Stone Junction (12 page)

‘We doing good?’ Daniel asked. They’d hardly spoken since they’d left, but the silence was solid and comfortable.

‘We’re doing fine,’ Annalee said.

When they passed a Texaco station she pointed out the rain-blurred window and told him, ‘That’s the pay phone we want, so we’re close now. Look for 4800.’

When Daniel spotted it moments later, she turned right and circled the block. There were few cars on the wet streets, fewer pedestrians.

‘The rain’s a blessing,’ Daniel said. ‘It’s hard to see out the side windows, makes people concentrate on the road.’

Annalee said absently, ‘Small blessings.’

She stopped at the mouth of the alley. As she reached to switch off the ignition her hand stopped. She giggled, ‘Help! Do I turn it off or leave it running?’

‘Off,’ Daniel said. ‘Along with the headlights. And pull up the hood on your coat.’

‘Thanks.’ She smiled at him as she killed the engine. She glanced in the rearview mirror and then up the street.

‘Looks fine,’ Daniel said.

‘Well,’ she said, reaching over into the backseat for the shopping bag, ‘here we are.’

‘I’ll give two short honks if anything looks like trouble.’

Annalee opened the door and slid out, pausing to tell him, ‘You’re special, Daniel.’ She shut the door with her knee, adjusted the bag in her arms, and walked briskly down the alley.

Daniel could barely see her through the rain-smeared glass so he cranked the window down halfway. He caught a flash of headlights in the rearview mirror and turned to watch as a car hissed passed. The rain came down harder. He turned back to the alley just as Annalee disappeared around the left corner. He checked the streets quickly for pedestrians. Not a soul. He was just turning to check the alley when he heard Annalee scream, ‘Daniel! Run!’ and the bomb exploded, blowing the car fifteen feet sideways and hurling a shard of metal through his right temple. He staggered from the car, swayed, collapsed on the wet pavement. Shaking his head, he pushed himself up on his hands and knees, crawled toward the alley, and collapsed again. He lay still, blood and rain in his eyes. When he tried to blink them clear, they stayed closed.

Far below, he saw a tiny point of light. He began sliding toward it, helplessly gathering momentum. As he plunged, the light slowly enlarged, gleaming so brilliantly he was blinded. Daniel was falling into the sun. Just as he was about to be consumed, he realized the light was being reflected from a mirror. He tried to raise his hands to protect his eyes but his hands wouldn’t move.

They were lifting him into the ambulance when his heart stopped. The two attendants clamped a defibrillator to his chest, each jolt shooting a thin stream of blood from Daniel’s temple, flecking their white uniforms. Daniel’s heart fluttered briefly, faded, then weakly started beating again.

Daniel was in a coma when Annalee was buried five days later. Only a few stunned friends from the Random Canyon Raiders attended the brief service. They were photographed from an unmarked car as they left the cemetery.

That night, weeping, Shamus dug far down in the still-loose earth of the grave. He left his black glove, a large gold nugget nestled in its palm gleaming in the moonlight before he covered it over.

Jessal Voltrano was a prodigy of the air. At fourteen, critics were hailing him as a master of the aerial arts, and perhaps the best trapezist who ever lived. For the next five years, he dazzled crowds from Paris to Budapest. He refused to perform or practice with a net. As he explained to one reporter, ‘Nets discourage concentration.’

But two weeks before his twentieth birthday, during a solo performance in Prague, the empty concentration essential to exquisite timing failed him for an instant. He would never forget that disembodied moment when he saw himself open from the plummeting whirl of somersaults, never forget how softly the bar brushed his fingertips as he continued to fall.

One of the clowns reached him first. Jessal was still conscious. ‘I can feel my skeleton,’ he whispered in amazement. ‘I can
feel
it.’

No doubt. Except for his hands, he’d broken nearly every bone in his body. During his grueling convalescence, Chester Kane, an American intern, introduced him to sleight-of-hand magic. Jessal practiced the tricks with the same diligence he’d brought to the trapeze, absorbing the nuances of each grip, shuffle, slide, and turn. His therapy became his passion, and when he left the hospital nine months later, he was teaching Dr Kane.

Jessal returned to the trapeze, but it wasn’t the same. His brilliant grace was lost forever to damaged nerves, knotted bone. He left the circus and never looked back.

