Magic Mansion (22 page)

On Iain’s signal, Monty smiled broadly at the contestants and said, “Before you dive in, Magicians, there’s just one more thing. Playing with only three team members would put the Red Team at a serious disadvantage.”

Oh, great, Ricardo thought. Just when we get our plan all hashed out, they’re gonna tell us to have two people sit out. Maybe Muriel would volunteer. And who else? Maybe Faye…she hadn’t seemed too keen on the challenge during the whole planning process, anyway.

Monty took a deep breath, and went on. “And so, to even the odds, we turned this decision over to our home viewers—and they have spoken. Red Team, say hello to your new member…Amazing Faye!”

Ricardo had been so sure he was about to hear a directive to sit someone out, Monty’s words didn’t even make sense to him. Not until Faye whispered, “I’m sorry, guys…nothing personal,” and gave the belt of her gold sparkle wrap a tug. It slid to the floor, pooling around her kitten heels…and there she stood in a shimmering scarlet bikini. The gold wrap lay on the floor like a shed skin as she strode away to join the other team—who looked just as shocked as Ricardo felt.

“How long did she know?” Sue whispered, bewildered.

“Wardrobe,” Ricardo decided, because to think she’d been in on the switch any sooner was just plain creepy. “They must have told her then, when they gave her a red bathing suit. Unless she’s colorblind.”

Kevin Kazan welcomed Faye with a courtly kiss on the back of the hand, and she proceeded to whisper urgently to the Red Team while they listened, and nodded.

“Well, that’s just great,” Bev hissed, “she’s taking our whole strategy to our opponents.”

Ricardo had never seen Bev so angry. Cameras swarmed.

“Don’t worry,” Muriel said, “she can steal our strategy, but she can’t take away our talent. Gold Team will win it, because that’s how we roll. We’ll do everything as planned, and with Bev’s eagle eyes, Ricardo will be the one to find the big stick.”

Sue looked like she was about to burst into tears, but she nodded extra-hard in agreement and said, “That’s right, guys. We’ll show them. We are totally
winning
this challenge. Group hug.”

Ricardo put his arms around Sue and Muriel and bumped heads with Bev. There they were, just “the girls” who’d shared their reality TV initiation on day one with the obnoxious taping of the show’s opening credits. But instead of feeling solid and unshakeable, Ricardo felt suddenly vulnerable, and profoundly exposed.

Chapter 21

THE WAND POND

“…so I’ll hop out first,” Faye said. “I’m quicker than the rest of you, and I’m taller than Jia, so it’ll be easier for me to climb out.”

“A’ight,” Kevin said, “so to figure out who’s staying in the longest…who’s wearing contacts? ’Cos I can’t see shit once my contacts start sticking to my eyeballs.”

“I had LASIK when I was eighteen,” Jia said. “But I’m not a big swimmer.”

“I’ll do it,” John said. “I swim.” And while he’d never taken an eye test in his life, he had every reason to believe his vision had never been anything less than perfect. The acuity had become obvious in his early fifties, when he and Casey noticed a preponderance of reading glasses cropping up among all their non-magic friends. They’d even tried a few pairs on, for a lark. Casey had looked distinguished in his pair. John’s did nothing but make the room wobble.

Kevin was giving John a hard look—possibly trying to see if he was being overconfident, or maybe if he was wearing contact lenses too, but was willing to risk the discomfort of wet lenses for a chance at winning immunity.

Which, when John considered it against Red Team’s horrific losing streak, seemed like it might not be such a bad thing to have. According to Faye, the Math Wizard had said it was statistically improbable.

No doubt. But there were statistics, and then there was Truth.

“Magicians,” Monty said, “take your places.”

Tape marks ringed the broad, shallow pool, interspersed with a pair watertight camera rigs positioned underwater at opposite sides. John found a tape mark and stood on it. He felt a cameraman behind him as he calculated whether it would be foolhardy to take a shallow dive. Not dangerous, no, not if he did it with control. But why hurry? He’d have the entire fifteen minutes to find his wand.

Faye, however, would really benefit from a quick entry.

“On your marks…get set….”

John turned to Faye, whispered, “Leg up,” and cut his eyes to the pool.

