by A. C. Wise
*
How the Trick is Done
This is how it goes: Meg protests; she blushes translucent. She is dead, but she is afraid.
Angie points out how many people the Magician has hurt, how many more he will hurt still. Meg comes around to Angie’s point of view.
They tell Rory together, a united front. With Angie holding Meg’s hand, amplifying her form, Rory can see her. His eyes go wide, and his face becomes a glacier calving under its own weight. After his initial moment of shock, something like wonder takes over Rory’s face as he looks at Meg.
“You have wings.”
She blinks, spinning in place to try to see over her shoulder. The wonder on her face mirrors Rory’s, but the melancholy in her voice breaks Angie’s heart.
“I remember,” Meg says. “I think, once, I knew how to fly.”
“I should have...” Rory says, but he lets the rest of the sentence trail. Meg offers him a sad smile, telling him over and over again that her death is not his fault. Angie tells him that kissing the Magician was not a crime. Rory looks doubtful, but in the end, like Meg, he agrees. They need to let the Magician die.
Angie tells herself they are doing this for the dozens of lost souls, blown in like leaves from the strip, looking for magic, and instead finding the Magician. She tells herself it is not revenge. That he failed them more than they failed themselves. She thinks of late-night coffee, and early-morning champagne. All the opportunities she had to tell Rory that she knew he was in love with the Magician, to tell him to run. She savors her guilt, and pushes it down.
The one person they do not tell is the Magician’s Assistant, his current one. It is unfair, but she needs to be the one to fire the gun. Magic, true magic, requires a sacrifice, and none of them have anything left to give.
On the night the Magician dies, he asks for a volunteer from the audience. A hand rises, but the woman raising it feels a terrible chill, ghost fingers brushing her spine. She takes it as a premonition, and lets her hand fall. Rory trains the spotlight on the woman, on Meg behind her, and its brightness washes Meg away.
No other hands rise; the Magician’s Assistant accepts the gun with a smile, and Angie’s heart cracks for her. There is brightness in her eyes, curiosity. She believes. Not in the Magician specifically, but in the possibility of magic. She’s the Assistant for now, but her faith in the world tells her that she could be the Magician herself someday.
Rory shifts the spotlight to the stage. Bright white gleams off the Magician’s lapels, the Assistant’s costume sparks and shines. Angie watches the Magician preen.
There is a flourish, a musical cue. The Magician’s Assistant fires the gun. Angie holds her arms tight by her side. The bullet strikes home. A constellation of red scatters, raining like stars on the stunned front row. The Resurrectionist grits her teeth and trains her will to do nothing at all.
The Magician’s eyes widen. His mouth forms a silent ‘o’. He falls.
Dread blooms in the Magician’s Assistant’s stomach. The gun smokes in her hand.
Angie sweats in the wings. The Magician’s death tugs at her, demanding to be undone. It’s harder than she imagined not to knit the Magician back together. He is a hard habit to break, and she’s been turning back his death for so long.
She considers—is she the villain in this story? The Magician is callous, stupid maybe, and arrogant for sure. Angie is not a hapless victim. She made a choice; it just happened to be the wrong one. Rory and Meg, they are innocent. All they are guilty of is falling in love.
Angie does not tell the bullet to stop, or the Magician’s blood to go. She lets it run and pool and drip over the edge of the stage and onto the floor. All Angie can hope is to turn her regret into a useful thing.
Rory lets out a broken sob. His will breaks, and he runs onto the stage, folding to his knees to cradle the Magician’s head in his lap. Meg hovers above them. She spreads her wings, and their translucence filters the spotlight, lending the Magician’s death a blue-green glow.
Angie walks onto the stage. In the corner of her vision, the lights are blinding. The theater holds a collective breath. She thinks of a lonely grave in the desert, and a rabbit without a name. She thinks of Meg, falling endlessly. She thinks of Rory, his lips bruised with regret. Angie kneels, and looks the Magician in the eye. She knows death intimately, his most of all, and she knows he can still hear her.
