08 Illusion

by Frank Peretti

  “Eloise Kramer, ladies and gentlemen!” bellowed Preston Gabriel.

  As planned, she crossed the stage, shook Gabriel’s hand, and took her place in the chair next to his desk for a short interview. She was still panting for breath.

  “Marvelous!” said Preston Gabriel, taking his seat. “Truly refreshing!”

  “Thank you.”

  He was smiling at her, but with a piercing gaze that made her want to cringe. “From Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.”

  “Yes, sir, born and raised.”

  “And just barely out of your teens—or are you?”

  “I turned twenty last Saturday. Two days ago.” There was some applause, about the only celebration her birthday got. She rehearsed on that day, alone.

  “Remarkable.” Gabriel leaned on his elbow, fingers supporting his face, still looking at her as if he were trying to figure something out. “And you studied with a close friend of mine, the great, the one and only Dane Collins.”

  If that was supposed to be a surprise to catch her off guard, it was. Some folks recognized the name, went “Oooh!,” and applauded again, which gave her time to recover, nod, and say a bit weakly, “Uh-huh.” Great, witty answer. Arnie told you, didn’t he? Please, no more questions about that.

  “You must have been quite a handful”—the glint in his eye telegraphed he’d used a pun—“with a remarkable trademark, bringing objects to life and making them your co-performers.”

  Did he just suggest … ? She was insulted whether he meant it that way or not. How was her smile? Was she having fun? She noticed a dead space in the conversation. It was her turn. “Uh … it’s … it’s like being a kid. When you’re a kid all your toys are alive.”

  Gabriel nodded. “Did you see our last guest?”

  Now, come on, it would be mean to talk about him. “The kung fu guy?”

  “I’d say you did a lot better than he did.”

  Some folks clapped, but at the kung fu guy’s expense. It felt mean. “Well …” She shrugged it off.

  Gabriel stood a pencil up on end on his desk. “How about this pencil?”

  There was a hush. She looked at the pencil, then at him. This couldn’t be happening. “How about it?”

  “Can you make it move?”

  No magician would do this to a fellow magician. What was he thinking? Smile, play along! “Sure—if I brought my own pencil.” She mugged to the audience and they chuckled.

  “So you don’t really have the power to make this one move.”

  The audience was hanging on what she would say. It was palpable. And what could she say? Saying “no” would break the spell, the whole covenant that made magic what it was, that made her performance what it was. He had to know that.

  She smiled and made a funny little show of thinking about it. Preston Gabriel gave her precious airtime to do so, his eyes locked on her. Maybe he was building the suspense …

  Or maybe he was trying to shrink her, make her wither like the kung fu guy. Arnie and he must have had a little talk between old buddies before the show. A tremble of anger went through her. Yeah, I can make it move. I can stick it in your ear.

  She tried to put on Playful and Teasing. “Which way would you like it to move?” It didn’t quite work. Her tone came across as challenging. The audience went “Ooooohhh …”

  This guy had gall that soured her stomach. “How about making it levitate?”

  In the greenroom, Arnie had come out of his chair and crossed to the television. Preston, what are you doing? Forget what we talked about, this is showbiz. I wouldn’t even fry her on television!

  Smile! “How high?”

  “Oh, let’s say—”

  The pencil shot to a foot above the desk and hung there. The audience was all over it: it was part of the act, planned as a surprise, Wow, great, we love it!

  And Mandy wasn’t about to disappoint them. She locked eyes—most pleasantly—with Preston Gabriel, friend of Arnie Harrington.

  She remembered how she and Dane spent his birthday, how she wished they could have spent hers.

  She made the pencil spin a cartwheel. “What else?”

  Gabriel eyed the pencil, fascinated.

  Fascinated wasn’t good enough. The folks deserved a real finisher, and Gabriel deserved … well, she’d be careful.

