The Enchanter Completed

(The Board had distributed these devices as a service to members who frequented the more isolated areas of the grounds. In the event of assault, one brief hypersonic tootle would fetch the immediate attention of several roaming packs of Bichons Fris-s. Your Bichon is small, curly-topped, and akin to the poodle. The assailant rash enough to linger once he saw that he was not to be torn limb from limb by Dobermans, pit bulls or any of their ilk soon learned the error of scorning attack-lapdogs. Affection can be fatal. At least one would-be footpad met an unspeakable demise, first battered senseless by violently wagging tails, then drowned in a veritable flood of canine drool.)

The rustling in the bushes stopped. " 'Sokay, man," came a hoarse voice. " 'Sokay, no sweat, be cool."

"If I wished my perspiration to respond to the commands of strangers, I would purchase an exercise video. Show yourself!" I cried.

The bushes rustled more and yielded up their prey. The young man thus disgorged from their thorny snare looked much the worse for wear and tear. His pale face was scored with scarlet scratches, his long, shaggy black hair bedecked with serrate leaves and a sprinkling of pink and crimson petals. There was a certain air of lost Arcadia about him, an image reinforced by the fact that he was clad not in the dungarees and rudely worded T-shirt that are the standard plumage of such rara avis as he, but in a chiton. (It is, alas, a sorry commentary on our times that the masses would not recognize the Greek chiton unless a rerun of Paul Newman in The Silver Chalice bit them on the fundament.).

He also wore sandals and carried an electric guitar.

"Who are you?" I demanded. Courtesy forbade me from likewise asking what he might be and why he was being it among our roses. "What are you doing here? This is private property!"

"Easy, man, easy," he said, swaying somewhat on his feet and blinking up into the sky as if he had never seen anything so wondrous as the sun. "Gotta get my bearings, gotta think things through. Oh wow, talk about your head trips." With that cogent observation, he laid one hand to his brow, rolled his eyes back in his head, and fainted.

I used my cellular telephone to summon aid. Specifically, I called young Langley, whom I knew to be somewhere about the premises at that time of day. As soon as I saw that guitar, I knew he was the man for the job.

Like Dawkins, Benet Owen Langley was a recent addition to the Club's membership rolls, though he joined our companionable establishment under circumstances every bit as distinct from Dawkins's as they were extraordinary in their own right. He might have claimed the honorific of Youngest Member had such a designation existed, for he was no more than twenty-one years of age. Through intense application he had graduated Harvard in three years rather than the customary four and thence proceeded to sweep through the Law School with as much dispatch as that venerable institution might allow. He ignored the jibes of such straw-headed idlers as pronounce overachiever with contempt and made Partner in a prestigeous New York City firm of corporate attorneys in record time.

This in itself was no great miracle. The phenomenal nature of young Langley's accomplishments became apparent only when one was privy to the fact that he was the offspring of one Thrash Gordon, late luminary of that genre of soi disant music known as Heavy Metal rock and roll. Before Mr. Gordon departed this life in the wake of a tragic tuning fork accident, he managed to break seventeen guitars, fifty-seven hotel suites, eight drummers, and Dorothea Langley's heart. Dorothea had retained her maiden name throughout the course of that ill-considered marriage and, upon her husband's death, returned to the estranged bosom of her family to raise her boy properly.

It worked. Albeit Benet Owen (so named by his father in a moment of cold-cough-and-flu-medicament-induced religiosity, commemorating both St. Benet Biscop, one of the lesser-known patron saints of musicians, and St. Owen of Rouen, invoked against deafness) had passed the first eight formative years of his life as a junior-rank roadie, once free of his father's world he embraced his mother's roots with a convert's holy passion.

Yet swear as he might that he had turned his back irrevocably on the realm of popular music and all it entailed, he could not deny he had retained much knowledge of that shadowy otherworld.

Now, as he knelt beside the apparition in the rose garden, his first remark proved that he had not removed himself so far from the late Thrash's sphere as he might have preferred, viz:

"Whoa. That is one bitchin' ax!"

"I beg your pardon?" I remarked.

Young Langley promptly re-collected himself and withdrew his hand from the guitar with all alacrity (though also with some obvious reluctance). "I mean to say, this is quite the costly musical instrument: Too costly to be in the hands of someone like that. It's probably stolen. We must alert the authorities."

Alerting the authorities was not in accord with Club policy. Despite repeated contretemps that had at the last ditch demanded the intervention of local law enforcement perso

"How can you be sure?" I asked.

"Well, just look at him!" young Langley replied with a fine que voulez-vous? gesture of his impeccably manicured hands. "He's in possession of one of the priciest guitars on the market, yet he's unkempt, uncombed, and in rags!"

"He is not in rags," I corrected him. "He is wearing a chiton, which is-"

Young Langley had no respect for a Classical education. "Have you searched him for identification?" he inquired, interrupting me.

"Where?" I countered. "The chiton was never confected that had pockets, as you would know if you'd bothered to hear me out." I confess, I was a bit acidulous, but his cavalier disregard for my hard-won erudition irked me out of all knowledge.

Young Langley made an impatient sound, then checked our uninvited guest for vital signs. He was just prying open the victim's eyelids when these flew wide of their own accord. Our visitor sat bolt upright and let out a shriek of abject terror that scattered the petals from a good half-dozen of the nearest rose bushes.

"Oh wow, man, I'm sorry," he said after he recovered his self-possession. "It's just, like, I thought I was still back down there, you know?"

"Back down where?" I inquired.

"The Underworld."

Young Langley and I exchanged a look of trepidation. Although I fancied myself a kind-hearted soul and was willing to believe the same of Langley until proved otherwise, we did not feel that it would be wise to offer the Club as a refuge for anyone unfortunate enough to have run afoul of Organized Crime. The police were too regular a fixture on Club grounds as it was, and were as tired of seeing us as we were of seeing them.

Langley, bless him, took all this into consideration and acted like a gentleman: His checkbook was out and open with an alacrity that would have set Alumni Fund solicitors to helpless drooling.

"What's the problem, old man?" he asked. "A loan come due? Piper to be paid and all that? Perhaps if you were to give me some general notion of how best we might aid you and see you on your way… " (Of course he was never crass enough to mention the M-word, nor how much of the M-word our uninvited guest might need to assuage his pursuers.)

"Huh?" The man brushed hair out of his eyes and gaped at Langley. "Oh, you think I need money?" The M-word! There it was, naked and blushing in the marketplace! Beyond all other external factors, this was proof positive that we were not in the presence of one of Our Kind. (True, I had used the M-word myself repeatedly, and not so long ago, but there is a great difference between mentioning it when you are speaking in the abstract and naming the Ineffable Name when you are dealing with concrete sums. The former is finance, the latter, vulgarity.).