Sarah was sitting on the bed when I returned to the motel. She had her laptop on her knees, and was typing rapidly, her eyes fixed on the screen.
“How’s Artie?” I asked, easing the door closed behind me.
“Antimony dragged him to roller derby practice. He’s never leaving the house again.” She turned in my direction, and blinked. “Why are you covered in mud?”
“Pit trap.”
“Oh.”
“Is there a Nest near here?”
Sarah blinked again. “Maybe. I don’t know. I don’t keep track. Why?”
“Because I’m pretty sure I just met the world’s first MMA-qualifying dragon princess.”
“Oh. And the poacher . . . ?”
“She kicked his ass.” I held up my souvenir. “I got his knife.”
“Oh.” Sarah paused for a moment before she brightened, and asked, “Does that mean we can skip the Pet Expo tomorrow?”
I laughed. I couldn’t help myself. I was covered in mud and I’d just shoved an adult man into a rabbit hutch, and there were beautiful blonde women with incredible roundhouse kicks running around in the woods, protecting their children from poachers. It was a wonderful world.
“Yes,” I said. “We can definitely do that.”
Sweet, Blissful Certainty
STEVEN SAVILE AND CRAIG SCHAEFER
Eddie Sunday was accustomed to dealing with dead men, but there was a proper time and place for that kind of job. Not on his doorstep in east Las Vegas, and not at two in the morning. He balled up a fist and rubbed his knuckles across his sleep-crusted eyes.
Eddie wore a pair of boxers and a ratty old terry cloth robe that hung low off his slack skin and very noticeable bones. His visitor, standing across the threshold, opted for a tailored black silk suit with the artfully folded puff of a blue silk handkerchief poking from his jacket’s breast pocket.
Eddie rubbed his eyes again. No luck. The man was still there, flashing a lazy smile edged with hunger and the threat of casual cruelty.
“Daniel Faust.” Eddie’s voice came out softer than he wanted it to. “Heard you were dead.”
“I heard that, too.” He glanced down. On Eddie’s side of the doorway, a thick line of salt ran from edge to edge across worn, bare floorboards. “You gonna invite me in?”
Eddie swallowed. “Are . . . are you a vampire now?”
Faust stepped over the salt and into Eddie’s apartment, rolling his eyes as he sidled past him.
“Vampires aren’t real. And Jesus, Eddie, how do you live like this? Have some self-respect.”
Eddie had to ask himself that same question. He shut the door, flipped the knobs on three separate dead bolts, and turned to share the view. His second-floor walkup was a wasteland of garage-sale furniture, empty beer bottles, and cigarette ash. A three-foot-tall cross made of neon tubing hung on one wall, bathing the room in flickering, sickly shades of orange.
He scurried over to the futon, stacking up a few empty pizza boxes and shoving them to one side, clearing up a space to sit. Faust ignored the gesture. He walked over to the window, slow and easy, like he owned the place.
“Hard times,” was the only explanation Eddie could manage.
“I’m guessing most of your disposable income’s still going straight into your veins.” He looked the man up and down. “What are you down to, ninety pounds soaking wet? I feel like I should take you down to Redondo for the afternoon, just so I can kick sand in your face.”
“Keeps the voices quiet.” Eddie sat down and nudged a stray pizza crust under the futon with his bare foot. “Gotta do what you gotta do, right?”
“I’m not here to judge.”
“It’s never that simple with you, eh?”
Faust glanced out the window. Eddie lived in no-man’s-land, across the street from a crumbling brick slab of shuttered storefronts, boarded windows, and an all-night massage parlor. The dazzling lights of the Las Vegas Strip rose up in the distance, a constellation of fallen stars shouting empty promises half a city away. Paradise, almost close enough to touch.
“So, uh,” Eddie said, “let’s just get the obvious question out of the way: why aren’t you dead? Everybody’s been talking about the riot up at Eisenberg Correctional. Something like a hundred people got . . .”
Faust looked at him. Eddie’s voice trailed off.
“The riot I’m guessing you caused,” Eddie said, finishing his thought.