“Dying is easy,” she says. “Being dead is hard. Coming back is the hardest part of all. See if you can figure out how the trick is done, this time all on your own.”
She leans back. It isn’t much, but it assuages her guilt to think he might figure out the secret, the catch, the concealed hinge. He might learn true magic, bend it to his will, and figure out how to bring himself back to life one day.
The Magician blinks. The spotlight erases Angie and Rory’s features; they blaze at the edges, surrounded by halos of light. Between them, a blurred figure occludes the lights. It reminds the Magician of someone he used to know, only he can’t remember her name.
“Is this….” The Magician’s fingertips grope at the stage as if searching for a card to reveal. Those are his final words.
*
Death and the Magician
Angie lets a month pass before she tracks down the Magician’s Assistant, his most recent one. They meet in an all-night diner, and Angie offers to pay.
The woman’s name is Becca, and she reminds Angie of a mouse. She starts easily, all shattered nerves. A dropped fork, bells jangling over the diner door—they all sound like gunshots to her, and her hands shake with guilt.
“It’s not your fault,” Angie says. “You did your job.”
Maybe one day Angie will admit the whole truth; maybe she’ll simply let it gnaw at her for the rest of her days, until she finds herself completely hollow inside.
“This is going to sound strange,” Angie says once they’ve finished their meals, “but how would you like your very own magic show?”
It isn’t enough, certainly not after what Angie has done, but it makes her feel slightly better to think she is offering Becca the chance to live her dream. The pain is still there in Becca’s eyes, but Angie sees a spark of curiosity and something like hope.
“Tell me,” Becca says; by her voice, she is hungry to learn.
The act that replaces the Bullet-Catch-Death-Cheat looks like something old, as all the best tricks do, building on what came before and paying homage, while being something completely new. Every night, the Magician summons a ghost onto the stage. It must be an illusion, audiences say. Smoke and angled mirrors, just like Pepper back in the day. Only, the ghost knows answers to questions she couldn’t possibly know. She finds lost things, things their owner didn’t even know were gone. Sometimes she leaves the spotlight and flies over the audience, casting the shadow of wings, and creating a wind that ruffles their hair. Sometimes she reaches out and touches one of them, and in that instant, they know without a doubt that she is absolutely real.
The ghost looks familiar, and so does the Magician. The audience can’t place either woman, but something about them calls to mind spangly leotards and pasted-on smiles. They look like people who used to be slightly out of focus, standing just on the edge of the spotlight, out of range of the applause. Now they’ve moved center stage, and their smiles are real, and they positively glow.
Angie no longer watches from the wings as the show goes on. Meg is strong enough now that she no longer needs Angie to ground her, and Becca and Rory are just fine on their own. Perhaps one day, Angie will slip away from the theater altogether, though she isn’t sure where she’ll go.
For now though, she sits backstage in front of the mirror and looks the old magician in the eye.
As she does, she learns what death looks like for him, and thinks about what it will look like for her when her own time comes. Sometimes it looks like the darkest depths of a top hat, endlessly waiting for the arrival of a rescuing hand. Sometimes it looks l
ike a party where everyone is a stranger, and no one ever looks your way. Every now and then, it looks like a diner at 1:47 a.m. and a heart waiting to be broken.
But most of all, it looks like a brightly-lit stage in a theater packed with people, utterly empty of applause.
The Stories We Tell About Ghosts
Growing up in Dieu-le-Sauveur, my friends and I told stories about ghosts—the Starving Man, the Sleeping Girl, and the House at the End of the Street. The summer I was twelve, I saw my first ghost for real. That was the summer my little brother Gen disappeared.
*
The first official day of summer, the day after school ended for the year, we gathered in Luke and Adam’s clubhouse—me, my little brother Gen, and Holly and Heather from across the road. Luke and Adam lived next door. By the time Gen was born, Luke and I had already spent years passing through the hedge between our houses.
