by Rucker Moses
Mint raises his hands like he means no harm. “No goose. No chase. No clown. No jokes.” His voice is steady, like how he spoke to his crew back at the Mercury, Smoke them out. Like it was nothing. Like talking to us now is nothing.
“What do you want, Mint?” asks Veronica in a bored tone.
Mint fixes his eyes on me. “My boss wants you,” he says.
“Who’s your boss?”
“You’ll find out when you come with me.”
Veronica and Too Tall fold their arms like a pair of bodyguards.
“That don’t cut it, chief,” says Too Tall.
“Do better,” says Veronica.
“Can he speak for himself?” asks Mint.
“He can. But we’re, like, his lawyers on this side of King’s County,” says Tall.
“Why doesn’t your boss come here himself?” I say. “And why do you have a boss anyway? Is bugging me, like, your job somehow?”
Mint holds out his hands. “I got no answers for you. I’m just an escort today.”
“Mint, I know we barely know each other,” says Veronica. “Just around the neighborhood here and there. But take it from me. You look terrible.”
Mint blinks like a lizard and looks at me.
Tall says to me under his breath, “He’s bad news, King. Bet you anything he wants to take you to that creepy spot on Torrini Boulevard. My cousin warned me not to go near that house. Says kids go in and don’t ever come back out.”
“What does your boss want?” I ask.
“Says the note should speak for itself,” answers Mint.
“Well, if the boss is not here, why’d the note say to come here?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” he asks, and then turns to admire the mural, with the porkpie hat on the sloping grass. “Boss thought you’d recognize this.”
I keep my poker face as flat as his tone. Reveal nothing.
“You painted this?” asks Too Tall.
“Me? Do I look like that freak?” Mint chuckles without smiling. His laughter sounds strange, like trying to start a car when the engine won’t turn over. “May not be CCTV, but it’s as close as we get.”
Too Tall is puzzled. “CC . . . TV?” he repeats, squinting at the mural.
“If you Einsteins need it spelled out for you, take a class. I’m here for Kingston. You coming or not?”
Veronica holds up a finger in front of Mint’s face like an exclamation point. “’Scuse us. We need a word with our client. King, sidebar.”
She hooks one of my arms and one of Tall’s and takes us out of Mint’s earshot. She whispers, “Okay. You’re not seriously considering going with him, are you?”
One look at me and she knows the answer.
“King!” says Tall. “For one, you’re crazy.”
“I know this is all a bit creepy,” I say.
“There has got to be a creepier word than creepy to describe how creepy this all is,” says Veronica.
“What’s for two?” I ask Tall.
“Huh?”
“You said, ‘King, for one, you’re crazy.’ So what’s ‘for two’?” I say.
“For two, this is all crazy!” says Tall. “I mean, that dude’s neck scar over there? Looks like somebody went and killed that dude but he forgot to die! That could be this ‘boss,’ for all we know.”
“Right—for all we know. But we don’t know. I came this far, Tall, I need to find out. Listen, if I don’t come back—”
“What?” says Veronica.
“I’m saying, if I don’t come back—”
“Oh no. That’s not how this works,” she says, and doubles back to Mint. “Okay, green eyes. King is coming. But so are we. So you and your boss got to deal. Deal?”
“I’ll have to ask,” says Mint.
“Fine, ask your supervisor for permission. But if you want King, you get us, too.”
* * *
An old three-story building stands out on Torrini Boulevard, separated by narrow alleyways on either side from the other buildings. Usually in Echo City, the buildings line up right next to one another, but not this one. There’s a yard out front with yellow grass, dirt patches, and crunchy leaves that’ve laid here dead since last fall. There’s an overgrown driveway and a car that probably hasn’t been used in decades, but it looks like it’s been centuries. The metal wheels bite the dirt and the tires droop in the dead grass like puddles.
