by Rucker Moses
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York
Copyright © 2021 by Craig S. Phillips and Harold Hayes, Jr.
Map and interior illustrations © 2021 by Sienne Josselin
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Moses, Rucker, author. | Gangi, Theo, author. | Josselin, Sienne, illustrator.
Title: Kingston and the magician’s lost and found / Rucker Moses and Theo Gangi; map and interior illustrations by Sienne Josselin.
Description: New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, [2020] | Summary: Returning to Brooklyn, where his magician father disappeared years before, twelve-year-old Kingston learns that magic is real and that if he enters the Realm, he might get his father back.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020027059 (print) | LCCN 2020027060 (ebook) ISBN 9780525516866 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525516873 (ebook)
Subjects: CYAC: Magic—Fiction. | Missing persons—Fiction. | Family life—Brooklyn (New York, N.Y.)—Fiction. | Magicians—Fiction. | African Americans—Fiction. | Brooklyn—New York (State)—Brooklyn—Fiction. | Mystery and detective stories.
Classification: LCC PZ7.1.M67725 Kin 2020 (print) | LCC PZ7.1.M67725 (ebook) DDC [Fic]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020027059
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020027060
Ebook ISBN 9780525516873
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Cover illustration © 2020 by Dan Mumford
Cover design by Lindsey Andrews
pid_prh_5.6.1_c0_r0
To my two favorite lefties
and my fellow Purple Gum Ball.
—C.S.P.
To Frederick.
—H.H. Jr.
To the Black Gangis.
—T.G.
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Map of Echo City
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
My father was famous. He was the greatest magician in Echo City. And he made himself disappear.
Disappear. Like, here one second, gone the next.
Not disappear like he went out for milk and eggs and never came back, like the bullies at school used to say. He wasn’t abducted by aliens or kidnapped by the mob. He doesn’t have another family and he isn’t dead.
He’s alive. I know he is. No one else thinks so, but I know.
Ma says not to sit around waiting for him. That I’ll just be disappointed. She’s afraid I’ll be like him, that I’ll get lost in magic and she’ll lose me like she lost him. I promise her I won’t get lost. Sometimes she believes me.
Sometimes I mean it.
It’s been four years, six months, and seven days since he’s been gone. I was eight years old then. That’s also four years and five months since we left Brooklyn, and today we’re moving back to Pop’s old home in Echo City, Brooklyn. Ma says the James Family Brownstone, aka 52 Ricks Street, will go back to the bank if we don’t. She taught me a nasty-sounding word, foreclosure. It’s like closed but times four and with a ure at the end in case you didn’t know that the word meant business. Ma says it means banks take your house when you run out of money. So now she wants to open up a café, which is her lifelong dream.
But she’s still nervous about moving. She doesn’t say so, only I can tell by how she’s driving. Inching along the hot summer streets and peeking at signs like a cat. Sighing at every red light. Squinting out the window at the street corners and row houses. She keeps tapping angry fingers at Google Maps on her phone screen. She thinks she knows Brooklyn, but it’s been a while.
“I don’t understand,” she says, frustrated. “This thing has us jumping all over the streets.”
Ma pulls the car over and flicks on the hazard lights of our rental SUV. She takes the phone off the dash mount, fingernails clicking on the screen as she stares with photon-beam focus. Mom believes in the power of apps and phone maps to get us places. The one thing she isn’t doing is looking out the windows. But that’s okay, I’m looking out for the both of us.
“How did our blue dot just land us in the middle of the Brooklyn Navy Yard?” she says. “Does it look like we’re in the middle of the Navy Yard? Oh, wait now . . . now we’re in the East River? We are literally in a body of water?”
I’m waiting for the car horns to start blaring at us, like they usually do when we stop and check directions, but there’s no one around at all. It’s like we found this one abandoned block in Brooklyn. I see a stop sign. There’s a word scribbled underneath.
MAGIK
It makes me smile. Brooklyn and magic have always gone together for me. When we lived here with Dad, our lives were full of magic. Tricks, shows, and convos about the all-time great magicians filled our home back then. Before Dad disappeared and we left Brooklyn, and magic along with it. And Ma got so sick and tired of magic she didn’t even want to hear about it anymore.
Then I realize the word magik is under the stop sign for a reason. It’s a message.
STOP
MAGIK
“Well. Would you look at that,” says Mom.
“Yeah. I know. ‘Stop magik’ sounds like good advice to you, right?”
Mom looks at me like she has no idea what I’m talking about.
“No—well, sure, I guess, but King, look—”
Before she can point her finger, I see it.
