by Marty Chan
“How did you know where we worked?” the other hunter asked.
Ehrich flashed an enigmatic smile and tapped the side of his forehead, then pointed at their dusters.
The girls rolled their eyes.
“Tell your colleagues to come. I’ll give them complimentary tickets. What I have planned tomorrow will dwarf what you witnessed tonight.”
The hunters waved as they walked out the theatre. Ehrich hoped he had planted the seed to spread the word. Only time would tell, but he feared time was running out.
The next night, Ehrich’s condemned man act featured a new twist. At the end, when Ehrich escaped, he declared that this was the first day of the rest of his life.
Amina stepped beside Ehrich and said, “Or is it?”
A second Ehrich—still bound—appeared on stage. The audience gasped at the sudden appearance of the other Weisz. This one knelt behind the guillotine.
“How is this possible?” Ehrich asked as he approached his double. Now they stood side by side. The audience gasped.
The Ehrich doppelganger placed his head in the stocks and the curtains closed.
“This can’t be me,” the real Ehrich said.
“It was you,” Amina answered. “Three…two…one.”
The guillotine blade dropped, followed by a thud of something falling into the basket in front of it. The audience gasped.
“Tell me how this is possible,” Ehrich begged Amina.
“Your last day has come and gone as your body has. All that remains is your spirit.” She waved her hand in front of Ehrich, then pushed her palm right through his ghostly body. “Now be gone!”
He howled, then leapt off the stage, but he didn’t land on the ground. He floated above the audience. He ran toward the nearest wall and vanished into the wood. Audience members screeched at the sight. One woman swooned into the arms of her date. The theatre erupted into a cacophony of white noise as the audience members chattered to each other about what they had just witnessed. Then they fell silent as a figure rose from behind the guillotine.
“Behold, the condemned man on his last day,” Ehrich announced, stepping in front of the device. He raised his hands in the air and took a bow. The effect sent waves of excitement through the audience. People couldn’t stop talking about the effect. The debut of the projection was a smash success.
The next two nights brought more audiences in, but Edison was not among them. Coppers had shown up, as did a few Demon Watch hunters, but the bulk of the audience were civilians. Many of the new audience members dressed better than the previous night’s spectators. Word of the effect had spread from the middle class audiences to wealthier New Yorkers.
The next afternoon, Godfrey approached Ehrich. “You are doing boffo for the box office, Harry. I’m going to extend your contract by two weeks. And I’m going to give you another twenty minutes for your act.”
“You’re making the show longer?”
“Naw. Just lost some dead weight is all.”
Ehrich feared that Godfrey had cut Bess’s group from the bill. “Who did you fire?”
“No one that matters,” Godfrey said as he lumbered off into the theatre to ogle a few of the women rehearsing their act.
Ehrich headed backstage. Bess’s steamer trunk still sat in the wings, but Walter was packing up his gear. Ehrich guessed who the venue manager had fired.
“I’m sorry,” Ehrich said. “I heard Godfrey let someone go.”
“I’ll land on my feet.”
“I’m sure you will.”
Walter glared at Ehrich. “You must be pleased for yourself. I’m sure the audiences just love that kind of performance.”
“What do you mean?”
“Your technique is awful. A flash in the pan. You stumble through a top change when the spectators are burning your hands. You don’t know how to distract them from looking where you don’t want them to look. You’ll be out of work in a month, I guarantee.” Walter closed his trunk and shoved Ehrich out of the way as he dragged the heavy trunk toward the exit.
“Let me help you,” Ehrich offered.
Walter stopped and laughed. “Your beard is slipping, Harry.”
Ehrich pressed the fake hair against his chin. Walter stomped out of the theatre. Ehrich rushed to his dressing room where Amina and Tesla carefully stowed the codex into a box. Ehrich ran to the mirror and used spirit gum to fix his beard.
“Still no sign of Edison,” Tesla said. “I think we need to hit the streets.
“I think I’m about to give up on this idea,” Amina said. “At the very least, it would be great to get away from Godfrey. He keeps touching me.”
“No, Edison will show up,” Ehrich said. “Last night, I saw a couple of hunters in the audience. They might be doing some reconnaissance.”
“We need to accelerate the process,” Amina said.
Tesla raised an eyebrow. “I think I can send the right message.”
“What is it?” Ehrich asked.
“Patience.”
AN OLD FRIEND RETURNS
Ehrich had a few hours in the afternoon to flog the show. He claimed he needed to pack the house, but he wanted the opportunity to chat with Bess as she handed out flyers for the evening’s performance.
They strolled through the Bowery streets, jamming the papers into the hands of anyone passing by. Word of Harry Houdini had spread, and a few people stopped to shake his hand. No one recognized Bess.
“Don’t let the fame go to your head, Mr. Houdini, or you won’t get it through the Bijou stage door,” she teased.
“Won’t happen. Not with you deflating it at every chance,” he replied.
“Just keeping you honest.”
“I thought the second lesson of show business was everyone lies.”
“You’re right. You’re the smartest man I know.” She winked.
He quipped, “And you are the cleverest woman I’ve ever met.”
