The Olfactory Magician

Speculative Fiction by Ken Foxe

When the Olfactory Magician left home, it was the day after he turned eighteen. That was no coincidence. The previous day, his father, a wizard, had told him he was adopted. He fled their great mansion in Foxrock carrying just a rucksack full of clothes and a small wad of cash filched from his mother’s purse.

In a fit of spite, he took a precious volume belonging to the man he thought was his father. It was the only one that wasn’t secure in the wizard’s arcane library, a room Donie had never once set foot in. The name of the book was written in Old Gaelic, so the young man understood nothing of its contents. But he knew it was valuable. And he was thinking he might be able to sell it one day when he got to London.

Sitting on the slow boat to Holyhead, the great ferry gently loping through the waves, he took it out to read. He had never been able to make any sense of his father’s books. They were all written in the old language with even the letters of its alphabet indecipherable. Donie had a light, very light, smattering of Irish from school, but it was of no help. And as he sat on a long couch on the boat to Wales, he had this fleeting idea he should just go out on deck and toss it overboard. Perhaps that would have been just as well.

He knew nobody in London but enough to know where all the Irish exiles went. That evening, after the long train journey down from Anglesey, Donie sat on a high stool in a Kilburn bar and legally ordered a pint of beer for the first time. He’d drank before, in the houses of schoolmates, and in fields and woods. This was different mind, and for perhaps the first time in his life, he truly felt a man. And it was one part liberating and the other part terrifying.

“You got some ID on you,” said the barman and his accent was as unmistakably of the Northside of Dublin as Donie’s was of the Southside.

“Here you go,” he replied as he laid his passport out on the counter. “Eighteen years plus one day.”

“Fair enough,” said the barman. “And Happy Birthday too.”

Soon enough, Donie was on his third drink, and his head was getting fuzzy. That conversation with his dad, his ‘former dad’, was bouncing around like a rugby ball on summer ground. How he’d been taken into care aged eighteen months. How his birth mother had died of a heroin overdose a couple of years later. How nobody knew who his father was. How fortunate he was to have wound up where he did when he could have been dragged up in some squalid hovel on Mountjoy Square.

Certain things were beginning to make sense too. The way he’d never quite fit in at the private school he attended, his strange affinity for getting in fights and taking risks. A peculiar feeling that had long been simmering within, of dis-ease, of unbelonging. And as his unquiet mind thrashed around, he slammed his almost empty pint glass down on the bar so hard, it was fortunate it didn’t crack.

The barman walked towards him, broadening his shoulders, making clear he was no stranger to handling tricky customers.

“You all right there?”

“Sorry,” said Donie, “That was an accident.”

“What you at in a place like this anyway?” the barman asked, casting a glance at the rest of his clientele, older men nursing pints of stout like they were their infant babies, another small group playing a game of poker.

“I just came from Dublin today,” said Donie.

“And signs on it. Have you somewhere to kip?”

Donie nodded a no.

“You’re not the first to scarper to London, and not my place to ask why,” said the barman. “You interested in work?”

“I suppose.”

The barman took a reporter’s notebook from behind the bar, tore out a page, and wrote down the address of a house in Cricklewood.

“You ask for Bridie, tell her Martin sent you. She’ll help get you settled here.”

“Can I have one more drink?”

“So long as you behave yourself.”

“Have you any food?”

“I could rustle up a toasted ham and cheese.”

In the years that followed, Donie walked that well-trod emigrant path between the building sites of Greater London, the Irish pubs, lively and decrepit, and every class of bedsit and flat in the British capital. There was always enough work, and money, and drink, and music, and women to go around. And in a blur, he was already twenty-five. It was only on very rare nights that he might pull down his father’s old book from whatever cranny it inhabited and start to leaf through the cryptic vellum pages, some nights with a few tears, and some nights in fury.

His dad made contact three times, pleaded with him to come home, and asking about the whereabouts of his precious missing volume.

“In the bottom of the f**king Irish Sea,” Donie would tell him.

Certain people just squeeze out into the world with a predilection for addiction and Donie was one of those. His first seven years in London, the drink had been enough for him. He was never the only man on site with a throbbing head and the hangovers never hit so hard in the twenties. That first snort of cocaine though, in the jacks of a Soho bar – that was all it took.

The building trade paid well, but not that well. And so it was that Donie came to be part of a fellowship of fiends who engaged in extracurricular activities to support their lifestyle. The city wasn’t short of ill-guarded building sites and empty mansions ready for ransack. There was other work that could be found too, bringing packages here and there without asking too many questions, giving fellas with small debts small bits of a fright.

It was himself and Mick Moriarty in the van on a murky November night, driving a rusty Hiace van down to Croydon. They were supposed to leave it parked up in a multi-storey there, take the train back into the city. What was in the back they did not know, did not care, until they were pulled over on the Streatham High Road. It was a planned operation; they’d been ratted out for sure. It was enough to put Donie in jail for five years, Moriarty for ten because of his previous convictions.