Faust spread his open hands. “Call it a magic trick. I need to be dead right now. It’s time to settle a few accounts, and it’s better if they don’t see me coming.”
Eddie pushed himself back against the cheap futon mattress, his spindly fingers digging into a cigarette burn.
“That’s cool, man. Everything’s good. You and me,” he said. “We’ve always had a, you know, a good working relationship. Right?”
“Sure, Eddie. We’re fine. Better than fine.”
“That’s good to hear, man.”
“So good, in fact, that I’ve got a little job for you, just to show there’re no hard feelings.”
Eddie was off the futon in a heartbeat, pacing the groaning floorboards, every muscle in the tweeker’s body twitching.
“No, uh-uh. I’m retired. I am fully and officially retired from that bullshit—”
“Don’t say that, Eddie. I come bearing gifts,” Faust said. He showed his open palm, closed his fingers, then opened them up again with a flourish. Now a bindle of plastic wrap sat nestled in his hand, twisted around a mound of crumbly yellow-brown chunks.
Eddie stopped pacing. Eyes drawn to the bindle like a fly to an electric light.
“A cut above your usual stuff, I’m going to guess. It’s yours if you want it. All you have to do is hear me out.”
Eddie shook his head, but he couldn’t pretend he wasn’t interested. He clenched his right hand into a fist like he was thinking about hitting Faust. Maybe he was, just for a second. Some rogue synapse in his brain going off with a flash: this is a good idea. It didn’t take long for the rest of Eddie’s brain to shout it down. “You’re a real bastard, you know that?”
“That’s a no then?”
“Just give it to me, don’t be a bastard and make me beg, okay?” Eddie held out his right hand. It was shaking as Faust tossed him the bindle. He looked back to the window.
“You ever hear of ‘the man with the Cheshire smile,’ Eddie?”
Eddie was already busy halfway across the room, rummaging inside a cluttered end table drawer.
“Rings a bell,” he said. “Nothing specific, I mean, just fringe stuff. Rumors about rumors. Sounds like a bad dude. Somebody to stay away from. There are plenty of people like that in this city. Like you.”
Faust looked out the window. Stared at the distant lights. They lacked the glamour of the casinos and the high-priced hotels that Vegas was famous for.
“I saw something, in prison. Brushed up against the edges of something big this guy’s been cooking up. Something big and something terrible. I think I stopped it from happening. But I need to know.”
Eddie walked back to the futon, carrying his kit. He let out a nervous laugh as he rested a zippered eelskin case on his bony lap.
“You’re getting a little fortune-cookie here, boss. You need me to take you down to Madam Zee’s to see if she can help you out?”
Madam Zee was a contortionist clairvoyant who had a weird little show she put on in one of the seedier theaters just off the Strip. The one thing she absolutely didn’t do was see the future, though she did plenty of other tricks.
“I’m not allowed back there anymore,” Faust started to explain, then paused. “You know what? Never mind why. I need your help to get a glimpse into the future.” Before Eddie could object, Faust said, “Because there’s a very real chance there isn’t going to be a future.” He worked his fingers, like the old gag where you danced a coin across the top of them. It looked like he was playing an invisible piano. There was something about Faust’s exp
ression that scared the tweeker. “It’s been eating at me since I got out. I can’t sleep, not without dreaming about it. It’s always there, worming away inside. I can’t stop thinking about it. I need some peace of mind, that’s all.”
Eddie quirked an eyebrow at him. “You know I talk to dead people, right? Very good for learning about the past, but I’ve gotta be honest, it’s kinda lousy for learning about the future, given that the only people who’d know about that aren’t dead yet. The dead can’t help you with that.”
“One dead man can.”
While Eddie unzipped his case, his trembling fingers clinging to a length of coiled rubber tubing like it was plated in gold, Faust got out his phone. He tilted the screen toward Eddie, showing him the picture of a vintage theater poster. Doves flew from the outstretched arms of a man in a tuxedo, while tiny red imps capered at his feet.
