Call Me Wizard

Evelyn E. Smith

• Editore: Start Publishing LLC
• Anno: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781649741493
• Argomento: Literature
• Categoria: Science Fiction

Coveting someone's wife and place in the world is an old, old story—except that the woman and the place Philip coveted were his own! What might alternate time-lines in alternate universes hold. Be careful what you wish for. Evelyn E. Smith is best known as the author of the Miss Melville mysteries. From 1952 to 1969 she wrote dozens of science fiction and fantasy short stories that appeared in magazines such as The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Galaxy, Super Science Fiction, and Fantastic Universe. Her stories were witty, well written, often humorous, and always unforgettable.

Coveting someone’s wife and place in the world is an old, old story—except that the woman and the place Philip coveted were his own!

I

“What are you doing, scroyle?” Dorothea demanded, brandishing her ladle. Her elongated shadow cast on the wall by the leaping flames still gave Philip a tremor, although he’d been wed to the wench for nigh onto a decade. “You know right well ’tis you who should be a-mixing of this brew—’tis naught but a charm ’gainst the megrims, as any fool might contrive, for I ha’ more weighty matters to which I should tend.”

Philip had in truth been wondering why she had not noted his preoccupation afore. ’Twas queer she had let him be without hindrance for so long a space of time. Could she be up to some deviltry of her own? No, not Dolly-deviltry she was capable of, right enough, but ’twas not like her to be secret about her actures. For whom bad she to fear? There was no sorceress in the world who was her peer and, having a trace of royal blood in her veins, she was virtually above the law. Devil take the wench, why had he ever consented to espouse her? For ’twas monstrous hard to get shut of such a paragon.

“Jade me not, giglet!” he replied. “You’re forever making plaint that I’m naught but a third-grade wizard! How can I pass the examination to better my rank if you’ll not let me ply my own artifices?”

“Humph!” she sniffed, adding a pinch of powdered mummy to her brew. “Sith you’re really desirous to be perfected in the mystical art, you could do no better than emulate me, ’stead of practicing your own paltry tricks—for, as all the world knows, I’m the most parlous necromancer in the realm.”

“In this realm,” Philip spoke before he thought.

She stared at him, and he could not fathom the look in her flat yellow eyes. “In any realm, rag,” quoth she. “What d’ye mean, ‘this realm’?”

Philip glanced down at the pipkin in which he was mingling his own modest concoction. “Marry, I’ve heard talk,” he said, somewhat weakly, “that there are other realms of existence—outside this one. Aye, and that there have been those from this realm who have visited another—”

“Twaddle!” Dorothea retorted, bending over her cauldron so that her long red hair concealed her face. “You’ll never make a wizard, dribbling, if you’ll not learn to distinguish ’twixt superstition and sorcery. Not that I fancy you’ll ever attain even second rank, poor natural. Sorcery’s a woman’s work—it takes more of a closeness to nature, a practicality, than you or most men own.”

Philip merely grunted in reply, for he feared he had said overmuch already. Superstition, push!

So there was something she did not know! He’d show the haggard wit-snapper the difference ’tween superstition and sorcery! For had he not come across an antique volume that gave the very receipt for the changement of existences writ out in black and white—with, moreover, the exact measurements for bat’s blood and grated mandrake root and suchlike modern ingredients—and the proper spell to be chanted set down precisely in all the customary forms! And pictures, too, illustrating all these mysteries. Did that look like superstition, forsooth?

But he’d not tell her—let her discover it for herself when he was gone. Then she’d grieve over his loss when ’twould be too late. “Aye, weep your eyes out, my lady,” he muttered. “I’ll warrant me you’ll ne’er find another spouse as lovesome as I—” “ Eh?” Dorothea queried.

“’Tis naught,” he replied hastily. “Merely a spell I was running through.”

“Well, hold it to yourself, else it’ll mingle with mine and who knows what strange and unnatural forces it might unleash? Sorcery’s a serious thing, rogue. Y’must not slubber it.”

“Aye,” he agreed. “’Twould not be well.”

But it was not for that reason he assented. It was rather that he did not want her to hear the spell he was chanting. For once he had learned that they existed, he had searched the various realms of existence in his crystal—and found another Philip Gardner marvelously like himself.

Now he gazed into the crystal, which he held concealed ’neath a fold of his palliament, and saw the image of his counterpart reflected therein. How frolicksome a jade was Nature—to fashion two men in the same assemblance, yet make one a handsome, hearty rogue and the other, though touch for touch the same fellow, a lank, pallid, peeled cullion.

Peeled...Philip felt his beard thoughtfully. Philip² had no beard—belike the poor twig was incapable of one. So his own brave valance was like to prove monstrous awkward. For he could not remove it ere he left or Dorothea’d be sure to take notice and impeach his motives therefor. He’d have to get it off afterward and the same for his robes...mortal strange attire they flaunted in that other realm.

But now that he had both spells pat, he’d transfer himself there. He looked into the depths of his crystal. Marry, but that was a plausive dame with whom Philip² was holding parlance. For shame, the rudesby had made her weep! Let her but tarry a bit and her estate would be bettered.

“I’ll consolate you, my pretty wench,” Philip murmured.

“What?” Dorothea said sharply.

“I did not address you, kicksy-wicksy,” he snarled. “I but spoke to myself. Must I crave your leave to soliloquize?”

“If y’addressed yourself as ‘pretty wench,’” she retorted, “you’re even scanter of wit than I’d fancied... eh, Perkin?”

