All Out--The No-Longer-Secret Stories of Queer Teens throughout the Ages

by Saundra Mitchell

  I should refuse to visit her, deny the will of the prioress, on behalf of my soul.

  Yet I know they wait for such weakness in me, weakness as they profess did haunt my mother’s soul. My poor mother.

  * * *

  I returned to her this morning with the prayers of a full night bolstering me. Her eyes remained bright, her pale cheeks hollow but pink with passion. She holds her lips parted always, as if she tastes the very world, oh, Holy Mother.

  It stirs me, though I would it did not. It stirs me, for I never have seen anything outside this cloister, in sixteen long years of life. These walls are my only world, and I know it so well there was never new taste, until her.

  Oh, Holy Mother! Salve, Regina, forgive me. This place is a refuge, my home. I know it as I know my heart, and so I need not long for anything other than your perfect self and the Beloved Heart of Your Son.

  I said to her, to Violante, “You must give up this desire, if you would be holy.”

  “Unless my desire is for God?” she asked, glancing to the empty north corner. She does this sometimes, as if she fears some other might overhear us, though we are always alone.

  I pursed my lips, knowing not how to respond, and held out the food for her. She accepted, and ate. I said, “Your brother upset you.”

  “He needs me. Who did you leave behind?” she asked. “When you made your profession of faith.”

  “None.”

  “No family? You are an orphan?”

  “Yes. Born in the Church.”

  “They give you to such danger, here with me, if they think I am near to the demons of Hell.”

  “Say no such thing,” I warned, flattening my palm toward her.

  She caught my hand in both of hers and glanced to the empty corner again. She stepped closer to me, to ask in confidence, “Why do they risk a girl like you?”

  “It is no risk,” I promised, eyes lowered to our joined hands. I could not confess to Violante that my mother died in the Inquisition’s prison, awaiting her trial for reversion. They told me once my mother had screamed an infidel name as they took me from her, barely born, dripping her womb blood off my skin.

  Thus I began my life promised to heresy, and baptism saved me. Gracia Magdalena they called me in God, for thanks and for my lack of innocence.

  Violante leaned toward me. “Are you certain I am no risk?”

  “A risk to yourself,” I whispered to her. “Please pray with me, Violante, for absolution.”

  “I cannot ask to be absolved of love. I won’t. I love.”

  I shivered then, and had a vision of my mother, whom I never met: she knelt and leaned forward against the earthen floor, murmuring a prayer. “I love,” she said as she sat and looked directly at me. “I will not give in.”

  A martyr’s words.

  “I will not give in,” I said to Violante.

  “I will not give in,” she returned to me, and took my hand. She curled her fingers around my wrist, tugging gently at me. “I feel it in my heart, my very soul, Gracia Magdalena.”

  She said my name slowly, tasting the flavor of it.

  “Help me,” she whispered.

  “I don’t know how, except...”

  I meant to say, “except to pray, to lead you to absolution.”

  But Violante touched my cheek to kiss me, and I fled.

  * * *

  Hail, Holy Queen.

  Mother of mercy.

  Of life.

  Of sweetness.

  Of hope.

  Have mercy on me.

  I can’t stay away.

  It is my duty to face this. I must face this temptation. Which is the true way? What is the temptation? To give my love to her or to abandon her? Which is your will? Which is the path of love?

  I must love. Oh, Holy Mother, Regina, have mercy.

  III.

  She crouches unseen in the corner, waiting.

  This is the moment.

  One girl has seen her before, because it pleased her to be seen.

  The other girl never has. She had not been ready.

  Now.

  Now.

  One girl kneels beside the narrow bed. The other sits on the mattress edge with her knees together. One touches shaking brown hands to the other’s pale, unhappy fingertips.

  One whispers.

  The other shakes her head.

  They pray.

  But this one crouches, unseen.

  She hopes. She thinks of sweet things while she watches the two girls:

  Of mercy.

  Sunset.

  Bonfires under the full moon.

