Magician's Fire

by Simon Nicholson

  Wesley had lied. But why? What did it mean? Harry had no idea, but he could feel a strange coldness spreading through him. He pulled his jacket close, but the feeling kept spreading. The more he thought about Herbie and that conversation with Wesley Jones…

  “It’s him! Look!”

  “The boy! The one who threw himself out the window!”

  “Get him!”

  The hotel porters. Far across the roof, they were clambering out of the hatch, two of them. Wisps of purple smoke rose from their clothes. Clearly, they had been alerted by the explosion in Room 760. Boris could explain everything, but how long would that take? I’ve lost enough time already.

  “Boy! What you doing? You crazy?” shouted Zell.

  Harry felt bad about Boris. He had just started getting to know him, and far from being menacing, the burly magician seemed rather friendly. But there really was no time—the porters were already stumbling between the chimney stacks, and he needed to be quick. With a leap, he was at the railing again, balanced on the rope. His boots dangled around his neck, his arms wavered at his sides, and he was high over the street, one foot following the other, even faster than before…

  “Come back, boy!” Zell’s cry echoed after him. “I already had to rescue you! Stop! Stop—”

  “I’ll be careful! It’s for Herbie’s sake, Mr. Zell!”

  Harry’s feet flashed along the rope. The wind blew; the rope shuddered; the horses and people and cabs looked just as tiny down on the street below. But for some reason his legs didn’t feel as weak this time. His heart wasn’t pounding as fast, and his feet were picking up speed. He wondered if it was because he had done the tightrope walk one time before, had even survived a fall from it, thanks to Boris Zell. Perhaps that was why he felt more confident now, surer in his step. But he knew there was another reason too, a reason that burned deep inside him, powering him on…

  Get to the theater.

  A gust of wind buffeted him, but he was ready. When it swung around behind him, he even used it, letting it push him along. His fists were clenched, his feet kept flashing along, and he was already halfway. The rope bounced with every step, but Harry decided to use that too, letting the energy in the rope spring him along, powering him faster. Why, he wasn’t just tightrope-walking; he was tightrope-running—and a good thing too. Get to the theater. Only a few steps left, and he took them even faster, leaping, springing along the rope, and landing with a neat chime on the iron fire escape…

  …where he was knocked straight off his feet by Arthur, racing down the stairs.

  Chapter 17

  “Harry! What were you doing on the roof—Ow!” Arthur tumbled down the fire escape. “I was watching you.”

  “You were?” Tangled up with his friend, Harry tumbled too.

  “Yes! I saw you. With Boris Zell! Ouch!”

  “I was talking to him—”

  “I know you were talking! But what about? I couldn’t hear—Look out!”

  They were gathering speed. Harry watched Arthur’s face speed past and snatched at the railings, but he was traveling too fast. He tumbled onward and made out a familiar voice and some footsteps clanging up the steps.

  “So I got out easy, Harry. No fancy tightrope-walking needed by me! The Princess Moldo trick, that’s all. I just walked out through the lobby, cool as a cucumber, nobody asking me a single question. Not that you care about that—Ooof!”

  They slammed right into her. Billie must have seen them coming, but their speed had clearly taken her by surprise, and she was part of their tangle now, tumbling downward. The silk dress ripped, the bonnet crumpled, the peacock feathers flew through the air, and Harry’s flailing arm tore the Princess Moldo glasses right off Billie’s face. They had snagged on his jacket’s sleeve. He tried to pull them off, hoping to give them back to her, but they were too firmly lodged, one of the wire arms twisted through the lining.

  “Don’t look so surprised, Harry. You’ve wrecked the plan—why not wreck the costume as well?”

  “I didn’t mean to wreck… I was just trying to… Ow!”

  They had toppled down onto one of the fire escape landings, Harry slamming his head hard against its rails. He sprawled there and wondered if he was still falling, because his head was spinning so fast. He stumbled up and immediately fell down again. His head throbbed and his vision blurred, but he just about managed to make out his friends, still tangled up with him.

