by JL Bryan
We made our way downtown. It wasn't particularly late by the standards of the neighborhood where the old Corinthian Theater stood. With playhouses, bars, trendy restaurants, coffee shops that didn't even open until lunchtime, and a vintage toy store that stayed open until midnight, Broughton Street was a definite night-owl area of the city.
If the weather hadn't been so poor, we would have waited until later to reduce our odds of getting arrested. The rain gave us an excuse to go early and get it over with.
I nosed into the narrow lane behind the theater and killed the headlights and engine.
Across the alley was a six-story parking deck, like a stack of dark caverns behind chainlink. Ahead of us lay the loading dock behind the French restaurant Louis, where a bartender and server had told us about strange goings-on around the theater, particularly a creepy face that had leered from mirrors, and reports of girls being grabbed in the shadows.
The rain pounded down around us. Water churned over the glass T-tops that roofed my car and sluiced down over the windows and windshield, creating the feeling that we were in some kind of underwater glass tunnel.
"Uh, Ellie?" Stacey asked. "Should we start moving in?"
"Let's just wait and watch for a minute. We want to make sure there's not too much activity back here."
"I don't see diddly squat," Stacey said. Dumpsters, trash cans, and loading docks lined one side of the alley, making it nearly impassable.
"Hold your horses," I said.
Then two cooks emerged from the back door of Louis. They lit cigarettes and huddled over them beneath the very slight overhang, trying to keep them burning in the miserable rain.
"Whoa, how did you know they were coming?" Stacey asked. Then she looked at Jacob and narrowed her eyes. "And why didn't you?"
"I only know things about dead people," Jacob said. "If the cooks had died, then I could have told you where they were."
"I didn't know they were coming," I told Stacey. "That's why we sit and watch for a while. They could have walked out and seen us breaking into the theater. Now that they've gone back in, the coast is probably clear for a few minutes."
"Then why are we sitting here yapping?" Stacey hefted her backpack with spare batteries and memory cards. "Let's go work some magic."
"Please don't say that," Jacob and I both told her at the same time. Then we looked at each other. It was awkward.
"Yeah, let's go," I quickly added, and I stepped out into pounding rain, pulling my rain slicker hood close to my face again, trying to steel myself for another encounter with the magician.
Soon we were inside the long-closed theater, greeted by The Mummy from the old black and white movies, who guarded the back door in cardboard cutout form.
"Maybe that's why it's cursed," Stacey whispered. "The mummy."
"Ha ha. Now let's keep quiet." I led the way through the back warren of rooms, past a clothing rack where a red dress hung, once flashy and glittering with its fake gems, now as dusty and cobwebbed as Miss Havisham's wedding decor.
Even Stacey fell silent. The place was gloomy by design, blocked off from the outside to create a shadowy world of fantasy and illusion within. Jacob had said a number of spirits moved here. Most were harmless residuals, but not all of them, unfortunately.
We emerged onto the stage, strewn with broken remnants of the catwalk structure that had once hung above it. Jacob and I both looked into the shadows above the stage, our powerful flashlights barely penetrating the cavernous darkness.
Both of us were looking for signs of the evil magician ghost with the top hat and the long, long bony fingers.
"He's up there," Jacob whispered. "He knows we're here. He's watching."
"Does he have any plans to come down?" I whispered back.
"I don't know. I suggest we do whatever you're here to do and then run out as fast as we can."
"Sounds like a plan." Stacey hopped off the front edge of the stage, down into the audience pit, and headed for the tripod in the back corner, beyond the rows of empty seats. I kept my flashlight high, helping to light her path.
"Wait up." Jacob carefully dropped and scooted off the stage, then hurried after her.
I lingered behind, looking up into the emptiness above. There was a storage area for sets and anything that was going to be raised or lowered on the old rope and pulley system that used to be there. That was now smashed to bits all over the stage, because the magician ghost had hurled it down at Jacob and me, along with the rotten catwalk.