She elbowed him and scurried away, divesting the last of her handbills. Ehrich chased after her, but a young man stopped him.
“You are the Houdini everyone has been talking about, aren’t you?”
“Yes, sir, I am.”
“I must know. Are you a spiritualist? Do you possess a medium’s power?”
“A what?”
“Do you speak with the dead?”
“I’m afraid that’s not part of my act.”
“You’re not aware if you possess the gift?”
“I suppose not.”
The man reached into the pocket of his grey jacket and pulled out a flyer for a spiritualist meeting. “Come to one of our gatherings. We’ll test your latent abilities.”
“Sure, but only if you come to tonight’s show. Tell your spiritualist friends.” He gave the young man his last few handbills.
The young man eagerly accepted them and headed off. Ehrich searched the streets for Bess and spotted her leaning against a light standard at the far end of the block. He deliberately took his time strolling toward her, not wanting to appear too eager for her company.
“Hey, I can do magic too,” she announced. She placed her hands together and separated her thumb, hiding the severed joint with two fingers.
Ehrich laughed. “How did you ever do that?”
She beckoned him close and whispered in his ear, “A magician never tells.”
He cracked a grin. “Third lesson of show business?”
She shrugged. “No, that’s just common sense.”
She headed down one of the side streets toward an area where the invalids begged for money.
“Where are you going, Bess? We’re out of handbills. We should go back for more.”
She swept a stray hair from her face. “Giving out the handbills is Godfrey’s work. Now I can do some of my own.”
He followed the frail girl into the three-storey brick boarding house. She scaled the steps two at a time and knocked on the door.
“What is this place?”
“Shh, it
’s a secret.”
A kindly woman answered the door. Her dark hair was tied back in a bun and a soiled apron hung over her tan Mother Hubbard dress. She beamed. “Come on, Bess. They’ve been expecting you.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Sherman. This is my friend, Harry Houdini.”
“Oh my, I’ve heard of him. Everyone in the city is abuzz about the man who can cheat death.”
“Pleasure to meet you,” Ehrich said.
Mrs. Sherman led the pair into the sitting room where a half-dozen men and women sat in wheelchairs. Other than the patients of this sanatorium, the sterile room had few furnishings. A few paintings adorned the striped walls and a well-worn Oriental rug covered the hardwood floor.
None of the patients seemed to care about the condition of the room. They stared blankly, barely moving in their wheelchairs. Ehrich supposed that they were victims of strokes or brain injuries. He wondered why Bess would come here and leaned over to ask, but she had already sashayed away.
To his surprise, the girl began to dance in front of a couple of the women and finished with a flourish, garnering absolutely no response.
“Looks like the audience you had at last night’s show,” he quipped.
“No, these people are much kinder. No eggs.”
She patted the hands of her audience members and even wrapped her arms around one of the women. Then she stood up and sought another patient in need of her entertainment.
“How often do you come here, Bess?”
“Not as often as I would like.”
“Do they know you’re here?”
“Deep down, I think they do.” She patted the shoulder of the woman next to her. “Sometimes, I can see a flicker in her eyes. It’s as if she’s trying to tell me that she’s glad I’m here.”
“Bess, why do you come here?”
“Sometimes, you have to stop and think about those who are less fortunate. When I was born, the physician didn’t hold out much hope that I would live past the year because I was so tiny. My mother wouldn’t hear of this. She nursed me as she did my sister Marie. Because of my state, I often became ill. One time, I had a fever so bad the physician thought it would be the end of me. I had lost consciousness, but my mother stayed by my side and sang to me. She held my hand through the night and pressed cold compresses on my forehead until dawn and my fever broke. The doctor claimed I could not have heard her songs, but I swear her voice pulled me through. You should know this as a magician. What we can’t see is often the most powerful effect.”
“Can these people recover?”
“I don’t know.”
“Will they regain their former lives?”
“Things change. Friends move on. Children grow up. I can only imagine the horrible sensation of waking up after two years and discovering everything in your life is different.”
“At least you wake up,” Ehrich said, thinking of Dash.
“Yes, but as you can see, few of their family members or friends have elected to wait around. So, all these people have is what happens to them now. Why not give them something to hope for?”
He considered her words for a moment, then he reached into his pocket and pulled out a white silk handkerchief. He twirled it into a makeshift rope. Then he showed the silk to a pair of patients sitting next to him. He tied a knot in the silk. He blew on the knot as he pulled either end of the silk until the knot dissolved before their vacant eyes. He didn’t know if he had connected with them, but Bess applauded, and she was the spectator he wanted to impress.
He approached a patient at the back of the room. His jaw dropped. Charlie, his former Demon Watch squad leader, slumped in a wheelchair.
The last time Ehrich had seen his friend was at the Hudson River Tunnel Project. They had narrowly escaped an attack from Dimensionals. Charlie had taken a blow to his head, and then he fell into a coma.
Ehrich lost track of his friend over the months on the run from Demon Watch, but he always wondered if the teen had recovered. The answer sat before him in a vegetative state. His blond hair had grown long. Now a scruffy beard covered his gaunt face. The boy’s limbs had atrophied into limp appendages, dangling over the arms of the wheelchair. Ehrich searched Charlie’s eyes for some sign of recognition or spark of life.