Faye understood immediately. She gave a curt nod.

“Go!”

All around the pool, magicians in glittery red and gold swimsuits began boosting themselves over the pool’s sides. John, however, knelt beside Faye instead. He almost catapulted her right to the center—she weighed next to nothing, and her foot felt as small as a child’s against his palm—but at the last moment he reined in and aimed her closer to the pool’s side. She splashed down, went under, burst back up with a wand, then swung herself out over the edge. Sue followed close on her heels, but the seconds the jump-start had gained Faye proved to be crucial.

First wand to Red Team.

John swung his legs into the pool. Immediately, he was startled by the feel of the rods beneath his feet, uncomfortable to stand on, and strangely slippery, too. Wherever a number of them had fallen parallel, they functioned as a sort of conveyor belt, rolling the contestants out of their strides.

And if that wasn’t enough, there were cameras to avoid. And splashing.

And screaming.

He was unsure who’d started the screaming. Possibly Jia—the water was unexpectedly cold. But the manic energy spread fast, and pretty soon Muriel was whooping, Kevin was bellowing, and Bev was hollering over the top of it all, “Not that one! The other one next to it!”

John went under and picked up two wands. Were they ten inches? Ten and a half? He emerged and compared them. They were the same size. Or were they? Maybe they weren’t. Maybe he was holding them wrong. And maybe, in his apprehension, he would throw away the longer wand if he wasn’t careful, thereby letting victory slip right through his fingers.

Honestly, don’t be such a drama queen.
The words popped into John’s mind as if dear departed Casey had been commentating on the whole fiasco, lounging on the sidelines with a mai tai in his hand and a lazy smile on his face.
If nothing else, you get to ogle the cute twink in the gold trunks. So live a little. Relax.

John took a steadying breath, then searched through the splashing, screaming, wand-waving melee. Sue and Faye stood outside the pool, dripping on the tile floor, adding to the chaos by shouting encouragement at their teams. Muriel slogged through the water with her hair a mass of heavy gray tangles that covered her face. She seemed to be laughing. Jia bobbed up holding her nose with a wand hooked awkwardly in the pinkie finger of that hand. She compared two lengths of wand, threw one back in, then held her nose and went under again. Ricardo broke the surface of the water with a wand in each hand, compared them, and tossed one away while Bev shouted, “Not that one!”

Kevin lurked behind them, eyes riveted to the spot Bev was pointing at.

And despite the fact that he was standing nearly chest-deep in water, John felt somewhat…soiled. Because while he did want to win—enough to launch his new teammate into the pool—it just didn’t seem right to prey on the Gold Team’s strategy.

You can’t control what other people do,
Casey used to say.
You can try, but the only thing you accomplish is driving yourself crazy.

Too true. John took a deep breath, bent his knees, and went under.

The pool consisted of inflatable blue vinyl sides with a rigid framework holding it up, a sort of semipermanent structure that could be disassembled and stored in the garage at the end of the season. With all the harsh studio lights shining on and through it, the water took on the gentle blue cast that it would in a much deeper pool. It was cold, as if it had recently come from the garden hose. And all the splashing was stirring up plenty of bubbles.

John turned his attention to the wands. They covered the pool’s bottom like a fantastic black coral reef. He saw them,
beheld
them…and then looked deeper. An image popped into his mind. Pine needles. Of course. What else would cheap lumber be made from but fast-growing pine?

The lumber held a stronger sense of itself than a man-made object might, and so it was quite possible that the longer pieces might be located by something a bit more precise than simple trial and error. If only John could figure out, between the splashing and the timer and the cameras, how to communicate “length” to a thousand simple pieces of wood.

Normally, John would take a few breaths to center himself. Underwater, this was not very practical. He closed his eyes, opened them again, and willed himself to feel stillness. A pair of gold trunks flashed by, and…my, what an ass. Stillness. Not so easy. He stood, broke water, took a breath, and went under once more.

He focused on the wood again. It felt somehow…scattered. Baked dry, lathed into smooth regularity, chopped into bits, and painted black. Despite its confusion, it did, however, seem to be “listening.”

John sent the tendril of thought:
long?

