The Magicians

by James Gunn

  And I had senses I had never possessed in real life: I could look down through the roofs of the houses at the people in them. In most of the cottages the inhabitants already were asleep although night was not yet complete, but in a few of the one-room dwellings people were still awake and active. Most of them were women, and they were naked or disrobing, as if on some common signal—perhaps the bell?—but not for bed.

  “They have a spot on their body which feels no pain, but when it tingles they know they are summoned.” The voice came from behind me, but I could not turn my head to see who had spoken.

  I continued to stare below, unable, really, to look away. Most of the women were old or middle-aged, and their bodies were hardly the kind to fill a young man's dreams. They were leathery and stringy and ill-favored, as if life had not been kind to them. But a few were young and reasonably attractive, though somewhat thick-waisted and heavy-thighed by contemporary standards. Rubens would have enjoyed them. One of them, however, looked like the girl next door, if you were lucky about places to live; she was slender and high-breasted and, well, virginal—sort of untouched looking and a little tremulous, too, as if whatever she was doing she had never done before and wasn't too sure it wasn't a terrible mistake and she should back out while she still could.

  To tell the truth, she looked a lot like Ariel, and I felt a twinge of envy toward the old woman who was smearing the girl's body with some sort of lotion or salve. There was a lot of that going on in the cottages, women being rubbed down by others or doing it to themselves. Even in the mansion, I saw now, the same sort of thing was happening. In a bedroom decorated with silk wall hangings and a canopy bed and a thick rug, a dark-haired woman was standing naked in front of a fire. An older woman was anointing her, and she was preening herself in front of a mirror, clearly admiring her aristocratic figure. I admired it, too, and felt a bit sheepish about it, as if I were a voyeur, but then I told myself that it was only a dream, and a man should be able to enjoy his own dreams without guilt.

  A larger group was gathered in one of the cottages. An ugly, middle-aged man was sitting on a stool reading from a book. He had a turban on his head and a bat was perched on the turban, and his eyes were demonic.

  “That's a sorcerer, you know,” said the voice behind me; “and he's reading from a Black Book.” The voice said it that way, in capitals, and I figured it was talking about a Grimoire, one of the books of magic I had seen advertised in the program that day. But I still couldn't turn my head to see who was speaking.

  A skull and a bone were placed inside a circle near the hearth, and cabalistic signs were traced in and around the circle into the dirt floor. Over the fire in the fireplace, a caldron boiled. It was filled with toads and snakes and other vile substances, as well as with what seemed to be the body of a baby. I felt a touch of horror at the thought, as if what had started as a harmless show had turned into something ugly and perhaps worse.

  On the mantel was a burning candle and beside it a mummified hand whose fingertips had been lit. “A hand of glory,” the voice said behind me. From the caldron women were dipping some of the fluid. It was this they were rubbing on their naked bodies or on the bodies of their companions.

  I could smell the fluid mixed with the old sweat of a life of hard labor—they almost never bathed—and it was nauseating.

  “The magic unguent contains aconite and belladonna as well as hellebore root and hemlock,” said the voice behind me. “That's enough to give anyone strange sensations, maybe even delusions—such as being able to fly through the air to some forbidden meeting."

  As I watched, the naked women one by one got astride broomsticks and vanished up the fireplace. They emerged from the chimney and sailed into the night sky like every version of Halloween that has been commercialized and denatured in our time; only here it wasn't funny or pleasantly eerie; it was frightening.

  The beautiful witch in the cottage and the beautiful witch in the mansion disappeared in the same way. It didn't matter that fires were blazing in the fireplaces or that the chimneys were too small. That's how it is in dreams: a different kind of logic prevails. Maybe that was true, as well, in the times when people believed in witches.

  The strangest part of their departure, however, was that they rode their broomsticks the wrong way, with the straw in front of them and a lighted candle stuck in the straw as if to light their way through the darkness to their darker destination. And once they were in the air it seemed as if some of them were not alone on their brooms, as if something else, monstrous and misshapen, rode behind them, an arm—or something like an arm—familiarly wrapped around a waist.

  Perhaps that wasn't the strangest part after all. I suddenly discovered that the reason I could look down on this scene from above was that I was high in the air myself. I, too, was astride a broomstick. I was naked, and my whole body tingled with open nerve endings, but I wasn't cold. A chill of another kind prickled my skin, however, as I saw that a scaly arm was around my waist, a sharp chin pressed into my shoulder, and I smelled something foul and alien. I forced myself to look behind me.

  A hideous face leered at me. The expression of a vicious murderer had been impressed upon the basic features of a toad, and when it smiled, as it did now, the lips parted from warty ear to warty ear, exposing sharp, mottled teeth.

  “Ready?” it said.

  “Ready for what?” I asked, although I didn't really want to know. I wanted to get out of there, to wake up, but I couldn't do either one.

  “For the Sabbath,” it said. And without waiting for an answer it tugged at the broom and we set off through the night sky at a speed which blew my hair straight back from my head, although the candle set in the straw in front of me did not flicker.

