The Book of Magic Read online

  I said nothing.

  “I used to love that con. Every year, your grandpa got us memberships as our Christmas gifts.”

  I nodded. “Where am I going?” I asked him.

  And after that our conversation was just directions. We left the Wedge and drove through Hilltop. The toy-eater’s house was on the edge of Edison. I wondered if she rented or owned. Little house, painted gray with white trim. No better or worse than any other on the street. Paved pull-off for the car. I drove in and stopped behind the Mercedes. I cut the engine and turned off the headlights. We sat in the dark. There was one window lit, a curtained yellow square. I waited.

  “I guess I’d better take it to her,” Farky said.

  I nodded. No talking or I’d shout that I’d changed my mind, give me my Terry back. Give me the little pretend dog who had guarded me from nightmares for so many years. I touched the paper sack with one fingertip. He was going to end a nightmare. I’d always known that nothing from the dark could hurt me with Terry clutched in my arms. I told myself he was going into his last battle. Brave little dog.

  She opened the door and stood there, a black silhouette against the lit hallway. Farky opened his car door and the dome light came on. She could see me, I thought, and felt a chill. I couldn’t make out her features, just her dark shape against the light. She was a tall and angular woman. Then Farky shut his door and the dome light went off and I watched the shape of him and the paper bag as he carried Terry toward her.

  She didn’t wait. She came down the steps toward him, hands reaching for the bag, and Farky surrendered it to her, holding it out as he cowered back. She snatched it from him and tore the bag open. The brown paper sack fell away, and she clutched Terry in both hands. I made a sound I hadn’t known I was going to make as she lifted him to her mouth. It seemed to me that her lower jaw dropped wider than it possibly could. She bit into the middle of him, not tearing a bite free, but chewing into him, both her hands forcing his head and his stubby tail toward the middle. She was chewing as she pushed him into her mouth.

  Then she stopped. She swayed. I hit my headlights. She was gagging. She began to claw at her mouth.

  I’d never seen Farky do a brave thing. I’d seen him run from fights in elementary school, cry when bullies hit him when he was a freshman. I’d lost count of the times I’d seen him lie his way out of trouble. But he sprang at the toy-eater. One hand behind her head, the other forcing old stuffing and fabric into her mouth. She went down, falling on her back on the steps, and he put his knee in her middle and with both hands he pushed Terry into her mouth.

  I was out of the car and moving toward them. My eyes couldn’t make sense of what I was seeing. The more Farky stuffed the toy into her mouth, the smaller and flatter she got. Her legs were shortening, her arms becoming floppy, her body drawing in skinnier and shorter. Farky was panting with the effort, and then, as he stopped, in the rectangle of light from her open door, all that remained was a flat body in badly fitted doll clothes and an ugly plastic head, greenish in my headlights. The head sagged suddenly to one side, and I thought I recognized the profile. Farky stood up and stumbled back from her.

  The junk drawer had tried to tell me, but it had been too weak. A shiny red shoe. A ruby slipper.

  “We’re leaving,” I told Farky.

  “But what about…”

  “Leave it. Someone else will clean it up. We’re done here.”

  We drove back to my shop. No talk, no radio. We got out of my car. I locked it.

  “Was that Terry? Your old stuffed dog?” Farky asked softly.

  I walked away from him, unlocked my grille and my glass door, and went inside. I locked up behind myself and went upstairs to where Cooper and my boarders were watching Animal Planet. I sat down with them, and the dachshund wormed into my lap. I petted him. I wondered if I had changed, if I would change now that Terry was gone. I felt around inside myself; anything different? Not that I could tell. I decided I was fine.

  About midnight, I turned off the television. Everyone was asleep. I left them in darkness and went to the kitchen. I opened up my laptop and did a quick search. It didn’t take me long. Mego. A toymaker. Wizard of Oz dolls. Including the Wicked Witch.

  Had someone loved that doll and imbued it with life? Hated it?

  The magic I had didn’t give me any answers.

  I felt cold as I got into my pajamas, and even colder as I lay alone in my bed. My arms were empty. I hadn’t slept with a stuffed toy in over a decade. Did I miss one now? Don’t be silly. I closed my eyes.

