There was a long pause as we all continued to register what we were witnessing, and she continued to bask in our collective gaze. Various low voices said “Wow” or something equally articulate. We were more dumbfounded by the fact of the transformation than by its result (although I cannot stress enough how impressive the result was)—but we were definitely dumbfounded. And she was definitely preening.
Then Tristan collected himself. “So.” He coughed slightly. “All right then. How did you just do that?”
“It was a big spell. Not easy,” she said offhandedly. “But I have been thinking about it, rehearsing it in my head, for a hundred and sixty years—since the groundwork for it was laid in Budapest. I did it to see if your ODEC works to my satisfaction.” She smiled, and shifted her hips a few times so that the hem of the cocktail dress swirled around her knees. “It does. In fact it was never so effortless to do a spell as in this ODEC, which I like very much. What shall I do next?”
“What kind of magic were you in the habit of doing before?” Tristan asked. Without taking his eyes from her, he pointed toward the small table on which sat a MacBook Air. “Stokes.”
I collected the laptop and dutifully seated myself, opened the audio recording software, and pressed “record”; for backup I decided to take dictation and remained there, fingers poised over the keyboard.
Erszebet sobered abruptly. Even grave, she was mesmerizingly beautiful. “I was young, and magic was waning, and it was a very turbulent time. My mother was in the service of Lajos Kossuth, and if you know anything about our history, you will realize her magic was often ineffective. I assisted her when she required it.”
Eyes still on Erszebet, Tristan signaled to me. “Lajos Kossuth,” I said, typing.
“With a j—” she said to me; I overlapped: “A j, I know.”
Her beautiful dark eyes flitted back to Tristan. “I like that she is educated,” she said, as if approving of him for this, then continued her narrative: “After the revolution failed, after Kossuth fled in late ’49, the aristocracy would call upon my mother or myself to perform stupid parlor tricks. We would change the color of somebody’s hair, or force somebody to speak a childhood secret out loud. It was deliberately degrading to us, and I resented it, but my mother was so alarmed at our weakening powers that she grew fearful of displeasing those horrid people. She became sycophantic, which disgusted me, and so I went abroad.”
“Where to?” asked Tristan.
“I wanted to follow Kossuth, but his wife did not want me in his sight. Instead I went to Switzerland awhile, to train with a powerful witch who was making sure younger witches still learned certain spells and charms that had fallen out of use as the world perceived we were losing our power and relied on us for fewer things. Her efforts were, in retrospect, somewhat romantic, as if somebody in today’s world were teaching how to measure longitude with a timepiece. I learned much that I had little occasion to use, but I was still glad for the learning, although eventually I rejoined my parents in Budapest.”
“So can you change somebody into a newt?” Tristan asked, getting to the point.
“Of course I can,” she said. “What a stupid question.”
“Can you change them back?” I asked quickly.
“If I feel like it,” said Erszebet complacently. She gave Tristan a slightly defiant look. “Do you wish to test me?”
He pondered a moment, assessing her on so many levels. “Let’s start with an inanimate object,” he said. “I assume that’s possible? I mean, can you . . . transubstantiate inanimate objects?”
“Tell me what you need,” she said with a suddenly inviting smile. Truly, it was almost a grin. For the first time, she and Tristan were in the same groove, and they smiled at each other. He bit his lower lip excitedly, which made him look charmingly like a goof.
Then he clapped his hands together in front of him, actually squatted slightly like a coach laying out a game plan. It was the first time I noticed—fleetingly—that he had a cute butt. “Just going to put you through some paces on the most basic level today. Stokes will take notes. Ms. Stokes will take notes,” he corrected himself quickly, staving off her irritation.
“I wish those stupid aristocrats who made us do parlor tricks were still alive,” Erszebet said eagerly. “The pains I would bring upon them now.”
“Never mind about them,” said Tristan. “You’ll have plenty to occupy you right here.”
For the rest of the afternoon, Tristan tasked Erszebet with simple assignments, for which we were all the amazed witnesses. I can hardly describe the electricity in that dull warehouse that day, our breathless wonder at the impossible-turned-evident. Even though she began with the humblest of efforts, the whole thing was totally
To begin, Tristan put a gallon of white paint into the ODEC with Erszebet, and asked her to turn it black; she did so, and after the Maxes took a sample to have analyzed, she returned it to white, which was also sampled. She could turn it any color, we learned; she could match it perfectly to colored objects Tristan gave her to take into the ODEC with her. (She could not reproduce this effect when the paint or objects sat outside the ODEC, to the frustration of both herself and Tristan.) He then had her bend metal rods into perfect circles; splinter stones; break glass and then restore it.
It was clear now that anybody actually inside the ODEC with her could not (by definition, really) remain mentally coherent, and so each time she set about to work her magic, she did so alone. Sealed up within the ODEC, her workings remained a perfect mystery.
These acts of magic each took between five and thirty minutes to achieve. While happily invigorated after the first dozen or so, she presently showed signs of tiring. Tristan chose not to notice this, and tried to step things up a notch: he asked her to materialize something out of nothing.
“There is no such thing as nothing. Not even in what you call a vacuum. But I am tired now,” she said, lolling against the control console. “Materialization is a complicated summoning and requires many calculations. And I am tired of taking orders from you, Tristan Lyons. Perhaps tomorrow.”
It was clear from her tone that Tristan should not bother asking more of her. He looked both contented and resigned. “That’s a wrap, then,” he announced to all of us. “Back here at 0900 tomorrow. And Miss Karpathy, thank you for your efforts today. You have begun to change the future of magic. Thank you.”
She made her now-usual dismissive face, and otherwise did not respond.
As the Maxes—who had scarcely left off staring at the beautiful witch when she wasn’t in the ODEC—began to collect their jackets and such like, I had the sudden thought: Where are we going to put her? Clearly we could not return her to the nursing home.
I was startled by Rebecca’s soft voice behind me: “How large is your apartment?”
I turned to her. “Not large enough,” I said.
Rebecca sighed rather pointedly to get Tristan and Oda’s attention. “Well then,” she said in a slightly raised voice. “I suppose we must. But only for the one night.”
Erszebet heard this, and smiled. She straightened up and strolled toward us. And then—in a moment of unguarded bliss—she threw her hands up and cried triumphantly, “How wonderful not to be in prison anymore!”