Illusion
Peretti - Novels [8]
Frank Peretti
Howard Books (2012)
Rating: ★★★★☆
Tags: Christian
Christianttt
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Dane and Mandy, a popular magic act for forty years, are tragically separated by a car wreck that claims Mandy’s life—or so everyone thinks. Even as Dane mourns and tries to rebuild his life without her, Mandy, supposedly dead, awakes in the present as the nineteen-year-old she was in 1970. Distraught and disoriented in what to her is the future, she is confined to a mental ward until she discovers a magical ability to pass invisibly through time and space to escape. Alone in a strange world, she uses her mysterious powers to eke out a living, performing magic on the streets and in a quaint coffee shop.
Hoping to discover an exciting new talent, Dane ventures into the coffee shop and is transfixed by the magic he sees, illusions that even he, a seasoned professional, cannot explain. But more than anything, he is emotionally devastated by this teenager who has never met him, doesn’t know him, is certainly not in love with him, but is in every respect identical to the young beauty he first met and married some forty years earlier.
They begin a furtive relationship as mentor and protégée, but even as Dane tries to sort out who she really is and she tries to understand why she is drawn to him, they are watched by secretive interests who not only possess the answers to Mandy’s powers and misplacement in time but also the roguish ability to decide what will become of her.
Frank Peretti has crafted a rich, rewarding story of love and life, loss and restoration, full of twists and mystery. Exceptionally well written, Illusion will soon prove another Peretti classic.
Review
“Frank Peretti is a master storyteller. His novels stay with you a lifetime, drawing you closer to God and the truth in His word.”
— Karen Kingsbury, New York Times bestselling author
"Frank Peretti kicked open the doors that all of us Christian novelists are passing through today. We owe him a huge debt."
—Jerry B. Jenkins, author, The Left Behind Series
"Frank Peretti may just be the master storyteller of our time—using modern metaphors and fresh images, this remarkable writer helps us visualize the unseen world in ways we never quite pictured before."
—Joni Eareckson Tada
"Frank Peretti is a master storyteller. He has a way of using fiction to draw our attention to the very real spiritual world around us. His stories are modern day classics and I can't wait to see the impact Illusion has on readers!"
—Michael W. Smith
About the Author
Frank Peretti is the author of This Present Darkness, Piercing the Darkness, The Oath, and many more. There are more than 12 million copies of his novels in print. He lives with his wife in the Western United States.
DANE AND MANDY, a popular magic act for forty years, are tragically separated by a car wreck that claims Mandy’s life—or so everyone thinks. Even as Dane mourns and tries to rebuild his life without her, Mandy, supposedly dead, awakes in the present as the nineteen-year-old she was in 1970. Distraught and disoriented in what to her is the future, she is confined to a mental ward until she discovers a magical ability to pass invisibly through time and space to escape. Alone in a strange world, she uses her mysterious powers to eke out a living, performing magic on the streets and in a quaint coffee shop.
Hoping to discover an exciting new talent, Dane ventures into the coffee shop and is transfixed by the magic he sees, illusions that even he, a seasoned professional, cannot explain. But more than anything, he is emotionally devastated by this teenager who has never met him, doesn’t know him, is certainly not in love with him, but is in every respect identical to the young beauty he first met and married some forty years earlier.
They begin a furtive relationship as mentor and protégée, but even as Dane tries to sort out who she really is and she tries to understand why she is drawn to him, they are watched by secretive interests who not only possess the answers to Mandy’s powers and misplacement in time but also the roguish ability to decide what will become of her.
Frank Peretti has crafted a rich, rewarding story of love and life, loss and restoration, full of twists and mystery. Exceptionally well written, Illusion will soon prove another Peretti classic.
With more than 12 million copies of his novels in print, FRANK PERETTI is nothing short of a publishing phenomenon and has been called “America’s hottest Christian novelist.” As a youngster in Seattle, he regularly gathered the neighborhood children for animated storytelling sessions. After graduating from high school, he began playing banjo with a local bluegrass group. He and his wife, Barbara, were married in 1972, and Peretti soon moved from touring with a pop band to launching a modest Christian music ministry. He later studied English, screenwriting, and film at UCLA, and while there began a novel he would continue to develop as he assisted his father in pastoring a small Assemblies of God church. In 1983, he gave up his pastoring position and worked in construction and then a local ski factory to make ends meet. It was during this time that he completed his novel This Present Darkness, the book that would catapult him into the public eye. Peretti’s two spiritual warfare novels, This Present Darkness (1986) and Piercing the Darkness(1988), captivated readers, together selling more than 3.5 million copies. Frank and Barbara live a quiet and creative life in the timberlands of northern Idaho.