Something rustled in the darkness above. I squinted, unable to see anything. I swung my flashlight up.
A thin shadow in a top hat leaned over the edge up there, looking down at me. It was gone almost the instant that the high-powered beam struck it, vanishing into nothing like burning flash paper. I'd only seen it for an instant, so briefly that it could have been a trick of the eye.
It hadn't been, though. I had a sickly feeling in my stomach, remembering how his long, bony fingers had felt on my abdomen, on my face.
Something bumped overhead, beyond the edge of the ceiling and out of my sight. Then there was a long, heavy scraping sound.
"Ellie?" Jacob called across the house. Stacey was finishing up with the camera.
"I think he's up to something," I said. "Let's get out of here."
"Scary Houdini?" Stacey asked, zipping up her backpack with the camera's drained batteries and full memory card. She poked around in the darkness with her flashlight. "I don't see anyth—"
That was when the scraping sounded again, heavier and louder this time. Something filled the darkness above. It was the color of graham crackers, adorned with candy canes and long white icicles.
It was a gingerbread house, or at least the front panel of one, a stage flat that I remembered from my previous visit. I'd once dodged through its arching, gum-drop-lined doorway while the magician ghost was chasing me. Now, apparently, he'd decided to heave it down at me.
"Gingerbread house incoming!" I shouted, while dashing back from the stage and into the wings as quickly as I could. There was already plenty of shattered wooden rubble for me to trip over, so simply running offstage wasn't as easy as it sounds.
I made it to the side of the stage just before the gingerbread flat crashed into it. The big gingerbread panel ruptured on impact and cracked in half. A plywood circle, painted to look like hard candy with a red and white spiral, broke off and rolled away like a tire, disappearing somewhere in the shadows.
"Ellie!" Stacey screamed as she and Jacob ran toward the wreckage on the stage.
"I'm over here!" I called out. "I'm fine, but be careful crossing the stage, or maybe find another way—"
Too late. As Stacey jumped up onto the stage, heavy scraping echoed from above. Down came a flimsy plywood castle tower, dropping straight toward the lip of the stage where Stacey stood. She had a second to gape at it while it rushed toward her.
Jacob wrapped his arms around Stacey and pulled her backward off the stage. They toppled to the floor of the house as the thin tower crashed into the growing pile of debris onstage.
A thick cloud of dust filled the area above the stage, as though a sandstorm had come through. I coughed while trying to keep my flashlight trained on the darkness above.
"Holy..." Stacey coughed. I could barely make her out through the dust as she stood up. "Holy cow, what else does he have to throw at us?"
"A lot," I said. "Especially if he doesn't mind tearing the building apart."
"I doubt he does," Jacob said.
"Is there another way out?" Stacey asked.
"The front doors are chained up on the outside," I said. "We have to exit through the back."
"Awesome," Jacob said, looking up into the darkness.
Jacob and Stacey made their way to the same side of the stage where I stood. They needed to climb up and dash across twenty feet of rubble-strewn stage to escape the crash zone and make it safely into the wing. The question was how to keep Scary Houdini distracted while
they did it.
Well, the ghost was a stage performer, or had been in life. I could think of one thing no performer could resist.
I whistled up at him, then dropped my flashlight to the stage, helping to light a path for Stacey and Jacob through the dust cloud. I began clapping. "Bravo!" I shouted. "Great show!"
Stacey looked confused, but Jacob looked up into the darkness above, then nodded at me to continue.
I clapped harder, whistled, stomped my feet, like a lone but extremely enthusiastic audience member. With any luck, this would hit the stage performer right in the narcissism, soaking up his attention for a few critical seconds.
Jacob and Stacey helped each other up onto the stage. I kept my eyes on the vaulted darkness above, watching and listening as best as I could while also applauding, stomping, cheering and generally acting like my favorite team had just won the World Series.
The air around me felt chilly, a sudden cold snap that was definitely not natural.