That didn’t change immediately when Gen was born, but it changed when he got old enough to walk and my parents insisted I take him with me any place I wanted to go. Luke didn’t mind, but he was the younger brother in his relationship, the one used to tagging along. He couldn’t understand why I could be annoyed, and yet protective of Gen at the same time, the first to rush to him if he got hurt, or stand up for him if someone else gave him trouble.
This is what I couldn’t explain to Luke: It didn’t matter that I loved Gen or not, because I did; it didn’t matter that he was actually pretty cool for a little brother. What mattered was I didn’t have a choice anymore. I used to be just me, but for the last seven years, I’d been Gen’s big brother. I would always be Gen’s big brother, with all the weight and responsibility it entailed.
“This is that game I was telling you about.” Adam pulled out his phone. All week while we waited for school to be out, he’d been talking about an app called Ghost Hunt!, where you collected virtual ghosts and stored them in a scrapbook. He already had 27 unique ghosts, including the Bloody Nun.
“I found her behind the church. There used to be a cemetery there, but they dug up all the bodies and moved them somewhere else.”
He turned his screen to show us the Bloody Nun’s picture. The clubhouse was really a cleared-out garden shed, but Luke and Adam’s mom had put in a carpet for us and a mini fridge with an extension cord running to the garage. I reached to grab a soda, popping the tab before I looked at the picture on Adam’s phone.
The colors were washed out and strange, like one of those filters had been applied to make it look like an old photograph. The grass had a peachy tone, but I recognized the lawn behind the church, but not the woman, who wore an old-fashioned habit, with a wimple and a big silver cross. Her face was jowly, making me think of a bulldog, and at first I didn’t even notice her feet until Holly pointed it out.
“She’s floating.” Holly pointed at the screen.
Even though she was closer to Luke and mine’s age, Adam had a crush on Holly. Even though he hadn’t said as much, I’m pretty sure recruiting me and Luke to play Ghost Hunt! was Adam’s way of trying to impress her.
I leaned in for a closer look. Holly was right, below the nun’s full skirt, her feet just sort of vanished. Instead of standing flat on the ground, she hovered, casting a dark stain of shadow.
Gen jostled my shoulder. I glanced back, moving so he could see better, but he edged away from the screen as Adam continued to scroll. Heather looked doubtful, too. She and Holly were only eleven months apart, practically twins. Like me and Gen, they came as a set. Wherever Holly went, her sister followed.
“Certain ghosts show up more in certain places.” Adam continued flicking through his catalogue. “Like the Nun and the church, but regular haunts and ghouls can show up anywhere.”
He paused on the picture of a haunt, a black and white photograph made to look all harsh and full of contrast, so the boy in the picture appeared to have no eyes, only dark staring pits where his eyes should be. The ghouls Adam showed us looked like they’d been shot in night-vision, emerald-tinted blurs hinting at tooth-filled mouths and legs bending the wrong way.
“We should all play together.” Holly searched for the app on her phone, setting it to download, and Adam sat a little straighter. “I know some places where I bet we’ll find ghosts.”
Even though I didn’t know Holly all that well, I knew she considered herself an expert on ghosts. I looked back at Gen. He had his phone out, but he hadn’t downloaded the app yet. Our parents had gotten him his own phone just this year. They didn’t care if he used it to play games and watch videos as long as he kept it with him in case of emergency.
“It won’t be scary. I promise,” I said, taking his phone.
Gen scrunched up his mouth; I hadn’t played the game yet, so I had no way of knowing if it was scary, but I could tell he wanted to believe me.
“There are add ons,” Adam said. “EVP Mode, Night Vision, Auto Detect, but they cost extra. The game’s still fine without them.”
He led us outside, and we swept our phones around the yard.
“I don’t see anything.” Holly sounded impatient.
“Ghosts don’t appear everywhere.” Adam put his phone away. “Anyway, I have soccer practice now, but we’ll go on a proper hunt tomorrow.”
