Michael stepped away, abandoning the spotlight to the master, who leaned on his rod and glared appraisingly, mockingly, at the applauding audience. His usually pale face was flushed, and a look of terrible exaltation burned in his single eye. Different music began, primitive, sinuous, chthonic, like something played on instruments made of bone and hide before the dawn of what is referred to as civilization. He cast down his rod upon the stage, stooped, and picked it up; some people cried out, for he was holding an extremely long and madly wriggling snake. He flung this down in its turn, it clattered woodenly against the boards, and when he stooped and straightened, it was a rod again. He repeated these actions several times, moving closer and closer to the footlights as the barbarous music thundered louder, his grin growing more and more ghastly, the snake larger and more furiously wriggling with each successive transformation. He stopped at the edge of the stage, shook his rod, and waited.
He did not have long to wait, for screams began to erupt from the back of the auditorium, screams at first mingled with exclamations of disgust or disbelief, then turning into expressions of unadulterated primeval terror: a squadron of long, thick, garishly colored snakes, perhaps a dozen or more—though some who attended the show later claimed there were hundreds of them—was slithering along the floor of the theater toward the stage. Some were using the aisles, others making their way under the seats and between or over the feet of the audience. A few of them wrapped themselves briefly around ankles or ramped up the sides of the chairs, raising their wedgelike heads between the seat cushions and flicking out their forked tongues, but these quickly recovered from their confusion and returned to the pursuit of what appeared to be their single purpose: reaching the stage as soon as possible. The throbbing music was overlaid by piercing shrieks as people leaped to their feet, shoving, hopping from one leg to the other, climbing onto their seats, where they gaped and swayed; a few brave souls tried to kick or stamp on the serpents, but their feet rebounded as if from automobile tires.
In a short time, though it didn’t seem short to the crowd in the Little Cairo, the lead snakes arrived at the front of the theater and began to wriggle and slither up the steps. When the swiftest of them reached the stage, the master, who had stood observing the scene with the rod clutched in one of his outstretched hands, dashed it down at his feet; whereupon it became a serpent of pythonlike proportions, charged its arriving fellow, and swallowed it in a series of horrible peristaltic gulps, repeating the process with each newcomer. All this ingestion required some ninety seconds, sufficient time for the audience to move from visceral fear to horrified fascination, and so no sound could be heard but the music—now a reedy, whining snake-charmer’s air—when at last the master snatched up his bloated creature by the tip of its tail and snapped it like a whip against the boards. It became a rod, longer than before, and encircled by a leafy green vine. He held this innocent-looking pastoral instrument out to the cringing audience, while Michael, advancing to the footlights, announced with a theatrical sweep of his arm, “The Great Wurlitzer, ladies and gentlemen. Ladies and gentlemen: the Great Wurlitzer!” Then they waited for the applause that they knew would, eventually, come.
At length the master raised his hand for silence, and a drumroll rose in extended crescendo from the loudspeakers. Laying aside his rod—to everyone’s relief, it remained a rod—he stepped to meet Michael at center stage and surveyed the house with a triumphant air, his single eye unblinking in the glare of the footlights. Flushed with excitement, standing next to the master, who was gathering himself to address a totally subjugated audience, Michael found that all his misgivings had vanished like smoke in the wind, and he told himself that this power, this incredible, transforming power, was the only thing worth striving for, the only thing worth having. “The only thing,” the master whispered into his ear, echoing his thought and chilling his blood, and then the Great Wurlitzer began to speak aloud.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “if I may interrupt the performance for a moment, I have a few things to say. First of all, I should like to thank you for your attendance here tonight at this, my farewell performance. I trust you are being entertained by our little spectacle. We have saved the best for last: the Tempest Illusion, the highlight of the evening, during which you will experience the four elements magically released in all their fury. I warn you: it may seem frightening, even pitiless, as storms are wont to be; you have come to this theater to see real magic, and real magic has no mercy. But before we bring the proceedings to a close, I wish to offer public thanks to my colleague and successor, Michael Hawke, alias Presto the Great, without whom it would not have been possible for me to make my exit in such a memorable fashion.”
He paused, grinning abominably, while the audience cheered and Michael, standing off to one side, made a charming, deferential bow. Then, picking up the thread of his speech, the master went on. “I am convinced that Michael will be a worthy successor and will carry on the proud magic tradition of the Little Cairo Museum of Wonders. As a symbol of this transfer of power, and as a token of my final farewell, I hereby present Michael with my magic amulet.” He removed the Eye of Horus, pressed it for a moment with both hands against his breast, and then, like a priest displaying the sacrament, he held it up for the audience to see before waving Michael to his side with a dramatic, summoning hand.
Michael approached and bowed his head, the drumroll sounded again, and the master, holding the golden chain with both hands over Michael’s bent neck, said, “Michael, I give you the falcon-god’s Eye. It is in some ways a heavy burden but also a source of great satisfaction. Wear it as a symbol of your power among men.”
What a blowhard, Emily thought, watching with Lena from the wings. The drumming stopped; the master placed the chain around Michael’s neck; and a blinding flash of light, followed immediately by a deafening roar, like an awful thunderclap, stunned the assembly. Emily reeled against Lena and clutched the curtain, watching Michael go chalk white, stagger, and sink to his knees on the stage.