The Great Damiola, screamed a splash of garish silver text. You will be Astounded! You will be Amazed! You will witness Miracles!
“Huh,” Eddie said, squinting. “Damiola? Does he have a show just off the Strip? Could swear I saw him and The Amazing Jonathan on a double bill once.”
“I don’t think that’s very likely, Eddie, seeing as Cadmus Damiola has been dead for almost a hundred years.”
“Ah, so you want me to talk to him?”
“He was one of the last true magicians, Eddie. He had a gift. A proper talent. I’ve got my own suspicions how he came into his power, but to be honest I don’t really care about the hows and whys; I’m all about his legacy. His last great illusion.”
“Isn’t that cheating? Going after a dead magician’s tricks? Aren’t you guys supposed to be all honor and secrecy?”
He swiped the picture away, replacing it with a grainy photograph.
“What is that? Some kind of movie projector?” Eddie asked.
“Some kind,” Faust agreed. “Damiola called it the Opticron. It offered glimpses of other worlds, or so he claimed. It was the center of his act during his last few shows in London before he disappeared. Listen to this:
“‘At first I thought he’d presented us with a doll’s house, for that is exactly what it looked like; a house with countless windows. When he fed electricity into the infernal machine, a light from deep within flared to life, and with the jarring rattle of a praxinoscope’s drum spinning almost out of control somewhere deep inside the mechanism, the shaft of light that speared through one of the open windows projected the most shocking spectacle onto a white sheet the magician had stretched taut across the window frame. The sky darkened with vast-winged planes, while an army walked in a lockstep parade. Maps showed the tide of war, surging once again across Europe, while a voice warned of a new threat posed by the combined forces of Italy and the Hun.’”
Eddie shrugged. He pushed up the right sleeve of his robe, bunching it up around his shoulder, and took one end of the plastic tubing between his teeth. “Sounds like a World War Two newsreel. I’m not seeing the amazing trick here? It’s not like the guy invented TV.”
“That extract is from a diary written in 1923.”
Midway through wrapping the tubing around his scrawny bicep, baring an ant parade of needle marks down the inside of his arm, Eddie paused. He blinked. “Okay, that’s slightly more impressive, I’ll give you that, but still, it’s like Nostradamus, right? Show enough possible visions of the future, one of them is going to have to be right—or at least look the part when seen in hindsight.”
“There are others. Plenty of them. One for each window in that doll’s house, I’d hazard. One report describes the Kennedy assassination, right down to Jackie O’s pillbox hat. Just days before Damiola disappeared in January 1924, another audience got a real treat; they witnessed the launch of Apollo 11.”
“Okay, that must have been some show the guy put on.” Eddie grinned. He tied off the tubing and picked up a corroded spoon before opening the plastic-wrap bindle with all the care of a bomb disposal guy handling a primed detonator, fingers trembling, and delicately placed a few crumbly pebbles in the bowl of the spoon. “So where’s this Opticron now?”
Faust slipped his phone back into his pocket. “That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it? I put some feelers out. A few of those feelers got bitten. Near as I can tell, it’s in London. Damiola left all of his tricks to the Magic Circle, so I figured it had to be in there, but it’s not.”
“You know that for sure?”
“Yep. There was a break-in the other day. Two comedians walked out with one of Damiola’s journals. It was the only thing taken. No reports mentioned the Opticron so I dug a little deeper. Cashed in a few favors I probably shouldn’t have. Best I can tell, if it isn’t in a thousand pieces, it’s in the hands of an old-school gangster family. We’re talking proper East End heavies.”
“Too heavy for you to handle?”
“Right now? I’ve got the Chicago Outfit breathing down my neck, half my crew is missing or in hiding, and Vegas is disputed territory for the first time in thirty years. Flying to Britain and reenacting a Guy Ritchie movie is not on my agenda, as much fun as that may sound. I figure we can do better than that. And by ‘we,’ I mean ‘you,’ Eddie. And before you try and wriggle out of it, you owe me. So, we go to the source. Cadmus Damiola built the thing. He can tell me how to build another one.”