Looming right there above us like an elephant on the sidewalk.
The Mercury Theater.
We’re quiet for a moment. I’m not sure how Mom will re
act.
I don’t even know how I’m reacting, honestly.
Most times, when you visit a place you haven’t seen in years, it seems small. Not the Mercury. And for sure I’ve grown a ton since I was here. But somehow the old theater is as huge as it ever was. It’s like the dinosaur of buildings. Bigger than everything around it, and from another time.
Mom takes a deep breath and I hear her tremble on the exhale. My heartbeat is jacked up quick like I just hit the fast-forward button a couple times. I remember how sad she was, back when Pop never came home that first night. When she filled out the missing person report. How we held each other and cried.
I wonder if she’s going to hit the gas and drive off, like she did the day we left Echo City. Like when she stashed all the pictures of Pops and his magic shows in a box down in the basement. I wonder if she’s going to make a comment that cuts about magic and fools and leaving things in the past.
But she doesn’t do any of that.
She opens her door and just stands there in the heat. Taking it in.
I hop out of the car and stand next to her. She doesn’t look away from the theater, but her hand finds my shoulder.
There’s a hole in the dome of the theater, with pigeons flying in and out. There are carvings of vines and grapes all up and down the columns and in patterns surrounding the windows, elaborate, with carved birds here and there fluttering at the stems. There are two gargoyles with mouths open and fangs tilted to the sky at the foot of the dome, like they’re trying to shout to the world about the fire. Even now, all these years later, you can see the charred marks of that blaze.
To look at the marquee, you might think the theater was just down for a week between shows. Random letters are scattered around like they’re waiting to be reassembled and make sense. But look at the glass front doors and those rusty chains, and you know that the shows, the crowds, the magic are all a distant memory. The ticket booth is boarded up with cheap plywood that couldn’t even keep out the rain. The underside of the marquee is lined with busted-out light bulbs with shards like the stalactites of a cave.
Ma takes my hand. Crazy how many things she can say with a touch—things like, I miss him, too, We’re going to be okay, and I love you and You still better not be thinking about doing magic.
But she doesn’t say a word. And believe me, Ma can talk when she wants to.
We just stand there, holding hands, at the last place in this world anyone ever saw my father alive.
Mom gives my hand one last squeeze and I understand it’s time to get back in the car and move along.
Only I’m not ready. I’m here—Echo City, Brooklyn, the Mercury Theater—and I think of all the times I’ve fantasized about this place, all the late nights of imagining the theater in EC, BK, like it was some land of make-believe. In school I’d zone out and sketch that dome in the margin of my notebook without realizing. I’d remember the gargoyles in different poses and the vine carvings circling the windows like snakes.
I drift closer to the theater doors and I see my own reflection in the glass. Black eyes like little hovering planets. Long cheeks and a double dimple like Pops. Hair tight at the sides, growing in free twists up top, several inches in the air like a volcano midblast. I’ve got a quiet face, I’ve been told. It stares back from the glass.
“King? King!”
Just a peek, I’m thinking.
Maybe there’s a phantom crowd in there. Maybe the ghosts relive that night we lost him, over and over, like I do in my head. Maybe Pop left me some bread crumbs to follow. Maybe he left me a sign. Something to explain why he had to go.
“King!”
I use my hand like a visor and press the side of my palm against the glass and all the sun vanishes. I can just make out the inside.
Some corner of my mind thinks, Maybe he’s there. Waiting, all these years. To reappear like this was all an elaborate trick, like, ta-da.
It’s dark in there. Crazy dark. And behind all that dark there’s . . . nothing. A whole lot of it.
“King! Get away from there, let’s go!”
“It’s fine, Ma!” I call back. “I’m coming!”
I linger there for a cool second that drags into a cool five seconds and just as I’m ready, sorta, to pull myself away, I think I see something.
A dark figure in a Prince Albert coat.
I nearly leap out of my shoes.
It’s just the outline of his shape in the reflection. It’s a man. But he isn’t in the theater. It’s almost like he’s trapped in the glass itself. I can’t see his face in the dark. Just the coat, buttoned beneath the breast and cut off just before the knees, like something straight out of an old-school magic poster.
Is that him? In a throwback magician getup? Is it Pops?
“King? What is it? Will you get away from there?”
I glance at my mom. Then I press back against the glass, cupping my hands around my eyes to block out the sunlight.
Only, I don’t see anything but the dark anymore. I stare as hard as I can at the nothing until Ma has her hand on my shoulder again, not quite so gentle this time. She spins me around to look at her.
