The Way of the Wizard

The Sorcerer Minus Jeffrey Ford

Minus was considered the most evil of all sorcerers because his sorcery was backwards. He didn’t enchant. He beckoned no wretches from the dead. He commanded no shadow people, slipping along the corridors of night. His work was to seize the day by the hair, pull back its head and slit its throat to let the last glistening drop of magic pulse out and reveal the grisly carcass of reality. He then read those stark remains of the day as a soothsayer might the entrails of a chicken and offered shrewd advice to the rudely awakened about what was left.

Sorcerers feared him, knowing he could sap their art and leave them mere men and women. Wealthy families hired him to cause a conversion in a patriarch gone grandiose with the family fortune.

“He’s lost touch,” they’d say to Minus.

“Do you want him to see reality or your reality?” the sorcerer always asked.

“Anything you could do would be fine,” they usually said and then Minus went to work with the diligence of a crooked banker. There was no detail too small to obscure.

Sorcerers usually control spirits of the dead; instead Minus had two living creatures in his employ. One was a tall, gaunt man, in a black hat and raincoat, named Bill Mug. The other was Axis, an ingenious rat, whose loyalty was perfect to the cheese in the sorcerer’s hand. When Mug took the job, Minus put certain spells on him to slowly leach away all but one single drop of his self-delusion. As for Axis, Minus knew he could never rival the rat’s dedication to reality. He spent a mountain of cheese to learn the rodent’s secrets.

What the sorcerer prized most about Bill Mug was his slowness, not physically — rumor was he could rapidly punch a man in the face for a solid hour without stopping — but mentally. Mug liked to mull things over, scratching his chin, forgetting what it was he’d been thinking. His conclusions, when they came, were like smoke becoming nothing. It was a constant reminder to Minus that illusion begets speed because illusion begets need. The pointless maunderings of Bill Mug were a tonic to the quicksilver of private Dreamlands. When Minus needed assistance, though, he always called first for the rat.

Given but a single name at birth, Minus found himself making a concession to the times in which he lived and attached a first name to his title so that he could move easily among the magically unendowed. A popular moniker of the day was Skip. Movie stars, singers, athletes had that name, and so he became Skip Minus. He drove a fast yellow car, wore sunglasses, and was known as an easy going guy. He could mix a drink and play a hand of Whist; he could cut a rug. He could shovel snow, smoke a pipe, or recite in its entirety “The Hall of the Mountain Springs” by Miss Stattle Dees.

Underneath all of this, though, at his very core, he was an evil sorcerer. It was whispered that a fair number of his human “patients,” for whom he was paid to rub their noses in harsh reality, didn’t survive the treatment. Of those that perished in pursuit of stark enlightenment, ninety percent committed suicide and one curious case could have been construed as murder. The victim was a Martin Aswidth.

Aswidth was found in a garbage dump, his face caved in, beaten to a shattered, bloody pulp. The last to have seen him alive was his maid who happened upon her employer and Minus and a drab, long fellow in a hat and raincoat. It was in Aswidth’s bedchamber, amid the purple curtains. Skip Minus stood at his bedside, frantically gesticulating and rhythmically grunting. The prostrate Aswidth shivered and cried, “No, no, no… ” like a child from a nightmare. The sorcerer called over his shoulder, “Bill, come and see if you can work your magic with Mr. Aswidth. He’s a stubborn fellow.”

Then Minus noticed the maid, a witness to it all, and he commanded her to leave. When Aswidth’s body was discovered, she did come forward to tell the police what she’d seen and heard, but she only told them once. Two days later she disappeared from her locked bedroom in the middle of the afternoon on a clear day and was never seen or heard from again.

It’s surmised that after she’d left the room that night, ordered out by Minus, Bill Mug went to work, beating the enchantment out of Aswidth’s brain. The hardest punch is one thrown by a wiry man with thick wrists. Aswidth, for his part, was besotted with delusion like a fruit cake soaked in rum. He was, after all, a writer of genre stories.

At the trial, Minus told the jury that it was Axis who’d engineered the disappearance of the maid. “For a block of cheese,” confessed the sorcerer, “he brought me a mercenary army of his brethren. They took her out through a mouse hole.” The jury was aghast. “Those rats could be right now in the walls of this courthouse, laying dynamite charges,” he said. He waited for a small panic to brew throughout the court, and then added, “But I wouldn’t let that happen, of course.”

Bill Mug was then called to the stand. The prosecutor asked, “How many times did you strike Mr. Aswidth on the night in question?” Mug mulled it over for two hours which gave Minus time to work a spell. He let it out slowly into the courtroom, a barely discernible gray miasma that spread and wafted over everything. Eventually, Mug answered, “I didn’t strike him on the night in question, I struck him in the face. I lost count at three hundred.” Both defendants were convicted and sentenced to the death penalty.

