The Magus

by John Fowles

  Another startling figure: a man in a crocodile head-a bizarre maned mask that projected forwards, more negroid than anything else, with ferocious white teeth and bulging eyes. He hardly paused, but came swiftly to his place beside the stag, as if the wearer was uncomfortable in costume; unused to such scenes.

  A shorter male figure came next: an abnormally large head in which white cube-teeth reached in a savage grin from ear to ear. His eyes seemed buried in deep black sockets. Round the top of his head there rose a great iguana frill. This man was dressed in a black poncho, and looked Mexican; Aztec. He moved to his place beside the witch.

  Another female figure appeared. I felt sure it was Lily. She was the winged vampire, an eared bat-head in black fur, two long white fangs; below her waist she wore a black skirt, black stockings, black shoes. Slim legs. She quickly went to her place beside the crocodile, the clawed wings held rigidly out, bellying a little in the air, uncanny in the torchlight; a great flickering shadow that darkened the cross and the rose.

  The next figure was African, a folk-horror, a corn-doll bundle of black strips of rag that hung down to the ground in a series of skirted flounces. Even the head mask was made of these rags; with a topknot of three white feathers and two huge saucer eyes. It appeared armless and legless, and indeed sexless, some ultimate childish nightmare. It shuffled forward to its place beside the vampire; added to the chorus of outrageous stares.

  Then came a squat succubus with a Bosch-like snout.

  The following man was by contrast mainly white, a macabre pierrot-skeleton; echo of the figure on the wall of my cell. His mask was a skull. The outline of the pelvis had been cleverly exaggerated; and the wearer had a stiff, bony walk.

  Then an even more bizarre personage. It was a woman, and I began to doubt whether, after all, the vampire was Lily. The front of her stiffened skirt had the form of a stylized fishtail, which swelled up into a heavy pregnant belly; and then that in turn, above the breasts, became an up-pointed bird’s head. This figure walked forward slowly, left hand supporting the swollen eight-month’s belly, right hand between the breasts. The beaked white head with its almond-shaped eyes seemed to stare up towards the ceiling. It was beautiful, this fish-woman-bird, strangely tender after the morbidity and threat of the other figures. In its upstretched throat I could see two small holes, apertures for the eyes of the real person beneath.

  Four more places remained.

  The next figure was almost an old friend. Anubis the jackal-head, alert and vicious. He strode lithely to his place, a Negro walk.

  A man in a black cloak on which were various astrological and alchemical symbols in white. On his head he wore a hat with a peak a yard high and a wide nefarious brim; a kind of black neck-covering hung from behind it. Black gloves, and a long white staff surmounted by a circle, a snake with its tail in its mouth. Over the face there was no more than a deep mask in black. I knew who it was. I could see the gleaming eyes and the implacable mouth.

  Two more places at the centre. There was a pause. The rank of figures behind the table stared up at me, unmoving, in total silence. I looked round at my guards, who stared ahead, like soldiers; and I shrugged. I wished I could have yawned, to put them all in their place; and to help me in mine.

  Four men appeared in the white corridor. They were carrying a black sedan chair, so narrow that it looked almost like an upright coffin. I could see closed curtains at its sides, and in front. On the front panel was painted in white the same emblem as the one above my throne – an eight-spoked wheel. On the roof of the sedan was a kind of black tiara, each of whose teeth ended in a white meniscus, a ring of new moons.

  The four porters were black-smocked. On their heads they had grotesque masks – witch-doctor faces in white and black and then rising from the crown of each head enormous vertical crosses a yard or more high. Instead of breaking off cleanly, the ends of the arms and the upright of these crosses burst out in black mops of rag or raffia, so that they seemed to be burning with black flame.

  They did not come directly to the centre of the table, but as if it was some host, some purifying relic, carried their coffin-sedan round the room, up the left side, round in front of my throne, between me and the table, so that I could see the white crescent-moons, the symbols of Artemis-Diana, on the side panels, then on down the right side to the door again and then finally back to the table. The poles were slipped out of the brackets, and the box was lifted forward to the central empty place. Throughout, the other figures remained staring at me. The black porters went and stood by the brands, three of which were almost extinguished. The light was getting dim.