“King, I said let’s go. What are you doing?” Her eyes are wide with worry.
“Nothing, Ma. I just wanted to see.”
“See what?”
See him.
“Nothing,” I say.
“Please don’t tell me I’m making a huge mistake bringing you back here,” she says.
“No, Ma. It’s good. I’m good. We good.”
“Come on, King. Get in the car.”
She looks at me with that side-eye and headshake like, Look at this kid.
Nuts like his father.
As we drive away from the Mercury, I keep staring out the back window. The theater doesn’t appear abandoned anymore—not exactly. Before, I thought the chains kept the world out, but now I think they keep something in. Something alive. As Mom takes a turn and the theater passes out of sight, I think the chains expand for a second like the ribs of a caged beast, breathing.
Now that we’ve found the Mercury, Mom knows exactly how to get to our old brownstone. A few quick turns and we pull up in front of the three-story town house. I haven’t seen this place since I was eight. It’s not how I remember it. Our stoop is overgrown with vines. We used to decorate the windows of the storefront “like a magician’s Macy’s,” Pops would say. Now they’re covered in old newspaper and the glass is cracked like spiderwebs. Tree roots carve up the sidewalk where my cousin Veronica used to school me at hopscotch.
The ground floor is a half-abandoned storefront. A rusty sign reads: SECOND SIGHT. A handwritten note is taped to a soiled window: Possibly on Vacation. There’s a hodgepodge of locks on the door. Dead bolts, latches, chains, and a dozen or so knockers.
Mom sighs. “Well, we got three months to get this operation straight or the whole brownstone belongs to the Bank of Cities,” she says.
“Sure, Ma, I know.”
“And your uncles . . . ,” she starts in. I’ve heard this one before.
“They’re not really good at . . . work,” we say at the same time.
“And ‘Second Sight’?” Mom continues. “Is this a magic shop or are they selling eyeglasses here?”
“It’s a reference,” I say, and regret it right away.
“Do tell.” Mom’s eyes are wide.
I know I shouldn’t explain. Mom gets tired of my magic history lessons. But I want to explain.
I close my eyes and speak extra fast. “Magician Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin’s famous two-person mind-reading trick.”
“Even a non-magic mom like me has heard of Houdini, you know.”
“Not Houdini, it’s Houdin,” I correct her.
“So there’s two Houdies now?” She chuckles.
“Houdini nam
ed himself after Houdin, that’s all. He’s only the father of modern magic.”
“Why, thank you for the Kingsplanation.” Her voice is dry.
“Yeah.” I shrug. “I know stuff, is all.”
“Yeah, you sure do. You even know a ton of stuff that isn’t about magic. I’d love to hear about that stuff, too, sometime, how does that sound?”
“Sure, Ma.” I do this sorta shrug-nod thing that Ma says looks like I got the hiccups.
“Welp, might as well try these knockers,” she says, and taps one of the half dozen.
No answer.
I try my luck with a lion-faced knocker. The door rattles rat-tat-tat, with still no answer.
Ma spots a doorbell behind some overgrown ivy. But before her finger can find the button, the door swings open.
We’re looking at the point of a sword blade.
Ma gasps.
A burnished-metal medieval helmet with grim eye slits glares from behind the curved blade.
“Aunt Nina?” a muffled voice echoes inside the helmet. “King?”
The warrior lowers the sword and raises the helmet visor.
It’s my fourteen-year-old cousin, Veronica. Her soft brown eyes gaze at us. She pries the helmet from her head, which takes some effort, and shakes her hair out. Buzzed on one side and long the rest of the way around. Black with ash-blond streaks at the edges.
“I’m so sorry, I forgot you were coming today!”
“Veronica, if I may ask, you forgot we were coming, and you greeted us as if we were . . . customers?”
Veronica chuckles. “Oh. Those. Figured you were intruders. But customers—interesting. Suppose that’s theoretically possible. Anyway, come in, come in! Experience the wonder,” she says, oozing sarcasm.
My eyes adjust to the gloom as we enter a small room with red satin walls. It’s all dusty. More like a museum than a shop. Masks and wands are set out on display. Shelves are lined with magic boxes, gag tricks, ornate coins, and top hats. I see a tuxedoed mannequin holding a fanned-out deck of cards. There’s a set of fancy canes with brass handles in the shapes of different animal heads. Two taxidermy owls are mounted one on either side of a shelf: one perched, one in flight. There’s photos of famous magicians on the walls. I recognize Dad’s hero, Black Herman, as well as Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin and the Martinka brothers, who opened the most famous magic shop in NYC. But this place is no Martinka & Company.