Murder by Magic (5 page)

When the mirrored cabinet was finally whisked onstage by the black-spandexed minions, Marlon stared hard at the space above the wheels. No mirror halfway back to reflect the front wheels as if they were the back ones and disguise an escape or entrance through the stage floor. In fact, Majika writhed underneath the cabinet like a sex kitten—or Eartha Kitt in heat—just to show the space was open and empty.

But not to worry. He’d soon know the way his “twin” would enter the box, although how she got that “two melt into one before your eyes” effect would be interesting to know. Probably mirrors again. So embarrassingly often, it was mirrors.

When she singled him out in the audience, he stood, nervous as a schoolboy at his first magic show. He was used to being in control, the king of the board, not a pawn.

As he headed for the six stairs to the stage, he heard an audience member hissing, “Look at that kooky old guy, that big white hair! Televangelist showman. Las Vegas!”

He held his cherished snowy pompadour high. It gave him an ecclesiastical air, he thought. He liked to consider himself as the high priest of magic in a town riddled with cheesy acolytes.

Chardonnay went through the usual chitchat with him: name, where he was from, what his hobbies were. The audience quickly caught on that he was more than the nightly guinea pig, that he was a noted magician himself, and laughed at his coyly truthful answers.

“Are you ready to face my mirror of truth and consequences?” she asked at last.

He glanced over his sober, caped, black shoulder at the gaudy thing. “Of course. I am even more ready to meet myself coming
from
it than going
into
it.”

That earned a few titters from the audience, and then the gilt-frame door was swinging toward him like a horizontal guillotine aiming at his sutured neck. He ducked when he stepped up to enter the dark space behind the silvered door, thinking the opening might be too small for his height.

But nothing impeded him, and in a moment the door swung its matte-black-painted interior shut on him with a finalizing snap.

He turned at once, feeling up . . . down . . . around for any panel that might give.

Nothing did. In fact, he felt no edges of anything, no limits.

Surprised, he took a step or two forward. Or four or five. Six, seven, eight! Backward. Sideways. Nothing. And he could hear nothing, no muffled covering lines from Majika while the transfers were accomplished inside the mirrored cabinet. No transfers were accomplished. He couldn’t even feel the cabinet jolted and manipulated by her accomplices as they spun the unit on the stage.

Nothing spun but his own baffled speculations. No way could such a paltry cabinet be so vast inside. No way, no illusion . . .

He was in a void. A soundless, motionless void. Not a hair’s-width of light entered or escaped that void. It was as pitch-black as a childhood confessional booth.

Used to mentally tracking time, Marlon tried to tote up the seconds, minutes, he had been thus isolated. He couldn’t compute it. Had no idea. His every expertise failed him here.

He would have pounded on the cabinet walls, broken the illusion, if he could have. But there was nothing to pound upon except the solid floor upon which he stood.
Upon which he stood.
He stamped an angry foot, a child having a tantrum. No sound, not even the pressure of an impact.

He searched his throat for a cry of protest or fear, but found it too tight and dry to respond to his panic.

And then, just like in that long-ago confessional, a small square of gray appeared in the darkness.

“At last! Where have you been?” he demanded. “There can’t be much time to make our reappearance together.”

“Time?” asked an odd, wheezing voice. “What’s that? Be still. I need to absorb you.”

Absorb him?
“It’s a little late for Method acting,” he fussed. “If you can’t do a reasonable impression of me right now, this entire illusion is ruined.”

Hmmm.
A botched illusion wouldn’t do much for Majika’s hot new career. Perhaps this mess-up was for the best. One less rival was one less rival. “Where do we exit this crazy thing? I’m first.”

“And the first shall be last,” the wheezing voice noted, laughing soundlessly, or rather, with something like a death rattle.

“I don’t understand,” he said.

“This is where she fulfills her bargain. I have provided the faces and bodies of hundreds of mortal souls for her nightly exhibitions. It was always understood that I, the eternally shifting one, should eventually acquire a mortal body and soul of my own and escape this endless lonely dark.”

Perhaps his eyes had finally adjusted to the sliver of gray light that shared the darkness with him. He imagined a wizened, warty figure not at all human, as perhaps the cat-suited and masked ninja men might look if stripped of their shiny black skins.