  Then the thirteenth figure appeared.

  In contrast to the others he was in a long white smock or alb that reached to the ground; whose only decoration consisted of two black bands round the end of the loose sleeves. He carried a black staff in red-gloved hands. The head was that of a pure black goat; a real goat’s head, worn as a kind of cap, so that it stood high off the shoulders of the person beneath, whose real face must have lain behind the shaggy black beard. Huge backswept horns, left their natural colour; amber glass eyes; the only ornament, a fat blood-red candle that had been fixed between the horns and lit. I wished I could speak, for I badly needed to shout something debunking, something adolescent and healthy and English; a ‘Doctor Crowley, I presume.’ But all I could do was to cross my knees and look what I was not – unimpressed.

  The goat-figure, his satanic majesty, came forward with an archi—diabolical dignity and I braced myself for the next development: a black Mass seemed likely. Perhaps the table was to be the altar. I realized that he was lampooning the traditional Christ-figure; the staff was the pastoral crook, the black beard Christ’s brown one, the blood-red candle some sort of blasphemous parody of the halo. He came to his place, the long line of black-carnival puppets stared at me from the floor. I stared down the line: the stag-devil, the crocodile-devil, the vampire, the succubus, the bird-woman, the magician, the coffin-sedan, the goat-devil, the jackal-devil, the pierrot-skeleton, the corn-doll, the Aztec, the witch. I found myself swallowing, looking round again at my inscrutable guards. The gag was beginning to hurt. In the end I found it more comfortable to stare down at the foot of the dais.

  Perhaps a minute passed like that. Another of the brands stopped naming. The goat-figure raised his staff, held it up a moment, then made to lay it on the table in front of him; but he must have got it caught in something because there was a comforting little hitch in the stage business. As soon as he had managed it, he raised both hands sacerdotally, but fingers devil-horned, and pointed at the corners behind me. My two guards went to the projectors. Suddenly the room was flooded with light; and, after a moment of total stillness, flooded with movement.

  Like actors suddenly off-stage, the row of figures in front of me began removing their masks and cloaks. The cross-headed men by the brands turned and took the torches and filed out towards the door. But they had to wait there, because a group of twenty or so young people appeared. They came in loosely, in ordinary clothes, without any attempt at order. Some of them had files and books. They were silent, and quickly took their places on the tiered side-benches to my right. The men with the torches disappeared. I looked at the newcomers – German or Scandinavian, intelligent faces, students’ faces, one or two older people among them, and three girls, but with an average age in the early twenties. Two of the men I recognized from the incident of the ridge.

  All this time the row of figures behind the table were disrobing. Adam and my two guards moved about helping them. Adam laid cardboard folders with white labels in each place. The stuffed cat was removed, and the staffs, all the paraphernalia. It was done swiftly, well rehearsed. I kept flashing looks down the line, as one person after another was revealed.

  The last arrival, the goat-head, was an old man with a clipped white beard, dark grey-blue eyes; a resemblance to Smuts. Like all the others he studiously avoided looking at me, but I saw him smile at Conchis, th
e astrologer-magician beside him. Next to Conchis appeared, from behind the bird—head and pregnant belly, a slim middle-aged woman. She was wearing a dark-grey suit; a headmistress or a business woman. The jackal-head, Joe, was dressed in a dark-blue suit. Anton came, surprisingly, from behind the pierrot-skeleton costume. The succubus from Bosch revealed another elderly man with a mild face and pince-nez. The corn-doll was Maria. The Aztec head was the German colonel, the pseudo-Wimmel of the ridge incident. The vampire was not Lily, but her sister; a scarless wrist. A white blouse, and the black skirt. The crocodile was a man in his late twenties. He had a thin artistic-looking beard; a Greek or an Italian. He too was wearing a suit. The stag-head was another man I did not know; a very tall Jewish-looking intellectual of about forty, deeply tanned and slightly balding.