  “You should have left it to me and Artie!” Billie sat up first, grabbing her bonnet from under Arthur’s foot and jamming it on her head again. “If you hadn’t blundered in and set off that explosion of smoke, I’d probably still be up there. Spying on Boris from under the bed. I’d have found out all kinds of things. Instead we’ve all of us found out nothing. Diddly-squat!”

  “You’re wrong about that, Billie. Harry may have found out quite a bit!” Arthur tugged at a peacock feather in his hair. “He’s been up on the hotel roof for nearly ten minutes talking with Zell. I saw them.”

  “Really?” Billie sputtered.

  “Not that he’s told me much about it, mind.” Arthur frowned. “Have you, Harry?”

  “I’m sorry…” Harry gasped, still struggling to get up. “I—”

  “So tell us now, Harry.” Billie grabbed Harry’s sleeve. “It’s the least you owe us after what you’ve done—especially to Artie!”

  “It’s true.” Arthur hesitated and folded his arms. “I’m sorry I got angry before, Harry—but I meant what I said. My whole life, I’ve been treated like I’m nothing important. Meeting you and Billie—well, it’s the first time I’ve felt I’m actually somebody…”

  “True of all of us!” Billie gripped Harry’s sleeve tighter. “What would I be without the two of you to help? A scruffy New Orleans street girl, doing crummy jobs and struggling to get by, that’s all. As for you, Harry, where would you be if me and Artie hadn’t noticed your tricks? So tell us! Tell us what happened!”

  “I’ll try… It’s not easy… I don’t understand most of it myself yet…” At last, Harry managed to stumble up. He tried to make out his friends more clearly, but his vision was too blurred. And he tried to take in everything they had said, but his head was still spinning. “I’m sorry, Artie. Of course I think you’re important… I…” Get to the theater. His head spun even faster as he stumbled down the fire escape toward the street below. “I’ll try to explain… Boris Zell… He’s different from what I thought…”

  “Different how?” Billie clanged after him, and Arthur wasn’t far behind.

  “Well, he’s Herbie’s friend…” Waves of dizziness swept over him.

  “Friend? Why did he kidnap him, then?”

  “He didn’t…” Get to the theater.

  “Who did, then?”

  “I don’t know… Not yet…”

  “What exactly did Boris say? You’ve got to tell us, Harry!”

  Harry’s head spun faster. His stomach throbbed, deep inside, and he thought he was going to throw up. The iron struts of the fire escape were a blurred jumble. The words in his head were a jumble too. He had to get away from his friends’ questions, however much he wanted to answer them, because each one was only making him dizzier.

  Even if he managed to stutter something out, that would only lead them to ask more questions, needing more answers, taking longer and longer…and how would that help Herbie? Get to the theater, he thought. That’s the only thing that matters. He stumbled down onto the fire escape’s next landing.

  “I’ll tell you as soon as I can… It’s too complicated… There isn’t time… Herbie, he’s in trouble… I’ve got to go… I…”

  He saw the Number 47 streetcar rattling along the street toward him three stories below.

  “Harry!”

  “Come back!”

  He was throwing himself off the fire escape. With a life of i
ts own, his fist was gripping the iron rail. His arm straightened, his body swung, and he was tumbling toward the rattling streetcar’s roof twenty feet below. He thudded onto the roof, just inches away from the deadly overhead cables, and sprawled there as the streetcar rattled away, sparks showering around him. Still dizzy, he sat up and looked back.

  “I’m sorry…”

  The words were snatched by the wind. His friends back on the fire escape clearly hadn’t heard them at all. Billie pounded about on the landing; Arthur tore the peacock feather out of his hair and threw it to the ground. All around them lay the wreckage of their carefully put together costume—the squashed bonnet, the torn dress.

  Remembering the Princess Moldo spectacles, genuinely made in Lima itself, Harry fumbled with his jacket and managed to untangle them at last. Both lenses were smashed, and the wire frames were bent out of shape. He tried to bend them back, but fragments of glass just fell out of the frames.

  How can it have ended up like this? he thought as he looked back up at the two shapes on the fire escape, his friends. But they were too far away to make out properly now. He slid the broken glasses into his pocket. He would give them back to them later. Perhaps that’ll make things better, he told himself.

