I took a moment to think about this. Only the fellow from the shadowy government entity called me Stokes, so this must be him. His name was something from a medieval romance. Percival? Lancelot?
“Tristan,” he corrected, grinning down at me. “But I get the Lancelot thing a lot.” He roughed up my hair. “Come on, sit up. Meet our new witch.”
Memory came flooding back. “Yes,” I said unsteadily. “Erszebet. I’ve met her.”
“No.” He chuckled. “You haven’t. Take a look.” He propped me farther up so I could look across the room.
About twenty feet away from me, near the control console, stood a stunningly beautiful young woman, hardly more than a girl, wearing Erszebet’s dress. The garment now curved and clung to an exaggeratedly shapely physique, almost perfectly hourglass. Her hair was shoulder-length, thick and full and dark, her eyes a deep green. She mesmerized us all by simply standing there, with a gleeful, impertinent smirk tugging the perfect curve of her mouth to one side.
With Tristan’s assistance, I rose to my feet terribly awkwardly, the snowsuit making synthetic slithery noises as I moved. I felt like a yeti in the presence of a gazelle.
“Meet Erszebet Karpathy,” said Tristan, beaming. “She’s our witch.”
Diachronicle
DAY 294 (CONTD.)
In which every little thing she does is magic
EVERYONE IN THE ROOM WAS staring at her—Oda-sensei, Rebecca, the Maxes. The gleeful impertinent smirk fixed on Tristan.
Tristan started to laugh in a breathy way, trying but failing to suppress glee. “Wow,” he said. Against my upper back, his torso shifted slightly. “We did it.” He sounded giddy. Everyone applauded, looking rapt.
“I did it,” she corrected him. The accent, which had made her sound crabby when she was nearly two hundred years old, now made her exotic, adding to the glimmer of her beauty. “I warned you do not want to get on my bad side.”
“Doesn’t look like you have a bad side,” I said, so that Tristan wouldn’t.
Her attention turned to me, and she grew more serious. “Do I look more familiar now?” she asked. “This is how I appeared when we first met. I was only nineteen, but I was a prodigy. You were lucky that I was the one you found.”
“I’m sorry, but we really have never met before,” I said. And then to Tristan, almost under my breath: “I . . . I’d like to get out of this thing, please.” It was foolish to feel so self-consciously lumbering just because there was another young female in the room who happened to be crazy-gorgeous. I was not used to being fawned on by anyone—Tristan treated me like an extension of himself—but suddenly I felt somewhat gruesome.
Tristan, eyes glued to Erszebet’s face (and curves, I am sure), released me so I could unzip myself from the snowsuit. But even wearing civvies, I felt doltish while this elegant creature held us all entranced. Entranced is not the right word, though—that conjures a sense of a doe-eyed fairy-tale princess, and Erszebet was not that. She was fierce. Not deliberately, not like the Alpha Girl in a high school clique . . . it was effortless on her part, elemental. And she seemed amused by how her transformation distracted the rest of us.
“The experience was very pleasant,” she continued to Tristan, in a so-there tone. “Do not presume to tell me what is good for me or not. Ever again.”
“Got it,” he said almost meekly. His eyes kept sinking toward her boobs breasts bosom, as if lead weights were attached to them; then, with visible effort, he would wrench them back to her face.
There was a long pause as we all continued to register what we were witnessing, and she continued to bask in our collective gaze. Various low voices said “Wow” or something equally articulate. We were more dumbfounded by the fact of the transformation than by its result (although I cannot stress enough how impressive the result was)—but we were definitely dumbfounded. And she was definitely preening.
Then Tristan collected himself. “So.” He coughed slightly. “All right then. How did you just do that?”
“It was a big spell. Not easy,” she said offhandedly. “But I have been thinking about it, rehearsing it in my head, for a hundred and sixty years—since the groundwork for it was laid in Budapest. I did it to see if your ODEC works to my satisfaction.” She smiled, and shifted her hips a few times so that the hem of the cocktail dress swirled around her knees. “It does. In fact it was never so effortless to do a spell as in this ODEC, which I like very much. What shall I do next?”