  That left the witch on the extreme right of the table. It was Lily, in a long-sleeved high-necked white woollen dress. I watched her pat her severely chignoned hair and then put on a pair of spectacles. She bent to hear something that the ‘colonel’ next to her whispered in her ear. She nodded, then opened the file in front of her.

  Only one person was not revealed: whoever was in the coffin-sedan.

  I sat facing a long table of perfectly normal-looking people, who were all sitting and consulting their files and beginning to look at me. Their faces showed interest, but no sympathy. I stared at June-Rose, but she stared back without expression, as if I were a waxwork. I waited above all for Lily to look at me, but when she did there was nothing in her eyes. She behaved like, and her position at the end of the table suggested, a minor member of a team, of a selection board.

  At last the old man with the clipped white beard rose to his feet and a faint murmuring that had begun among the audience stopped. The other members of the ‘board’ looked towards him. I saw some, but not many, of the ‘students’ with open notebooks on their laps, ready to write. The old man with the white beard gazed up at me through his gold-rimmed glasses, smiled, and bowed.

  ‘Mr Urfe, you must long ago have come to the conclusion that you have fallen into the hands of madmen. Worse than that, of sadistic madmen. And I think my first task is to introduce you to the sadistic madmen.’ Some of the others gave little smiles. His English was excellent, though it retained clear traces of a German accent. ‘But first we must return you, as we have returned ourselves, to normality.’

  He signed quietly to my two guards, who had come back beside me. Deftly they untied the rosetted white ribbons, pulled my clothes back to their normal position, peeled off the black forehead patch, turned back my pullover, even brushed my hair back; but left the gag.

  ‘Good. Now … if I may be allowed I shall first introduce myself. I am Doctor Friedrich Kretschmer, formerly of Stuttgart, now director of the Institute of Experimental Psychology at the University of Idaho in America. On my right you have Doctor Maurice Conchis of the Sorbonne, whom you know.’ Conchis rose and bowed briefly to me. I glared at him. ‘On his right, Doctor Mary Marcus, now of Edinburgh University, formerly of the William Alanson White Foundation in New York.’ The professional-looking woman inclined her head. ‘On her right, Professor Mario Ciardi of Milan.’ He stood up and bowed, a mild little frog of a man. ‘Beyond him you have our charming and very gifted young costume designer, Miss Margaret Maxwell.’ ‘Rose’ gave me a minute brittle smile. ‘On the right of Miss Maxwell you see Mr Yanni Kottopoulos. He has been our stage manager.’ The man with the beard bowed; and then the tall Jew stood. ‘And bowing to you now you see Arne Halberstedt of the Queen’s Theatre, Stockholm, our dramatizer and director, to whom, together with Miss Maxwell and Mr Kottopoulos, we mere amateurs in the new drama all owe a great deal for the successful outcome and aesthetic beauty of our … enterprise.’ First Conchis, then the other members of the ‘board’, then the students, began to clap. Even the guards behind me joined in.

  The old man turned. ‘Now – on my left – you see an empty box. But we like to think that there is a goddess inside. A virgin goddess whom none of us has ever seen, nor will ever see. We call her Ashtaroth the Unseen. Your training in literature will permit you, I am sure, to guess at her meaning. And through her at our, we humble scientists’, meaning.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Beyond the box you have Doctor Joseph Harrison of my department at Idaho, and of whose brilliant study of characteristic urban Negro neuroses, Black and White Minds, you may have heard.’ Joe got up and raised his hand casually. ‘Anton’ was next. ‘Beyond him, Doctor Heinrich Mayer, at present working in Vienna. Beyond him, Madame Maurice Conchis, whom many of us know better as the gifted investigator of the effects of wartime traumata on refugeee children. I speak, of course, of Doctor Annette Kazanian of the Chicago Institute.’ I refused to be surprised, which was more than could be said of some of the ‘audience’, who murmured and leant forward to look at ‘Maria’. ‘Beyond Madame Conchis, you see Privatdozent Thorvald Jorgensen of Aalborg University.’ The ‘colonel’ stood up briskly and bowed. ‘Beyond him you have Doctor Vanessa Maxwell.’ Lily looked briefly up at me, bespectacled, absolutely without expression. I flicked my eyes back to the old man; he looked at his colleagues. ‘I think that we all feel the success of the clinical side of our enterprise this summer is very largely due to Doctor Maxwell. Dr Marcus had already told me what to expect when her most gifted pupil came to us at Idaho. But I should like to say that never have my expectations been so completely fulfilled. I am sometimes accused of putting too much stress on the role of women in our profession. Let me say that Dr Maxwell, my charming young colleague Vanessa, confirms what I have always believed: that one day all our great practising, as opposed to our theoretical, psychiatrists will be of the sex of Eve.’ There was applause. Lily stared down at the table in front of her and then, when the clapping had died down, she glanced at the old man and murmured, ‘Thank you.’ He turned back to me.