I felt his bony fingers like tentacles across my back. When I turned to look, he was close. Most of the apparition was dark and insubstantial, a shadow among the shadows, but I could see the outline of his top hat. His face beneath the hat brim was pale and transparent, except for his black eyes. His smile was like a death rictus.
Scary Houdini.
My tactical light was on the floor at my feet. It wasn't exactly inaccessible, but I didn't want to bend over to pick it up, since that would give the magician ghost an opportunity to attack me.
Instead, I reached for the iPod at my belt.
His fingers brushed across my face, like skeletal snakes sheathed in dirty white cloth. Two prodded into my ear.
When he drew his hand back from me, a large silver coin glittered at his fingertips. It looked strange and ancient, the inscription depicting a temple with columns. He flipped and spun the coin, then made it dance across his long white-gloved fingertips. When it rested flat against his knuckles for a moment, I saw an intricate arrangement of tiny circles and triangles etched into the other side. I sort of couldn't pull my gaze away from the coin.
It moved back and forth across his fingers, now vanishing, now reappearing, now floating above his hand or inexplicably spinning below. He'd pulled a coin from my ear and hypnotized me with it. It didn't even occur to me to move, to try and break the spell he was casting over me.
With his other hand, he held up a wand, long and black, white at the tips. This he touched to my head.
And then, just as on our previous encounter, I was watching from afar. Well, I don't know if eight or ten feet above the scene really qualifies as "afar," but the sad fact was that I now floated out of my body, looking down on myself as I swayed before the magician.
This had only happened a few times, the whole soul-leaving-my-body experience, and I already hated it. I felt weak and useless, hovering helplessly over the scene. All I could do was feel angry. I couldn't even speak, what with my mouth and vocal cords now disconnected from my consciousness.
I thought of Abe Simpson in the famous Simpsons meme, waving his fist uselessly at the cloud. I was now the cloud, waving my non-existent fist ineffectively at the scene below.
With my out-of-body non-eyes, the physical world seemed to be made of layers of vague shadow. Scary Houdini, though, stood out in full color and three dimensions, a tall, long-fingered man in a crimson-lined cape and top hat, his face thick with stage makeup, dark at the eyes and lips, funeral-pale everywhere else. The makeup didn't quite disguise how badly rotten the skin of his face actually was.
His dark eyes looked up at me, and still he smiled, his teeth framed by his pointy mustache and goatee.
He'd yanked me out of my body like a rabbit from a hat.
I was getting sick of people doing that.
I grew angry. I had no boundaries, either. Nothing to contain my fury, fueled by all the fear I had and all that I'd suffered. No skin, no walls.
Filled with unfocused, blinding anger, I rushed down at him.
Scary Houdini's smile vanished for once—thank goodness, because it was really disturbing—and his dark eyes widened. They seemed to glow now, a hideous yellow color.
I slammed into him, and swept through him, like one lightning-charged cloud bashing into another.
Looking back on it, I probably should have known better than to throw myself at him. What can I say? I was all ghost, all emotion, and I wasn't accustomed to existing in that state. The frontal lobe of my brain, the rational part that's supposed to help restrain blind instincts and rash impulses, was several feet away, connected by nothing but a thin, silvery tether of energy. My lifeline from my spiritual body to my physical one.
So, when one highly charged cloud of energy lunges full-force into another, it turns out that the effect is not at all like one entity's fist pounding into the other entity's face, as I'd so dearly hoped. I had wanted to punish him.
Instead, I tangled in him.
And it was gross.
The dead magician's memories surrounded me like, let's say, a damp and gritty burial shroud. Some were benign: standing on a crowded train, watching the brick station approach ahead, suitcase and magician's trunk waiting at my feet. Using sleight of hand to pick a pocket or two. Standing on a stage to applause, the smell of paint and burning gas lamps and the sweaty bodies of the audience.
