by Rucker Moses
When we get home, I’m so ready to talk to Long Fingers that I’m actually shocked that my mother is the first person I see.
“Oh, hi, King!” she says.
She’s sweaty in a tank top and her braids are pulled up in a high ponytail. She’s hard at work clearing out the ground floor to turn the space into a café. She’s made some progress. The walls are bare of any and all posters and signs of magic. The shelving units are pushed to a wall. The velvet curtain that separated the front area is gone, and when you stand near the entrance, you can just about see all the way to the back room and the windows that look out on the backyard.
“Hi, Miss James!” says Too Tall.
“Welcome to the future King’s Cup!” Ma returns his bright smile. “Would you all like a tour? Full disclosure, it may require some imagination.”
“King’s . . . Cup?” I repeat.
“You like it?” she asks with a wink.
“Well, yeah,” I say.
“Okay, over here to my right,” she says, and waves an open hand along the wall where the shelves are stacked, “will be the countertop. We’ll serve the drinks here. We’ll have all your milks and sugars and napkins and such. Behind that wall will be the kitchen. We’re going to stain—yes, stain—this brick wall here. It’ll be all nice and warm and red and exposed. Then here, here, there, and outside, this will all be seating areas . . .”
I start to zone out as Mom walks us through each part of her dream café. All I can think about is Pop. How can she stand there and yap away about this when we have less than three hours to save him?
Because she doesn’t know, I remind myself. Because you won’t tell her.
“King, are you okay?” she asks.
The seconds feel like an eternity as Too Tall, Veronica, and my mom all watch me.
Tell her, some voice urges from the back of my mind. Tell her everything. She has a right to know.
“I’m fine, Ma,” I say.
“You don’t like the name?”
“No, I love it. I appreciate it. Like, a lot.”
“Okay. You don’t sound too sure.”
“Ma—I just need to talk to Uncle Long Fingers, really quick.”
“Oh? That’s so strange, because he just left.”
“He left?” I almost shriek.
Mom shrugs. “I was as surprised as you. Him and Crooked Eye. They just took off. They wheeled this huge contraption out the back. Whole thing covered in a tarp. Wouldn’t say where they were going, or when they’re coming back. King, you sure you’re okay?”
“It’s just . . . this game we were going to play. Long Fingers, he had, like, the rules.”
Mom looks at me like I have five heads. Then she scans Veronica and Too Tall, who smile and nod like, Exactly what King said.
I’m so relieved when Ma finally nods back and goes to work. Not that I got away with anything. She’ll ask later, why I’m acting so strange. But right now, we have under three hours and counting, and it looks like we’ll have to try and pull something off without my uncle’s help.
“He left?” Veronica says in amazement as we take the stairs up to the second floor. “Wow.”
“What’s so strange about that?” asks Too Tall.
“Nothing, if he were anyone else in the world,” says V as we gather in the doorway to my room. “But my dad doesn’t leave this place. Wild horses couldn’t get him out the front door.”
“Must be serious,” I say.
“So what’s the next move?” asks Tall.
“We got to hit Long Fingers’s workshop,” I say, ready to do just that. “Maybe we can figure out what he was building, and where he went or something.” A plan is kicking into overdrive in my head. And see if he left the Lost and Found behind.
Because Urma came through a rift to the Realm. She knows how to do it.
And if I bring her the box, she will help me get him back.
The hard truth is, I would trade this box for my dad. Any day.
I lead the way through the doorway to the room with the wall of books.
“His lab is right back there. You’ll like this, Tall. Watch this sick bookcase move,” I say, and point to it. “Whoops—”
The book The Four Elements of Magic leans back on its spine and the wall rumbles and turns to reveal the opening passageway.
I’m standing about twelve feet away, looking at my Realm hand. Just by thinking about moving the book, I moved the book from across the room.
Too Tall covers his amazed mouth with his hands, like he saw a celebrity but knows it’s not the time to shout their name.
I shrug. “I didn’t mean to do that. I mean, I meant to go do that the normal way.”
Finally he says, “Ba-NA-nas.”
“I’d really like to understand the powers of that hand of yours better,” says Veronica.
“Me too,” I say.
Okay, I realize as I step into the passageway. I’m moving books from across the room by accident. My focus is so strong, it’s almost out of my control. Glad Mom wasn’t around to see that. I’d have some explaining to do.
My eyes adjust to the dim light and the red glow in the foyer. It’s the old shrine to my father, with the pictures and clippings of him and his tricks. V reads the sign hanging over the doorway.
“The Four Elements Open the Way. Huh.”
“What?” I ask.
“No, it’s nothing. Just, four, like the number Sol showed us.”
“Four Elements of Magic,” I say.
“And these four walls here,” she says.
I look from one wall to the next in the hexagonal room—six sides: one entrance, one exit, and four walls. “A wall for Dad’s three best tricks . . . and one for the Mirror.”
“Okay, that is a lot of fours. So what’s it mean?” asks Too Tall, looming behind us in the tight space.
“I’m just thinking, those four elements, right? See, I know how my dad’s mind works. The Four Elements Open the Way. Very clever. I bet you anything that’s not about the book and this passageway. It’s about the actual four elements, whatever those are.”