  * * *

  —

  It was over a week later that I went to Expensive Coffee. I didn’t know what I hoped. I hadn’t seen or heard from Farky. Just as well, I told myself. Just as well. And what I’d expected, right? Right.

  I chose what I hoped would be a less busy time of the day. I pushed the door open, and Selma glanced over at me. “Vanilla latte, whole milk, twelve ounce. Blueberry muffin, warmed.” She called out my order and then went back to waiting on the customer in front of her. By the time I reached the front of the line, she handed it to me. Hot coffee, warm muffin. Old friend.

  “Having a good day?” I asked her.

  “Oh, about the same as always. Coffee and pastries. How’s things in the pet boarding world?”

  “About the usual. Litter boxes and kibble. Nice earrings.”

  She touched the silver unicorns that dangled from her earlobes and smiled. “You don’t think they’re too young? A bit silly?”

  “Not at all.” I wondered what I was feeling. There wasn’t a word for it. Like something I used to feel had rolled over inside me, stirred briefly but not awakened. Like suddenly remembering a piece of a dream, but only in a fleeting flash. Whatever I had felt had faded away and it didn’t matter.

  “Customer gave them to me. Farky. You remember Farky?” She spun a forefinger at me in a circle. “We used to play board games at your dad’s shop. And Magic. Back in the day.”

  I nodded. “Back in the day. I remember him.”

  “He’s doing good. Almost clean, just smoking grass, he says.” She touched a unicorn again. She shook her head, puzzled. “Strange for Farky to bring me a present. No reason for it.” She shook her head, and the unicorns swung, and then she looked past me. “Good seeing you,” she said, and rolled her eyes toward the customer behind me.

  “Good seeing you again, Selma,” I said, and stepped away, coffee in one hand, bagged muffin in the other. There was something I’d meant to say to her, something about the earrings. Gone. Couldn’t have been important then. I shouldered the door open.

  Outside, it was raining again.

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  One of the most acclaimed and respected authors of our day, John Crowley is perhaps best known for his fat and fanciful novel about the sometimes dangerous interactions between Faerie and our own everyday world, Little, Big, which won the prestigious World Fantasy Award. His other novels include Beasts, Daemonomania, Endless Things, The Deep, Engine Summer, The Translator, Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land, Four Freedoms, and Love and Sleep. His short fiction has been collected in Novelties and Souvenirs, and his most recent novel is Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr. He lives in the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts.

  In the eloquent and lyrical story that follows, he tells the tale of a boy who is being groomed by the great Elizabethan physician and magician Dr. John Dee for a part in the coming war, a war that will take place both on Earth and between the Powers who live beyond it.

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  JOHN CROWLEY

  [EDITOR’S NOTE: The following pages were recently discovered among uncatalogued papers of the novelist Fellowes Kraft (1897–1964) that came to the Rasmussen Foundation by bequest following his death. They comprise thirty-four typewritten sheets of yellow copy paper (Sphinx brand) edited lightly in pencil, apparently
intended to be a part of Kraft’s second novel, A Passage at Arms (1941), now long out of print and unavailable. In the end these pages were rejected by the author, perhaps because the work had evolved into a more conventional historical fiction. The mathematician and spiritual adventurer John Dee would appear in later Kraft works, both finished and unfinished, in rather different character than he does here.]

  Blind O’Mahon the poet said: “In Ireland there are five kingdoms, one in each of the five directions. There was a time when each of the kingdoms had her king, and a court, and a castle seat with lime-washed towers; battlements of spears, and armies young and laughing.”

  “There was a high king then too,” said Hugh O’Neill, ten years old, seated at O’Mahon’s feet in the grass, still green at Hallowtide. From the hill where they sat the Great Lake could just be seen, turning from silver to gold as the light went. The roving herds of cattle—Ulster’s wealth—moved over the folded land. All this is O’Neill territory, and always and forever has been.

  “There was indeed a high king,” O’Mahon said.

  “And will be again.”

