Zaprezs placed the tips of his unpolished shoes at the exact edge of the stage. His attire had been treated with meticulous care to eliminate all light and all reflection. The only white was the collar of his shirt, which pressed the flesh of his jowl against his jaw and pushed his head backward. His entire body followed: erect beneath a close-fitted frock coat whose edges were indistinguishable from the black behind him. An overhead light tracked his hands, and everyone believed it was their own dazzled eyes that guided it. His profile remained in shadow, framed by a beard of precise lines.
Darius Zaprezs, the enigmatic magician come from the east, did not manipulate playing cards or pull flowers from a hat, did not cut ropes or swallow billiard balls. All of that seemed to him vulgar entertainment, unworthy of one who had faced the abysses of life and trodden the limits of existence. True, in his day he himself had played with those trinkets typical of conjurers, but he had abandoned them as a child who, on growing up, leaves his toys in a corner.
Of the traditional tricks, he retained only those that destroyed and reconstructed. Only those, in his view, responded to the final purposes of creation. He was particularly drawn to the guillotine, but he knew as well as everyone that the body was never truly cut, that the blade was false. No — that was not real magic. The blade had to cut in truth. No mirrors, no false doors, no doubles or other deceits.
And what greater proof of truth is there than pain? The magician warned that no effect could mask that truth, and asked for a volunteer. On that occasion, a man climbed the steps with the unsteady gait of the drunk. No one else dared. With his uninhibited gaze, the volunteer challenged the pretentious magician who addressed them from the heights in a foreign accent. Let’s see if you can really do what you boast — he seemed to say in his silence — and if it’s true, I’ll show you how an Irish sailor bears pain.
The man inserted his arm into a small guillotine aimed at the centre of his wrist. Very slowly, in full view of everyone, Zaprezs tied a tourniquet around the man’s arm just below the armpit. Only then did he permit himself a joke:
“The staff don’t want to clean up the blood.”
Nobody laughed. Beneath the volunteer’s hand sat a basin to catch whatever came. The magician spoke no further, and everyone felt his dark gaze fixed upon them, on each eye, convinced that it would happen exactly as he had described — no tricks, no deviations.
Zaprezs pulled the lever and the hand fell instantly. From the opening of the guillotine poured a blackish jet. The volunteer, who had been bracing for the blow with his head bowed and his other fist clenched, let out a cry that came a few seconds after the amputation. First he tried to wrench his arm away violently, but it was held fast by straps. If the man, as on that occasion, was drunk, he would often vomit and lose consciousness, left hanging there with a handless wrist in the air and his body slumped beneath the machine.
The magician, without the slightest trace of agitation, approached the fallen object slowly and lifted it as a butcher offers a cut of meat. He displayed the clean severance and brought it close to the terrified audience, who turned their faces away. Many wished to leave or to cry out, to denounce the madness before them, but they remained in their seats, held fast by the strange figure of Zaprezs. He set the trophy on a silver tray and approached the fallen man, untied him, and raised him with the ease of one lifting something filled with feathers, settling him into a chair. Then he covered the amputated hand with a black cloth and carried it to its home at the end of the arm he held aloft. He joined the pieces beneath the cloth and worked like a mechanic.
“One dies in the light, one is born in the darkness,” he said, before pulling the cloth away with a single motion. The arm appeared intact. Finally, he held a pinch of powder beneath the volunteer’s nose, which revived him at once — but though his eyes opened, his will did not. With difficulty, he got to his feet and left the stage like a puppet dragging threads no one was pulling.
The magician did not wait for applause. He never received any.
Whispers carry news that no one proclaims aloud. In this way the presence of a sinister foreign magician became known throughout the city. No one announced him, yet his performances grew steadily fuller.
The moment came when Zaprezs, satisfied with his success, wished to go beyond the mere amputation of hands and feet.
“Tonight, dear audience,” he announced, drawing out his words, “you will witness a real decapitation.”