“You mean like the four walls here?” asks Too Tall.
V smiles at me.
The pictures on each wall are each devoted to a different object. Three are of my dad’s best-known tricks: Hooker’s Vanishing Deck, the Skull of Balsamo, and William Tell’s Pistol. The fourth wall is all pictures of Maestro’s Mirror. Could each trick represent an element?
“The way these pictures are organized. It’s no coincidence,” I say. “Four tricks, four elements . . .”
Like Dad’s book . . . More like the fourth member of our family . . .
Realizing there’s one clue that’s been right under our noses, I head back out the way we came.
“Where you going, King?” asks Tall.
“About time we checked out my dad’s old book.”
Back out at the wall of books, V removes The Four Elements of Magic from its wall contraption with a screwdriver from her dad’s workshop.
The book is so old, pages are falling out as I leaf through. Tall bends to pick a couple off the floor.
I’m not gonna lie, the book is crazy hard to read. Fs and Es are thrown into words in bizarre places, and some phrasing just sounds beyond odd. I stop at a passage that reads:
The third kinde of Magick containcth the whole Philofophy of Nature which bringeth to light the inmoft vertues, and extracleth them out of Natures hidden bofome to humane ufe;
“Whoa,” says Tall. “Is that even English?”
“It’s Old English. Like old before spelling was a thing, I guess,” says Veronica.
I keep paging through, searching for something I can understand. Then I stop at a page full of Dad’s handwriting. “Here!” I say, and get a warm rush at the sight of the fa
miliar script. Looping Ls and bold Ds in the handwriting that used to fill the pages of yellow legal pads stacked around the house.
“You can understand that?” says Tall.
“The Four Elements,” I say as I decipher my dad’s handwriting. “He’s talking about the four elements. Just like the Magician’s Lost and Found.”
Tall looks at me, puzzled.
“The top of the box, it had the same four signs. The Pistol. The Deck of Cards. The Skull of Balsamo. And the Mirror.”
“The Four Elements Open the Way,” says Veronica. “Your dad was using three of them in his act every night.”
“Yup. The William Tell’s Pistol gag, Hooker’s Vanishing Deck, and the Skull of Balsamo,” I say excitedly. “Those were his go-tos.”
“And Maestro’s was the Mirror,” Veronica says.
“It says here they each represent a different school of magic, the Pistol is Force, the Cards are Illusion, the Skull is Mystic, and the Mirror is Sorcery.”
“So they’re like parts of a magic puzzle or something,” Tall jumps in.
“Bingo,” I say. “The box must bring the four elements together?”
Too Tall shrugs. “Maybe it’s in the wood? Wish we had that thing. You think there’s any chance your dad left the box in his workshop?”
“Only one way to find out,” says Veronica. She has this determined look that makes me smile.
* * *
Long Fingers’s lab looks very different without the man himself sitting in the middle of it all. I can actually see to the back wall without that big thing under the tarp in the middle. I look around, wondering how he and Crooked even got that thing out of here. There’s some of the stuff from the magic store—the canes and mannequin hands—that my uncles stashed here. The taxidermy owls are high on a shelf, keeping watch. There’s a bunch of blueprints tacked to the walls with handwriting scribbled all over them. There’s a giant map of the world with dates scribbled across different places: Ancient Egypt, 2594 BC; Carthage, 146 BC; Ancient Rome, 44 BC; Britannia, 420; Paris, 1312; Florence, 1492; Edo, 1603; Budapest, 1881; West Africa, 1901; Louisville, 1934. There’s a stack of mirrored shards. Each shard is cut in the shape of a lightning bolt. I find more and more of them as I look around for the box, all about the same size.
“He sure did leave in a hurry,” Too Tall says, holding his hand to a warm coffee mug sitting on the desk.
“I don’t see it here,” I say. “Anyone?”
“Nothing,” says V.
“Nada,” says Tall.
“Hmm,” I say. “Think Long Fingers took it with him?”
“Possible, I guess,” says V. “Well, hey, look at that.”
“What?” Tall and I say at the same time.
V runs her fingers alongside a cabinet about the size of a mini-fridge. The wood is stained blond and it has a five-pointed star tooled into the center of each side.
“My dad, he built this for me,” she says.
“I’m all about a good trip down memory lane, but I think we’re on the clock here,” Tall says.
V ignores him and traces her finger along the five-pointed star.
“A five-sided star is also five Vs joined together.” She bends to pull the cabinet away from the wall. “Whoa, this thing got heavy,” she says as she turns it around.
The side she reveals has a metal latch and lock bolted to it. There’s a four-digit number combination beside the lock.
Tall face-palms. “I mean enough already, it’s like this family does everything in code.”
V starts playing with the combination.
“You think you can figure it out?” I ask.
“Like I said, I know how my dad’s mind works,” she says, turns the last number wheel, and unlatches the lock. She opens the lid of the cabinet and it releases air with a hiss. “Five Vs. Or, five fives. In other words, five to the fifth power,” V explains. “Five to the fifth power equals 3,125.” She shrugs. “That’s the code: 3125.”
