The Masquerading Magician

by Gigi Pandian

  My throat constricted. Penelope had to have known Peter was an alchemist. Could they tell that my sickness was brought on by practicing backward alchemy? By letting them see me in my weakened state, had they figured out I was a fellow alchemist, despite my lie about having bad allergies?

  “Zoe Faust,” she continued, ignoring the confused look on Peter’s face, “who is the reason the police searched through every inch of our possessions.”

  “I don’t know what you’re—”

  “Your cheap knock-off statue, Zoe. The gargoyle you brought to the theater was such a shoddy piece of work that a piece of him must have broken off.”

  I froze.

  “That,” Penelope said, “was what the police were looking for.”

  “My statue?” I croaked.

  “Wallace Mason,” she said. “That poor man someone murdered and planted in our set piece—the police found a fragment of a stone statue clutched in his dead hand.”

  Dorian’s toe. That’s where it had gone.

  The dead man had it.

  I drove like a madwoman on my way back to the house. I couldn’t reach him any other way. Dorian didn’t have a cell phone. Not because it would be ridiculous for a gargoyle to have a cell phone—even though we both agreed that would be true as well—but because he had trouble using small keyboards, and touchscreen phones didn’t respond well to his touch. I had a land line so he could make outgoing calls. But because he wasn’t supposed to exist and live with me, he didn’t answer the phone.

  Max was waiting for me on the rickety front porch.

  “I’m so sorry, Zoe,” he said.

  “For what? What’s going on?”

  “I really hoped the piece of evidence would match something found at the theater, but it didn’t. They’ll be here any minute. I had to tell them.”

  “Tell who, what?”

  “About your gargoyle statue. The crime scene guys were looking for a piece of evidence relating to something the investigating officer found. They didn’t find a match in the magicians’ props. But that gargoyle of yours … The magicians said you brought him to the theater. Zoe, it may have been used in the commission of the crime.”

  The world around me spun in and out of focus. Stars flashed in my eyes. I couldn’t let myself faint. I focused on Max’s deep brown eyes, trying to steady my breathing.

  “You don’t understand,” I said, raising my voice. I hoped Dorian would hear me inside the house and hide, rather than turning to stone as soon as a guest appeared, as he usually did.

  “Then why don’t you tell me?”

  I opened my mouth but couldn’t speak.

  “What’s going on with you, Zoe?”

  “I need to go inside.”

  Max stepped in front of me. “I can’t let you do that.”

  “What are you talking about? This is my house.”

  “There’s a search warrant on its way.”

  I clutched his arm. “You have to let me inside, Max. My statue isn’t simply a statue.”

  Max frowned, but at the same time he took my hand in his and squeezed it gently. “Our guys know how to be careful. They won’t break it. But really, Zoe, I didn’t know you were so attached to physical objects.”

  I’d respected Dorian’s wishes that we not share his existence with anyone else, and I agreed with him about the need for secrecy. But this was an emergency. I had to trust Max.

  “You’re not listening to me. He’s not a statue.” I took a deep breath. And another. “He’s my French friend.”

  “Oh, you mean you borrowed him from that shy friend of yours? Don’t worry, he’ll be able to get his statue back after the investigation.”

  “Listen to me, Max. The things you saw your grandmother do when you were a child, when she helped people as an apothecary—there were parts of what she did that you thought were magic, before you decided you didn’t believe in it. You were wrong. It’s not a supernatural magic that apothecaries and alchemists perform, but their work is real. Alchemy brought the statue to life.”

  I held my breath and waited for him to respond.

  “Zoe,” Max whispered. “I know you’ve been under a lot of stress lately, moving to a new place, buying a house that was a bigger fixer-upper project than you thought, and getting up in the middle of the night to bake for the teashop. I’ve seen how tired and ill you’ve been. And between my trip and work I haven’t been around this month—”

  “I’m not going crazy, Max! I’m trying to open up to you and tell you what I’ve been holding back. Come inside with me. I’ll show you.”

  I took a frantic step toward the door, but Max’s gentle hold on my hand turned into a firm grip. He held me in place and shook his head as a police car drove up and parked in the driveway.

  I stared mutely at the duo who walked up to us.

  “It’ll be easier,” Max said softly, “if you let them in and let them have the statue. I’ll get you some help, Zoe. Fighting us right now will only make things worse.”

  I closed my eyes and breathed. This couldn’t be happening. It was daytime, so Dorian would be somewhere in the house. I couldn’t warn him. As soon as he heard voices in the house, he’d turn to stone. A defenseless stone statue that the police could take in as evidence. And the longer he stayed in stone, the harder it would be to awaken him.

  I nodded numbly and unlocked the door.

  The police found a three-and-a-half-foot gargoyle statue standing in the kitchen, next to the fridge. It was missing a pinky toe that matched the piece of stone clutched in Wallace Mason’s hand. But he was very much a stone statue, not the living creature I’d tried to tell Max about moments earlier. I watched helplessly as they carried Dorian from the house.

  Twenty-Seven

  saint-gervais, france, 1860

  “Non Degenera Alchemia,” the retired magician read aloud.

