Stealer of Souls

“You’ll have to go upstairs, boys,” Miss Rosalie said. “I kept him in bed today. He was fretting himself ill about meeting young Antonio. So excited about the new magic. Up this way.”

They followed Miss Rosalie up the deeply carpeted stairs and into a big sunny bedroom, where white curtains were gently blowing at the big windows. Everything possible was white: the walls, the carpet, the bed with its stacked white pillows and white bedspread, the spray of lilies-of-the-valley on the bedside table – and so neat that it looked like a room no one was using.

“Ah, Eric Chant and Antonio Montana!” Gabriel de Witt said from the bank of pillows. His thin dry voice sounded quite eager. “Glad to see you. Come and take a seat where I can look at you.”

Two plain white chairs had been set one on each side of the bed and about halfway down it. Tonino slid sideways into the nearest, looking thoroughly intimidated. Cat could understand that. He thought, as he went round to the other chair, that the whiteness of the room must be to make Gabriel de Witt show up. Gabriel was so thin and pale that you would hardly have seen him among ordinary colours. His white hair melted into the white of the pillows. His face had shrunk so that it seemed like two caves, made from Gabriel’s jutting cheekbones and his tall white forehead, out of which two strong eyes glared feverishly. Cat tried not to look at the tangle of white chest hair sticking out of the white nightshirt under Gabriel’s too-pointed chin. It seemed indecent, somehow.

But probably the most upsetting thing, Cat thought as he sat down, was the smell of illness and old man in the room, and the way that, in spite of the whiteness, there was a darkness at the edges of everything. The corners of the room felt grey, and they loomed. Cat kept his eyes on Gabriel’s long, veiny, enchanter’s hands, folded together on the white bedspread, because these seemed the most normal things about him, and hoped this visit would not last too long.

“Now, young Antonio,” Gabriel said, and his pale lips moved in a dry way Cat could not look at, “I hear that your best magic is done when you use someone else’s spell.”

Tonino nodded timidly. “I think so, sir.”

Cat kept his eyes on Gabriel’s unmoving, folded hands and braced himself for an hour or more of talk about Magic Theory. But, to his surprise, the kind of talk Cat could not understand only went on for about five minutes. Then Gabriel was saying, “In that case, I would like to try a little experiment, with your permission. A very little simple one. As you can see, I am very feeble today. I would like to do a small enchantment to enable myself to sit up, but I believe it would not come to much without your help. Would you do that for me?”