Real Magic (31 page)

As the car turned onto a dirt drive leading toward a white farmhouse a few acres back, Duncan felt woefully unprepared.

 

Freddie shut off the engine,
reached into his coat, and produced a snub-nose .38 Special. He opened the handgun and checked that it was fully loaded. Without looking up, he smirked. "Don't ask about the cop I took this from."

"Wait a second. We don't need guns here."

"This is the place, right? Then I got my orders."

Duncan peered out at the farmhouse, his mind whirring through angles and outcomes. "You go in there with your gun and you'll never see the Door, and Walter will be pissed off."

"Shut up. I know how to do this kind of thing."

"Then think for a second — this magician has gone to a lot of trouble to stay hidden. He's already scared of the police. He sees you coming with a gun and he'll vanish before you can get your finger on the trigger."

"He ain't Houdini."

"That's right. He's better. You ever hear of Houdini pulling off this Door of Vanishing trick? Besides, he's been hard enough to find once, we don't want him disappearing again. We'll never find him."

Freddie weighed it out, rocking his head from shoulder to shoulder as he thought. At length, he holstered his weapon. "Fine. I'll go in without showing the gun."

"He'll see it. Magicians like him train to observe little details. The slightest bulge in your coat will tip him off. And frankly, even without the gun, a big guy like you is going to make him nervous."

"Then what the hell do you suggest?"

"Let me go in by myself. I'm a fellow magician. I understand how he thinks, how to approach him, how to talk his language."

Crossing his arms as he strained his brain, Freddie said, "I don't know. Mr. Walter wouldn't like that."

With an incredulous look, Duncan said, "You really afraid I'm going to run? Look around you. Nothing but farmland. Where am I going to go? Besides, I've been wanting to meet this guy as much as Walter. Trust me, there's nothing to worry about here. Just wait a little bit so I can get him calm and open to meeting you. Then you can join us, and all will be fine. It'll be a lot better than scaring him off and never finding the Door."

"Okay," Freddie snapped. "Just shut up already. You yap like an old lady. Just get going. Don't take too long. I ain't staying back forever."

"Give me ten, fifteen minutes. That's all."

Duncan didn't wait around for a reply. Despite the heat, he buttoned up his coat, donned his hat, and moved at a brisk pace toward the front door. Like the house itself, the yard had been well maintained and free of clutter. The sweet farm aromas of earth and manure blended in the morning air.

When he neared the porch steps, he heard the steady clap of an ax chopping wood. He made a quick left and walked around the house. Turning the corner, he saw a boy in overalls no more than twelve chopping wood atop a tree stump. Behind the boy, Duncan saw a large chicken coop and run, and an endless field with a dark red barn in the distance. As the boy reached over for another piece to split, he spied Duncan and stopped.

"Hi, there," Duncan said. "Your father home?"

The boy stared, not moving or saying a word. Finally, he appeared to have made a decision. He buried the ax into the tree stump and yelled out, "Pa! Fella here to see ya."

A man stepped out from behind the chicken coop. He carried a shallow metal bucket filled with eggs. Wearing denim overalls and a straw hat, the man looked every bit the farmer except for one thing. His hands. As he set the bucket down, wiped his hands on a handkerchief, and approached with an offered hand and a wary nod, Duncan noticed how gracefully the man moved. Hand motions that smooth only came about from endless hours of practice. Duncan had no doubt — this was Dominic Rose, an accomplished magician.

"You're a hard man to find," Duncan opened, flashing his best smile.

Dominic looked around the farm. "I been here all along."

Duncan smiled and nodded. "I suppose so." He searched Dominic's face for any resemblance to Pappy but saw none. Yet the man did look familiar. A strong, cold glare in the eyes that reminded Duncan of every disappointed look his father ever gave.

"You want something, Mister, or you just going to stand there all day?" Dominic asked.

With Freddie counting the minutes out front, Duncan had to jump straight into things. But the boy may not know anything, and a man trying to keep a secret from his boy could be difficult to work with. "We need to talk."

"So talk."

"I'm not sure this is something you want your son to hear. It's about magic."

Dominic shook his head and turned away. "You can leave now, Mister. I don't talk with newspaper people. I don't know anything about magic or magicians or anything like that. You people keep mistaking me for someone else and I've had it with you. You leave now, or I'll get the police to make you leave."

"You won't call the police." Duncan raised his voice to be heard as Dominic retrieved the bucket of eggs. "We both know it. And I'm not a reporter. So why don't you talk with me. I promise you'll be glad you did."

"If you ain't a reporter, then you're a nut. And I don't need nuts around here either."

Dominic made every indication that he would return to his farm work and ignore Duncan. Ten minutes later, Freddie would arrive and the trouble would start. "Sir, please listen to me."

"You get off my farm."

"My name is Duncan Rose. I came here through the Door of Vanishing."

Dominic's face paled and he dropped the bucket. It knocked over, and cracked eggs oozed onto the ground.

 

Dominic sent his son
to milk the cows. As he watched the boy walk off, his paled skin slowly regained some color. "Come on inside," he said without looking at Duncan.

The farmhouse had a low ceiling and wood floors. Practical, wooden furniture with little in the way of decoration fueled Duncan's suspicion that no woman lived here. Still, the place felt cozy and he couldn't help but note that in 2013, people would pay millions for an old home on a large farm like this.

"You want a beer?" Dominic asked.

"Little early."

"Not after what you said." Dominic entered the kitchen and indicated a chair for Duncan to sit on. From a white cabinet with a cylindrical apparatus on top, he pulled out a brown bottle and poured half his beer into a glass.

