The Best Paranormal Crime Stories Ever Told (18 page)

“Abner!” cried Dix. “Stop!” And I saw that spray of sweat, and his face working like kneaded bread, and the shiver of that abominable chill on him.

Abner was silent for a moment and then he went on, but from another quarter.

“Twice,” said Abner, “the Angel of the Lord stood before me and I did not know it; but the third time I knew it. It is not in the cry of the wind, nor in the voice of many waters that His presence is made known to us. That man in Israel had only the sign that the beast under him would not go on. Twice I had as good a sign, and tonight, when Marks broke a stirrup-leather before my house and called me to the door and asked me for a knife to mend it, I saw and I came!”

The log that Abner had thrown on was burned down, and the fire was again a mass of embers; the room was filled with that dull red light. Dix had got on to his feet, and he stood now twisting before the fire, his hands reaching out to it, and that cold creeping in his bones, and the smell of the fire on him.

Abner rose. And when he spoke his voice was like a thing that has dimension and weight.

“Dix,” he said, “you robbed the grazers; you shot Alkire out of his saddle; and a child you would have murdered!”

And I saw the sleeve of Abner’s coat begin to move, then it stopped. He stood staring at something against the wall. I looked to see what the thing was, but I did not see it. Abner was looking beyond the wall, as though it had been moved away.

And all the time Dix had been shaking with that hellish cold, and twisting on the hearth and crowding into the fire. Then he fell back, and he was the Dix I knew—his face was slack; his eye was furtive; and he was full of terror.

It was his weak whine that awakened Abner. He put up his hand and brought the fingers hard down over his face, and then he looked at this new creature, cringing and beset with fears.

“Dix,” he said, “Alkire was a just man; he sleeps as peacefully in that abandoned well under his horse as he would sleep in the churchyard. My hand has been held back; you may go. Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord.”

“But where shall I go, Abner?” the creature wailed; “I have no money and I am cold.”

Abner took out his leather wallet and flung toward the door.

“There is money,” he said, “a hundred dollars—and there is my coat. Go! But if I find you in the hills tomorrow, or if I ever find you, I warn you in the name of the living God that I will stamp you out of life!”

I saw the loathsome thing writhe into Abner’s coat and seize the wallet and slip out through the door; and a moment later I heard a horse. And I crept back on to Roy’s heifer skin.

When I came down at daylight my Uncle Abner was reading by the fire.

CAROLE NELSON DOUGLAS

“Magic is a man’s game,” he told the reporter for the
Las Vegas Review-Journal
who sat beside him in the audience.

“In this town, for sure,” she answered. “Except for Melinda at the Venetian, a female illusionist has never headlined in Vegas before. That’s why I’m interested in your take on this one.”

His “take” on this one was he could take her or leave her, and she had left him, long ago, not on her terms.

“Even you must admit,” the reporter said, eyeing him slyly, “that her Mirror Image trick is a winner.”

“It’s all mirrors,” he answered, snorting ever so slightly. No sense in demeaning his own act while dismissing that of a rival.

Rival?

Chardonnay LeSeuer was one of those tall black women with a whole lot of cream in her coffee. Looked like a freaking supermodel. Now she was “Majika” and making hay by playing both the sex and the race card: not just the second woman ever to headline on the Strip, but also the first black magician.

She was also an ex-assistant he had sent packing years ago for packing on a bit too much poundage. Sure, she looked pretty sleek now, but usually it was all downhill with women once the weight started piling up. How was he to know she’d get over putting on fifteen pounds because her kid had gotten that annoying disease? She’d missed a lot of rehearsals with that too.

Time had added assorted swags and sags to his six-foot frame as well, as if he were an outmoded set of draperies, but his magician’s costume could be designed to hide it, as did the ignominy of a custom corset that also doubled as a handy storage device for assorted paraphernalia that shall remain nameless, at least to readers of the
Review-Journal
.

“Actually,” he added, trying to sound affable, “I haven’t seen this infamous Mirror Image trick yet.”

“Why do you say infamous?”

“From what I’ve heard, it smacks more of a gimmick than legitimate magic.”

“Aren’t all magic tricks a gimmick?”

“Please. Not ‘tricks.’ It makes magicians sound like hookers. We use the term ‘illusions.’ We are frank about what we do but we don’t debase it. There’s a fine line.”

