Magic Mansion

by Jordan Castillo Price

  “Makeover?” Faye said through her smile, between clenched teeth. “If they’re planning on messing with my hair, they can think again.” She was almost as good a ventriloquist as Charity…who really could have used that makeover.

  Ricardo had just had his hair trimmed and his brows waxed that week, but heck. He wasn’t averse to a bit of star treatment. Maybe it was exactly what he needed to stop rehashing the Worst Days of his Life at the first sign of stress.

  “Unfortunately, Red Team,” Monty said, “you’ll be participating in a metamorphosis of your own. Some hedges behind the mansion were skipped on the last round of garden maintenance. You’ll spend the day trimming them back into shape.”

  “I guess I’d rather have the makeover,” Faye whispered. “As long as they don’t try to give me a haircut. My hair grows really slow.”

  “Okay, everybody,” Iain called, “that’s a rap. Eat, drink, be merry, have a cigarette, go back to your room and cry, or do whatever it is you do. A small camera crew will be present, as usual, to record your reactions to the day’s events. We expect you to be up and at ’em bright and early, ten a.m., for your makeovers or your slave labor. Any questions?”

  “Are you fucking kidding me?”

  Ricardo flinched, startled.

  Apparently Ken Baron had finally noticed the state of his fly.

  _____

  “Looks like another wild night at the mansion is already underway. The Gold Team is enjoying its moment in the spotlight, with champagne flowing all around. Amazing Faye and Ricardo the Magnificent truly earned their appellations in this challenge.

  “The leader of the Red Team took a gamble with some risky strategy, and his gambit didn’t pan out. His team is not feeling the love for him tonight—and they’ll be even more disappointed come morning when they see the state of the grounds.

  “What they don’t know is that while they’re out back trimming hedges, our home audience will be trimming down their team. The Red Team lost the challenge, and the price must be paid. One of them…is going home.

  “Will it be escape artist, Ken Barron? Or will it be master illusionist, Fabian Swan? We leave it up to you, the audience.

  “I’m your host, Monty Shaw. Don’t forget to tune in next time and see…who will stay, and who will leave…Magic Mansion.”

  Chapter 16

  MANUAL LABOR

  “Last time, on Magic Mansion….

  “Our winning magicians were treated to a day at the spa, but some of the treatments were anything but relaxing.”

  (Sue) No, seriously, let up—it really hurts. -CRYING-

  “Meanwhile, the losers spent the day cleaning up after their teammates.”

  (Faye) I don’t care if you’ve got a puppet on your hand or not. I am not scrubbing out the toilets myself.

  “Once the teams were reunited, they discovered that two of them…had been eliminated. One of them will be dearly missed…”

  (Ken) Chip Challenge has been awesome…like the kid brother I never had….

  (Chip) Thank you. Thank you very much.

  (Oscar) Are you -BLEEP- kidding me?

  “…and one of them…will not.”

  (Oscar) This mansion is a joke!

  (Muriel) I felt that damn dummy looking at me all night!

  (Oscar) It’s bullsh-BLEEP-!

  “Now ten magicians remain, but one of them…is going home. Which member of the Red Team has been voted out of the mansion? Is it aging illusionist Fabian Swan?”

  (Fabian) -GROAN-

  “Or is it double-jointed Ken Barron?”

  (Ken) Maybe things can work out for me after all.

  “The Gold Team was victorious in the Metamorphosis Challenge, and now the Red Team is stuck clearing an overgrown spot on the Mansion’s grounds, and one of them is about to be rewarded—with elimination. I’m your host, Monty Shaw. Stay tuned and see who was voted off…Magic Mansion.”

  ____

  “Sunscreen?” Marlene said, looking up from her checklist. John nodded, though he’d never worn sunblock a day in his life and wasn’t about to start now. “Insect repellent?” Likewise. “Fabian, you’ve got your back brace? Good. Professor, you’re sure you won’t reconsider?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “It won’t show. We’ll make sure.”

