The Magician's Lie

by Greer Macallister

  “Yes. I need magic.” It’s a relief to admit it, to say it so nakedly. In front of anyone else, he’d be embarrassed. In this way, as in so many others, she is an exception.

  “Because science has its limits.”

  “Yes.”

  There is no emotion in her voice, he realizes, and it worries him. It’s as if she’s reading someone else’s words from someone else’s script. There was passion in every word when she was telling her story, but now she tells the facts: bald, cold. “Magic has limits too.”

  “Don’t be coy,” he says. They’re so close now. He’s so close. She can’t hold out on him; she can’t. “I said it’s a favor, and it is, but I’m not asking you just to do it out of the goodness of your heart. I’m asking it as a trade.”

  “I understand perfectly. If I heal you, you’ll set me free.”

  “Yes.”

  She sounds almost disappointed. “So I’m telling you all this for nothing. My story makes no difference to you.”

  “It’s a fascinating story. Truly.” He wants to put his hand on her arm but doesn’t dare. He can only hope his words will be enough. “But how could I care about your life more than my own? That’s what I’m asking you to give me. My life.”

  The moment she waits before answering him is days, months, years long. It stretches on far longer than he thinks he can bear.

  Then she finally raises her blue-and-brown eyes, meets his gaze, and says in an almost whisper, “Would that I could.”

  “But you can! It’s easy! Heal me. Draw the bullet out and you’re free.” He raises his hand, snaps his fingers. The sound in the small, bare room is as loud as a gunshot. “Nothing could be simpler.”

  She speaks slowly. The quiet night around them has never been quieter. It seems hard for her to choose her words.

  “Virgil, when I—struck out at Ray, cut his throat—after the fire. You remember, I told you exactly what happened. I tried to heal him. It didn’t work.”

  “You were in a rush,” he says without the slightest pause. He’s already thought of every reason. “You didn’t take the time to do it properly. And you hated him anyway. Why would it work on him? You didn’t really want him to get better.”

  She shakes her head and leans slightly forward in the chair, intent. “I’d never been sure about the limits of my gift. After that time with Ray, I suspected I’d found them.”

  “That was just—”

  “Hush,” she says, not unkindly. “So I tried it out. People are always getting injured on the road—not through any acts of mine. It’s just dangerous to be moving all that equipment, especially in a rush. Since they were my family, my company, it wasn’t odd for me to insist on taking a look at their injuries. So I’d put my hands on them and whisper a little something under my breath. They thought it was a prayer. It was a wish.”

  She takes a moment, squares her shoulders.

  He has to prompt her. “And…?” Even then, he trails off. He both does and doesn’t want to hear the answer, to know where the story goes. If it were good news, she wouldn’t be so slow to tell it.

  “I’ve tried to heal broken fingers, bruised ribs, bloody toenails, every injury large and small and in-between. It never worked.”

  “But you said—bruises, cuts, broken bones—”

  “My bruises. My cuts. My bones.”

  The air goes out of his lungs.

  She swallows, as if she doesn’t want to say what comes next, but she goes on anyway. “I can’t do it, Virgil. I can’t help you. My own body, I can do anything. Someone else’s body, I’m powerless.”

  He feels like he’s fallen from a great height. This must be how she felt, being thrown from the hayloft and crashing to the floor of the barn all those years ago. Like there isn’t anything to breathe, and nothing to breathe it with.

  “I’m sorry,” she says, but she doesn’t sound sorry, not at all, and her indifference is what finally leads him to reach out and put his hands on her.

  He puts both hands on her shoulders and shoves her backward, and the chair tips over with a crash. The sound echoes off the wall.

  The crash of the chair is the only sound. She says nothing. Doesn’t cry, doesn’t scream, doesn’t move.

  She lies still.

  For a moment, he’s afraid he’s killed her. Any normal person would have screamed. She just lies there on her back, the chair underneath, her eyes open and staring up. The only other woman he’s ever seen lying on her back is Iris, and the sight disturbs him so much he reaches down and rolls the magician over on her side and the chair with her.