Everyone looked at him as though sharing a collective hallucination.
“And an equally real resurrection.”
The magician was not expecting volunteers. Only his assistant was willing to offer his body for such a sacrifice. Urguz was in his manner and appearance the very opposite of his master. He was a broad, stooped man with long arms and thick hands that hung nearly to the ground. His skull was a landscape of scars and his stony face was perpetually shadowed by a drowsy rage. This creature fitted his neck into the stock like a trained beast. His indifference suggested that some crude trick lay behind the display, but the magician fastidiously avoided every form of sleight of hand. There was nothing on the stage save the dark wooden guillotine and the body trapped within it. A metal trough beneath the head completed the props. When Zaprezs pulled the lever, a sharp blow decapitated Urguz, whose head fell bathed in a rush of blood. The brutality of the act, before which few managed not to look away, drew a brief, collective shriek from the audience. Afterwards, they watched in exhausted silence as the magician raised the head and displayed it. He then laboriously seated the corpse in a chair and rejoined the two pieces beneath the concealment of the black cloth. The decapitated man appeared whole and covered in blood. The powders beneath his nose revived him.
In the midst of a horrified silence, Zaprezs bowed to receive his glory and withdrew, followed by his servant.
Only on one occasion did he have a volunteer for the decapitation. By the time his performances had become clandestine, held before a dozen sadists gathered in the cellars of a disused prison, a tall, elegant young man rose with a defiant gesture. Zaprezs noticed at once that his pupils crackled with the effects of some drug, and turned that hypnosis to his advantage. The young man lost consciousness a second before his head. When it hung from the magician’s hand, no one present doubted its reality.
After the reassembly, and already backstage, the blood staining the volunteer’s face was cursorily cleaned. When he left, those who had been present saw him wandering the surrounding streets like one of the living dead. When asked what he had felt beneath the blade, he claimed to remember nothing and gave every sign of being on the edge of derangement. A few days later, his body was found in a dark alley. The autopsy attributed the death to a heroin overdose and noted the presence of a very fine scar around the neck. The superficiality of this mark was not enough to prevent Zaprezs from becoming, definitively, a forbidden magician.
Those who now sought him out devoted themselves wholeheartedly to helping the magician conceal himself. No one spoke of him, no one knew him — yet he had a cohort of admirers who, summoned in secret, came to witness his art in ever-changing locations. Conscious of his patrons’ tastes, he devised a variety of executions. He ran bodies through with swords, split them in two, or broke them on the Spanish garrotte. Urguz was the first to undergo these ordeals, but there were always volunteers who, driven by curiosity and the accounts of some predecessor, wished to feel the shock of a real execution. Pain, if it was not forgotten, fell away like a fleeting nightmare that fortified one for future torments.
Not all of them, however, were drawn by the morbid thrill of the killings. Some watched with distaste, yet persisted, held fast by the personality of a man whose magic they sensed as real, even as reason screamed that such things were impossible. For these delicate souls, Zaprezs devised a new effect. Now it was no longer a matter of killing in order to revive, but of reviving in order to kill.
Gathered in a remote cemetery, by firelight and a moon veiled by the storm, a group of people formed a circle around a grave. Aided by two well-paid hirelings, Urguz strained to shift the heavy marble and draw out a coffin of rotting timber. Before them, the magician moved his hands slowly, as though conducting an adagio. When the coffin was opened, it was tilted slightly toward the audience so that they might contemplate the desiccated body of an old woman wrapped in the finery of eternity. Then the magician covered it with the black cloth and passed his powerful hands along its length. A bluish radiance appeared at the edges before the cloth was drawn away. The corpse appeared enveloped by this faint spectral halo and began to tremble, as though the worms that inhabited it had started to dance. Zaprezs thrust his arms beneath the supine figure and helped her to rise. Supported by invisible threads, the old woman stood before the astonishment of all. Then, without assistance, she took a few steps and gaped. At last she opened her eyes and revealed the black abyss of her empty sockets. Fearing that the thing would throw itself upon them, the onlookers drew back, ready to run — but after an ungainly bow, the revived woman stopped, floating in the centre with her arms hanging at her sides. The magician, who understood her desires, helped her return to her resting place and ordered that she be restored to the depths.