“What kind of magic were you in the habit of doing before?” Tristan asked. Without taking his eyes from her, he pointed toward the small table on which sat a MacBook Air. “Stokes.”
I collected the laptop and dutifully seated myself, opened the audio recording software, and pressed “record”; for backup I decided to take dictation and remained there, fingers poised over the keyboard.
Erszebet sobered abruptly. Even grave, she was mesmerizingly beautiful. “I was young, and magic was waning, and it was a very turbulent time. My mother was in the service of Lajos Kossuth, and if you know anything about our history, you will realize her magic was often ineffective. I assisted her when she required it.”
Eyes still on Erszebet, Tristan signaled to me. “Lajos Kossuth,” I said, typing.
“With a j—” she said to me; I overlapped: “A j, I know.”
Her beautiful dark eyes flitted back to Tristan. “I like that she is educated,” she said, as if approving of him for this, then continued her narrative: “After the revolution failed, after Kossuth fled in late ’49, the aristocracy would call upon my mother or myself to perform stupid parlor tricks. We would change the color of somebody’s hair, or force somebody to speak a childhood secret out loud. It was deliberately degrading to us, and I resented it, but my mother was so alarmed at our weakening powers that she grew fearful of displeasing those horrid people. She became sycophantic, which disgusted me, and so I went abroad.”
“Where to?” asked Tristan.
“I wanted to follow Kossuth, but his wife did not want me in his sight. Instead I went to Switzerland awhile, to train with a powerful witch who was making sure younger witches still learned certain spells and charms that had fallen out of use as the world perceived we were losing our power and relied on us for fewer things. Her efforts were, in retrospect, somewhat romantic, as if somebody in today’s world were teaching how to measure longitude with a timepiece. I learned much that I had little occasion to use, but I was still glad for the learning, although eventually I rejoined my parents in Budapest.”
“So can you change somebody into a newt?” Tristan asked, getting to the point.
“Of course I can,” she said. “What a stupid question.”
“Can you change them back?” I asked quickly.
“If I feel like it,” said Erszebet complacently. She gave Tristan a slightly defiant look. “Do you wish to test me?”
He pondered a moment, assessing her on so many levels. “Let’s start with an inanimate object,” he said. “I assume that’s possible? I mean, can you . . . transubstantiate inanimate objects?”
“Tell me what you need,” she said with a suddenly inviting smile. Truly, it was almost a grin. For the first time, she and Tristan were in the same groove, and they smiled at each other. He bit his lower lip excitedly, which made him look charmingly like a goof.
Then he clapped his hands together in front of him, actually squatted slightly like a coach laying out a game plan. It was the first time I noticed—fleetingly—that he had a cute butt. “Just going to put you through some paces on the most basic level today. Stokes will take notes. Ms. Stokes will take notes,” he corrected himself quickly, staving off her irritation.
“I wish those stupid aristocrats who made us do parlor tricks were still alive,” Erszebet said eagerly. “The pains I would bring upon them now.”
“Never mind about them,” said Tristan. “You’ll have plenty to occupy you right here.”
For the rest of the afternoon, Tristan tasked Erszebet with si
mple assignments, for which we were all the amazed witnesses. I can hardly describe the electricity in that dull warehouse that day, our breathless wonder at the impossible-turned-evident. Even though she began with the humblest of efforts, the whole thing was totally fucking mind-blowing. Here follows a sampling, and then I must move on to what happened afterward, as I still have not accustomed myself to writing with a dip pen and this is far more painstaking than I had realized when I began this project—and I am running out of time.
To begin, Tristan put a gallon of white paint into the ODEC with Erszebet, and asked her to turn it black; she did so, and after the Maxes took a sample to have analyzed, she returned it to white, which was also sampled. She could turn it any color, we learned; she could match it perfectly to colored objects Tristan gave her to take into the ODEC with her. (She could not reproduce this effect when the paint or objects sat outside the ODEC, to the frustration of both herself and Tristan.) He then had her bend metal rods into perfect circles; splinter stones; break glass and then restore it.
