by JL Bryan
Looking around, I found I was in some other attic or maybe an enormous storage closet. It was dim. Precarious towers of junk were heaped all around, reaching up and out of sight into the darkness above. It looked like it would all come crashing down on me at any moment.
All the junk was magic-related. There were big trunks adorned with symbols that would have been at home in a Lucky Charms box; oversized playing cards, wands, and top hats; large stage fixtures like coffin-sized boxes for sawing ladies in half; a huge tank full of dirty water and rusty chains, this last one balanced very improbably atop a tall column of brightly colored handkerchiefs tied together clown-fashion. There were ropes, handcuffs, leg irons, blindfolds, and straitjackets.
Mirrors of every shape and size were scattered among the unsteady heaps of magic junk, reflecting the weak flickers of light provided by Aladdin-style lamps, giving off smoke in every color of the rainbow, but very little light. These were lamps meant to obscure, not illuminate.
I brushed myself off as I stood. Weak light glowed behind me, too. There was an oval cutout in the wall, the same shape and size as the mirror through which I'd been pulled. Through it, I saw my body sprawled on the dusty floor of the theater attic. Stacey knelt there, my head in her lap, trying to rouse me.
I started toward the oval doorway, but something like an invisibly wall or membrane blocked my way, giving me a painful electrical shock when I tried to escape.
“It would appear we are trapped here together,” a voice said. It was loudly projected and over-enunciated, the voice of a stage actor accustomed to addressing the back row of a packed house.
“You can speak.” I felt a coldness deep down inside as I turned to face him.
“Speak?” He asked. “I do more than speak—I confound, amuse, horrify, surprise, and bedazzle.”
“Well, 'bedazzle' might have been an impressive word in your day, but now it just makes people think of this gadget that stamps shiny plastic beads onto clothes. You can order them off TV.”
He regarded me quietly for a moment, as though trying to figure out what I was talking about.
“Now who's confounded and bedazzled?” I asked. “Say, how about you just let me out of here...wherever here is...and we'll call it a day?”
“I am not holding you here,” he said.
“Really?” I reached toward the oval cutout again and winced at the bite of pain. I looked out and saw Stacey and Jacob both trying to revive me now. Stacey might have pressed the button...meaning I was caught in our trap, or at least my soul was, right alongside Aldous himself.
This had to be at least partly Kara's fault, I figured. It was because of her that my soul was loosely attached to my body.
“But I am so pleased to see you here,” he said, his voice powerful, smooth, and sinister. Small scratching and creaking noises emerged from the swaying towers of old-fashioned stage junk. Rotten creatures moved among them—a decayed rabbit, nosing its way down through a moth-chewed knot of cloaks and masks; a cadaverous dove, one eye missing and several bones exposed, flapping down to alight on the corner of a magic trunk.
The Aladdin lanterns were really smoldering now, putting out clouds of red, orange, and yellow smoke. Strange shadows flickered in the mirrors lashed to the heaps of tricks.
“Most souls must be pried free from their shells,” the magician said, approaching me through the unwieldy stacks of tricks and stage dressing. “Like clams or oysters. Or the way they prepare snails in New Orleans. But you have come fully prepared to be devoured.”
Muffled voices and cries began to echo around me. The lids of trunks and the doors of cabinets, lashed shut by rope, began to bang as though living things were trying to break free of them.
A woman's hand just barely wriggled out of a trunk lid. The trunk was orange, with cats and pumpkins painted in black on the outside of it. The hand was pale and bleeding, the long nails cracked and broken, the fingers moving weakly.
I realized the shapes in the dark mirrors were faces, their mouths stretched open in what looked like powerful screams, their voices faint and distant behind the glass. These were the souls of those he'd killed, or at least fragments of them, trapped inside this place, which seemed to represent the inner psyche of Aldous the Mysterious.