  “Really. It’s not necessary.”

  “If you start feeling any twinges,” Marlene told him, “go talk to the medics and strap one on. I don’t want any more replays of the deep tissue massage incident. Dirty? Fine. Tired? Fine. Uncomfortable? Fine. But hurt? Not fine.”

  “I will. At the first sign of a twinge.”

  Marlene planted her hands on her hips and looked John square in the eye—with a surprising amount of authority, considering she needed to crane her neck back to do it—and said, “All right. You’d better.”

  “Cross my heart.”

  Marlene was about to look away, but then she did a double-take, met John’s eye again, and gave a vulnerably silly half-smile. Inside her, the spark of life—of Truth—flickered as she allowed her sense of humor to feed it. Casey had been fond of reminding him, You’re as dry as a martini in the Mojave. And so John could spot a kindred spirit by seeing if they noticed his passing attempts at frivolity.

  Too bad the spark was too small to qualify as full-blown True magic. No doubt it would make for an interesting phone call, once the Magic Mansion show had wrapped, if John offered to be her mentor.

  Then again, there was someone else in the mansion who had Truth, in spades. Would it be strange to cast himself in the role of Ricardo’s teacher? Probably. John’s interest in Ricardo was anything but academic.

  “Okay, magicians,” Marlene called out, “here’s the drill. The greensman didn’t cut back the weeds on the west side of the lot, and now it’s a jungle back there. Your punishment for losing last night’s challenge is to cut down the growth between the two lines of orange tape. A pair of production assistants took a whack at another overgrown section, and we timed them. Judging by that, it should take you a good four to six hours to trim back the weeds and pile them in the designated area, so you’ll need to pace yourselves.”

  She signaled to an assistant, and he whisked the tarp off a cartload of tools while a handheld camera filmed the reveal. “You’ll have shears, axes, rakes…but no power tools. This is a punishment, after all. Step up to the cart and pick your poison.”

  Ken Barron fell into step beside John. He said, “Shouldn’t Monty be explaining the challenge?”

  “I suppose they can overdub it later.” After all, Monty probably hadn’t signed a contract that stipulated he’d be working 24-hour days, not like the magicians had.

  “Unless they’re not even gonna show it,” Ken said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “They can’t show everything, right? They’ve only got an hour…well, forty-two minutes with ads, minus a ninety-second intro and a thirty-second recap every time they come back from a commercial. So really, they only use half an hour of material for each show. And most of that’s gonna be the next challenge…and the next elimination.”

  “Precisely which half hour they use, though,” John said. “That’s what you need to watch out for.”

  Kevin Kazan was first at the tools. He took up a small, curved scythe and gave it an experimental twirl.

  “Don’t even think about juggling that,” Marlene said.

  He grinned at her.

  “If that thing leaves your hand,” she said, “you finish clearing the lot yourself while your teammates sip lemonade. And I don’t care if it takes all night.”

  “Got your message, Miz Perez. Loud an’ clear.”

  Jia grabbed a small axe out of the cart—and twirled it as neatly as Kevin had the scythe. She was looking directly at his throat while she did it, too. And the cameras seemed to have noticed.

  Fabian chose a set of long-handled pruners. He made no attempt to twirl them.

  John glanced at the overgr
owth—grass, brambles and weed trees—and opted for a saw. It seemed to him that one cut to the trunk of a woody shrub was more efficient than hundreds of smaller snips. Ken took a pair of shears. The magicians handed over their red-ribboned medals for safe keeping, then pulled on their gloves and approached their punishment.

  John had never been one for gardening—not that he didn’t think he would have a talent for it if he ever applied himself, just that he’d always been too much of a nomad to develop the requisite skills. Casey was the one who’d grown up in a sprawling ranch house in the suburbs with a garden in which every bud, leaf and stem had its place. Not John.