  Dancing and screaming!

  Figs.

  Choice.

  She stands, her body forming from the shadows, eyes gray as twilight, a smile on her plain face.

  They are choosing her world.

  Choosing love.

  This is the moment.

  When they kiss, she laughs and throws out her hands. Both shall fly with her!

  Salve, maleficia!

  * * * * *

  THE INFERNO &

  THE BUTTERFLY

  BY

  SHAUN DAVID HUTCHINSON

  London, 1839

  Wilhelm appeared. Not in a cloud of smoke or a flash of light, but in the moment where the heart skips a beat.

  He exhaled, his eyes closed, and I watched him smile and gracefully bow as the audience applauded and cheered, even though he couldn’t see them nor they him. Wilhelm was the one who truly deserved their love and adoration, though they were, and would remain, ignorant of that fact.

  When he opened his eyes and saw me, his smile faded and he said, “Alfie, you shouldn’t be here.”

  I stepped forward, determined, and said, “I’m asking, Wilhelm. I’m asking now.”

  * * *

  The Mystic Mycroft, better known to me as Thierry Dubois, had rescued me from a life of crime and misery after I foolishly attempted to pick his pockets on the streets of London.

  I might have succeeded had I been paying better attention and seen the carriage bearing down on us. Its passing splashed water on Mr. Dubois, causing him to turn his head toward me while my thieving fingers were in his pockets. Rather than shout for a constable to haul me away, he backhanded me hard enough to send me sprawling into the street wall and then offered me a bed and a hot meal, neither of which I’d had in as long as I could remember.

  My intention in accepting his offer had been to stay with Mr. Dubois long enough to earn his trust and then relieve him of whatever belongings he possessed, but he introduced me to the world of magic and I gladly left behind my life of occasional housebreaking and perpetual hunger. Well, the hunger part anyway.

  Mr. Dubois’s persona, the Mystic Mycroft, had purportedly traveled the entire world—the Americas, Africa and the peaks of the Himalayas—seeking the wisdom of ancient practitioners of mystic arts with which he could amaze and awe willing (and unwilling) spectators, but the truth was that Mr. Dubois’s early life shared many parallels with my own: he’d grown up poor and been forced to steal to survive. He’d traveled from France when he was fifteen and, after sneaking into a third-rate prestidigitator’s show, had endeavored to become the greatest stage magician in living memory.

  Under the less-than-patient tutelage of Mr. Dubois, I flourished, and the crowds clamoring for more Mystic Mycroft swelled as a result. Mr. Dubois’s skillful legerdemain was unparalleled throughout London, but he’d lacked a certain necessary theatricality, which I’d been more than happy to provide.

  When it comes to the art of illusion, nearly every member of the audience walks into the show suspecting deception. They believe themselves intelligent enough to discern the nature of the trick—that if they watch closely and pay unwavering attention, they can detect the misdirection
and unravel the secret—but the Mystic Mycroft was too good. His performance too perfect. Before meeting me, he’d more often left his audiences feeling duped and foolish rather than dazzled by his wondrous feats of magic.

  Even with my nimble fingers, I could never hope to attain the Mystic Mycroft’s level of dexterous mastery, but I possessed an intuitive sense of drama that he did not. I taught him how to lure the audience in, show them something they shouldn’t believe while giving them just enough to convince themselves that if they paid the admission and returned frequently they might one day learn the secret.

  By the time I was sixteen, Mr. Dubois and I were selling out the Gramary Theatre five nights a week.

  Though Mr. Dubois was often difficult and prone to violent outbursts, I’d never expected to live or die anywhere other than the gutters, in a workhouse, or in gaol, and I’d never entirely forgive myself for betraying him.

  * * *

  The illusion was called the Butterfly, and both it and the magician performing it had been bleeding away our audience for weeks.

  The Butterfly served as the climax of the show during which the Virtuoso, whose real name was Percy Beevers, brought out a young man about my age whose hands remained shackled throughout, and made him vanish.