  “Where are we going?” I shouted into the slipstream, but the demon behind me—I was sure it was a demon—didn't answer. When I forced myself to look at it again, it grinned broadly at me. The teeth looked as if they could tear me apart in a couple of quick bites.

  I didn't look back again. Some fates are better if you don't look them in the face. I tugged at the arm around my waist. It was rough and scaly and incredibly strong, or I had grown weak, because I could not budge it. I would have thrown myself off the broom and trusted myself to the possibilities of surviving a long fall. In dreams, I told myself, people always wake up before they reach the ground. Of course that may be because we only hear from those who don't hit the ground.

  Still, I would have taken my chances.

  The trip seemed to continue interminably, but also to be almost instantaneous. Dreams don't worry about inconsistency.

  Finally the demon spoke again in my ear. “There!"

  I looked down. Below was a flattened mountain top. A gigantic fire blazed in the middle of a kind of clearing. Strange shadows danced and cavorted obscenely around it. Then stick figures like children's drawings swooped down from the sky, naked witches and sorcerers and demons on broomsticks descending from the night sky like falling leaves to stop upon that blasted mountain.

  I wondered about the people who lived nearby. Well, perhaps there wasn't anybody in the forest—a hunter or two, a wood gatherer. What did they think about these strange happenings? And then I thought, Of course! That's how the stories about witches’ Sabbaths got started. And then I thought, But this is only a dream. But why should I dream of a mountain top like this and naked witches and broomsticks with the straw the wrong side to? And why did this dream go on and on in a linear fashion? Dreams were jumbled and broken. Weren't they?

  “Brocken!” the demon said.

  Brocken. Yes, that was where I got the mountain top. This was the legendary location of the witches’ Sabbath. Brocken. In the Harz Mountains, in the Black Forest, one of the wildest and most savage areas of northern Germany. I remembered reading about it. Here was where Goethe placed the witches’ Sabbath in Faust. I remembered a map in which even the cartographer had paid tribute to the legend with images of witches on broomsticks flying above the
mountain.

  But then I had time for no more soothing explanations of my dream state. My broomstick swooped down out of the sky toward the mountain top like a dive bomber coming in on its target. Just before we hit the ground, the demon—a hot pilot, all right, and a smartass—pulled up on the stick. The broomstick braked like a jet reversing its thrust and settled gently the last half-foot. My feet, knees stiff, met the ground. The broomstick dropped to the rocks beneath. I was left standing, trembling and uncertain, before a scene of unspeakable abandon.

  I swallowed hard to get the lump out of my throat. “Good landing,” I said sarcastically.

  In one part of the clearing a group of naked women were dancing wildly in a circle, facing outward, hands clasped each to the next. Some were young and attractive, some were old and sharp-featured, but all of them were alike in their possession by some demonic fury that drove them to incredible feats of contortion and endurance.

  “It may be novel,” I said, “but it will never bring back vaudeville."

  In another area a group of women and demons were seated alternately around a big stone table. The women were unlovely and didn't know the appearance of soap, but the demons were worse. They were like ill-assorted pieces of men and animals stuck together by a whimsical blind butcher; each was different and each was uglier than the next. On the table was a bowl of meat that resembled the parts of an infant. They were passing favorite pieces to each other, demon tempting witch and witch, demon, until, satiated, they rose from the table and joined another dance around a peculiarly deformed tree. The demons faced toward the tree and the naked witches faced away from it, and they threw their bodies about obscenely.

  “When do things get started around here?” I asked.

  “Soon enough,” the demon behind me said grumpily.

  In the center of the clearing a fire leaped and soared into the night. Rather than pushing back the darkness, it, too, seemed in a kind of dance with the blackness, with fingers of flame interlaced with the night. The fire seemed to be fed not by logs but by a jet of gas from deep in the mountain; from time to time I could catch a whiff of rotten eggs, sulfur, and hydrogen sulfide.

  “Brimstone,” said the voice behind me.

  On the far side of the fire, only occasionally revealed by it, were three big stone chairs, almost like thrones. Three people were sitting in them, but I couldn't see who they were because of the flames.

  “Some people at a party just never get into the spirit of things,” I said, but as I said it a hand pushed me hard in the back, and I plunged toward the fire.

  I dodged to one side and even so felt the heat scorch my face. The hand pushed me again. I tried to turn to confront my tormentor, my own personal demon, but each time the hand or claw pushed me again. When I looked up I found myself standing in front of the stone chairs, naked, but more than that feeling terribly exposed and vulnerable but unwilling to appear self-conscious by trying to cover myself. Because I was standing in front of a Presence.

  In the central throne, as I thought of it now, sat a creature who was as dark as sin but whose very blackness seemed to radiate an aura, as if darkness could blaze. This creature, too, was part man and part animal, but more care had been taken with his construction, as if the demons were botched attempts at creating what sat upon the throne. Perhaps half human and one-quarter animal, the other quarter was something supernatural from which it derived its authority.