  Something to do with alchemy. Robert-­Houdin knew basic Latin, and he knew of alchemists. He, in fact, had many books on the subject. Not one but two rooms of his home had been designated as libraries, filled with over a thousand volumes both accumulated by himself and given to him by friends. He devoured books the way some men devoured bottles of wine. It had been an obsession of his ever since he was a young man. While studying to be a clockmaker, he ordered a set of books on the subject. After the books arrived, he unwrapped the paper packaging and found there had been a mistake. Not truly a mistake, though. It was fate. Instead of books on the craft of clockmaking, he had been sent books on the mechanics of magic.

  Instead of returning the books, he read them. To the curious boy, the idea of true magic opened up a world of possibilities. But where the books explained the technical structure of magic tricks, it seemed to Robert-­Houdin that they failed to elevate the conjuring tricks into a true art form. Why was magic lower-class entertainment of the streets? Would French society not appreciate skillfully enacted illusions in the comfort of the theater?

  From that moment on, the clockmaker was no more. The formally dressed stage magician who became the Father of Modern Magic was born.

  He performed on stages across Europe, honing his craft. He spoke often of the fated books that showed him the path to his true destiny. He wasn’t sure he actually believed in fate, yet it made for a good story. Because of it, friends and well-wishers often gave him strange books on a wide range of subjects. Alchemy was as strange a subject as one could find, and therefore several dozen acquaintances had brought him alchemy books over the years.

  But Non Degenera Alchemia enticed him more than the others.

  He ran his weathered fingers over a woodcut of a globe encircled by flames. He hadn’t noticed before that the globe was also a face. It screamed in agony.

  A knock on the drawing room door startled him. He’d been so caught up in the wonderful and horrible illustrations that he’d lost al
l track of time.

  “Well, mon ami,” he whispered to the stone beast, “our illusion will have to wait.” He closed the book. Was it his imagination, or did the scent of decay permeating the room disappear as soon as the book snapped shut?

  When Robert-­Houdin returned to the drawing room the following day, the strange alchemy book lay open on the side table. He narrowed his eyes. His wife knew he hated it when she fussed with his books. At least she hadn’t covered up the carving again.

  He glanced at the clocks in the room, all of which kept perfect time, from the grandfather clock next to the window to the glass clock on the mantel. Three hours until dinner. He would not let himself get distracted by the illustrations again. He wished to find a passage to read that would sound mysterious to his audience, providing the drama to elevate his illusion to the perfection he demanded.

  Ah! There it was! He took back what he was thinking about his wife. She’d selected—accidentally, almost certainly—a page with a perfect section of text. It was almost as if it was calling to him …

  He shook his head, feeling the aches of old age as he did so. As he lifted the book into his hands, the pain in his joints lightened, as if the book itself were affecting his body. “Bof!” He was definitely growing fanciful in his old age. It wasn’t the book itself. It was the anticipation of creating a new illusion that made him feel young again.

  He mouthed the Latin words on the page. Three lines of text. A strange combination of words, he could tell, even though he didn’t speak Latin well. He’d studied Latin in school, of course, but the method of study was so rote that he’d memorized written passages without understanding their meaning. He formed the words of the first sentence. In spite of his incomprehension, the first line rolled off his tongue. He practiced it again. Yes, he liked the sound of it. Very theatrical. The first two were easy, the last more difficult. He decided he would try again later.

  That night after dinner, he moved the statue onto the small stage he’d erected at the house. The automaton would take much more work to complete, but in the meantime he could practice timing with the stone beast.

  Alone in the miniature theater, Jean Eugène Robert-­Houdin licked his dry lips, looked out over the empty chairs, and read the incantation. His shoulders drooped. The words fell flat, and not because of the lack of an audience. The words were incomplete. The first two lines screamed to be read with the next. He licked his dry lips and read the last line of text. His tongue stumbled over the foreign words.

  Squaring his shoulders, he tried again. The words again came haltingly, as if he were trying to speak backward. He knew an English magician who read backward to pretend he was conjuring the Devil. This Latin evoked a feeling at least as dangerous.

  He read the words again. Better. They became easier each time he tried. Having practiced, he turned at a right angle to the empty seats, facing the stone carving, and read the three lines together.

  The heavy book became light in his hands, as if an illusion using ether were in play. He glanced upward, annoyed. Someone was surely playing a joke on him, using fishing wire hanging from the ceiling to lift the book without him seeing the mechanism. Yet he saw no wires. His eyesight was not as good as it once was. To be sure he wasn’t missing anything, Robert-­Houdin held the newly light book in one hand and swiped his other hand above the book. His fingers did not find any wires. What type of illusion was this?

  He looked back to the stone gargoyle—but the creature was gone.

  Twenty-Eight

  Dorian was gone, taken into police custody as evidence.

  I didn’t know how my life could get any worse. My closest friend had been forcibly removed. The longer he stayed in police custody, the more likely it was that he’d remain trapped in unmoving stone forever. The first man I’d been interested in in years thought I was insane. I was a failed alchemist, unable to create enough gold to make any of my other problems go away. My hair was falling out. And now, after decades of not drawing attention to myself, I was being questioned by the police for the second time since moving to Portland.

