The Devil's Mirror by Ray Russell Page B

wife. ‘Anyone else expected?’ asked Temple, accepting a beer. ‘Just Mac,’ said Fairbank.
    ‘Bill McDermott?’ said Weiss. ‘I haven’t seen him in ages. He owes me five bucks. I’ll have Scotch, please.’
    Father William McDermott entered a couple of minutes later, profusely apologising, demanding gin, and angrily pressing five singles into the outstretched palm of the gloating Weiss. ‘You were right, you buccaneer. Leoncavallo did compose a La Bohème. I looked it up. Here, take your tainted money. I’ll trip you up yet, though, mark my word!’ Turning to Fairbank, the priest said, ‘Now then, Marcus. What the dickens are we all doing here?’
    ‘You’re here to witness something,’ said Fairbank, ‘to be present at an historic occasion. Here’s your martini, Mac. If you will all step this way?...’
    Clutching their drinks, Fairbanks guests followed their host in single file down a narrow flight of stairs to a cellar workroom.
    Fairbank snapped on the lights. A semi-circle of simple wooden chairs had been grouped facing a large, sheet-shrouded object. Father Mac said, ‘What is that thing—a coffin?’
    Weiss added, ‘Or a piano?’
    Fairbank smiled at the composer. ‘You’re close. Sit down, all of you, please.’
    As they did so, they took note of the wall behind the draped object: set into it with custom-crafted care was what looked like a forty-inch television screen.
    Graner groaned, ‘You didn’t bring us here to watch TV? ‘That’s not a TV set,’ Fairbank assured him. ‘I do make use of the cathode principle, but there the resemblance ends.’
    ‘I’m a-quiver with suspense,’ said Haskell.
    Fairbank took a position in front of the impassive screen. Habit urged him into a professorial stance and manner. ‘My dear friends,’ he said, ‘what you are about to see—’ (he turned towards the screen) ‘—is the culmination of ten years’ heartbreaking work...’
    ‘Sorry, Marcus,’ said Temple, ‘I didn’t catch that last. You turned your back.’
    Fairbank faced Temple and spoke distinctly, so the deaf painter could read his lips. ‘I said: the culmination of ten years’ heartbreaking work. Heartbreaking not only because of time lost on false trails, beautiful theories shattered by inflexible facts, research halted time and again by lack of funds, failure after failure after failure—but also because my devoted Thelma, who shared the toil and travail of this project, the... the sacrifice, is not here to share the triumph.’
    He faltered for a moment, brushed by emotion, then he grasped one corner of the sheet in front of him. You are the very first to see—’ He whipped off the sheet.
    ‘—The Fairbank Light-Organ!’
    A curious instrument was revealed. At superficial glance, it looked like an ordinary concert organ, Italian Provincial in sherry walnut, available from any music dealer. Then one noticed certain modifications. Thick black cables writhing from its base. The pedals removed. One entire bank of keys replaced by a gleaming platoon of gauges and a complex of transistors. The lettering on the stops and switches revised: the harmonic drawbars, for example, now bore hand-painted numbers in the high hundreds, thousands, millions, billions; VIBRATO WIDE and VIBRATO FAST had become SLOW IMAGE and SPEED IMAGE; DEEP BASSOON was now LONGSHOT, and FLUTE was CLOSE-UP; HARP SUSTAIN was freeze image; thorny equations stood in the stead of the designations BANJO, CHIMES, MARIMBA, GUITAR, GLOCKENSPIEL; and the abbreviated, enigmatic ETERN. was clumsily pasted over what had been DIAPASON. Connected to all this, the dark eye in the wall—the television screen that was not a television screen.
    ‘Hell,’ Weiss growled. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve re-invented the colour organ! Patterns of coloured light flitting across a screen while music plays? Scriabin tried that over fifty years ago and it was a flop even then.’
    Fairbank shook his head. ‘No, it’s nothing like