“It's been so long since I fed,” he said, and I noticed he did look gaunt and bony under his face paint. “And now you have delivered yourself here to me, by some miraculous sleight of hand, to be part of the big show.”
The magician held out one hand, fingers splayed open. His fingers continued to lengthen, unfolding across the room, one clicking knuckle after another, until the fingers were impossibly long, stretching across the cluttered space, somehow not toppling one of the high, unsteady columns of magic tricks.
I glanced behind me. Stacey and Jacob seemed distant now, as if the oval cutaway were drifting backward whenever I looked away from it. The invisible electrical barrier still blocked me from returning.
Aldous approached, the long fingers clicking and clacking as he wiggled them, as if to limber them up for me.
“Stop,” I said, as firmly as I could.
He smiled and continued his approach. “You won't want to miss my greatest trick,” he said. “Making you disappear. Don't you want to see how I made them all disappear?”
The voices sounded louder from the sealed trunks and dark mirrors all around. Louder, and more desperate. The lids of the trunks continued banging against their ropes, the occupants fighting hopelessly to escape.
“I'm afraid I won't be joining your show,” I said.
“You have much to fear, my little dove,” he replied. “But separation from me is not one of them.”
He moved in, his fingers wrapping around me like bony, jointed tentacles.
I reached out for the rope of tied-together handkerchiefs that, very improbably, held up the person-sized glass tank of dirty water and rusty chains. It had provided a support column for one corner of the tank, and the other three corners were completely unsupported.
I snatched away the line of handkerchiefs. The tank hovered in the air, unsupported, holding tons of mirrors, trunks, and other heavy items on top of it.
Then I wrapped one end of the brightly colored handkerchief rope around the magician's wrist.
“What are you doing with that?” he asked.
“There's something you may have forgotten.” I wrapped it around his opposite arm. “The dead often do.”
“The dead?” he asked.
“You poor thing. Don't you understand?” I made my trickiest move, tying a loop in the rope, while I kept up the patter to distract him. “You've been dead for more than a century. There was a terrible choking accident...involving a rope trick.”
Then I threw the noose I'd made over his head, knocking off his top hat.
Under his hat, the skull was crumbling and rotten, and worms nosed their way out of flaking remnants of flesh.
Fighting revulsion, I pulled on the noose with all my might. His mouth and eyes widened in surprise as the cloth cinched tight around his throat. His fingers released my torso.
As a ghost, he obviously didn't really need to breathe. However, this flashback to his death could jar him pretty badly...maybe even convince him to move on.
In case it didn't, though, I hurried to snake the rope around his arms and neck a few more times while he gaped in shock.
Then I again pulled tight, pinning his arms uselessly against his sides while two layers of colorful handkerchiefs squeezed his throat.
“This is how you died,” I said.
“No.” His voice came out in a dry croak. “No, wait—”
“Wait for what? For you to find a way out?” I leaned closer, staring into his bulging eyes. They were turning red, tiny veins cracking open, the pristine whites of his eyes going bloodshot.
I noticed the voices and clatter of his victims had gone silent. I looked up to see face after face, watching me from the dark mirrors, silent as if holding their b
reaths to see what would happen next.
“You've killed a lot of women, haven't you?” I asked. “They're all around us now. They're hoping I can set them free. And you know what? I will.”
Aldous glared up at me and moved his lips, but nothing came out of his mouth except drool tinted pink with blood.
“Aldous the Mysterious,” I said. “Lucas Babbage.”
He seemed to shrink, growing smaller before my eyes. Knowing a ghost's name is useful, but I guess it can be extra powerful when the ghost kept his real name a secret even during life.
As for me, I felt myself grow an inch taller. My body here was a bit indistinct, but it was a reasonable copy of the one outside the mirror, down to my clothes and boots.
I grabbed the magician's jaw from underneath. The stage makeup felt like a layer of cold slime. His face felt like a skull underneath it, sharp and thin.
“Let them go,” I said.
“What....?”