He tried out a grin, seeing whether anyone would challenge his self-appointed role as our leader. Holly fake-pouted a moment, but no one else said anything, other than agreeing we would meet up again tomorrow. I couldn’t tell whether Holly liked Adam the way he liked her, or just considered him a means of finding ghosts. I couldn’t tell whether I liked Holly, not as a girl, but as a person. But the best place to hang out was Luke and Adam’s clubhouse, which probably meant I’d have to put up with her either way.
I ducked through the hedge, pausing when I realized Gen wasn’t following me. He stood framed by the gap we’d made over the years, the ground worn by our feet so the grass didn’t grow. I crouched, so I could see him fully. He had the look of concentration he got when he was trying to solve one of the math problems my parents gave him to practice while I was doing my homework, so he wouldn’t feel left out.
“What’s wrong?”
“What if I don’t want to see a ghost?” Gen fidgeted with the pack around his waist. It held his phone and his inhaler; he wasn’t allowed to leave the house without it.
“You don’t have to play.”
“But then you won’t play with me if you’re all doing it and I’m not.”
Gen pushed his lower lip out. Guilt stung me, making the hope that flared for the briefest of moments feel ugly and cruel. I couldn’t help the thought: would it really be so bad if Gen stayed at home and played with his own toys some days while I played Ghost Hunt! with Luke and Adam? At the expression on Gen’s face, I tried to push the thought away.
“Hey.” I crab-walked through the hedge and put my arm around his shoulders.
His bones poked at my arm, even through the fabric of his shirt. He’d always been small. Reminding myself that Gen needed my protection chased away the last bit of hope so that I could almost convince myself I’d never felt it in the first place.
“It’s just a game.” I tightened my grip into a one-armed hug. “If it gets too scary, we’ll both stop playing, okay?”
“Promise?” Gen looked up at me through his lashes.
I held out my hand. Our dad had once sealed a promise to take us out for ice cream if we cleaned up the yard with a handshake. Gen had been three-years-old, and the idea of a handshake had stuck with him as the gold standard for a really serious deal you couldn’t ever go back on.
“Promise.” I said it loudly and clearly, making sure I believed it, too.
*
“I have a good one,” Holly said.
The six of us sat shoulder to shoulder in the clubhouse. We’d been hunting ghosts all morning, but only Holly and Adam had caught anything, a regular haunt and a ghoul each. After a while, it had gotten too hot out, and we’d retreated to the shed with a fan run from t
he same extension cord as the mini fridge, and freezies from the corner store.
“It’s one you haven’t heard.”
At the edge in Holly’s voice, I looked up. She was looking straight at me and I blushed, realizing I must have rolled my eyes. She held my gaze for a moment longer, then launched into her story.
“Before Dieu-le-Sauveur was a real town, it was just a bunch of houses and a general store. A man named Martin St. Jean lived in the last house at the end of town, and everything after that was fields and forest. Everyone knew everyone back then, and neighbors looked out for each other, except for Martin St. Jean.
“He didn’t go to church on Sundays. He would grunt instead of saying hello to his neighbors. His wife was even worse. If she came to the general store with him, she would sit in the wagon and wait, or walk behind him with her head down, never looking at anyone. She never spoke at all.
“The last time they came into town together, Martin’s wife was pregnant. They were there to get supplies before a big snow storm. The shopkeeper’s wife tried to talk to Martin’s wife about the baby while their husbands loaded up the supplies, but Martin came back into the store and grabbed his wife’s arm saying they were done.”
Holly paused, looking around to make sure we were all paying attention. Seeing nobody was looking away or playing with their phones, she gave a half-smirk of satisfaction, and continued.
“When the storm came, all of Dieu-le-Sauver was snowed in for weeks, but no one thought to check in on Martin St. Jean and his wife, even with the baby on the way. Or maybe they did think of it, and they chose not to go because he didn’t smile and nod at them and because his wife looked so small and afraid all the time.
“Once the snow thawed, people started to feel guilty. They got a party together to check on Martin St. Jean. No one answered when they knocked, but they heard a sound like a wild animal inside his house. It took three men to break down the door.”
