now could they?
Oh yeah, he’d been bothered by visions for a long time, all right. At least since adolescence. Sometimes he’d had them right on stage. It was just that he’d taught himself to recognize them as outside of ordinary reality, and to ignore them once he knew what they were. So the reason he wasn’t worried now about going for a medical exam was that he knew he really wasn’t going to have one. He’d considered having checkups before, at various points in his life, for similar reasons, and in the end he’d never had them. Because he knew they were unnecessary.
Ruby wine before him. Even with eyes closed he could see the glass, how much was left in it, its exact position. The clearest possible vision: maybe Vivian for once had told the truth.
A couple of hours ago Margie had signaled him that all was well. And Margie was probably watching him right now from her vantage point behind the wall, ready to do the act. Was it really credible that Vivian didn’t know about the passage? Anyway she was pretending she didn’t know. Too late to worry about all that now. Now it was almost show time.
Eyes still closed, Simon reached for his wine again. His fingers, with perfect sureness of the position of the glass, closed on it gently. He drank all that was left.
Surrounding the great house were all the sounds of summer night in rural northern Illinois, sounds well- remembered by Simon from the visits that he’d made to the country in his childhood. He’d dwelt then not in the castle but in one of those huts… little houses… over there across the river. Those little dwellings were, if you could discount the water, almost at the castle’s foot. Like the huts of peasants. Land-bound creatures who were once owned, body and soul, as part of some great lord’s dominion. Maybe that was why, when Simon was growing up, he’d never thought of the castle in romantic or adventurous terms. It wasn’t his castle, and he knew it. It sat on him.
Clear seeing indeed came from this wine. The others round the table were sipping their own assigned vintages. The talk was lively but not noisy; through it Simon could hear, barely audible, the hiss of a torch burning in a wall sconce. From outside there drifted in the sounds of low, distant thunder, the night-noises of insects and an occasional bird. A very occasional something else, perhaps. All this was not particularly reassuring, even though it was familiar. Even as a child Simon had spent most of his life in the city, and the country had never quite lost its strangeness to him, though he’d come to know his way around it well enough…
A great howl, somewhere outside, made him open his eyes. Had that really come from a dog? But no one else appeared to have noticed it at all.
“A small coin for your thoughts,” said Vivian beside him. She appeared totally relaxed now, the model of a relaxed and confident hostess, with nothing on her mind, for the moment, but chatting with one of her guests.
“Sorry. You’d never guess. I was trying to remember my grandmother.” And it became true as he said it; that would have been the next turn his thoughts had taken. Today was for, among other things, probing his own past. His parents had died before he could start remembering them at all. That happened to a fair number of kids, sure, but… the more he looked back on his childhood, the more he realized its strangeness.
“You’re right,” said Vivian calmly. “I mightn’t have guessed that. Was your grandmother fond of parties like this one?”
The question struck Simon as supremely irrelevant. The odd thing about this party, as it had turned out, was that all the disparate guests appeared to be enjoying each other’s company more and more.
Simon sighed, really trying to remember Grandmother now. A firm, sallow face. Nondescript gray hair, small frame. She’d died when Simon was away at his one year of college. He couldn’t remember having any important feelings when he heard the news. He chuckled. “I don’t know what Grandma thought about parties. I don’t know that the subject ever came up.”
“Maybe she gave you birthday parties when you were little?” Vivian was probing, as if she were interested.
“I guess. I guess they were routine, as those things go.” And now Simon noticed, without any particular surprise or concern, that Margie was not going to be the only exotically costumed entertainer of the evening. There were more acts than he’d been told about. Someone in an excellent, highly realistic toad costume was squatting in a corner, amid thick shadows at the far end of the great hall. Probably getting ready to do some kind of jester’s number as soon as he was noticed. Well, Simon wasn’t going to be the one to point him out to the other guests.
“I don’t remember my parents at all, you see,” he explained to Vivian. “And I don’t know much about my aunt and uncle either, come to think of it, though I lived with them for a time.” Now stop it, he warned himself, you’re going to give your identity away.
But Vivian only said: “Oh?” politely, and turned to speak to someone across the table.
Now, how could she fail to identify him sooner or later as her own second cousin, or whatever the hell the exact relationship was supposed to be? The boy from across the river, the one she’d once let… but maybe she had as little inclination as he did to keep up with relatives—and old lovers. He hadn’t been the first for her, that in hindsight was obvious enough.
Simon had never made any effort to keep up with relatives, or childhood friends. And now, whenever he tried to visualize any of the people he’d grown up among, their images came to the eye of memory with an odd, faded quality, like old photographs.
Except, of course, for the image of Vivian herself.
Now, on the other side of the table, the smooth rounds of Sylvia’s inflated breasts were more than half exposed to candlelight. Yet Simon had scarcely noticed, because Vivian sat beside him.
The night-sounds of the surrounding countryside besieged the castle, came in through the narrow windows piercing the enormous thickness of the walls. The dinner went on. Thunder grumbled louder. If rain now drummed on the roof that was so far above, in here no one could hear it.
Someone had just spoken to Simon, and he opened his eyes (when had he closed them again?) to see Vivian regarding him. The expression on her face was one of utter, almost worshipful intentness; and one of her little hands was raised in the shadow of a gesture, that must have been meant to warn some third person against interfering.
Simon began to speak, in a loud, clear voice: “If we must find something, an obstacle to be removed, then the place to look for it is—” And having got that far he stopped, listening to himself in utter amazement, with no idea at all of what he had started to talk about.
Vivian was leaning forward, concentrating so intensely on Simon that for the moment she seemed to have stopped breathing. The flicker of a reflected candle was the only motion in her eye. The folds of the shapeless kirtle did not stir across her breast.
“Yes,” she urged Simon when he paused. “Where is it?” Her voice was quietly solemn.
“I don’t know yet.” The answer felt like something forced from him. He had the feeling that it was true. Then he blinked and with an effort recovered something like normal control over his speech. “Sorry, what are we talking about?”
Vivian sank back a little in her chair. Disappointment had struck her but she was very brave and still hopeful. “We’re having a party, Simon. We can just relax and talk as our thoughts lead us.”
Thunder crashed again, this time even closer than before. A puff of wind somehow got into the great hall, to make the flames of torch and candle flicker. The dinner was almost completely cleared away by now.
Wallis down the table imitated thunder, with a laugh. The imitation was not too well done, but everyone, except for the silent, frightened servitors, seemed to enjoy the effort, and some applauded. “Good night for some ghost stories,” Willis told the table in a loud voice.
It’s showtime, folks, thought Simon. Vivian was now looking at him keenly, as if to make sure that he recognized his cue. As he could hardly fail to do.
Simon drew a deep breath, and tried to will himself back toward an ordinariness of mind and of perception. It was not to be, not now. But still he felt that he was ready to perform, more than merely ready. His vision was very clear, his hands supremely steady.
He got to his feet smiling, silently running through the last items on his mental preperformance checklist. He noted that the toad-costume was no longer to be seen. Good, no immediate competition. Establishing the proper atmosphere for magic? In tonight’s special setting that wasn’t going to be a problem; quite the opposite, in fact. He was going to have to be careful to keep it light.
Servants, presumably at someone’s signal, had already ceased activities, and most of them were out of sight.