After one such performance, when all had departed, a solitary man waited to speak with the magician. Zaprezs always concealed his routes and could have disappeared unnoticed, but he sensed that the offer awaiting him might merit his attention.
“My daughter Clara, a child of only thirteen years, was interred two days ago,” said the stranger without preamble. “I want you to bring her back before the colour fades from her cheeks.”
Zaprezs looked at him with studied hauteur and let the silence linger. He considered dwelling on that man’s pain and replying with something such as: The dead know only the road to dust. Instead, he asked drily how much the man was prepared to pay.
“Whatever you ask.”
“The sum will be immense.”
“So is my fortune.”
“Very well.” Zaprezs had his prey. “But it is an enormously complex effect. It will take time — by then the colour in Clara’s cheeks may no longer be recoverable.”
“It does not matter. Give her back to me and I will give you everything I have.”
To prepare the resurrection, Zaprezs was provided with all the information he requested about the girl. He surrounded himself with her portraits, her letters, her childhood poems, her dresses. Two weeks after the agreement, the father received the long-awaited summons to his daughter’s graveside. No one would disturb them. Only the parents and the magician’s assistants would be present. There was no audience to impress, but Zaprezs could not dispense with his stagecraft. His art stood above science and mere technique; it demanded the precise execution of ritual — arcane words and gestures whose meaning only he knew.
When the henchmen had the coffin open before the stricken parents, he let them contemplate their daughter for a few seconds. The girl lay sunken in the depths of the casket, pressed among the unnecessary padding that encased her. Her grey skin still held over the flesh, at least on the surface, and whatever lay beneath the eyelids seemed to concern no one.
The magician, with his measured elegance, covered Clara with the black cloth. This time the bluish radiance was more intense than before, but it went out abruptly the moment the cloth was removed. The girl did not move, and the parents feared that everything would end in failure. Zaprezs, however, conceded not a fraction of his bearing. He approached slowly and placed a handkerchief soaked in vital essence over the face of the sleeper, then slid his arms beneath the body and lifted it from the coffin. When he released her, Clara remained upright, held by a wind that made the gauze of her dress and the loose strands of her hair float about her. The mother moved to throw herself upon the girl, but the magician stopped her with a stern gesture and said solemnly:
“The soul has not yet returned.”
All waited patiently until a convulsion shook the child’s chest. A thread of saliva ran from her mouth and Zaprezs hastened to wipe it away, then carefully lifted her chin, and the eyes opened. The vacant gaze was incapable of expressing the terror of return. No one could comfort that aberration, forced to cross back against the order of nature.
“She has seen what no one has yet seen. Do not expect her to be the same,” declared the author of that wonder. He took the girl by the hand and led her to her parents, who embraced her in tears. The sallow cheeks troubled them not at all, nor the spent eyes, the absence of a smile and of speech, the total oblivion of her name and her former life. Their daughter was back.
Zaprezs collected his price and disappeared. But no one can keep secret an act such as that, and before long he was sought out by other wretched souls. Those who looked for him did so with the hope kindled by the silent legend of a man capable of miracles. They called him sorcerer, necromancer, and prophet. Only a few found him — those whose fortune was sufficient to purchase the will of the demons who, so it was said, worked for him from the shadows.
On the advice of Zaprezs, Clara’s parents avoided having her seen by doctors. Very few, in fact, knew of the girl’s return, and those who did were persuaded by the lie that she had not truly died, but had been placed in a distant sanatorium. Some who had attended the discreet funeral balked at that portentous reappearance, but they soon relented. Clara was there with her green eyes and her upturned nose, with her teeth pressed behind her small mouth and her straight black hair braided over her shoulders. She was there, and yet she was not. Her only words were monosyllables pronounced in an inhuman tone; her gaze lost itself at the far end of the garden, where she spent hours doing nothing. On the pretext that any company disturbed her gravely, no one was permitted to approach; and so no one was able to confirm that, in truth, that adolescent face was a death mask distorting the features that had once been alive.
