Carol O’Connell - Shell Game

Charles was looking at the cafe table and the chair that Malakhai had used last night. „Max had no degrees in psychology, but he understood the darkest things about his audience.“ Charles picked up the chair and set it in the center of the velvet-roped square. He dipped one hand into another carton and retrieved a long cape of scarlet silk, an exact copy of the one Oliver Tree had worn.

„You think it’s like herd instinct? Is that what keeps them in their seats?“

„Yes, but there’s more to it.“ He examined the material and draped it on a pedestal. „I understood the phenomenon better when I was at school. I did a paper on crowd behavior. My best case study was a small town in New Jersey. A clothing store caught fire. A schoolgirl was trapped in a room fronted by a plate-glass window.“

His face was somber as he unchained one of the velvet ropes and entered the square. This was not a pleasant memory. „Her name was Mary Kent. She was fifteen years old.“ Standing behind the chair, he glanced up at the platform. „There were broken bones in Mary’s hands. That’s how hard she beat on the window, but the plate glass was too thick. She was a tiny little thing, not strong enough to break it. This was a Saturday afternoon, and there were lots of pedestrians passing by on the street. They gathered in front of the window, completely mesmerized by the fire – and the girl who was screaming and beating on the glass. I suppose the window was a lot like a giant television screen. They formed an audience and watched her die.“

„Where was the fire department?“

„No one called them. Eventually, a fireman saw the smoke from the other side of town. But they were too late for Mary. Not their fault.“

He stepped outside the square and walked up the platform staircase. „I interviewed all the witnesses – the audience. They blamed the firemen for Mary Kent’s death – actually ragged them for being too slow with the fire truck. They all believed that someone else had called in the fire – or that’s what they told me. I asked why no one had thought to pick up a rock and break the glass so Mary could escape. ‘Never thought of it,’ they said. Just never occurred to any of them.“

„Did you believe the witnesses?“

„No, I didn’t.“ He pointed down to the roped-off square. „You’re going to sit there. Remember, this illusion was staged for an intimate audience and a narrow field. That’s because of the mirror. So don’t move outside the ropes.“

Charles checked the reflection of the chair in the mirror. „Max arranged the Halloween party for me.“ He touched a switch on the side of the left post. A lightbulb glowed from its submerged socket in the crossbeam. „The other guests were children of magicians – a very tough audience.“

Mallory took her seat inside the ropes as Charles ran down the stairs, two at a time, and retrieved the scarlet cape. She glanced at the nearby carton filled with the same material. „Why so many?“

„Real silk.“ He turned off the floor lamp near the base of the platform. „Sometimes the material ripped when the metal tongs came up through the floor. So Max needed a large supply.“

He disappeared around the dragon screen. And now the lights were going out all over the basement. The bulb in the crossbeam made a dull halo around the mirror.

„Ready?“ Charles returned, wearing the scarlet cape. A monk’s hood covered his hair and shadowed his face as he walked toward the platform.

The mirror reflected only the black shadows of the space behind her chair. When Charles neared the top of the staircase, she could see his face climbing in the wavy distortion of the glass, elongating and compressing in grotesque caricatures. He stood center stage and spread his arms wide. The material of the cape concealed the entire mirror and touched the curtains on either side of the posts. After a few moments, the silk collapsed. Charles had vanished, but the red material was not falling to the floor. It was slipping through the center of the mirror in a thinning stream of scarlet silk.

And now the cape had disappeared into the looking glass, and Charles’s disembodied head was floating inside the oval frame. The light shone all around the mirror, no feet, no physical man to make that image. His nose elongated in the carnival glass, turning to a snout, and his eyes widened to saucers. When he bared his teeth, they grew longer in the distortion of the mirror, turning into fangs as he mouthed a silent howl.

Two white hands appeared beside the floating monster head. He snapped his fingers, and the mirror revolved on its pivots, spinning end over end between the posts. When the oval frame stopped revolving and righted itself again, Charles was no longer trapped inside the glass. The mirror was empty and black.

A finger tapped Mallory’s shoulder, and she jumped, startled.

Charles stood behind her.

And that must be the scary part.

He was grinning, utterly pleased with himself. „What did you think of it?“

„Good trick.“ She glanced back at the platform. „So tell me if I’ve got this right. The cape was tied to a wire that fed through a hinged opening in the mirror. That’s why he used a carnival mirror, right? So the distortion would hide the imperfection?“

Charles nodded, not smiling anymore. He was turning on the lamps.

„The drapes are lined in black,“ said Mallory. „I know you can’t move the support posts. But the mirror frame is thick enough to reposition the glass inside it. When the lazy tongs spread the cape, you pushed the glass out of alignment and stepped behind the curtain. And then you were reflected in the mirror from a different angle.“

„Well, yes.“ He turned to her with a face full of disappointment. „But what about the effect? The illusion – “

„I got the mechanics right?“

Charles didn’t answer her. He walked back to the platform and climbed the steps, moving slowly, as if suddenly very tired. When he stood before the oval frame, he pressed on one side of the glass to reposition it. And now he found her face in the wavy distortion. Their eyes met, and he stared at her with his unhappy reflection. In this new angle, the carnival mirror shortened Charles’s nose and contracted his bulbous eyes to more normal proportions.

Mallory sipped in a breath and held it.

In the distortion of the mirror, Charles was reborn as an incarnation of his famous cousin. Mallory’s eyes were riveted to the beautiful man inside the glass – alive and a hundred times more compelling than any of the old photographs. The man in the mirror was touching her insides with chemistry and flooding her face with heat. It was a fight to remain still, to keep the fragile illusion in place. One move would destroy it, but she had the sense of levitating with a lightness of head and body, almost hollow now, rising slowly.

So beautiful.

This was what Louisa saw the day she met Max Candle. In that first second, Malakhai was doomed to lose his young wife. This man was so -

And then Max was gone, vanished in the moment when the mirror was lifted from the post slots. Charles turned to her with his more familiar face, his large nose and the eyes of a sad but charming frog, unaware that he had resurrected the dead.

„Magic is wasted on you,“ he said.

After Charles had left the basement, Mallory continued to prowl through the boxes until she found the missing leg irons for the Lost Illusion.

All four crossbows were fixed on their pedestals and angling up toward the target. She cocked the weapon nearest the staircase. Very smooth operation, no problems. No need to run the pedestal gears again. Every weapon had fired in good working order. Now she only needed to work out the rest of the mechanics.