Free The Case of the Vanishing Beauty by Richard S. Prather

sit here quietly in the darkness till the sun came up before anything happened.
    The woman came in again carrying the candle and followed by two people. It was a man and a woman, and in the faint light they looked old, close to seventy. They were seated and the woman went out again.
    Minutes dragged by.
    Then, again through the archway, the woman came. Only this time another was with her—probably the same woman who'd led me here from the temple. They walked down past the front row of seats and stood facing the crowd, separated from each other by about four feet. They were perhaps no more than twelve or fourteen feet from me. They stood holding their flickering candles while the organ continued to play.
    As if on signal, the candles went out.
    The organ music stopped.
    Then, overhead and a few feet behind the spot where the two women stood, light began to grow and illumine a large mass I couldn't make out at first. Then as the light increased in intensity, I could see that it was a huge face. A massive painting or photograph, at least fifteen or twenty feet long and high. It was the face of a man who seemed to be looking directly down at us from his position of eminence, out of deep, glowing eyes, a white turban upon his head. The light increased in intensity only enough so that the outlines of the picture could be seen and the face seemed to be hanging unsupported in the darkness.
    Nothing else happened for what was probably only a minute or two, but seemed longer. Then, with startling suddenness, a beam of light flashed down from somewhere up above and fell full upon the face and shoulders of a man standing four or five feet above the level of my eyes. His face was the face in the picture that seemed suspended in the air behind him, and on his head was a white turban. His arms were upraised and his head was bent down toward the people below.
    There wasn't a sound anywhere around me. And then he spoke.
    "Disciples. Disciples. Listen to me. Listen to me."
    The voice was deep, resonant. A soothing murmur that reached my ears easily and without strain, as if I were heating it more from within my head than from that strange figure above me.
    I put my head down and shut my eyes. Scott, old boy, I said to myself. Take it easy, chum. Don't get carried away here. The guy's got a big blow-up of a studio portrait behind him like a billboard, and he's probably standing on a rickety platform put up by nonunion labor. There's a baby spot stuck up on a beam or a tree limb, shining down on his kisser, and he's wondering what the take's going to be. Don't forget what you're here for.
    I looked up at the turbaned figure again and my mind flashed back to pictures I'd seen of another mass hypnotist, a guy named Hitler, who used to perch himself up above the crowd with a big blow-up of his mug behind him, and scream of the place Germany was soon to take in the world.
    So this was Narda. He was good. And he'd been reading books, I'd have bet my Cad against his turban that half of them had something to do with crowd psychology and hypnosis. You know hypnosis? It's not black magic anymore, or country-fair shenanigans; it's a tool of psychiatrists and psychologists, even doctors and dentists and advertising men who write the nauseous but effective air-wave commercials. It's a mental scalpel, anesthetic, medicine—a lot of things. And most of the favorite clinical techniques invariably include eyestrain, repeated suggestion, and a monotonous voice. I was beginning to appreciate Narda—the conditioning I'd been put through before he appeared, the strain on my eyes as I looked up at him, his words and the sound of his voice like the rise and fall of the surf as he launched into his spiel, which stretched credulity if you were looking for flaws, but was pretty good if you were willing and even anxious to believe him.
    He didn't speak with the wild ravings of the hillbilly revivalist, the hoarse, impassioned scream of words with the tight, quick gasp