They clinked glasses and drank. Wolf carelessly tossed off a toast in Old Low Frankish, with an unpardonable error in the use of the genitive.
The two men next to them began singing “My Wild Irish Rose,” but trailed off disconsolately. “What we need,” said the one with the derby, “is a tenor.”
“What I need,” Wolf muttered, “is a cigarette.”
“Sure,” said Ozymandias the Great. The bartender was drawing beer directly in front of them. Ozymandias reached across the bar, removed a lighted cigarette from the barkeep’s ear, and handed it to his companion.
“Where’d that come from?”
“I don’t quite know. All I know is how to get them. I told you I was a magician.”
“Oh. I see. Pressajijijation.”
“No. Not a prestidigitator; I said a magician. Oh, blast it! I’ve done it again. More than one gin-and-tonic and I start showing off.”
“I don’t believe you,” said Wolf flatly. “No such thing as magicians. That’s just as silly as Oscar Fearing and his temple and what’s so special about April thirtieth anyway?”
The bearded man frowned. “Please, colleague. Let’s forget it.”
“No. I don’t believe you. You pressajijijated that cigarette. You didn’t magic it.” His voice began to rise. “You’re a fake.”
“Please, brother,” the barkeep whispered. “Keep him quiet.”
“All right,” said Ozymandias wearily. “I’ll show you something that can’t be prestidigitation.” The couple adjoining had begun to sing again. “They need a tenor. All right; listen!”
And the sweetest, most ineffably Irish tenor ever heard joined in on the duet. The singers didn’t worry about the source; they simply accepted the new voice gladly and were spurred on to their very best, with the result that the bar knew the finest harmony it had heard since the night the Glee Club was suspended en masse.
Wolf looked impressed, but shook his head. “That’s not magic either. That’s ventrocolism.”
“As a matter of strict fact, that was a street singer who was killed in the Easter Rebellion. Fine fellow, too; never heard a better voice, unless it was that night in Darjeeling when—”
“Fake!” said Wolfe Wolf loudly and belligerently.
Ozymandias once more contemplated that long index finger. He looked at the professor’s dark brows that met in a straight line over his nose. He picked his companion’s limpish hand off the bar and scrutinized the palm. The growth of hair was not marked, but it was perceptible.
The magician chortled. “And you sneer at magic!”
“Whasso funny about me sneering at magic?”
Ozymandias lowered his voice. “Because, my fine furry friend, you are a werewolf.”
The Irish martyr had begun “Rose of Tralee,” and the two mortals were joining in valiantly.
“I’m what?”
“A werewolf.”
“But there isn’t any such thing. Any fool knows that.”
“Fools,” said Ozymandias, “know a great deal which the wise do not. There are werewolves. There always have been, and quite probably always will be.” He spoke as calmly and assuredly as though he were mentioning that the earth was round. “And there are three infallible physical signs: the meeting of eyebrows, the long index finger, the hairy palms. You have all three. And even your name is an indication. Family names do not come from nowhere. Every Smith has an ancestor somewhere who was a smith. Every Fisher comes from a family that once fished. And your name is Wolf.”
The statement was so quiet, so plausible, that Wolf faltered.
“But a werewolf is a man that changes into a wolf. I’ve never done that. Honest I haven’t.”
“A mammal,” said Ozymandias, “is an animal that bears its young alive and suckles them. A virgin is nonetheless a mammal. Because you have never changed does not make you any the less a werewolf.”
“But a werewolf—” Suddenly Wolf’s eyes lit up. “A werewolf! But that’s even better than a G-man! Now I can show Gloria!”
“What on earth do you mean, colleague?”
Wolf was climbing down from his stool. The intense excitement of this brilliant new idea seemed to have sobered him. He grabbed the little man by the sleeve. “Come on. We’re going to find a nice quiet place. And you’re going to prove you’re a magician.”
“But how?”
“You’re going to show me how to change!”
Ozymandias finished his gin-and-tonic, and with it drowned his last regretful hesitation. “Colleague,” he announced, “you’re on!”
Professor Oscar Fearing, standing behind the curiously carved lectern of the Temple of the Dark Truth, concluded the reading of the prayer with mumbling sonority. “And on this night of all nights, in the name of the black light that glows in the darkness, we give thanks!” He closed the parchment-bound book and faced the small congregation, calling out with fierce intensity, “Who wishes to give his thanks to the Lower Lord?”
A cushioned dowager rose. “I give thanks!” she shrilled excitedly. “My Ming Choy was sick, even unto death. I took of her blood and offered it to the Lower Lord, and he had mercy and restored her to me!”
Behind the altar an electrician checked his switches and spat disgustedly. “Bugs! Every last one of ’em!”
The man who was struggling into a grotesque and horrible costume paused and shrugged. “They pay good money. What’s it to us if they’re bugs?”
A tall, thin old man had risen uncertainly to his feet. “I give thanks!” he cried. “I give thanks to the Lower Lord that I have finished my great work. My protective screen against magnetic bombs is a tried and proven success, to the glory of our country and science and the Lord.”
“Crackpot,” the electrician muttered.
The man in costume peered around the altar. “Crackpot, hell! That’s Chiswick from the physics department. Think of a man like that falling for this stuff! And listen to him: he’s even telling about the government’s plans for installation. You know, I’ll bet you one of these fifth columnists could pick up something around here.”
There was silence in the temple when the congregation had finished its thanksgiving. Professor Fearing leaned over the lectern and spoke quietly and impressively. “As you know, brothers in Darkness, tonight is May Eve, the thirtieth of April, the night consecrated by the Church to that martyr missionary St. Walpurgis, and by us to other and deeper purposes. It is on this night, and this night only, that we may directly give our thanks to the Lower Lord himself. Not in wanton orgy and obscenity, as the Middle Ages misconceived his desires, but in praise and in the deep, dark joy that issues forth from Blackness.”