The Masquerading Magician

by Gigi Pandian

  “There are more beings like me in science fiction than in detective novels.” He accepted the sour-smelling concoction. “Though I’m not sure I enjoy the ambiguous endings. Next time, I will ask you to bring me more cookbooks as well.”

  “The last time I did that, you scribbled notes in the margins throughout the books. You can’t do that to library books.”

  “They should thank me!” he replied indignantly.

  Dorian’s snout scrunched as he drank the thick, grainy tea. As soon as he handed the mug back to me, with only sediment remaining, the near-black color of his left leg and wing lightened. A moment later, his wing flapped, and he was able to bend his knee.

  “Merci, mon amie.”

  He bounded down the stairs. I was glad his newfound energy had given him the speed to depart quickly. That way he didn’t see me falter. My legs no longer had the strength to hold me upright. I tried to push myself up from the floor, but my shriveled fingertips felt as if they were still clutching the leather binding of Dorian’s book. I tried to breathe, but I imagined I was still smelling the confusing scents from Not Untrue Alchemy. My vision clouded and I collapsed onto the dusty floor.

  Twenty-Two

  saint-gervais, france, 1860

  The retired magician lifted the book from the dusty shelf. A jolt of electricity caused his fingertips to tingle as the leather spine touched his skin.

  The scent of the volume pushed its way through the still air of the old magician’s study, seeming stronger than anything that could possibly emanate from the leather binding and onion skin pages. He identified cloves, honey, and dung, accompanied by an imprecise hint of decay. It was as if the book was greater than the sum of its parts.

  The magician shook his head. He knew that wasn’t possible. He was becoming fanciful in his old age. Yet there was something mysterious about the antique book. He hoped others would sense its power.

  Though officially retired, Jean Eugène Robert-­Houdin wanted to keep his mind sharp. The Father of Modern Magic had moved to Saint-Gervais to write his memoirs. When the French government had taken him away from his writing, calling upon him to serve his country by intervening in Algeria to help divert a military crisis, he had been skeptical. True, he was arguably the most famous stage magician in the world, but his sleight of hand wasn’t magic. Nobody was more surprised than Robert-­Houdin when his new way to perform the bullet-catch illusion convinced Algerian tribal leaders of France’s power. They believed he was performing real magic.

  Perhaps most unexpected was his own reaction to his assignment. Instead of discomfort at the dangers he encountered, Robert-­Houdin found himself craving further adventure. No longer content to sit in his study and write his memoirs, he wished for a continued audience. Not necessarily on the stage in Paris where he once performed, but creating new illusions he could show to his family and friends.

  It was for this end that he selected the curious book with a Latin title. It would be the perfect prop for an automaton he was building.

  Robert-­Houdin carried the hefty volume to the drawing room, where a meter-high stone carving rested in the corner, underneath a sheet. He chuckled to himself. His wife hated the gargoyle given to him by his friend Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, and tossed a covering over it whenever her husband wasn’t looking.

  The carving was unlike other gargoyles Robert-­Houdin had seen in his travels across Europe. First, it was not technically a gargoyle, in the original meaning of the word, for it did not function as a waterspout. This stone carving was purely ornamental. Viollet-le-Duc had been commissioned to renovate the great cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris, and he had the fanciful idea of creating a gallery of monsters looking over the saints below. The stone creature sitting in Robert-­Houdin’s drawing room was an early prototype of Viollet-le-Duc’s that the architect realized was too small to sit aloft the cathedral’s high walkway.

  Robert-­Houdin pulled the sheet away from the stone carving. Folded wings curled around the stone beast. The little gargoyle looked remarkably like Le Styrge, the carving of Viollet-le-Duc’s that held a prominent spot next to the stairway entrance to the cathedral’s gallery of monsters. An impish grin adorned the creature’s face. Yes, this gargoyle would be perfect for what the great Robert-­Houdin had in mind.