  Although, as he rattled off across Manhattan to the Wesley Jones Theater, he thought it probably wouldn’t.

  Chapter 18

  The streetcar clattered past the Wesley Jones Theater, and Harry jumped off. He touched his head and felt a swelling bruise, but the dizziness was nearly gone. It kept fading as he slid into the laughing, chattering crowd that was pouring out from the theater’s afternoon show. No shoeshine plan was necessary to get backstage this time—just a simple break-in. He weaved through the crowd until he was in the foyer and glanced about, searching for a way. Seeing a door, he ducked across, checked that no one was looking, and pushed the handle up. Not even locked. He slid through and closed the door behind him.

  He was in a dimly lit corridor. He climbed a rickety staircase. More corridors, more staircases flashed by, and pipes, hundreds of them, throbbed and wobbled around him. Harry stared at them because almost everything Wesley had said seemed suspicious now, and the stuff about the plumbing improvements was no exception. Finding another staircase, he recognized it as the one he had climbed with Wesley Jones that morning and swiftly scrambled to the door at the top, placed an ear against it, and, checking no one was inside, crept in.

  “He has worked happily at this theater for no less than ten years…”

  Harry stood in the middle of Wesley Jones’s office. He saw the plush rug and the cupboard containing the twenty pairs of shoes. The theater owner’s words echoed back to him—words which Harry now knew were not entirely true. Why had Wesley lied? Why had he exaggerated the length of time Herbie had worked here? Could it be that he wished to make the old magician’s happiness with his job at the theater as convincing as possible? If so, why?

  The coldness Harry had felt on the roof crept into him again, and he started pacing the room, partly to keep warm, partly to help himself think. Five times, he circled the office, and then he dropped into Wesley Jones’s leather chair, positioning himself just as the theater owner had earlier that day, sliding into the curved hollow left by that plump figure—unpleasant but worth it, if it helped him see things from Wesley’s point of view.

  The mantelpiece. There in front in Harry, as he sat in Wesley’s chair, was that carved marble bulk, with its framed photographs of the performers running along the top. All through his weeping, Wesley had been staring right at those photographs, but why? Harry was out of the chair, inspecting the mantelpiece and lifting each frame. His brain still couldn’t piece together this business, but for the moment his fingers were doing the thinking. They scurried about, checking the frames and exploring the edge of the mantelpiece. From its frame, Herbie’s face peered out, as mysterious and wrinkled as ever…

  Harry’s fingers brushed against something.

  On the underside of the mantelpiece, just beneath Herbie’s photograph, was a bump, a metal tip. Harry’s fingers explored and managed to grip its edge. He pulled, and an inch-long stub of metal slid out, a hinge at its base. Some sort of switch. He flicked it and toppled back as the whole mantelpiece swung out from the wall, its heavy marble bulk moving smoothly and silently, supported on huge iron hinges that glistened with oil. Harry sprawled on the plush rug, staring at the dark doorway that had been revealed, before scrambling up and springing into the gloom.

  A spiral staircase. Harry clattered down it, his hand clutching the rail. Light from Wesley’s office spilled down from above, revealing crumbling walls, rotten timbers, and yet more throbbing pipes. Harry heard the roar of the water inside them and wondered again about the plumbing work Wesley had mentioned and whether it was really just to improve the running water in the dressing rooms.

  He plunged deeper into the gloom. The only light came from an iron lamp, dangling from a chain, with a candle flickering inside. The stairs led to a windowless room that seemed to be full of water: black, rippling, the candlelight glimmering on its surface. Harry bent down and dipped his hand in the water. Icy cold. Harry flinched and flinched again as, right in the middle of the water-filled gloom, he made out a cage.

  It was large, rectangular, and made of iron. Across the front of it, Harry noticed some letters. Candlelight flickered weakly off them, but he couldn’t quite make them out.

  He stared at a figure inside the cage, knee-deep in water. Knotted ropes crisscrossed his body and a gag distorted his face, but Harry recognized him immediately.

  It was Herbie.