Changing his name to The Great Volta, he wandered through Europe, Africa, and Indonesia, walking by day, sleeping where night found him, performing his magic wherever people would gather to watch, surviving on the coins they tossed in his hat. As opportunity offered, he watched other magicians work, consulted with them, taught and learned; in every town, he scoured the library for useful texts. At the end of four devoted years, he was an accomplished practitioner of sleight-of-hand magic. However, he began to feel an increasing dissatisfaction, as if his craft and knowledge had become a trap.

One afternoon in Athens, as he performed for a crowd of pensioners and street urchins, Volta muffed a simple card trick, turning the queen of hearts instead of the ace. As the audience hooted at his blunder, Volta realized his magic was hollow, a magic of distraction and mechanical deceit, a manipulation of appearances that could never produce the substance he sought. Volta tossed the deck high in the air, laughing with the crowd as the cards fluttered down. He would remember that moment as his first great escape.

His second occurred a month later, summer solstice 1955. He was sailing to America on a Greek freighter, watching the moon rise from the top deck, when a leaky fuel tank exploded, hurling him into the sea. Watching the moon rise saved his life, for another tank detonated a minute later, engulfing the ship in flames and screams. Volta saw a life raft hit the water and swam for it.

Volta found only one other survivor, and he was badly burned. After attending to him as best he could from the meager first-aid kit, Volta propped him in the bow. He checked the raft’s provisions: a week of canned rations, five gallons of water, compass, flare gun, and a steel signal mirror. He set a westerly course and began to row.

When the burned man died five days later, calling deliriously for his mother as Volta held him in his arms, Volta barely had the strength to slip him overboard. A day later he was too exhausted to row. Caught between the punishing sun and the icy moon, he let the raft drift.

The food ran out first. The next night, his throat still aching with the last swallow of water, Volta fired the three flares in quick succession, blooding the sea. He dropped the compass over the side, the first-aid kit, then the flare gun. But when he picked up the signal mirror, he caught an image in the mirror. It wasn’t him. The face was swollen and peeled. In his exhausted delirium, he thought that to see his real face he would have to put his mind within the image in the mirror, look at himself through its burned eyes. With his last speck of concentration, he sent himself into the mirror, surrendered himself. When he opened his eyes, there was no one in the raft. He looked into the mirror. It was empty. As he started to fall, he could hear, distantly, a terrified scream wrenched from his lungs. Just as he returned to his body, Volta dropped the mirror into the sea. He was still following its sliver of light when he heard a woman singing. He listened, then opened his eyes.

Her name was Ravana Dremier, the twenty-six-year-old daughter of a French smuggler and Jamaican shamaness. By general consensus, Ravana was the most gifted healer in AMO. She explained to Volta that they’d found him unconscious in the raft four days earlier. They were on the
Pinga del Ray
, one of the few boats in AMO’s Caribbean fleet. When he asked her if she’d been singing, she said, ‘Only if it was your song.’

In their four years of travel as allies and lovers, Ravana led him deeper into the magical arts. Ravana’s mother had, like Volta, ‘entered the mirror,’ a practice, according to Ravana, she’d abandoned almost immediately, warning it was solitary magic, a sensational power not worth the risk. She’d told Ravana, ‘Entering the mirror requires a unique combination of gift and circumstance. But entering the mirror is simple compared to escaping it. To escape, you must swim the river of stone or fly into the sun.’

‘Yes,’ Volta said. Near death on the ocean, he’d found his magic – the art of escape.

Having affiliated himself with AMO before the
Pinga del Ray
reached Haiti – Ravana possessed an eye for talent and persuasive ways – Volta availed himself of Alliance resources, particularly the LUC, its Library of Uncollected Collections, a wildly decentralized network of personal libraries. With a phone call and an access code, a book was mailed the next day. Even better, Volta discovered, was picking the book up in person, because the librarians were scholars of their keep, repositories of distilled information. When they didn’t know the answer, they knew the best place to look. They saved Volta time by keeping his focus precise. Volta supplied the passion and discipline. Less than two years later, he performed his first magical escape.