  She still makes no noise, and he watches her for a moment, watches the side of her neck, until he’s sure he can see the pulse beating there under the skin. She’s alive. The noise he heard, the cracking noise, wasn’t her skull. Thank God.

  “I’m sorry,” he says.

  In a very small voice, she says, “I understand.”

  When he bends down next to her, behind her, he sees what’s happened. The middle bar of the chair has snapped off. That was the noise, the sound of wood snapping. Both pairs of handcuffs were laced through it, and now they aren’t. She is barely restrained at all. He grabs the chain of the handcuffs in his fist before she notices that her wrists can move farther than they have in hours.

  “I’ll right you,” he says, as if she weren’t completely free of the chair, as if nothing at all has changed.

  He takes her silence as assent. He bends down and picks them up together, her body and the chair, to right them again. He can feel her heartbeat against his shoulder. He smells the sweat of her neck, an earthy, salty smell, not the same as his wife’s, and that tickling scent of citrus from earlier. His body holds hers in place, and his breath stirs her hair. She remains silent.

  When he settles her feet and the chair’s feet both squarely back down on the floor, he releases everything but the handcuff chain, which he grips so hard his knuckles are white. Luckily, she can’t see his knuckles.

  “It looks like this one has been cutting into your wrist,” he says. “I’ll fix that.”

  He unlocks the right wrist, laces the chain through one of the remaining bars, and relocks it in place. He hustles to do the same with the other set of cuffs, unlocking it from the right wrist, lacing the chain behind the bar, then locking it to the wrist again. Now she’s set, back in two pairs of handcuffs holding her tight to the chair, fully secure.

  Her silence and lack of resistance since the fall begin to worry him. It’s getting later, and he’s getting more vulnerable. He’s sure she must sense that. Maybe she hit her head harder than he thought.

  “Are you all right?” he asks. He comes around to the front of the chair so he can look into her eyes when she answers. He’s seen a man kicked in the head by a horse so hard his eyes never did both look in the same direction again.

  She locks her eyes on his. They are the same. Three-quarters blue, one-quarter brown, a strong fierce gaze, boring into him like she can see into his brain. He doesn’t know what she sees there.

  “There’s really only one question. Do you believe me?” she asks.

  He’s tempted to make her spell it out, but he knows what she means. The murder. She’s been telling him all night she’s innocent. All night, he’s been resisting that fact. “I want to.”

  “But you’re not sure.”

  “No.”

  “Lies are harder than the truth,” she says. “They have a way of falling apart. So tell me. Have I contradicted myself yet? Slipped up? Have you caught me in a lie?”

  “Not yet.”

  She raises her chin. “You remain hopeful. I can tell.”

  “Well,” he says, deciding to tell the truth. “Your story is awful. You were abused and attacked, terribly. And it all ends in murder. So yes. I hope it’s not true.”

  She seems to smile a little at
that, in the midst of her sadness. “I wish it weren’t. But this is life, and when bad things come to us, there isn’t much choice. You survive them or you don’t.”

  “And you hope to survive this one.”

  “Dear God, yes,” she says intently, “I do. I do.”

  He doesn’t know what to say to that. When he doesn’t reassure her, she seems disappointed. But it would be hypocritical, given his role. Hours ago, she asked if he would be her executioner. He denied it, but she was right. If he turns her in, he might as well use his own two hands to fashion the noose. Don a black hood and be done with it.

  He wants to know the truth. He needs to know.

  He circles around behind her. She doesn’t even lift her head to look. The night has been long. And whatever happens, one way or another, it’s almost over.

  He inspects her hands and says, “You’re not wearing the ring.”

  “No.”

  “There was no ring, was there? Just one of your many inventions. You haven’t been able to prove a single lick of your story all night, and this is no different.”

  She says, “In the valise. The muff. Put your hands in it.”

