Redondo started to laugh, but it was broken up by his cough. He wiped blood from his mouth and massaged his ribs, clearly in pain. “Let’s get out of here.”
“Right.” Joey looked into the mirror, seeing not his reflection, but where he wanted to go in his mind. He dragged Redondo into the mirror. Once again, it was like stepping into liquid, and the two of them were spirited away.
11 The Choice
Joey and Redondo fell forward out of the mirror and collapsed onto the stage. Leanora and Shazad were waiting beside the mirror with the baroque golden frame—the one Joey had originally used to enter the mirror world. When they saw the shape Redondo was in, they were bursting with questions, asking if he was all right, what had happened, and specifically, what had Joey done? Clearly, they had expected to see Redondo helping Joey back through the portal, not the other way around.
Ignoring them both for the time being, Joey set Redondo down gently and turned his attention to the mirror they had just come out of—the one with the jewel-encrusted frame. Knowing that its counterpart in the mirror world was still intact, Joey tipped it back and let it crash down. It hit the stage hard, shattering the glass inside the frame.
“No!” Leanora exclaimed.
“What are you doing?” Shazad demanded.
“You might want to back up,” Joey said, turning away from the mirror.
Just like in the mirror world, the glass exploded outward with tremendous force. Perhaps it was the magical energy leaving the broken mirror that did it. Shards of glass shot up into the air and showered the stage. Another relic lost.
When the dust settled, Leanora and Shazad were flabbergasted. “Why would you do that?” Leanora asked.
“Just in case,” Joey said. “Don’t want anybody following us.”
“Can’t be too careful,” Redondo agreed in a weary voice.
“Following you? What happened over there?” Shazad asked.
“Bozhe moi!” Leanora exclaimed. “Why does he have the wand?” she asked, pointing at Joey.
“Oh yeah.” Joey looked down at his own hand. He had forgotten he was still holding Houdini’s wand. “It’s a long story.”
Shazad looked at Joey, astonished. “I’ve got time.”
“Not now,” Redondo said, his voice exhausted. “Right now I need to…” He struggled to stand, coughing and clutching at a pain in his side. “I need to rest.” He turned to Joey. “Take me to my office.”
“Right.” Joey nodded and carefully swept glass off the trapdoor in the middle of the stage with his foot. Once again he was without shoes, having left his sneakers back in the mirror world. Joey opened the door in the floor and helped Redondo down the steps. “There’s a good lad. Leanora, Shazad… if you wouldn’t mind waiting here. I need to talk to young Kopecky. Alone.”
“Alone?” Shazad repeated, taken aback.
“Thank you,” Redondo replied as he disappeared down the steps.
Joey read the expressions on Leanora’s and Shazad’s faces. They couldn’t believe they were being left out of this. Joey didn’t take any pleasure in the momentary reversal of fortune. His head was still spinning from what had just happened in the mirror world. “Just hang out,” he told them. “I’ll fill you in when I come back.” He followed Redondo down and closed the trapdoor behind him.
Joey and Redondo came out in Redondo’s messy office, high up on the back wall of the theater. With Joey shouldering most of Redondo’s weight, they descended the attic ladder steps slowly and shuffled over to a sofa that had been buried under an abundance of boxes, papers, and files. Joey pushed everything to the floor and set Redondo down. The old man sighed with relief, but didn’t relax. “Help me get this off.” Still sitting upright, he turned away from Joey and held his arms behind him so that Joey could help pull off his tuxedo jacket. Joey gripped the cuffs and tugged back gently. Redondo grunted in pain as the jacket came off. “That’s better,” he said, easing himself down into the couch cushions. “I told you… you might regret this,” he added with a weak smile. “Sorry to keep you waiting in there. I would have arrived sooner, but the mirror’s link to the mirror world was broken. I had to pull another mirror out of storage before I could reach you.”
“Never mind that,” Joey said, concerned. The man in the top hat and scarf had given Redondo quite a beating. “Are you going to be okay?”
