John Fowles - The Magus

Her head was shaking. “Please forget I said that.” But after a moment she leant back and said, “Yes. Obviously we thought you must have guessed.”

“Film stars?” My voice was high with incredulity. She raised her finger, as if we must keep quiet.

“No. But there’s only one profession—isn’t there?—where you do kiss strange men with apparent passion. Because it’s part of your job.” She suddenly grimaced. “I’ve just thought of another. I didn’t mean that.”

“You’re trying to tell me you’re both actresses?”

“We’re not even that. Just two girls in desperate need of help.”

“Help?”

“Are there any police on the island?”

I clutched my hair.

“Let me get this straight. First of all you were ghosts. Then you were schizophrenics. Now you are next week’s consignment to Saudi Arabia.”

She smiled. “Sometimes I almost wish we were. It would be simpler.” She turned and put her hand on my knee. “Nicholas, I’m notorious for never taking anything very seriously, and that’s partly why we’re here, and even now it’s fun in a way—but we really are just two English girls who’ve got ourselves into such deep waters these last two or three months that…” she left an eloquent silence.

“But how did he get hold of you? Where were you actresses?”

“Tomorrow. Tomorrow morning we’re all meeting. The three of us.”

“How do you know?”

“Because nothing here happens by chance. It’s all planned in advance.” She touched my sleeve. “You must tell me the time.”

“Including this?”

“Including my meeting you. But not what we’ve said.” She pulled her cloak round her. “Or only some of what we’ve said.” She took my hand and looked at the time. “I must go.”

She stood up.

“I’ll come with you now.”

“No.”

“She told me you live on a yacht.”

“She told me what a terribly good impromptu liar you were.”

I stood up and she put her hands on my shoulders and regarded me with a kind of anxious concern. “Nicholas, let’s be friends. Now we’ve met, I do trust you.”

“That’s hardly the question. Do I trust you?”

I answered “no” in my mind, but I reached up and took her hands; the cloak was open. I could see the white dress, the white throat. What I suspected of Conchis, what she had accused me of, I gave myself to taste: the charms of a ménage a trois ; that wild kissing. Who cared about real meaning? I pressed her hands.

“At least tell me your name.”

“Rose.”

I pressed her hands again.

“Come on. Friends.”

“Call me anything you like. You baptize me.”

“No.”

She smiled; a pressure back, the hands withdrawn.

“I must go. I hate all this mystery. But just tonight.”

“I’m coming with you.”

“You can’t.” She had that same slightly desperate urgency Lily had had two weeks before. She moved away a step or two, as if to test me. I stood still.

“I’ll follow you.”

“Tomorrow morning.”

“Now.”

She eyed me, then shrugged, with regret.

“Then I’m awfully sorry, but I’ll have to use the emergency exit.”

With her eyes still on mine, she called. Not very loud; to carry thirty or forty yards; as if to a dog.

“Anubis!”

I whipped round. She came and put her arm on mine. “Actually this looks better. He won’t hurt you if you stay here.”

Already I could hear someone coming swiftly down through the trees behind us. I saw a monstrous dark shape. “Rose” stood near me as if to protect me.

“Who is it?”

“Our dearly beloved watchdog.” Her tone was dry; and when I looked at her, she confirmed its dryness.

It was the figure from the death and the niaiden scene of two weeks before. The jackal-head, the “nurse.” Standing against us, in black from head to foot, the long ears pointing stiffly up, the muzzle waiting.

She muttered quickly, “Don’t be afraid.” Then, in a very low whisper, “We had no choice tonight.” I didn’t know whether she meant “you and I,” or “Lily and I.”

She started to walk down past the statue. I looked back up the hill. The figure had not moved. I began to walk after her. Immediately she heard me she stopped. When I came up with her, she gave me a wide-eyed look and then she said again, “Anubis.”

The figure came and stood some six feet away. I could see that behind the macabre disguise was a big, tall man. He moved like a very fit man, too. I would be no match for him physically. I shrugged.

“ Force majeure .”

“Just stay here. Please just stay here.” She turned to the figure. Her voice was cold. “And there is absolutely no need for violence. We all know you’re very strong.”

She turned back to me, touched my arm one last time as if to reassure me; then she disappeared down through the trees towards the carob under which the man and the girl had stood.

I spoke.

“I suppose you’re the Reverend Mr. Foulkes.”

He raised his arm and took off the headpiece. I was looking at a Negro. He had on black trousers, a black shirt, black gym shoes; even black gloves. He did not smile, but simply watched me. Poised yet coiled; an athlete, a boxer.

I calculated whether I could risk a dash into the trees. But it was already too late. She had disappeared; and I felt sure that her real destination was in some very different direction.

“Where you from? The West Indies?”

No answer.

“Well what are you supposed to be—the black eunuch or something?”

No answer again; but I thought there was a tiny contraction of the eyes.

“I’m going back to sit on the seat. All right?” He did not even nod. I said again “All right?” and then moved crabwise back up the hill, cautiously, watching him. He stayed where he was, and we remained like that for perhaps a minute. I lit a cigarette to try to counter the released adrenalin, and listened in vain for the sound of an engine down by the sea. Then, abruptly, the black figure came up towards me. He stood in front of me, blocking out the sky. The cigarette was snatched out of my mouth and flicked away. Then in the same movement I was jerked to my feet. I said, “Now wait a minute.” But he was strong and as quick as a leopard. Sweating a little. I could smell his sweat. An absolutely humorless face, and an angry one. It was no good, I was frightened—there was something insanely violent about his eyes, and it flashed through my mind that he was a black surrogate of Henrik Nygaard. Without warning he spat full in my face and then palm-pushed me sharply back. The edge of the seat cut into my legs and I fell half across it. As I wiped the spittle off my nose and cheek I saw him trotting away, carrying his mask, through the trees to the north. I opened my mouth to shout something at him, then said it in a whisper. I kept wiping my face with my handkerchief, but it was filthy, defiled.

I went back to the gate and ran down the path to Moutsa. There I stripped off my clothes and plunged into the sea and rubbed my face in the salt water, then swam a hundred yards out. The sea was alive with phosphorescent diatoms that swirled in long trails from my hands and feet. I dived and seal-turned on my back and looked up through the water at the blurred white specks of the stars. The sea cooled, calmed, silked round my genitals. I felt safe out there, and sane, out of their reach, all their reaches.

Contracts … actresses … I was now asked to believe that they were hired to play their roles; not only that, but so in the dark about Conchis’s intentions that they didn’t even know whether I was not deceiving them exactly as they were deceiving me; trying to vamp Lily as Lily vamped me. But when I thought back to various inexplicable things Lily had said, to inconsistent looks, tentative looks, those out-of-role looks, and other doubtfulnesses beyond any she might have been acting, I began to wonder, to waver… I had long suspected that there was some hidden significance in the story of de Deukans and his gallery of automata. What Conchis had done, or was trying to do, was to turn Bourani into such a gallery, and real human beings into his puppets… but how could they be his puppets when they knew so much about him? Or did they know so much about him?