Carol O'Connell - Mallory's Oracle

"Wait here," said the old woman. Til just be a moment. I have to test the equipment. It hasn't been used in more than thirty years." She handed the flashlight to Mallory and disappeared behind the screen.

Mallory felt a prickling sensation on the backs of her hands. All her good instincts made her wary. She took inventory of the shadows on the periphery of the globe lamp. The beam of the flashlight found the eyes she had only felt at her back the moment before. Charles?

No. She was staring into the eyes of a disembodied head. The flesh had to be wax, she knew, but something icy was leaving a slick trail down her spine as she drew closer. The thing sat on a trunk at her own eye level and stared back at her with eyes entirely too real. The irises had more normal proportions of blue to white, but the wide-eyed stare of a Christmas-morning nine-year-old was definitely genetic. This was Charles's cousin.

Hello, Max.

Mallory heard her name called. She rounded the screen and walked through a passageway of wardrobe racks, stopping ten feet short of the old woman who was kneeling at the base of a guillotine fifteen feet high. The white hair was covered by a red turban, and her neck lay between the posts and locked in place by wooden braces with three openings to accommodate head and hands. Above her neck was a wide and wickedly sharp blade hanging high and waiting.

Edith smiled up at Mallory. "Pull on that, dear." She nodded to an ornate golden lever at the side of the guillotine.

Mallory only shook her head from side to side with rare wonder. Had the old woman gone crazy? This was no waxwork dummy. Edith spoke to her and the body moved, both were real, and the blade was sharp. This was not the work of mirrors.

Mallory heard the sound of metal grinding, and her eyes flashed up. Had the mechanism slipped a gear? Her stomach flipped over. She watched the blade with dark fascination. Was the blade closer now? Was the angle of the blade changed?

The blade slipped a notch.

Edith screamed as a bright light washed out the tableau and lit the entire basement with a blazing ball of sun mounted atop the guillotine. Mallory was in motion moving towards her, eyes blinded by the light, hands reaching out, nearly there, when the blade fell and the turbaned head with its bloody stump of a neck fell from the wooden brace and rolled across the floor, awash in brilliant white light. The old woman's feet spasmodically kicked out and then went limp.

Mallory froze. She was shot through with ice and her throat was paralyzed.

The head at her feet was laughing. No, it was not. Her eyes were adapting, and she could see the head more clearly. It was only another wax mock-up, a younger version of Edith Candle's head. There was no blood. An intact Edith Candle was rising off the floor. "Oh, your face, your face," said Edith, breasts heaving, belly shaking. "That's what made the trick so powerful." She wiped tears from her laughing eyes. "People were convinced that the gears had slipped, that they were witnessing an accident. It was an amazing effect. They screamed and screamed. Most of Max's illusions were life-and-death affairs. It was his trademark."

Mallory sat down on the floor before her knees could fail and dump her there. "Christ, I hope that was your best shot."

Edith pulled a low stool out of the clutter of props and sat down beside Mallory. "I can't tell you much about Max's illusions. The magician's code, you know. But the light is the most important element of this trick. You don't see clearly while the eye is adjusting. You see what you expect to see – an accident. I can't tell you more than that. I can't even show you the mechanism that works the light. Trade secret."

Mallory grappled with previous conceptions of elderly women and made rapid adjustments in her thinking. When she looked up at Edith perched on the stool a head above her, it was with new respect. Yes, she had come to the right place.

"What kind of tricks do mediums do?"

"Well, there's quite a difference between magic and spiritualism, but illusions are all related by the same principles – misdirection, sleight of hand. A client once told me about a medium she visited on Forty-second Street who made things float through the air. I could show you something like that."

"Wires?"

"No, it's done with black art."

"Black art?"

"Nothing to do with the occult, dear. Black art is the camouflage of black on black. You need a hand-held mirror and a very dark room. The object only has to levitate a few inches. Too much is ostentatious and smacks of fakery. A few inches of levitation in an angled mirror is more believable and frightening for some reason. Your medium would need an accomplice for that, someone free to move about the room."

"She has one, a little boy."

"Well, that widens the field a bit. With a helper she can do quite a number of illusions."

"She's the high-technology type."

"Well, don't expect anything too exotic, no holographic imaging, anything like that. The simpler the illusion, the better it works. This medium wouldn't want to take any high-tech devices to a mark's home."

"She uses her computer to research the victims."

"Say mark, dear. Victim makes it sound so sorted, as if the audience isn't having a good time. Max and I created the mind-reading act while he was recuperating from an injury. A dangerous illusion had gone wrong… But I'm digressing. You wanted to hear about the tricks. Well, I used to guess the object in the mark's hand while wearing a blindfold."

"How? Microphones?"

"No, dear. Most tricks are very simple. If you give too much credit to complexity, you'll never work them out." She pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose and her eyes were looking at some middle ground of memory. "Max would cue me with first words. If he said, "Concentrate," it was made of metal. The next word would tell me if it was a coin, a watch, whatever. If he said, "Please," it was paper, money or a photograph. Then, when I took off the blindfold, I would read their faces and all their secrets and worries."

"You researched the marks?"

"No, dear. Max waited in line with them. We always kept them waiting a long time. People in lines can be very chatty. The audience participation was never by random selection. I know it sounds like a cheat, but every one of those people got full value for the price of admission. It was quite a show." Her smile ended in a serious afterthought.

"Then I found my true gift. A sheriff caught up with us in another town when one of my visions came true. I had seen a body and the sheriff had found it. My name was made. We went on a new world tour, and this time out, I was the headliner instead of Max. I regretted that gift after Max died. I foresaw his death, you know. You don't believe that. I can feel it. Yet it did happen to me, this terrible gift."

"Did you foresee Pearl Whitman's death?"

"No, dear. The fugue comes on a few days before the death of someone who's been recently close to me. I haven't seen Pearl in years and years."

"You don't mind talking about her?"

"No, not at all. Oh, her death was a sad business, wasn't it? She was only sixty-five when I met her. Her father had recently died. He was in his nineties I believe. She asked me to contact his spirit. I told her I didn't do such things. I'm a clairvoyant. Lumped into the same bag with mediums, I'm afraid, but not quite the same thing."

"So, what did you do for her?"

"I advised her on stocks and business matters. That's what she wanted to talk to her father about."

"You advised her by way of a crystal ball?"

"No, dear. May I call you Kathy? Good. I'm quite adept at playing the market. I do it with research, I have quite a database, but I also depend on instinct. I advised Pearl on a merger that made her twice as rich as she had been before."