  The magician was known for his ingenious engineering as much as for sleight of hand. His most well regarded invention was an automaton that could both write and draw, a creation which he had shown to King Philippe before it was sold to P.T. Barnum. His favorite, though, was his orange tree. Symbolizing spring renewal and rebirth, the mechanical tree “grew” from a withered stump into a lush patchwork of leafy branches that sprouted real oranges. Mechanical birds appeared in the tree, which was impressive enough, but these birds would then perform yet another feat for the audience. They flew above the tree and revealed a ring “borrowed” from an audience member. The mechanical tree was his crowning achievement—until now.

  Robert-­Houdin had given a metal plant life. Now, he would bring a stone chimera to life. His own personal golem. He allowed himself a sly smile nobody was there to see. The feat wasn’t real, of course. Merely an illusion. He would craft a metal automaton and cover the moving parts with a dummy made in the mold of Viollet-le-Duc’s stone creation. Then, on stage, he would recite a few words of “magic” from an ancient book, bringing the creature to life.

  He stroked his chin. He would have to time it perfectly, by adding a winding mechanism to the automaton so it could be wound up several minutes before springing to life. But for a former clockmaker, this was a trifling task—far easier than lifting an assistant above the stage with ether.

  First, however, it was time to practice. The most important part of any illusion was the drama surrounding it. Without expectation, an illusion was a simple trick, easily forgotten. And Jean Eugène Robert-­Houdin did not wish his work to be forgotten.

  Sitting in an armchair in front of the creature, he leafed through the book. The intermingling scents were stronger now, as if the book had been dropped in a farmer’s field. But no damage showed upon the pages. Odd, that.

  No matter. The book was almost twenty centimeters by fifteen, large enough to be easily seen from a stage, especially in a small theater with only a dozen people in the audience.

  The book was written mostly in Latin, but many pages were filled with woodcut illustrations rather than text. Robert-­Houdin had seen many things in his life, both horrible and wondrous, but the illustrations in this book sent a shiver from his head of gray hair down to the bunions of his feet in his patent leather shoes.

  An admirer had given Robert-­Houdin the book as a gift, and now Robert-­Houdin would put it to good use. Yes, this antique book plus his new gargoyle automaton would create the performance of a lifetime.

  Non Degenera Alchemia, the title read.

  Twenty-Three

  I wasn’t unconscious for long, but it was longer than I would have liked. The taxing act of creating the Tea of Ashes caused me to have disturbingly vivid dreams. In my unnatural sleep, the pages of Non Degenera Alchemia—Not Untrue Alchemy—came to life before my eyes and transformed into Jean Eugène Robert-­Houdin’s stage magic performance I’d seen in 1845. The bees rose from the dead and circled sluggishly around me, as if by the magical ether that raised sleeping people above the stage in the theater. When I woke up, I was shivering. I half expected to see a dead bee next to me.

  My legs and arms shook as I climbed down the attic stairs. I drew a bath, the most comfortable option in a house with pipes that insisted on alternating between scalding hot and freezing cold water. I applied a poultice of plantain and salt to my skin to suck out any toxins from my alchemy. The wild plantain weed was from the equally wild yard in front of Blue’s cottage.

  My skills were only one of the reasons I made my own remedies. I’d lived through times when supposed medicines were filled with poison
. The “blue pills” dubbed as cure-alls during Victorian times were full of mercury, and many medicines for babies had contained opium. Though I was born in New England during Colonial times, I think of myself as a Victorian more than anything else. I left home at sixteen, and it was during the Victorian era that I settled down for a time after a long period of travel. Therefore the fears and mores from that era were etched into my mind more firmly than the culture of other places where I lived for shorter periods of time.

  Right now, I wished there was a cure-all that would be as easy as swallowing a pill. I knew I should fix myself a healing tea or tincture, but I couldn’t fathom doing anything besides sleeping after my bath, so I dressed in flannel pajamas and crawled into bed. I was planning on taking a nap, but as soon as I lay down I detected the fragrant scents of berries and cream.

