In the depths of Calanais, Phyllis and Clement bumped against the cobwebbed ceiling of the underground room, their legs dangling in the air like those of helpless spiders.
‘Please,’ Phyllis implored, ‘let us down!’
‘Ouch!’ Clement’s head bumped against an oak beam. His glasses almost got knocked off, and he pushed them quickly back up his nose.
The old man was pointing his long, bony finger at Phyllis and Clement, raising it and lowering it. Whenever he did, they would soar up and come down a few feet and then shoot upwards again, banging against the ceiling.
In his other hand the man clutched the photograph of Alexander Sturdy.
Phyllis flailed about. This was so different to being levitated by her great-grandfather in Venice. ‘Please, sir, we mean no harm!’ she cried.
‘You bring THIS with you’—the old man brandished the photo up at them—‘and you say to me you mean no HARM? Are you in cahoots with this vilest of villains? Are you in his employ?’
‘Oof!’ gasped Clement as he was bumped hard against the beams. ‘Hey, cut it out! Whaddya think we are, chandeliers?’
The ancient man’s eyes twinkled at that. His whiskers—not a full beard, but bristly enough to cover his long face—splayed outwards as a faint smile manifested on his lips.
At that moment, the huge rook swooped down the stairs. It glided through the room and came to perch on the old man’s shoulder.
‘Please,’ Phyllis implored again, raising her arm to shield her head from the ceiling, ‘please, Mr Myrddin, let us down?’ She tried to speak in a strong, confident way, but her voice was absorbed by something, and it came out muffled, as though she were speaking from far away.
The rook opened its beak and delivered a harsh screech. ‘SCRAAAAAAAARKKKKKKKK!’
At the sudden noise, another barrage of sound erupted, this time from inside Phyllis’s bag: ‘ARF! ARF! ARF! ARF! ARF! ARF! ARF!’
The old man spoke to the rook. ‘She knows my name, Corvus,’ he said to it, quietly.
Corvus the rook blinked his flame-yellow eyes and clacked his beak loudly.
‘He is Myrddin,’ Clement whispered to Phyllis. ‘Oof!’
‘Please, great wizard,’ Phyllis pleaded. ‘Lower us. I’ve been searching for you . . . my great-grandfather has been searching for you . . . we mean you no harm . . .’
When he heard mention of her great-grandfather, Myrddin took a long, hard look at Phyllis. There was something about her, something in her eyes and the shape of her mouth, that brought back to him a distant memory.
Phyllis gazed down at him. Despite the bumping and dangling she was undergoing, she tried smiling.
And the memory became immediate! Myrddin had seen that smile before, and he knew when and where!
Clement collided with the oaken beam again. This time, his glasses did get knocked off and, as if in horrible slow-motion, they fell to the floor. With a dreadful crack they shattered against the hard wooden boards.
‘No!’ he shouted angrily. ‘They’re the only pair I’ve got with me!’
Myrddin eyeballed Phyllis. ‘Tell me, what is your name?’
‘Phyllis,’ she gasped. ‘Phyllis Wong.’
Myrddin’s expression changed, as if a shadow were beginning to lift from his face. He gave Phyllis a shrewd, guarded stare. Then he exclaimed, ‘Ezcaphanum!’
What happened next took place swiftly: Myrddin lowered his finger and Phyllis and Clement plummeted towards the floor. Just when they were inches above it, holding out their hands to try to protect themselves, they stopped in the blink of an eye. They hung in the air, floating, and were able to step down—as though they were stepping down off an invisible step—onto the floorboards.
The flames of the candles around the walls billowed at the sudden descent, but stayed lit.
‘Th . . . thank you,’ Phyllis stammered, and Clement scrabbled about, picking up the pieces of his shattered spectacles.
‘Phyllis Wong.’ Myrddin repeated her name, and Corvus’s eyes regarded her, slit-like, yellow, waiting.
‘And this,’ Phyllis said, ‘is my friend, Clem.’ She opened the top of her bag and Daisy sprang out. ‘And Daisy.’
Daisy stood by Phyllis’s feet, watching the rook suspiciously.
‘Hound unbound,’ said Myrddin, observing Daisy.
