The Magic Cottage (39 page)

When that happened, the darkness beyond the pale neons became infinite.

I realized that the room above had to be part of the pyramid, the sloping walls cutting through the ceiling, maybe even piercing the ceiling above that one.

Only a single chair stood in the centre of the floor, the light beams like four slender posts spaced around it.

‘What d’you do in here – sharpen razor blades?’

Despite the lack of adequate light, I could tell my remark hadn’t amused Mycroft. ‘Just as a church spire is constructed to draw spiritual grace towards the congregation below, so the pyramid seeks to direct psychic energy,’ he said. ‘The shape is repeated beneath us, inverted, of course, so that the tip grazes the earth.’

He lowered himself into the chair, resting his hands on the short blunted handle of the cane. ‘Midge, would you like to sit as before, and perhaps you’ll do the same.’ (He hadn’t bothered to use my name.)

I wasn’t keen on squatting at the Synergist’s feet but it had, after all, been a long run through the forest. I followed Midge’s example, though I declined the lotus position, prefering to lounge on one elbow, ankles crossed, and giving the impression of being quite relaxed about all this. Midge and I were between two light beams, and I twisted my neck to glimpse her profile, which was intense as she gazed up at Mycroft. There was the smell of incense about the place.

The Synergist leaned towards me. ‘You failed to answer my question,’ he said.

‘Question?’

‘Do you believe in Magic?’

‘There’s a coupla card tricks I know—’

He interrupted, although still not riled. (That can be irritating when you’re deliberately crass.) ‘Can you comprehend Man as an identical counterpart to the universe and every force it holds, that the universe itself is no more and certainly no less than an infinitesimal human organism? That the energy driving and governing the universe is the same energy contained within ourselves? Can you understand that Man, with this inner knowledge, could learn to transcend all material limits, and eventually time and space itself?’

I wasn’t sure if he was expecting an answer, but I gave him one anyway, maintaining the crassness for my own pleasure and maybe in the hope of piercing his smooth veneer.

‘I can’t even understand the question,’ I replied.

‘No, of course not. Perhaps I’ve overestimated your intelligence.’

There it was, the first chink. I nodded grimly to myself, appreciating the insult.

‘None the less,’ he went on, his eyes lost in shadow, ‘I’m sure it’s not beyond you to realize that human knowledge purposely confines itself to a limited reality, one that it doesn’t have to fear, and one that scientists and material philosophers show us to be true. Sadly, we choose to see only the least important actuality. The other realities around us – and
within
us – have tended to be ignored for the last few hundred years.’

‘No kidding.’

His hands grasped the metal cane-top just a fraction more tightly. ‘Except that now, recently, the reality of precognition, extrasensory perception and psychokinesis has become accepted by even the most ardent of sceptics. Those hidden powers that have been rejected for so long by scientists are now the subject of scientific study.’

I was becoming impatient. ‘I don’t get what this has to do with so-called Magic.’

‘Surely you can see where I’m leading? Those powers that are inevitably being recognized by the most pragmatic sectors of our society were once considered Magical or supernatural. The view used to be that such powers set aside the natural order of nature, but that was a huge misconception: Magicians merely strive to discover those hidden forces and to work through them and
with
them, whether they are part of us or part of the whole.’

Much as I tried to remain aloof from all this, I have to admit Mycroft was getting through to me. No, I don’t mean I followed what he was saying, but his voice had become soothingly persuasive, almost mesmeric (have you ever been hypnotized? You know what’s going on, but you don’t realize what’s happening), the oddness of the room, with its smell of incense and the soft downcast lights, providing helpful special effects. It all had to be consciously resisted.

I pretended a yawn.

He pretended he hadn’t noticed.

‘We must learn in stages, first casting off restraints imposed upon us since birth, becoming refreshed again. Convention, rationalism, materialism, our principles and ethics: these are nothing more than psychological screens. We must become children again, innocent of such influences. The very young believe in Magic until they are influenced otherwise. The beliefs of unenlightened maturity must be overturned, and the shackling doctrines of religion thwarted because religion reserves divine power for God alone, whereas the way of Magic offers divine power for all.’

