The Magus

As Nick approaches the statue, Julie beckons to him from behind a hillock. Nick walks in her direction and comes across an incongruous sight: Julie in a vertical iron tube from the chest down, her elbows resting on the ground in front. Julie climbs out and tells Nick the tube was a spy station built by the Germans during the war. According to Julie, now that Conchis’s masque is concluded, she and June have been staying in the village at Hermes’s cottage. They plan to spend the summer in Phraxos. She wonders if Nick will want to stay. He happily agrees.

Julie and Nick climb down the tube, which ends in a small cellar. As Nick settles in, Julie climbs up to close the lid, and is seized by someone and pulled down. The lid shuts, leaving Nick trapped. It takes Nick half an hour to free himself and emerge on the empty beach. Filled with rage at being played again, Nick races to the Bourani house.

At the house Nick finds a naked doll and a skull suspended from a tree. The doll has its underpants about its ankles and is meant to represent Julie, while the skull perhaps means death. Grappling to make sense of these symbols, Nick runs to Hermes’s house in the village, where he is told the young women are on Conchi’s yacht. Unable to understand the situation, Nick returns to the school.

He receives another reply confirming Julie’s identity, but by now something fundamental has changed within him in relation to her and June. Nick feels he can trust them no longer, having been fooled one time too many. On Wednesday, the school guard tells Nick a beautiful young woman, a foreigner, is there to see him.

Nick goes outside the school and discovers June, instead of Julie. June tells Nick she is there to tell him the truth that she and June are faking their identities. All the replies to Nick’s enquiry letters were also forged. June is being truthful to Nick because she, too, is sick of Conchis’s and Julie’s games. Julie has always been Conchis’s co-conspirator, not necessarily his mistress, but his most devoted student. Right now, Julie is probably in bed with her actual lover, Joe.

An angry Nick tells June that the cost of the games has been high. Fooled by Julie, Nick broke Alison’s heart, and she died. Learning of Alison’s death, June changes track and says she was playing a part even now, but the game is finally over. Nick must immediately come with her to see Julie.

June leads Nick to Conchis’s house, where Julie greets him and takes him to her room. She and Nick have a night of elaborate lovemaking, with Nick filled with euphoria at Julie’s beauty and wantonness. Afterward, Julie puts her kimono back on and heads for the door. Nick lazily asks Julie where she is going. Like an actress making an exit, Julie looks over her shoulder and says she is leaving for his trial. What’s more, Julie was never her name. Light floods the room and three men rush in, grabbing Nick.

Joe, leading the men, jumps on Nick before Nick can shout. As Nick struggles to get Joe off him, he recognizes one of the men as the actor who played Anton. Conchis appears in the doorway as well, dressed in all black, like the others. Recalling the castrated man from Cochis’s story, Nick is filled with panic that he will be subjected to the same fate. Anton puts Nick out of his misery by injecting him with a sedative.

Nick has little memory of the next few days, drifting in and out of consciousness. He senses he’s being kept in a small room on a yacht. Each time he wakes up and asks a few questions, he is injected again with a sedative.

One morning, a man lets Nick stay awake, dresses him, and makes him walk around the room. Soon, Anton enters Nick’s room to tell Nick that his “trial” will be held shortly.

Anton and his associates handcuff and straitjacket Nick, silencing him with a black, rubber gag. Nick is marched into a cistern room and placed on a throne facing 13 chairs. As he looks on in silence, a procession of figures enters the room, wearing head masks and costumes meant to represent gods, demons, and archetypes from various folklore and mythologies. The masked folk sit on the chairs facing Nick’s throne. One of the figures is carried in a coffin decorated with icons of the Goddess.

Soon, the figures unmask and disrobe to reveal their true identities, only the figure in the coffin staying hidden. The vampire is June, while an astrologer-magician is Conchis, and the witch is Julie. An older man introduces himself as Doctor Friedrich Kretschmer, while Conchis is Doctor Maurice Conchis of the Sorbonne. Julie is Doctor Vanessa Maxwell, and June, her twin, is the actress Moira Maxwell. The rest of the group are professional actors, social workers, and psychologists. Kretschmer says that while Nick may be thinking he was abducted by a group of sadists, the truth is he has been a subject of study by an international group of psychologists, whose radical methods require “that the subject should not, even at its conclusion, be informed of its purpose” (523).

An angry Nick makes an obscene gesture at the so-called psychologists, as they thank Nick for his participation and read out some of their notes about him, all harsh and unflattering. Nick is discussed as a man who preys on women due to a partly resolved Oedipal complex, with Vanessa (Julie/ Lily) describing Nick as incapable of treatment through psychoanalysis.