No, no, no. Not long
. The image of the green-needled tip of a tree reaching toward the sky fleeted through his mind. Now
that
was long.

John broke the surface again. Three minutes had elapsed. He began to doubt he could convey the concept of “twelve inches” to a bunch of painted dowels in fifteen years, let alone fifteen minutes. He took another breath and went under once more.

He pictured a tall tree, and a small tree, and he conveyed that for as long as he could hold his breath. When his lungs began burning a few images drifted up from various wands…but it was more along the lines of,
Yes, this is where I came from.

John surfaced again. Jia was swinging herself out of the pool at four and a half minutes to ensure they’d gain another time advantage over Gold Team’s five-minute member. This counter-strategy had stirred up more chaos than the wand-diving. Faye was hauling her out, shouting, “Go! Go! Go!” while Sue leaned into the edge of the pool, screaming, “Stay in, Muriel. You might as well just stay in now!” Muriel, blinded by her own hair, slid on a dowel and splashed under. Ricardo came up with a wand in each hand, and his shoulder connected with Kevin Kazan’s chest. He looked, for a moment, as if he would snap at Kevin to back the hell off—especially as Kevin puffed out his chest and began posturing for a fight. But instead, Ricardo responded with a cool “I know exactly what you’re playing at” look, turned his back to Kevin and went about trying to grab whichever wand Bev was pointing out before Kevin did.

Kevin was gunning for Ricardo. No two ways about it. That realization settled like a stone in the pit of John’s stomach. Because there was competition…and there was spite. And spite, he’d always found, was a True magician’s greatest enemy. It was spite that caused normal, everyday folks to turn on people like John. It was spite that had ejected him from his work at the hospital. And it was spite, John was convinced, that energetically drew in the bizarre accidents that would be their ultimate demise.

In which case…how safe was it
really
to be prancing around on a reality show, exposing oneself not only to everyone else’s envy, and criticism, and spite…but to drowning, and potentially dangerous spa treatments, and pruning shears? Best not to think of it. Not in the middle of a timed challenge.

John took a breath, went underwater, and tried to convey
a little bit longer
to the wood. No images came back to him, and no wonder. The concept was too abstract. He took two dowels as he came up, and compared them. They looked the same. And while he suspected that it was counterproductive to attack the problem both mentally and physically at the same time, the screaming and the commotion was making it impossible to focus on just one or the other.

He dropped a dowel, went under again, and tried to convey the concept of “different.”

No. All the same. In every way that really matters.

He broke the surface with two more wands. Yep. The same, all right.

Two, three more dives, and still the dowels were the same. John checked the clock. Five minutes left. Theoretically, Kevin should leave the pool and gain another time advantage. But despite his wet contact lenses, he was circling Ricardo like a shark. And although both teams had planned to leave the pool at timed intervals, other than the ladies who had stepped out when they were supposed to, the rest of the magicians were sticking with the task in a stubborn game of “chicken.”

John gazed at the splashing, screaming hubbub for a moment, considering whether he should simply get out with whatever wand he had in hand…but then he looked above the fracas and saw the sample board on the wall. The wands were arranged from smallest to largest, like the bars of a cell phone service area. Maybe that was a strong enough visual to go on.

He stared at it for a moment, fixed it in his mind, then took a deep breath, and went under.

A few wands stirred as contestants’ bare feet kicked them up. But mostly, they lay still. Waiting.

John pictured the image of the four wands side by side as clearly as he’d just seen it with his physical eyes, and then he sent it to the wood. He held the image patiently, as long as he could while also holding his breath, in hopes that somewhere the barrier between incomprehension and understanding might break. That his intention might leak through.

Yes.

That’s all? Yes? Yes what? Time was running out.

Another image came to John, a tree with snow on the branches. Yes, some of the lumber in the pool was from the same tree as the lumber on the wall.

He grabbed two random wands, splashed up, and drank a breath of air as he checked them against each other.

The wands he held were still the same length.

He threw them down in disgust.

Longer, he thought, focusing hard on the longest dowel in his mental image. In return, he received flashes of many disjointed ideas. The gentle prick of a bird’s claws. The kiss of the wind. The sound of chainsaws. None of these were good or bad. They simply were.