Eddie didn’t answer right away. He sat snared in the spiral of an old, familiar ritual; the snap of his cheap plastic lighter, bringing the ceremonial flame. The slow, oily bubbling of the heroin in the spoon, chemical sorcery transforming solid to liquid, readying the holy sacrament for his veins.
Eddie sat, transfixed by the lighter’s glow.
“Conjure Cadmus Damiola’s spirit for me, and you’ll be five hundred dollars richer.”
Eddie glanced up at him. “Five hundred and you go away?”
“And I go away.”
He set down the lighter and picked up the syringe.
“Do you think he’s in Hell?”
Faust shrugged. “How should I know? Why? What difference does it make?”
The syringe, thirsty, slurped up the tar in the spoon. A tiny wet driblet drooled from the tip of the needle.
“It’d be nice, you know,” Eddie said, “if just for once the dead man wasn’t in Hell. Being down there does stuff to a soul. And you know, no one who ends up burning was exactly sweetness and light in the first place.”
“Five hundred bucks, Eddie.”
“I didn’t say I wasn’t going to do it. I was just making a point. You owe me.”
“Five hundred bucks,” Faust repeated.
The needle bit and the warmth flooded in, racing through Eddie’s veins like the tropical surf on a white sand beach. All the filth and the fear tore away like a bandage from a healed wound, and he was a child again, safe in his mother’s arms.
Sometimes, on the nod, he dreamed of the old days. The better days before everything went wrong. The days when he wore a three-piece suit the color of vanilla ice cream and preached the Gospel to a packed tent. The Minnesota heat and the summer flies couldn’t slow him down, and he’d brush the sweat from his brow with a smile as his words conjured up visions of thunder and brimstone.
Elsa Mae’s funeral, that’s where it started. He remembered it like it was yesterday. Standing by the open casket, holding hands with the elderly woman’s daughter and trying to help her through the pain.
“She’s in a better place now, Norma. Looking down—no, she’s smiling down on you, better believe that. The cancer’s gone, all that weight lifted from her. She’s with the good Lord now, and—”
Norma, croaked a strangled voice in his left ear. Is that you? I can’t see you.
“Pastor?” The woman blinked at him. Eddie froze, shaken.
Norma, the voice whispered. They put razors in my eyes.
He slowly turned to look. A standing mirror by the altar caught a beam of sunshine, Elsa Mae’s coffin glowing in the reflection.
And the bloody, dis
figured crone in the glass, the one pulling her way out of the coffin with broken fingernails, turned her sightless head toward him.
That was the first time. Not the worst, though. When Eddie couldn’t find solace in his faith any longer the Bible was shouldered aside by new books; books sold out of back rooms, and in dark alleys, books whose pages sprouted verse in degenerate forms of Latin and sported spidery, hand-drawn symbols that made his eyes water and his stomach twist.
He had a natural talent, he discovered, for conjuring the dead by name. The one thing he could never do was shut it off completely. The spirits he didn’t want to summon? They were always with him. In every reflection. In every dark and quiet room. Making him a witness to their pain.
The only thing stopping Eddie Sunday from putting a gun to his head was his fear of joining them.
The back room of Eddie’s apartment had been converted into a magician’s temple. Octagonal walls, painted in alternating colors: garish fire-engine red and midnight black. The hardwood floors bore the ghostly white traces of a thousand chalked symbols, drawn and erased again and again.
Fresh from his heroin dream, Eddie was on his hands and knees, chalking a circle within a circle. Hebraic letters ringed the outer rim, wards and seals he only half-understood. Faust helped, rolling a standing mirror with a scalloped wooden frame to the circle’s edge.
“Little left,” Eddie said. “Has to be perfectly facing the southwest corner.”
There were four mirrors in all, aligned to converge on the center of the conjuring-circle. Faust chuckled.
“Funny,” he said, “calling up a dead stage magician like this.”
Eddie squinted at him. “What’s funny about it?”
Faust rapped his knuckles against the antique mirror’s glass.
Urban Allies: Ten Brand-New Collaborative Stories Page 7