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JACKET DESIGN & PHOTOGRAPHY BY KIRK DOUPONCE/DOGEARED DESIGN
AUTHOR PHOTOGRAPH © RUSS HARRINGTON
COPYRIGHT © 2012 SIMON & SCHUSTER
ILLUSION
Howard Books
A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2012 by Frank Peretti
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Howard Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.
First Howard Books hardcover edition March 2012
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Peretti, Frank E.
Illusion : a novel / Frank Peretti.—1st Howard Books hardcover ed.
p.cm.
1. Husband and wife—Nevada—Las Vegas—Fiction. 2. Accidents—Fiction. 3. Hallucinations and illusions—Fiction. 4. Psychological fiction. I. Title.
PS3566.E691317145 2012
813’.54—dc22
2011040115
ISBN 978-1-4391-9267-2
ISBN 978-1-4516-1735-1 (eBook)
All scripture quotations are from King James Version of the Bible. Public domain.
To Barbara Jean, my beloved for forty years.
Only the Lord God could have brought me such a woman.
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Contents
* * *
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
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
A Note from the Author
Acknowledgments
ILLUSION
chapter
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1
Mandy was gone. She went quietly, her body still, and Dane was at her bedside to see her go. The ICU physician said it was inevitable, only a matter of minutes once they removed the ventilator, and so it was. Her heart went into premature ventricular contractions, stopped, restarted momentarily, and then the line on the heart monitor went flat.
It happened more quickly than anyone expected.
She was an organ donor, so she had to be removed immediately for procurement. Dane touched her hand to say good-bye, and blood and skin came off on his fingers.
A nurse wheeled him out of the room. She found a secluded corner out on the fourth floor patio, a place with a view of the city and shade from the Nevada sun, and left him to grieve.
Now, try as he might to fathom such feelings, grief and horror were inseparably mixed. When he wiped his tears, her blood smeared his face. When he tried to envision how she gladdened whenever she saw him, how she would tilt her head and shrug one shoulder and her eyes would sparkle as she broke into that smile, he would see her through the blackening glass, crumpled over the steering wheel, the deflated airbag curling at the edges, melting into her face.
A handkerchief made careful passes over his face below and around his eyes. Arnie was trying to clean him up. Dane couldn’t say anything; he just let him do it.
The smell under his robe found his attention: sweat, antiseptics, gauze, bandages. His right shoulder still felt on fire, only, thanks to the painkillers, on fire somewhere else far away. Not a serious burn, they told him, so he kept telling himself. The bruises ate away at him, little monsters sequestered against his bones, festering under all that blued flesh in his side, his right hip, his right shoulder. It hurt to sit in the wheelchair; it hurt more to walk.
He broke again, covering his eyes to ward off the vision of her hair crinkling, vaporizing down to her scalp, steam and smoke rising through her blouse, flames licking through the broken glass, but it remained. Oh, God! Why? How could He change her so instantly from what she was—the woman, the saint, his lover with the laughing eyes, wacky humor, and wisdom of years—to what Dane had just seen perish on a bloodied gurney behind a curtain, sustained by tubes, monitors, machines? The images replayed. He thought he would vomit again.
Arnie brought the pan and a towel close under his chin.
He drew in a long, quaking breath, then another, then centered his mind on every breath that followed, commanding, controlling each one.
Arnie put the pan aside and sat close, silent.
Dane gave his weeping free rein; there could be no stopping it even as his bruises tortured him with every quake of his body. The moment passed, not in minutes but in breaths, thoughts, memories, wrenchings in his soul, until somewhere in his mind, just slightly removed from the visions, the soul pain, the hospital smells, and the painkillers, he took hold of what he already knew.
He could hardly place the breath behind the words. “I am just so much going to miss her.”
Arnie blew his nose on the same handkerchief he’d used to clean Dane’s face. “You may never finish saying good-bye. Maybe that’s okay.” He cleared his throat. “If it were me, I could never give her up.”
Dane noticed the move of the breeze over his face, the warmth of the sun on the patio. Birds flitted and chattered in the arbor. Mandy was about things like that.