It was clear now that anybody actually inside the ODEC with her could not (by definition, really) remain mentally coherent, and so each time she set about to work her magic, she did so alone. Sealed up within the ODEC, her workings remained a perfect mystery.
These acts of magic each took between five and thirty minutes to achieve. While happily invigorated after the first dozen or so, she presently showed signs of tiring. Tristan chose not to notice this, and tried to step things up a notch: he asked her to materialize something out of nothing.
“There is no such thing as nothing. Not even in what you call a vacuum. But I am tired now,” she said, lolling against the control console. “Materialization is a complicated summoning and requires many calculations. And I am tired of taking orders from you, Tristan Lyons. Perhaps tomorrow.”
It was clear from her tone that Tristan should not bother asking more of her. He looked both contented and resigned. “That’s a wrap, then,” he announced to all of us. “Back here at 0900 tomorrow. And Miss Karpathy, thank you for your efforts today. You have begun to change the future of magic. Thank you.”
She made her now-usual dismissive face, and otherwise did not respond.
As the Maxes—who had scarcely left off staring at the beautiful witch when she wasn’t in the ODEC—began to collect their jackets and such like, I had the sudden thought: Where are we going to put her? Clearly we could not return her to the nursing home.
I was startled by Rebecca’s soft voice behind me: “How large is your apartment?”
I turned to her. “Not large enough,” I said.
Rebecca sighed rather pointedly to get Tristan and Oda’s attention. “Well then,” she said in a slightly raised voice. “I suppose we must. But only for the one night.”
Erszebet heard this, and smiled. She straightened up and strolled toward us. And then—in a moment of unguarded bliss—she threw her hands up and cried triumphantly, “How wonderful not to be in prison anymore!”
“How many guest rooms do you have?” Tristan asked Rebecca quietly. “I’m responsible for her, I have—”
“You are not responsible for me,” said Erszebet, immediately exchanging glee for contempt. “And you have no authority over me at all.”
“Excuse me, miss, but if it wasn’t for me, you’d still be a crone living in a retirement community.”
“You had nothing to do with that,” she said dismissively. “It was Melisande who found me. Not that she has authority over me either, but I owe her at least a debt of gratitude.”
Journal Entry of
Rebecca East-Oda
MAY 19
We’ve brought all three home for the night. I made it clear they must respect this as our home, not merely a dormitory for experimental physicists and their sideshow curiosities. (Obviously didn’t say that. Still in shock about Erszebet.)
Immediate disagreements about sleeping arrangements. We have the guest room (double bed) and Mei’s room (twin). Tristan said he would take Mei’s room, but Erszebet demanded to sleep alone. Then:
ERSZEBET: It is ridiculous that you (Tristan/Mel) refuse to share a bed.
MEL: We don’t refuse to—
ERSZEBET: Good, then, do it.
MEL: It’s just that we don’t.
ERSZEBET: Why not?
MEL: We’re not romantically involved.
ERSZEBET: Why not?
MEL: Because we’re just not.
ERSZEBET: That answer is too stupid to justify depriving me of my own room. Even in that prison, I had my own room to sleep in at night.
MEL: He snores very loudly and I won’t be able to sleep.
TRISTAN : Yeah, it’s terrible, women leave me all the time because of it.
ERSZEBET: They leave you for other reasons.
MEL: So please, let’s you and I share the double, and Tristan has his own room.
ERSZEBET: I cannot believe the indignities I am already having to suffer under your regime. Sharing not just a room but a bed. I haven’t had to do that since the 1930s.
TRISTAN : You want to go back to Elm House, I’ll drive you.
MEL: Let’s everyone just calm the f**k down.