“Charlie?” he whispered.
Not a flicker. He wondered if any of his squad even bothered to visit. If he had known about Charlie, he would have visited; at least, he believed he would have. His thoughts wandered to Dash and how many times he had visited his brother. Other than the recent return to Purgatory, he had rarely seen Dash. He tried to convince himself he was too busy with the search for Ba Tian’s army, but he doubted this was the entire reason.
Bess tapped the back of his shoulder, “What’s the matter?”
“I can’t do this, Bess. I’m sorry.” He left the sanatorium.
v
That evening’s performance was spectacular. Ehrich had honed his patter and Amina grew into her role as the magician’s assistant. But the kicker was Tesla’s addition to the projection. When the ghostly Ehrich ran over the audience, the stage erupted into a shower of electricity from coils and inductors Tesla had cobbled together during the day. The eerie blue light show stunned the audience. When the ghost version of Ehrich ran through the wall, the electricity chased after him and danced across the wooden wall, searing a message into the wood: “The War of Currents is not over.”
When he reappeared on stage, Ehrich was nearly bowled over by the applause. The entire audience rose to their feet and gave him a standing ovation. He noticed a few of the hunters were talking to each other and gesturing at the message on the wall. He wondered about it himself.
At night’s end, he pulled his friend aside and asked, “What did that message mean, Mr. Tesla?”
“Thomas Edison will know it well. Before Devil’s Island, I had partnered with a clever entrepreneur. George Westinghouse. With my AC generators and inductors, we had planned to usurp Mr. Edison’s direct current technology. The papers dubbed the battle between Westinghouse and Edison as the War of Currents. We would have won as well if not for an accident that took the life of my benefactor. The horses of his carriage were spooked during a brawl in Five Points. A few conspiracy theorists accused Mr. Edison of engineering the accident, but no one could ever prove their allegations. They claimed the War of Currents was far from over. The accusation became a sore point for Mr. Edison. He will receive the message. What he chooses to do with the information will speak much about his character.”
He resumed disconnecting the equipment. Ehrich lent a hand.
“What if he doesn’t come?”
“Patience. He will.”
“We need to draw Edison out. He’s our only bargaining chip with the general. What if Kifo reaches him first?”
“Ehrich, did I ever tell you about Macak?”
He shook his head.
“He was my cat. Black as a shadow, he never left my side. Followed me everywhere. I loved watching him roll in the grass around our farm. He loved when I stroked his back. One winter’s evening, I remember petting him. His fur became a sheet of light and sparks danced across my hand, crackling loud enough for even my father to hear in the next room. I asked him what caused the sparks, and he told me it was electricity. I was fascinated with the notion that a simple stroke of my hand could create such an effect, and I tried to recreate the effect on Macak until the candles grew dim and night took over. To this day, I don’t know if what I saw was a trick of my mind, but my cat was surrounded by a halo. After that, I wanted to discover the origin of electricity. I wanted the answer to ‘what is electricity?’ To this day, I still ask the question and still don’t have the answer, but I will not give up my quest.”
Ehrich chewed his bottom lip. “I suppose so, sir.”
“Take solace in the fact that if we have this much trouble getting to Edison, Kifo must be experiencing the same difficulty.”
The young Weisz rubbed his anchor nose. His mento
r was right.
“Now go join the others. They sound as if they are celebrating. Enjoy the night. You deserve a break.”
“You sure you can finish this yourself?”
Tesla shooed him away. “I know how I like my equipment organized. Go, go.”
Ehrich joined the other performers backstage. The jubilant performers celebrated the end of a long week and to swap stage stories. Ehrich and Amina joined the group while Tesla took down the apparatus. Everyone buzzed about Tesla’s light show.
“Is it safe?” Bess asked. “I heard you can kill a person with electricity.”
“If Mr. Tesla built the device, then it’s perfectly safe,” Ehrich answered.
“Who is Mr. Tesla?” Bess asked.
Amina and Ehrich glanced at each other, worried. He had let slip their guise in front of the performers.
“He’s a friend of our stage manager. He was the one who loaned Mr. Vernon the equipment.”
“Ah,” Bess said, shrugging. “I’d love to see how it works.”
“A magician never tells.”
“I’m sure I can find a way to loosen your tongue,” she purred.
Godfrey sidled into the room and wrapped his arm around Amina. She squirmed away.
“This was the best house ever,” he announced. “And after that effect, I’ll need to print standing room only signs next week. You were magnificent.”
Amina hooked her arm around Ehrich’s. Godfrey snaked his arm around Bess and launched into a story about his life as a performer. “When I worked the Vaudeville circuit, the audiences were tough. You did what you could to get a laugh on most nights. And on some nights, you did what you could to avoid the hook.”
A cold ache ran through Ehrich’s chest as he watched Godfrey play with Bess’s dark hair. He didn’t like the letch touching her. He disguised his seething jealousy with indifference, addressing Amina. “You were amazing tonight. You’re much more comfortable on stage.”
