Potatomancer

This is different, thought the man waiting in the sitting room. He sat on the couch, removed his sling pouch from his shoulder and placed it by his feet. His eyes fixed on every detail of the room. It was sparsely decorated for a sitting room, the wooden walls bare and windowless. On the wall before him was a large, cheaply framed oil of a man of perhaps forty. A relative, maybe. A few old, dust-encrusted books were on the small oak end table right of the couch. The couch was comfortable, but lumpy. How it managed to be both he could not envision.

A woman stepped in from an adjacent room. "Madam will see you, Mr. Fielder."

"Fielder" was not his name, but it served his purpose that she believed it was. If they had known that Harry Houdini, legendary escape artist and occultist, had come, it may ruin everything. Houdini was here to find his lost mother, who was somewhere where mortal eyes could not see. He had traveled much in his search, trying to find a mystic who could contact his mother. What he found was that these so-called mystics, necromancers, seers, and channelers were invariably charlatans. By some trickery they would move tables, light candles without touching them, make inexplicable noises and such. His quest evolved into a dual purpose because of this. He would find his mother, and expose any charlatan he saw along the way.

Houdini had developed a clear eye for trickery. The sitting room seemed too bare to have knockers and scratchers and howlers hiding behind curtains or bookcases. There were no such items in the room, nor were there any other tables, chairs, or even rugs. It was just the couch, the end table, the picture on the wall, and a modest-looking chandelier. There was nothing to make this place look like the dwelling of a necromancer. There was barely anything at all.

Usually these folk would try to make a dim, candlelit atmosphere. A crystal ball or deck of cards would rest on a table with black or red cloth. The room would be cluttered with herbs, incenses, stones, silks, bookshelves, anything to make the poor fools who come to these places expect to see something extraordinary. Often some contraption was obscured in the mess, something to knock down books or a bellows to blow the fire off of the candlewicks. There was no evidence of such contrivances here, nor any reason to suspect such things. Houdini didn't know whether to see this as comforting or even more suspicious.

Houdini's eyes then fixed on the woman who had come into the room. He made a cursory inspection of her, looking for signs that she was an accomplice to the necromancer's trickery. The woman looked as plain and innocuous as the rest of the place, though. She wore a simple coffee-brown dress, no jewelry, barefoot, auburn hair straight behind her back. She was surprisingly young; she appeared to be in her early twenties. Not quite beautiful, but had a quiet grace and meekness. She was upright and honest-looking.

Houdini rose to follow the woman through the entry when another woman stepped in. "Mr. Fielder. Did you bring what I asked of you?"

Houdini reached into his pouch and pulled out a potato. "Yes, Madam." He looked down at the potato, rolling it in his hands. He wanted to look as if he were idly studying it, but he was actually looking over Madam Ceres. She wore a dress similar to the younger woman, but it was black. Long black silks were draped around her neck, shoulders, and arms, running down the length of her body and arms, reaching nearly to the floor. Her age could not be easily distinguished from her face, but her voice was one of more experience and assertiveness than her young accomplice. She moved with elegance yet with a bit of stiffness.

What surprised Houdini most was that Madam Ceres had come to him in the sitting room. Usually when he had to wait in a sitting room he would be led to the mystic's room, so as to give the appearance of coming into their world, into their lair.

"Please, sit, Mr. Fielder." Madam Ceres gestured with her hand to the couch. Houdini looked back and sat. As he turned back to Madam Ceres, he saw that she was placing a chair on the floor in front of him. She sat.

Ah, the trickery begins so soon, and so ill hidden. Houdini was not impressed with Madam Ceres's mysterious production of a chair. It was certainly made with hinges so that it could be made flat and easily hidden behind the back. Gesturing to the couch was a misdirection, an opportunity to take the chair from behind and open it, all in a single fluid motion, unseen. The common folk would probably marvel at such a trick, but Houdini had seen far better in his search for a true mystic. He was now certain that he would leave disappointed.

Madam Ceres reached her hand to take the potato, and Houdini gave it to her. "You are a necromancer, is that right?" Houdini asked as she studied it.

