LITMIR.BIZ

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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.

      I paused for a moment, knowing that Alys was still some way off, and looked over this pale, unfamiliar landscape, then upward, seeking the comet, but before I could orientate myself beneath the stars something shimmered in the distance. Someone was coming over the brow of the field. Hard to see—they were wearing white, not some farmer encased in an ancient Barbour—and who, I realized with sudden shock, would be in white in the middle of a field in the middle of winter?

      I knew who it was: not the death that comes to us all at our end, whose hand is not always unkind, but the other death, the one who snuffs out life as though it has never been, who steals the candle of the soul. The figure passed down the field, heading for the gate. He wore a headdress in the form of a star, like a child’s drawing of Jack Frost, and long robes that sparkled like the crystals around the moon. He was more solid than the form I’d seen in my earlier vision. He was moving swiftly, gliding over the ground. I had an impression of black, inhuman eyes; a long lantern jaw. I was, almost literally, frozen to the spot. As he neared the gate he looked up and reached out a finger like a claw. Then he blinked out, like the woman had done. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to see him, but he was gone in an instant, and I was alone with the hawthorns and the moon. Distant on the road I heard the throb of the Land Rover’s engine, and a moment later saw Alys turn down the lane.

      Gradually, I started to warm up. I felt that I’d been touched by a cold that was much greater than that of a frosty January night. Alys kept glancing at me in concern, and eventually she said, “Dad, are you all right?”

      “Just tired.”

      “You can have a rest tomorrow,” she remarked, encouragingly. Normally, I bridle at being treated like a poor old thing, but tonight I found I didn’t mind so much. When we finally got home, driving slowly over the frozen roads, and the bedroom door closed behind me, I thought: Enough.

      Despite the tiring previous day, I woke early next morning. It was about six-thirty, and not yet light. When I drew the curtains, I saw frost flowers decorating the pane for the first time in years. We have double glazing, and anyway it’s rarely cold enough in this mild part of the country. I was reminded of childhood, when there was a magic in such things. There still is. I traced an icy star with my finger. When I took it away, the skin was faintly silvered.

      In magic, there are really only two choices. You can act or not act. You have to be clear about your decision, though, and your reasons, and you have to be prepared to take the consequences. Be careful what you wish for, and all that: the monkey’s eldritch paw. Now, I thought I was clear; I knew what I wanted. Knowledge. And irritatingly, I thought I already had it: that subconscious push beneath the surface of my mind was still present, and still insistent. But I wanted more of an answer.

      But first I needed tea. I went to the door of the bedroom, took hold of the handle, and the subconscious push broke through the surface of my mind in a shower of crystal drops.

       Sage juice with trefoil, periwinkle, wormwood, and mandrake placed will increase gold, accumulate riches, bring victory in lawsuits, and free men from evil and anguish—

      It was my own inner voice, not some external agency, and I knew where it came from. Cornelius Agrippa: theologian, physician, soldier, occult writer, much more besides. Many of the correspondences in magic come from Agrippa’s obsession with noting what goes with what, macrocosm and microcosm. In the Book of Hermes, he speaks of the fixed stars—known as the Behenian stars—and their influences and attributes. Each star is associated with corresponding plants and gemstones, and the idea

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