The chain lay about his neck like a steel cable, and the weight of the pendant amulet dragged him down. He tried to rise, to go on with the part he had so carefully rehearsed, but his burden fettered his movements, confounded his memory, and spread open the boundaries of his consciousness. He saw the firmament, the fiery stars, the unspeakable void, and as he peered into those black depths he found himself staring up into the master’s appalling eye, and through that eye he glimpsed a parade of hallucinatory images. He saw the inside of an ancient Egyptian funerary chamber, where a wizened figure bitterly embraced the mummified corpse of a dead prince; he saw the sleeping quarters of King Solomon, and laughed as he watched the great king, stupid with wine, heave himself upon the beautiful dark body of his desert queen; he saw a magus in a purple gown, a weary old man in druid’s robes, a fetid dungeon, the gray fog settling like a shroud over the graceful arches of London Bridge. All these things he saw in succession, and all at once.
Meanwhile the audience perceived a sound as of rising wind, and the old man spoke again, in a penetrating, exultant voice. “Brace yourselves, ladies and gentlemen! A mighty storm is coming! I, for one, shall not survive it. Farewell!” He faced the wings where Lena and Emily stood. “Farewell,” he said again, more softly. Then, turning once more to the audience, he shouted above the increasingly ominous sounds of the oncoming tempest, “Long live magic! Long live magic!” Spinning on his heel amid the sweep and flutter of his robes, he strode quickly upstage to where the Chinese cabinet stood.
With every step he took, the wailing of the wind grew in volume, turning into a drawn-out howl. Another lightning flash bathed the entire theater in a wash of lurid light, and, almost simultaneously, an earsplitting burst of thunder shook the building to its foundations. Suddenly it began to rain, big, pelting drops that the wind drove into the faces of the spectators, who sat as though chained to their seats, helplessly exposed to this elemental violence.
When the master reache
d the cabinet, he stopped and held up his outflung arms as though commanding the storm. Its fury redoubled; lightning struck one of the light fixtures, which exploded in a shower of electrical sparks; the footlights dimmed, flickered, grew very bright, went out; lightning lit up the house again, apparently striking the curtain, which began to burn brightly above the stage, despite the pouring rain and the howling, lashing wind; rolls of thunder swept through the hall like harbingers of utter destruction.
Michael knelt where he had dropped, nailed to the stage, his neck bent to the Eye’s intolerable weight. Though it threatened to snap his spine, he accepted it, accepted the burden and the terror it brought, for he saw clearly the inevitable steps that had led him, compelled him, to attain his desire. He recalled his last glimpse of his parents, the hours of frightened waiting, the strangers who dragged him from the bus station; he experienced anew the horror of his frog-thralldom; he felt once more the same pitiless exaltation, the same monstrous panic he had felt at the sight of the desperate animals in Washington Square, he shivered at the memory of the naked corpse in the funeral parlor, in his mind’s eye the statue in the garden once again nodded its cold stone head, and he gasped as the stone hand saluted him. Once he had fondly believed that knowledge would drive out fear, but now he saw that one of its functions was to incorporate fear. Fear was essential; if he strove against it, he could have no power. He sensed the audience’s fear, sensed Emily’s mounting terror, and the recognition of her suffering, and of himself as the cause of her suffering, made him bow his head still more profoundly.
“What’s happening?” Emily shouted into Lena’s ear. “What’s he doing?” Her heart nearly stopped as she saw Michael, still on his knees, pitch forward as though yanked by the chain around his neck. “Did they rehearse this?” she yelled at Lena, but received in reply only a terrified stare. He’s not acting, Emily thought; he’s in trouble. She shook off Lena’s restraining hand and hurried onto the stage, heading for the spot where Michael was lying, but a bolt of lightning that seemed to strike directly in front of her knocked her flat on her back. She rose at once, whipped to her feet by fear—for Michael, not for herself—but now she realized that the only way to help him was to make Wurlitzer stop whatever it was he was doing. Avoiding the charred, smoking hole in the stage, crouching against the wind and the rain, she ran toward the cabinet.
Wurlitzer was still standing before it with outstretched arms, his head thrown back ecstatically, savoring this final triumph. Emily’s arrival interrupted his transports, and he opened his eye to see her standing between him and the cabinet doors. Around them the storm raged on unabated, but they were confronting one another at its center, where the air, though rank and sulphurous, was terribly still. His eye widened in disbelief as she grabbed the sleeves of his robe.
“Stop this!” Emily shouted at him with a fury so intense it made her temples ache. “Whatever you’re doing, stop it!” She pulled at his robes with both hands, trying to turn him in Michael's direction. “Look at him!” she screamed. “Do you want to kill him too?”
With a furious jerk, he freed himself from her clutches. “Get out of my way, you little fool,” he hissed, thrusting her aside. His face bore a look of consummate repulsion, as though physical contact with her filled him with loathing. “He’s not dying,” he snarled. “He has found his heart’s desire.”
