The Magicians

by James Gunn

  I turned it over and over as I let a cold shower bring me fully awake, shaved hurriedly with a razor I had picked up last night in the hotel drugstore, and reluctantly put on the clothes I had worn yesterday.

  Eleven eleven. Obviously a room number. Too obviously. Or was I being too subtle? A date? What happened in eleven eleven? Nothing. The Normans conquered England in ten sixty-six, and King John signed the Magna Carta in twelve fifteen, but nothing happened in eleven eleven. November eleventh? That was more than a week ahead, and what did it matter? This problem would be over by then, or we all would be dead, wasted away, perhaps, like Ariel's father. A room number, then. Whose? Ariel's? That was logical. But why should there be danger there? It could be a trap. Maybe it was Solomon's room, or La Voisin's, or maybe I would find myself in a trap like the black mirror from which I could not extract myself.

  I shrugged. There was danger in excess caution, too, and a man could speculate himself into a hole. I strapped on my shoulder holster and inspected the clip. I felt a little safer as I slipped the gun back. Maybe I was foolish, but I had a hunch Betsy might come in handy before the day was over. She wasn't subtle and she didn't know the first thing about magic, but when she spoke, people listened.

  I hid Uriel's manuscript, hesitated at the door, and returned for a piece of chalk. I jotted an equation across the inside of the door, making certain that it crossed onto the door frame. I stepped out into the hall, closed the door behind me, and heard it latch. If magic really worked, that should keep everybody out, including hotel employees.

  I waited a few minutes for an elevator. When the doors opened in front of me, I walked right in, proud of myself—not for refusing to consider the possibility that the elevator was only an illusion but for walking into it even though I thought it might be only an elevator shaft waiting for me. I pushed the button marked 11. When the elevator stopped and the doors opened, I stepped out into a corridor just like my own.

  The door across the corridor was marked 1100, and arrows pointed left and right with appropriate numbers in the eleven hundreds printed in the fat middle of the arrows. But all that could have been a trick. I didn't believe anything any more.

  Eleven eleven was down the corridor to the right and just around a corner. I took a deep breath, grabbed the doorknob, and turned it. Something snapped. The door swung open.

  I looked at the sun-bright room for a long moment before I understood what was going on.

  “My God!” I said, my voice quivering with horror. “Ariel!"

  Chapter 10

  The mind is its own place, and in it self

  Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.

  - John Milton, Paradise Lost

  She was still in her nightgown, and the face she turned up to me was twisted with guilt, and some other emotion I could not read. In her hands, as she sat cross-legged upon the floor, was a little waxen figure. Even if I had not seen the blond hairs pressed into the tiny head, I would have known who the figure was supposed to represent. Me.

  Her hands were still busy, winding darker hairs around the chest of the mommet. In the window, directly in the sunlight, were two other figures. One was made of a darker material. Around its chest was a red hair. Next to it was a wax image that the sun had half-melted into a puddle.

  Strangest of all was Ariel. Before I had thought her only pretty. Now I knew that she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, and my throat ached with loving her, and my arms twitched with the desire to gather her up in them.

  “Oh, no!” I said, and turned away, my hands thrown up to cover my face, as if by this gesture I could shut out the scene I had stumbled upon.

  “Wait, Gabriel!” she said urgently, her silence suddenly broken. “Wait! You don't understand!"

  I moved away blindly. What could she say to change what I had seen? She muttered something behind me. I stopped, not because I wanted to but because suddenly I couldn't move. I was fixed to the spot like Lot's wife or like all those foolish men who looked at Medusa's snaky locks. Then I could move my hands, and I took them away from my face, and I was inside the room and the door was closed.

  Ariel was standing. Her look of guilt had changed to annoyance, as if I were the one who had done something wrong. “Oh, why did you have to break in here now?"

  “Ariel!” I exclaimed. “Why? Why are you doing this? I thought we were working together, and now I find you making wax images of me. It's fantastic. It's terrible! Why are you doing this to me? My God, Ariel, you'd think after what we've been through together, after last night—"

  “For goodness’ sake, shut up!” she said, her annoyance replaced by bewilderment. “What in the name of—What do you think I'm doing?"

  “Look!” I said, trying to point to the images slowly melting in the window, and failing. “You've been trying to kill me! But why?"

  Slowly, irresistibly, a smile spread over her beautiful face. She started to laugh. It bubbled out of her uncontrollably. She fell across the bed and howled. I watched her with growing irritation as my anger and horror faded. I didn't see anything funny about it."

  “Kill you, Gabriel?” she gasped. “Only with love. Oh, no, Gabriel. Not you. Anybody but you."

  “Well, then,” I snapped in my best schoolteacherish manner that had straightened up the most giggly of girls, “what's the meaning of all this?"

  She sat up in the bed, suddenly sobered, studying my face as if she wasn't sure how I would react. “It's a love spell,” she said, and then she couldn't look at me any more.