That’s when Skip Minus rose, combed his hair, and bellowed for everyone to sit down and be quiet. The commotion that had been sparked by the reading of the verdict instantly ceased. Minus looked around. “I’ve had enough of this. I’m leaving and you won’t want to stop me. If anyone raises a finger, I’ll steal the magic from your children. I already have your self-confidence; perhaps I’ll return it someday if I learn to forgive you. Come, Mug,” said Minus and the two of them strode out of the courthouse, got in the yellow sports car, and sped away.

Humans could complicate his life and in the gnat storm of their complications his distraction could open him to truly dangerous attacks from other sorcerers. Minus knew he had to lay low. They fled to a rented cabin in the mountains where they met Axis. The place, a hunting lodge, was enormous and well stocked with provisions. They lit a fire in the stone fireplace and hunkered down for winter.

It wasn’t long before Mug started to get on Minus’s nerves. That gray scarecrow of a form, plodding endlessly from one end of the lodge to the other, occasionally stopping by the back door to smoke a cigarette. Even through the night, he struggled around, never sleeping. They had few conversations. Once they talked about how cold the wind was, and another time, after Minus had broken into the whiskey, he tried to explain to Mug the difference between objective and subjective reality. It was like talking to slate. Mug simply walked away, returning to his pointless rounds.

Later, over a piece of cheese and more whiskey, Minus confided to Axis, “Mug’s a real pain in the ass.”

“The right weight from that wheel of Gouda you have stashed away will make Bill Mug disappear,” said the rat. “I’ll need to contract a sizeable army to bring him down.”

“No, no,” said Minus. “I mean, come on, I have to show some restraint.”

“As you wish,” said Axis, contemplating the wheel of cheese.

“I have other work for you,” whispered Minus.

The rat crawled closer across the white linen table cloth and sat on the edge of the cheese plate. He lifted an errant crumb, bit into it and said, “Tell me.”

“That town where they put us on trial. I’m going to do them a favor. You must return to that place with your mercenaries, and I want you to bite each of the human inhabitants just once. You must puncture the flesh so that the magic can drain out, and the delusion can seep into the atmosphere and become a harmless gas. I want them all to be facing cold hard reality before the first snow.”

“What will you pay?” asked Axis.

“The entire wheel of Gouda.”

“Deal,” said the rat and they shook on it, Minus using only his thumb and forefinger. Axis left that very evening to martial his forces for the raid. Also that very evening, Minus, unable to sleep for Mug’s pacing, noticed that the lights were flickering in unison with the howling of the wind. He went into a spare bedroom they weren’t using to look for an extra oil lamp should the electricity go out. He found one there and also a stack of board games and a small book shelf filled with mildewed paperbacks.

Minus scanned the titles, and the last book on the bottommost shelf was a novel, Night and Day by Martin Aswidth. He laughed as he pulled it off the shelf. The cover showed two faces side by side, very simply drawn. The eyes were open on one face and closed on the other. The awake face was rendered in white on a black background and the sleeping face in black on a white background. On the back cover there was a photo of Aswidth, his arms folded, his head held high, his eyes gazing into the distance. “This ought to be good,” said Minus and slipped it into his back pocket.

He poured himself a whiskey, lit a fire in the den, and sat down with the book in hand. As he opened to the first page and started reading, a chill came into the air. A moment later, Mug passed through like a sleepwalker. His monumental lack of purpose could not be ignored. Minus closed the book, stared into the flames, and wondered how to get rid of him. The fire told him to empty his glass.

Mug lurched by three times, and on the fourth pass, Minus stopped him in his tracks by saying, “Mug, I’ve got a job for you.”

“Now we’re talking,” grumbled Mug and approached his employer.

Minus held the copy of Night and Day out to Mug and said, “I want you to read this novel in the next three hours, and then I want you to take a rifle, and whatever other provisions you think you’ll need, and strike out into the world, hunting for the very spirit of this book. When you find it, I want you to shoot it and bring it to me.”

Mug stood still, staring.

“Do you get it?” yelled Minus, and in that shout he released a spell that reached into Mug and stole back the one drop of self-delusion he’d long afforded his employee.

Mug said, “Yeah, okay.” He took the book, and paced away, opening to the first page. The sorcerer lifted his glass, and looked at the fire through the last drop of Mug’s self-delusion. The fire told him to empty his glass, so he did.

By that night, Bill Mug had left on his quest. Good riddance, thought Minus and smiled when he noticed the air smelled like snow. He’d heard on the radio a blizzard was coming. It wasn’t until the next morning when he went to the pantry for eggs that the sorcerer realized his mistake. There was no food left and Mug had taken the car.

It came to him instantly that he should never have taken Mug’s last drop. He pictured his gray employee, devoid of self-delusion, in the yellow sports car: top down, speeding across the continent with one hand on the steering wheel and the rifle in the other. “God help the spirit of Night and Day,” said Minus. And that’s when it began to snow.

It snowed hard and constant, the drifts slowly burying the lodge, and Minus grew ravenously hungry.