Wandsworth Prison had its Irish contingent and Donie fell with ease into their company. The strangest thing was just how comfortable it all felt – knowing these people were his kind, like he was born ready to endure prison. The years had taken a chisel to the high-toned southside accent he had taken with him on the ferry. And now he could move the timbre of his voice from the inner city of Dublin to the East End of London, with all destinations in between catered for.

There was one person in prison he could never fool though, a genteel Galway-man named Laurence Madden. Stories of why Madden was incarcerated were as varied as they were numerous. And he was apt to say when asked: “I wouldn’t be here unless I was meant to be.”

Donie had a soft spot for him, and just maybe, it was because with his snow-white hair, he looked a little like his foster father, the wizard.

“Dónal, my young man,” Madden would say, “there’s layers to you. Like a nun in winter.”

The older prisoner always had a book in his hand: the classics, sports biographies, science fiction, Mills and Boon even. He read so much that he couldn’t afford to be picky about what. A few months after Donie’s sentence began – the book of choice was An Béal Bocht by Flann O’Brien, which had come as a gift in the post.

“You’ve fluent Irish?” said Donie.

“I used to teach it,” replied Madden.

“Hmmm.”

“I can still teach it to the type of people who are willing to learn.”

So began an hour’s lesson each day, sometimes more, in which Donie would grapple with the intricacies of his island’s native language. The spelling he remembered from signposts and from school, about how long vowels went with long vowels, and short with short. He struggled with the tenses and most of all the prepositions, but there were twenty-four hours each day to kill. In his cell at night, the words of his forebears would run unbidden through his mind so that he began to sometimes dream in his true mother tongue.

“Dónal,” Madden said one day, “you know you have a real gift for the language.”

“And I always hated Irish so much in school.”

“You wouldn’t be the first to say that. Sometimes, a person is not ready to learn yet. And it’s all the sweeter when they come back and try again.”

Three years rolled by. Donie’s nose was as unblemished as his Irish was well-polished. The prisons were, as jails tend to be, overcrowded and the better-behaved residents were given opportunities for temporary release, and then parole.

The day before his final departure from Wandsworth, Donie was sitting in Laurence Madden’s cell saying his farewells.

“God gave you a good head Dónal,” said Madden, “you should make use of it this time.”

“Of course,” said Donie”

“Don’t come back here or anywhere like it?”

But Donie wasn’t quite listening.

“Tell me something Laurence, do you know anything about reading old Irish?” he asked, “like really old Irish?”

Freedom was what it ever was. In a pub in Neasden that night, the newly coined ex-con drank Guinness and Bollinger, had a snort or two, and was given an envelope filled with cash. A hand-written note inside said: “Many are the men who prove weak in times of trouble.” Donie knew it had come direct from the Boss McDonnacha. There would be no more half-baked delivery jobs and amateur shakedowns. It was time for him to get right down to business.

One of the better outcomes of his prison sojourn was that it helped break the cycle of addiction. It wasn’t that drink or drugs were unavailable, but they became – more occasional treats. He took that attitude with him when the door of his cell closed for the last time. The cash was enough to get him set up in a nice apartment. And he knew it was just a matter of waiting for further instructions.

Donie had never been to the British Library before, never had any reason. He’d driven by it a few times, didn’t pay it too much heed. It always struck him as strange that the old empire’s national library would be housed in such a modern building. As he approached the information desk, his luck was in because the librarian that greeted him was a man from Belfast.

“I want to learn how to read old Irish,” said Donie.

“Do you even know the new version?” the librarian joked.

They began to speak in Gaeilge, the two of them falling like feathers into their ancestral language. By the time they were finished talking, Donie had a list of a dozen books to help him get started.

His foster father had always told him most people could never do magic. There were only seventeen licenced wizards in Ireland, plus a few other dabblers and rogues who had the knack for a weak spell or two. The words of the enchantments though, they were useless without the Flair. And that was if you could even find the close-guarded books in the first place. Donie knew how minute his chances were as he dusted down his father’s vellum volume, its title revealing itself to him at last. ‘The Book of Olfactory Illusions’.

The illuminated pages were filled with spirals and curlicues, strange anatomical diagrams of the nostrils, nasal cavities, and the cribriform plate. There were explanatory notes for each spell, its effects, range, and power, along with the text of the incantation. Donie waded through it, word by word, trying to piece together the meaning, scribbling down rough translations. There was no way to be sure of how accurate they were but as he moved through the pages, he grew more confident.

