The Magic Cottage

Then it was gone and Mycroft was weaning a 'so what d'you think of that, Smartarse?' smile.

I blinked my eyes at the faded illusion, but refrained from asking him how he'd performed the trick. Nobody likes a show-off. Besides, I wanted my jarred thoughts to settle.

'Magic of a sort,' Mycroft intoned depreciatingly. 'A trivial example of the will's power.'

He pointed his stick at a space between two down-beams of light to my left and a narrow table appeared, on it a bottle of wine and an empty glass. As we watched, the bottle lifted, tilted and poured red liquid into the glass.

In my astonishment I turned to Midge and her face was full of awed delight, like that kid's in Close Encounters. The sheer gullible innocence of her expression made me want to grab her and run fast from that dark, pointed room where the aroma of incense was now tainted with a faint corruption. My mind was concentrated on flight, and when I returned my gaze to the table and the wine its image was wavery, its lines softened. But the sight steadied, became solid once more.

'You may drink,' Mycroft offered very casually. 'You'll enjoy the taste, I promise.'

'No thanks,' I said, and he lowered the cane, the image quickly dissolving to nothing.

I knew what he was doing, but not how: I'd always assumed that hypnotists had to tell you verbally what they wanted you to see or do, or how you should react. Nevertheless, I was certain that what we'd witnessed hadn't existed outside our own imaginations.

I was searching for my next quip when Mycroft made the light beams bend.

The puddled circles of brightness started moving inward quite slowly, the two in front touching the Synergist's feet while the two behind crept up the chair legs. He'd inverted the cane so that the tip was aimed at his own face, and that's what the dust-filled rays were traveling toward, bent like jointed drainpipes about four feet from the floor, their slopes gradually becoming more acute until right-angled to the down-beam. Mycroft's head was spotlighted from the front and behind, and his skin glowed with the attention.

I sensed more in Mycroft at that moment than I ever had before.

Energy, vibrancy—whatever that invisible vigor can be called—seemed to dance across his cheeks as tiny sparks of static, and his eyes, fixed on mine, were crystalline and dazzling, multifaceted pupils sparkling back light. The deep fissures on his face I'd observed outside in the corridor were gone, bathed away by the sunny glare, each plane of his skull reflecting a different light, some shiny brillant, others more subdued but never dull. No shadows there, his features merged, nothing prominent, nose leveled with lips, forehead leveled with eye sockets; a simple mask whose form depended on degrees of reflected light. Even his hair effulged silver.

It was a sight to make you gulp.

For a briefest instant, his whole head flared—or appeared to—a spectrum aura radiating outward, expanding until the triangular room was filled with its variegation, driving away the blackness and forcing me and Midge to shield our eyes.

But not before we'd both perceived other worlds inside those subtle and lifting rainbow colors, floating planets that resembled body cells, stars and suns that shone green, blue, the deepest mauve, shapes that were sometimes human and sometimes vast expanses of protoplasmic masses, a coagulation of life forces. We experienced the lonely darkness of infinite space, which was the pitch umbra of time itself, both casts of the same nonentity; we felt huge tides of shifting emotions sweeping through those gossamer galaxies, shaping destinies and creating forces that would become rock and flesh and more emotion, emotion being the creative energy that bred with itself, the source of everything, the progenitor of all we knew and all we didn't know.

And at the center of this revelation we saw a whiteness that would have seared our eyes had it been real; and it was this, not the brightness inside the room, that caused us to cover our faces.

But all this was only a glimpse, no more than that. A glimpse allowed by Mycroft.

We cowered, and the vision was gone.

Darkness came back with the smell of foul incense.

I shook my head dazedly, more wearied than alarmed; there was a peculiar sensation in my stomach, as if there were a shining down there, something alight and warming my veins. The heat surged into my limbs, to my fingertips and toes, then vanished, dissipated through them.

I shifted over to Midge, not sure I wanted to stand just yet. Mycroft, returned to normal self, the light beams rigid posts once more, watched impassively, an entomologist studying a specimen beetle who struggled with a pin stuck in the shell of its back.

'Midge? Midge, are you okay?'

Her hands were still held to her face, and I gently pulled them away. She blinked, seemed not to recognize me, and I caught sight of the white light still twinkling in her pupils, but distant, diminishing, finally snuffing out. She looked past me, at Mycroft, and her smile was tentative, unsure.

I turned and his visage remained impassive.

'What was it?' Midge asked in a small breathless voice.

I expected a profound answer from the Synergist, but he only smiled enigmatically.

'Yeah, I'd like to know too,' I said.

'You were spectators to the mysteries.'

Pretty profound.

'That doesn't tell us much.'

'What do you feel you saw?'

It was Midge who replied. 'I felt I was witnessing the source of all things, but it was incomplete, only a fragment.'

He nodded slowly (and a little too sagely, I thought, like it was part of the show). 'A vision only of a glimmer. Nothing more than that. Your imagination rendered the truth into a vision your mind could perceive—but only just. At such moments sight can be as useless as words, imagination as inadequate as reason. Even dreams can barely sense the Unity.'

Whatever, it had given me a headache. 'A nice display, Mycroft, but what was it for? To impress us?'

'Perhaps.'

'We're impressed. Now can we leave?'

'You let us see your power,' said Midge, leaning forward eagerly.

'I revealed a channel to power, one that courses through my own body and mind,' Mycroft replied. 'There are other . . . stronger channels around us that can be sought and found. Access points, conduits—call them what you will. They can be used . . .'

He suddenly clammed up and avoided our eyes. I think he'd been getting carried away by his own genius.

'I don't understand what you want from us,' I persisted. 'We're not interested in becoming Synergists, or anything like this . . .'

'I think your partner is,' he came back, mysterious as ever.

'Find them for me again,' Midge said to him. 'Let them speak to me. Let Mike hear for himself.'

We both knew whom she meant.

I touched her hand. 'This is madness. Can't you see what he's doing? Thought projection, mind manipulation, plain old-fashioned hypnotism—it's all part of the same thing. Nothing really happened. Mycroft is making us see all these things, they're not real—'

'Their presence is in the room,' interrupted Mycroft. 'I can sense them, and so can you.' He was addressing Midge.

'Yes,' she said simply.

'They've more to tell you.'

She nodded.

'They want you to listen.'

She nodded again, and her eyes closed.

And now I could feel something else inside that room. But I wasn't sure if it was because Mycroft wanted me to.

'They're speaking,' said Midge in a hushed voice.

'I can't hear anything.' My own voice was a whisper.