It rattled as he set it on his saucer, and to keep his hands busy he smoothed his hair and readjusted his shirt. What had happened while he stood in the cabinet, braced, he thought, for any eventuality? He tried to recall the exact progression of feelings and events—the magician’s unctuous, mocking invitation, his own confident acceptance, the darkness inside, the waiting. Then the sudden, desperate combat: something, like a pair of human hands, seizing him, pummeling him about the shoulders and neck, not a pair of hands exactly, but some invisible force fastening upon him, an uncontrollable flexion of muscles, a set of purely physical sensations without any accompanying mental processes. How had it been done? How had there been time? Suddenly he’d found himself in the cabinet, wrestling for his life against something dark and powerful, something that buffeted him ruthlessly, flinging him like a sack against the sides of the narrow space, until one vicious, final blow, one last humiliation, like a disdainful kick in the rear from a giant foot, lifted him up bodily from behind and propelled him staggering back onto the stage.