The cat miaued. Always agreeing with her, Philip thought resentfully—smoothing her and soothing her. Well, she might be his superior in sorcery, but he had never stooped to fawning on her like Perkin. And let her see how she fancied this second Philip whom he was substituting for his own sweet self in this existence—the Philip who made women weep. But what if she discovered forthwith that Philip² was not her own lusty spouse? Impossible. Had she not said herself she placed no credence in the other realms of existence? And with his magical arts—for he had more doctrine than ever the proud-stomached wench had supposed—he’d alter the form of the false Philip to resemble himself, the veritable Philip, even more closely than Nature’s original design.

“Here, Perkin,” Dorothea commanded. “Lave me this crucible.”

The cat obediently licked it clean with his tongue. As I have been doing in essence for this many a year, Philip thought. But I’ll be her pet domestic no longer. She never thought I’d have the , audacity to quit her—that’s twice she’ll have been proved wrong. That is, if the spell does work...

He checked to make sure he had an ample store of the mixture, in case the need should arise for him to depart from the next realm of existence incontinently...and his crystal ball...and his pocket Grimoire. He decided he had all the equipment he required, thought, Farewell, Doll-mayhap now you’ll realize what a rare treasure you had in me!”

And Philip disappeared from that realm of existence while Dorothea’s back was turned. Her back was still turned when Philip² took his place.

The transfer had been virtually instantaneous, so that Philip² was only just aware that something odd had happened to him. He had blacked out and there had been an odd rushing sound in his ears—Philip¹ passing him in infinity—and now here he was in a strange room. No, not wholly strange—although it was entirely different, except perhaps in dimensions, for some reason it reminded him of his own living room.

The furniture, so far as he could make it out in the half-darkness, was massive and ornate, unlike the chaste simplicity of his own Swedish modern. And the smell here was different, too—in fact, he had never been conscious of any odor at all in his own quarters, although, as a scientist, he realized that one was never conscious of the distinctive odor of one’s own person or one’s own home-odors which have little to do with cleanliness or uncleanliness, but stem from variations in food habits, metabolism, cleansing agents and furniture polish.

In this room, it was impossible to avoid noticing an almost tangible cloud of what smelled like the more pungent chemicals, mixed with smoke, heavy perfume or incense, spices and a strong taint of decay. The fireplace in his living room had been a small genteel installation, used only for occasionally cultivating small genteel blazes designed solely for visual appeal.

Here was a huge fireplace, containing a roaring inferno that gave this room what little light it had. And there had certainly been neither a cauldron in his room nor a gaunt female figure in flowing robes stirring its contents and ululating pensively to herself: “Bat’s blood, cat’s blood, pickled capers-snake’s tongue, drake’s tongue, purge the vapors.”

“There must be some logical reason for this,” he told himself sternly, “as there is a reasonable explanation for everything. If I keep calm, I shall find out.” He applied himself to calm thinking. “Since this lady is the only person in the room, she is the logical one to whom I should apply for information.” An odd irrelevant thought—it occurred to him that she looked like one of those sackcloth-and-glamor witches drawn by that fellow Adams. Or was it Addams?

As he emerged into the ragged circle of light cast by the fire, the long amber eyes of the woman seemed to see for the first time. She was clearly not afraid. Her throaty contralto laughter played delicate arpeggios upon Philip’s nerves. He couldn’t help wondering whether, in the reversing roles of male and female that characterized the mid-Twentieth Century, he had not been the victim of a white slave gang. After all, his female students had found him attractive.

“I knew y’couldn’t do it, geck!” the woman informed him with a visible gloat, waving her ladle in triumph. “Any fool could disappear for the matter of a minute, eh, Perkin?”

There was a yowl from the darkness where, beyond the reach of the firelight a pair of nitid green eyes regarded Philip² knowingly. It was only a black cat, virtually indistinguishable from the shadows, yet a memory of the stories he had read in his childhood before he decided that fiction was unworthy of the higher intellect stirred the hairs on the back of the man’s neck.

“A witch,” the memory whispered, “a witch and her familiar.”

But this was absurd. He knew no such beings as witches existed. And why did he persist in feeling that, somehow, he was still in his own living room? Was all this his imagination? He had been studying too hard...overwork must have turned his brain. But one must be polite, even to the creations of one’s own diseased brain.

“I—I beg your pardon, madam,” he began, resisting the temptation to mop his brow, although the blast of heat that assailed him from the front provided ample justification. Behind him, cold lapped in icy waves at his spine. It must be England, he thought wildly. No central heating.

“Don’t try your cozening airs on me, my lad!” the woman howled, waving her ladle so carelessly that part of the liquid it contained spattered on the faded Saruk, leaving a charred black circle and a stench where it fell. “You’ve failed, jolthead,” she went on with evident relish. “Now you’ll not deny that I am arch-sorcerer in this household or, in fact, any!”

“Madam,” Philip² said , “I’m very much afraid you’ve mistaken me for someone else.”

She stared at him. She was fairly young, he saw, and if the carroty hair that hung in elf-locks all around her thin face were arranged more becomingly, she might be rather attractive in an elegant angular Vogueish sort of way, for all her lack of grooming.

“Is this some jape?” the woman demanded. “D’ye think to gull me into supposing you’ve indeed journeyed to another realm according to your fond conceit? There is another realm to which I will dispatch you, if you persist in your fantastical behavior.” Narrowing her eyes, she peered at him. “And what have you done with your beard, meacock?”

“Madam,” Philip² said desperately, “I’m not whoever you think I am, I assure you. My name is. Philip Gardner. I’m a member of the faculty of—”

“Of course your name is Philip Gardner. And Philip Gardner it was at the time , I wed you, ten years agone, when I was too young to know what I was doing.”

“There’s some mistake,” Philip² persisted. “I’m not your husband—although I ...