by Rucker Moses
“Who walks around with smoke bombs?” Tall shrieks before covering his face with his fitted cap.
The cans unleash clouds of smoke that flood the trap. I try to cover up, but smoke streams through my fingers and eyelids, tears stinging my face. I squeeze my eyes shut in blinding pain.
“We got to get outta here!” Tall coughs.
“Now come up,” I hear Mint’s voice. “Or I’ll shut this trap and let you two steam like a couple lobsters.”
“Okay,” says Tall. “You win, let us out!”
I hate to admit it, but he’s right. We’re helpless down here, both of us.
“Take my hand,” Mint says as I blindly reach up for it. “Closer,” he says, “closer,” until I feel his stiff grip. He pulls me up and out of the trap. As soon as I get back onstage, his boys grab me and pin my arms behind my back.
“Give me the box,” orders Mint.
“Too Tall”—I cough—“get him out.” I can barely open my eyes. The sting is still so sharp.
“Yo, Mint!” I hear Tall shout from below the stage. “Come on, man!”
I squint to see smoke billowing from the trapdoor behind Mint as he glares like a demon. His faceless crew tightens their grip on me.
“I’ll make you a deal,” says Mint. “Give me the box and I’ll help your friend.”
“Help him out now!” I say. If I just hand over the box, how do I know he’ll do what he says?
“What, help him out of here?” Mint says with a nasty snicker.
My vision clears up just enough to watch him reach down into the smoke and pull the trapdoor closed with a thud.
“No!” I shout.
Too Tall hollers from under the stage, hoarse and desperate. There’s snickers and laughter from all around. I lunge at Mint but his minions hold me back. My blood goes hot. I pull and yank and claw in rage.
Suddenly, the trapdoor opens again and smoke shoots up and Too Tall shouts with relief. “Whoa, that’s better! Now get me outta here!”
Mint looks confused by the door having opened.
Who did that? Somebody must have worked the backstage levers. Veronica? I wonder.
“Give me that bag,” Mint snaps, and grabs my backpack strap and yanks hard. I hook my arm to it and hold on for dear life, hold on with everything, thinking, This box is mine, my dad wanted me to have this—
And I feel this strange energy suddenly course through my hand—the ghosted hand—almost like it’s heating up like a kettle until it reaches a point where the hand can’t contain all that hot anymore and I swing it at Mint and—
I look up to see all the smoke, every curling, steaming inch of it, has gathered beneath the roof into the shape of a giant fist. A smoke-made fist the size of a wrecking ball. My fist and the smoke fist both speed toward Mint and—
—boom—
The bag goes slack. No one is pulling on it anymore.
I open my eyes. I can see again.
The smoke fist is gone, now the stage is covered in fog, and there’s a large puff of smoke coming from the stage trap. Completely normal and not at all in the shape of a giant fist.
All those bodies that were surrounding me are gone.
Mint is gone.
Then I realize they aren’t gone gone. Not Dad gone. They’ve just moved a ways back.
Mint has fallen clean off the stage and is spread out somewhere between the third- and fourth-row orchestra seats. Like about ten to fifteen feet away.
The rest of his crew isn’t far from him. They were all blasted off the stage. They writhe around the seats and aisles, dazed but awake. I’m standing center stage, alone.
“Tall!” I rush to the trapdoor. “Tall!” I shout down into the thick layers of smoke. I can barely make out his shape through the gray curtain.
“Yo, King!” I’m relieved to hear his voice—at least he sounds with-it. “What in the world is going on up there?” He coughs.
“You okay, man? I’m getting you out!” I say. I drop to my knees and reach my gloved hand into the trap. “Come toward me!”
And as soon as I speak, I feel Too Tall’s hand collide with mine. “Whoa!” he says, like he’s as surprised as I am. I brace myself to pull him up, but I’m amazed by how easy it is—he practically floats up the chamber by the tug of my hand, and then he’s beside me onstage.
He’s still holding his hat over his face. When he removes it, his eyes are red and teary, but he looks okay.
“How—did you do that?” he asks.
“I—I don’t really know. I don’t know how I did any of it. You good, Tall?” I ask.
“Yeah, I think so,” he says, staring at my gloved hand.
I follow his gaze. The white glove is lit up with a faint blue glow like a colored light bulb with fingers.
“My man, how are you doing that?”
“I don’t know!”
“And look at this,” he says, and shows me a clear crystal about the size of a dinner knife.
“What’s that?” I ask.
“No clue. I slipped on it down there when the smoke was everywhere.”
“That thing was just down there? I swear it wasn’t there before,” I say, and examine the crystal. It reflects the blue glow from my hand. My hand . . .
“Did you see the fist?” I ask him. “The fist made of smoke?”
“What smoke fist?”
Before I can answer, a voice shouts from behind me, “King, come on, let’s go!”
And I remember how the trapdoor opened. Like someone had worked the lever backstage . . .
It’s Veronica. She’s all the way stage left, pointing, and it seems like she knows what she’s saying and where she’s going.
I wonder how long she’s been waiting and watching, and I am so glad to see her.
We follow Veronica to a set of stairs that leads us one level down, and then to another trap that leads to a ladder. The ladder leads us to the sewers.
