Night Magic (3 page)

Such was the power of the Grand Copt, and such was the faith of his believers. Yet there were some scoffers who said that he was neither Copt nor count, but plain Giuseppe Balsamo, a scion of Palermo’s working classes, and that he had begun his charlatan’s career as a peddler of panaceas and amulets, working his way up the scale to mystical communion with the cosmos. Others told tales of a direr sort, that he was in league with the powers of darkness, that his magic was black and blasphemous, that he hosted “Suppers with the Dead,” where the illustrious damned sat down at table with the living.

And yet his prophecies were often accurate. Was that guesswork? He healed the sick, made the lame walk and the blind see. Was that mass hysteria, mass hypnosis? Who could tell what was truth and what was illusion? Perhaps the distinction was not clear, even to the magician himself; or perhaps when he died ten years later in one of the Inquisition’s dungeons, his tortured body foul with its own filth, perhaps even then what others called illusion was his reality, and the Count Alessandro di Cagliostro, adept, high priest, miracle worker, gratefully betook himself to his next incarnation.

The men and women arriving at the great house, just off Park Lane in one of London’s poshest neighborhoods, were a mixed lot, brought together by a shared interest in occult phenomena; no class distinctions exist in the spirit world. Some of those whom Mrs. Angus Macbride (widow of Professor Macbride of Edinburgh) had invited were personally unacquainted with one another, but many bore names familiar in esoteric circles. Several foreign guests lent the gathering an international flavor, and titles of one sort or another—Lord, Lady, Sir, Reverend, Captain, Professor—figured in the appellations of most of the company, but not all. Jane Cox, for example, the milliner whose trances had first stirred Mrs. Macbride’s interest in the unseen, was an honored, familiar guest. Only one person was totally unknown, by name or reputation, to his companions, but the openhearted Mrs. Macbride, paying no heed to his slightly outlandish clothes and more than slightly outlandish accent, welcomed him warmly, and his gaunt, hawklike features and the penetrating gaze of his single eye exacted deference from the rest.

Before moving on to the real business of the evening, the visitors, about eighteen in all, paused to chat and browse in the handsome library. The dark, polished shelves were laden with works of occult literature, which was flourishing vigorously as the long reign of Queen Victoria drew to its close. Enshrined on a shelf all its own stood a photograph of the golden lily, perfectly formed and seven feet tall, which had been materialized at a famous seance given by one Madame d’Esperance, author of
Spirit Land,
one of the books to be found here.

At a gentle hint from Mrs. Macbride, the guests left the library and filed into the séance room. The house had recently been wired for electric light, but the maids called it “electric dark”—the bulbs were maddeningly fragile, and the light they shed was much weaker than gaslight. In the designated room a single lamp glimmered dimly, outshone by the intermittent flames of an expiring fire. The company took their seats around a large, circular table, their hushed conversation charged with anticipation. Having closed the heavy main doors, Mrs. Macbride swept aside the thin curtains that covered the entrance to an inner room, or “cabinet,” revealing there the seated figure of her guest of honor: Mr. Eglinton, the celebrated medium.

Eglinton was a stout young man with a placid face, hooded eyes, and the vague expression of one tottering on the brink of sleep, unsure whether to climb out or fall in. Renowned in occult circles throughout Europe, he had achieved successes in every type of mediumistic endeavor, from levitation to clairvoyance, from telepathy and telekinesis to the various forms of spirit evocation and ectoplasmic materialization. He traveled constantly, giving demonstrations of his powers all over the world, and had just returned to his native England from a triumphant tour that included sittings in Vienna, Paris, and Venice (“a veritable hotbed of spiritualism,” as he described it to his friend Mrs. Macbride).