“And how has Majika crossed over it?” the reporter asked, pencil poised. She was a twenty-something twerp with an overstudded left ear and an annoying manner, as if she knew something about him that he didn’t.

By overstepping her bounds, he wanted to snap. Instead, he displayed that mysterious and vaguely sinister smile that was pasted on billboards high above the Strip and had been for fifteen years. It was pasted on his face now, too, thanks to Dr. Mengel. “We’ll find out tonight, I’m sure.”

Marlon Carlson sat back in the seat, startled when it tilted back with him. The damn Crystal Phoenix Hotel and Casino had gone first class in designing a house for this upstart woman. He’d had an exclusive gig at the Oasis down the Strip—as Merlin the Magnificent—for years, but the fact was the joint was getting a bit tacky. Every older stage show seemed shabby after Cirque du Soleil had hit town. That was the trouble with Vegas: it took millions to set up a theater specifically for a designated show meant to run for decades since the star got millions.

Refurbishing in mid-stream was the name of the game and he was getting tired of it, personally. He was getting tired, period, especially of the cosmetic surgery that had tilted his eyes to a Charlie Chan slant and drawn his neck skin back like a hangman’s noose. At least he didn’t look as artificial and aerodynamically taut as the eerily ageless Siegfried and Roy down the Strip. Yet. And at least he didn’t have to work with cats, animals almost as annoying as the clichéd rabbit. He understood that Majika still resorted to producing the expected (another word for rabbit) in the illusion trade.

When he couldn’t help shuddering at the indignity of resorting to the rabbit, which was literally old hat, the snippy young reporter had the gall to ask if he were cold, like he was somebody’s Uncle Osbert instead of a first-rank stage magician at the top of his game.

He forced his attention to the stage, where the woman who now called herself Majika, slim and limber in spangled leopard leotard, was going through the motions of various sleight-of-hand illusions.

She was sleight of form again, he noted nostalgically. Always a looker, but not very cooperative. Usually his assistants considered it a signal honor to sleep with him. Well, maybe it was a less signal honor these days, but it was still a tradition at least.

She had no real assistants, except for various members of the audience she called onstage.

That’s what was wrong with magic shows nowadays. They had all gone over to the proletariat. There was Lance Burton with his kiddie brigade at the Monaco, as if magic were still something meant to amaze and amuse the pre-teen set instead of a multimillion-dollar con game with almost forty million tourists a year to milk and bilk. There were the afore-considered Siegfried and Roy, in their off hours breeding rare albino lions and tigers and, perhaps someday, even some bloody bears. Oh, my. All for the good of the planet and mankind.

All Merlin the Magnificent did was mystify and collect his millions. At least Majika had no politically correct cause on display along with her lean form and her skimpy magical prowess.

His nose wrinkled despite itself, quite an achievement given his last surgery, as she coaxed a shy, fat middle-aged woman in a (sigh) floral-decorated sweat suit from one of the first rows of the audience onto the stage.

The usual cabinet had been wheeled center stage by the blackclad ninja stagehands Majika used for assistants. They came and went like ebony fog, no posing, no muscle-flexing. In fact, there was something weirdly boneless about their silent, supple forms, like electric eels gone upright. Frogmen in wet suits, that’s what they evoked in their shiny Spandex jumpsuits covering head to toe to little finger. Disgusting.

This time the eternal magician’s prop was presented with the mirror in plain view on the outside front, even framed in ornate gilt wood, as if it were made to hang on a wall. The simpering cow from the audience, obviously a plant, was finessed into the cabinet by the door swinging open on a dead matte-black interior.

Once the dupe was inside, the shadowy ninjas sprang from somewhere to spin the cabinet sideways. Majika stood proudly edgeways behind it, her figure as sleek as a diver’s.

To the uneducated eye, the cabinet looked no more than two inches wide, like an ordinary mirror frame. Please! Marlon was getting a headache.

“How does she do that?” the reporter was whispering, nagging in his ear.

“Mirrors!” he snapped.

But he wasn’t sure. How irritating.

The frogmen spun the cabinet . . . once, twice, three times.

Its side profile was always as black and narrow as a dagger’s and Majika made sure to stand behind it fully visible, as if it were really that thin an edge.

He rapidly calculated angles, checked the wings and floor for hidden mirrors.

The audience gasped. . . .

. . . for out of the narrow edge of the dark mirror the woman in the gaudy sweat suit stepped, blinking as if emerging from the dark.

