Midnight Wonders: Magic in the Shadows of San Francisco

The official story is that the figures atop the Palace of Fine Arts are maidens, contemplating the impermanence of beauty. Last week on Waverly Place, Admin, we found a different kind of magic in the scent of drying herbs. Tonight, it’s in the tears of statues. I’ve always felt they weren’t just contemplating. I felt they were watching. And so I am here, long after the last tourist has gone, sitting on the cold stone edge of the lagoon. The air is thick with the smell of salt and eucalyptus, and the only sounds are the distant hum of traffic on Doyle Drive and the occasional, lonely cry of a night heron.

The great rotunda glows across the water, a perfect, impossible gold. Its reflection is laid out on the black water like a second, sunken palace. But tonight, something is… wrong. A breeze ghosts across my face, sending a shiver through my jacket, but the reflection on the water remains absolutely, preternaturally still. Not a single ripple. The ecosystem is quiet. Too quiet. A swan, a real one, glides from the reeds, a slash of white against the dark. It paddles across the reflected dome, but its own image is… missing.

The water beneath it is just a black mirror. My heart begins to beat a little faster. This is the behavior I’ve been waiting for, the shift in the pattern. And then I see it. On the reflected path that circles the reflected dome, a figure is walking. It’s just a silhouette, but it moves with a strange, fluid grace. I look up, across the lagoon to the real path. It’s empty. There is NO ONE there. Yet in the water, the figure keeps walking, closer and closer to the edge of the reflected shore. I feel a pull, a strange magnetism drawing me toward the water’s surface.

The weeping ladies on the colonnade… they don’t look sad anymore. They look tense. They look like they are holding something back with all their might. I have to know. I have to understand the mechanism. I kneel down, my knees cracking on the stone, and reach out a trembling hand. The air grows cold around my fingers as they approach the lagoon. I expect the icy shock of water, the breaking of the surface tension. Instead… my fingertip meets something smooth, and cool, and utterly solid. Like polished obsidian.

The surface gives no resistance, but it does not break. It’s a barrier. A membrane between worlds. And in the reflection, the walking figure has stopped. It turns its head slowly, impossibly, and looks directly up at me. It isn’t a reflection of a person. It is a thing of the reflection. And it is smiling. I snatch my hand back as if burned. The spell is broken. The water shatters into a thousand ripples, the wind breathes again, and the reflection of the golden dome wobbles back into a familiar, watery shape.

The figure is gone. I am just a person, alone, at a pond in the middle of the night. But I know what I felt. The weeping ladies weren’t weeping from sorrow. They were weeping from the strain of holding the two worlds apart, of keeping the reflection from spilling out into the real. The Palace isn’t a ruin from a forgotten past. It’s a lock. And tonight, I found the keyhole, waiting patiently in the dark water.