The glimpse was enough to convince him that this was no derelict hired double, but something far less ordinary.

“You’re a genie,” he guessed, “like in a lamp, only in a mirror. And she found you somehow and you gave her a wish, her resurrection as a youthful woman and a magician, only she had to promise you . . . something.”

“Not very much.” The tone implied the creature had been studying him and found him wanting. “I did require a soul that had squeezed itself bare of attachments to this world, that had shriveled enough that there would be room for me to expand.”

“You can’t just . . . take me over!”

“Ah, but I can. That is my sole talent. I can replicate any being, any body. I got into trouble about that millennia ago, and some wicked magician—a real one—sentenced me to my lonely mirror.”

“What kind of demon are you?”

“Explaining that would take too long. Although time is endless for me, I see by the spinning of my senses that we are expected to make our appearances upon the stage. I will warn you about one thing: my gift of replication responds only to the genuine. I can’t control that. So it is and so shall you be and so shall I be when I become you. But freedom is worth the price.”

“Freedom! And you would imprison me in your place? For eternity? No mortal soul deserves that.”

“You are right.” The creature’s gray aura faded as it appeared to think.

Marlon knew a moment’s relief and a sudden surge of hope for a new life, a better life, a kinder, gentler life. It was not too late . . .

“I will not abandon you to the dark,” the croaking voice whispered, very near now, but no more visible. “I will not deprive you of your beloved limelight. I am a master of transformations, and I can manage that. Watch and believe.”

Marlon . . . Merlin the Magnificent . . . found himself blinking like a tourist under a bank of gel-covered spotlights. Red, blue, green they blazed, Technicolor stars in an artificial sky.

He was . . . himself. Standing on a stage as he did almost every night, and Majika was lifting one graceful arm to indicate his presence. His reappearance from the box. His deliverance. His rebirth.
I will be good, I will, I will. Well, better.

He took the stage, spread his arms and cape, rejoiced in the magic of his vanishing and recovery.

Applause.

And then more applause, accompanied by fevered whispers and then shouts of wonder.

Majika had thrust her left arm out to introduce the second half of the illusion, the other Merlin the Magnificent standing on her other side.

Marlon turned his eyes uneasily, expecting to see the gray, shriveled, scrofulous thing from the dark.

Instead, he saw a tall, white-haired man in fanciful evening dress . . . a man whose snowy mane had dwindled to a few threadbare strands . . . whose lumpy frame slumped like an overstuffed sack of extra-large baking potatoes . . . whose neck had become a jowly wattle, whose eyes were sunk in ridges of suet flesh.

For the first time he truly felt the horror in the story of Dorian Gray.
Gray!

And before he could do or say anything, or even make a few more frantic mental promises to what or whom he couldn’t say, before he could even take in the enormity of it all and the loss that loomed before him, the foul thing moved toward him—the man he was before he had changed his own mirror image—and sank into him like fog, or like an exiled part of himself.

Marlon drowned in the engulfing presence of Merlin, a Merlin cursed to live and die looking exactly as Marlon had not allowed himself to look, and happy for that.

Where Marlon went he couldn’t say. It was dark. And narrow. And he heard and felt nothing and knew he’d go mad if he was kept here.

And then . . . slap! Snap! A sharp small sound and the world exploded again with light and applause. He gulped a deep, anxious breath of light-heated stage air, lifted his head, and almost sniffed the sound of the applause. It was thunderous. Better than ever. He’d survived whatever nightmare the mirrored box had put him through.

Then it became too much. The continuing racket crashed on his sensitive ears. He shrank again, cowered, even as Majika lifted her arm the better to display him to the admiring audience.

His heart pounded against the palm of her hand.

His long white hair was full and thick again, luxurious, and she stroked it with her other hand.

Majika’s giant face stared down with piercing eyes. His sensitive ears flattened at the horrid screeching of her voice in the microphone as she displayed her triumph of illusion: him.

Her face came close, smiling.

“You’ve been such a good boy tonight, Marlon,” she whispered giddily as if to a confrere, “you’ll have extra veggies in your after-show supper, and maybe even a big carrot from Mr. MacGregor’s garden.”