Tristan took Mel aside to discuss surveillance of Erszebet. Assuming my role as hostess and lady of the house, I stepped in to see how she was settling in. She had left the elder-hostel with only one large bag of faux leather that looked stolen from a fashion shoot. She was removing her possessions from this bag and laying them out neatly on the painted wooden dresser: ancient boar-bristle hairbrush, couple of camisoles and dresses, small satin bag for toiletries and makeup, nylon stockings. Plus one object made of yarn or string, a kind of fiber-sculpture. The calico had leapt up onto the dresser to examine this, but seemed to know better than to swat at it.
I looked closer at it. It was very old and frayed in places. Its central artery was a length of spun wool perhaps as long as my forearm, and tied to it were several hundred more slender strings, of varying lengths. All bore multiple knots along their lengths—knots of varying shapes, sizes, complexities, and densities. A number of strands were deliberately entangled to each other, and some of the strands were tied together into bundles thick as my thumb, creating an effect like dreadlocks. It resembled a design I remembered from my favorite college class, on South American anthropology, so I assumed that what appeared to be the ruins of a mop was in fact a calculation-and-record-keeping device.
“Looks like an Andean quipu,” I said.
“Mm,” said Erszebet absently, removing her shoes and wiggling her toes. “Mine is better.” She shooed the cat off the dresser. “What do you use?”
“Sorry?” I said.
“What do you—” She stopped herself, blinked, looked lost. “Never mind,” she said, sounding cross but looking confused. “I forget there is no magic now except in this ODEC.” She gave me a searching look. “So you can’t do magic? Ever?”
“That’s right,” I said. Neutral voice, neutral expression.
“Well, you can now, with this ODEC-room,” she said.
“I don’t do magic,” I clarified, hoping Mel would return and interrupt this conversation. “I have no idea how to do it.”
“Ah,” she said, still distracted, and began to brush her hair. “Of course, if it cannot be done, then it cannot be practiced or remembered. I wonder will Tristan Lyons require me to show witches how to do magic. Probably.”
“I don’t see myself volunteering to become a witch,” I said.
She paused in her brushing to give me a curious look. “You are already a witch.”
“Excuse me?” I said. “I don’t know where you would get that impression from. Do you think that just because I knew what a quipu is? That’s nothing to do with magic, it’s because—”
She resumed brushing her hair. “Of course you are a witch,” she said with offhand impatience. “You smell like a witch.”
“What?” I demanded. “What do you mean by that?”
She shrugged. “What is the scent of a baby or an old person or a man in love? There are different human scents. You have the scent of a witch. How wonderful it feels to have a full head of hair to brush again! You take these things for granted when you’re young.”
“Excuse me, I’m not a witch,” I said. “That would be ridiculous.”
“Then your mother’s mothers were,” she said very matter-of-factly, setting the brush on the dresser. “Some ancestress. You carry the blood.”
Suddenly I was irrationally angry at Frank. “Did my husband tell you to say that to me?”
“I would not say something because your husband told me to. Ha! What an idea.”
“I have an ancestor who was hanged in Salem, but she was not a witch—”
“Well, somebody was,” she said, and peered into her toiletries bag for something.
“This is nonsense,” I said, ruffled. “I don’t have one of those”—pointing to the quipu-like object—“and I don’t do magic, and I’m not a witch, and I shall go put on deodorant right now if you think I smell like one.”
“You act as if I have insulted you,” she said, sounding amused. She took a bottle of witch hazel and a cotton pad from the little silk bag. “I have given you the greatest compliment.”
“Not by my lights,” I said.
As soon as I left her, I confronted Frank, who never understands that the Salem witch hysteria is inappropriate for jokes. He claimed innocence, pointed out that he had never been alone with Erszebet, but then—since the matter had been raised, I suppose—repeated his perennial joke-theory that Mary Estey really was a witch. “Now that we know there really are witches, don’t you want to know?” he said with his eager little knowing grin. “Wouldn’t that be something?”
How could I ever fault him his curiosity? So. Made sure the guests were settled in with bath towels and water glasses, and then went up into the attic to Nana’s trunk, which I have managed to avoid opening for a quarter century, despite Frank’s nudging. God knows why I felt compelled tonight. I already know the family tree; I don’t require seeing it in writing. But something pushed me to go up.