After nodding distractedly to the gathering, the medium sat in the chair nearest the fireplace and bowed his head. The room, except for the death throes of the fire, remained utterly silent for a few minutes, then Eglinton raised his arms and extended his hands to the persons sitting on either side of him. As if acting on a signal, the entire company joined hands around the table—the one-eyed stranger did so with an air of hard-won resignation—and sat there in the gloom, striving to unite and focus their thoughts on the immaterial world. Suddenly, behind the entranced medium, who remained seated, head bowed, eyes closed, clutching his neighbors’ hands, an indistinct, gauzy form materialized, seeming to grow in height until it began to resemble a very tall man. This shape passed silently around the room, shaking hands with three or four of the guests. When it had nearly completed its circuit of the table and was approaching Mr. Eglinton, he moaned loudly and staggered to his feet, where he stood swaying, half supported by Captain Rolleston, who was seated on his left hand. The form seized Eglinton by the shoulders and dragged him into the cabinet. A few seconds later, when Mrs. Macbride drew aside the curtain with a shaking hand, Eglinton could be seen inside, sprawled as though lifeless across the armchair, but otherwise the cabinet was empty.

Those of the company who had moved from their chairs took them again at a sign from Mrs. Macbride. All eyes strained toward the cabinet’s curtain, below which the medium’s feet were protruding slightly into the room. A few chairs scraped, the fire hissed, then silence descended again upon the gathering.

More minutes passed, heavy with wonder and expectation. Then sounds came from the cabinet, and the curtain billowed outward, taking on a shape almost human, but this disorienting illusion lasted only a few seconds before the medium emerged from beneath the curtain, having walked straight into it without drawing it aside. He was obviously in a state of trance, and for some minutes he lurched about the room among the sitters. Leaning against the wall that faced the fireplace, he began to draw out, apparently from his side, a dingy whitish substance that fell to the floor like some misshapen rope. While the medium continued to pull it out from his side, the ectoplasm—for so it was—began to increase in mass and pulsate, moving both laterally and vertically as though driven from underneath. The mass grew slowly to a height of about three feet, and then, with a sudden burst, it attained full stature. Mr. Eglinton deftly flicked away the white material covering the head of the form, and as he did so, this covering seemed to merge with the apparition’s clothing. The link connecting the figure to the medium was severed or became invisible, no one could say for sure, for at this point a loud shout in an unrecognizable language brought the demonstration to an abrupt end.

The one-eyed man thrust himself away from the table and leapt to his feet, fixing Mr. Eglinton with a look of murderous contempt; the form at Eglinton’s side dematerialized at once. Stepping past the shocked guests, the stranger stopped beside Mrs. Macbride’s chair and bowed stiffly, snatching and kissing her fluttering hand in one rough motion. “I beg your pardon, Madame,” he murmured, then turned and left the room.

Alone on the street and walking away from the house as fast as his old legs could carry him, the man rubbed his one good eye and glowered into the dark, his face more fierce and hawkish than ever. What tawdriness, what fakery, what fools! And this medium, this Eglinton, with his pudgy fingers like white worms and his indolent, stupid eyes. Ectoplasm, indeed! If he thought Eglinton was what he was looking for, his brain must be turning to ectoplasm. But how many choices did he have? The world was poised at the edge of the precipice, ready to slide down into the snake pit of the twentieth century, and weariness was laid across his shoulders like an iron yoke. His amulet was gone; his search for an apprentice, for a successor, had grown so desperate he was sitting down among idiots to admire the posturing of charlatans; and he was alone, tired, thoroughly ready to leave. He couldn't bear this mumbo jumbo, this hocus-pocus, these tricks a child could see through, especially when he knew, and when he needed, real magic; not phantoms conjured up in the dull glow of electric lightbulbs and half-dead fires, but something from nothing, light out of darkness: night magic, real night magic.

T
HE MAN APPROACHING THE
Metropolitan Museum of Art, on Fifth Avenue at Eighty-first Street in New York City, was seedy, tall, scarecrow gaunt, clad in indifferently fitting preacher black, despite the heat. His head bobbing, he strode amid the crowd, shadowed by a large black silk umbrella as if shunning the light, like a parasol-shaded spinster. His spare form seemed to gather mass by a trick of the eye, optically, like a desert mirage, undulant, damply vaporous in the convection currents rising from the steaming pavement, a discernible aura emanating from the dark outline of his spidery figure, wobbly, insubstantial, all of it wavering in the heat.

