A Scatter of Stardust (12 page)

“Nothing.”

“And you a psychologist?” Chandler shook his head. “Why lie to yourself? Every man has something he fears. Snakes, insects, insecurity, each of us has a buried dread.” He looked at the liquid in his glass. “You looked to me like a man who has suddenly met it face to face.”

“Yes.” Mark felt sweat bead his forehead.

“You know your trade,” said Chandler. “You don’t want me prescribing for you. But one thing I will prescribe. Go home. Go to bed. Get some rest.”

“A good idea.” Mark finished his drink. He almost dropped the glass as something edged his vision. He left before Chandler could ask more awkward questions.

The something didn’t go away. It remained with him, riding at the very edge of sight, but this time Mark didn’t swing his head to try and see it in full view. He had done that once and had seen what he wanted to forget.

Whiskey could help him do that. He bought a bottle and took it up to his flat. The phone rang as he closed the door.

“Yes?”

There was no answer. The line hummed with a cold emptiness and, after a while, there was a click and the familiar burring of an open line.

*

Halfway through the bottle he began to grow cold.

It was an actual, physical coldness, with goose-pimples rising on his skin and his teeth chattering within his head. He swallowed another glass of whiskey, waited for it to warm his stomach and, when it didn’t rose from his chair and looked out of the window.

It was late, almost midnight, but it was summer and the few pedestrians on the street wore light clothes. He went to a cupboard and found an electric fire. He plugged it in and watched as the elements grew red. He held his hands close to the glowing bar. It helped but not very much.

First the thing at the edge of his vision. Now the strange coldness. Lefarge?

Mark wished that he hadn’t thought of the thing at the edge of his vision. He had been trying to forget, sitting with his back hard against a wall, drinking whiskey, letting his mind drift free. Good therapy, he told himself. Don’t try to forget. You can never forget. Just don’t try to remember. He had given that advice a thousand times. He wished that he could follow it.

He turned his head away from the blur at the edge of his vision. He closed his eyes and moved his head back toward the right. He opened his eyes and felt relief at seeing only the hatefully familiar blur. It was odd that he should feel relief, but it was better, far better, that the thing should remain a blur.

He shivered, not wholly from the cold.

He started at the sound of his doorbell. For a moment he hesitated, wondering what new thing was about to happen, then, as the ring was repeated, he rose, crossed the room and opened the door. Ram Putah stood outside.

“Good evening, Mr. Conway.” His English was faultless. “I must apologize for the lateness of the hour. May I enter?”

“Sure.” Mark waited until the man had entered then gestured with the bottle in his hand. “Want a drink?”

“Thank you, no.” The Indian gazed impassively at the electric fire. He turned, surveying the room, his eyes drifting to a spot just above and behind Mark’s shoulder. They fell to the bottle he had subconsciously carried as a weapon. “Mr. Conway,” he said abruptly. “I have come to warn you. Doctor Lefarge is a very dangerous man.”

“You too?” Mark crossed the room to his drink and swallowed it. “Warnings seem to be the order of things today. Perhaps you would tell me — just how is that charlatan dangerous?”

“He is a man obsessed with the desire for power,” said the Indian. “Such men are always dangerous.” He glanced behind him, found a chair, sat down without invitation. “Mr. Conway, you are a psychologist. Do you underrate the power of the human mind?”

“Of course not.”

“Lefarge has a powerful mind.”

“So?”

“I would not like to see a man such as yourself burn himself on the heat of flames he does not understand.”

“Interesting.” Mark helped himself to more whiskey. The glass clattered against his teeth as he drank. It rattled as he set it down. The cold had grown to a point where he felt as if cased in ice. “Tell me, are you a friend of Lefarge?”

“No.”

“So this warning isn’t in the nature of a buildup? I mean, you aren’t trying to scare me?”

“I am trying to warn you.”

“Of what? Of spells, mumbo jumbo, incantations, witches’ brews? Are you trying to warn me against things which do not exist?” Mark paced the floor. He found it impossible to keep still. The cold was too intense for that, but the exertion did little to warm him. Automatically he turned to the left, away from the blur in his sight.

“They exist, Mr. Conway, make no mistake about that. What you call magic is a very real thing. It would be foolish of you not to admit it.”

“Are you trying to convert me?”

“Only to a realization of your danger. You are in danger, Mr. Conway, and I think that you know it.”

“From Lefarge’s hex? Rubbish!”

“Rubbish?” The Indian leaned forward. “Then tell me, Mr. Conway, why are you so afraid of what stands behind you?”

*

The streets were deserted, the lights few and far between, the night wasted until close to dawn. Mark walked on the pavement, hugging his overcoat tightly around him, staring straight ahead. The blur in his sight was clearer now, as if whatever caused it walked more to his side than behind. The same thing he had caught a glimpse of in the mirror. The reason why he had fainted in the office. A hint of which Ram Putah had discerned with, so he had claimed, his mystic sight

And the cold was a physical agony.

Cold and something horrible just behind him. Had Lefarge caused this?

Could magic be responsible?

Ram Putah had said that it could. He had said much more than that, talking in his faultless English, making the ridiculous seem normal. And, because he had no obvious ax to grind, Mark had listened and, finally, understood.

Magic was real.

But magic was what you chose to call it.

Utter a spell, close a switch and, lol the demons of light brought forth brilliance. Electric light would have been magic to a bygone age. Mix a mess of sprouting mold, coat it on a wound, appeal to the spirits of healing — and penicillin would take care of the rest. Crush a toad and get a heart medicine, adrenaline, still used together with digitalis contained in the foxglove, another witches’ standby.