  He feels both foolish and excited as he does what she says. He retrieves the muff, which appears to be rabbit fur on the outside and silk on the inside, and positions it on the desk. Of course, he’s never placed his hands in something like this before and is surprised to find it isn’t just a hollow tube but has a shaped lining that draws tight around each hand. The fingertips of his left hand strike something round and cool.

  Gingerly he draws out the object. A ring. Exactly as she described it. A beautiful blue stone with a brown flaw. Eerily like her eye.

  The feeling that floods him is overwhelming. If her story is true, if the man she loved was neither her husband nor her victim, that gives him something to hope for. He doesn’t want her story to just be the old sad tale of a man and woman whose love turned to poison. He wants something better, something more.

  “Arden,” he says. “Please. If you’ll finish the story, we can settle this, and I can go home to my wife, who you’re so curious about.”

  “To Iris.”

  “Yes, to Iris.” That’s all he wants. To go home to Iris, as soon as this is over. To be done with this and return to his life, however much of it is left to him. He needs to be home. As soon as the sun comes up. He’s been away too long. He’s spent too much time chasing an impossible dream of erasing what’s happened to him, when what he needs to do is accept it and move forward.

  “Well, I’m truly sorry to keep you from her. But I have my limits. I won’t admit what I didn’t do.”

  “But now you’re getting into the right part of the story. How you got a husband. Tell me how you came to hate him. And then, how you planned and decided on murder. Was he unfaithful? Were you in a rage? How did it happen?” He doesn’t add now that I know it matters. Most of the night, he’s been planning, hoping, thinking he knew how this would all end: healing, and release. Now everything has changed. Now he needs to be a police officer again. Not the Virgil Holt who’s terrified of death coming upon him without warning; instead, a man of the law following the rules, searching for the truth.

  “The answer is the same,” she says. “I didn’t kill him.”

  “Then tell me that, if it’s true, but tell me the whole of it,” he says, softening his voice. “Maybe you didn’t swing the ax, but you were there. Maybe you only saw it. Were you there when he was murdered? Did you watch your husband die?”

  “Clyde was with me every night until he wasn’t,” she said. “And that’s when it happened.”

  “The murder?”

  “No,” she says. “Worse.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  1905

  Resurrections

  Three weeks before the end of the circuit, it was time for Clyde to go back to New York for a few days to work with the new kid he’d hired for the practical work and get everything settled up right. I had three nights in a row booked in Savannah, challenging but hardly outlandish. I had gotten so used to having Clyde around. I missed him too much now that he was gone again. I wasn’t sleeping well—I was restless, constantly waking up over and over to find only minutes gone by—but a couple of fingers of brandy helped with that.

  On the third night in Savannah, I was looking forward to my brandy. I was exhausted from the demanding routine and from the lack of good sleep, and I wrapped my linen robe tightly around my tired body and poured myself a good heavy glass, and all was well until I heard knuckles rap against the door, which I hadn’t yet locked for the night.

  “Yes?”

  I expected Doreen, who had stepped into a certain role as my proxy most nights, accepting bouquets of flowers and sending away unwelcome visitors, but it was not her voice that answered. No voice answered. Instead the handle turned, and someone stepped up into the car and swiftly closed the door behind him, and quickly it was already too late.

  The lamplight glinted off his pale hair. He looked almost angelic, with the light hitting him like this, at this angle. But he was earthbound enough, a sandy-haired man in a suit slightly rumpled from travel, with a grin that would have looked cheerful and welcome on any other face. He paused with his back pressed against the door and waited. Perhaps he was waiting for me to panic, to scream. Instead I only stared.

  It couldn’t be him. It couldn’t. It wasn’t.

  It was.

  “Ada,” he said in a new voice, one with a hoarse scratch to it, where there had been none before.

  The shock of seeing Ray alive and well and here froze my blood, and I was helpless.