He had worse memories. Pinching and prodding defenseless girls on the crowded train. Groping actresses at assorted theaters. The stiff, rancid sheets of a New Orleans bordello, perfume and body odor and cigar smoke.
Then he was in a dark alley, in another town that smelled like the ocean and burning coal. He was cutting a young blond girl to pieces and placing the body parts into a burlap bag, which was so damp with blood it soaked the dirt road beneath it, turning it to dark mud.
He was grinning the whole time.
I saw how he used his magic skills to hunt the girls, to hide, to surprise, to make a knife appear instantly in his bare hands.
He traveled from one city to another by rail. The constant movement gave him plenty of opportunity to hunt, to hide the evidence, to move on before the crime was ever discovered. The railroad provided him freedom, anonymity, and access to the towns and cities of the entire continent. Just one more showman on the road, in an era full of such itinerants.
I transformed into a feeling of pure revulsion, so intense I had almost no room for thought.
The emotional repulsion seemed to translate into a more literal one, too. I backed away from the magician, and his memories began to fade from my consciousness, though they remained inside me like a mass of dead fish and worms.
Now I could see him clearly again, in his top hat and gloves, his coin and wand vanished. He stared at me. I wondered which of my memories he'd seen, and what he now knew about me. All my secrets, probably. I certainly knew his.
"Get away!" Jacob sounded. My attention shifted back to the living, and I saw Jacob standing beside me, as if he could see me and the magician ghost, which he likely could.
Stacey was kneeling on the floor, gently easing my unconscious body down so I didn't topple over.
The magician was already drawing back from me, but he vanished altogether as Jacob barked at him. Even in my out-of-body state, I had no idea where he'd gone.
"Ellie!" Stacey was saying. Her voice was distant, like she was down a deep well. It was almost the way a ghost voice sounds to living ears. She was kneeling beside me, shining a flashlight into my face and shaking me.
Jacob turned to look at me—not my body, but the invisible me that floated just beside him. I felt very small, curling in on myself, still horrified from what I'd seen while mingled with the magician ghost's energy.
"Hey, Ellie, I don't want to embarrass you," Jacob said, pointing in my direction, "but you're not wearing any clothes."
My gaze shifted downward, but of course there was nothing at all to see, nothing but warped old floorboards.
Very funny, I would have said, if I could
speak.
"Yeah, if the accounting thing didn't work out, I was going to be a stand-up comedian," he said. "It's good to have a practical back-up plan."
Can you hear me?
"I can, but not very well. You're not a strong ghost. Really weak, in fact."
Thanks?
"You're better off back in your body, that's all I'm saying. So you might want to, you know..." He pointed at my unconscious body. Stacey still knelt beside me, but now she looked at him, puzzled.
"Is she over there?" Stacey asked. "You can see her?"
"The magician could return at any time, and this theater is teeming with other ghosts," Jacob said.
Other ghosts? I looked around, which seemed to involve slowly rotating my entire being. Now that my focus was off the magician, I could glimpse others coming and going in the shadows. Men in century-old suits, women in lavish dresses, masked figures. A muted soundscape filled the theater, whispers, cries, fragments of piano and string music, a sigh of pleasure, a scream.
"We should probably get going." Jacob waved a hand in my general direction.
Okay, okay. I focused on my body and tried willing myself back into it. The going was slow. I drifted down toward it, but there was no speed in my movement, no power. As I drew closer, I could discern the barely visible, silver-gossamer thread extending from my body to my disembodied consciousness, the anchor line keeping me connected to my body. It seemed incredibly thin, incredibly vulnerable.
I sank, and the line gradually drew me in.
Soon my eyes opened. My body felt stiff, the joints aching, as if I'd slept too long on a sofa bed.
"You back, buddy?" Stacey asked, probing at my face with her fingertips.
"Yeah, that's why I opened my eyes." I blinked and tried to sit up. I needed her help. It took a moment for my body to loosen up and act alive again.