  I opened my eyes. Dorian stood at the foot of the bed, carrying a tray of food.

  “Is it lunchtime already?”

  “Brunch. You had a taxing morning, so I have made crepes for you. One is filled with chocolate, the other coconut cream and wild strawberries. The English cannot compete with the French when it comes to any food invention—besides Vindaloo, of course—yet their idea for this extra meal of brunch is quite a good one.”

  I smiled with my cracked lips, happy to see Dorian back to his old self. “I don’t think it’s supposed to be an extra meal, but I’ll take the crepes. I’m famished.”

  He set the tray on the side table and hopped up on the edge of the bed. “This is my fault,” he said, his gray legs dangling without touching the floor.

  “You’re apologizing for the food? That’s a first.” My throat was so dry that I barely recognized my voice.

  He clicked his tongue. “You are sick. I was unsure which herbal remedy you would like, so I brought food. I will return with tea, once you tell me which one you would like.”

  “There’s a glass jar in the backyard labeled Lemon Balm Infusion. Would you bring it to me?”

  When he returned a few minutes later with the sun-infused tea, I had nearly finished the first crepe. That morning’s transformation had expended a lot of my energy.

  “Are you are strong enough to hold the mug yourself?” Dorian asked.

  I nodded, unable to conceal a smile, and accepted the giant porcelain serving carafe in which he’d warmed several servings of tea.

  “Bon. Then I will read you the news we have missed.” He jumped up onto the bed and spread Le Monde in front of him.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked as his wings drooped.

  “For the past month, I have not found any more news of gold statues crumbling in Europe.”

  “I noticed that too.”

  “Does this mean the false gold is already … dead?”

  I knew what he meant. Just as Dorian’s life force was reversing for a reason I had yet to identify, false gold in Europe had begun to crumble into dust at the same time. The newspapers had reported the missing gold as thefts, but we knew better. Whatever was happening to both Dorian and the crumbling gold, the gold had already wasted away. Or as Dorian had put it, the gold was dead. I shivered. My Tea of Ashes alchemy might be the only thing keeping Dorian alive.

  At that moment, with the scared look on Dorian’s face, I abhorred the backward alchemists with the strongest conviction I’d felt this century.

  There have always been rogue alchemists. I’d learned from Nicolas Flamel, who was my mentor for a brief time, that the core group of men who’d practiced backward alchemy in Europe were long-since dead. It was an inevitable outcome, since backward alchemy is dangerous and unsustainable. But a break-off sect of alchemists from the heyday of Western alchemy had set forces into motion that were coming to a head half a millennium later.

  What I didn’t know was why this was happening now. The backward alchemists were dead. What was it they had done?

  I’d failed miserably when I tried to find true alchemists, some of whom should still be alive. But I was out of my depth. I had to try again.

  I wasn’t well enough to leave my bed, so I asked Dorian to bring me my laptop. From the bed, I searched for any leads I might have overlooked before. I’d searched before, but the Internet rabbit hole had many winding paths. I decided to join a chat group of alchemy enthusiasts. What can I say? I was desperate.

  After joining the online group, I was allowed to look through the discussion archives. An hour later, I was certain these alchemists were an assortment of well-meaning amateurs across the spectrum of alchemical interests.

  All alchemy is about transformation, but it’s approached in different ways. The three core elements of alchemy are sulfur, mercury, and salt. Sulfur is the soul, mercury is the spirit, and salt is the body. Over the centuries, alchemy has involved transformations of base metals into gold, of the mortal body into an immortal one, and of the corrupted spirit into something pure.

  In the past, the first two were primarily what alchemists studied, thus acting as a precursor to modern chemistry and medicine. More recently, spiritual alchemy had become more prominent. That’s what the members of this listserv were mostly concerned with. The few new members who asked about making gold were met with derision, and they quickly left. Interesting how times had changed.

