The Manticore

" 'I can't imagine anywhere I'd rather be,' I said slowly and deliberately. 'I'll go. Thank you very much for suggesting it. Now you run along, or you'll miss your appointment.'

"Off he went, grateful to have done something for me and to have escaped without trouble. He wasn't telling me anything I didn't already know. I had been to Eisengrim's Soiree of Illusions the week before, with my father and Denyse and Lorene, whose birthday it was. I was sucked into it at the last minute, and had not liked the show at all, though I could see that it was skilful. But I detested Magnus Eisengrim.

"Shall I tell you why? Because he was making fools of us all, and so cleverly that most of us liked it; he was a con man of a special kind, exploiting just that element in human credulity that most arouses me – I mean the desire to be deceived. You know that maddening situation that lies behind so many criminal cases, where somebody is so besotted by somebody else that he lays himself open to all kinds of cheating and ill-usage, and sometimes to murder? It isn't love, usually; it's a kind of abject surrender, an abdication of common sense. I am a victim of it, now and then, when feeble clients decide that I am a wonder-worker and can do miracles in court. I imagine you get it, as an analyst, when people think you can unweave the folly of a lifetime. It's a powerful force in life, yet so far as I know it hasn't even a name – "

"Excuse me – yes, it has a name. We call it projection."

"Oh. I've never heard that. Well, whatever it is, it was going full steam ahead in that theatre, where Eisengrim was fooling about twelve hundred people, and they were delighted to be fooled and begging for more. I was disgusted, and most of all with the nonsense of the Brazen Head.

"It was second to the last illusion on his program. I never saw the show to the end. I believe it was some sexy piece of nonsense vaguely involving Dr. Faustus. But The Brazen Head of Friar Bacon was what had caused the most talk. It began in darkness, and slowly the light came up inside a big human head that floated in the middle of the stage, so that it glowed. It spoke, in a rather foreign voice. 'Time is,' it said, and there was a tremble of violins; 'Time was,' it said, and there was a chord of horns; 'Time's past,' it said, and there was a very quiet ruffle of Drums, and the lights came up just enough for us to see Eisengrim – he wore evening clothes, but with knee-breeches, as if he were at Court – who told us the legend of the Head that could tell all things.

"He invited the audience to lend him objects, which his assistants sealed in envelopes and carried to the stage, where he mixed them up in a big glass bowl. He held up each envelope as he chose it by chance, and the Head identified the owner of the hidden object by the number of the seat in which he was sitting. Very clever, but it made me sick, because people were so delighted with what was, after all, just a very clever piece of co-operation by the magician's troupe.

"Then came the part the audience had been waiting for and that caused so much sensation through the city. Eisengrim said the Head would give personal advice to three people in the audience. This had always been sensational, and the night I was there with my father's theatre party the Head had said something that brought the house down, to a woman who was involved in a difficult legal case; it enraged me because it was virtually contempt of court – a naked interference in something that was private and under the most serious consideration our society provides. I had talked a great deal about it afterward, and Denyse had told me not to be a spoil-sport, and my father had suggested that I was ruining Lorene's party – because of course this sort of nonsense was just the kind of thing a fool like Lorene would think marvellous.

"So you see I wasn't in the best mood for the Soiree of Illusions, but some perversity compelled me to go, and I bought a seat in the top gallery, where I assumed nobody would know me. A lot of people had been going to this show two and even three times, and I didn't want anybody to say I had been among their number.

"The program was the same, but the flatness I had expected in a show I had seen before was notably missing, and that annoyed me. I didn't want Eisengrim to be as good as he was. I thought him dangerous and I grudged him the admiration the audience plainly felt for him. The show was very clever; I must admit that. It had real mystery, and beautiful girls very cleverly and tastefully displayed, and there was a quality of fantasy about it that I have never seen in any other magician's performance, and very rarely in the theatre.