I hear Too Tall’s lungs heaving by my ear. I look up at the house and I almost lose my nerve. We approach the front door. It’s huge and towers over even Too Tall. There’s a crystal mounted atop the entrance. I point to the crystal and look at Tall. He nods. It’s just like the crystal he had back at the theater. I wonder if he’s still got it, but I don’t want to ask in front of Mint.
There are white columns on either side like a pair of fangs. The white paint is chipped and the panels are decaying. Ivy covers the building like some tentacled monster. Mint pounds a fist on the door and slips inside. We shoot nervous glances at one another.
“Thank you guys,” I whisper, and part of me wishes they weren’t here. I’m glad they are, but if anything bad happens to them? I’d never forgive myself.
The door opens up like a slow yawn and Mint’s voice tells us to “Come in.”
We take uneasy steps through the gloomy archway. It smells like wet, rotten wood mixed with old washed-up-actress perfume.
Urma Tan is at the top of the stairway in front of us. Maestro’s assistant. The one who went through the Mirror that night at the Mercury.
Last time I saw her was the last time I saw my dad.
My mouth drops open. I can’t believe my eyes.
She should not be here. She should be in the Realm, with Maestro and my father.
But she is here. It’s her, there’s no mistaking. She looks older, of course, but it’s her. Same pale eyes and pale skin. Her hair is all the way white now. She takes a step down the stairs in a nightgown and it looks like she’s floating.
“The She-Wizard . . . ,” Too Tall whispers.
“Is that . . . ,” asks Veronica, her question trailing off.
“Welcome,” Urma says, and extends a hand, her long, pale fingernails like a drawn blade.
“You—you’re Urma Tan,” I manage to say.
I give her hand an awkward half squeeze.
“I am.”
“But . . . you’re not supposed to be here. You’re supposed to be gone, with my dad,” I say.
“Hello, Kingston. Veronica.” She takes the hand of my cousin, who also looks dumbfounded. “And who is this?”
Too Tall introduces himself.
“Thank you all for coming. I’m sure you have questions, and I’m happy to explain. Come,” she says. “Have a seat.”
Mint leaves us as Urma leads the way into a sitting room that feels like no one has sat in for years. There’s a thick shag carpet and a couple of couches, and all of it is beige. The couch cushions look comfortable but have these springs that stick you where you sit.
“Some tea?” she offers. There’s a little teapot on a silver tray on the coffee table. I feel like I’m at my grandma’s. Too Tall looks at it like it’s a tray full of rat poison.
“No thanks. Um, where’s my dad?” I ask.
She purses her thin lips. “I don’t know,” she says with regret in her voice.
“But you both went through that Mirror,” I say.
“Kingston, I think you ought to listen to what I have to say. Then maybe you’ll understand where I’ve been and what I’m doing here. Tell me, first, what do you know about the Realm?”
Too Tall gives me a wary look that says, Don’t give anything away.
I almost say I know my dad is there—thinking, I don’t know much else, I don’t know what he’s doing there, or what actually is there—
but Veronica cuts me off.
“Wait, King.” She turns to Urma Tan. “Lady, with all due respect, you asked him here. You’re the one that went to the Realm. You slipped him that note somehow, into his Realm hand. Neat trick and all, but you’re the one that should be telling us about the Realm.”
“Fair point,” says Urma, clicking her teeth. “It’s hard to know where to begin.”
“Maybe start with how you got back to our reality?” I say.
“One can get from the Realm and back with a portal, like Maestro’s Mirror. Creating a portal is difficult, but not impossible.”
“And I can do it? I can bring my dad back?” I ask, trying to keep the excitement out of my voice.
“Yes,” she says. “And I can help you.”
“How?” asks Veronica. “And why? I mean, what’s in it for you?”
“I can help you make the portal. That requires some doing. And as for what’s in it for me, well, that’s a longer story. In order to understand why I need your help, you must understand the nature of the Realm.”
“Okay, so what is it?” I ask.