The old man opened the cabinet doors and tried to step inside, but Emily flung herself past him into the dark space, braced her shoulders against the back of the cabinet, and held out both hands. “No!” she shouted, the blood pounding in her ears. “Help him! Don’t let him die!”
A lightning flash lit up his face, black with scorn and rage. “He will live a long time!” he spat at her. “Save yourself! Get out of there!”
Emily lunged forward and blocked the entrance to the cabinet, shouting through the riot of the storm and her own thundering blood. “I’m not afraid of you! Make this stop!”
His contempt was absolute, his indifference to her fate like the indifference of the speeding vehicle to the little animal whose life it unmalevolently crushes out. “You are blind, you understand nothing,” he said, beyond all patience. “For the last time: out of my way!”
“You’re not going anywhere, you old fraud!” Emily yelled.
“So be it,” Wurlitzer said fiercely. He sprang into the cabinet, sending her staggering into one of its murky corners, and pulled the doors shut behind him.
At that moment the tempest exploded in a paroxysm of violence, as though its manifestations heretofore, however tremendous, had but foreshadowed the ferocious apocalypse that now began. An eye-searing, hair-singeing lightning bolt, an electrical discharge of cosmic proportions, split the stage in front of the Chinese cabinet, and the white-hot flash was accompanied by a thunderclap whose gigantic pressure ripped gaping holes in the ceiling and the walls. Power cables, blasted from their moorings, fell to the floor, setting off shimmering blue-green bursts as they lashed the rising water. The burning curtain was rent in two and fell in twin fireballs to either side of the stage. The wind roared and raged, totally submerging the shouts of the audience.
From where he lay on his side, still pinned to the stage, Michael could see the two gleaming, lacquered doors of the cabinet slam closed. Ignoring the tempest—it was, after all, only an illusion—he fixed his mind on the Chinese cabinet, concentrating as he had been taught to do. He had the power to see into sealed boxes, locked rooms, enclosed spaces; it was only a question of finding the right formula and focusing intensely. He strained to penetrate that shiny exterior and enter that darkness. Thrusting aside his dread, the final obstacle, he passed inside the black cabinet, though he lay unmoving, and what he saw there blighted him forever. He saw Emily in mortal danger, fighting not for her life but for his, and he saw the master looming over her in the blackness, hardly bothering to fend her off, his single eye transfixed by his single purpose. Emily lashed and tore at her adversary, who seemed to grow larger, darker, amorphous, and Michael had a flashing vision of his own future, the new master, isolated by the power he had so tenaciously striven for, struggling in the loveless night, and Emily gone. He could feel her desperation, her mounting terror, all for his sake, all for him, and he cringed as he realized that his ambition had put her in that box with her worst enemy. Her eyes—he could see them, and the sight scarred his heart—shone like two points of heat, grew hotter and smaller, and then all at once the great darkness enveloped and extinguished them. Michael shrieked in agony, but the sound of his cry was swallowed by the howling wind.
And suddenly all was silent, the cataclysm was over. People looked at themselves and one another with incredulous eyes: they had been neither blinded nor deafened, neither scorched by fire nor struck by falling debris; they weren’t even wet. The curtain hung suspended above the proscenium, unharmed, ready to fall at the end of the show; the boards of the stage itself, polished and shining, reflected the bright footlights. An awed silence fell over the crowd as they watched Michael rise shakily to his feet. He looked about him as though dazed; then, with a lurch, he approached the front of the stage.
“The Tempest Illusion, ladies and gentlemen,” he proclaimed by rote, his professional instincts almost completely masking the wobble in his voice. “Thank you for your attention, and we hope you’ll come again. Good night to you all.” Michael waved and bowed, then stood valiantly smiling until the first uncertain smattering of applause began, whereupon he bowed again and vanished into the wings.
There he found Lena, wild-eyed and speechless. Though he too was bewildered, he knew that the show must be closed and the house emptied before he could give his entire attention to the mounting dread he felt. He grabbed Lena’s shoulders and shook her as gently as he could. “Bring down the curtain, Lena!” he commanded, staring into her stricken eyes. “Bring down the curtain.” He walked back onstage to acknowledge the applause, which was growing steadily in volume, bowed once and then again, and finally the curtain
began its slow descent behind him. There was a tumult of clapping now, and the houselights came on, and Michael could see Dazz standing in front of his first-row seat, shouting “Bravo! Bravo!” again and again and clapping as though he meant to cripple his hands forever. On either side of Dazz, Michael recognized the bulky figures of Samir and Beulah Wales, still in their seats, apparently being ministered to by a vaguely familiar figure, a tall man with thick blond hair who bent over each of them in turn. Michael bowed one last time and disappeared through the curtain.
Lena came up to him at once. “Where are they?” he asked urgently, ignoring the insistent clapping, shouting, and foot stamping on the other side of the curtain.
She seemed about to falter, but her voice was firm. “I don’t know, Michael. I’ve looked everywhere backstage. Unless they’re…” She hesitated, turned slightly, and simultaneously their eyes focused on the Chinese cabinet. Michael walked upstage toward it as Lena murmured, more to herself than to him, “But they couldn’t possibly…”