“V—you knew this was here?” I ask, descending the metal rungs.
“The chute from out front. It led me here,” she says. “I climbed back up this way to get to the theater.”
I touch my foot to a long tunnel made of dark, wet bricks.
“Make sure you shut that door!” she calls to Too Tall.
There are two walking platforms, one on either side of the running filth and sludge.
“Come on,” says V. “They’ll try to follow. Look alive.”
She’s moving fast, ducking past rusty pipes. I hurry after her. She’s found another ladder on the side of the tunnel. Veronica climbs without a word. It’s even darker up the ladder than it is in the tunnel.
“Can you guys help me?” she calls. “This manhole cover is too heavy.”
She comes back down and Too Tall quickly climbs up and starts pushing and forcing the underside of the manhole cover, but the thing is really heavy. As I watch Tall struggle, I think about what’s just happened. I hold my hand up and watch it ripple with blue light beneath the glove. I moved all those boys. I made a fist out of smoke, I think, and then I moved Too Tall. I put him back onstage like it was nothing. With this.
“Tall,” I say, “let me try something.”
I wave my hand at the manhole and concentrate like I’m trying to push, like the round iron lid is right there in my hand.
It opens. Streetlight suddenly beams into the shaft. Too Tall slides the cover along the sidewalk with a scrape and we’re free.
The street is quiet as we step into an alley. Folks walk by on the avenue like it’s just another ordinary evening in ordinary ole Echo City.
Veronica grabs me by the shoulders and spins me around to look at her.
“Now, what in the world was that?”
“I—uh, um . . .”
Where do I even start?
�
��His hand,” says Too Tall, giving me up. “His hand, like, disappeared but it’s still there actually and it’s just pure magic or something. And I think it kinda moved that manhole cover, ’cause it was too heavy for me.”
I give Tall a long stare.
He shrugs. Then elbows me. “What, you think you’re gonna figure this out on your own? Show her!”
He may have a point.
“Yeah, King, show me.” Veronica’s eyes are tired and her hair is mussed up. There’s a little pulse popping behind her jaw that I’ve only seen when she’s really worried about something.
I pull the glove off my hand.
“To be honest,” I say, “there’s not a lot to see.”
She gets the point. She puts her fingers to her astonished lips.
“And you’re saying your hand is still there somehow?” she asks.
I reach to touch her. She flinches at first, just like Too Tall did, then relaxes as I take her hand in mine. I feel her warm flesh, clammy with sweat. “See? Still there.”
“I see,” she says, squeezing my hand as she stares at her own hand gripped around nothing. “Or I don’t see. I mean, I get . . . I mean, wow.”
“Can I ask you, V? How long were you watching us?”
“Long enough,” she says.
I ask, “Long enough to see the smoke form the shape of a fist?”
She looks at me like I’m nuts. “It’s not exactly something you miss,” she says.
“I missed it!” Tall whips his head back to V. “You saw it?”
“How did you do that?” she grills me, like she’s more worried than impressed.
I think: How did I do that?
“Those guys were all over me. I mean, I was surrounded, Mint had my backpack, I could barely see anything, I was upset about how they trapped Too Tall, and then—my hand—well, you saw. You tell me. What did it look like?”
“It was like . . . all the smoke suddenly woke up and changed direction and gathered up into a giant fist, like a smoke ring, but with knuckles.”
“Wow,” says Too Tall.
“Yeah,” I say. “That’s what I saw, too. Tell me, you think it looked like, I dunno, my hand?”
“I don’t know, King! Maybe? Who notices how a giant smoke hand looks?”
“I’m just wondering, that’s all.”
“Well, you’re messing with some scary stuff. Powerful stuff. It wasn’t just the smoke hand, King—that wasn’t the scariest part. It crashed down like your fist was controlling the smoke fist. Your left hand was glowing blue and that fist and the smoke fist synchronized and wham. There was this blast. Those boys went flying, I bet you broke some bones. Mint—I mean, he flew. It was . . . the craziest thing I’ve ever seen,” she says like she never expected to say that phrase and actually mean it.
I glance at Too Tall. He can’t stop tapping his giant feet. I can’t tell if he’s nervous or excited. “You saved me, though,” he says, and takes my hand and holds it fast, like he means it. “I won’t forget that. Not ever.”
“Thank Veronica, too,” I say. “She’s the one that opened the trapdoor when Mint closed it on you, so you could breathe.”
“You did that for me?” Tall says, touching a closed fist over his heart. “Thank you, V. They could have caught you backstage. You didn’t have to do that.”
“Don’t mention it,” she says, like she’s a little uncomfortable with the attention. “Mint is just terrible. I don’t understand what happened to him. He didn’t use to be like that.”
“I know. He even looks different,” says Tall. “All of those boys do. Like they’re, I don’t know, what’s the reverse of a suntan? Anyway, we better get moving. Don’t want to see them again.”
But Veronica has her attention back on my hand. “How did this happen?” she asks me.
I tell her about the trunk beneath the stage, how I opened the lock and found this strange box, and how Too Tall fell on me and my hand went through the box somehow, and there was a blast of light from the box, and how Tall found that crystal down there after that . . .