Not until the dark afternoon of the second day did he remember the wheel of Gouda. He’d kept it separate from the other provisions, in a locked trunk in his room. Even as he feverishly dialed the lock’s combination, he pictured what might happen when Axis returned and demanded payment. He thought of the rats taking Aswidth’s maid out through the mouse hole and shuddered, but by then he’d already opened the trunk, taken the cheese from its burlap sack, and bitten through the outer wax of the wheel.

Surely the rat will understand, he thought each time he sliced the golden cheese. “Just a touch to keep body and soul together. Who could argue with it?” he’d say aloud and then listen long and hard to the howling of the wind. The snow rose, the days passed, the wheel, slice by slice, rolled into his stomach. All that Gouda and the loneliness and the dark days, the windows all covered by drifts, made Minus simple. He’d sit for hours before the fireplace, staring until it was dark and cold, his mind in an uproar from the effects of that indigestible drop of self-delusion.

He thought of Mrs. Aswidth, who’d hired him to relieve Martin of some of his “bullshit,” as she put it. She was a statuesque, dark haired woman with a small chin. She wore tremendously high heels and met him for lunch at an egg and waffle place in the low-rent district.

“Do you want him to see reality or your reality?" asked Minus.

“He couldn’t see reality if it sat on his face,” she said. “Just do him.”

Minus nodded. And woke later, shivering in the dark, wrapped in a blanket in the chair before the fireplace. His mind slipped and swirled into possible plots for Aswidth’s Night and Day. He saw space travel, a story of an alien world, a giant cave filled with cryogenic cocoons, and a dangerous creature at the mouth of that cave. He imagined deeply into this scenario — saw the star-studded black velvet of space, imagined a caretaker of the cocoons falling in love with one of the frozen sleepers, gazing on her face through an icy window — until Gouda cravings commanded him to rise.

On the day after he ate the last half sliver of cheese, he looked up and noticed he was standing in a beam of sunlight coming through the front window of the lodge. He saw trees and grass outside, and upon seeing them, the howling of the wind abruptly disappeared from between his ears. He opened the door and breathed deeply, a warm breeze powdered with the scent of blossoms. He went to his room and dressed in one of his best Skip Minus get-ups, checkered slacks and a mohair cardigan, with Oxford loafers. Later that afternoon, as he sipped the last of the whiskey, sitting before the fireplace, he heard what at first he believed to be a hard rain. He looked to the window but the sun still shone.

Axis appeared then, standing on the table, leaning against the sorcerer’s whiskey glass. “Mission accomplished.”

Minus started at the sound of the rat’s voice. It took a moment to recover his composure. “Did you bite them all?”

“Every one,” said the rat. “Reality is backhanding them as we speak.”

“Were there any problems?” asked Minus.

“They set some cats on us. We killed and ate them and took their fur for our nests.”

“How was the weather…?”

“Forget the weather, I’ve got hungry troops to feed. The wheel of Gouda, please.”

“The wheel of Gouda is elsewhere,” said Minus.

“Where?”

“I ate it. I was trapped by the snow. Mug took all of our provisions. “

Axis shook his head and smiled, “Your strategy is weak, sorcerer, but you’ve still got a lot of meat on you. As I said, my troops are starving.” The rat nonchalantly gave the command and a furry wave of paws and teeth and tails rushed forward from the rafters to devour the flesh of Minus. The sorcerer, screaming, remained conscious through much of the repast and each bite was a sharp spell of agony.

The eyes were reserved for Axis, and he had them served with mustard when the day was done. Their jellied reflection told him that Minus could have used enchantment to save himself but chose not to. “Fool,” said the rat. He bit down on the first eye and dust exploded into his mouth. “They didn’t call him Minus for nothing,” he said, spitting into the puddle of mustard and wiping his snout. The second eye, when bitten, gushed the drop of self-delusion and tasted sweet as a pineapple candy.

Years passed and the hunting lodge was forgotten by whoever had owned it. The picked-clean skeleton of Minus sat in its chair before the fireplace. On the day ten years later when Bill Mug finally captured the spirit of Night and Day and minutes later willingly released it before blowing his brains out, the sorcerer’s jawbone fell off into his lap. On the evening when Axis was devoured by a swarm of locusts during the Battle of the Great Plains in the Insect/Rodent Wars, the rotted front chair legs gave out and dumped Minus’s skeleton in a jumble on the floor before the fireplace. The mohair cardigan was eaten, over a decade of summer evenings, by white moths. Weeds grew up through what remained of the planks and sprouted from the skull’s left eye socket. The roof collapsed, the rains came, the drifts of snow and weeds again.

Everyone who remembered the sorcerer Minus eventually died. His bones were pulverized to dust by the tread of Time. It’s hard now to remember if he ever really existed or was merely some spell of enchantment, perhaps the dream of a space traveler asleep in a cryogenic cocoon. Or something far less: an act of subtraction, diminishing into the future.