His caricature of a nose ended in a bulbous knob, red, as though not even the umbrella had managed to protect it from the sun, and the growth of hair curling outward from around his dark red mouth—mustache and beard, both curly—glistened with perspiration. His expression was vague, abstracted, one might say almost blank, his heavily Semitic features made more striking by the eyes, one of which, if careful notice were taken, drew fine light to itself even under the umbrella, while the other was dim and lacked sheen, skewed off in its alignment, as if seeking its separate way or viewing the world askance.

The lope-gaited, awkward figure reached the museum steps, which he took two at a time, and bounded through the wide doors, loose-jointed, long, manipulative fingers swinging jerkily like slack-strung puppet's hands, his gangling stride neither taking space nor assuming it, but seeming rather to encroach upon it as he came. One might have thought that, spiderlike, he had let himself down on an invisible filament to dangle there and, after the habit of arachnids, could retract himself with ease at any moment.

He looked around over the heads of the crowd and moved across the Great Hall to the checkroom, where he rid himself of his umbrella and a large paper shopping bag: the words “Big Brown Bag” printed on its side identified it as coming from Bloomingdale’s. Then he crossed to the ticket booth, his steps resounding emphatically on the marble floor. It was his shoes and his curious way of walking in them that caused this emphasis. They were hardly what might be called ordinary footgear, but of a peculiar sort, ankle-high, in an old-fashioned gaiter style with inserted elastic panels. The worn patent leather was cracked and seamed across the instep, soiled with long wear but not so much that the blunted toes did not gleam when he moved; and he moved in a peculiar way, splayfooted, with toes turned out, each heel striking the marble first, then the sole coming down, producing a splat-splat splat-splat sound, an almost comical rhythm that rebounded acoustically in the hushed hall.

An off-duty flatfoot? A burlesque comedian? Who could tell?

At the ticket booth he paid the suggested admission fee of five dollars, pinched the small tab button he received onto his jacket lapel, and entered the Egyptian wing, where he inspected the antiquities displayed in the jewelry room off the main corridor, while the uniformed guard locked the backs of his knees against fatigue. Glass cases held, on illuminated shelves, an array of gold bracelets and necklaces, other cases contained talismans and amulets, including a number of scarabs carved from semiprecious stones—lapis lazuli, jade, obsidian, rose quartz—some raised over little squares of mirror so that the writing on their undersides would be legible.

Reading, the man had a peculiar way of holding his head canted to one side, with the left eye askew in its socket, as one might regard a single object from two separate points of view, the white of the one walleye gray and pallid, the iris lackluster and obliquely angled, hardly matching the right one, which peered with the intensity of a magnifying glass focusing the sun’s rays down to the point of combustion.

His was an unhurried survey, interested but not too interested (the guard, though bored, was watchful). One could safely say moderately interested: the man seemed to mutter something as he bent to study, amid the collection of scarabs, an Eye of Horus painted on an azure fragment of faience. His thick gray brows contracted as he peered through the glass; he put his ear to the protective wall, compressed his lips more tightly. He placed his spread palm on the glass, silently shook his head. The guard came meandering in; the man ignored him, gazing at the fragment as though considering a swap, an eye for an eye, as Scripture says, that ancient visionary Eye for his more recent but sightless one.

The guard ambled out. The visitor might ponder these pharaonic treasures with impunity; there was no one to disturb him, the room was now quite empty. Today, the larger share of the museumgoing public was upstairs on the second floor, attracted by the famous Rembrandt portrait recently placed on exhibition in the European Painting wing at the head of the grand staircase, now thronged with art lovers going to view or already having admired the portrait of Saskia. The appertaining brochure printed under the museum’s imprimatur for the occasion stated that the priceless work, on loan from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, had been painted in 1637, just after the artist’s first marriage. It hung in solitary splendor against one large red wall in the second gallery to the right, the space before it cordoned off with velvet ropes.

There it was, the partially nude figure, full of warmth and tenderness, well composed, offering a serene harmony of flesh tones, a deft handling of the brushstrokes, whose rich impasto brought a luminous quality to the features, captured in the subtle chiaroscuro the artist controlled so well, while the contours of the figure softly receded into shadow. Though bare breasted, she seemed chaste and maidenly, her features reflecting a pensiveness, even a melancholy.