  “A love spell!” I repeated. And I recognized instantly that it was true. I loved her madly, infinitely, eternally. She was the most precious thing in the world. It would be ecstasy to die for her, and I would spend the rest of my life keeping anything from harming her, from troubling her for an instant. “But all these images—"

  “They were part of it. The wax one there, the one melting in the sun, that made your heart soften toward me."

  “It wasn't exactly hardened before,” I pointed out

  “I know that,” she said, “but I didn't want to take any chances. The clay image that is hardening is intended to harden your heart against La Voisin.” She laughed. “You should have seen me earlier, when I was chanting."

  “But why did you do all this?” I asked. “You didn't have to use magic to get me to help you."

  “Don't you see?” she said quickly, as if she were trying to convince herself as well as me. “I was trying to protect you from La Voisin. When they found out that their mirror trick didn't work, she would have tried a love spell, or an Amatory Mass, rather, since that is the way their minds work."

  I shuddered. In love with Catherine La Voisin. I would rather be in love with a black widow spider. I wasn't sure, either, that my feeling was all due to the clay image. And then I thought of something. “I'm not sure that she didn't,” I said slowly.

  “What do you mean?"

  I told her about the dream and the corridors and the strange Mass.

  Ariel nodded. “That's what it was. The room you described is like the chapel in which Madame de Montespan had several love Masses performed in order to win and keep Louis XIV. The chapel belonged to a widow named Catherine Deshayes, who was known as La Voisin. And the priest you described sounds very much like the sinister Abbé Guibourg, who performed several of the Masses, just as you described."

  “Then it wasn't a dream!” I exclaimed. “How could I have dreamed it like that?” I stopped and thought a moment, my natural skepticism surfacing again. “Unless I read about it last night."

  “It could have been real,” she said, “and perhaps my clay mommet saved you—"

  “From a fate worse than death,” we said in unison. “Yeah,” I said, “but if that could have been real, and I was really in danger, what about the other dream?” And I told her about the witches’ Sabbath.

  “I think that really was happening,” she said, “in a symbolic sense, anyhow. And that's what magic is, the substitution
of a single aspect for the whole, or a resemblance for the real thing. A symbol. Which means you can get killed just as easily by a symbol, or a dream, as by reality."

  “But the brooms!” I said. “They were riding the brooms the wrong way, with the straw in front of them—"

  “And a candle in the straw?” she completed.

  “How did you know?” I demanded.

  “That's the way paintings and drawings began to show them beginning early in the seventeenth century."

  “I know I didn't read anything about that!” I said.

  “Are you sure?” she asked a bit tartly.

  “I'm sorry,” I said. “All this comes hard.” I looked up. “Then you really could have been there, the young witch—"

  “Never!” she said, and then her voice softened. “But I'm glad you acted as you did.” She sighed and then muttered something. Suddenly the rest of my body was free to move. “You can go now,” she said quietly.

  I turned toward the door, frowning and feeling unhappy. I didn't like the way I was being pushed around, brought here, involved there, trapped, my feelings changed, and—

  Not so fast, boy! What are you complaining about? Why don't you admit it! Ever since you met this girl you've been falling in love with her, long before any spells were said over wax images. Remember last night?

  I remembered and smiled.

  Maybe the spell had nothing at all to do with the way you feel. Even if it did, it only intensified something that you already felt. So things got hurried up a little. So things got intensified, made more perfect. Have you got a kick coming?

  Sure, I've got a kick, I thought, and frowned. Suppose she isn't in love with me. How about that?

  Come on, Casey! You may be in love, but you don't have to be stupid. You didn't believe everything she said, did you? There must have been simpler ways to protect you against La Voisin. If she went around making men fall in love with her right and left, it would be damned inconvenient for her. See the way she looks at you, boy! Look—

  I turned back into the room. Ariel was still sitting on the bed, watching me with big, serious eyes. Of course. It was true. Girls cast love spells over men because they're in love with them. I took three steps toward her and bent down and gathered her in my arms and kissed her passionately.

  She stiffened and struggled in strange helplessness for a girl of her powers. Her hands beat a gentle tattoo against my chest. “Stop!” she gasped, when she had freed her lips from mine. “Stop it!"

  “I can't,” I said. “I can't help myself. Besides, you could always cast another spell if you wanted to."

  I gave her a chance, but she didn't say anything. So I kissed her again. Slowly she relaxed. Her arms went around my neck. We sank down onto the bed. I gathered her close to me, knowing I would never be closer to paradise.

  Finally she put her head back and sighed. She opened her eyes, her beautiful blue eyes, and whispered, “Then you don't mind?"

  “Mind?” I said. “One might as well mind the coming of the seasons, the way the moon turns round the earth, the fact that rain falls down instead of up, the rising of the sun in the east, the singing of the birds, the—"

  “Hush!” she said and kissed me.

  We sank into another period of rapture, and I discovered that she was proficient in an older and more powerful witchcraft, that she was indeed in love with me, and with a passion as powerful as my own. But she had willpower and I didn't, and finally she fought herself free of my embrace and her desires and sat up, straightening her hair and rearranging her nightgown. I reached for her again, but she pushed my hands away.

