Oscar and the Magi: Magic and Terror
After the dim calm of the shelves of books, this department was bright and colourful. They walked between tall shelves filled with glittering glassware and shining, mysterious contraptions.
At the end of the shelves was a table on which was set up some kind of scientific experiment: retort stands and flasks, beakers and pipes. A bright blue rock in the bottom of a bottle steamed out yellow smoke that condensed in a long coil of pipe into a thick scarlet liquid that oozed down through a column of glass beads.
Beyond, at the end of a further set of shelves, something was buzzing and throwing out sparks. Beyond that Oscar could see the great wall of drawers that he had glimpsed earlier, where a shop assistant was weighing out garish powders on a set of scales.
“Alchemy!” Maggs was gesturing at the experiment, “Oldest of all the sciences… First find your spirit, then libby… libiberal… set it free. This is how you conjure a spirit out of its hiding place, you see.”
“It looks like chemistry,” Oscar was doubtful: this reminded him a little too much of school.
“It is chemistry!” Maggs seemed inappropriately enthusiastic, “Without the alchemy of the Magi, there wouldn’t be any chemistry - there wouldn’t be any of the modern sciences. Of course, people these days don’t think anyone does alchemy anymore: but they’re wrong!”
Maggs was shouting and waving her arms about and she was attracting the attention of a distant shop assistant, who was watching her prancing around the display with a snooty expression. Oscar decided he ought to try and distract her.
“So magic is all experiments and chemicals?” He could see that all the bubbling and explosions looked like fun, but in his bitter experience such excitement always seem to need too much hard work to get it going. And too much tidying up afterwards.
“Ah, no,” Maggs was off again, beetling away between the shelves, “Alchemy is not just a science: it is an art: the art of magic!”
They had come through into a more open section of the department, where stands and racks dotted the floor, displaying sequined cloaks, long straggly scarves and oddly shaped hats. The floor itself was covered in strange patterns, circles and stars and five sided shapes, and stuffed animals stared down on them from niches in the wall. It was quieter here and the lights were dim.
Maggs was standing in the middle of one of the circles drawn on the floor, surrounded by cryptic symbols.
“A magic circle,” she was just as enthusiastic about this chalk drawing as she had been about the experiment, “You see, once you’ve liberalated your spirit you have to bind it again, but this time to your own command. The Magi must ensorcel the spirit to obey the words of power…”
“Like spells?” Words of power sounded more like the sort of magic Oscar had had in mind when he snuck his way up here.
“They are spells! Magical lore handed down through the millennia: the secrets of the ancients,” Maggs spread her arms wide and Oscar became aware that the snooty shop assistant and once again appeared in the distance.
“Although, to be honest, they don’t use the ancient lore so much these days,” Maggs was leaning forward conspiratorially, “The Great Work simplified a lot of the rites, made everything a lot easier.”
“I see,” said Oscar, he didn’t, of course, but magic made easy sounded perfectly fine to him.
“You shall do, you shall do,” Maggs moved away again, dodging around a stand of gnarled old staves, “This way, and I shall show you.”
Maggs opened a door in a wall and led them through into the back of a display made up to look like a real room, complete with wood panelling and bookshelves, only with one wall missing so that customers could look in.
At one end of the room was tripod with a bronze dish on top that was spewing out purple smoke. As Oscar watched a suit of armour emerged, clanking, from beyond the smoke and dropped a creaking handful of powder into the dish. The smoke turned dark red.
At the other end of the room a book on a lectern turned its own pages as a strange billowing, glowing fire jumped in a magic circle on the floor before it. The fire danced and writhed, taking on different shapes: a dragon, a cat, a strange beast like a horse with horns, a small, goblin like creature…
Maggs pushed past a skeleton on a stand and ducked under a crocodile hanging from the fake ceiling, stepping down out of the display back onto the shop floor. The suit of armour watched them pass and then heaved itself back to its bronze dish.
They passed down an aisle of what looked to Oscar like empty fish tanks, turned into one of pet food and supplies and then came out into a small open space.
All around them were high walls of cages, stacked one above the other and in each cage were animals: alternately small white dogs and black cats. Normally you might have expected to have heard so many animals before you saw them. Oscar knew well (after many failed attempts to persuade his parents that a pet dog would be good idea) that the normal pet department downstairs in Hammages was a cacophony of barking, yowling, chirping, scraping, banging and rattling. But this one was quite different.
The animals sat perfectly still in the centre of their cages, none of them so much as twitching or scratching, all of them staring forwards, breathing gently. The effect was deeply eerie.
As they approached, a small black cat came wandering out from behind the cages and, seeing them, sat down in their way, curling its tail around its front paws. It strange air of self-possession seemed to affect even Maggs’ boundless enthusiasm.
“Here,” she whispered, “I’ll show you. What’s the time?”