The inside of the cabinet is lined with steel chrome, like a real safe.
There at the bottom, looking like a buried treasure, is the Magician’s Lost and Found.
“Why you smiling like that?” Tall asks V.
“No, it’s nothing. He knows that I would guess that code. Didn’t know he trusted me like that.”
“I’m so glad he did,” I say, and pick up the Lost and Found.
The Watch of 13 is even still in the locking mechanism. I notice the watch hand is on the 11. Are the watch hands clicking toward Dad’s fading echo? I look at my own watch. It’s 6:25 p.m.; we’re about two hours away from the 13.
“What, King?” asks V.
“Two hours and counting,” I say, and open up the Lost and Found, hoping for a clue, some direction, anything to help get Pops back before it’s too late.
There’s a handwritten note floating near the top. I’d know that handwriting anywhere.
It’s my dad’s.
This note wasn’t here before. He wrote this. Recently.
Not four years ago, gathering dust.
He wrote this now. Like, in the present. He’s alive, he has a hand, and that hand held a pen and wrote this note. And now it’s in my hands.
I realize this is the closest I’ve been to my dad in nearly four years.
Tall prods, “What’s it say?” like he can’t take the suspense anymore.
I read it to them:
“Message received, big brother. Will be at appointed place by thirteenth hour. The elements await you in Black Herman’s grave, but you’ll have to pull a Henry Brown to get them.”
In the silence that follows, I read the words over and over again.
“Wow,” says V. “That’s a lot.”
“Yeah,” I agree.
“So the note was meant for my father?” she observes.
“Apparently,” I say.
“It sounds like my dad is trying to save your dad after all, huh?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
She leans in to read the note herself. “What’s this, ‘appointed place’?”
“I have no idea. Must be something they worked out between the two of them.” Still, something about all of this is bothering me.
“King, why do you sound so glum? Isn’t this good news?”
“I dunno, V. It’s just, we’re running out of time, and Long Fingers didn’t even see this note yet, obviously. You see this reference to Black Herman’s grave?”
“I did notice that,” says V.
“Tall, is there a graveyard in Echo City?”
“Not that I know of.”
“I thought so.” I dig in my shorts pocket for the map and lay it out. “I’m pretty sure I remember seeing some sort of grave reference on here . . . There. Look,” I say, and point to a spot on the map by Algernon Lane and Broken Jade Junction. Graveyard Gate, it says. “I’m going.” I start packing up the map.
“Whoa, whoa, King, not so fast,” says V.
I turn on a dime. “Yes, so fast. Matter-of-fact, not nearly fast enough. The clock is ticking, V. We don’t even know what we’re doing or whether we’re on the right track. But I got to try something. And this makes the most sense. Come or stay, but I’m going.”
I stop at my room to strap on my backpack after I slide the Lost and Found inside and zip up. Then I lead the way back downstairs and to the front door as quickly as possible.
“Leaving us already?” My mom intercepts us. She has a rag in hand like she’s just scrubbed all of Echo City by herself. She can’t seem to decide whether to be concerned or playful.
“Um, yeah, Ma, it’s that game we were playing,” I say.
“The one that Uncle Long Fingers knows the rules to?” asks Mom, eyes squinted in suspicion.
“Yeah. That one. And it’s like, we got to go
back outside . . .”
“Outside, huh? Well, that sounds nice. I was going to ask if you wanted to go for a walk, I haven’t been out all day,” says Ma.
“Um, well, the thing is . . .” I’m trying to think of a reason she can’t come, but I’m coming up blank.
My hesitation isn’t lost on Ma. “Are you ducking me, King?” she asks.
“No, Ma, I swear.”
“I’m only kidding,” she says, and then tilts her head. “Sorta.”
“Let’s spend time together tomorrow, okay, Ma? Tomorrow, I promise, I’ll help out with the house and everything. All day, I’m here.”
Maybe with Pop, I think. Maybe we’ll all be here and we can get back all that lost time.
“Okay,” she says. “Veronica, you’re playing this game, too?”
“Sure am, Auntie,” she says. “Tons of fun.”
“Okay. Well, don’t have too much fun. Keep an eye on King, V. Please, for me. King’s not exactly used to the big city these days. Don’t let him get too carried away.”
Veronica pauses awkwardly. “I—I won’t let him. I mean, I’ll keep both eyes on him, Auntie. Not to worry.”
“I’ll try not to. Good to see you, Eddie. See you later, King. Love you.”
“See you, Ma.”
As soon as she nods, we’re out the door.
It isn’t until I take the steps down to the sidewalk that I realize I didn’t say I love you back.
* * *
The shadows fall heavy and stretch long on the sidewalk as time inches closer to the thirteenth hour.
“So tell me, what’s up with the rest of that note?” Tall asks me.
“Which part?”
“Well, whose grave are we going to, for one?”
“Black Herman,” says Veronica. “Famous old magician from back in the day. He was like a hero to our dads.”
“Oh yeah, you mentioned him yesterday. He was the one that would fake his own death and come back?”
“He had this old saying,” I explain. “The Great Black Herman Returns Every Seven Years. Had it printed on all his old posters and everything.”
