The Magicians полностью

“Now we turn to the third point in our little triangle of love. By all rights the professor should have been completely impervious to our Emily’s charms. He should have had an avuncular little chuckle over it in the Senior Common Room and then forgotten about it. She wasn’t even that hot. Maybe he was having a midlife crisis, maybe he thought a liaison with Ms. Greenstreet could restore to him some of his long-vanished youth. Who knows. He was married, too, the idiot.

“We’ll never know exactly what happened or how far it went, except that it went too far, and then Professor Sexyman came to his senses, or got what he wanted, and he called it off.

“Needless to say our Emily became even gothier and weepier and more like a Gorey drawing than she already was, and her boy became even more besotted and brought her presents and flowers and was Supportive.

“Maybe you knew this, I don’t know, I didn’t, but Woof used to be different from the other fountains. That’s why the doomers started hanging out there in the first place. You wouldn’t notice what was off about it, at first, but after a while you’d realize that when you looked into it, you wouldn’t see your own reflection, just empty sky. And maybe if the sky was cloudy on that particular day, the sky in the fountain would be blue, or the other way around. It definitely wasn’t a normal reflection. And every once in a while you’d look into it and you’d see other faces looking up at you, looking puzzled, as if they were looking into some other fountain somewhere else and were weirded out because they were seeing your face and not their own. Somebody must have figured out a way to switch the reflections in two fountains, but who did it and why, and how, and why the Dean didn’t change them back, I have no idea.

“You have to wonder, too, if it was more than just the reflections—if you could dive down into one pool and come up in the other one, in this world or some other world. There’s always been something off about those fountains. Did you know they were here before Brakebills? They built the school to be near them, and not the other way around. Or that’s what people say.”

Eliot snorted.

“Well that’s what people say, darling. Anyway,” Janet went on, “the thing is, Emily started spending a lot of time at Woof, just smoking and hanging out, and I guess mooning over her little affair. She spent so much time there that she started to recognize one of the faces in the fountain. Somebody like her, who was spending a lot of time at the other fountain, the one in the reflection. Let’s call her Doris. After a while Emily and Doris got to noticing each other. They’d acknowledge each other, a little wave, you know, just to be polite. Probably Doris was a little mopey, too. They got to feeling like kindred spirits.

“Emily and Doris worked out a way to communicate. Again, the exact details have eluded your intrepid correspondent. Maybe they held up signs or something. They must have had to be in mirror writing, to make sense as reflections, or am I getting that wrong?

“I don’t know how things worked in Woofland, where Doris lived, maybe magic is different there. Or maybe Doris was fucking with our Emily, maybe she was sick of hearing Emily whine about her love life. Maybe there was something really wrong with Doris, maybe she was something genuinely evil. But one day Doris suggested that if Emily wanted her lover back, maybe her appearance was the problem, and she should try changing it?”

A chill settled over the group, where they lay on the sun-warm turf. Even Quentin knew that using magic to alter one’s physical appearance never ended well. In the world of magical theory it was a dead spot: something about the inextricable, recursive connection between your face and who you were—your soul, for lack of a better word—made it hellishly difficult and fatally unpredictable. When Quentin had first gotten to Brakebills, he’d wondered why everybody didn’t just make themselves ridiculously good-looking. He’d looked at the kids with an obviously flawed feature—like Gretchen with her leg, or Eliot with his twisted jaw—and wondered why they didn’t get somebody to fix them up, like Hermione with her teeth in Harry Potter. But in reality it always ended in disaster.

“Poor Emily,” Janet said. “When she took down the spell that Doris taught her through the fountain, she actually thought she’d found it, the secret technique everybody else had missed. It was elaborate and costly, but it really looked like it might work. After a few weeks of laying the groundwork, she put it together one night by herself in her room.

“How do you think she felt when she looked in the mirror and saw what she’d done to herself?” You could almost hear a note of genuine sympathy in Janet’s hard voice. “I can’t imagine. I really can’t.”

It was late enough in the afternoon now that the shadows from the forest had almost stretched out from the western edge of the Sea far enough to lap at the edge of their blanket.