  The pencil shot around the stage like a frantic bird, circled back, dropped, and touched eraser down on the top of the desk. As if the pencil were doing the lifting, the whole desk rose a foot from the floor and rotated, colliding with the old man’s legs and making his chair spin—she enjoyed that part, but threw up her hands for the audience, Don’t look at me, I can’t control it! While the desk continued lazily rotating in midair, Camera Two lifted from the floor and rose above the frantic attempts of the camera operator to hold it down. It floated above Preston Gabriel, and a lovely crane shot appeared in the monitors: Preston Gabriel, stoic demeanor cracking, about to duck aside in case the camera fell. Oh, no you don’t. Mandy scurried over, put her arm around the snooty, thoughtless old geezer, and looked up, waving, her smile big with sarcasm.

  The audience was rumbling, applauding, gasping.

  Mandy let the camera and desk down gently, then gave Preston Gabriel a kiss on top of his head. The audience went nuts. They rose to their feet. She pranced forward and bowed, threw them a kiss, and scampered offstage.

  They were still applauding as she brushed past Linda the producer—“Hey, that was incredible!”—and slammed through the soundstage door.

  Preston Gabriel’s voice came from monitors in the control room—“The incredible Eloise Kramer!”—as she rushed down the hall to the ladies’ room.

  The closing theme music and Preston Gabriel’s sign-off came from the ceiling speakers in the restroom as Mandy pressed her face into a corner and let herself cry, really cry.

  chapter

  * * *

  33

  First and foremost,” said Preston Gabriel, removing his hat and coat, “you’re not crazy.”

  Arnie said nothing. He just hung his coat in Dane’s front closet.

  “We need a table,” said Preston.

  Dane, face-to-face with his oldest and best friend and his agent who thought he was crazy, was at a loss other than to say, “I’m taking orders for coffee.”

  They gravitated to the breakfast nook, that well-lit corner of the house with a great view and close to the coffee. Dane brewed lattes for Arnie and himself, a cup of black for Preston. He put some of Noah Morgan’s cookies on a plate, but by then the nook table hardly had the space. Preston had spread out snapshots, eight-by-tens, trade articles, and promotional photos featuring Mandy, most dating back to the earliest years of Dane and Mandy’s career. One was a snapshot from a magic convention in Miami in 1974: Preston and Dane, in long, ’70s hair and sideburns, had first met, and now they posed on either side of the long-tressed flower girl, Dane’s beautiful bride and performing partner of two years.

  Arnie, still somber, provided recent photos from Eloise Kramer’s promotional packet and laid them alongside the others. Dane brought his computer and opened a folder of digital photos, the “Gleesome Threesome” building the stage in the shop building. Among these he found his favorites, close-ups of Eloise.

  Arnie scanned them all from a standing position with no comment and a predisposed detachment.

  Preston bent over the table, slid photos around, examined close-ups of Mandy and Eloise under a magnifier.

  Dane mostly waited. He’d already anguished through this exercise so many times in so many ways he no longer trusted his own eyes. He looked at Arnie, the skeptic.

  Arnie reminded them, “Of course we can all agree that she looks like Mandy. I’ve never argued that point.”

  “Dane,” said Preston, “may I see that close-up of Eloise, the one where she’s holding up the hammer?”

  Dane brought it up on the computer screen.

  “Can you zoom in on the mouth?”

  Dane zoomed in u
ntil her smile nearly spanned the screen.

  Preston pointed to the screen. “Just for one of many examples, note the flaw, the little dip on the left side of that tooth.” Then he pointed to the magnifier he held over an old promo photo of Mandy Collins. “Take a look.”

  Dane deferred to Arnie, but Arnie let him go first. He looked through the magnifier and found exactly what he expected. Both girls had the same flaw on the same tooth. “That freckle, too, on her upper lip.”

  “Mmm-hmm. And the tiny mole under the left eye, and the asymmetry of the smile, the way it stretches just a little more to the right.”

  Arnie huffed in exasperation. “Do you guys know where you’re going with this, where you’d have to go?”

  Preston told him, “We welcome your arguments, Arnie. This is so bizarre we need some checks and balances.”