“I’ll live,” Redondo said. “Another day at least. I’ll take that back now.”
“What?”
“The wand.” Redondo motioned for him to fork it over. “If you would be so kind.”
“Of course. Here you go.”
“Thank you.” Redondo studied Joey as he took the wand back from him, almost as if he was surprised to see him give it up so easy. “Are you feeling all right?”
Joey shook his head. When he’d given Redondo the wand, he had gotten a healthy dose of reality back in return. The feeling of raw power and magical might that had swelled Joey’s heart while holding the wand now flew from his body. Suddenly deflated, the magnitude of what had just happened hit him fully. “Redondo, that was close. That was way too close. Who was that guy?”
“An old friend.”
“Some friend,” Joey said. “That was the second time he came after me. He was the one who showed up in my room last night. He’s after the wand.”
“Believe it or not, I managed to figure that out on my own,” Redondo said, wincing as he gingerly felt at a pain in his side. “The Invisible Hand has obviously chosen a very motivated enforcer to deal with me.”
“You think?” Shock was setting in now that the danger had passed. The Invisible Hand was still coming after him. The first time they had met, the man in the top hat and scarf had been content to give him a bad dream, but this time around he had actually intended to hurt him. Joey realized his hands were shaking. “Redondo, I’m—I’m scared.”
“Don’t be scared.”
“I can’t help it.”
“Of course you can. You just proved that. You weren’t scared over there, were you?”
“I was terrified over there!”
“Really?” Redondo tapped the wand lightly in his hand. “I thought you handled yourself remarkably well. Don’t you?”
“Redondo, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I ran away from him. He chased me into the ocean. He would have killed me if not for you!”
“Don’t get hysterical. He wouldn’t have killed…” Redondo paused, clutching his side as he succumbed to an excruciating cough. “He gets nothing out of killing you. He needs to kill me,” Redondo stressed, gritting his teeth. “Now stop it. This is what he wants. He wants you scared so you’ll give up… so you’ll quit all this.”
“He doesn’t want me to quit. He wants to use me to get in here. He told me to take him back through the mirror, but I wouldn’t do it. I smashed the mirror on the other side so he couldn’t make me try.”
The corners of Redondo’s mouth twitched. “Smashing things is getting to be habit with you.”
“I don’t know what I was thinking. I could have been stuck there for good.”
“You were thinking on your feet, like a good magician should.”
Joey frowned. He wasn’t so sure he wanted to be a good magician if this was what it was going to be like. “I don’t know if I can do this, Redondo.”
Redondo cocked his head to the side. “Don’t tell me you want to give up. Not when you’ve just taken the lead in the competition for the wand.”
“I gotta tell you, I’m not really feeling this competition. Can’t you just teach me some magic in whatever time you’ve got left instead?”
Redondo wagged a finger. “What you need to learn can’t be taught. This wand…”
“I told you, I didn’t come here because I wanted the wand.”
“But you keep coming back.”
“Yes, because I want to learn magic!”
“Why?”
“What do you mean, why? Who wouldn’t want to learn
magic? It’s amazing.… It’s exciting.… It’s special.”
“And you want those things.”
“I want my life to be all those things! That doesn’t mean I have to be the world’s greatest magician, and it definitely doesn’t mean I want to fight some magical Legion of Doom. I don’t need to be better at this than Leanora or Shazad. They’re way ahead of me already! Let them have the wand and worry about the Invisible Hand. That’s fine by me.”
“I see.” Redondo grimaced. “You want the power but not the responsibility.” He gave a little cough and made a face like someone had stabbed him. “I’m afraid it doesn’t work that way.”
“It doesn’t have to be that much power,” Joey specified. “This place is full of relics, right? Maybe you could just leave me a couple cool things that the Invisible Hand doesn’t want so bad. Things that aren’t worth going after. I’m not picky about it, really.”