While his ears and tail drooped with self-recognition, he spied his former form, now bent and shuffling, hastening out of the theater before the crowd began its rush for the exits.

Doppelgangster

Laura Resnick

Laura Resnick is the Campbell Award–winning author of several fantasy novels, and more than forty SF/F short stories. She is also the award-winning author of a dozen romance novels published under the pseudonym Laura Leone. In her copious spare time, she wrote
A Blonde in Africa,
a nonfiction account of her journey across the continent. You can find her on the Web at
http://www.sff.net/people/laresnick.

I
t wasn’t no surprise that Skinny Vinny Vitelli got rubbed out. I mean, hey, I’d nearly whacked him myself a couple of times. So had most guys I know. Not to speak ill of the dead and all that, but he was an
irritating
bastard. Vinny could pick an argument with a plate of pasta. He could piss off the Virgin Mother. He could annoy the dead—so it wasn’t exactly a big shock when he
became
one of them.

A couple of nuns taking a cigarette break found his body in an alley early one morning. He’d been done with four slugs straight to the chest. Which was a little strange, actually, because Vinny always wore the bulletproof vest he got the time he whacked that fed.

It’s not what you’re thinking. It was personal, not business. Vinny caught the guy in bed with his underage daughter. The vest was lying right there on the floor, and after Vinny impulsively emptied a whole clip into the guy’s torso, he decided the vest was A Sign. (Did I mention he was a pretty religious guy?) See, Vinny had always been afraid of dying exactly the way he’d just killed the fed who’d been stupid enough to take off his bulletproof vest before humping a wiseguy’s seventeen-year-old daughter right there in her father’s house. (Feds. They breed ’em dumb.)

So Vinny picked the vest up off the floor, put it on, and never took it off since. I mean
never.
Just ask his wife. Well, if you can find her. She hot-tailed it straight down to Florida before the corpse was cold and ain’t been seen since. She was making plans for her new life right there at Vinny’s funeral, yakking on her cell phone with her real estate agent while the casket was being lowered into the ground.

“It’s a funny thing,” I said to Joey “the Chin” Mannino while the grieving Mrs. Vitelli kicked some dirt into her late husband’s open grave with the toe of her shoe while telling her real estate agent she expected to be in Florida by nightfall.

“Huh?” Joey didn’t really hear me. He was stroking his scarred chin as he stared lovesick at the Widow Butera. She was glaring back at him. A very beautiful woman, even at forty-five, but bad news for any guy.

“Give it up, Joey,” I advised.

“I can’t.” He shook his head. “I’ve asked her to marry me.”

I slapped my forehead. “Are you nuts?” One of the mourners frowned at me, so I lowered my voice. “She’s had three husbands, and they’re all dead. Don’t that tell you something?”

“She’s been unlucky.”

“Her
husbands
have been unlucky. All three of them. So I’ll lay odds that number four is gonna be real unlucky, too.”

“It’s not her fault, Vito.”

“No, but being married to her is so unlucky it crosses over into dumb.”

Her first husband got hit just because he was having dinner with Big Bobby Gambone at Buon Appetito the night Little Jackie Bernini decided to kill Bobby and didn’t feel too particular about who else he sprayed with his Uzi. That was the start of the first Gambone-Bernini war. Well, a beautiful woman like that couldn’t stay widowed forever. So three years later, during the second Gambone-Bernini war, she married a hit man from Las Vegas who the Gambones brought into town to teach the Berninis a lesson. But then the Berninis brought in their own hit man from Boise to deal with him, and ain’t
nobody
tougher than those Boise guys. So the Widow was widowed again. Then, maybe because she was tired of marrying Gambones who got whacked out, the Widow shocked everyone by marrying Bernini Butera, who was everybody’s favorite pick to head the Bernini family next—until Joey clipped him last year. That hit pretty much ended the third Gambone-Bernini war. But from the way the Widow Butera was glaring at Joey across Skinny Vinny Vitelli’s grave now, it didn’t look like she had forgiven Joey for stuffing her third husband into a cement mixer in New Jersey.