  “Well, how about, Mandy is dead?” he said. “I know it’s a small detail, but I feel I should bring it up.”

  “But can we agree on one redeeming fact, that except for different hairstyles and color, these two girls are physically identical in every way?”

  “I told you, I’ve never argued that point.”

  “But it means that Dane isn’t crazy. Any sane person would have the same conflicts.”

  Arnie thought for a moment. “I’ll accept that this gal could fool anybody. Dane, if I’d been you … yeah, she could have fooled me.”

  Yes, of course it was a relief, but it had been so long, so torturous that the relief could only trickle in, displacing despair and supposed madness one drop of comfort at a time. “All right, so we agree on that.” Preston pulled a chair over and sat down. The others did the same and they faced each other across the table, all the photos spread out between them. Dane sipped his latte. It was cold. Preston drew a DVD from his leather satchel and handed it to him. “This will bring you up to speed.”

  Dane slid the DVD into his computer and they watched Eloise’s performance, the on-edge interview with Preston, the mayhem that followed. As the closing credits began and Dane clicked the stop button, he was smiling like a proud father.

  “Whom did you see?” asked Preston.

  Dane felt safe. “I saw Mandy.”

  Arnie let out a quiet whoosh and stroked his brow.

  With an acknowledging glance at Arnie, Preston said, “That was my experience as well.”

  “Careful,” said Arnie.

  “Keep an eye on us.”

  Arnie nodded.

  “I first met Mandy Collins when she was in her early twenties …” Preston looked at Dane. “She would have been … twenty-three?”

  Dane did some quick figuring. “1974. Yeah.”

  “Dane, my heart goes out to you. Except for the shorter hair I could have sworn I was meeting the young Mandy Collins all over again. You should have said something.”

  “And what would you have done?” Dane asked.

  Preston nodded, conceding, “Not having met her, I would have tried to talk you out of it. I would have thought you were mentally disturbed.” Preston cocked an eyebrow. “But that’s why you wanted her on my show, isn’t it?”

  Dane nodded. “You had to see her for yourself.”

  Arnie countered, “And I thought you’d be clever enough to see through her.”

  “The resemblance was astounding,” said Preston, “but not the only factor. There were also her abilities.”

  “I told you she was good,” said Arnie.

  Preston looked at one and then the other. “You’ve both seen her perform. How did you think she was doing it?”

  Arnie answered, “Wires, magnets, gyros. Rigging small enough to carry on her person.”

  Dane admitted, “I tried to figure it out, but then … I thought I was meeting my wife all over again. I thought I was going crazy. I let it go, I just threw it in with everything else.”

  Preston slid some of the photos around, looking them over again as he spoke. “I tested the resemblance further. I baited her to see how she carried herself, how she related to me after I needled her, how she handled anger. Turned out, once again, she was Mandy to a tee. From there, I went out on a limb.”

  Arnie wagged his head. “And I couldn’t believe you’d do a thing like that.”

  “In retrospect, neither can I. What I did just isn’t done.” Preston wagged his head as he recalled it. “We are deceivers, but we’re honest about being dishonest, and no magician exposes the dishonesty of another. It would spoil everything. The audience would be disappointed.” He smiled. “But Mandy Collins never, ever disappointed an audience.”

  What Dane suddenly understood, he also had trouble believing. “You forced her to move that pencil.”

  Preston was amused by the twist of it. “And I was as lucky as any man could ever be. I bet on her being dishonest about being honest. I bet on her really being able to do it.”

  Arnie was stung for a moment. “Whoa, whoa, hold on. What are you saying?”

  “You asked if we knew where we were going with this. Well, for a moment, let’s go here: It would not have been enough for her to rig the pencil or my desk or the camera, as impossible as that would have been anyway. She would have had to rig the whole room. My desk is at least two hundred pounds, that camera weighed well over three hundred, and yes, I did question the TV crew and the set builders, all close friends and associates. They were as amazed as I was.”

  “You’re not saying you owe her a million dollars?”