I cringed inwardly, waiting for a thunderbolt to strike. Disappointingly, it didn’t.

‘Each step the initiate takes must be experienced and mastered, every new mystery revealed must be contemplated, each developing phase considered. And perhaps the first and most important secret is that which lies within ourselves.’

He leaned forward so that his chin very nearly rested on his hands clutched over the cane, and his voice lowered.

‘That is,’ he said gravely and confidentially, ‘the mystery of our own energy, our own astral forces in the earth itself, and so, too, the infinite forces of the universe. A Magician, my friend, is always in search of those hidden links.’

He straightened once again, his face gone to stone. My throat was dry.

‘And when those links are discovered,’ he added in the same low voice, ‘they may be employed for the Magician’s purposes.’

He gave me time for it to sink in.

‘All that to pull a rabbit out of a hat?’ I said.

He allowed a cold smile.

‘All that to discover our true self and the veiled power we hold. There is nothing more basic, nor more transcendent. With that knowledge, a man has access to the limitless forces of his own will. He can evoke an imagination so concentrated and so vivid that it can create a reality in the astral light.’

He pointed the tip of his cane at the floor, close to my leg.

‘That reality may be reflected in this physical world, if we so wish.’

My rabbit appeared on the spot he was pointing at.

I jumped back and Midge gasped.

The rabbit twitched its nose.

Tentatively, I reached towards the white furry bundle, not believing it was real.

And snatched my hand back when it turned into a black, wicked-toothed rat. I hate bloody rats.

Then it was gone and Mycroft was wearing a ‘
so what d’you think of that, Smartarse?
’ smile.

I blinked my eyes at the faded illusion, but refrained from asking him how he’d performed the trick. Nobody likes a show-off. Besides, I wanted my jarred thoughts to settle.

‘Magic of a sort,’ Mycroft intoned deprecatingly. ‘A trivial example of the will’s power.’

He pointed his stick at a space between two downbeams of light to my left and a narrow table appeared, on it a bottle of wine and an empty glass. As we watched, the bottle lifted, tilted and poured red liquid into the glass.

In my astonishment I turned to Midge and her face was full of awed delight, like that kid’s in
Close Encounters
. The sheer gullible innocence of her expression made me want to grab her and run fast from that dark, pointed room where the aroma of incense was now tainted with a faint corruption. My mind was concentrated on flight, and when I returned my gaze to the table and the wine its image was wavery, its lines softened. But the sight steadied, became solid once more.

‘You may drink,’ Mycroft offered very casually. ‘You’ll enjoy the taste, I promise.’

‘No thanks,’ I said, and he lowered the cane, the image quickly dissolving to nothing.

I knew what he was doing, but not how: I’d always assumed that hypnotists had to tell you verbally what they wanted you to see or do, or how you should react. Nevertheless, I was certain that what we’d witnessed hadn’t existed outside our own imaginations.

I was searching for my next quip when Mycroft made the light beams bend.

The puddled circles of brightness started moving inwards quite slowly, the two in front touching the Synergist’s feet while the two behind crept up the chair legs. He’d inverted the cane so that the tip was aimed at his own face, and that’s what the dust-filled rays were travelling towards, bent like jointed drainpipes about four feet from the floor, their slopes gradually becoming more acute until right-angled to the down-beam. Mycroft’s head was spotlighted from the front and behind, and his skin glowed with the attention.

I sensed more in Mycroft at that moment than I ever had before.

Energy, vibrancy – whatever that invisible vigour can be called – seemed to dance across his cheeks as tiny sparks of static, and his eyes, fixed on mine, were crystalline and dazzling, multi-faceted pupils sparkling back light. The deep fissures on his face I’d observed outside in the corridor were gone, bathed away by the sunny glare, each plane of his skull reflecting a different light, some shiny brilliant, others more subdued but never dull. No shadows there, his features merged, nothing prominent, nose levelled with lips, forehead levelled with eye sockets; a simple mask whose form depended on degrees of reflected light. Even his hair effulged silver.

It was a sight to make you gulp.