“All of them. You release these little soul pieces you've collected over the years, and you won't have to suffer what it feels like when I rip them away from you. That's my offer.”
The magician collapsed to the floor, still seeming to shrink, thrashing from side to side. I pulled the ropes tighter, determined not to let him escape. He was trussed up, trapped, and I needed him to stay that way.
He looked up at me, his eyes full of fury as I stood over him.
“Let them go,” I said.
“I...don't...know...how...” he rasped through his choking throat. “You're...killing me...”
“What's dead can't be killed, unfortunately,” I said. “I just need you to move on. That's all. Everything else will fall into place.”
He glowered at me.
The lamps all around put out even thicker smoke, as though things were really heating up now. The tower of junk that had been absurdly held up by the rope of handkerchiefs now crashed. The tank of water burst into a thousand sharp pieces—a bazillion, Tammy probably would have said—and foul water gushed everywhere, all over the floorboards.
Swords, metal rings, and playing cards rained down from the other towers of junk. An entire guillotine broke loose and crashed to the floor just in front of me. The rotten dove tumbled and slapped the floor, where it twitched once, then flew no more.
“Things fall apart, huh?” I asked, while more junk rained down on us. “I guess Yeats had a point about that...”
Then my eyes landed on the spot where the magician had been. The tangle of colorful handkerchiefs lay limp and empty on the floor, colored smoke drifting across it.
He was gone. Where he'd sat, a square had appeared in the floor, the edges of a trap door—I was sure that hadn't been there before.
Uh-oh. He'd slipped loose.
“Aldous?” I asked, turning slowly. The towers of junk were swaying, more pieces were raining down. Screams sounded from the small mirrors and sealed chests where the souls of his victims remained trapped. “Lucas? Where are—”
He seized me from behind, as he was so fond of doing, drawing me close and tight against him. I could smell rotten meat under the greasy odor of his stage makeup. His fingers coiled all over my torso, locking tight this time.
“Now you are mine,” he whispered, his breath sour and freezing cold, his dead lips much too close to my ear.
I happened to glance down at myself and saw I was now wearing a glittering short dress edged in shiny beads—almost as if someone had been at it with a Bedazzler. The hem barely covered my hips, and the neckline plunged way, way too low. I also wore a headband adorned with big peacock feathers.
“Uh,” I said. “What is this? You made your assistants dress like this, didn't you?”
“You will serve me as obediently as they did.”
I tensed up. My fear was starting to be joined by something new: outrage. Outrage at how he was treating me, obviously, but even greater outrage at how he'd made a game of murder, how he'd hunted women for sport as he traveled from city to city, leaving their mutilated bodies behind.
Then I thought of Clay, and all those he'd killed, during life and after. And all the other ghosts, the monsters I'd met throughout my life, the dead refusing to let go, the dead who hated the living or stalked them, feeding on them, killing them. So much injustice. So many dead for no good reason.
I thought of all that the ghosts had taken—my parents, first of all. The evil dead were my enemy. Lucas—or Aldous the Mysterious, as he liked to be called—was just one of countless vicious, unnatural spirits I'd met, but for the moment he stood for all of them. Not just the ghosts, either. All the murderers, live or dead, all the ruthless destroyers of life, all those who found delight in the suffering and destruction of others.
For that moment, the magician ghost stood for all the evil I'd seen, all the pain I'd encountered.
And then, with all my hate and anger and loathing brought to a white-hot focus, I unleashed it on him.
I can't say for sure whether I actually screamed, but it certainly felt that way even if no sound came out. I opened my mouth and fury roared out.
The entire room shook. The towers of magic props and sets crashed to the ground all around us. A crystal ball shattered at my foot, which was dressed in nothing but a thin gold ballet slipper.
Oversized, stylized playing cards rained down in a slow drift.
Lanterns spilled, igniting a dozen or more scattered, brightly-colored fires.