Not all of the resurrected, however, conducted themselves with such docility. Within a few weeks, Lucien’s parents wished their son had not come back. The interruption of their grief by that misshapen and savage creature opened their eyes to the divine meaning of existence, and they repented the monstrosity they had committed. In desperation they sought out the magician, but he refused to show himself before them again.
Other troubles came to harass him. Word reached his ears of the stories being told in the harbour taverns about a bloodthirsty monster lurking in the alleyways of the lower quarters. The confused descriptions were enough for him to recognise Urguz, whose clumsiness was placing them both in danger. He had believed he had suppressed the servant’s extreme lasciviousness, but he learned now that his lackey had clumsily gone too far with some girl who had the misfortune to encounter him. Cautious and flush with money, he moved swiftly to conclude the last resurrection he had agreed to. When that transaction was closed, he let it be known to whoever might be listening that there would be no more. He still had to endure the pleas of one final supplicant, before whom he wielded a terrible excuse: the Reaper had paid him a visit to warn him that he must abandon his presumption.
“Whoever undoes my work gives his days in exchange — so the winged shadow told me.”
The man ignored this account and pleaded until, resigned to his misfortune, he turned his weeping into insults that swelled until they covered the magician in the most vicious curses. Zaprezs had exchanged an imaginary enemy for a real one. He knew this end was inevitable, and that worse things awaited him if he did not act cleanly and quickly. He returned to his lair and ordered Urguz to gather everything and erase any trace.
But it was not his intention to renounce his art or return to the old tricks. Weary of flesh and bone, he aspired to the supreme conquest of the soul. Several months later, in another place and before other eyes, he presented his new creation. Seven men and two women were assembled in a circular terrace roofed with glass panes. The rivulets of the storm slid along the facets and joined in the steel rods that supported them. The location had been chosen by another, and the magician had known it only a minute before the performance began. It was not possible, therefore, for anyone to suspect the presence of hidden mechanisms.
“The volunteer will feel no pain,” he said by way of introduction. “His death will be clean and his soul, tamed by my art, will show itself before us and behold its own body. Only I will be able to make it return.”
A tremor passed through those present. A volunteer had been requested, but no one moved. On this occasion Urguz was not there to whet the appetite — his coarse, unkempt body harboured no soul worth extracting. Indifferent to the silence, Zaprezs held himself upright in the centre of the room. His eyes looked at no one in particular, yet each person felt them fixed upon him. At last he turned his gaze toward a man who had caught his attention: a young man with pale hair and a freckled face who shifted nervously inside an oversized dark suit. The moment the magician fixed him with his gaze, the young man felt compelled to rise. Once on his feet, in full view of everyone, his fear dissolved and a comfortable warmth carried him away from his surroundings. The others watched as his eyelids closed and he sank into a placid, apparent sleep. Zaprezs nudged him gently and helped him lie down on the carpet. Then he placed his fists on the young man’s chest as though gripping something, and a white light formed around them. He pulled with feigned effort, and the light shaped itself into a silhouette that rose until it took a vertical stance — though it was no more than an unrecognisable mass.
“He is now sunk in unconsciousness,” said the magician. “When I command it, he will awaken and take possession of himself once more.”
The command was given in a word unknown to all. The image of the volunteer took shape over the light until a perfect double was complete. The carnal body lay still on the floor, its chest motionless, no other sign of breathing. The spectre looked about itself in wonder and fear, trembling as it struggled to remain upright on a floor whose gravity it could not feel. Zaprezs tugged an invisible cord and the soul took two steps through the air, turned to face the audience, and moved its mouth in an attempt to speak. Nothing broke the funereal silence that paralysed the room. There was no further exhibition. After being displayed, the light was gathered back into the arms of its invoker, who kneaded it into a silver sphere and pressed it into the forehead of the young man lying face-up. Through contained spasms, the body returned to life and rose with difficulty. The spectral gaze was the same. Certain of his success, Zaprezs was escorting the young man back to his place among the audience when someone dared to speak with insolence.
