John Disk held the gun in a trembling hand and looked into Cagliostro's icy eyes.
"Oy, have you picked the wrong Black Magician," Cagliostro said in a stage-Yiddish accent.
John Disk fired five times into the heart.
The gate of Chinatown opened.
MASS LANDING
Justin Case was released from the flying saucer in the middle of Central Park. He was still rather befoozled mentally and unsteady on his feet, so he staggered to the nearest bench and sat quietly, watching them take off.
His wristwatch said 7:15-which seemed plausible.
"It is the morning of December 24," he said aloud. "Tomorrow is Christmas." It seemed necessary, somehow, to get the simple things cleared up first of all, before dealing with the Mysteries.
Things like this didn't happen to New York music critics. They happened to farmers in Iowa or fishermen in Arkansas, or other such unsophisticated types, and, besides, they were hallucinations.
Justin watched the flying saucer disappear across the sky, reminding himself that it was a hallucination.
But still their words rang in his ears:
"It is time for your species to join the Galactic Community."
Justin finally got his mind and legs and various organs working together well enough to walk. He headed for Central Park West, hoping to find a cab.
At Fifty-eighth Street he saw a newsstand. The headlines glared at him like Tibetan demons:
And in a corner the inevitable surrealist tag line to such a night:
As Justin stared at those remarkable messages, he heard five rapid pistol shots.
From somewhere nearby music drifted toward him. He found himself absently putting the words to the melody:
He hastily bought a newspaper and hailed a cab. He was going to go right home and, for the first time in his life, break his rule against drinking in the morning.
When he was drunk enough to stop trembling, it would be time to decide whether to report his experience or let those who had already talked take all the heat.
CROWN POINT
Crown Point Jail, in Indiana, was called "the escape-proof jail," when John Dillinger was brought there in May 1934. On the day Dillinger destroyed that name by escaping, an out-of-work vaudeville magician was begging in Central Park, New York. One thought burned in this man's head- With a little luck, I could have been a second Houdini- and that was what he was thinking as he fought the hunger cramps and laid his spiel on Tom Crane.
When he felt the ground move in that big wobble of uncertainty, he remembered suddenly the ever-branching Tree of Life as memories of Adam Weishaupt and Mohammed and insects and trees flooded through him, a million balloons bursting inside him and outside him at once, each balloon releasing a twinkle of light, each light part of the infinite ladder of light, and he was watching himself die, in horror and ecstasy, through the eyes of a little boy.
How did my karma ever land me here? he thought as he died, and the boy heard him thinking.
THE ELEPHANT
MAY 1984:
In short, the wave of delusion, mania, and hallucination that occurred over the Christmas-New Year's holidays last year can only be attributed to the paradoxical nature of the unconscious. Where previous mass hysterias have occurred (e.g., the end-of-the-world manias of the Middle Ages, the Orson Welles Martian invasion broadcast of 1938) the cause was, obviously, the tensions, stresses, and fears of those times. This latest eruption, coming in the midst of a time of progress, optimism, and rising expectations, can only be explained by Freud's great discovery that opposites are equal to the prelogical unconscious mind [ambivalence principle]. In other words, high hopes, like high anxieties, can unleash the dreaming mind into the waking state…
–A. Besetzung, M.D.
JUNE 1984:
The categories of hallucination or delusion do not fully cover the phenomenon-which to some slight extent is still continuing…
The Mayor of Chicago "hallucinated" the beautiful "Princess Isis from Venus" who seduced him, in his fantasy life, but the witnesses at the stockyard insist that he was sodomizing a quite real hog at the time…
Mars is as inhospitable to life as Venus, but a prominent music critic has told this author, in private, of an abduction by little green Martians out of 1930s science fiction, but this obviously hallucinatory experience does not help us understand how the man was transported from his apartment on Twenty-third Street to the middle of Central Park, where he heard the shots of a murder that never occurred…
One of the blind men cured by the Virgin of Perth Amboy had been examined at Johns Hopkins just one week earlier, where the optic nerve was found to be irreparably dead, so that this is not a matter of hysterical blindness cured by hysterical faith, but of real blindness cured by hysterical faith…
–B. Gilhooley, M.D.
JANUARY 1985:
As the "Christmas Miracle" continues to accelerate worldwide, it becomes more obvious than ever that the old concept of aliens coming here in spaceships just cannot account for it. Even those most committed to the spaceman theory must admit, in the light of the recent events, that the sciences involved in what is being done to the human race are primarily psychic or parapsychological. If space beings are doing it, whatever it is, they must be doing it by what I can only call, vaguely, "psychotronic technology," and they could be doing it, for all we know, from their home planets, without physically traveling at all. By the same token, we have no need to posit spacemen at all, since whoever or whatever is doing this could be as close as the psychology department of some obscure university or the mind-control sector of any Intelligence Agency…
Human minds are being manipulated on a massive scale; that is all we know, and all theories about the Manipulators-terrestrial or extraterrestrial-are mere guesswork…
–J. Lacombe, Ph.D.
MARCH 1985:
… The idea that the "Christmas Phenomenon" is being done to us by some Agency (terrestrial or otherwise) is based on the categories of Indo-European grammar and Aristotelian logic, which modern physics has long known to be inadequate. A Taoist or a Hopi Indian, for instance, with a different semantic "set," might regard the events as a cosmic happening or growth process, without trying to isolate out one part of the universe as the "cause" and thus relegating the rest of the universe to the dependent position of "the effects." Modern quantum theory, at least since Bell's Theorem (1964), would suggest strongly that these holistic Chinese-Amerindian concepts are more accurate maps of what is happening than the linear A-causes-B sequences of Aristotelianism…