All eyes were on Simon as he stood up.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he began, looking up and down the table. “Our charming hostess tells me that she’s expecting one more guest—” Vivian was nodding, smiling tightly. “—and as on many occasions of this kind, when one more guest arrives, the hostess is somewhat upset to find that the balance of male and female guests has been upset.” Simon was ready here, should Vivian show the slightest sign of social distress, for the quick switch: But this is not one such occasion. There was no distress signal from her, and Simon moved smoothly on: “So I’m going to find out first what sex our impending visitor is. Vivian hasn’t told me. Am I right?”
She nodded encouragingly. “Right.”
“So my intention now is to summon up one of the fay, the fairies of the old world, to help us find out some more about this potential visitor. Maybe even to help him—or her—to find the way to get here.”
Vivian, enthralled, was nodding with great intentness. This wasn’t at all the way that Simon had planned to open, but once he stood up the stunt had just seemed to suggest itself. He could see, as in a flash of inspiration, how it was going to work. If the visitor then failed to arrive, Simon would have a way out; if he did arrive, so much the better. Margie was quick-witted, she’d pick up quickly on what he had in mind, and work along. “Would you all join hands, please?” Simon asked. “It’ll help the vibrations.”
With merriment, and a minimum of delay, the folk at the table all brought themselves into a hand-joined circle. “Now I need just a little more room,” said Simon, backing away a few steps from the table. He was standing now, as he had planned, with his back only a few feet from the fireplace, to which another log had recently been added. The blaze was up moderately, and he could feel the warmth of it, welcome in the damp coolness of the castle’s interior night. He had another reason to be glad for having his back to the fire now; when he’d first stood up he’d started seeing faces, real faces, in the flames. He could do without that kind of a distraction just now.
Simon’s audience would be seeing him backlighted now, but the firelight gave him a good look at their faces, and he noted with professional joy that they were receptive to whatever he was going to do. They watched him happily. They were already a little high on the wine, or whatever had been added to the wine. They were calmly certain that he was going to show them wonders. And indeed he was.
The object that he meant soon to throw secretly into the fire was already concealed in Simon’s palm. Ten seconds, approximately, after he threw it in, the fire would flare up dramatically and in exotic colors. In that moment when everyone but Simon himself was looking at the fire, Margie would be able to slip through the dark hidden panel in the dim far wall of the great hall, and close the panel after her. She would have appeared in what looked like a doorless and windowless corner, inaccessible except by passing within a very few feet of the dinner table itself. Simon expected that the effect would be tremendous.
But before he threw anything into the fire, he would puzzle the audience first with Margie’s voice, seemingly coming out of nowhere.
He made wild passes with hands and arms, he rumbled his made-up words of magic, “Sprite of the woods and waters, princess of the summer night! I summon thee to questioning!”
There was a quavery moan, from… somewhere. Oh, beautiful, Margie. Simon called out peremptorily: “Are you there? Answer me clearly, please!”
“Simon… I’m here.” It was a very eerie voice, from very far away, from everywhere and nowhere. For a moment it even raised the hair on the back of Simon’s own neck.
Vivian watched, calm but utterly intent. The rest of the people at the table marveled, more or less quietly.
Simon called softly: “The guest that our hostess is expecting. Can you see him or her from where you are?”
And the disembodied voice: “Yes, Simon. Yes.”
“A man or a woman?”
“A man.” Margie from her secret observation place had perhaps learned something; otherwise there would have been no need for her to be so positive.
“Is he going to be able to join us here tonight?”
“He will try.”
Vivian did not take her eyes from Simon. The rest of the audience looked everywhere, under the table, up among the distant rafters, for the source of the voice. Simon heard someone mutter about ventriloquism.
“Will he be here soon, do you think?”
“Either he’ll be at the castle very soon… I think he will… tonight or tomorrow… or… if not soon, then never…”
“And are you going to join us too?”
“I’ll try… Simon.” There followed a soft, heartrending cry, from what sounded like an enormous distance. Oh beautiful, Margie! Beautiful!
Simon faced the table. “Our sprite is going to try to join us. It will help if we all concentrate intensely. All of us, even the old gentleman up there on the wall. I’ve been watching him. Now if I were to tell you that I’ve seen the eyes of that portrait move, you’d tell me that I’ve been seeing too many horror movies.”
And in beautiful obedience to suggestion, all eyes, even Vivian’s, swung together to regard the portrait high on the dim wall above Margie’s secret door. And in the second of time he had thus obtained for invisible action, Simon’s wrist flicked gently, tossing the object already in his hand behind him at the fire.
He and Margie now had about ten seconds to wait, if all went well. If it didn’t, if his toss had missed the actual flames, then he’d have to distract the audience once more, and try again. But so far tonight everything was going so smoothly and so well that Simon was absolutely sure he hadn’t missed.
And now while the count (five) was going on in his head (four), he kept the patter going (three): “To bring our guest among us, we call upon the powers ruling space and time, the strength of Astarte and Apollo, the oaths of Falerin—”
Where had that last name come from? There was no time to wonder now, for behind Simon the fire whooshed up most satisfactorily, smothering his words. The faces round the table all swiveled right to left, tennis- watchers startled bright green in the eerie new glow of a conjurer’s chemistry set. Saul, under the surface of his mild surprise, still looked bored and worried; the man who called himself Reagan looked almost childlike in the openness of his wonder. Only Vivian’s gaze did not turn all the way to the fire, but came to rest again on Simon himself.
This was the second of time in which Margie should be halfway through the panel. Simon of course was not looking toward the panel now, but it should be now, this very second—
It struck like some monstrous aftershock from the puny stage-explosion in the fireplace. Ten thousand times as loud, it came with a deep crack sounding through the timbers overhead, and a simultaneous flat concussion of the stone floor, as if the castle’s foundation of bedrock had been struck by some earthgod’s hammer from below. All Simon’s sureness of body and mind was in an instant brushed away. From a corner of his eye he saw one, two, three of the fear-struck dinner servants vanish, go out like blasted candle-flames. Simon staggered on the vibrating floor and almost fell. Voices round the table, Vivian’s among them, were raised in fear and incomprehension. And now a brightness, a fishbelly glare the equal of midday, struck in upon them all from the place where the secret panel had been sealed into the wall.
In the first instant of shock, that secret door had been burst from its hidden hinges. It spun now toward Simon as if hurled from some giant’s hand, and he watched it coming with the sense that everything in the world around him had been shifted to slow motion. There was a blast of wind, bearing a strange smell. Trying to dodge the flying door, his own body seemed capable only of very slow movement, feet stepping awkwardly and off balance.
The door missed him, somehow. It missed everyone, to crash with splintering force against a distant wall.
Vivian, breaking the handheld circle, was on her feet, her arms spread wide, her head thrown back in what appeared to be a paroxysm of triumph. She looked past Simon, into the cold furnace of light beyond the once-secret doorway. Then she screamed a name.
And now, from that glaring, howling world beyond the blown-in door, someone was trying to enter the great hall, someone very different indeed from Margie Hilbert. It was a man, tall and powerful, handsome and richly robed. The young and evil king of Simon’s afternoon dream. He was about to burst in and claim them all.
And Hildy was screaming, on and on, in utter terror.