“My goodness,” she murmured like the tourist born she was.

What a stooge! So annoying as to appear absolutely natural. He wondered what casting director Majika used.

The lithe magician gestured the woman to stand at her right side, then nodded to the dark men to spin the mirror again.

And this time the very same image of the sweat-suited woman stepped out from the other edge of the mirror. Majika moved between them, her own figure reflected to infinity in the bland mirrored face of the cabinet front.

The split images of the woman from the audience eyed each other, and then began addressing each another.

“You can’t be me.”

“You must be me.”

Twins. Simplest trick in the book. One backstage waiting to go on, the other planted in the audience. What a sucker ploy!

“How’d she do that?” the reporter prodded, her pencil waving in his face.

Watch the fresh peel, baby!

He leaned away from the unwanted contact. Twins, he was about to say, when Majika waved the two women together and they slowly converged until they melted into each other and only one stood there, looking like she needed to be pinched to wake up.

“How’d she do that?” the reporter persisted, insisted, as that ilk will.

“Mirrors,” he said shortly, rising so he could beat the rest of the audience to the exit doors. It was hard work. They were all standing, blocking the rows and the aisles, giving Majika a standing ovation for the final illusion of her act. He didn’t even glance stageward to catch the vaunted final fillip of the show: a white rabbit pulled from a black top hat that moments before had been flatter than a Frisbee. Even flatter than the edge of a spinning mirror.

“Chardonnay,” he greeted Majika when she finally returned from the multiple bows to her dressing room, which he had managed to enter as if he had appeared there by design. It stunk of opening night floral arrangements, but the show had been running for eight months.

“Merlin,” she answered. ”I mean, Marlon. Dare I ask how you got in here?”

“Started early, honey. Shut the door. We have things to discuss.”

She obeyed, just as she had used to when she’d needed the paycheck.

His confidence perked up. He was the maestro, she the upstart. “That mirror thing is a fairly effective trick,” he said, smiling. God, it hurt.

“Works for me.” She sat at her dressing table to swipe the glitter highlights from her face.

He wished she would wipe off that new expression of elegant self-satisfaction. Or had she always looked that way?

“Seriously,” he added, “I think you might have something there.”

“Really?” She spun toward him, bare-faced, looking as taut as a teenager.

He blinked like a tourist in the limelight. Something was wrong here. Unfair. Why should she be slim and unwrinkled, when she’d passed off his Babe-scale years ago?

“So how’s your kid?” He had searched for the given name and given up.

“He died.”

Silence always made him uncomfortable. He supposed firing her in the middle of that medical melodrama could have made it hard on . . . someone. He didn’t like to hear about people dying. He never knew what to say, so he said nothing.

She seemed to expect no less from him. “So, did you like the show?” she asked.

“What’s not to like?” Everything. “Glad you made such a great . . . comeback. You look terrific.” Spoken softly, like an invitation.

“Thanks. It’s good to see you again too.” She seemed pleased that he was here.

Oddly, that cheered him. He hadn’t realized he’d needed cheer until now. “Really?”

“Well, you are the maestro. I’m flattered that you bothered to see my show.”

“It’s that Mirror Image trick that’s the draw.”

“Illusion,” she corrected as swiftly as he had corrected the reporter.

She leaned an elbow on the dressing table, then her chin on her fist. Her image reflected to infinity behind her, thanks to the room’s traditional parallel aisle of dressing table mirrors. It was all done with mirrors, and he was never done with mirrors, for he saw himself, small and wee, in a tiny corner of the reflected room behind her. His trademark mane of hair, now a dramatic white, was mostly extensions now. He was the sum of all the parts of his former illusions.

His heart fluttered. This moment was important. He knew it. For her, for him. He couldn’t tell for which one it was more vital, just as one couldn’t tell the twins from the Mirror Image illusion apart, even when they merged at the end.

“It’s twins, isn’t it?” He spoke without wanting to, hungry, urgent, worried.

“No, not twins.”

“Not twins?”

She smiled, gently, as at a slow-witted child. “This is something totally new, my illusion.”

“Nothing’s new in magic. Nothing! It’s the same dodge and burn the photographers used do to enhance photographs, only it’s performed on the audience’s eyes instead of a negative.”

“Dodge and burn,” she repeated. “I like the way you put that.”