  ‘The students you see are Austrian and Danish research students from Doctor Mayer’s faculty and from Aalborg. I think we all speak English?’ Some said, yes. He smiled benignly at them and sipped a glass of water.

  ‘Well, so, Mr Urfe, you will have guessed our secret by now. We are an international group of psychologists, which I have the honour, by reason of seniority simply’ – two or three shook their heads in disagreement – ‘to lead. For various reasons the path of research in which we are all especially interested requires us to have subjects that are not volunteers, that are not even aware that they are subjects of an experiment. We are by no means united in our theories of behaviour, in our different schools, but we are united in considering the nature of the experiment is such that it is better that the subject should not, even at its conclusion, be informed of its purpose. Though I am sure that you will – when you can recollect in tranquillity – find yourself able to deduce at least part of our causes from our effects.’ There were smiles all round. ‘Now. We have had you, these last three days, under deep narcosis and the material we have obtained from you has proved most valuable, most valuable indeed, and we therefore wish first of all to show our appreciation of the normality you have shown in all the peculiar mazes through which we have made you run.’

  The whole lot of them stood and applauded me. I could not keep control any longer. I saw Lily and Conchis clapping, and the students. I cocked my wrists round and gave them a double V-sign. It evidently bewildered the old man, because he turned and bent to ask Conchis what it meant. The clapping died down. Conchis turned to the supposed woman doctor from Edinburgh. She spoke in a strong American voice.

  ‘The sign is a visual equivalent of some verbalization like “Bugger you” or “Up your arse”.’

  This seemed to interest the old man. He repeated the gesture, watching his own hand. ‘But did not Mr Churchill

  Lily spoke, leaning forward. ‘It is the upward movement that carries the signal, Doctor Kretschmer. Mr Churchill’s victory-sign was with the hand reversed and static. I mentioned it in connection with my paper on “Direct Anal-Erotic Metaphor in Classical Literature
”.’

  ‘Ah. Yes. I recall. Ja, ja.’

  Conchis spoke to Lily. ‘Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo, Aureli patheci et cinaedi Furi?’

  Lily: ‘Precisely.’

  Wimmel-Jorgcnsen leant forward; a strong accent. ‘Is there no doubt a connection with the cuckold gesture?’ He put finger-horns on his head.

  ‘I did suggest,’ said Lily, ‘that we may suppose a castration motive in the insult, a desire to degrade and humiliate the male rival which would of course be finally identifiable with the relevant stage of infantile fixation and the accompanying phobias.’

  I flexed muscles, rubbed my legs together, forced myself to stay sane, to deduce what reason I could get out of all this unreason. I did not, could not believe that they were psychologists; they would never risk giving me their names.

  On the other hand they must be brilliant at improvising the right jargon, since my gesture had come without warning. Or had it? I thought fast. They had needed my gesture to cue their dialogue; and it happened to be one that I hadn’t used for years. But I remembered having heard that one could make people do things after hypnosis, on a pre-suggested signal. It would have been easy. When I was clapped, I felt forced to give the sign. I must be on my guard; do nothing without thinking.