It was only illusion, they said.
It was.
Wasn’t it?
But who could tell what was truth, what was illusion? The magician could, though for him illusion was the true reality.
Who was mightier than Merlin, prophet, magician, and privy councillor to Arthur the King? Who but he had provided for the establishing and prosperity of the kingdom, as well as for the very engendering of the king? And yet Merlin had become a sorrowful, lonely figure, bent under the weight of his vast knowledge and terrifying because of his occult powers and his uncertain (some said diabolical) origins. Long before the events, he foresaw the hideous ruin awaiting Arthur’s realm, the treachery and faithlessness, the internecine carnage, friends striking down friends, brothers slaughtering brothers, the king and his only son barbarously murdering one another in simultaneous paroxysms of rage. It was likewise with Merlin’s own personal doom; the seer could foretell but not forestall it. A power, greater still than his, would seek him out. And so, it seems, he deliberately went to meet it.
His fate was not long in arriving. Her name was Viviane.
She was one of the damsels of the mysterious Lady of the Lake, and she came to Arthur’s court as part of King Pellinore’s entourage. From the moment he saw her, Merlin would let her have no rest; he must be at her side, he must converse with her, he must gaze into her dark and disingenuous eyes. The girl fought down her revulsion, along with her scorn, and learned what she could from this decrepit sorcerer while prudently keeping him at a distance.
So they traveled together into the forests of Cornwall, each entreating the other, he for her supple body, she for his secret wisdom. And there Merlin lured Viviane into the hollow of a great tree, where, at last, in exchange for the promise of an embrace, he made known to her certain fatal charms and revealed the magical properties of the ancient Eye that hung on a gold chain about his neck; whereupon, stepping lightly away from the tree, she spoke the appropriate charm.
Though he knew there was no escape, he could not keep from struggling against the bark thickening around him, pressing against his chest. As he tried to lift himself from the tree, his arms were pinned above him, and he felt the blood ebbing from his feet, which grew cold and stiff, anchoring him like roots to the earth. He could not speak. His breath came hard, catching in his throat, where it chilled, congealing like ice. He had foreseen it all, but not this, to be so cold. His hair swarmed above him, twisting into the branches so that his head ached and he could not turn his face. His eyes searched the narrowing gap. He saw the bright fabric of her dress, and then the slender pale hand darted through the weaving, encircling fibers to snatch the gold chain from his neck. He raised his eyes and saw above him new green shoots where his fingers had been. The next things he saw were the last: Viviane’s exultant, pitiless eyes, laughing at him from the face of a man older yet than he.
Acolytes swung heavy censers, and clouds of strange, aromatic incense filled the great hall with intoxicating perfume. Silver stars embroidered on the blue damask that covered the walls of the room sparkled in the dancing light of a hundred candles. Placed at intervals along the walls, pedestals of polished wood bore statues of Egyptian deities. In the middle of the room stood an altar, and, facing it from the far wall, a golden throne on a dais covered with fine white silk. A solemn hymn begun by the acolytes was taken up fervently by the gathered faithful.
It was a noble assembly; the liveried ushers had been called upon to pronounce some of the most resounding names in France. And only in Paris could so resplendent and fashionable a gathering take place. Nowhere else were the ladies’ gowns so rich, so bright, their jewels so tasteful and expensive, the men’s buckled shoes and lace shirts and formal coats so exquisite and so imposing. As they stood and sang in the closed room, adding faint hints of sweat, powder, and perfume to the all-pervasive incense, they looked forward eagerly to the revelation of secrets that would regenerate mankind and change the world. They could not know that within a few years their world would indeed change, beyond all recognition; revolution was a phenomenon occurring in Anglo-Saxon countries, and the guillotine had not yet been invented.
The hymn ended, a hidden door opened, and suddenly the Grand Copt himself was in their midst and approached the throne, his unprepossessing figure made stately by his long black robe, his stole of gold brocade, and his tall, golden double crown, modeled after the pharaohs’ crown that signified the unification of Egypt’s Upper and Lower Kingdoms. For this was Count Alessandro di Cagliostro, Grand Copt of the order of Egyptian Masonry originally established by the prophets Enoch and Elias. He was attended by his wife, the radiantly beautiful Serafina, and it must be admitted that more than one male member of the company had come hoping to receive personal initiation into the mysteries from the countess herself.
In sonorous but heavily accented French, the Grand Copt welcomed the company, invoking the pure spirits that hovered over it. Then, after a significant pause, he plunged headlong into an ecstatic, overwhelming, not always comprehensible discourse. He was come, he said, to heal the sick, give succor to the poor, and bring about the moral and physical regeneration of the world. He would accomplish this mission through occult powers and secret knowledge arrived at over many centuries and many incarnations, a long apprenticeship that had raised him to the summit of the Great Pyramid of Being and rendered him an adept in such arcane arts as healing, prophecy, and spirit evocation. His was the white magic capable of overcoming the powers of darkness and transfiguring humanity.
He spoke at length, as though entranced, captivating his listeners with his strange imagery, his mysterious allusions, his mesmerizing eyes, the sheer force of his will. Suddenly he stopped and gestured to Serafina. The spellbound audience watched as she opened another hidden door and led out a shy young girl, dressed in a gleaming white robe with a crimson sash. This was the petite colombe, the “little dove” whose purity and innocence made her the perfect liaison between the Grand Copt and the spirit world. She was led to a chair surrounded on three sides by ornate screens, and she sat inside this “tabernacle,” facing the congregation from behind a table that was bare except for three candles. Hypnotically, inexorably, the High Priest induced a trance in the girl, muttering to her and breathing upon her; then, supported by the cadenced chants of the faithful, he began to adjure one of the attendant spirits to make itself manifest. Finally the child, who had been sitting stiffly and silently, groaned aloud.
“What is it that you see?” cried the Grand Copt.
The girl replied in a faint, broken voice, the voice of a scared child. “I see…a giant man…in a white cloak…with a red cross on it.”
“Ask him his name,” Cagliostro commanded, his tone a mixture of reverence and authority.
The child asked the question, her voice faint and broken as before. Then her lips moved again, but what issued from them was no young maiden’s voice but a resonant bass, uncanny and penetrating: “I am the Archangel Zobiachel!”
The crowd gasped and shuddered, but the High Priest's voice was calm. “Do not be afraid, brothers and sisters. The spirit loves us all. Ask him to kiss you, little dove.”
There was a rushing, as of great wings, audible to the whole rapt assembly, followed by the distinct, unmistakable sound of a kiss. The girl’s right cheek glowed brightly, and a surge of warmth flooded the hall. A few people began to sob quietly. One lady, amid the whispering of silks and taffeta, slid softly to the floor and lay in a bright heap, unnoticed and unmoving.
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.
CHAPTER ONE
Saskia in Tears
THE 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, li
ke 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.