  Though I didn’t learn anything on that website, it showed me that perhaps expanding my search would lead me somewhere. I wondered if any of the few real alchemists I’d once known had gotten involved with spiritual alchemy to ease their discontent with outliving everyone they cared about.

  With renewed hope, I felt a surge of energy. I scoured the Internet for spiritual alchemy gatherings. I felt my stomach rumbling and was about to give up, when my hands froze above the keyboard.

  I knew the light hazel eyes of the spiritual alchemy speaker in the photograph on the screen. I knew the man not from my many travels throughout the United States since 1942, but from long before.

  Or at least, that was my first impression. It couldn’t be true, though. Toby was a man I’d known in the late 1850s, during the time I spent with the Underground Railroad. He’d been a sickly man when I first encountered him and nursed him back to health. Nothing like the vibrant man in the photograph named Tobias Freeman. Toby had known nothing of alchemy, and I hadn’t taught him. I was heartened, though. This strong resemblance must have meant that Toby had survived and had children.

  Because I was good with herbal remedies, my role in the Underground Railroad was to help slaves who were too weak to make the journey north, nursing them back to health to give them a fighting chance to make it. Tobias was one of the weakest men I’d cared for. He was close to six feet tall, and I doubt he’d weighed much more than 100 pounds when he was brought to my doorstep.

  But there was no mistaking those light hazel eyes, so light they shone like gold.

  The online conference program listed an email address for Tobias Freeman. Nothing ventured …

  My friend Levi Coffin recommended I get in touch, I wrote in an email from my Elixir email account, signing my name simply as Zoe. Levi had been involved in the Underground Railroad, so if this was the same man I’d known, I hoped he’d pick up on the reference. If not, I’d simply get a polite message telling me I was mistaken.

  Not five minutes later, an email reply pinged on my phone.

  Zoe Faust. I never thought I’d see you again, my friend.

  Twenty-Four

  I hadn’t yet decided how much would be prudent to tell my old friend—that a living gargoyle was living with me, that a murderous alchemist had recently come to town, or perhaps that a book of dangerous backward alchemy was in my possession—when he sent me a second email.

  Too much to say over email, he wrote. Checked my schedule and I’ve got a couple of days off work this week. As long as you’re in the U.S., I can catch a flight to see you.

  I agreed there was too much to say over email
. In person, I would also be able to confirm that he was still the same good man I’d known over a century before. Some things about people change over time, but some don’t. I hoped Tobias was still the pure-souled Toby I’d once known.

  We made plans for him to fly to Portland in two days. I also had an email from Veronica, apologizing for the joke she and Ethan had played and saying she’d started work on my website. I sent quick email replies, then practically flew down the stairs in search of Dorian, my sickness nearly forgotten.

  “Salut!” the gargoyle said as I came through the kitchen’s swinging door. He hopped down from his stepping stool and wiped his hands on his flour-covered apron. His balance was a little off, with two missing stone toes, but he quickly recovered. “You are well enough to venture to the market! I have made a shopping list.”

  “Dorian, I found someone who can help us.” I didn’t even care that flour and some sort of red paste covered a swath of the kitchen walls, including the curtains that prevented curious onlookers from spotting Dorian. I took the list and set it on the countertop.

  “You are feeling braver about the magician?”

  “No, I found a man I trust.” I accepted a miniature red velvet cupcake from Dorian’s outstretched hand, and told him about Tobias.

  “And he will be here in two days?” Dorian asked once I concluded.

  “He’s flying in on Wednesday. Can I have another cupcake?”

  “Non.”

  “No?” That was a first.

  “You have not yet eaten lunch.” He gave a sniff. “Have I taught you nothing about being a civilized person in these months we have known each other?”

  I threw my arms around the gargoyle.

  “Nor have I taught you enough about being dignified,” he mumbled, though he hugged me back. “Your fidgeting is making me nervous, Zoe. I can see you do not wish to be cooped up in the house with me today. I will pack your lunch as a picnic basket to take with you.”