"What's this?" he said. "Damme, sirrah, it hath the look of a den of unholy mysteries!" He talked like that when in his eighteenth-century mood.
The dim-lit sign in the window said: MADAME FATIMA NOSI. FORTUNES TOLD. SPEAK WITH YOUR DEAR DEPARTED. OCCULT WISDOM SHARED. A crude painting beneath the legend showed a gypsylike woman bent over a crystal ball.
"I can just imagine," said my friend. "This is the cener of a secret, sinister cult. They're a gang of illegal immigrants from Kaftristan, where the ancient paganism survives. They worship a chthonian deity, which is in fact a gelatinous being that oozes its way through solid rock ..."
"Why not go in and see?" I said. "Madame Nosi seems open for business."
"Oh, you're so practical, Willy!" said my friend. "I had rather gaze upon this cryptic lair from afar and let my imagination soar. Inside, it is probably dirty, squalid, and altogether prosaic. Besides, our sibyl will expect remuneration, and I am badly straitened just now."
"I've got enough dough for both," I said. "Come on!"
It required urging, because my friend was a shy man and sensitive about his perennial poverty. This indigence was curious, considering his gifts and intellect. A few minutes later, however, we were in Madame Nosi's oratory.
The place was as dingy as my friend had predicted. Fatima Nosi proved a tall, strongly built, bony woman of middle age, with a big hooked nose and graying black hair hanging down from under her head scarf.
"Well," said she, "what can I do for you gentlemans?" She spoke with an accent, which did not sound Italian. She looked hard at me. "You are college student, no?"
"Yes."
"At the—um—the Massachusett Institute of the Technology, yes?"
"Yes."
"And you expect to graduation in—umm—two year, no?"
"That's right," I said, surprised at her prescience. "Name, please?"
"Wilson Newbury."
She wrote in a little notebook. "And you!" she turned to my friend. When she had written his name, she said: "You are writer, no?"
"I," said my friend, "am a gentleman who sometimes writes for his own amusement and that of his friends." His face tensed with the effort of trying to speak a foreign language without stuttering. "P-parlate italiano?" He got it out slowly, with a pronounced down-east accent. |
She looked puzzled; then her face cleared. "Cosi, cosi. But I am not Italian, me, even though I was born in Italy."
"What are you, then, if I may be so bold?" asked my friend.
"I am Tosk."
"Oh, Albanian!" he exclaimed. He said aside to me: "It fits. She's a perfect example of the Dinaric racial type, and that name didn't sound quite Italian." He turned back. "I am honored; sono—sono onorato."
"Tank you. Is many Albanians in Italy," said Madame Nosi. "They went there two, tree hundred years ago to excape the Turks. And now, what can I do for you? Horoscope? Séance? Crystal ball? I tink, you smart gentlemans no care for simple occult manifestations. You tell me what you most want. You, please." She indicated my friend.
He thought a long moment and said: "Madame, the thing whereof I am most desirous is to view the world as it was at the climax of Western civilization—that is to say, in the eighteenth century. No, permit me to amend that. It is to witness the most civilized part of that world—England—at that period."
"Umm." Madame Nosi looked doubtful. "Is difficult. But then, maybe I get chance to use the mirror of Balsamo. You got to come upstairs to inner sanctum."
She led us up creaking steps to a shabby little sitting room. Stepping to the side of the room, she pulled a cloth cover off a mirror on the wall. This mirror, otherwise ordinary-looking, had an ornately carven frame whence most of the gilding had worn off.
My friend leaned towards me and murmured: "This should be interesting. Giuseppe Balsamo, alias Count Alessandro di Cagliostro, was the most egregious faker and charlatan of the eighteenth century. Wonder what she'll do?"
"This," said Madame Nosi, "will cost you ten dollars. Is a very powerful spell. It exhaust my weak heart. If your friend want to go along with you, it cost him ten buck, too."
My friend looked stricken, as well he might. For ten dollars, one could then eat in a good restaurant for a week. Twenty sounded steep to me, also; but I had lately received a check from home and did not like to back out. Had I been older and bolder, I might have haggled—something I knew my friend could never bring himself to do. I pulled out my wallet.
"Tank you," said Madame Nosi. "Now, you sit here facing the mirror. You, too. I will light candles on this ting behind you. Look at reflections of the candles in glass."
She lit a sconce on the opposite wall. In the dimness, the reflections of my friend and me were little more than shapes. I took my eyes off the image of my gaunt, lantern-jawed friend and raised them to that of the cluster of wavering lights.
Madame Nosi bustled about behind us. A sweetish smell told me that she had lit incense. She began to croon a song in a language I did not recognize.
I cannot tell exactly when her spell, or whatever it was, took effect, any more than one can tell exactly when one drops off to sleep and begins to dream. But I presently found myself trudging a dirt road, overgrown with foot-high grass between two deep, narrow ruts.
This experience, I soon discovered, was not a simple case of time travel, such as one reads about. In stories, the time traveler arrives in another time in propria persona, able to act and function as he would in his own time. I, however, found myself in someone's else body, seeing and hearing with his organs and able to follow his thoughts but helpless to affect my host's actions. I could not even crane his neck or roll his eyes to see anything that he did not wish to look at. Now his gaze was fixed on the ground before him to avoid a stumble.
This situation avoided the familiar time-travel paradox. While I partook of all my host's experiences, mental and physical, I-could not do anything that would change an event that had already taken place. Whether this adventure should be explained as a return to a former time, or the vision of former events imposed upon my present-day mind, or sheer illusion, I cannot judge.
I could only sense the thoughts that ran through my host's conscious mind; I could not plumb his store of memories. Hence I had no way of finding out who or where or when I was, until my host happened to think of such things or until someone or something else gave me a clue.
"Now remember, lad," said a creaky voice in my ear, "no gangling after the trollops, to the peril of thy immortal soul. And if we meet the squire and his Macaroni zon, keep thy temper no matter what they zay."
At least, this is what I think he said. So strong was his unfamiliar dialect that, until I got used to it, I caught only half his words.
My host did me the favor of turning his head to look at his companion. He said: "Oh, hold thy water, Vayther. P faith, I'm a grown man, can take care.o' meself."
"Childhood and youth are vanity. Ecclesiastes eleven," said the other. "Thy loose tongue'll get us hanged yet."
"Unless thy poaching doth it virst," replied my host.
"I do but take that dominion over the vowls of the air and the beasts of the vield, which God hath given me. Zee Genesis one. 'Tis wrong o' Sir Roger to deny us poor volk the use of 'em ..."
My companion, evidently my host's father, continued grumbling before relapsing into silence. He was a man of mature years, with the gnarled brown hands and deeply creased brown neck of a lifelong outdoor worker. He wore the knee breeches and full-skirted coat of the eighteenth century, but these were of coarse, self-colored homespun, patched and darned. His calves were clad in a pair of baggy, soiled cotton stockings, and his big, shapeless shoes did not differ as to right and left.