The last part of the experiment is Nick’s test. A flogging-frame is brought out, and Vanessa is tied to it. Nick is freed and handed a cat-o’-nine-tails—a multi-headed whip—and asked to flog Vanessa to take revenge. Nick is nearly tempted to hit Vanessa, but connects this moment with Conchis’s decision to spare the kapetan. Nick decides against revenge and throws down the whip. The group bows to him and leaves, Lily giving him a peculiar look.

Alone in the room with Anton and the other guards, Nick is once again handcuffed and gagged, this time taken to a room set up as a cinema hall, and fastened to the flogging frame. An old-fashioned silent movie is played for him, with labelled descriptions preceding each frame. However, the contents are pornographic, showing Vanessa and Joe having sex.

Interspersed with these pornographic scenes are shots of Nick’s meeting with Alison in Parnassus. Nick is aghast at the violation of privacy, as well as the sullying of his time with Alison. As the film ends, Conchis enters the room and tells Nick he must learn to smile, as he is now “elect.” Nick is injected with the hypodermic. This time, Nick welcomes the oblivion.

When Nick wakes up, he is alone in a dilapidated shack in an abandoned village, his belongings, an envelope, and a black box are dumped next to him. The envelope contains cash, his passport, and a note that lists the timings for the boat to Phraxos.

Although Nick is groggy, he also feels a sense of relief at having survived the experiment, as well as euphoria that, like the leader of the resistance fighters, he held on to his eleutheria, or freedom. He opens the box to see a loaded revolver, “Conchis’s last joke” (551), and fires it in the distance, asserting his desire to live.

Nick’s relief soon turns into irritability, and then rage. Fueled by a desire to blame someone for his misery, Nick decides Meli was Conchis’s spy in the school and seeks him out in the breakfast hall, punching him in the eye. Nick is summoned to the headmaster’s office and given his dismissal letter for unsatisfactory conduct as a teacher. However, the letter is dated two days prior, making it clear to Nick that the school meant to fire him before the Meli incident, possibly at Conchis’s behest.

As Nick packs his things, the deputy headmaster, Mavromichalis, visits him in his room. Mavromichalis’s veiled statements to Nick make it clear he is in Conchis’s employ. Mavromichalis tells Nick he can turn his dismissal into a resignation, if Nick agrees to never talk about Conchis and the masques. Nick relents.

However, after Mavromichalis leaves, Nick proceeds to Bourani with a lamp, crowbar, and hacksaw, telling himself that he promises to be quiet, but not to withhold an investigation.

Nick first goes to the German spyhole on the beach, climbs down, and finds Julie’s clothes, books, and notes on the masque around him. Nick also finds a fairy story called “The Prince and the Magician,” in which a young prince grows up believing there are no princesses, gods, or islands. One day, he runs away from home and meets a man on the shore, who tells him that all the things he thought non-existent do exist. The prince simply cannot see them as he is under the spell of his father, who is not a king but a sorcerer.

The prince returns to his father and demands to know the truth. The magician-king tells the prince the truth is that he is a sorcerer, as was the man on the shore. Agonized that the man on the shore was no god, the prince says he wants to die. The king summons death, who beckons to the prince. In the end, the prince does not choose death. Pleased, his father tells the prince that he is ready to be a magician himself.

On his return to Athens, Nick asks around about Conchis, and learns that there is no such professor at the Sorbonne. There is a man called Maurice Conchis, who has been dead for four years. Nick is directed to the cemetery where Conchis lies buried, and finds his grave. On the grave are fresh flowers, lilies, roses, and an unknown white flower. He understands the lilies and the roses are another dead-end or joke, meant to show him that his detective work will lead him nowhere. As he leaves, he takes one of the unknown flowers with him as a keepsake, wearing it in his buttonhole.

One day, he gets an anonymous call in his hotel room, asking him to look out of his window. Puzzled, Nick looks into the street and sees a girl in a black dress walking toward a waiting taxi: She is none other than Alison. Alison looks up and stares at Nick, who is leaning out of his window, then she gets into the taxi and leaves. Nick’s last shred of sanity seems to crumble.

Nick asks the hotel to trace the unknown call, but they are unable to do so. He is seized by anger and confusion. Gradually, it dawns on him that Conchis must have planned to include Alison in his games the moment Nick revealed her name. The more Nick contemplates Alison’s role in the enterprise, the angrier he gets, no longer Hamlet mourning Ophelia but Malvolio, the irate antagonist of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.

The next day, Nick finds the wilted flower he took from Conchis’s grave and visits a bookshop, picking out a tome on identifying flora. He finds that the name of the flower is Alysson maritime, known in English as “sweet Alison.”