  Preston feigned offense. “Oh, perish the thought. She never made a challenge, and the offer is for anyone proving psychic ability.”

  “Then how do you explain it?”

  Preston clapped his hands together, then rubbed them lightly. “All right. We are here, so let’s do some exploring.” He turned to Dane. “Pardon the question. Did you see Mandy die?”

  The question hit like an arrow. Off guard, unprepared, Dane tried to grasp the question and why Preston would even ask it.

  Preston asked again, “Did you see her die?”

  Dane fended him off. He couldn’t bear to revisit that room. “Of course I did.”

  “How do you know she was dead?”

  She wasn’t? No, he couldn’t carry that hope again. He turned up his hands, let them drop. “She had to be.” Preston was still waiting. “The heart monitor went flatline. She was gone.” He drew some breaths to keep emotion down.

  “Then what happened?”

  “Preston …” Arnie cautioned.

  “They wheeled her out of the room,” Dane answered. “That was it.”

  “Who?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Who wheeled her out of the room? Who was there?”

  “A doctor and a nurse.” Something connected, something so far from credible …

  Preston pressed his gaze.

  Dane could see Kessler standing over his dying wife and the nurse continually fingering the wires from the monitor. He could remember a strange hastiness in getting Mandy out of the room. Why the hurry if she was dead? “Dr. Kessler. Margo Kessler.”

  “Did you see Mandy cremated?”

  Dr. Kessler was wrong, wasn’t she? There was never an effect from the medication, Dane was never crazy, never hallucinating. She was wrong, all along—or lying.

  “Dane? Did you see Mandy cremated?”

  “Of course.”

  “In a cremation casket?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was she in it?”

  Wasn’t this grasping at straws? He wished it wasn’t.

  “Do you have direct, personal knowledge of Mandy’s body being in that casket? Did you see it yourself?”

  The question was unfair. “I didn’t pry the casket open and look, no.”

  “Preston, come on,” said Arnie. “Give the man some space.”

  Preston pulled a photograph from his satchel and placed it on the table in front of Dane. “Have you ever seen this man?”

  Dane was afraid to hope. He’d been through so much, and this
… what could it accomplish other than to stab him with fresh pain he’d taken months to get over? He cared little for Preston’s photograph …

  … of a man he’d seen before. A man in his forties. Thin, graying hair, wire-rimmed, professorial glasses, a somewhat stern, focused expression.

  He plucked the photograph from the table. “Who is he?”

  Preston was intently reading his face. “So you have seen him before?”

  “Who is he?”

  Now Preston was the one shaken. “His name is Jerome Parmenter, former professor of physics at Stanford. I say ‘former’ because he seems to have disappeared.”

  chapter

  * * *

  34

  Dane was trying to breathe. His hand was shaking.

  “You need some water?”

  Dane nodded. Arnie hurried to bring a glass.

  Dane’s heart was racing. Anger, hope, relief, anxiety, all boiled inside him at once. “He was there at McCaffee’s …” He told Dane and Arnie the whole story of the man he’d seen in McCaffee’s, sitting in a corner with a computer while Mandy—Eloise—tried to levitate and came crashing to the floor.

  Preston was as agitated as he ever got, which wasn’t very, but on him it was impressive. “Unbelievable! The odds! I was shooting in the dark, following a hunch! Unbelievable!” He grabbed at the photos on the table. “Let’s make some room here!”

  They put away the photographs. Dane set aside his computer. The table was clear.

  “The odds!” Preston was still recovering. “But I shouldn’t be surprised. Sooner or later the pieces had to fall together.” He reached again into his satchel and produced a small stack of lengthy articles in fine print from professional journals and scientific publications, some featuring the same photograph. “No, this is not from my pleasure reading list. My staff is always investigating new ideas and technologies that could be useful for new tricks and illusions—and psychic hoaxes, either one—and they sniffed out Parmenter. Here’s a man with cutting-edge interests: interdimensional crossovers, electromagnetic pulse, scalar waves, time travel. He’s a regular Tesla, or Einstein.