  Before doing so, the Virtuoso invited audience members onstage to test the floor for trapdoors and his assistant for wires. When they were satisfied neither existed and had returned to their seats, the Virtuoso began a ludicrous dance while chanting gibberish we were supposed to mistake for an ancient language. As seconds passed, he moved faster, his long arms and legs flapping and stomping, his chanting growing louder and more deranged, so much so that when I first witnessed it I suspected him of having a fit.

  And then, in a puff of smoke, the young man would disappear and be replaced with a beautiful young woman in a flowing, brightly colored kimono, who would raise her hands and drop the manacles to the stage with a dramatic thud.

  The audience loved it. Mr. Dubois was less enthusiastic.

  Over the years, I’d proven adept at perceiving the nature of other magicians’ tricks, and Mr. Dubois frequently sent me to spy upon his rivals, but no matter how often I watched the Butterfly, I couldn’t discern its secrets.

  I’d suspected at first that it was a cleverly hidden trapdoor that allowed the manacled young man and the beautiful woman to quickly trade places, but I’d managed to get myself onto the stage more than once and could find no seams in the floor. It was either ingeniously concealed or something else entirely.

  * * *

  “We’re ruined, Alfred,” Mr. Dubois said as I helped him undress for the evening. “That old fool Bostwick has warned that if we can’t fill the Gramary, he’ll replace us with a touring ballet company or some such rubbish.”

  Mr. Dubois had been the Mystic Mycroft for so long that he rarely broke character anymore. Whatever French accent he might have once had no longer existed. I poured him a glass of wine and handed it to him as he flopped heavily into the chair by the fireplace.

  “Good lad,” he said. “But I fear our days together may be at an end if I can’t expose the Virtuoso for a fraud.”

  “I’ve seen him perform it a dozen times,” I said. “And I still have no idea how he does it.”

  “Then you have failed,” he said, and the indictment stung more than I was willing to admit. “I believe it’s time we unveil the Inferno.”

  “Sir, please no. It’s too dangerous. I can learn the Virtuoso’s secret.”

  I’d first learned of the Inferno from Mr. Dubois during one of his drunken soliloquies in the midst of which he’d lamented the possibility of dying without creating a trick the world would remember him for. He believed the Inferno would be his legacy.

  His idea was to place his assistant—me—in a box similar to the type used during our underwater escape act. The difference was that the box would be filled not with water, but with fire. The Mystic Mycroft would drop me, my hands bound, into the box, close the lid—which would extinguish the fire as it consumed the oxygen—and then I would escape and appear to walk out of the smoke and through the box unharmed.

  I’m afraid I can’t divulge the secret of the trick without further betraying my mentor, but it would prove to the world that the Mystic Mycroft was the greatest magician to ever live. It was also extremely dangerous. Our success to that point had allowed me to delay Mr. Dubois from incorporating the Inferno into the show, but with the Virtuoso’s steady theft of our audience and income, however, I feared I could no longer prevent my inevitable conflagration.

  Mr. Dubois glared at me coldly through heavy-lidded eyes. “I love you like a son, Alfred, but I would sooner see you dead than allow Percy Beevers to ruin me.”

  “I know, sir,” I said. “I’ll learn the secret of the Butterfly. I swear.”

  And as I promised, I knew my life depended on my ability to keep that oath.

  Which was how I met Wilhelm Gessler.

  * * *

  During previous viewings of the Virtuoso’s show, I’d spent the majority of my time focused on the stage, on the Virtuoso himself, but little on the young man in shackles.

  A magician relies on misdirection—a flash of light or smoke or a pretty girl, anything that keeps the audience from seeing what they ought not. A prestidigitator says, “Look over here,” while the actual magic is happening elsewhere.

  I’d noticed that the Virtuoso practically begged the audience to focus their attention on the manacled boy, so I assumed it was because we were meant to pay attention to him so that the mechanics of the trick could play out unnoticed. Which was the beauty of the Virtuoso’s act. That we believed we were being deceived was the deception.