Duncan's surprise and curiosity took over for a second. "Is that a refrigerator?"

"Yup. Bought it a year ago. I hate iceboxes." Dominic drank the glass down, then decided to drink the rest straight from the bottle. "So, Mr. Rose, where are you from ... and when?"

Duncan opened his mouth to answer but hesitated.

Dominic nodded. "Worried about messing up Time? Don't. You can't. I don't know as much as you might think about all this. I kind of stumbled upon it. But I do know that people have gone through the Doors for a long time. You aren't the first. Which means that Time is constantly in flux. People are forever changing the timeline that we once knew. But the universe is still here. We still wake each morning and live our lives as we always have. It is what it is and somehow it works."

"But what about all the paradox stuff? Killing your grandfather and all that? After all, we might be related."

"Why the hell would you want to kill your grandfather?"

"I don't. But if I did it by accident then I would never be born, so I couldn't go back in time and accidentally kill him, so I would be born, but then I would go back in time — get it? It's an endless loop."

Dominic gulped down most of his beer. "I don't know about that kind of thing. But think about this — the Door is ancient, so somehow the universe can deal with these things. If it couldn't, we'd have vanished long ago. I sure hope so, anyway. I pray it's true every night. Because I messed up."

"What happened?"

"That damn Door is what happened. I gambled my life on it. It gave me everything and then took it away fast. See, when I was young, I struggled hard. I didn't want to farm like my daddy and I didn't want to be a miner or anything else like that. I never liked hard labor. Didn't see the point in breaking my back for a few bits."

He finished his beer, reached over to the refrigerator, and pulled out another. "Gentleman came along one summer and taught me a few magic tricks. What can I say? The bug had bit. I loved fooling the audience, but more than that, I loved simply performing. Getting on stage, getting their eyes on me, getting that recognition. If you've ever had it, you know what I mean. It's something you taste and then you want more and more. There's no stopping it.

"So I left home and started going around the country performing wherever I could. Speakeasies ate it up and everyone was so drunk I didn't have to be all that good. County fairs were big business to me, too. That's when I met Laura. She had worked with a few stage magicians before and knew more than I did. She became my assistant and we joined up with one traveling show after another until we had a good set worked out. I became The Amazing Verido and we settled in with The Wilkinson's Wonders Show. We weren't anything all that special, but we put on an entertaining show and made a living. That's when I found the Door.

"We had finished a long weekend run in some Kansas town. They were tearing down the tents and packing up the show to move on that night when I decided to see if I could find a girl for a few hours. I don't want you to think I did that often, but I'm like any other man. And there's something about being on stage that got girls interested in doing more than they ever thought they'd do.

"Anyway, I didn't find any girls hanging around the tents where they normally waited to meet us. But there was a man. I'll never forget him. He had sharp, angular features and thick, black hair. His face was so narrow and pointy — he could've played one of them vampires in the pictures. Downright frightening. He told me he had a magic trick unlike any other in existence. He told me that if I performed his trick, I'd become the most famous magician ever to walk the stage.

"I don't think I was really enticed by all of that. Not much, anyway. But I had the sense that Wilkinson was gearing up to fire me, and I did get curious. Figured what harm would come from taking a look at this trick?

"I'm sure you've guessed some of this. He showed me the Door. And he walked through it. Disappeared. Never saw him again, of course. Now, I don't know why he did this. Maybe he was a relative, too, like you, and he knew I needed the Door for some Time-related thing. Or maybe he was just crazy. I'd think traveling through Time would scramble a man's brain. All I know is that I stood there looking at this door for a long time until I finally decided to take it and make it work for me."

Duncan drummed his fingers on the table as he thought. "You never went through the Door yourself?"

"Thought about it a thousand times, but the way that man looked, the way he acted — haunted like he'd seen a lustful horror, something he knew he should never see again, and wanted nothing more than to go back. I'd seen that look on men who took to the bottle. I figured I didn't want a part of those sorts of things through there."

"But you sent others through it."

"I did. At first, I sent trouble-makers through. See, I built a door illusion that we worked into the show. It was nothing more than a real door on a frame and the frame was on a platform that could be rolled out. I'd set the door sideways and walk through it to show it was an ordinary door. Then Laura would come out, we'd turn the door to face the audience and she'd go through. I'd close the door and she'd curl up through a trap. The base looked like a narrow platform, too small for a person to fit in, but that was an illusion of the stage. From an audience perspective, it looked small, but it could fit Laura just fine. Set off a couple flashpots so we got some smoke in the air and when I open the door, she's gone."

Dominic reached into the refrigerator for a third beer and drank much of it before speaking again. "One night, Wilkinson comes to me like he'd seen the Devil. Some men were trying to rough him up, threatening to kill him, that kind of thing. I don't know why. I didn't want to know. But I got the clear message that if he didn't get out of this jam, he might not make it to see the next day, and even if he did, no matter what, the show would be over. I'd have to start from scratch, looking for a new place to work. I didn't have anything saved, squandered it all on foolishness. Worst thing was that when I had signed on with Wilkinson, I didn't know nothing about contracts. Turned out, the name The Amazing Verido belonged to Wilkinson, so starting over meant I'd be building a new name, too. I wasn't going to do that.

"I told Wilkinson to give these men free tickets to my show, and I promised him, it would all be fine. After Laura and I performed the Door of Vanishing trick, I stepped forward and rattled on for a moment to distract the audience. Laura wheeled the fake door behind a set piece and switched it for the real Door, which I had mounted on a rolling platform as well. She didn't know what it was. Then I called for volunteers and picked out the men that were after Wilkinson. They walked through the Door without a second thought." He drank.