The Book of Magic: Part 2: A collection of stories by various authors

And nothing happened that night. At one point I woke, nerves jangling, but the bedroom was quiet and undisturbed. Now, however, the silence was anticipatory; it felt as though something huge was waiting to happen. I even went to the window again and looked out, but everything was normal. The fields lay under a crisp frost, moonlight-touched. Orion marched away to the west with his blue dog at his heels. It was all winter-clear. I wrapped myself in my dressing gown and went with some trepidation up to the attic, where I keep the telescopes.

The moon was gibbous, and there was a single bright star beneath it, guiding it to moonset like a tug with a ship into the harbor of the dawn. The star was Spica: the only really vivid body in the constellation of Virgo. A binary star, comprised of a blue giant and a Beta Cephei variable, if you want to get technical. If you prefer to be historical, an early temple of Hathor was aligned to Spica, and Copernicus did many observations of its passage. Now, not far before sunrise, it burned in the cold sky. I watched it and its fellows. Jupiter was visible now, the red spot a dusky rose. Akiyama-Maki would first appear above Arcturus and travel northward, heading up the handle of the Plough. I looked, but it was not yet visible.

He is coming! said a voice inside my head. I started and looked around, half expecting to see woman or flame, but there was nothing.

… Fermi Asian Network (FAN) was established in 2010 to promote collaborations among the high-energy astrophysicists in Asia with particular focus on using the data obtained by the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope for observational and theoretical investigations. Over the last few years, we have published a series of papers related to gamma-ray astronomy …

It was two days after my night in the attic, and I was on the train, heading north. I looked up from the abstract I was reading, watched the gray fields flash by. We rarely get snow in the Southwest, but the Midlands were another matter.

“Jane’s in Wolverhampton,” Stella had said that morning, privy to the mysterious revelations of Facebook. “That’s near Birmingham, isn’t it? And she says there’s snow. Do you want me to look at the trains for you?”

There were no cancellations. I wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or not. The conference was only for a day: a series of not uninteresting papers. Now that I no longer taught, there wasn’t a great deal of call to attend, but I thought I ought to take an interest, keep my hand in, all that kind of thing. Unfortunately, the invite had arrived in July, on a sweltering day when any thought of bad weather was very far from the mind. Winter, my late wife said once, is like childbirth: you never remember it properly once it’s over and done with. She was right. Now that the conference date was actually here, I was faced with the usual problems of the wrong kind of snow on the line, the numerous excuses that the national rail network seem to conjure up to explain its inexplicable delays.

However, Alys got me to the local station for seven-thirty; the conference didn’t start until ten. I would have to change at Bristol, but then it was a fast service straight through. Bristol was the usual scramble—wrong time of day, full of commuters—but Alys had booked me a seat, and I sank into it gratefully. We stopped once at Parkway, then belted through Gloucestershire, the hills vanishing into cold, low cloud. Everyone had long since settled down by then, and all the seats were taken, but a few stragglers were going up and down to the buffet car in search of more coffee, so when a woman brushed past me, I didn’t register it until she was past me. Then the green of her gown caught my eye. I looked up. She glanced over her shoulder; an emerald in her hair flashed in the overhead glow and she gave me a small, enigmatic smile in which I thought I read something of triumph. Then she was gone.

Green for “go.”

Inside my head, my inner voice said: It’s not the house, you bloody fool. It’s you.

After that, I got really jumpy. No one else seemed to have noticed her, although admittedly they were all absorbed in laptops and the newspapers, but women in Elizabethan gowns are not common on trains. I got the feeling that I was the only one who could see her, but it made me nervous all the same; what if she popped up during the conference? Thank God I wasn’t giving a talk. It had, of course, occurred to me that I was simply becoming senile, but these visions seemed too specific, too precise. As I’ve said, I was pretty much used to the house being haunted—but then the flame in the graveyard had, as far as I knew, appeared to me alone. And now so had she.

I reached the conference center in something of a state. Pretend to be a normal person, I kept telling myself. Inevitably, I ran into some people I knew in the lobby and was immediately hauled into one of those slightly-oneupmanship-dominated conversations that academics often engage in. But the first talk was due to start soon. Together, still chatting, we filed into the lecture theater, and confronted with a deeply earnest paper on the nature of gravitational microlensing, I managed to push the woman to the back of my mind.

For reasons that I hope are obvious, I’d always kept my magical interests separate from my worldly job. It’s not a good idea, if you’re a university professor, to start babbling on about astrology—one of the dirtiest words in professional astronomy. But it hasn’t always been the case: look at Newton, returning to alchemy at the end because he didn’t think this physics stuff was ever really going to hack it. You can’t get away with that now, but as the talk—which was frankly rather tedious—dragged on, my mind started to wander back to the Renaissance, to magic. To planetary spirits, which each planet possesses, along with its own sigil, its own quality. Jupiter confers wealth; Venus is the bringer of love. Now, in an age that demotes planets annually (poor old Pluto), it’s perhaps hard to enter a mind-set in which celestial matters have an eternal quality.

All of this was lurking at the back of my mind throughout the series of seminars—some interesting, some turgid. During the latter, I found myself doodling in my notebook like some lackluster undergraduate; it had always been a bad habit. I drew a woman’s face, a series of traced lines, not very good, and a sprig of sage. As I drew, I could almost smell it and I glanced up fearfully, expecting to see her there, but the room was full of my mercifully dull colleagues with no Elizabethan ladies in sight. I stopped doodling after that, afraid I might conjure her up. But there was something brewing in my unconscious; I could feel it, nudging me like the memory of a dream, and it stayed with me all through the buffet lunch.

During the afternoon break, I managed to collar one of my more comet-informed colleagues by the tea urn and I asked him, in what I hoped was a lightsome tone, about Akiyama-Maki.

“Oh, yes, wonderful. Marvelous to have such a visitor. Should be visible from tonight, you realize? Just a smudge, at first.” Dr. Roberts was enthusiastic. “Really will come awfully close, though—at least half a million miles.”

I smiled at this routine joke, but Roberts wasn’t really kidding. For a foreign body traveling the solar system, this isn’t far off a near miss. It sounds like a long way off, but it isn’t in astronomical terms.

“Conspiracy theorists are having a ball, of course. I’ve had at least five emails a day asking if it’s the end of the world.”

“How exceedingly tedious.”

At this point we were interrupted by a young man summoning us back to the lecture theater, so our conversation came to a close. That morning’s encounter with the woman had put me on edge so much that, making the excuse of worries about the weather, I bailed out of the communal Indian meal organized by one of my former colleagues and picked up sandwiches at the station before catching an earlier train home.

Not that it made any difference. We were held up before Bristol, with a fault on the line. I was grateful that I’d brought a book. I texted Alys with some difficulty—you’d think a scientist would adjust more readily to modern technology—and told her I’d call from the station. When we finally got into Temple Meads, the train out was delayed. I could have gone for a curry after all, I thought gloomily; I’d arrived after the original later train was due in. By now, close to ten p.m., the platform and the surrounding fields were heavy with frost. My breath steamed out before me in clouds, and even in woolen gloves my hands felt immediately pinched. I rang Alys, fumbling the phone, and told her that I’d meet her on the road. The station is too small for a waiting room, and I didn’t fancy sitting for twenty minutes in the open bus-stop affair on the platform. So I set off at a brisk, but careful, pace down the lane that leads to the station. The moon hung high, outlined by cold: a ring of ice crystals sparkled around it, and its light caught the frozen hawthorn. My footsteps rang out on the hard ground. I came to the summit of a small rise, which carried the lane down to the main road. Here, a gate revealed a long rolling vista of fields.