The ropes holding the imprisoned souls in their chests and cabinets frayed as the prisoners banged and shouted. Cracks appeared all over the dark mirrors, as they tumbled and crashed into the dusty, uneven floorboards. The screams of those within the mirrors grew louder and closer.
“What...what...?” Aldous muttered, his grip on my waist and chest weakening as his mind fell apart around us.
I slipped out of his unnaturally long fingers and dropped to my knees on the floor. As Jacob had warned, the psychic scream had completely drained me. I was mentally and emotionally exhausted—and considering my body lay outside the mirror, abandoned for the moment, there wasn't much to me except for my mind and emotions.
My body had gone cloudy and transparent, as if to represent just how empty and weak I was. On the bright side, the ridiculous magician's assistant costume in which he'd dressed me had apparently faded away, too. No great loss there.
Tendrils of mist, slightly glowing, began to rise from the cracked mirrors. More leaked out from the trunks and cabinets that had finally opened, their rope bonds completely ruptured.
As the souls began to pull free, everything else in the room—the props, the wands, the shiny hats and capes, the mystically decorated boxes and trunks—began to crack and crumble, flattening out into a layer of gray dust and ash, like candles melting into puddles of wax. Only the thick dust was dry, gritty, and cold like it had been poured out of a deep freezer.
The souls were taking all of the vitality with them, leaving Aldous with nothing but darkness and ash.
He shriveled more, until he was little more than a skull on a stick, painted with stage makeup, his clothes cracking and falling apart at the seams. His dark eyes looked up at me, no longer amused, no longer smoldering with dangerous power, but instead plain, brown, and full of fear.
As the lights rose around us, he could only shrink, lying on the floor like a forgotten marionette while the scraps of souls he'd taken from his victims rose away, glowing.
Standing victorious over the magician's ghost, watching all he had crumble into psychic dust around us, I had a new idea.
Maybe it was an evil idea.
But I wanted to test it out.
Mentally, I imagined reaching out to all those newly liberated souls, as they wandered free for the first time in many years. They wanted to slip away, naturally, to move on, finally free.
I didn't let them.
Instead, I caught them, one by one, like gathering stray balloons out of the air.
I drew them close to me, holding tight. Mayb
e they cooperated because they'd just watched me free them from Aldous. More likely, they were just lost and confused, which made them easy to control, at least for now.
I watched Aldous shrink away to nothing on the floor. At the same time, I inhaled power from all the pieces of soul I'd just collected.
They charged me up, in a way I'd never felt before. I seemed to grow larger and larger while Aldous's mind fell apart and dissolved around me. Soon his remains were like a broken toy. I felt incredibly powerful, almost godlike, brimming with energy from his collection of stolen souls.
I let out something like another scream, a psychic blast, but this time it didn't drain me to my core.
The gray-dust room blew apart completely, shattering like glass.
Then I was out in the theater attic again.
My body still lay on the floor, with Jacob and Stacey on either side of it.
Both of them gaped as all the mirrors shattered, the three we'd set up as well as the one built into the side of the magician's cabinet. Broken glass rained down all over the old floorboards, glittering like stars in the night sky.
I could have dived right back into my body then, but there was one more thing that needed doing.
So I left, with my friends still kneeling over my body and trying to figure out just what was going on. I didn't want to stop and explain.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Though I didn't have much experience traveling in my new out-of-body form, I felt powered up and focused at the moment. I felt like I could do anything I could imagine.
I rose above the theater, through lashing rain, toward the lightning above. The thousands of cold water droplets blowing through me were an irritating distraction, but I did my best to ignore them and keep focused.
Fueled by the power of stolen souls, I sent my mind out through the storm, through the streets and alleys of the city, through shadows and light, flesh and souls...searching.
Searching for her.
And when I found her, I went to her, crossing town in an eyeblink.
Kara rented a luxurious townhouse on Chatham Square. I found her upstairs, in the master bedroom level, a spacious attic that had been refurbished and modernized.