“That kid with the green eyes—he called this box the ‘Lost and Found’ or something,” I say. “They came into the theater for it, I think.”
“But you still have it?”
“Yeah.” I put my glove back on and take the box out for her to see.
She examines the pocket watch still lodged in the locking mechanism. “Wow. Your dad’s watch . . .”
“Look. It’s running now. It’s never worked before, but once I put the watch in the lock, the hands started moving.”
She thinks this over but says nothing. Traffic passes by on the street outside the alley. It’s getting late.
“And there’s a map inside,” I say.
She opens the box and looks at the map. “It’s Echo City,” she says.
“V, you know why those kids would want that box? Or is it the map they want? You think they knew I got it open somehow?”
“I don’t know, King. I really don’t. Mint and those kids—they hang around that weird house on Torrini.”
“Where the She-Wizard of Torrini Boulevard lives?” says Too Tall, and makes the sign of the cross.
“I guess?” says Veronica. “They’re into some weird cult stuff, daring each other to jump off buildings and break police car windows, crazy as a bag of cats. They’re the type of kids that pull the legs off a spider ’cause they’re bored. I stay away from them. You should, too,” she warns.
“Gladly. But what if they come looking for me? I mean, they know I’ve got the box and I’m not exactly hard to find.”
She sighs. “Jeez, King. You’ve been in town less than forty-eight hours and already stirred the hornets’ nest. I mean, these guys can sting. I hate to say it, but you need help. You’ve got to tell someone.”
“Tell my mom? That we broke into the Mercury? She’d flip!”
She closes her eyes like she’s going to regret what she’s about to say. “I was actually thinking of . . . my parent.”
Veronica leads the way to the old bookcase wall.
She’s spent the last twenty minutes preparing Uncle Long Fingers for my hand situation. I spent that time being cross-examined by Mom about why we got home at 9:00 p.m. instead of 8:00. I told her about meeting Eddie “Too Tall” at Not Not Ray’s. She remembered him. I said we lost track of time, hanging out. I think she bought it, but you never know. I’m actually surprised we were only an hour late.
When Ma and Crooked start cleaning the kitchen from dinner, Veronica gives me the sign. I stand beside her as she pulls the book to open the secret door.
Then she lets me go in ahead of her.
“You’re not coming?”
“Listen, thanks to tonight, I have now entered that old, musty lab exactly 1.5 times, and that’s 1.5 times too many. Find me when you’re done. And good luck.”
My uncle is exactly how he was the first time I came in here. Same ratty beard, same fried eyes, same tired expression, and I’m pretty sure he’s working on the same trick or device or whatever beneath that massive tarp.
“Hey, Unc,” I say.
He holds out one of those long hands he’s known for. “Lemme see the box.”
I give it over.
For some reason, it feels like a teacher grading my paper in red ink right in front of the whole class. He examines the box for what feels like forever. Taps it, knocks it, opens it, right side up, upside down.
As he works, I can’t help but wonder, Did he leave it there under the stage for me to find? I know it sounds out-there, but there’s only so many people who could have known the code and put it up on the marquee—my pops, and him . . . But if he did, then all this box examining is a bunch of playacting, and Uncle Long Fingers just doesn’t seem the sort to mess with all of that. No, if Uncle Long had wanted me to ha
ve that box, he’d probably just have walked into my bedroom and dropped it on me and left without a word.
He sets the box down on his desk and places his hand on top.
“Well, congratulations,” he says in a dry tone. “You found Preston’s old box. The Magician’s Lost and Found. One hundred percent authentic, not a fake or a copy.” He lets out a sigh. “Now tell me how you found it.”
I tell him. I don’t leave anything out, at least not deliberately. I tell him about the code, the watch, and the moment I found it—
“That’s when the hand . . . happened?” he asks.
Knew he’d get to that.
“Yeah,” I say.
He holds out his hand toward me just like he had for the box.
As I give him my gloved hand, I realize that he needs to touch things to understand them. Probably how he got his nickname.
Without a word, he rolls my white magician’s glove up onto my fingertips so it looks like the glove is floating like a marshmallow without the stick.
Now, I’m still startled to see that there’s nothing there, but for whatever reason, Long Fingers isn’t. He just looks like a scientist observing science stuff. He then takes my glove all the way off and holds my wrist by the faint blue glow up to his work light.
Which is about the same as just, well, looking directly at the light.
Then he gives it back to me, and hands me back the glove, and asks me to explain everything, and he means everything, that happened.
And I do.
And he asks me to repeat the whole story, including everything, and he means everything . . .
And I repeat the story and try not to skip anything.
Then he asks me to focus on the part when Too Tall fell on me. When my hand went through the box.
“There was a flash of light?” he asks.
“Yeah.”
“What color was it?”
“Blue light,” I say.
He nods, sighs, and leans back, clearly bothered by something.
“Your uncle—my brother, as it were—Crooked Eye believes that children shouldn’t know any more than they can handle. My question is, how does anyone know what they can handle until it’s there to be handled? Child or no. Kids are adaptable, isn’t that right, li’l King?”