Oscar instinctively went to look at his watch and so almost missed what happened next as the black cat quite clearly and unmistakably said:
“Four forty eight.”
Oscar stared at it, open mouthed, but it didn’t do anything else: it just sat there staring over his shoulder, off into the distance.
“What?” was all he could say.
“Oh, it’s a simple grandeur…no… glamour! They put it on all the familiars to show that they’ve been properly enscorce… orlorce… orlated…. spellbound, you see,” Maggs waved her hand at the cages, “You can ask any of them. Any one at all.”
“But you’re not going to,” said a voice, “Because you’re leaving, now.”
They both turned to find the shop assistant Oscar had noticed earlier standing between the cages, glaring at them. He was thin, balding man, with the kind of wispy moustache that makes you think the owner must have grown it simply to put himself in a bad mood whenever he looks in a mirror.
“I’ve been watching you - especially you,” he jabbed a finger at Maggs, “Prancing like a twit. And now you’ve really done it - letting animals out of the cages: I’ll have you banned for life - and you:” he turned on Oscar, “We don’t allow unaccompanied children in here.”
“He is accompanied,” interjected Maggs.
“I’ve told you before,” repeated the shop assistant, “You don’t count.”
“But I’ve got my voucher,” Oscar held out the piece of yellow paper with the special offer on it. The man snatched it out of his hand.
“Give me that. You won’t be needing that, because you’re leaving - now: out!”
“You can’t!” Oscar was too horrified to be able to argue coherently: he was overwhelmed by the thought of all this being snatched away before he had even started exploring, let alone understanding, let alone even learning some real, genuine magic. It was too much to bear.
“I can, and I am; I am deputy sub-manager, Alchemy, and given the current security situation….”
“I have friends in high places,” Maggs was trying to draw herself up to look imposing but it wasn’t working very well: she wasn’t very tall, even drawn all the way up.
“No you don’t,” snapped the shop assistant, “You say that every time and none of them has ever materialised. So this time, out you…” he stopped suddenly, peering over their heads, into the distance, “What have you done now?”
Oscar and Maggs turned. Oscar suddenly realised that they had almost come full circle and were back at the books department. Away in the distance, beyond the books, there was what looked like camping things and surveyor’s equipment. Someone was running about down there and shouting.
“Tsk, customers,” said the shop assistant, who obviously saw the ‘assisting’ part of his job description as an unnecessary waste of his time, “Stay here.”
“I thought you wanted us to leave,” said Maggs.
“I’ll be back with security,” shot the assistant over his shoulder as he marched away through the books.
“Come on, Maggs,” Oscar tugged at her sleeve, anxious to get away before everything could be spoiled, “While he’s gone.”
“Wait a moment, Oscar,” Maggs was staring after the assistant, “There’s something…”
Maggs’ voice trailed off, her attention fixed on the distance. What was it now? He felt a sudden cold chill - as if a door had been opened somewhere and a wind had blown in from outside.
He suddenly realised that all the animals had also turned their heads to look back over his shoulder at the books. He turned that way slowly.
The reference section was empty, but away in the distance, among the tents, he could see that the lights had gone out. As he watched more lights went out, plunging more of the department into shadow. Someone was shouting somewhere again.
The cold chill was intensifying: there were goose bumps on his arm now.
The lights in the further books section went out.
Oscar felt panic rising in his throat, as a thick silence rolled in with the dimming light, a silence in which the tiniest noises became at once magnified and distant.
Someone screamed and then an old man with a knotted beard ran into the reference section from the darkness beyond. He tripped and fell, bringing a stack of books down with him. Oscar could hear that he was crying.
Then the light went out in the reference section.
“There’s something…” Maggs’ hand suddenly gripped Oscar’s shoulder. It was as if she was trying to pull him away, but neither of them could move.
Oscar shivered: it was really cold now - the cold of deep cellars, of high, lonely places, of stone and ice and dark malice.
Something shook the bookshelves like a storm wind passing, lacing Oscar’s face with ice and whipping his breath out behind him. Books fell to the floor, their pages rattling in the wind. And as they watched, something came ratcheting up from the pages, the black, scratchy lines of diagrams and drawings cross-hatching together, sketching out a thin, angular, scarecrow figure that stepped up out of the books. A half-completed drawing of something unimaginable, the work of an insane and impossible artist, the shape, the angle, the style constantly shifting and changing as it stalked out of the darkness and lifted a terrible clutch of talons and claws out towards them both.
A sudden thump against his back, a scrabble of paws and warm fur against his face and the little black cat that had been sitting on the floor beside them leapt up onto Oscar’s shoulder and launched itself, hissing, at the shape in the darkness. It folded itself away as the cat jumped straight through it, lines and stalks snapping as the wind sucked it away, back among the books, bouncing between the shelves like tumbleweed.