“And don’t just say it will wreck reality as we know it if we open a portal,” says Veronica. “We get it.”
“I would never tell you that,” says Urma. “In order to understand the Realm, first you must understand the nature of magic. You see, real magic can do anything you could possibly dream. Only, magic doesn’t dream. It doesn’t imagine, or think, or anything we people do. It can’t. Magic is not people. However, it likes people. Without people, who would care about magic? Without people, who would dream up the impossible? Without people, magic doesn’t really know what to do. So you could say magic is dependent on people. And in that way, the Realm is very suggestible.” Urma turns her pale eyes to me. I feel like I’m under a hot lamp. “When one opens a rift between worlds, the Realm absorbs all it sees. And copies it. Creates an echo. A moment in time that lives forever. Does that make sense?”
Veronica and Tall look about as lost as I feel.
“Um, sort of,” I say. “So it’s, like, a copy of our world? With, like, places and people and things?”
“And Not Not Ray’s?” asks Too Tall. “I mean, Poppa James gotta be eating something.”
I have to admit, it’s nice to think my father might be in a place that resembles our reality. I realize that I’ve been imagining him sort of floating in a netherworld, with solar systems and shooting stars and empty space like he’s alone in the universe.
“When a rift opens, the Realm copies. So if there’s a rift near the pizza place, then yes. There’s pizza.”
“And you were there?” says Veronica.
“How did you get back?” I ask.
Urma stands. She opens her robe and reveals a crystal dangling around her neck by a thin chain. The crystal is big like costume jewelry with a blue light glowing in its center like a cold star.
Too Tall slaps a hand over his mouth. It looks just like the crystal he found under the stage.
“This may be hard to believe, but here’s the truth. I know the Realm because the Realm made me,” says Urma Tan. “I’m not the Urma you think I am. I’m not from this world.”
“Huh?” comes out my mouth.
“Um, excuse me?” says V.
My uncle’s words come back to me. Say there was a fish, ended up on our side of the glass . . .
“The night of the fire at the Mercury, the Urma of your world went through the Mirror and to the Realm with Maestro and your father.” She shrugs and paces like a cat. “That wasn’t me. I’m a different Urma Tan.”
“Wait, what?” I sputter.
Veronica folds her arms. “Does that not-of-this-world bit work on Mint and those followers of yours?”
“I’m too old to play games with children,” Urma says. “I’m too weak, and I don’t have the time. Remember you asked if the Realm had people in it? Well, it does. I was one of them. I’m not the your-world Urma Tan. That Urma is there, somewhere, best of luck to her. I’m a copy.” She flashes jazz hands. “Ta-da.”
“You’re saying that wasn’t even you onstage four years ago?” I ask.
“Correct. We just did the teleportation trick, and I was hiding.”
The three of us are stunned silent. I don’t even know where to begin with this one.
“Maestro led me to this reality to use me in his magic act,” she says like that should explain everything. Then she sees how unconvinced we are. “I know. It’s a lot. I have something to show you. It might help you understand.”
Urma opens a pair of cabinet doors. There’s an old television set there, and a stack of homemade DVDs. She puts one in the DVD player and pokes a couple buttons on the remote.
There’s a stage. It looks like the Mercury before the fire. But I can tell it’s not that night. The lighting is different, like it’s a matinee. Maestro waltzes out to rounds of applause in his spooky, mirrored magic-man mask. Urma is behind him. She’s wearing black elbow-length gloves, a white halter top, and a bow tie.
“I look good, don’t I?” says Urma in the living room, watching the screen. “Well, she looks good, anyways. We were identical.”
She hits the fast-forward button. Maestro’s act flies by on the screen. He buzzes around the stage doing illusions with metal rings, works the crowd, gets back onstage, does card tricks with a volunteer from the audience, shows him a card, pretty standard stuff.
Urma clicks a button and the DVD plays at regular speed for this next part. I recognize the setup right away; they did this trick the night of the fire.
