kind of spirits. But it was Dickens, and I knew it. I said right away, ‘Why that’s Dickens, Mr. Free, isn’t it?’ and then I explained about not having any liquor in the bags, but I invited him for a little sherry if he would like some. I always keep a bottle in the house because it benefits me so when I have the cold. And he said he had used the word—the word spirits was what he meant—in the Pickwickian sense.”
“I had understood that Mr. Free was a rather uneducated man.”
“Why, I don’t think—bless me, Miz Valor, here I’ve been sitting and jabbering and not giving you any tea. It’ll be stewed to prunes.” She picked up the flowery teapot and decanted pale brown liquid into the brunette’s cup.
“Would you say that Mr. Barnes, for example, was well educated? More so than Mr. Free?”
“Why he would be bound to be, wouldn’t he?” Mrs. Baker asked. “They go to school so much longer than what we did. We never learned but readin’, writin’, and ’rithmetic. That was the way we used to say them. Nowadays you young people don’t even bother with those.”
“Are you teasing me, Mrs. Baker?” the brunette asked.
“Me?” Mrs. Baker shook her head. “Course not! Why I’m innocent as a limb. I suppose Mr. Barnes is very well educated, in the modern manor.”
A Friend Of Crowley’s
“Marie,” the King boomed, “I want you to meet a special friend of ours.”
The special friend was a tall and very spare old man with a bristling white mustache; he wore a loose gray tweed suit that was either British or a remarkably good imitation of it. When the witch extended her hand, he bowed over it, brushing her knuckles with dry lips.
“I am very pleased to meet you,” she said. “I cannot welcome you to this house—it is our King’s, not mine—but I join him in welcoming you to the encampment of the Last Free People.”
“I thank you,” the elderly man said. “Indeed, I thank you very much, Mademoiselle.”
“When we shorted the juice to get you and Rose and the rest of our people out of Belmont, Mr.—uh—” The King snapped his fingers.
“Illingworth, Mademoiselle,” the old man said. “Cassius Illingworth, at your service.”
“Mr. Illingworth was able to help us quite a bit. It turned out he knew about the tunnels downtown where the power lines run. He drew a map, and Bella and some of the other young guys went down there and fixed things.”
“I am a journalist, Mademoiselle, and in a lifetime a journalist acquires many bits of queer lore. During the Second World War, those tunnels were prepared for use as air-raid shelters. How preposterous it seems now to suppose that German bombers might have reached this city in nineteen and forty-two! Yet it did not seem preposterous then; many serious-minded men believed it. And afterward, when everyone except a few laborers employed by the utility had forgotten them, they were used as a meeting place by certain—ah—seekers.”
The witch regarded him speculatively.
“He knows about that too, Marie.” There was sly pleasure in the King’s smile. “See, when you came here and asked me to help you find this Ben Free, Mr. Illingworth was one of the first gadje I came across. He says he never met this Free, but he knows people who have.”
Illingworth nodded. He stood with his back to the fire, big, age-spotted hands clasped behind him. “I have the honor and pleasure of editing and publishing certain journals of the occult, Mademoiselle. I believe you have already met one of my staff, Miss Duck.”
“Ah!” The witch nodded. “So you are her employer.”
“I am, Mademoiselle. I have that honor.”
“Mr. Illingworth used to belong to the Golden Dawn,” the King said. “He’s been in the business a long time.”
“You knew Aleister Crowley?”
“I did, Mademoiselle. He was perfectly charming, despite all you may have read of him, and a fine mountaineer. We climbed together in the Himalayas on several occasions, and we are still not wholly separated, though our essential energies are now on different planes. I have been so fortunate as to communicate with him on several occasions.”
“He was called the wickedest man in the world,” the witch said.
“He was, Mademoiselle. In fact, I believe I had the honor of originating the phrase, though I did it only to please him. For all Aleister’s penetration, he was like a little boy in one respect: he loved to shock. Years later—at least it seems to me like years now, though perhaps it was only a year or so—in Smyrna, I was sitting with him in a cafe when we heard the major domo tell a tourist couple, giving that little movement of the head that those diasporic Greeks (if I may coin a term) use so well, that Aleister was the most evil man God permitted to remain on earth. The tourists were very impressed indeed, and I think I never saw him so happy. Certainly I was never to see him so happy again.”
“Marie hasn’t had your experience,” the King rumbled. “But she has the gift.”
Illingworth nodded politely. “Your people are famous for it, all over the world.”
“Most of us fake it—I do myself.” Suddenly the King smiled. “So does Marie, sometimes. But with her, sometimes it’s the real thing.”
“Fascinating.” For a moment, Illingworth studied the witch. “Just what is the real thing, dear? Telekinesis? Precognition?”
She shook her head, then nodded. “I do not seem to be telekinetic at all. I am strongly precognitive. A bit of telepathy, though I have met people who are much better at that than I. I am also a fairly good medium,