  One afternoon, while in attendance, I decided to pay special attention to the young man. He was tall with broad shoulders, curly blond hair and clear blue eyes so bright I could see them shining from five rows back. As the moment of his transformation approached, I determined not to blink so I wouldn’t miss it, whatever it was.

  The Virtuoso began his absurd dance and Wilhelm closed his eyes. While the others were watching the magician, I watched Wilhelm. He dropped what I assumed was a smoke bomb—a commonly employed distraction—that exploded in a thick grey haze, and then he vanished.

  If there’d been a trapdoor I would have expected to see movement created by the suction generated by Wilhelm’s downward movement, but the smoke remained still. And almost simultaneously the woman appeared where Wilhelm had stood not one second before.

  I wasn’t certain how, but I understood in that moment that Wilhelm was the trick. He was the key to the Butterfly.

  * * *

  A magician guards his secrets more fiercely than any other thing he possesses. Without his secrets, a magician is naught but a pauper. Mr. Dubois kept a workshop filled with devices and schematics that did absolutely nothing except act as a ruse to tempt and thwart would-be thieves. Not even I knew all of Mr. Dubois’s secrets, and he trusted me more than any other. If I was right about Wilhelm, the Virtuoso would guard his young assistant with his life.

  I spent two weeks following the Virtuoso until I knew his schedule better than my own. Meanwhile, the Mystic Mycroft’s audience continued to decline, and our patron, Sir Charles Bostwick, had grown tired of excuses and declared his intention to replace us if we couldn’t reverse our fortunes.

  Each Thursday afternoon at exactly 11:30, Mr. Beevers left his workshop to attend lunch with a young woman who was not his wife, and stayed with her well into the late afternoon. If the scandal of an extramarital affair would have been enough to destroy either Beevers’s or the Virtuoso’s reputation I might have sought out some way to expose him, but there were few men of means in London who would not have sympathized with the Virtuoso, and instead of ruining him, such knowledge might have increased his popularity.

  Since coming to live with Mr. Dubois,
I’d had numerous opportunities to keep my thieving skills sharply honed, and in some circumstances—such as with picking locks—I’d even learned some new ones. I’d expected to find the Virtuoso’s workshop guarded, but the lock was easily dispatched and the studio empty.

  The workshop seemed as wondrous as Mr. Dubois’s, but these were no mere decoys. Percy Beevers was either careless with his secrets or confident none could unravel them. I stopped to examine a box fitted with gears and mirrors that changed its internal structure and gave it the illusion of being empty, and I flipped through a notebook, written in plain text rather than in cipher, detailing numerous ideas for tricks the Virtuoso hoped to incorporate into his act. All of these I committed to memory so that I could report back to Mr. Dubois, though nothing I found revealed the answer to the puzzle that might keep me from the Inferno.

  I felt a rush of excitement at being in the Virtuoso’s inner sanctum that reminded me of my early life of thieving. The difference was that I was no longer merely skulking about to keep myself fed. I knew that Mr. Beevers wouldn’t return for some hours, but the thrill that he could return at any moment was exhilarating.

  After I’d thoroughly searched the workshop, I turned my attention to the stairs leading to the cellar from the ground floor. I crept down them, testing each step for creaks before resting my full weight on it and keeping my feet to the far sides of each step.

  In all my observations of the Virtuoso, I’d never seen him with his young assistant anywhere other than inside the theater. In fact, I’d never seen the boy other than when he was onstage, which only made me more certain that he was the real key to the mystery of the Butterfly.

  The cellar was relatively clean if a bit dark, and it took my eyes a moment to adjust to the lack of light. I searched around for a lamp but found nothing. There were crates stacked along the walls and I was about to give up when a voice called to me from the far end of the room.

  “You shouldn’t be here.”

  I froze, unsure whether to run or attempt to hide, which was foolish because clearly I’d already been caught. I searched the darkness for the source of the voice and noticed a heavy shadow where before I’d seen none.