Urma, on the stage, wheels out a tall cabinet with two doors that stands a head taller than Maestro. There’s no chatter, just instrumental music that buzzes heavy with bass. Urma moves half like a dancer and half like she’s showing cars at a car show. She wheels another cabinet out that’s identical to the first one. Then a third cabinet that she sets between the other two. Maestro gestures for the audience to watch carefully as he enters the first cabinet on the left. Urma joins him. She pulls a rope from inside somewhere and ties Maestro’s wrists up. Maestro pretends to struggle. Urma closes the cabinet doors on him. Then she steps inside the cabinet in the center and waves her arms around “magically,” and the cabinets to either side of her rise off the ground (on wires; I can see the wires). She picks a white sheet up off the floor and holds it high so you can’t see her. She shakes the sheet once, twice. And reveals . . . Maestro. He’s standing there now, twirling the sheet, and posing in the center cabinet to applause. Urma is gone. He points to the first cabinet, where he was just tied up. The doors fly open and it’s empty. He points to the third cabinet, to his left. The doors fly open and there’s Urma. Posing. Cheesing.
“Voilà,” Urma says, pausing the DVD as her old self takes a bow. “Teleportation. Maestro’s best trick. None of the old magicians could figure out how he did it.”
“Wait, so you’re saying that’s you? And there’s another Urma on the stage somewhere?” I ask.
“We would switch roles. Sometimes I would be the one hiding behind the cabinet. Sometimes I’d be the girl getting the applause.”
“But you could be look-alikes,” Veronica says. “You could even be her twin for all we know. I’m saying, how does this all mean you’re from the Realm?”
“My dear, I didn’t believe it myself. When I first met the other Urma, I even thought I was the original Urma, and she the copy. But Maestro showed me it’s true.”
“Wait, so you’re saying there’s copies of everything in our world?” asks Too Tall. “Like, there’s a Realm Kingston, there’s a Realm me?”
“Certainly.”
Too Tall is trying to process all this. “So it’s a multiverse sort of situation?”
“Come on,” says V. “You’re not buying this, are you?”
“I have no reason to lie to you, Veronica,�
� says Urma.
“I bet you do,” V shoots back. “I bet you have some reason you lured my cousin to this house.”
“You’re right, Veronica. There is a reason I brought you here. And a reason I’m telling you everything I know.” Urma holds the crystal around her neck in her hands. “Because I can’t live without this.”
“I found one of those under the stage,” says Tall. “What is it?”
“This crystal, like me, is of the Realm. It enables me to live in your reality. Without it, I would wither up and expire. It’s like pure Realm energy, concentrated. It’s made of the stuff of my world, and it keeps me going.”
“Okay,” I say. “But what’s that got to do with me?”
“When Maestro first brought me to this world, he had this box. It was a small box, made of wood, but enchanted in such a way that it could reach the Realm without opening a rift. Maestro would put a crystal inside and it would come out full of Realm energy. It’s a small thing, but it means everything to me.”
“And this box . . . ,” I say.
She looks back at the television like she’s remembering something. “It turned out it was Preston’s box, and he took it back. The box you found at the Mercury, Kingston.”
“Okay,” says Veronica, losing her patience. “So you want the box King found. Is that it? Well, you can’t have it. Because we don’t even have it. Can we go now?”
“You don’t have it?” Urma asks with a nervous chuckle. She digs her nails against the crystal around her neck. “But I’m sure you can get it, no?”
“Wait, I don’t understand,” I say. “If you need these crystals to survive, what have you been doing since my dad disappeared? I mean, you haven’t had the box this whole time.”
“It hasn’t been easy. When Maestro opened the portal the night of the fire, that rift created heaps of crystal. I gathered them. I’ve kept them. There’s crystals all around us, in this house. I’m surviving, but barely. I haven’t left the house since that day four years ago, Kingston. I need that box to live. If you would bring it to me, I will show you how to retrieve your father from the Realm.”