Redondo made a sound that was part cough, part chuckle. He had an amused look on his face. “There is nothing I have here… nothing I could give you… so trivial that the Invisible Hand does not wish to obtain it. There’s no halfway in this world, young Kopecky. You’re either in or you’re out. That’s the reason for this competition. Part of the reason, anyway. If I’m going to leave this behind—any of it—I need to know it’s in the care of someone with the strength to look after it.”
He went back to his fortune-telling cards and once again pulled out three cards from the deck. This time he got the Shield, the Sword, and the Escape Artist.
“What’s that about?” Joey asked him.
“Decisions, decisions…,” Redondo muttered, putting the cards away. “We’ve all got choices to make.”
Redondo hiked up his shirt on his left side to inspect his wounds. Splotchy reddish-purple bruises covered his body from his waist to his ribs, parting gifts from the man in the top hat and scarf. “That doesn’t look good,” Joey said.
“No? Because it feels wonderful.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right. It could have been worse,” Redondo said, smoothing his shirt back into place. “And it was worth it to find out what you’re capable of. Tell me, how did you get us out of there?”
“What do you mean? I used the mirror. You told me which one led back here.”
“But how did we reach the mirror? What did you do to make everyone float away? How did you do that?”
Joey scratched his head. His memory of picking up the wand and putting it to use was a blur, but after some thought the word jumped out at him. “Excelsior. I said, ‘excelsior.’ It means ‘ever upward.’ ”
Redondo stared at Joey, mystified. “Where did that come from?”
“Marvel Comics,” Joey said instantly. “You know Stan Lee? The guy who made up all those superheroes? He says it all the time. It’s like his catchphrase. I didn’t know what it would do, but it seemed like the right thing to say for some reason.”
“Amazing,” Redondo marveled. “Who would have thought a lifetime of comic books and superhero movies would come in handy?”
“I got lucky.”
“What’s luck but a touch of magic? With the right tools, we make our own luck. Do you have any idea what you did? This isn’t like the mirror or the key.… You didn’t just believe enough to use a magical object. You cast a spell of your own design and actually made new magic. You used the wand!” Redondo shook his head, staring at the wand in disbelief. “That shouldn’t be possible. Not while I’m alive.”
Joey felt sick. Yesterday he would have been thrilled to achieve something so extraordinary, but today he felt more dread than pride. “I don’t know about this, Redondo. I don’t want a life where I have to look over my shoulder for the Invisible Hand all the time.”
“If you want to use magic, they’re going to be there whether you watch for them or not.”
“Just how powerful are they?” Joey asked. “Leanora and Shazad made it sound like the Invisible Hand is secretly running the world.”
“Manipulating the world would be more accurate. That is, after all, what magicians do. The Invisible Hand believes that only they deserve to use magic. They’ve filled the world with things that manipulate and deceive audiences, with results that are anything but magical: isolating technology, social media, cable news channels… The list goes on.”
“Wait a minute… social media?” Joey said. “What’s that got to do with magic?”
“More than you think. The Invisible Hand has been hoarding magic for centuries. What do you think people replace it with? What fills the void? Technology. The opposite of magic. Things that work whether or not you believe in them. Things that make people lazy and do their thinking for them. People see the world through screens these days. Is it any wonder they can’t see magic when it’s right in front of their face?”
“What are you telling me?” Joey asked. “The Invisible Hand is hypnotizing people through their phones?”
“It wouldn’t surprise me. The world’s become a dark and angry place. Maybe you’ve noticed? People are depressed, distracted, and divided… trapped in lives where possibility exists only for the few… and yet no one does anything about it. No one thinks they have a chance. The Invisible Hand has had great success turning the public into sheep. People today will believe anything except that which is truly extraordinary.”