  “I can see that I'm going to have trouble with you,” she said with mock severity. “The Grimoires and the Keys and the Faustbooks are so impractical. They never mention this kind of difficulty."

  “You have no one to blame but yourself,” I pointed out. “You have bewitched me. I am a slave of passion.” I tried to pull her back to my side.

  She brushed my hands away and stood up, although I could tell that she did it with difficulty. “I suppose,” she said moodily, “but I must remain a virgin."

  I sat up at that, frustrated and impatient and as nearly sharp with Ariel as I could ever be. “That doesn't seem quite fair!” I said.

  “I don't mean forever,” she said.

  “You mean you're holding out for marriage,” I said unhappily.

  “I'm not ‘holding out’ as you so delicately put it,” she snapped, and then her tone softened. “It's not just the morality, and I'm certainly not thinking of marriage right now, but the condition, the physical condition, is of great importance in the practice of magic, and we need all the help we can get. I don't dare lose my virginity while we are in such peril."

  “And was there any danger of that?” I asked.

  She caught her breath. “Oh, you know,” she said softly. “You know."

  I controlled myself and stood up. I crossed my arms and moved a few feet away. “Did you work that spell just to save me from La Voisin?"

  Her eyes widened innocently. “Why, what other reason could I have?"

  I growled and lunged at her, but she jumped out of my way and evaded me easily. “You beautiful witch!” I said, panting as I tried to corner her. “You must have known what would happen when you put your room number in my box."

  She stopped running. I caught her, almost knocking her to the floor. We stood, swaying like poplars caught in a storm, her face upturned to mine, wide-eyed and afraid.

  “I didn't put anything in your box,” she said.

  We were still pressed close, but the half-controlled urgency of passion no longer bound us. Around us the almost forgotten forces of evil were closing in, and for a moment our closeness was our only protection.

  “They must have done it,” I said. “At least we can thank them for this—they brought us together and let us discover how we feel about each other."

  “Maybe,” she said. She was trembling a little in my arms. That bothered me. She had always been the steady one. “If they did it to drive us apart. If they wanted you to find me working spells."

  “Why else?"

  She shook her head. “I don't know. They're devious and nasty, as you discovered. Suddenly I'm afraid."

  I bent down and kissed her lips. Not like before. Gently. Her lips were cold. “The frightened witch!” I said, to chide her back into courage. “Don't be afraid! This was their second mistake. We'll prove it to them. They can't beat us now."

  She raised her head and smiled. She was a magnificent woman, even if she was a witch, and I had more reasons to be proud of her every time we met.

  “Listen,” I said. “We need a council of war. Can you get hold of Uriel?” She nodded. “Bring him down to my room, then. Seven oh seven. Half an hour. Okay?"

  She nodded again. I released her, stepped back, and looked at her with fond and possessive eyes. “I love you, Ariel,” I said. “I don't think the dolls had anything to do with it, but I don't care if they did."

  “I love you,” she whispered, “and there wasn't any witchcraft about that. Was there?” she asked suddenly. I held out my hands helplessly, and she laughed. She got serious again. “I'll remove the spell.” I shrugged to show that I didn't believe in spells even now. “No,” she went on, “I want to. Not because of you. For me. I want to be sure it's real. I want you to love me for myself."

  “Don't you dare!” I said, as my disbelief crumbled with a shudder. “Do you think I want to take a chance on losing this—this way I feel? But,” I added wryly, “I'd appreciate your keeping those dolls in a safe place. I wouldn't want them falling into just anybody's hands."

  I closed the door gently behind me, feeling as if I were leaving a treasure that only I knew about, that only I appreciated. I felt too good to wait for the elevator. For the moment I forgot my distrust of stairs, and I ran down four flights, three steps at a time. I ran out into the hall and slowed to a walk as a well-dressed elderly couple passed on their way to the ele
vator. I could feel them turning to stare at me.

  “It's magic,” I hummed.

  The woman sniffed.

  I reached the door, inserted the card, and tried to turn the handle. The handle didn't turn. I tried again and then again. The door was closed as tightly as if it had been boarded up from inside. I glanced at the room number to make certain I had the right room, and then I remembered my precautions. I took the piece of chalk out of my coat pocket and scribbled another equation on the front of the door. Added together, the two equations canceled each other. Their sum was zero.

  The door swung open. I scrubbed the figures off both sides of the door with the heel of my hand, stepped into the room, and closed the door behind me. I fastened the chain latch and spun around, checking the room carefully for any changes. Everything was just as I had left it, down to the smudged circle on the rug.

  I stood there, just inside the door, reliving the experiences of the morning, the pain and the joy, and feeling great, feeling that we would win, that events were breaking our way. I had no doubts about that. All that was left was a little detail work.

  Ariel! My body got warm as I remembered the beauty of her face, the sweetness of her lips, and the fire of her body, a perfect combination 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.

  “I've had a shower this morning!"

  That isn't the kind I meant, and you know it.

  “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 discovering Solomon's identity. And until you've discovered that, you're not walking on clouds. You're walking on quicksand.