“Is that all you can do?” said a deep voice. The transgressor was a dark-complexioned man with broad shoulders, a penetrating gaze, and an air of self-assurance.
The magician ignored him and completed his protocol, positioned himself at the centre of the stage, and waited for the other to release what he still held in reserve.
“A simple light trick and a little drug,” the provocateur continued, unable to stop himself.
“Would you care to try a real death?”
“A real death? Nothing but deceptions.”
Convinced that nothing more would come of the exchange, Zaprezs made a bow of farewell.
“Where is your lackey?” That question caught the magician off guard — though he did not let it show, and hastened to leave. “Are you sending him through the streets in search of replacements?”
What he next learned was that Lucien had fled from his home. Like a wild dog, he had bitten his carers and leapt from the window. They searched for him at night in the woods, but found only the traces of a relentless march that ended at a river and led into the city. There he attacked several people before being captured. His disappearance had not been reported by his parents, who wished to protect their secret at all costs, and so the police were left to piece together his identity blindly. They learned that he had vanished several months earlier from a distant suburb — how had he survived in such a terrible state since then? Loose ends connected him with a surly individual who had been drifting through similar places.
No shadow could conceal Urguz. A bare description was enough for two guards to recognise him at the door of a tavern. They followed him and cornered him at the rear of a brothel, where they took him in a net as though he were a wild animal escaped from a circus. Once they had him bound in a cell, they could extract from him nothing but grunts and clipped words. They untied him and let him sleep to have him fresh and calm. Only then did they employ the most sophisticated means of persuasion at their disposal. They wanted to know his name, his origin, and his motivations, but Urguz resisted every question and offered only laughter and a harsh humming. They did not know that for this man pain was a way of life, a routine. Needles under the fingernails were to him a caress; his bones were broken in a thousand places; his skin was the rugged terrain of a land of scars. They gave up on him as useless and confined him in a dungeon. By other means they managed to connect him with a mysterious magician from the east who had, over recent months, been displaying his sinister abilities in clandestine locations.
A manhunt was organised against Zaprezs that forced him to abandon his trade entirely. That loss of self threatened to plunge him into despair, but he was a strong man and brushed aside faint-hearted sentiments with the back of his hand. He had always accepted unexpected events as opportunities to discover new horizons. On this occasion, he was curious to know what the police had learned of him, and he allowed an inspector to find him. With a trail of false clues, he led him to his last hiding place — the attic of a disused warehouse, barely lit by the light that filtered between the boards sealing the windows. Believing an informant awaited him, the inspector entered cautiously and climbed the stairs with one hand on the grip of his pistol. He was a man with a long, bony face who scrutinised everything through small, sunken eyes beneath a broad, prominent forehead. The visitor found a clean, open space, in the centre of which stood a cot covered with a white sheet. The shape immediately suggested a body concealed beneath. He made to approach, but a voice froze him. He knew, without ever having heard it before, that it was the magician’s voice.
“Like a surgeon, I too must pursue my studies,” said Zaprezs in a languid tone. The inspector looked about him and saw no one. “How is my servant faring?”
“Show yourself.” The man raised his pistol.
“Are you going to shoot me? I am defenceless.”
The figure of the magician took shape at the far end of the room, as though a light were creating it from within the very shadow. Behind him, the faint glints of several glass jars revealed the existence of a long shelf.
“Your slave has confessed everything. You would do well to surrender.”
Zaprezs, who knew perfectly well that this was untrue, let out a low, sinister laugh.
“Of what crime am I accused? I have killed no one — quite the contrary.”