  Chapter 19

  Bicycling over Spikes. The Flying Knives, Spider up Sleeve. Harry remembered all his old friend’s tricks and how they had fascinated him. But none of them had ever made him feel as astonished and horrified as he felt now, seeing Herbie in the cage. Harry stood at the bottom of the stairs, the black water lapping at his boots, for some time before he realized that the old man was jiggling in his chair, staring at him with bulging eyes, and trying to say something.

  “Mmmmmmph!”

  Harry splashed into the water. It reached halfway up his legs, but he waded to the cage and gripped its bars. Herbie’s mouth was struggling to shape words around the cloth gag, and Harry wondered if he could somehow read those struggling lips. He tried to do that, only to realize that the frail magician was jerking his head back toward the dangling iron lamp. Harry splashed over and found, just next to the candle, a key. Twisting it in the lock, he slid the door across and waded into the cage. He tried to undo the old man’s gag, but the knot securing it was tight. He tugged at it, pried it, and finally pulled it loose, only to collapse back into the water with a splash, knocked off balance by the force of the old man’s cry.

  “Harry! What are you doing here? You are in danger! Don’t you realize?”

  Harry sprawled in the water. Soaked, he struggled back up. Herbie’s cry still echoed, but the power of it seemed to have exhausted the old man, and he was slumped in his chair. Harry’s fingers probed the ropes that held the old man, their knots even tighter than the gag’s. He worked them and tried to answer Herbie’s questions.

  “I’m here to rescue you, Herbie. I watched the window of your dressing room—saw what happened before you disappeared. I thought Boris Zell was behind it but…”

  “Boris?” The old man’s face lifted, his eyes shimmering. All that was left of his voice was a feeble gasp. “Why would Boris do such a thing? He is my oldest friend—”

  “I know that now.” Harry kept working at the knots. “You trained him. You met each other all over Europe. You saw each other at theaters, in city squares—”

  “If only I had stayed in Europe,” wailed Herbie. “If only I had never come to New York…if only I had never set eyes on the Cruel Theater of Wesley Jones!”

  Tears traveled down the complicated pathways of the old
man’s wrinkled face. His lips trembled and went still, a sorry sight. Harry hoped that Herbie would gather enough strength to continue with his tale soon. Clever though it had been to discover the mantelpiece trick, he still had no idea what was going on, and so far his elderly friend’s gasps had just confused things further.

  “The Cruel Theater of Wesley Jones? What do you mean?”

  “I signed Wesley’s contract in desperate times…” The gasps could only just be heard. “I had fallen ill on the journey across the Atlantic, and for nearly a month after arriving in this hard city, I could not work—I was penniless! So when I met Wesley, I signed. I agreed to perform at his grubby theater for a grubby wage, show after show, night after night. But no one gets out of Wesley’s contracts. I know that now…”

  “How come?”

  “Because Wesley Jones never lets go of a talented performer! Once he has you in his grip, he never relents. All of us at this theater are forced to perform endlessly for a pittance, but no one dares leave. Some he has tricked into debt, and if they dare defy him, he will have not only them but anyone they hold dear thrown out on the street, penniless. Others he controls thanks to harboring little secrets from their past, petty crimes or shameful doings, proof of which he keeps filed away in a hidden safe. Again, if they defy him, he will destroy them utterly. What power he has!”

  The old man clutched his throat, every word causing him pain. “And then there are those, such as myself, whom he controls by sheer menace alone. Desperate, we wish to leave this dreadful place. And yet we dare not, for fear of what would happen if we tried. A terrible threat hangs over us…”

  “What?” Harry was trying to take it all in.

  “What? Who, you mean. Why, Arnold, of course! Stage manager…and notorious failed trapeze artist.”

  Harry’s fingers tore at the knots. Each one was more intricate than the last, but he was prying them loose, and the terrible business of Herbie’s disappearance also was unraveling. Harry remembered his conversations with the theater’s performers and how mournful they had been about Herbie. Perhaps they were sad for other reasons too. As for Arnold, the gangly stage manager with his weakened leg seemed an unlikely threat, but Harry also remembered that moment when Arnold had shown him out of the theater and had gripped his shoulder with surprising strength.