Clement had picked up the three separate pieces of his glasses—the frames had snapped apart and the right lens was shattered completely. ‘Hello,’ he said, frowning at Myrddin.
‘Such a thick be-whiskering for one so young,’ said Myrddin, squinting at Clement’s handlebar moustache.
‘Oh,’ said Clem. ‘I’m mature for my age.’
Myrddin’s eyes twinkled. ‘Your roidi da ogli are broken, Master Whiskers.’
‘Huh?’
‘The crystals for your eyes.’
‘He means your glasses,’ said Phyllis, her voice muffled by the atmosphere.
‘Oh. Yeah.’ Clement was going red, and blinking heavily—he was upset about his specs. ‘I can’t see very well without these, and I didn’t bring my spares.’
‘Hold out the pieces,’ Myrddin commanded. His voice was deep, and flowed like a river in full current, not muffled like Phyllis’s or Clement’s. ‘All in one hand.’
Clement looked at the bits of his glasses, then put them all into his left hand and extended it towards Myrddin.
The old man reached into a pocket in his dark brown cloak and took out a long, willowy stick, thick at one end and tapering up to a twiggy finish. Phyllis watched carefully, her heart skipping a beat. This is his wand, she realised. The wand of Myrddin.
‘Eschefrew vetri da occhi celeriter!’ Myrddin spoke the words breathily, fast, waving the stick in a wide arc above Clement’s outstretched hand. A soft smell of fresh rosemary and fragrant lavender wafted into the room. In an instant, the glasses were restored—the frames reunited and the lenses as perfect as the day they’d been made.
‘Crorark,’ croaked Corvus, in approval.
‘Cool!’ Clement exclaimed, popping them quickly on.
Phyllis was tingling with the sort of deep excitement she tingled with whenever W.W. performed one of his special tricks that only he knew how to do.
‘That was marvellous,’ she said, her face glowing.
‘Marvellous is what I do,’ Myrddin said. ‘Marvellous is what I have always done. You are descended from one who understands marvellous, Phyllis Wong. Are you not?’
He studied her intensely, and Phyllis thought again how he reminded her of someone. It wasn’t only the man they’d seen on Clem’s phone. She tried to work out who but, as she stared at his features, something happened which made her catch her breath: his whole face shifted, changing shape and length and breadth. It wasn’t a big shift—his head didn’t grow oversized or anything—but it was enough to make him look like a different person. Different but similar at the same time.
And the funny thing was, with these new features, Myrddin reminded Phyllis of someone else. Someone apart from the man on the phone, and from the man she was trying to place in her memory a few seconds ago. And, frustratingly, she couldn’t place who this someone else was either!
Clement hadn’t observed the slight variance in Myrddin’s features. He was too happy to have his glasses restored, and was too busy looking all around the room, to notice anything else. ‘Thanks, Mr Myrddin,’ he said. ‘Man, these are even clearer than before. It’s like I’m not looking through glass at all, but I can see things like they’re magnified and close-up and crisp as can be!’
Phyllis said, ‘My great-grandfather was a famous magician. Way back in the early twentieth century. Um . . . way forward in the early twentieth century . . .’
‘Back,’ said Myrddin, still clutching the photo of Alexander Sturdy in one hand and his twig-wand in the other, ‘forward . . . they are one and the same to me, Phyllis Wong. And, as you are here now, they are one and the same to you, yes?’
‘They are,’ replied Phyllis.
‘Phyll’s a magician too,’ Clement said. ‘She’s brilliant!’
‘As brilliant as your great-grandfather?’ asked Myrddin. ‘As brilliant as Wallace Wong, Conjuror of Wonder!?’
Phyllis gasped. ‘You know W.W.? He’s been searching for you, trying to find you and . . . say, wait a minute! How do you know him?’
‘I would like to see your magic, Phyllis Wong,’ said Myrddin. There was a challenge in his voice, almost a command.
Phyllis took a deep breath. Performing magic—the sort of magic she performed—in front of the greatest wizard ever known to History? That was some ask, even for her. But a challenge was a challenge.
‘Okay,’ she said. She looked around the room, then at the table by the bed. On the table she saw the feather quills on a pile of papers. ‘May I?’ she asked Myrddin.
