ability without the use of magic. I filed that bit of information away, just like a real detective. “Sir,” he repeated, “we would be honored if you would join us."

  Join them. It was the last thing in the world I wanted to do, in either sense, and perhaps the last thing in this world I would end up doing. On the other hand, to break for the door would be the worst kind of cowardice. And, with the kind of powers I had seen demonstrated in this hall, perhaps useless.

  “The honor,” I said, “is mine."

  I walked toward the stage, trying to assume a debonair saunter and a confident tilt of the head, and afraid that I merely looked foolish. I had the uneasy feeling, kind of a crawling of the skin, that I was being inspected by four men and a woman, both outside and inside. I felt chilled by it all. But the woman's eye
s held a kind of personal inquisitiveness that made me colder than all the rest.

  No matter what the ordinary dress of the five people at the front of the room, no matter what the casual interest of their ordinary faces, no matter what the polite shambles of the meeting room, I was approaching a kind of witches’ summit, a devilish ceremony in which I would be expected to play the central role. I steadied myself with the thought that at least they lacked the proper numbers; they didn't have a coven.

  “Gabriel, eh?” Solomon mused when I was close enough for my badge to be read.

  La Voisin looked surprised. “But I thought—” She stopped abruptly and looked at Solomon.

  I was glancing at her name card. I had to stand almost on tiptoe to read it because the magnificent slope of her bosom tilted it virtually horizontal, but I made out the first name. “Catherine.” Catherine La Voisin. I was no wiser.

  “You thought what, my dear?” Solomon asked, beating me to the question.

  “I thought Gabriel would be a much smaller man,” she completed smoothly. Her eyes narrowed and her pupils expanded to suggest that I was also much sexier than she had imagined; it was like being plunged into a steaming bed and wondering if one were going to escape alive.

  It wasn't what she had been about to say, however. We all knew that.

  “Well, Gabriel,” Solomon said, “what is your opinion of this afternoon's activities?"

  I weighed being noncommittal and discarded it. Perhaps it was the feminine challenge of La Voisin. Perhaps it was only the appropriate decision that boldness might win me points. “It looks like Uriel has won the battle,” I said, “but you haven't lost the war."

  He smiled with real amusement. I awarded him a kind of grudging admiration. He was a good antagonist; nothing shook him. He seemed to enjoy crossing words with me. Or maybe he was contemplating the fate he had in mind for me. I knew I was in the presence of pure evil.

  “The sides have been chosen,” he said. “The body of the society against an old man and a young girl. The program was intended to accomplish that one event. Uriel has cut himself off from the society, and the society will have to act to defend itself against the threat he represents."