For a briefest instant, his whole head flared – or appeared to – a spectrum aura radiating outwards, expanding until the triangular room was filled with its variegation, driving away the blackness and forcing me and Midge to shield our eyes.

But not before we’d both perceived other worlds inside those subtle and lifting rainbow colours, floating planets that resembled body cells, stars and suns that shone green, blue, the deepest mauve, shapes that were sometimes human and sometimes vast expanses of protoplasmic masses, a coagulation of life-forces. We experienced the lonely darkness of infinite space, which was the pitch umbra of time itself, both casts of the same non-entity; we felt huge tides of shifting emotions sweeping through those gossamer galaxies, shaping destinies and creating forces that would become rock and flesh and more emotion, emotion being the creative energy that bred with itself, the source of everything, the progenitor of all we knew and all we didn’t know.

And at the centre of this revelation we saw a whiteness that would have seared our eyes had it been real; and it was this, not the brightness inside the room, that caused us to cover our faces.

But all this was only a glimpse, no more than that. A glimpse allowed by Mycroft.

We cowered, and the vision was gone.

Darkness came back with the smell of foul incense.

I shook my head dazedly, more wearied than alarmed; there was a peculiar sensation in my stomach, as if there were a shining down there, something alight and warming my veins. The heat surged into my limbs, to my fingertips and toes, then vanished, dissipated through them.

I shifted over to Midge, not sure I wanted to stand just yet. Mycroft, returned to normal self, the light beams rigid posts once more, watched impassively, an entomologist studying a specimen beetle who struggled with a pin stuck in the shell of its back.

‘Midge? Midge, are you okay?’

Her hands were still held to her face, and I gently pulled them away. She blinked, seemed not to recognize me, and I caught sight of the white light still twinkling in her pupils, but distant, diminishing, finally snuffing out. She looked past me, at Mycroft, and her smile was tentative, unsure.

I turned and his visage remained impassive.

‘What was it?’ Midge asked in a small breathless voice.

I expected a profound answer from the Synergist, but he only smiled enigmatically.

‘Yeah, I’d like to know too,’ I said.

‘You were spectators to the mysteries.’

Pretty profound.

‘That doesn’t tell us much.’

‘What do you feel you saw?’

It was Midge who replied. ‘I felt I was witnessing the source of all things, but it was incomplete, only a fragment.’

He nodded slowly (and a little too sagely, I thought, like it was part of the show). ‘A
vision
only of a glimmer. Nothing more than that. Your imagination rendered the truth into a vision your mind could perceive – but only just. At such moments sight can be as useless as words, imagination as inadequate as reason. Even dreams can barely sense the Unity.’

Whatever, it had given me a headache. ‘A nice display, Mycroft, but what was it for? To impress us?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘We’re impressed. Now can we leave?’

‘You let us see your power,’ said Midge, leaning forward eagerly.

‘I revealed a channel to power, one that courses through my own body and mind,’ Mycroft replied. ‘There are other . . . stronger channels around us that can be sought and found. Access points, conduits – call them what you will. They can be used . . .’

He suddenly clammed up and avoided our eyes. I think he’d been getting carried away by his own genius.

‘I don’t understand what you want from us?’ I persisted. ‘We’re not interested in becoming Synergists, or anything like this . . .’

‘I think your partner is,’ he came back, mysterious as ever.

‘Find them for me again,’ Midge said to him. ‘Let them speak to me. Let Mike hear for himself.’

We both knew whom she meant.

I touched her hand. ‘This is madness. Can’t you see what he’s doing? Thought projection, mind manipulation, plain old-fashioned hypnotism – it’s all part of the same thing. Nothing really happened. Mycroft is
making
us see all these things, they’re not real—’

‘Their presence is in the room,’ interrupted Mycroft. ‘I can sense them, and so can you.’ He was addressing Midge.

‘Yes,’ she said simply.

‘They’ve more to tell you.’

She nodded.

‘They want you to listen.’

She nodded again, and her eyes closed.

And now I could feel something else inside that room. But I wasn’t sure if it was because Mycroft wanted me to.