“You have desecrated graves and abducted several minors. Shall I continue?”
“The graves were opened with the consent of the families, and I have abducted no one.”
“You sent your henchman to do it.”
“Urguz was a savage when I found him. My failure to entirely extirpate his impulses is a minor disappointment to me. In any case, I am not responsible for his excesses.”
“And that body?”
“Come closer and see for yourself.”
The inspector felt then that the magician was playing with him. He had set a trap, and he had walked into it like a fool. He understood that he was caught in an invisible cage and that the eyes watching him were morbidly dissecting his every gesture. Zaprezs already had the information he wanted. He observed his prey and blew from his open hand a wind that enveloped him. The man began to feel himself suffocating and dragged himself anxiously in search of a free space. He found it on a landing of the staircase, where a window of broken glass let in his remedy. There he stopped until he lost consciousness and tumbled down the stairs.
The fate closing in on Zaprezs was the opportunity to show the world the immensity of his power. In his own hand he wrote an elegant letter to the police announcing his forthcoming performance. The pretentious missive was not taken seriously; even so, they could not help but go to the appointed place.
At midnight, the temple was cleared and surrounded by two brigades. All the lights went out, and the twisted, elongated silhouettes of the pinnacles dissolved into the blackness of a moonless night. In that darkness, seven men advanced along the central nave guided by the circle of a lantern. When they reached the centre, they turned their lights in every direction and stood in silence, hands on weapons, alert to any suspicious sound. Around them, a gallery of distant echoes betrayed the slow movement of the stones on their advance toward ruin. The inspector at the head — the same man the magician had lured and then expelled from his laboratory — looked at his watch: several seconds remained until one o’clock. Just then a procession of dry strokes confirmed the punctuality of their host. After the chiming, a voice thundered from the heights in a foreign tongue.
“What game is this, Zaprezs?!” shouted the inspector.
The figure addressed did not interrupt his recitation. A pale halo appeared suspended from the retable, whose gilded ornaments gleamed to further exalt the figure of a man dressed in black.
“The building is surrounded — you have no escape! Enough of your games!”
“Tonight I shall offer myself in sacrifice!” the magician finally replied, in an apocalyptic tone. “My altar of fire shall be adorned with your souls.”
Zaprezs descended slowly until he came to rest on the floor, wrapped in a sphere that cast light through the entire space. Within it crackled the electric arteries pouring from his body. The policemen began to feel a weight on their chests, and their mouths ran dry from the acrid aromas thrown off by the thing approaching them. The magician raised a bare hand and feigned a threat which the others took for real. A burst of gunfire passed through the sphere, and the men fell exhausted. Zaprezs did not alter his expression and set about showing them that what loomed over them was real and not a mere projection. He extended his bubble until it enveloped the nearest man and seized him by the shoulders. He held him upright and left him in the middle of the aisle. Then everything went dark. A spark ignited the policeman’s body, which within a few seconds became a pyre that stretched out its fiery arms until they caught the lowest beams. His companions watched in horror as his body became a black mass that slowly crumpled in on itself. Immediately a rain of embers began to fall on them that would soon leave them without escape. They dragged themselves outside and watched the flames devour the temple and the two men who had remained within.
At dawn, when the fire died beneath the charred remains of the building, a team of firefighters entered the ruins escorting the inspector and other authorities who had come to the scene. In the centre they found a small cavern that had formed miraculously among the debris of the collapse. At its entrance crouched a hunched man who was coughing. They raised his head and saw the blackened face of the policeman his companions had watched consumed by fire. Traces of a trickle of blood that had run from his nostrils remained on his skin, and his vacant gaze did not recognise his rescuers. At the far end stood a crucifix of just over three metres, whose crown appeared to be supporting the irregular vault that had formed that niche. At its feet, a black cloth protruded from the floor of ash. Beneath it they found a decapitated body. A few red drops stained the only white part of his clothing. The precise scar had been cauterised by the same fire that had devoured everything.