The Synergist leaned toward me. "You failed to answer my question," he said.
"Question?"
"Do you believe in Magic?"
"There's a coupla card tricks I know—"
He interrupted, although still not riled. (That can be irritating when you're being deliberately crass.) "Can you comprehend Man as an identical counterpart to the universe and every force it holds, that the universe itself is no more and certainly no less than an infinitesimal human organism? That the energy driving and governing the universe is the same energy contained within ourselves? Can you understand that Man, with this inner knowledge, could learn to transcend all material limits, and eventually time and space itself?"
I wasn't sure if he was expecting an answer, but I gave him one anyway, maintaining the crassness for my own pleasure and maybe in the hope of piercing his smooth veneer.
"I can't even understand the question," I replied.
"No, of course not. Perhaps I've overestimated your intelligence."
There it was, the first chink. I nodded grimly to myself, appreciating the insult.
"Nonetheless," he went on, his eyes lost in shadow, "I'm sure it's not beyond you to realize that human knowledge purposely confines itself to a limited reality, one that it doesn't have to fear, and one that scientists and material philosophers show us to be true. Sadly, we choose to see only the least important actuality. The other realities around us—and within us—have tended to be ignored for the last few hundred years."
"No kidding."
His hands grasped the metal cane-top just a fraction more tightly. "Except that now, recently, the reality of precognition, extrasensory perception and psychokinesis has become accepted by even the most ardent of skeptics.
Those hidden powers that have been rejected for so long by scientists are now the subject of scientific study."
I was becoming impatient. "I don't get what this has to do with so-called Magic."
"Surely you can see where I'm leading? Those powers that are inevitably being recognized by the most pragmatic sectors of our society were once considered Magical or supernatural. The view used to be that such powers set aside the natural order of nature, but that was a huge misconception: Magicians merely strive to discover those hidden forces and to work through them and with them, whether they are part of us or part of the whole."
Much as I tried to remain aloof from all this, I have to admit Mycroft was getting through to me. No, I don't mean I followed what he was saying, but his voice had become soothingly persuasive, almost mesmeric (have you ever been hypnotized? You know what's going on, but you don't realize what's happening), the oddness of the room, with its smell of incense and the soft downcast lights, providing helpful special effects. It all had to be consciously resisted.
I pretended a yawn.
He pretended he hadn't noticed.
"We must learn in stages, first casting off restraints imposed upon us since birth, becoming refreshed again. Convention, rationalism, materialism, our principles and ethics: these are nothing more than psychological screens. We must become children again, innocent of such influences. The very young believe in Magic until they are influenced otherwise. The beliefs of unenlightened maturity must be overturned, and the shackling doctrines of religion thwarted because religion reserves divine power for God alone, whereas the way of Magic offers divine power for all."
I cringed inwardly, waiting for a thunderbolt to strike. Disappointingly, it didn't.
"Each step the initiate takes must be experienced and mastered, every new mystery revealed must be contemplated, each developing phase considered. And perhaps the first and most important secret is that which lies within ourselves."
He leaned forward so that his chin very nearly rested on his hands clutched over the cane, and his voice lowered.
"That is," he said gravely and confidentially, "the mystery of our own energy, our own astral forces in the earth itself, and so, too, the infinite forces of the universe. A Magician, my friend, is always in search of those hidden links."
He straightened once again, his face gone to stone. My throat was dry.
"And when those links are discovered," he added in the same low voice, "they may be employed for the Magician's purposes."
He gave me time for it to sink in.
"All that to pull a rabbit out of a hat?" I said.
He allowed a cold smile.
"All that to discover our true self and the veiled power we hold. There is nothing more basic, nor more transcendent. With that knowledge, a man has access to the limitless forces of his own will. He can evoke an imagination so concentrated and so vivid that it can create a reality in the astral light."
He pointed the tip of his cane at the floor, close to my leg.
"That reality may be reflected in this physical world, if we so wish."
My rabbit appeared on the spot he was pointing at.
I jumped back and Midge gasped.
The rabbit twitched its nose.
Tentatively, I reached toward the white furry bundle, not believing it was real.
And snatched my hand back when it turned into a black, wicked-toothed rat. I hate bloody rats.
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.