“I don’t plan on it,” Magnus said, sitting on the bed. “But could you share your cigarettes? This is my room you plan on defenestrating from, after all.”
This puzzled Alfie for a moment, but he carefully reached into his pocket, produced a pack of cigarettes, and threw them inside.
“So,” Magnus said, picking them up off the floor and pulling one from the pack, “before you go, why don’t you tell me what this is all about?”
He snapped his fingers and the cigarette caught flame. This was entirely for Alfie’s benefit, and definitely caught his attention.
“You . . . you know what this is about . . . what did you just do?”
“I lit a cigarette.”
“I mean, what did you just do?”
“Oh, that.” Magnus crossed his legs and sat back a bit. “Well, I think you’ve guessed by now, Alfie, that I’m not like the other children.”
Alfie squat-bounced on his heels for a moment, considering this. His gaze was clear, and Magnus thought this was probably the first time in weeks that he had been completely sober.
“So it’s true,” he said.
“So it’s true.”
“So, what are you?”
“What I am is someone who doesn’t want you to jump out of the window. The rest are details.”
“Give me one good reason not to jump,” Alfie said. “Everything is gone. Louisa. Everything I owned, everything I made.”
“Nothing is permanent,” Magnus said. “I know this from experience. But you can get new things. You can meet new people. You can go on.”
“Not when I remember what I had,” Alfie said. “So if you are . . . whatever you are, you can do something, can’t you?”
Magnus drew on the cigarette for a moment in thought.
“Come inside, Alfie,” he finally said. “And I will help you.”
The actual process of altering memory was tricky. The mind is a complex web, and memory is important to learning. Pull the wrong memory and you might make someone who forgets that fire burns. But memories can be softened, or shortened. A talented warlock—and Magnus was nothing if not talented—can embroider the past into something quite different in shape and tone.
But it was not easy work.
Why Magnus was doing this for no money for a mundane who had been freeloading off him for weeks was unclear. Maybe it was because this day was a day of great suffering, and this was the part of the suffering Magnus could end.
An hour later Alfie walked out of his suite not quite remembering a girl named Louisa, who was a bus fare collector or something. Perhaps a librarian in his hometown? He couldn’t have told you why he even had thought of her name. He also had no clear recollection of his brief fortune.
It was tiring, and when it was done, Magnus leaned against the sill of the window and looked over the darkening city, over the great expanse of Central Park.
That was when he noticed the strange light in the sky, right over the uptown area. It was a cone-shaped light, smaller toward the skyline and widening into the clouds, and it had a faintly greenish cast.
It was right over the Hotel Dumont.
There was no getting a cab. Every cab in the city was taken, and they were all speeding. Everybody was going somewhere, trying to ditch stocks or sell something, or they were just moving in total panic, zigzagging the city in a frenzy. So Magnus ran up the east side of the park, all the way to 116th Street. The Hotel Dumont looked exactly the same as it had when Magnus had last seen it. All the curtains were still drawn, the doors still closed. It was cold, quiet, and unwelcoming. But when Magnus tried the front door, he found it unlocked.
The first odd thing was that the hotel seemed to be completely vacant. There was no one at the desk, no one in the lobby, no one anywhere. It was certainly a magnificent setting, with a graceful and gilded grand staircase. And it was all very plush and padded. A rich red-and-gold carpet covered the floor, and the windows were covered with heavy drapes that stretched from floor to ceiling. It was cool, shaded, muffled, and disturbingly quiet. Magnus looked up and around, right up to the frescoed ceiling with its fat-faced cherubs pointing at one another and gleefully swinging on vine swings in gardens.
Just to the left, there was a wide archway flanked by pillars covered in a floral pattern. This clearly led to one of the hotel’s grander rooms and seemed as likely a place as any to look. Magnus opened this door. It led to a ballroom—an utterly magnificent one—with a white marble floor and a lacing of gilded balconies all around the room, broken by gilded mirrors that reflected the room back on itself over and over.