"No, no, Mr. Fielder. What I do is not about death and haunts. It is about life, growth. I am the last of my family, a Potatomancer."

Houdini had great difficulty stifling his laughter, but he knew how to deceive as well as any mystic. Never before had he heard of a Potatomancer. The man who referred him to Madam Ceres had said the word, but Houdini thought that it was humor. Madam Ceres's routine was to have people bring a potato to her, which she would use in her magic. That was fine, but to call herself a "Potatomancer" - it was laughable.

Houdini decided to say nothing as Madam Ceres began her routine. She turned the potato about in her hands, studying every bit of the skin. She seemed to make note of the sprouts, measuring with her knuckles their size and their distance from each other. She pierced the skin with her nail, observing its thickness or maybe how easily it yielded. She scraped off a bit of skin, tasted it, smelled the potato where the skin was gone.

This was all very amusing to Houdini. It was just a potato that he pulled from a barrel. How could Madam Ceres know anything about him, or communicate with the dead, by tasting potato bits? Perhaps it was her way of getting paid more than her fee, to be donated a potato from each poor fool who comes to her for advice.

After about ten minutes of thoroughly inspecting the potato, Madam Ceres spoke. "You are searching for something you will never find."

Houdini waited. She said nothing more. Madam Ceres held the potato between her open palms, and Houdini laid his hands upon it, though he had not been told. A vibrating energy coursed through his hands. It was strong, it tingled, and he felt it in his heart.

Electricity! Houdini jerked his hands away from the potato. He had seen a charlatan mystic use a potato to light a small lamp bulb. It was science, the chemical nature of the potato, not magic. Madam Ceres must have some contraption in the sleeves of her dress to shock his hands when he touched the potato.

"What have you done?!" cried Madam Ceres. Houdini did not hear her. Rage passed a shadow over his face, then a light. For so many years he had been searching for his mother, and every time some charlatan dunce mystic would dash his hopes of seeing her again.

"Now you will meet her again, and soon." Madam Ceres looked on him gravely.

A hot red-white light flashed before Houdini's eyes, turned black, then the room went out of focus. He laid his hand on the end table, and in the violent storm of his hatred he sent it crashing into the painting of the man on the wall. It spun and howled like a wind demon, and fell to pieces as it put a hole through the man's oil-painted chest. The painting fell, the frame cracked and ripped the old canvas.

Houdini's vision spun wildly, and he stumbled out the door.

Madam Ceres wept.

* * *

Only Madam Ceres knew what had happened that evening. Another Potatomancer would understand, but Ceres was the last of her family. The potato held some of the man's life force through his contact with it. It was his potato. The energy it contained was enough for her to know why he had come, that he was longing for his mother who had decided never again to step into this realm. To learn more, she needed him to lay hands on his potato so that his life force could pass through it into her, that she may feel his destiny.

She had time enough to feel the waves of his thoughts and emotions course through her blood, her brain. She felt his sorrow, his guilt, his anger. She had time enough to pull from this energy the knowledge that Mr. Fielder's real name was Weiss but many called him Houdini, and the quest driven by anger that made him disbelieve her.

Then Houdini broke contact, interrupted the flow of his life force. This was a shock to him. It began an unstoppable chain reaction of cascading emotional and physical states. It would impair his judgment, his physical capacities, and his sanity. And because some of his life force was trapped inside her and his potato, his life would end much sooner than it would have otherwise.

It was not long afterward that Madam Ceres read a newspaper article about the accident that had destroyed Erich Weiss, who was known to the world as Harry Houdini. He was not his full self during his final days. Something was missing from his spirit, something that would have made him more cautious about his health, and to mind what he was doing when he allowed himself to be punched as a test of strength.

Madam Ceres wept.

In the years following her husband's death, Bess Weiss would conduct seances to try to contact her beloved Erich. She never found a sign of him. It takes a spirit of great energy to interact with the world of the living, to make their voice heard or their form visible, to stir a breeze or to lift a book.

Harry Houdini just didn't have the life in him.