‘Anything you require.’ He gestured towards the table.
She went and took up one of the quills. The feathers were a deep red colour, and the spiny end had ink on it. Phyllis turned and faced the wizard, the red quill held aloft.
‘Behold, a small feat of the fantastic! Invented by a magician of great renown!’
Myrddin, Clement and Daisy watched as Phyllis laid the quill flat along her opened palm. It was a long feather, and the ends of it extended beyond her fingertips. ‘Alley oopus,’ declaimed Phyllis, holding her other hand above the quill.
Slowly, smoothly, the tip of the quill began to rise, up, up, up, until the quill was standing by itself, with no support, perfectly upright, balanced on Phyllis’s hand!
Clement’s eyes were big behind his glasses—he’d never seen her do this one.
Daisy wagged her short tail happily.
‘Crorark,’ croaked Corvus.
Myrddin smiled. ‘How did you do that?’ he asked, a cheeky look in his eye.
Phyllis winked at him. She took the feather from her hand and gave a small bow.
Then, with the flush of great excitement that always came after she’d performed an effect, her mind cleared. Suddenly she realised whom Myrddin reminded her of. ‘Holy moley!’ she whispered. Quickly she dropped the feather onto the table and took her Transiting journal out of her bag. She flipped the journal open and found one of the other photos she had in there: Hercule S. Perkus.
She held it up to the wizard. ‘This is . . . this was you?’ she asked him. The man in the photo had a shorter beard than Myrddin’s, and was dressed in more modern clothes, but there was a definite resemblance.
Myrddin clicked his fingers and Corvus shot across the room, snatched the photo from Phyllis’s fingers and brought it to his master, settling again on Myrddin’s shoulder.
‘Ah!’ said Myrddin. ‘You have been finding things, Phyllis Wong. You have discovered things unremembered, unrecalled, for a long, long Time.’
‘So it was you?’ repeated Phyllis.
‘It was me.’ Gently, Myrddin tossed the photo of Hercule S. Perkus up into the air and blew on it, waving his twig-wand as he did so. The photo floated across the room and back to Phyllis’s fingers.
Phyllis tingled—she loved his magic, and she wished she knew how to do that one.
‘I went forth as Hercule S. Perkus. And your great-grandfather was there, during that fateful week,’ said Myrddin, an edge creeping into his voice. ‘During that fateful week in which I also encountered the ventriloquist!’
Myrddin now tossed the photo of Alexander Sturdy up into the air, but not gently like he had tossed the Perkus photo. He threw this one high, waving his wand at it in a slashing movement. Sturdy’s image hovered up near the oaken beams; then it seemed to grow, swelling wider, taller, uglier.
Phyllis gasped.
Clement’s jaw dropped open.
‘Rrff!’ barked Daisy, uneasily.
The smell of rosemary and lavender, now combined with a pungent odour of rotting fruit, wafted about the room. Then Myrddin slashed his twig-wand again at the distorted photo.
‘Spargo sparsi sparsum perdo effwhoofium!’
With a loud P O P, the photograph exploded into a hundred bits of paper. Every piece of the distorted Alexander Sturdy floated in the air for a few seconds before dissolving away into nothing.
As did the smell.
Phyllis shook her head. She realised she’d stopped breathing while all that was happening.
Clement rubbed his moustache this way and that. ‘That was brilliant,’ he congratulated Myrddin.
Phyllis observed that the old man was looking very grim.
‘That man I just dissolved,’ he said slowly, ‘became the bane of my existence. He is the reason I have stayed, for most of my Time, holed up here, where I watch the planets and the stars, and where I prefer to slumber. He was the one who stole from me, something of my magic, something that I know I will never recover . . .’
‘Crorark,’ croaked Corvus, harshly, raspingly.
Clement gestured to the bed in the corner. ‘Is that where you sleep?’ he asked.
Myrddin pondered his question for a few moments. Then his face broadened as a wide smile emerged. He laughed—a long, loud, deep laugh.
‘Sleep?’ repeated Myrddin when his mirth had subsided. ‘Aye, Master Whiskers. I have been sleeping here for hundreds of your years . . . Sleep, deep, deep enough to reap.’