  “So,” I said, but no other words would come. I remained at the table and sipped at the brandy to wet my dry mouth, still somehow hoping that this wasn’t happening to me.

  “So,” he echoed me. “Offer your cousin a drink?”

  “No,” I said and didn’t dispute him on semantics. I took another sip instead.

  It was impossible. He couldn’t be here. It could be a look-alike, or a brother, or a bad dream. I had seen enough illusions to know things weren’t always as they seemed. But it was perfectly him, his hair longer than it had been in Chicago, the face just a little more worn. And I saw the mark on his throat, a sharp straight line. I knew I was awake by the spiraling dread in my belly, too insistent for the dream world.

  I had killed him, hadn’t I? There had been so much blood. I remembered how it gushed, how my hands were slick with it, how neither pressure nor magic would keep it from flowing. How I wished so hard to save him but was certain I’d failed. Yet here he was. Not a facsimile, not a look-alike, not a dream. Ray, in the flesh.

  There was only one possible explanation. I hadn’t killed him after all. The wound had been deep and terrible, but no matter how close he’d come to death, he hadn’t crossed over. His heart hadn’t stopped. His body hadn’t gone cold. Of all the bodies that covered the floor of the storeroom next to the Iroquois, left for dead, one had risen.

  In some small way, that should have made me glad, I supposed, not to be the murderer I’d thought myself for more than a year. But I couldn’t rejoice at seeing him walking and talking, not in the least. If I hadn’t taken his life, it seemed certain he would take mine. It couldn’t end any other way. The railcar was a prison now, just another box from which there was no escape. I had never wished more that I could be Houdini.

  I desperately needed to think of something to say. If I could keep him talking, maybe he wouldn’t touch me. If he touched me, I would fall apart.

  He stared at me, seemingly waiting for more words. I didn’t have any. I didn’t have anything. I had my brandy, which I drank, and that was all. I remained in the chair as if welded to it.

  While I drank, Ray finally stepped away from the door, though we both knew he was still close enough to lunge back in an instant. He reached
over to the sink where the straight razor sat—Clyde had forgotten it there, and I hadn’t wanted to touch it—and placed it on the table between us. I knew how strong he was. He didn’t need the razor at all. Alone in the private train car where no one could hear me scream, all it would take was his bare hands.

  “You don’t scare me,” I said, which was a bald lie. He terrified me. He always had.

  “You don’t think I’ll hurt you? I’ve done it before.”

  “You have.”

  “And you’re not scared?”

  “If you hurt me, it hurts, and then it goes away,” I said, chin up, fierce. “I’ll survive it.”

  “You’re not the only one I could hurt. There’s that boy.”

  “He’s not a boy.” A wave of cold crashed over me. I hadn’t immediately thought of the threat to Clyde, but of course, my tormentor had.

  “Whatever he is.” Ray sneered, stepping closer. “Your manager. Your lover. The slender one with the dark hair and the fine eyeglasses. The one who rubs his thumb along the bottom of your spine when he thinks no one is watching. The one who lives in New York, in rented rooms on the second floor of a house facing Jane Street. You care about him. And if you don’t do what I say, I will kill him.”

  How long had he been following us, stalking us, watching, learning? I thought I was scared before, but when he threatened Clyde, all the fear before was just like a shadow of a hint of fear. This fear hurt more than being thrown twenty feet down from a hayloft. More than the guilt of surviving a fire in which many better people had perished. More than any broken bone. It hurt the most because I didn’t know when it would end. It might never.

  If he knew where Clyde lived, all bets were off. Because I had no doubt at all that he would follow through. I felt the panic set my bones alight then, worrying that perhaps he’d already hurt Clyde and this was all just for show, but I made myself think like him. Of course his ultimate goal wasn’t to hurt my lover; it was to hurt me. He would give me a choice, because the consequences would be so much worse for me afterward if I knew I’d had the power to choose. Every way he’d hurt me before would be like a bee sting compared to how I’d feel if Clyde were killed, knowing I was the one responsible.