There were apparently spells to create every odour, from wildflowers to wee, from perfume to poop. There were ways to conjure up the smell of smoke, so that a person would think fire was licking at their heels. A wizard could make himself stench-immune so that a blocked drain was, in a manner of speaking, no different to him than a bottle of cologne. The conjuror could become near-canine, able to detect aroma at a nanoscopic scale, to tell people apart without seeing them, and from a great distance. Most powerful of all was the ‘Scent of Fear’, which could be made so remorseless that a person’s heart could be made to cease.

Donie had only seen his father perform magic a few times, glimpses caught through the library door inadvertently left ajar. The wizard would always be standing upright, his right hand at his heart, circling, the left hand an inch above his scalp. His eyes would be closed and then the words would spill forth, spoken just above a mumble.

Donie began to practice in the mirror, feeling foolish with his hands in gentle motion at his chest and above his head. But he persisted even as he went back to ‘work’ in McDonnacha’s gang. The jobs were higher stakes and higher pay now, but lower risk. And at night when he returned to his well-appointed apartment, he would stand looking at his reflection and practice the incantations.

There were certainly times when he felt like giving up, periods when he might not bother for a few days. He had been putting most of his effort into the spell called Wolfhound, which the book said would both amplify and neutralise his sense of smell. He was at the mirror again, and as he recited the words, he began to ‘feel’ their meaning. They had to be spoken at a certain pitch, as if whispering to a power that was listening in on a different frequency. The hand movements were unnecessary though, just an affectation of his father.

His nostrils began to flood. The chorizo burrito his next-door neighbour was eating, the smell of bleach from the press beneath the kitchen sink, diesel fumes from the road outside, even the Farrow and Ball paint on the walls. Each aroma was present, in ultra-high definition, yet neither pleasant nor unpleasant. It was almost overwhelming the first time, an extrasensory overload. Indescribable in truth, like trying to explain sight to a creature born without eyes.

As his spell-working confidence grew, Donie took his experiments outside his lair. His first success was very simple. In a coffee shop, he cast a spell of body odour on a customer drinking a cappuccino a few tables away. The man began to sniff vigorously at his own armpits to see if he was the source. In a supermarket, Donie conjured up the smell of smoke so that a fire alarm was set off, and the building evacuated. On a residential street in Camberwell, he magicked up the odour of natural gas. Two utility vans arrived not long afterwards in search of the imaginary leak.

There were trials, and there were errors too. On one occasion, he rendered his olfactory system dumb for nearly a week as if he was infected with some new variant of COVID. After bringing a woman back to his apartment one night, he thought the mood would be improved with some light incense, but his half-drunk sorcery cooked up the smell of sewerage instead.

His new talents proved useful too when he went about the work laid out for him by his boss McDonnacha. He could set people on edge, or make them feel more comfortable, just by changing the scent of a room. He could create distractions easily, make men feel ill or like they had just soiled themselves.

One Friday in May, Donie was due to meet McDonnacha at one of his many offices, out the back of a dingy snooker hall in Elephant and Castle. It was early in the morning and there were only two customers there. The two knuckleheads were playing a game, and you didn’t need to be that sharp to know they were there as personal security. Each was armed with a handgun, but Donie left them both on their hands and knees, sick to their stomachs, helplessly vomiting and retching, every millilitre of bile getting spewed out onto the threadbare carpet. He took their weapons, strolled into the office.

“What the f**k are you at Donie,” said McDonnacha, his hands clasping the mahogany desk.

“I need to know one thing,” he said, shaking his finger. “You set me up, didn’t you? You gave that van away to the coppers. Fed them a few scraps.”

For the first time, the young magician summoned up the ‘Scent of Fear’ so that his boss shook head to toe. His forearms, hands, and fingers shivered like he was hanging from a butcher’s hook in a meat freezer.

“What are you after doing to me?” said McDonnacha.

“Answer. My. Question.”

Donie raised the threshold of the enchantment, so that McDonnacha clutched his chest, his eyes starting to roll in his head. And then, just as quickly, he released the hold of the spell again.

“Yeah, we f**king gave you up,” said McDonnacha, “but didn’t I have you looked after in jail, take care of you ever since?”

“I just needed to know.”

McDonnacha flopped back in his leather chair, one hand rubbing the crown of his head, the other massaging his chest, taking each breath through pursed lips.

“I reckon if you wanted me dead. I’d be cooked already.”

“You would.”

“So, what d’you want?” said McDonnacha.

“You’re the boss,” Donie replied. “But maybe it’s time we expanded into Dublin. Been thinking it’s about time for me to go home.”

Bio: Ken Foxe is a writer and transparency activist in Ireland. He is the author of two non-fiction books based on his journalism and likes to write short stories of horror, SF, folklore, and speculative fiction.
Previous Stories: www.kenfoxe.com/short-stories/
Twitter: www.twitter.com/kenfoxe
Instagram: www.instagram.com/kenfoxe
Kofi: https://ko-fi.com/kenfoxe

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