  Casey’s childhood home in Whittier was still there—though whether the gardens were still as immaculate as they had been while Casey was alive, John couldn’t say. Maybe so, if Casey’s mother (Mrs. Cornish, to John) had opted to hire a gardener to help with the more arduous spring cleanup. If she even still owned the home at all. John hadn’t seen her since the funeral. Since he’d never been acknowledged as anything more than Casey’s “friend,” whether because it seemed useless to press the more intimate details of their eighteen-year relationship on her, or because her well-timed avoidances discouraged them from trying, John really had no reason to visit. Staring up into the browned fronds of a palm that was surely rotten inside, John wondered if it might have been better to lay all the cards on the table—even the doctored aces. Especially those.

  And then if Mrs. Cornish still needed to use the word “friend” for John, so be it. At least everyone would have known where they stood.

  Besides, it was likely that Mrs. Cornish had been well aware of the nature of their relationship all along…how could she not be? John knelt beside a gnarled weedy bush with a stem almost as thick around as his wrist, and began sawing while he mulled over the probability. Two men in their forties (and fifties, and sixties) didn’t share a townhouse merely because they were bachelors who could agree on the thermostat setting and the best wine to accompany that night’s entree.

  Wood cracked, and the weedy shrub sagged, its branches still tangled in its neighbor’s. Amazing, really, how much of John’s life had been spanned by his time with Casey. And how little he had to show for it.

  A few yards away, commotion flared up and cameras converged. Kevin was swinging his machete wildly as if he was doing some sort of exotic sword dance. A few small brown bats fluttered out of the tree above him, moving deeper into the brush. Marlene and a phalanx of staff determined that Kevin hadn’t been bitten, and that all the bats had fled to the neighboring property. But the magicians ended up spending an hour in shade while they waited for the crewmen to determine another patch of overgrown grounds was bat-free, and then cordon off a big enough swath to constitute their “punishment.”

  While they waited, Fabian sat himself down beside John on the edge of a retaining wall, fanning himself with a creased takeout menu he’d found in the litter that ringed the edges of the property that the cameras didn’t film. He was still moving stiffly, though not as badly as the day before. “I did a show,” he said, “guess it’d be fifteen years ago now, for cable. You probably didn’t see it.”

  “I don’t watch much TV.” Fifteen years ago, Casey had surprised John with a two-month European adventure for his forty-eighth birthday—and with both of them between gigs, it seemed as if providence had arranged everything so they could enjoy it to the hilt. While Fabian had been appearing on cable—local cable, most likely—John had been relaxing in a gondola, or strolling through Madame Tussauds, or sampling the wares in an Amsterdam coffeeshop.

  “We didn’t keep stopping the camera,” Fabian said. “A couple of takes, then get to the next scene.”

  Jia boosted herself up to sit beside Fabian, feet dangling a few inches off the ground. “How come Kevin was the one to find the bats? Now they’ll show him before every damn commercial swinging that stupid machete around.”

  Fabian grunted an assent.

  A handheld wandered past. Jia and Fabian let their expressions go grim—though it wasn’t much of a stretch, since both of them looked that way naturally—and John felt his own face follow suit. It occurred to him that if the editors needed to make one of the teams look like villains in post-production, with ominous music, uncomfortable pauses and dramatically manufactured shifty-eyed glances, the Red Team would definitely be the one.

  Especially since the Gold Team was continually hugging each other. And smiling.

  John sighed.

  Jia pulled out a pack of cigarettes, offered one to Fabian and John who both shook their heads, then tapped one out, lit it, and took a deep, thoughtful drag. “So you’re married,” she said to Fabian, “right?”

  “Thirty-seven years,” he said.

  She looked for John’s left hand, but he hadn’t bothered to remove his gardening gloves. “What about you?”

  “No.”

  The terseness of his reply didn’t seem to discourage her. She didn’t strike John as someone who lacked for audacity. “Because someone on the crew may have let it slip that I’d be way less likely to be voted off the show if I could get a little on-camera romance going.”

  John wondered what she wanted from him. His blessing? Doubtful. Maybe some advice. “I suppose it might make interesting drama.”

