The Magic Cottage

THE PYRAMID ROOM

IT WAS IN the shape of a pyramid, the tapering walls steep and high, apexed so that there was no ceiling.

And black.

Even the floor was black.

Above us—ten feet above, at least—shone small recessed lights, one on each angled wall, their thin beams picked out by dust motes, striking downward like straight translucent bars, creating four soft-edged moons on the smooth floor. Their glow became substantial only when the door was closed behind us.

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 center 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 toward 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, preferring 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 toward 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 being 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.

"Nonetheless," 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 skeptics.

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 toward 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 weaning 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 depreciatingly. "A trivial example of the will's power."

He pointed his stick at a space between two down-beams 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 inward 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 traveling toward, 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 vigor can be called—seemed to dance across his cheeks as tiny sparks of static, and his eyes, fixed on mine, were crystalline and dazzling, multifaceted 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 brillant, others more subdued but never dull. No shadows there, his features merged, nothing prominent, nose leveled with lips, forehead leveled 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 outward, 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 colors, 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 nonentity; 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 center 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.

"They're speaking," said Midge in a hushed voice.

"I can't hear anything." My own voice was a whisper.

A breeze stirred around us.

"They're faint, but they're here." Midge opened her eyes again.

I noticed Mycroft's were boring into hers. Then he turned his attention to me and his pupils were like tiny black holes, bottomless but not empty.

There was a shadow behind him. Gray and wispy, and moving forward. Another behind that one, appearing just beyond his left shoulder. Both taking on shimmering form.

Voices, an eternity away. So faint. From another dimension. Yet not voices at all. Thoughts that pressed into ours.

"Father?" said Midge.

One of the flimsy clouds at Mycroft's shoulder shifted as if stirred by an air current. And the thought in my mind answered her.

The breeze became a gust.

"Show Mike that you're really here." It was a plea from Midge.

The nebula took on more form: a vaporous head, a line of a shoulder. It became almost liquid, rippling as features shaped themselves. Those features slowly grew familiar to me, although they remained wavery and indistinct.

A word insinuated itself into my mind:

". . . Trust . . ."

But I didn't want to trust, because it was telling me to put my faith in Mycroft, this hazy spirit of Midge's dead father was telling me to believe in the Synergist, and I didn't want to because I knew he was a charlatan, that he had a purpose for Midge, but I didn't know what that purpose was, and I was going to resist, resist, I was going . . .

My incredulous gaze was drawn to the second fluid shape hovering there by Mycroft's other shoulder and it, too, was familiar, a face from photographs shown to me by Midge many times in the past, and she, this ghost of a woman, told me the same:

". . . trust . . . in . . . him . . ."

Midge was on her knees, reaching toward them, her upturned face fresh with its own glow despite the surrounding dimness, and I held her back, one arm around her shoulder, my other hand clenching her wrist; but still she shuffled forward, and it was toward Mycroft that she moved, on her knees, a cripple toward a faith healer, a follower toward her high priest.

For one fleeting moment his concealing mask fell away, his resolve failing as he indulged in the pleasure of triumph.

I caught that jubilant glint and something clicked inside my head, like a fingernail tapping on the window of my brain, warning me to accept none of this. These ghosts were just vapors, with no form and no thoughts.

"It's a trick!" I yelled at Midge, dragging her down so that we both sprawled at Mycroft's feet. "That isn't your parents! He's making us see them!"

She cried aloud, refuting my words, struggling against me.

The gust had steadily risen to a gale, ruffling our clothes, dispersing the mists so that they were spread thinly, eventually to be whipped into nothing.

Mycroft looked around as if startled, and that puzzled me. I wondered what new game he was playing. He suddenly seemed as confused as me. The Synergist half rose, but the wind tore at him so that he stumbled back. He raised the cane to beat at the storm, but then his eyes caught mine.

On another occasion I might have laughed, seeing his mouth drop open the way it-tfid. Right then, though, the situation wasn't conducive to humor. He was staring disbelievingly at me and I didn't understand why.

Until I became conscious of the cloud dribbling from my mouth like cigarette smoke.

It came from my fingers too, snaking out in tendrils, curling into the air to be torn away by the wind that now howled, drawn from me into the room. It was as if my innards were burning and my mouth and fingertips were the points through which the smoke could escape; yet there was no pain, only a feathery lightness inside me.

The mist billowed into the room, more and more extracted from me so that it gathered force, revolved in the air like a miniature whirlwind, with us at its center.

And in it, there were other voices.

They may have been as those before, sounds in our minds alone, but they seemed to come from around us. These had nothing to do with Mycroft, because he was cowering behind his cane as if it were a shield.

When the voices became coherent their message was different:

". . . Leave this place . . . leave this house . . ."

Two voices, two mental sounds; and they howled together with the wind.

Midge watched the storming mists and her face was sodden with tears.

Her voice was like a child's, a five-year-old's: "Mummy . . . Daddy . . ."

I was scared shitless.

"Mumeeee. . . Daddeeee . . .!"

Now she looked like a child.

I clambered to my feet, relieved at least that the cloudy flow had stopped trailing from me. Midge's eyes were wide and imploring. Mycroft was still crouching on the floor, his eyes wide too, but with fear. That suited me fine.

"Come on, Midge." I reached for her.

She focused on me instantly. "Yes," she cried. "Yes!"

As she rose, so the winds quickly died, and the vapors were soon drifting, then hanging, in the air. They began to dissolve.

I didn't wait any longer. I dragged Midge to the door, scraping my back as we entered the squared section of the sloping wall. I yanked the door open and there were Kinsella and Bone Man waiting, a couple of other Synergists with them. They looked anxious enough.

I bunched my fist. "Keep away from us! Just fucking keep away!"

Kinsella looked uncertain, but he had the muscle. He began crowding me.

"No!" came Mycroft's voice from within the pyramid room. "Not here! Let them go." Then weaker: "Let them go . . ."

We went. We went like bats out of hell.