Magic — or a fumbling pharmacopoeia?

Alchemists had mixed their brews to the accompaniment of incantations — and from alchemy had risen chemistry.

Magicians drew pentagrams and mathematicians drew equations, and both had their jargon.

Magic — or science?

Science Mark could understand, could use and respect. Magic he had always derided as a thing of arrant superstition and wishful nonsense.

But not everyone was a scientist. A child could play with wires and tubes and never manage to build a radio. A man could mix chemicals and never find the combination he sought, the results he desired. They would be working with the right tools but with insufficient knowledge.

And a child could electrocute himself. A man blow himself apart. Should electronics and chemistry be derided because of that?

Or because of failure to produce any results at all?

The concrete was hard beneath his feet, but Mark welcomed the hardness. It spoke of reality, of things he knew and understood.

Not like the cold which chilled his blood.

The thing which lurked at the edge of his vision.

Had magic done that?

Had science?

He paused and looked up at the building in which Sandra lived. Sandra whom he loved almost to distraction and who said that she loved him but who probably now loved Lefarge instead. Sandra who believed in magic and who, in a way, was responsible for the cold and the thing at which he dared not look.

The outer door was open, the night porter asleep. Mark crept past the man and climbed the stairs. He made no sound on the thick carpet, none as he walked down the corridor. He paused at her flat and tried the door. It was locked. He had expected that. He drew out his keys, found the one he sought and slipped it into the lock. Once she had given him her key and he had mislaid it. When he had found it, some subconscious impulse had urged him to keep it. The door opened silently inward.

The hall was dark, the air heavy with the scent of incense. Her bedroom was to the right, gently he opened the door and stared at the empty bed. A light glowed on the bedside table. His eyes flickered to it then back to the bed. It was smooth, the pillow unmarked. A nightdress lay over the counterpane.

He found her in the room she called the study and which he had never entered. Painted tapestries lined the walls; a parody of an altar stood against the backdrop of a Balinese grave cloth; chalk marks grimed the floor. The reek of incense was stifling; the flickering light of ebon candles the sole illumination.

In the fitful light Sandra looked like a corpse.

*

She wasn’t dead. She lay outstretched on the floor, unconscious or asleep, he couldn’t tell which. Heavy curtains masked the windows and he drew them, letting in the faint light of early dawn. The sash resisted at first, then opened with a bang. Cold morning air caused the flames of the candles to waver, eddied about the room, cleared it of the sickly stench of incense.

Mark stooped over the girl. She was naked beneath a thin robe, the long, smooth lines of her body delineated by the silk. Her hair was disheveled; the thick, black strands stark against the pallor of her face. Her eyes were closed, the lashes looking like black butterflies on her cheeks. She was so lovely that it didn’t seem possible.

Deliberately he raised his hand and slapped her cheek.

“Sandra!”

She stirred, whimpering a little from the pain. Again he slapped her, the impact of his hand leaving red marks against the white.

“Sandra! Wake up!”

“Mark!” She looked at him, startled, one hand lifting to touch her face. “What?”

“Get up,” he said harshly. “Get dressed.”

“But — ”

“Do as I say.”

Impatiently he lifted her to her feet and pushed her toward the door. Alone he stared about the room, feeling disgust and pity at what it told him.

Sandra was a witch.

Not a good one, perhaps, not a skilled practitioner at her chosen art, but she had wished to emulate the masters, had hidden herself away to perform the rituals, conduct the ceremonies, go through the motions. In this room she had debased herself, breathed air tainted with drugs, until emotional hysteria coupled with the vitiated air had resulted in a state of semiconsciousness and coma in which she had dreamed dreams and experienced nightmares.

But to her those dreams would have had the aspect of real experiences. She would have gained a false sense of power, of having intimate knowledge of things unguessed at by the normal world.

She was deluding herself. She was the child trying to build with components others had assured her would work, but she lacked the elementary knowledge of what she was trying to do. She was the amateur chemist who could blind or burn herself — by accident. But it went deeper than that.

She was a seeker after a path to power, and she dared not, for her own sanity, admit that the path she had chosen was anything but what she hoped it would be. But, believing in that path, her sanity was also in danger. For unless she gained concrete results, she would be forced to live in a world of illusion in which she would deny reality.

Schizophrenia was inevitable.

Mark walked about the room. He picked up a withered bunch of twigs and herbs. He threw it down and examined a murky bottle half-filled with what appeared to be ink. He discarded it for an ornate dagger razor-edged and hilted with brass. He stared at it for a long moment then slipped it into his pocket.

He blew out the guttering candles and wiped his foot over the chalked diagrams on the floor. He extinguished the smoldering incense and opened wide the door, so that the morning air could cleanse the room.

Sandra waited for him in the bedroom.

She had dressed and tidied her hair and had even applied makeup, so that her lips looked as if they had recently tasted blood. She sat on the edge of the bed, a cigarette between her fingers, her eyes on the floor. He put his hand beneath her chin and lifted her head.

“Why, Sandra?”

“I was trying to help you.” Her voice was little more than a whisper. “I was summoning powers to guard you against — ”

“Lefarge?”

“She nodded.

“Thank you for trying to help.” He was gentle. “But I didn’t mean that. Why do this at all?”

She didn’t answer but he could guess. Lonely, without family or the security which a family could give, needing to feel wanted and important, chasing after the false glamour of being different. It was exciting to be a witch. It was novel and amusing, and it set her up above her friends. It gave her the comfort of possessing a secret knowledge and it supplied a jargon to talk with others of similar professed beliefs.