Free The Last Magician by Janette Turner Hospital Page B

still again: portrait of a waterspout, an impossible aqueous ballerina en pointe.
    (Very clever, Charlie, though you’re making me lose my sense of balance. Which you always did, damn it. You always did.)
    Vertigo drains out of me, colour is drained from the image.
    Then, as subtly as a spill of ink disperses itself in clear oil, the cone of water is smudging at the edges, growing fur, putting forth angular roughness. It is no longer water, but something else. What? It looks vaguely medieval, or more ancient, like a diagram from a book on the plumbing of Roman bathhouses. Text appears at the bottom of the screen: Sandro Botticelli’s drawing of Dante’s Inferno.
    I am hanging in space, watching the funnel of hell entire, and it begins to spin like a top, faster faster, so that I grab the arms of my chair to stave off giddiness. Mercifully the dervish-thing slows down, it stops again, I have the sensation of flying toward the vortex, the zoom takes me closer, and where before the corded water of Cedar Creek Falls made its screw turns, now I see the spiral ledges of something like an open-cut mine. It is a black-and-white image, swarming with ants, no, with people, I am swooping down into the slope which is spinning again, I feel nausea, streaks of colour are spinning past me like spittle, I clutch blindly at armchair supports, I stabilise things, I slow down, I am now in the eighth circle of hell.
    Get off here, Lucy, Charlie whispers. (He speaks silently now; privately; for my ears alone.) Get off where the two gowned figures stand, one in scarlet and one in purple. Yes, you have your bearings now, he smiles, you recognise this famous landscape of paint and charcoal on white vellum. It is Sandro Botticelli, yes, from the drawings housed in the Berlin and the Vatican museums, the ones in a book on my shelves, the tourist’s illustrated guide to Dante’s hell.
    (You remember you commented, Lucy? You remember you thought of Botticelli?
    I remember, Charlie. Do you remember what I said when I picked up your videotape? Beckett and Monty Python, I said. I wasn’t so far out, was I?
    Pay attention, Lucy. Two gentlemen are waiting for you.)
    Here, then, are Dante and Virgil. Beneath their frail rock bridge, boiling excrement bubbles, froths, cords itself, piss-curls, shit-swirls, slips, slops, turd-twirls, putresces, a foul slippery flush of cosmic diarrhoea; and here the Flatterers (recyclers of sewage, panderers to Presidents and Prime Ministers and Supreme Commanders, flaunters of the Queen’s Birthday honours) here they cavort in acrobatic, scatological pain.
    Now the camera distances itself, backing away from the stench, so that the striations and rocky niches and rock ladders, the whole diabolic honeycomb, can again be seen entire. Colours stream down the funnel and are sucked out like water running down a plughole (the flushing of hell?). Mutations again; something subtle is going on, too minute to decode. Is that still Dante’s and Botticelli’s hell or an open-cut mine?
    (Everything reminded you of the quarry, didn’t it, Charlie? It was a Venus flytrap, it sucked you down.
    Wait, Lucy Wait.)
    Wait. Wait. I move slowly closer, riding the eye of the camera like a gull on a slipstream of air. The scene in my gull’s eye is steady, motionless, its colours gone: the same pits and ledges and rock pockets, the same ladders busy with tormented souls, but it is no longer Botticelli. It is the same pit all right, and yet it is also another, a black-and-white photograph that looks familiar.
    (Do you recognise it, Lucy? Charlie whispers.
    Is it the quarry?
    Not yet, he says.)
    Text flickers across the base of the screen:
    Since a peasant found the first nuggets there in 1980, a mountain has been reduced to a hollow 600 feet deep and half a mile wide. It has yielded 42 tons of gold. Bars, brothels and stores have sprung up nearby; 100,000 people now live alongside the pit. Photographer