While each of Volta’s seventeen escapes are renowned, and each culminated in that moment of dramatic astonishment at the heart of magic, his final escape is a legend of the art. It was performed in St Louis, on a barge towed to the center of the Mississippi River. Dressed only in tights, Volta was bound in a straightjacket and then shackled in twenty-gauge chain. Assistants helped place him in a cramped steel cube, each side drilled with a series of one-inch holes. When the cover plate was bolted down, a gas-driven crane swung the shining cube over the side and dropped it into the river. People thronged to the rails. Fifteen minutes later, as their anxious babble faded into a numbed silence, Volta, attired in a tuxedo, his hair dry, stepped from his makeshift dressing room. ‘Forgive my tardiness,’ he said, adjusting the rose in his lapel, ‘but I wanted to change into something more comfortable.’

The crowd went crazy.

So did Volta.

When all explanations but the impossible were eliminated, the secret to all of Volta’s escapes was simple: He dematerialized his body; disintegrated; vanished into air. The steel cube was empty before it touched the river. But as Ravana’s mother had warned, with each disappearance, returning became more difficult. He almost hadn’t returned the last time, had barely escaped the escape. With a cellular certainty that both terrified and compelled, Volta knew if he ever entered the mirror again, he would not return. The next day he announced his retirement.

But though he’d returned to his flesh, his spirit had snagged on the threshold – he was physically intact, but not quite coherent; dull to sensation; emotionally hollow. He couldn’t find a material essence powerful enough to silence the siren-song beyond the mirror, its promise of ecstatic oblivion, final surcease. He couldn’t find that binding essence in Ravana’s flashing eyes, couldn’t feel it in the wind or sense it in the shimmer of salmon moving upstream in the moonlight, couldn’t touch it in petals or flesh. Ravana brought her powers to bear but she couldn’t reach him. As his desperation drained into depression, Volta realized he could no longer love her as she needed and deserved; to honor Ravana, he forced himself to leave.

AMO provided him with a new identity, a small apartment in New York, and a job as a
sensori
, the Alliance designation for freelance investigators who identified and assessed useful information. The only information Volta wanted was a way to wrest his spirit from the mirror. He found it in a New York museum displaying the Treyton collection of precious stones. Saw it in the brilliant center and irreducibly dense reality of the Faith Diamond, fourth largest on Earth. Needed to touch it, hold it, feel its clarity. He smashed the display case glass with his forearm and was gently lifting the diamond in his cupped hands when a guard clubbed him from behind.

Released from the hospital three days later, Volta was taken directly to jail and booked on grand theft. A squat, pug-faced sergeant with a child’s pink skin uncuffed Volta in front of an open cell, punched him in the kidneys, and shoved him inside. Volta grabbed the rust-stained wash basin to keep from falling. When he looked up, he saw himself in the steel mirror bolted above the basin and instantly spun away from the glittering hunger in the mirror’s eyes. He used a washcloth to cover the mirror.

Volta was dreaming of sensuously interlocked loops of diamonds when he was slammed awake by a long shuddering wail: ‘Nooooooo!’ As two guards wrestled the new prisoner past Volta’s cell, he glimpsed a skinny, pimpled kid, not more than eighteen, throw his head back like a coyote and howl again – ‘Nooooooooo,’ a cry at once a denial and a plea.

For an hour after he was locked up and the guards had left, the kid continued wailing, at ten-second intervals, that single, anguished ‘Nooooooo!’ oblivious to the other prisoners’ curses to shut up.

The double metal doors at the end of the cellblock banged open and the pug-faced sergeant, his pink skin florid with rage, shambled down the corridor, lightly slapping a blackjack against his pudgy thigh. The cellblock fell instantly silent; then the kid, as if understanding what that silence meant, screamed ‘Nooooooooo!’

As he unlocked the kid’s cell, the sergeant said thickly, ‘You know what your problem is, son? You need something to plug that little pussy mouth of yours. Now you get down on your knees here for me.’

‘Nooo,’ the kid moaned, but his cry had lost its haunting denial. He was begging.

Volta screamed, ‘
Noooooooo!
’ He heard the two quick blows from the blackjack and the kid’s sharp cry slurring into a whimper.

The sergeant panted, ‘I said, on your knees, fuck-face.’

When Volta heard the kid gag, he tore the face cloth off the mirror. If he vanished and reappeared quickly in the kid’s cell, he might be able to stop it – but only if he could reappear. The eyes looking into his own – wild, inviting – urged him to try. Volta looked through them into the mirror. ‘No,’ he said. And he stood there watching himself weep until the kid’s choked sobs and the sergeant’s thin, rapid wheezing finally ceased.