  Max hovered nearby while the investigating officer asked me a few questions. The pitying look on his face made it easy for me to ignore him. I kept my focus on the other officer as I explained how I brought the statue to the theater to tell the magicians about my business, because I thought they might like some of my wares as props. The magicians would back up my story. I had no connection to Wallace Mason, and I had no idea why he would be interested in a stone toe that rolled away. He was a treasure hunter, so had he thought it was a treasure?

  I again neglected to mention that I’d seen Wallace Mason and Earl Rasputin sneaking around the theater. That admission would bring further scrutiny. Scrutiny I couldn’t afford. All it would do was lead the police down a path they would never believe.

  “You have a roommate?” the detective asked.

  I looked at him closely for the first time. As tall and thin as Ichabod Crane, his drawn face and dark craters under his eyes completed the look.

  “No,” I said. “I started cooking earlier and haven’t yet cleaned up.” Luckily Dorian hadn’t started the oven, or I would have had more explaining to do. The detective raised an eyebrow at my messy housekeeping, but seemed to accept my explanation.

  I didn’t have to go to the police station to answer further questions, but I had the distinct impression they’d be looking into any possible connections I had to the victim.

  Max stayed behind after the other officers left. The look of concern on his face was too much.

  “Maybe you could take a few days off,” he said softly. “The teashop can survive a few days without your cooking.”

  “Sorry for my emotional outburst.” I couldn’t look him in the eye. “I just need to get some sleep.”

  “Maybe you could talk to someone. I hated when the department made me talk to a psychologist, but—”

  My gaze snapped to his. “I’m not crazy.”

  Memories flooded my mind of what different societies have done to “crazy” people over the years. Doctors had explained and treated mental illness in many different ways. What was called “hysteria” in the 1800s became known as “nervous complaints” in the early 1900s, then a “mental breakdown” in the 1940s, followed by what we currently categorize as depression. Many of the poisonous drugs and physical traumas inflicted upon patients did more harm than good.

  But many of us who institutionalized our loved ones did it because we truly wanted to help them. When Ambrose snapped after his son died, psychiatrists were still called “alienists,” and I believed they could help him get better, or at least prevent him from harming himself while he took the time he needed to recover on his own. One of the ailments Ambrose was diagnosed with was “dementia praecox,” a condition later recharacterized as schizophrenia. I was able to find him one of the most humane asylums that existed in early-twentieth-century France. Charenton was located only a few miles outside of Paris, so I was able to visit Ambrose regularly—until he took his own life.

  I steadied my breathing enough that I could continue speaking. “I was simply trying to explain my emotional attachment to my statue. I got a little carried away.”

  “But you said—”

  “I want to be alone, Max.”

  What I really wanted was to try telling Max the truth again. But with how he’d reacted by not even giving me a chance to explain, how could I? It pained me that no matter how much we had in common and how much we were drawn to each other, his worldview was so different from mine in so many important ways.

  Even if Max would listen to me, I didn’t know the whole truth of what was going on. Why was Wallace Mason clutching Dorian’s stone toe?

  Without Dorian, the house felt strangely empty. After all these years, I was surprised by how quickly I’d become accustomed to living with someone. Though Dorian left the house during the
darkest and quietest part of the night, he was always here for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Not to mention tea, appetizers, desserts, and snacks.

  A tear slid down my cheek when I noticed what Dorian had been cooking in the kitchen. The thoughtful gargoyle had been fixing me an extravagant dinner with my new favorite dish—a smoked paprika macaroni and “cheese” made of creamed nuts. Soaking raw nuts ahead of time, then blending them with water and a little salt and lemon juice created a thick cream more decadent than the heavy cream Dorian used to cook with before he came to live with me. My old blender was far more versatile in the gargoyle’s hands.

  I called Heather and told her I was sick and that I’d be unable to bake pastries for Blue Sky Teas the next morning, or for the foreseeable future until I was better.

  Brixton would wonder what was wrong with Dorian, since the gargoyle was the real chef, but I didn’t have the heart to tell him. Maybe I could figure out what was going on and get Dorian back before Brixton knew he was gone.

  But how could I get Dorian back? After cleaning the kitchen and fixing some of the healing lemon balm tea I’d been drinking regularly to combat the effects of backward alchemy, I tried to sleep. I failed miserably.

  There was no point in lying in bed not sleeping while Dorian was trapped in a police evidence locker, slowly dying. His capture was only obscuring the real motivation and clues surrounding Wallace Mason’s death.

  I dragged my tired body out of bed, unlocked the door to the basement, and lit every candle. I didn’t know what I could do to get Dorian back, but once he was returned to me, I needed to have a real cure figured out. It was my best hope for being able to awaken him from stone after having to hold still for so long.

  I pushed all thoughts of Max out of my mind. Intent is essential in alchemy, and focus is key. I couldn’t let myself be distracted with regrets about Max. Maybe it was for the best that he hadn’t believed me. If Max had seen Dorian in living form, how would he have processed the information? With his attachment to the rule of law, would he have let Dorian escape, or would he have captured Dorian as a suspect? I didn’t want to know the answer.