Paul Uses Magic on a Police Officer

Paul Carpenter’s encounter with a policeman turns his claim to be a wizard into an early practical demonstration of magic. The spell does not work on command alone: Paul’s first attempt fails, and the difference between failure and success is his realization that he had not decided what he wanted the magic to do until after he snapped his fingers.

Circumstances and Arrest

After passing through what he regards as unutterable horrors, Paul heads to a pub and drinks six pints of lemonade shandy without the lemonade. When the barman discourages him from ordering another, Paul leaves for a second pub, where he orders ginger-beer shandy without the ginger beer. He refuses the barman’s suggestion that he might as well have lager, explaining that he is not used to strong drink. He then falls over, and bystanders help him out of the pub and into the gutter.

Paul stays there for a while, considering his options, until a policeman arrives and arrests him. The arrest brings his newly discovered magical identity into direct contact with ordinary authority. Rather than responding with alarm, Paul smiles: after everything that has happened, he believes he no longer has to accept this kind of treatment from the police because he is a wizard.

The Failed Attempt and Its Correction

Paul first tries to explain that the policeman cannot arrest him because he is a wizard. The officer is skeptical and reaches for Paul’s lapels. Paul brushes him aside, warns him that this is not respectful, and offers him one last chance. When the policeman does not take it, Paul narrows his eyes, breathes deeply, and snaps his fingers.

Nothing happens. Meanwhile, the policeman gets Paul to his feet, pushes him against a wall, and prepares to handcuff him. The mismatch between Paul’s confidence and the spell’s apparent failure briefly exposes how little he understands his new power. He knows he can find bauxite blindfolded, in the dark, and wearing boxing gloves, but cannot yet make a simple magical command take effect.

The important correction is not a stronger gesture but a clearer intention. Paul recalls that he thought of the specific thing he wanted the policeman to do—the officer biting his truncheon—only after the first snap. He therefore tries again with the desired effect already in mind. The scene presents the order of thought and action as decisive: the finger snap alone did not produce the result, while the second attempt follows his newly formed intention.

The Spell Takes Effect

For a moment, Paul is unsure whether the second attempt has worked. Then the policeman releases him and steps back. The officer makes a faint mewing noise and, in slow motion, takes the riot stick from his belt and bites it. The intended magical effect is unmistakable, although the scene does not present Paul as having mastered magic more broadly.

Paul responds with a joke about serving the truncheon as meat, then tells the policeman to take care as he walks away. His teasing ease contrasts with the officer’s involuntary action and with Paul’s own brief uncertainty while waiting for the spell to work. The episode is not simply a boast followed by instant success: it makes the success legible through the failed first attempt, Paul’s recognition of his mistake, and the changed result when he tries again.

Aftermath and Recognition

Paul walks straight into a deep, oily puddle and eventually gets home. He shuts the door, drops onto the bed, and falls asleep. In his dream, he fights goblins, discovers unearthly magical powers, and makes a policeman perform the same undignified act in public. Even within the dream, the events seem unusually strange to him. On waking, however, he understands that the episode was not a dream but a memory.

That delayed recognition gives the encounter its place in Paul’s developing understanding of what has happened to him. The magic has already altered an ordinary arrest, but Paul initially processes the experience as something dreamlike; waking turns it into an event he has to accept as real. The spell therefore marks both a practical change—Paul can make another person act through magic—and a change in his grasp of his own recent past. His astonishment is tempered by embarrassment at his joke, leaving the new power framed not as a grand triumph but as an unsettling, absurd incident that he must now remember as fact.