  The wind stirred the poet’s white hair. O’Mahon could not see Hugh, his cousin, but—he said—he could see the wind. “Now, cousin,” he said, “see how well the world is made. Each kingdom of Ireland has its own renown: Connaught in the west for learning and for magic, the writing of books and annals, and the dwelling places of saints. In the north, Ulster”—he swept his hand over lands he couldn’t see—“for courage, battles, and warriors. Leinster in the east for hospitality, for open doors and feasting, cauldrons never empty. Munster in the south for labor, for kerns and ploughmen, weaving and droving, birth and death.”

  Hugh, looking over the long view, the wind off the river where clouds were gathered now, asked: “Which is the greatest?”

  “Which?” O’Mahon said, pretending to ponder this. “Which do you think?”

  “Ulster,” said Hugh O’Neill of Ulster. “Because of the warriors. Cuchulain was of Ulster, who beat them all.”

  “Ah.”

  “Wisdom and magic are good,” Hugh conceded. “Hosting is good. But warriors can beat them.”

  O’Mahon nodded to no one. “The greatest kingdom,” he said, “is Munster.”

  Hugh said nothing to that. O’Mahon’s hand sought for his shoulder and rested upon it, and Hugh knew he meant to explain. “In every kingdom,” he said, “the North, the South, the East, and the West, there is also a north, a south, an east, a west. Isn’t that so?”

  “Yes,” Hugh said. He could point to them: left, right, ahead, behind. Ulster is in the north, and yet in Ulster there is also a north, the north of the north: that’s where his mad, bad uncle Sean ruled. And so in that north, Sean’s north, there must be again a north and a south, an east and a west. And then again…

  “Listen,” O’Mahon said. “Into each kingdom comes wisdom from the west, about what the world is and how it came to be. Courage from the north, to defend the world from what would swallow it up. Hospitality from the east to praise both learning and courage, and reward the kings who keep the world as it is. But before all these things, there is a world at all: a world to learn about, to defend, to praise, to keep. It is from Munster at first that the world comes to be.”

  “Oh,” Hugh said, no wiser, though. “But you said that there were five kingdoms.”

  “So I did. And so it is said.”

  Connaught, Ulster, Leinster, Munster. “What is the fifth kingdom?”

  “Well, cousin,” O’Mahon said, “what is it then?”

  “Meath,” Hugh guessed. “Where Tara is, where the kings were crowned.”

  “That’s fine country. Not north or south or east or west but in the middle.”

  He said no more about that, and Hugh felt sure that the answer might be otherwise. “Where else could it be?” he asked.

  O’Mahon only smiled. Hugh wondered if, blind as he was, he knew when he smiled and that others saw it. A kind of shudder fled along his spine, cold in the low sun. “But then,” he said, “it might be far away.”

  “It might,” O’Mahon said. “It might be far away, or it might be close.” He chewed on nothing for a moment, and then he said: “Tell me this, cousin: where is the center of the world?”

  That was an old riddle; even as a boy Hugh knew the answer to it, his uncle Phelim’s brehon had asked it of him. There are five directions to the world: four of them are north, south, east, and west, and where is the fifth? He knew the answer, but just at that moment, sitting with bare legs crossed in the ferns in sight of the tower of Dungannon, he did not want to give it.

  * * *

  —

  It was in the spring that his fosterers the O’Hagans had brought Hugh O’Neill to the castle at Dungannon. It was a great progress in the boy Hugh’s eyes, twenty or thirty horses jingling with brass trappings, carts bearing gifts for his O’Neill uncles at Dungannon, red cattle lowing in the van, spearmen and bowmen and women in bright scarves, O’Hagans and O’Quinns and their dependents. And he knew himself, but ten years old, to be the center of that progress, on a dappled pony, with a new mantle wrapped around his skinny body and a new ring on his finger.