‘Huh?’ Clement said out of the side of his mouth to Phyllis.
‘He likes to speak in rhymes sometimes,’ she whispered back.
Clement gave her an and now it’s contagious sort of look.
Myrddin motioned for them to sit on the floor. He lowered himself onto the chair by the table. Corvus hopped off his shoulder and onto the table, where he perched, watching, his glossy black feathers twitching every now and then.
‘Yes, I have been sleeping here at Calanais,’ said Myrddin. ‘There were Times I desired to walk amongst the humans. They who are half-like me. So every now and then throughout Time I used to come away from my slumbers, and venture out to . . . to have some fun.’ He gave a mischievous grin. Then his face fell. ‘But I always returned here, to sleep, if that is how you look at it. Being awake is not something I enjoy for long periods of time . . .’
Sitting cross-legged on the floor, with Daisy perched on one of her legs, Phyllis got the impression that there was a weariness, a sort of sad weariness, in what Myrddin was telling them.
‘I stopped venturing out into the future world soon after that fateful night. Soon after the theft of that which should never have been taken,’ Myrddin said slowly, ‘I vowed to have as little to do with the world of humanity as I could. But, Phyllis Wong, being holed up with only Corvus for company can take a toll on one. Not that Corvus is bad company; no, I do not mean that.’
‘Crorark,’ croaked Corvus.
‘You went out through the Pockets, didn’t you?’ Phyllis asked. ‘Through the TimePockets?’
‘TimePockets?’ Myrddin looked at her warily. ‘What are these things, these TimePockets of which you speak?’
‘It’s what we call them. Wallace Wong called them the Pockets, and I call them TimePockets. They’re the places, the openings, the blemishes in Time. If you can see them, you can Transit between Times. My great-grandfather believes that you invented the whole system of being able to do that.’
Myrddin regarded her, his left eyebrow arching high up his forehead. ‘Oh, he does, does he?’
‘It’s why he’s been searching for you,’ Phyllis said, ‘ever since he disappeared in 1936. It’s why he’s stayed . . . hidden . . . like you, I guess. He’s been trying to find you, to unravel the secrets more.’
The old man shook his head slowly. ‘There are some secrets that not even I can share. For secrecy is a paramount virtue when it comes to the unfathomable.’
Phyllis intertwined a thumb and pinkie finger. ‘I know what you’re saying. It’s the same in my sort of magic. But, please, Mr Myrddin, if you were to meet my great-grandfather and reveal even some of the secrets of Transiting, or to share them with me so that I could share them with him, why, he’d be—’
Myrddin interrupted her. ‘But as I told you, we have already met, Wallace Wong and I. During that fateful week when we were performing on the same bill together.’
‘When you went forth as Hercule S. Perkus?’ Phyllis said.
The wizard nodded slowly.
‘Was that when you got robbed?’ asked Clement.
Myrddin gritted his teeth and nodded even more slowly.
‘Tell us what happened?’ Phyllis asked. ‘Please?’
‘Yeah,’ added Clement. ‘What was taken?’
‘Ah,’ Myrddin said, ‘do I dare tell you? Do you really desire to know what took place?’
‘Yes!’ exclaimed Phyllis and Clement together.
‘Rarf!’ added Daisy.
Myrddin ran his long, thin fingers along the twig-wand thoughtfully. ‘Perhaps it would be a good Time for me to tell you what really happened. To share the burden of my loss. When you know what went on with this vile ventriloquist, you will understand why he is so dangerous. Disturbed. Destructive. Deranged.’
Suddenly Myrddin’s eyes lit up, as though bolts of lightning were waltzing around in the darks of his eyeballs. ‘But what malarkey do I spout? Time to tell you? We have all the Time in the worlds. Let me take the Time . . . let me conjure the Time . . . to show you what really happened!’
‘You mean—?’ began Phyllis.
‘Protinus Blurtemacias!’ cried Myrddin, springing to his feet. And, with a wave of his twig-wand, he rose Phyllis, Daisy and Clement to their feet and paws also and, with another wave, propelled them speedily out of the room before him, headlong into the Anamygduleon Pocket glimmering twinklingly at the top of the stairs.