The Bookman - Lavie Tidhar [38]
"My clothing is scant, and all tattered and torn, kind friends, I have none. I am sad and forlorn! And far from this cottage so lonely and wild, I'll wander away, cried the poor drunkard's child!"
And they fell, still laughing, onto the wide bed.
Orphan sat up on the edge of the bed. "What time is it?"
Tom Thumb grinned and said, "It is twelve o' the clock, and all is well."
Orphan stood up. A sudden sense of urgency seized him. "Midnight?"
"You slept for a long time."
"You needed to!" Ariel said. "You was like Hamlet's ghost, coming in 'ere last night."
"I have something for you," Tom said. "From the shop."
"From Jack?"
Tom shook his head. "I didn't see him at all. Perhaps he was in the basement, but if so, he wasn't coming out."
He took out a folded sheaf of paper from his back pocket and handed it to Orphan, who opened it.
"From that infernal magician," Tom said. "That Maskelyne fellow. He asked about you, then made the note appear in the pages of the book I was reading. The ass."
Orphan smiled, knowing the magician's fondness for elaborate illusion, and read the short note.
Dear Orphan (Maskelyne wrote),
I was dreadfully sorry to hear of recent events, and am only glad that you yourself are alive, and on the road to recovery.
If you recall, the last time we spoke I offered you to come and see me at the Egyptian Hall if you ever had need of counsel.
Let me once more extend this offer. If magic is an illu
sion, the act of smoke and mirrors, then nevertheless
the mirrors we hide may reflect, sometimes, a deeper
truth, one not so visible to the naked eye.
Come, and come soon.
Yours,
J. Maskelyne
"What does he want?" Tom asked.
Orphan shrugged. The words of the magician's simple sympathy had affected him, and for a moment he couldn't speak. Once again he was overwhelmed with that image of Lucy, smiling, the book held in her hands, and then the bright searing explosion that had ended her life, and changed his forever. And he thought, I must act. I must find the Bookman. He had almost forgotten, in this momentary haven; but now that ghostly, mist-like figure seemed to re-form around him, to press against the windows with its silence and to watch him as he stood there helpless. The words of his friend Gilgamesh returned to him. This is the time of myth, he had said, and Orphan thought, then I am the minotaur, and I am trapped in the Bookman's maze.
"He invited me to visit him at the Egyptian Hall," he said. "He was very kind."
"The Egyptian Hall?" Belinda said. She rose from the bed (where Ariel was now sitting cross-legged, an open tin box on her knees, and rolled a cigarette with Tom Thumb's cannabis, which he regularly bought at Captain Powers' Pipe Shop near Leicester Square), "Me and Ariel went there only last week. You must go see it! They have the most amazing machine there, an old, old automaton that plays chess and can beat any man or woman what tries to challenge it!"
More automatons. Was his life now bound into the aspirations of machines as well as human beings? He thought, I would send him a note and apologise for not being able to come. He would understand.
"Yes!" Ariel said, "And the funny thing is, it's made up to look like an old Turk!"
The words trickled, slow and with a stealthy smoothness, into Orphan's mind. "What did you say?"
His voice sounded to him like it emerged not from him at all but from some place far away. What had Byron said?
Ask the Turk. And he had not paid it much attention. Why?
"I said it looks like an old Turk," Ariel said, her fingers smoothing out a cone-shaped cigarette. She lit it with a match and a sweet, pungent smoke rose into the air. "With a turban and a drooping moustache and hands that move across the board like they was real." She inhaled deeply from the cigarette, shrugged, and said, "You should go see it. There's also a mechanical duck that eats food and then shits it out."
"French," Belinda added.
Orphan looked at the two