Joey was quiet for a moment. He thought about Shazad’s argument that it was no use trying to fight the Invisible Hand and knew that he was guilty of the same bleak outlook. His own reaction to the Earth Day rally in Times Square was proof enough of that. He had actually equated the event with the doomed efforts to save Planet Krypton. Joey thought about his attitude toward Exemplar Academy and Janelle telling him he didn’t believe in himself. When had he become so cynical? Had the Invisible Hand cast its spell over him, too?
“I still don’t get it. How do you fight the Invisible Hand doing magic tricks in a theater, pretending it’s all an act? Couldn’t you just use the wand to wish them away and change the world into something better? Or are you not strong enough for that?” Joey asked, thinking about Redondo’s terminal illness.
“I’m strong enough not to do it,” Redondo said. “There is such a thing as free will, young Kopecky. It’s not for me to play God with this wand. If I were to cross that line, where would I stop? Would I stop?”
“Free will, then… fine. Give people the choice. If you want to keep the Invisible Hand from rounding up all the magic in the world, show people what they’re doing. Can’t you just tell people the truth about magic? About everything?”
Redondo shook his head. “It wouldn’t do any good.”
“How do you know?”
“Because people are predisposed not to believe what they are told when it comes to such things,” Redondo said patiently. “There’s a reason we don’t share secrets. It’s the same reason I won’t train you and the other children in magic. Not formally. Magicians don’t pull back the curtain and show people how their tricks are done. That is not the path to belief in magic. The Invisible Hand can only be defeated when people are willing to believe—when they have faith—that the impossible is possible. You have to get in people’s heads. Inspire them. It takes showmanship and stage presence to make that happen. If a magician does his or her job well enough, the magic can last long after the curtain falls. It might even stop being ‘magic’ and just become part of the way the world works. But people need to think it’s their idea. They need to be moved, not pushed. You can’t spoon-feed magic to people. They won’t swallow it. You’ve heard the expression ‘I’ll believe it when I see it?’ With magic it’s the opposite. They’ll see it when they believe it.”
With a grunt Redondo forced himself to stand. He walked to the window and looked out on the theater.
“Magic is a noble profession, young Kopecky. Don’t ever let anyone tell you otherwise. People these days… they forget how much they need magic in their lives. That’s why it’s so important peopl
e believe in what we do. That kind of belief brings wonder and amazement to the mundane. Great magicians ignite a sense of childlike enthusiasm in their audience, reminding people, both young and old, that the world is a grand and wonderful place filled with potential and promise. We follow Houdini’s tradition, inspiring people to make their own brand of magic. It could be anything… art, science, simple acts of kindness… It doesn’t matter what form it takes. That kind of thinking got lost somewhere. We need to get it back. Sometimes it feels impossible. I know that better than most. But that’s the whole point of magic—to show people nothing is impossible. You want your life to be better. Special.” Redondo shook his head. “The Invisible Hand wants the same thing. We have to choose. If I leave the wand in your care, you have to decide what kind of show you want to put on. You have to pick a side. Will you inspire wonder… or terror?”
“What if I choose door number three?”
Redondo raised an eyebrow. “What’s that?”
“No offense, but you haven’t inspired anything in a long time.”
Redondo huffed and looked away. “I hate to think of what you’d say if you were trying to offend me.”
“I’m serious. You tell me I can’t quit, but you’ve been gone twenty years. The guy in the top hat… He said you gave up. That this place”—Joey motioned to the theater—“was your depression.”
Redondo frowned and looked out the window for several seconds. It was a bitter pill to swallow, but he took it. “He’s not wrong,” he said at last. “This place… It’s part of me. A reflection of what I became. But I’m trying. I’m trying to see things differently while there’s still time. If you want proof, just look around. There’s hope for me yet. Maybe for all of us.”
Looking out the window, Joey saw that the Majestic was making an inexplicable comeback. Like the once-dead plants in the lobby that were now clinging to life, the theater was repairing itself and restoring its lost splendor. The changes were not drastic, but they were a start. Joey watched as cracks in the walls healed themselves and burn marks around the stage retreated.
Order of the Majestic Page 14