  He kept seeming to recognize the environs of the castle, and scanned the horizon for it, and questioned his cousin Phelim, who had come to fetch him to Dungannon, how far it was every hour until Phelim grew annoyed and told him to ask next when he saw it. When at last he did see it, a fugitive sun was just then looking out, and sunshine glanced off the wet, lime-washed walls of its wooden palisades and made it seem bright and near and dim and far at once, heart-catching, for to Hugh the wooden tower and its clay and thatch outbuildings were all the castles he had ever heard of in songs. He kicked his pony hard, and though Phelim and the laughing women called to him and reached out to keep him, he raced on, up the long, muddy track that rose up to a knoll where now a knot of riders was gathering, their spears high and slim and black against the sun: his uncles and cousins O’Neill, who when they saw the pony called and cheered him on.

  Through the next weeks he was made much of, and it excited him; he ran everywhere, an undersized, redheaded imp, his stringy legs pink with cold and his high voice too loud. Everywhere the big hands of his uncles touched him and petted him, and they laughed at his extravagances and his stories, and when he killed a rabbit they praised him and held him aloft among them as though it had been twenty stags. At night he slept among them, rolled in among their great, odorous, shaggy shapes where they lay around the open turf fire that burned in the center of the hall. Sleepless and alert long into the night, he watched the smoke ascend to the opening in the roof and listened to his uncles and cousins snoring and talking and breaking wind after their ale.

  That there was a reason, perhaps not a good one and kept secret from him, why on this visit he should be put first ahead of older cousins, given first choice from the thick stews in which lumps of butter dissolved, and listened to when he spoke, Hugh felt but could not have said; but now and again he caught one or another of the men regarding him steadily, sadly, as though he were to be pitied; and again, a woman would sometimes, in the middle of some brag he was making, fold him in her arms and hug him hard. He was in a story whose plot he didn’t know, and it made him the more restless and wild. There was a time when, running into the hall, he caught his uncle Turlough Luineach and a woman of his having an argument, he shouting at her to leave these matters to men; when she saw Hugh, the woman came to him, pulled his mantle around him, and brushed leaves and burrs from it. “Will they have him dressed up in an English suit then for the rest of his life?” she said over her shoulder to Turlough Luineach, who was drinking angrily by the fire.

  “His grandfather Conn had a suit of clothes,” Turlough said into his cup. “A fine suit of black velvet with gold buttons and a black velvet hat. With a white plume in it!” he shouted, and Hugh c
ouldn’t tell if he was angry at the woman or Conn or himself. The woman began crying; she drew her scarf over her face and left the hall. Turlough glanced once at Hugh and spat into the fire.

  Nights they sat in the light of the fire and the great reeking candle of reeds and butter, drinking ale and Spanish wine and talking. Their talk was one subject only: the O’Neills. Whatever else came up in conversation or song related to that long history, whether it was the strangeness—stupidity or guile, either could be argued—of the English colonials; or the raids and counter-raids of neighboring families; or stories out of the far past. Hugh couldn’t always tell, and perhaps his elders weren’t always sure, what of the story had happened a thousand years ago and what of it was happening now. Heroes rose up and raided, slew their enemies and carried off their cattle and their women; some were crowned high king at Tara. There was mention of Niall of the Nine Hostages and the high king Julius Caesar; of Brian Boru and Cuchulain; of Sean O’Neill and his fierce Scots redlegs, of the sons of Sean and the king of Spain’s son. His grandfather Conn had been the O’Neill, but had let the English call him Earl of Tyrone. There had always been an O’Neill, invested at the crowning stone at Tullyhogue to the sound of St. Patrick’s bell; but Conn O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, had seen King Harry over the sea, and had promised to plant corn, and learn English. And when he lay dying he said that a man was a fool to trust the English.

  Within the tangled histories, each strand bright and clear and beaded with unforgotten incident but inextricably bound up with every other, Hugh could perceive his own story: how his grandfather had never settled the succession of his title of the O’Neill; how Hugh’s uncle Sean had risen up and slain his brother Matthew, Hugh’s father, and now called himself the O’Neill and claimed all Ulster for his own, and raided his cousins’ lands when he chose with his six fierce sons; how he, Hugh, had true claim to what Sean had usurped. Sometimes all this was as clear to him as the multifarious branchings of a winter-naked tree against the sky; sometimes not. The English…there was the confusion. Like a cinder in his eye, they baffled his clear sight.