Lev Grossman - The Magicians

In the window a single red leaf flapped crazily in the wind on the end of a bare branch, having hung on longer into the fall than any of its fellows. Quentin watched it. The wind flailed the leaf back on forth on the end of its stem. It seemed like the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. All he wanted was to go on looking at it for one minute longer. He would give anything for that, just one more minute with his little red leaf.

He must have slipped into a trance, or fallen asleep — he didn’t remember. He woke up to the sound of the man on stage singing softly and high under his breath. His voice was surprisingly tender:

He lapsed into humming. Then, with no warning, he vanished.

It happened so silently and so suddenly that at first Quentin didn’t notice he was gone. In any case his departure was upstaged by Professor March, who’d been standing onstage the entire time with his mouth open. The instant the man was gone March crumpled forward bonelessly off the stage and knocked himself cold on the hardwood floor.

Quentin tried to stand up. Instead he slid off his chair, down onto the floor between the rows of seats. His arms, legs, and back were hideously cramped. There was no strength in them. Slowly, lying on the floor in a mixture of agony and relief, he stretched out his legs. Delicious bubbles of pain released in his knees, as if he were finally unbending them after a trans-hemispherical flight in coach. Tears of relief started in his eyes. It was over. The man was finally gone and nothing terrible had happened. Alice was groaning, too. A pair of shoes, probably hers, was in his face. The whole room rocked with moans and sobs.

Afterward Quentin would learn that Fogg had mustered the entire staff almost immediately, as soon as the man had made his appearance. The school’s defensive spells detected him instantly, even if they didn’t keep him out. By all accounts Fogg made a surprisingly competent battlefield commander: calm, organized, rapid and accurate in his assessment of the situation, skillful in his deployment of the resources at his disposal.

Over the course of the morning an entire temporary scaffold had been constructed around the outside of the tower. Professor Heckler, wearing a welder’s helmet to shield his eyes, had nearly set the tower on fire with pyrotechnical attacks. Professor Sunderland had heroically attempted to phase herself through the wall, but to no avail, and anyway it wasn’t clear what she would have done if she succeeded. Even Bigby made an appearance, deploying some exotic nonhuman witchcraft that — Quentin got the impression — had made the rest of the faculty a little uncomfortable.

That evening after dinner, after the usual announcements about clubs and events and activities had been sullenly and desultorily attended to, Dean Fogg addressed the student body to try to explain what had happened.

He stood at the head of the long dining room table, looking older than usual, as the candles guttered down and the First Years gloomily cleared the last of the silverware. He fussed with his cuffs and touched his temples where he was losing his thin blond hair.

“It will not come as a surprise to many of you that there are other worlds besides our own,” he began. “This is not conjecture, it is fact. I have never been to these worlds, and you will never go there. The art of passing between worlds is an area of magic about which very little is known. But we do know that some of these worlds are inhabited.

“Probably the beast we met today was physically quite vast.” (“The Beast” was what Fogg called the thing in the gray suit, and afterward nobody ever referred to it any other way.) “What we saw would have been a small part of it, an extremity it chose to push into our sphere of being, like a toddler groping around in a tide pool. Such phenomena have been observed before. They are known in the literature as Excrescences.

“Its motivations are difficult to guess.” He sighed heavily. “To such beings we look like swimmers paddling timidly across the surface of their world, silhouetted against the light from above, sometimes diving a little below the surface but never going very deep. Ordinarily they pay no attention to us. Unfortunately something about Professor March’s incantation today caught the Beast’s attention. I understand it may have been corrupted or interrupted in some way. That error offered the Beast an opportunity to enter our world.”

At this Quentin convulsed inwardly but kept his face composed. It had been him. He had done it. Fogg went on.

“The Beast spiraled up out of the depths, like a deep-water shark intent on seizing a swimmer from below. Its motivations are impossible to imagine, but it did appear as if it was looking for something, or someone. I do not know whether it found what it was looking for. We may never know.”

Ordinarily Fogg projected an air of certainty and confidence, tempered by his natural slight ridiculousness, but that night he looked disoriented. He lost his train of thought. He fingered his tie.

“The incident is finished now. The students who witnessed the incident will all be examined, medically and magically, and then cleansed in case the Beast has marked or tagged or tainted them. Tomorrow’s classes are canceled.”

He stopped there and left the room abruptly. Everybody had thought he would say more.

But all that came much later. Lying on the floor after the attack, the agony fading from his arms and legs and back, Quentin felt only good things. He felt relieved to be alive. Disaster had been averted. He had made a terrible mistake, but everything was all right now. He felt a profound gratitude for the old, splintery wooden underside of the chair he was looking up at. It was fascinating and beautiful. He could have looked at it forever. It was even a little thrilling to have been through something like that and lived to tell about it. In a way he was a hero. He breathed deeply and felt the good solid floor under his back. The first thing he wanted to do, he realized, was to put his hand reassuringly on Alice’s warm soft ankle, which was next to his head. He was so grateful to be able to finally look at her again.

He didn’t know yet that Amanda Orloff was dead. The Beast had eaten her alive.

The rest of Quentin’s Third Year at Brakebills went by beneath a gray watercolor wash of quasi-military vigilance. In the weeks that followed the attack the school was locked down both physically and magically. Faculty members wandered the grounds retracing the lines of its ancient defensive spells, renewing and strengthening them and casting new ones. Professor Sunderland spent an entire day walking backward all the way around the school’s perimeter, scattering colored powders on the snow behind her in carefully braided trails, her plump cheeks turning pink with cold. She was followed by Professor Van der Weghe, who checked her work, and preceded by a gaggle of attentive students who cleared brush and fallen logs out of her path and resupplied her with materiel. It had to be done in one unbroken circuit.

Cleansing the auditorium was just a matter of ringing a few bells and burning sage in the corners, but resetting the school’s main wards took a solid week; according to student rumor they were all cinched to an enormous worked-iron totem kept in a secret room at the campus’s exact geographical center, wherever that was, but nobody had ever seen it. Professor March, who after his ordeal never quite lost a certain anxious, hunted look, roamed endlessly in and out of the school’s many basements and sub-basements and cellars and catacombs, where he obsessively tended and reinforced the foundation spells that secured them against attack from below. The Third Years had made a bonfire at their Equinox party, but now the faculty made a real bonfire, fed with specially prepared cedar logs, dried and peeled and as straight as railroad ties, stacked in an arcane, eye-bending configuration like a giant Chinese puzzle that took Professor Heckler all day to get right. When he finally lit it, using a twist of paper with words scribbled on it in Russian, it burned like magnesium. They were discouraged from looking directly at it.