  Three long, curly horns rose from a narrow, dark-polled head, two ordinary horns and one between them that was luminous like a firefly's tail. The eyes seemed human for a moment, and then I noticed that the yellow pupil in the dark iris was a vertical slit like the eye of a cat. The face was that of a goatlike man. The body seemed manlike down to the waist, although it was covered with black hair almost like fur, but the lower regions were animal, with the hips of a quadruped and the hooves and narrow legs of a goat. Its shoulders looked strangely humped, as if it had been wearing an opera cloak and the cloak had slipped off to rest against the back of the throne.

  I could believe that it was a fallen angel towering above me, who had taken on the semblance of a man to mock humanity and the attributes of an animal to illustrate man's beastliness. But I preferred to think of it as a teratology, the monstrous result of a mating between animal and human that now sought its revenge for the hate it had experienced by forcing humans to become animals in front of it.

  “You could make a fortune in a sideshow,” I said bravely, but my voice broke and betrayed me.

  Then it spoke, ignoring me, and I knew it was both male and supernatural. “A new convert?” he said. His voice rumbled like thunder beyond the hills, as if he held in reserve a great power that he could wield if necessary.

  “I'm an atheist,” I said.

  “So much the better."

  “I don't believe in you either."

  He laughed and then his goat's face grew serious. “You must be mistaken. Why are you here on this sacred ground if you are not of our faith?"

  “I don't know why I'm here,” I said, “but I think it's the result of too much new information absorbed too quickly. This is only a dream, you know, and you are only a figment of my imagination."

  Satan laughed again. The thunder was now this side of the hills, and it was threatening and lewd. It did my nerves no good, and I told myself that I would have to take all this up with a psychiatrist the first chance I had. “A figment, am I?” he bellowed. “A nightmare, is it?” He waved a scaly hand at all the wanton, sickening activity going on around us. “Tell me that you don't find all this worshipful behavior seductive! Tell me that you don't itch to join in the celebration of the Sabbath!"

  “Obviously,” I said, “all this comes out of the depths of my subconscious, and therefore it must—I must—” I lost the remark somewhere because I had noticed that his left hand had come to rest on the person who occupied the lesser throne on that side. The person was the naked woman I had seen in the mansion, the proud aristocrat who now seemed just as proud to sit at the left hand of the Devil. That hand was doing something lewd and disgusting to her, and she seemed to enjoy it.

  On the right—"That's the less favored spot,” said the demon behind me—sat the village maiden who looked like Ariel and suffered in a seeming paralysis of terror the indignities offered by Satan's right hand.

  “You cannot deny it,” Satan said. “You would like to be where I am now, handling these creatures as I do, everyone in this congregation eager to do me the slightest service, overjoyed to degrade themselves at my whim, panting for my smile, lusting for my touch, coveting the pain and humiliation I may choose to inflict upon them. Who would not want to be me?"

  “None of us is perfect,” I said.

  “You make a joke to hold back terror,” he said, “telling yourself that this is only a dream, that you will wake up. But what is nightmare and what is reality? Can you trust your senses any more? What is real and what is impossible? Can you tell them apart?"

  I had no answer to that. He had struck me in a vulnerable spot. Within the past twenty-four hours I had seen too many things happen that I would have sworn were impossible. Perhaps this wasn't a dream. But it had to be. I had to be asleep and dreaming. It made no sense otherwise. How else could I find myself back in the Dark Ages, at a witches’ Sabbath, among those who believed that these things were real, Satan and his powers? How else could I see the demons as they had imagined them, as they could not possibly have existed? How else could I find myself going through the rituals they thought were a way to power over the things of this earth?

  “You will see how real it is,” Satan said, and rose from his chair. He towered above me. The rock platform on which his throne rested gave him an advantage of a foot or so, but he was big. He seemed to me to stand more than seven feet tall, with huge, muscular shoulders and arms and slender, goatlike legs. Standing, he was indisputably male, though not humanly male; his maleness, erect and gigantic, was scaly and rough.

  As he
stood, giant leathery wings unfolded behind him and spread like darkness over the scene. The fire leaped high behind me, reddening Satan's body. “Come!” he thundered. “Do me homage!"

  The demons and the witches and the sorcerers rushed to be first in line to bow before his Satanic majesty, and as he turned and bent over to expose his backside to his worshipers he looked over his shoulder to leer at me. The aristocratic lady was first in line to kiss one hairy buttock with apparent adoration. It was not as clean as the backsides of most goats, I thought, but his followers were undeterred.

  “He has a second face there, you know,” the demon behind me said, but it looked like only a filthy buttock to me.

  “I'm not sure I'd like the face any better,” I said.

  When Satan tired of this game, he turned, spilling his worshipers to one side, careless of who might be injured, and spread his wings again. “You will renounce your faith in God the uncaring, God the remote, and you will affirm your faith in me, who is here, who hears your prayers and answers them, who reigns on earth!"

  A group of demons came from the darkness beyond the fire carrying a large cross fashioned roughly of wood, a cross such as might have been used to crucify a man. The witches and demons and sorcerers moved forward to dance and spit and evacuate upon the cross while they praised the power and the beauty of Satan.

  “Our father who wert in heaven,” they said. And “Satan is now and shall forever be our Lord, the king of all things here on earth. To Satan we swear eternal loyalty. In all things we are his, yea to the grave and beyond."