  Fabian made a scoffing sound that sounded like, “Psheh.”

  “I know, lame, right?” Jia bent forward to peer around Fabian at John. “But give it some thought, Professor. ’Cos I’m betting the Red Team gets pared down for losing last night’s challenge—no offense, Fabian—and I’m not ready to go home just yet.”

  “Give what…?” Oh, hell. She’d been looking for a lot more than John’s advice. Casey would have found his shock over the thought of romancing her, even faux-romancing her, laughable. Then again, Casey let everything roll off his back. Maybe even things he should have taken a bit more seriously.

  “All right, everyone,” Marlene called out. “Your bat-free zone is ready. And don’t think we’ve spared you any effort to move things along. There’s plenty of time before your next challenge. So let’s get chopping.”

  Kevin Kazan sauntered over in John’s general direction, and Jia shot up off the retaining wall and stomped to the opposite end of the designated punishment zone. He tagged along, saying, “Yo…yo!” as if he thought he had a chance of getting her to answer to “Yo.” Fabian shook his head and veered toward the corner of the lot with his pruners, where he started whacking off huge chunks of bramble.

  John took a moment to size up the patch of neglected yard. No rotten palms here, that was good. He glanced up. No bats either that he could see, though they looked a heck of a lot like leaves when they hung there sleeping. He placed a hand on the trunk of an opportunistic weed tree that had sprung up to nearly eight feet, and he felt. Whatever life touched it seemed small to him. Ants. Beetles. Nothing larger than that.

  He planted his feet and began to saw.

  “Good plan,” Ken Barron said, falling in beside him. “Take care of the big stuff first. Get it out of the way. While you’re fresh.”

  “That’s the idea,” John said, although in actuality he’d never been much of a planner. Since he was slow to speak his mind but his eyes were shrewd, people had a tendency to assume his actions were always unfolding to the scheme of a master plan he was constantly assessing and tweaking. But nothing could be further from the truth. John had discovered life was more like surfing. You could try to plan, but in the end, there was nothing to do but keep your head above water and do your best to catch the waves so they didn’t pound you.

  “You’re in pretty good shape,” Ken observed.

  For his age—that was probably the unspoken part of the sentiment. Though with last night’s defeat fresh in his mind, it was more likely Ken meant, compared to Fabian.

  “I suppose.”

  “A century ago, a magician who was forty, fifty…he’d be in his prime. Not like today.”

  “So my agent tells me.”


  “Houdini was fifty-two when he died,” Ken said.

  “Indeed.”

  “But now? No one looks twice at a middle-aged magician unless he’s already got a following under his belt. So I heard about this show….” Ken lopped a few branches off a shrub that would have been better tamed by snipping it off near the root. “And I just thought…if I can’t crack this thing by the time I’m forty…if I can’t make my name now…well then, what’s it all for, anyway? I might as well hang up my handcuffs and go sell insurance.”

  John stopped sizing up the next weed tree and turned to get a better look at Ken. Not full-on, of course, because Ken clearly had the very male approach of sliding his important personal revelations into the conversation while everyone’s attention was focused instead on the task at hand. But in his peripheral vision, John saw that Ken was lopping at the bush a bit harder than he needed to.

  John moved closer and began sawing at the bush’s base. “You have a name, Ken. You’re the biggest escape artist on the circuit. And now that you’ve landed this show, a whole new audience knows who you are.”

  Ken made a sound that John initially took for a laugh, until he realized it was more likely a sob. Ken began lopping the bush even harder. “An idiot. A fool. That’s what they know.”

  Emotion—anger, or maybe despair—could have been the cause…or maybe it was simple physics, the lopper blades glancing off a burl in the wood. Whatever the reason, the results were the same. The garden tool skidded, down and at an angle. Directly toward the spot where John knelt.

  He sensed it just before it hit, and he jerked away. The duration of the incident was a fraction of a second. It sounded no more threatening than a snip and a rustle.

  “Oh, man,” Ken said. “That was close. I’m really sorry.”