“I suppose there were many who loved her,” Dane said. “But it was my arm she took to go to parties; she wrote her love notes for me; she chose to share my future when I didn’t even have one.” His vision blurred with fresh tears. “How did a guy like me rate a woman like her?”
Arnie touched him on the left shoulder, the one that wouldn’t hurt. “That’s the stuff you wanna remember.”
Arnie Harrington, his agent but mostly his friend, a little on the heavy side, still had some hair but not much, and had to be as old as Dane but didn’t look it. How he found out there’d been an accident Dane would have to ask him later. It was only now that Dane fully recognized he was here.
He drew a breath to calm his insides and touched Arnie’s hand. “Thanks for coming.”
“Got a call from Jimmy Bryce over at the Mirage. He thought it was a rumor so he called me. I suppose I can call him back, but it’ll be all over town by now.”
“Guess it’ll be in the papers.”
“Guess they’re already writing it. I’ll handle all of that.”
“I’d appreciate it.”
Dane followed Arnie’s gaze toward the Las Vegas Strip, where every structure, object, entrance, and electric light vied for attention. It was no great revelation, but after all the years he and Mandy worked here, all he could see, all he cared to remember was the woman who remained real in such an unreal place. “I got way better than I deserved.”
“Well, yeah.”
“Forty years.”
“Like I said …”
“Forty years …” The fact came alive as he lingered on it and salved the horrors from his mind, at least for now. With no effort at all the unfaded image of Mandy first setting foot in his life played before his eyes, the dove girl sitting in the front row who caught and held his eye … to the swelling, carnival sound of a gilded merry-go-round.
chapter
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2
Whatever that organ-grindy tune was, Mandy had heard it so many times that day that she could sing along, with some harmony—“Da da da daaahh, tada da da bup booda WAA!”—as she clasped the silver anklet around her ankle. It cost her fifteen bucks, her limit for the day not counting an upcoming chicken basket from the Spokane Junior League booth. She and Joanie and Angie were looking through the old Shoshone Indian’s wares when the wings of two silver doves glinted in the sun and caught her eye.
Doves. Her favorite. She raised them. Bonkers, Maybelle, Lily, and Carson were even now strutting their stuff in their cages over in the Poultry Barn, basking in the glory of two blue ribbons and a red.
Doves. In the Bible, a symbol of the Holy Spirit.
And Joanie, her best friend since first grade, loved it. “It’s perfect! I love it!” Of course, she was still hyped out of her mind from her third ride on the Chair-O-Plane. Right now she loved
everything.
Mandy let the anklet hang with a gentle curve about her ankle, the doves on the outside, and straightened, clearing her blond hair from her face with a brush of her hand and flip of her head. She repositioned her headband, tresses properly in place, and looked down. All she could see were the flared bottoms of her faded jeans and the toes of her sneakers. “Well, guy, you can’t even see it.”
“That’s okay,” Joanie hinted.
She hitched up the leg of her jeans to expose the anklet—worn over her white crew sock. Yeah, it looked dumb.
“You should’ve worn a skirt and sandals,” said Joanie.
Mandy made a face at her. This was the county fair. She was helping her dad show his llamas, she was showing her doves, there was straw to pitch, feed to carry, poop to scoop—and ride the Chair-O-Plane in a skirt? Right!
“But doves,” said Angie, enraptured. Angie was a new friend from college, usually half on this planet and half not, depending on the moment. “It’s you, Mandy. Free-spirited, always flying somewhere.”
“Yeah?” said Mandy, admiring the doves once again. “Way cool.” Dumb she could do.
All around them was the carnival at the Spokane County Interstate Fair: the faithful, ever-turning merry-go-round putting out all that music; the ring toss, bag toss, ball toss, and dart toss booths making it look so easy; the crowds, kids, cotton candy, cheap prizes, stuffed toys, whistles, and windmills; one crying kid with one addled parent every hundred square feet; the rap-rap-revving of the gas engines that kept the rides spinning, lurching, tumbling, heaving; the screams—oh, Mandy and company had done their share of that already. What’s the carnival without screaming?
Like the screams coming from the Freak Out right now, getting louder with a touch of Doppler effect every time the huge pendulum swung through an arc and the eight kids riding it got another wave of adrenaline and nausea. The sights and sounds made Joanie unreasonable. “We gotta try that one!”
08 Illusion Page 1