by Jim Butcher
Magicians weren’t the only ones with tricks; ordinary decent criminals like Seth Lockwood had their own, and when it came to getting into locked buildings, theirs were far more effective than a few mirrors and a bit of smoke for distraction. He’d scavenged a decent set of tools from the back of the movie lot he called home, including the glass cutter he’d used to enter with as little breaking as possible. Now, creeping through the dark corridors, it was about finding whatever clues he could to the whereabouts of that damned magician, and getting out again without seeing another ten years of his life slip away unlived. The building didn’t live up to his expectations; it was more like a museum than a home of magic. But then, 99 percent of the illusions housed in it were nothing more than cheap chicanery. Wooden crates lined one of the walls, stamped FRAGILE and THIS WAY UP with arrows pointing at the ceiling, exhibitions yet to be laid out. He made his way through the various displays, reading names he didn’t recognize and looking at the tricks that had made them famous, things like the Mismade Girl and Asrah Levitation, the Devil’s Torture Chamber and Sands of the Nile, as well as Chen Lee’s Water Suspension and the Dagger Head Box. The props offered a candid look up the magician’s metaphorical sleeve, but Seth had no interest in the workings of a few old tricks. He moved through the displays, looking for Cadmus Damiola’s name on one of the small plaques. Display after display offered up the equipment of the deceased, Thurston and Robert-Houdin, Harry Blackstone, junior and senior, Chung Ling Soo, Sorcar and Kellar, Maskelyne and the great Houdini himself.
He was at the point of giving up and getting out of there when he saw a table with an ancient praxinoscope on it. There was a screen set up beside it and a number of cards cut out in the shapes of various scenes the device would animate on the screen. On the wall beside the display he saw Damiola’s face. He had forgotten just how much he loathed the miserable little man; seeing him brought it all flooding back. The short biography ended with the lines: Damiola failed to perform what would have been the last show of his tour, disappearing on the night of January 13, 1924, never to be seen or heard from again. It is believed he fell afoul of notorious figures from London’s criminal underworld. His disappearance was linked with that of a young actress, Eleanor Raines, who went missing on the same night. The commonly held belief is that the pair ended their days in unmarked graves somewhere outside the city limits.
If only they knew the half of it, he thought.
It answered the most obvious question, though: forty years on, it wasn’t going to be as simple as walking up to Cadmus Damiola’s door and demanding he reverse what he’d done. If he wasn’t dead, Damiola had done a bloody good job of making it look that way to the rest of the world.
Seth lashed out in anger, toppling part of the display. The praxinoscope lurched, starting to fall. He caught it as the rest of the setup fell and set it down gently. He spun the carousel, watching the figures flicker to life on the screen. They took a couple of faltering steps in a chiaroscuro ballet before the light burned out and left the wall in darkness. He spun it a second time, watching the couple dance on. It was a neat little trick, but nothing close to the kind of thing Hitchcock had been doing in Number 13. The description of the trick was dry, detailing how it had been first invented by Charles-Émile Reynaud in France and how it worked by inserting a strip of pictures around the inner cylinder, the motion of the praxinoscope bringing them to life. He couldn’t understand why a piece of junk like this was on display until he saw the twist Damiola had brought to the trick, bringing the animations to three-dimensional life detached from the screen. He had called them the Reels, which sounded positively monstrous to Seth.
Aside from a single inconsequential journal, it was the only thing of Damiola’s in the place. The brief biographical sketch described some of his other great illusions, including the Opticron, but suggested they had all been lost or destroyed and that aside from the Reels none of Damiola’s other illusions survived.
He didn’t realize what he was hearing at first, as the sirens wailed out in the street, but even out of his own time, it didn’t take a criminal mastermind to know he needed to get out of there. Fast. He hadn’t intended to steal the carousel and its cards, but that was exactly what he did. The cutouts were brittle with age. He slipped them into a manila envelope and took the praxinoscope by the base, making his way back toward the open window up in the gods.
The police could run around like rats down below, Seth thought with a wry smile as he made his escape across the rooftops. Today wasn’t the day they’d finally catch up with him. He moved from rooftop to rooftop, following an elaborate pathway of planks he’d put in place to take him out of harm’s way. By the time the police emerged, scratching their heads at the bizarre theft of an old trick, Seth Lockwood was long gone.
He needed to think, make an alternative plan.
He couldn’t simply wait it out in the ’60s—that meant aging forty years if he couldn’t find a way to reverse what Damiola had done. Without the magician that wasn’t a viable option, not with time catching up with him faster than he could run. No, like it or not, he was going to have to go back, regroup, come up with another plan. In the meantime it wouldn’t hurt to work out what, exactly, he had just stolen.
Seth took no joy from Eleanor’s company. Frequently he found her presence a drain on his composure and once his temper was frayed he’d lash out either verbally or physically. The bruises healed quickly enough. She cowered in his presence, preferring to hide rather than risk getting on the foul side of his moods, but Glass Town was a small place, and staying out of each other’s way only led to a crushing sense of loneliness that was in many ways the true curse of Damiola’s trickery. There was only so much of his own company a man like Seth could take, so inevitably he’d seek her out. The only reasonable conversation they had in weeks was when he admitted that he had made a mistake in bringing her here. Not that he was sorry, just that he’d been wrong. Seth Lockwood didn’t say sorry.
“You don’t get it,” he said, ignoring the loathing behind her eyes. “But why should you? I can’t just let you go. There’s no way out. This is it. From now, forever. These few streets. Me and you. I’m stuck with you. That’s what the reality of beating that idiot brother of mine means. This. Forever. Slowly driving me out of my mind. Even if I could just open a door out of here you wouldn’t last a week if you walked through it. Too much time has passed now. Believe me, it’s crossed my mind, but tearing the place apart, sending you back out there doesn’t just kill you, it condemns me to fifty, maybe sixty years of solitude. A man can’t live alone without losing his mind. He just can’t. So like it or not, I’m stuck with you.”
She was beautiful in all the ways a woman could be, truly beautiful, but looking at her, Seth found every single contour and pore repugnant. He couldn’t imagine being forced to look at her for the rest of his life, slowly watching her age and knowing they could never escape each other. Hell was getting what you wanted, he realized bitterly. Seth clenched his fist. His breathing hitched in his throat as his chest rose, and he had to force himself to let his anger go before he slammed his fist into her face and left it looking anything but beautiful.
She followed him around after that. He’d catch glimpses of her in the background, spying on him. She didn’t believe they were trapped here, that much was obvious. He’d have walked her to the oblique and kicked her out into the ’70s if he’d thought it would do anything other than damn him. He needed to find a way to undo Damiola’s illusion, and that meant understanding the mechanism behind it as much as the nature of it. And, should he somehow solve it, or find a way to circumvent the side effects and essentially find a way to live a lifetime that spanned centuries, he needed to know it was safe to emerge from Glass Town. Not that he feared the police. They couldn’t touch him. No one would look at a thirtysomething and assume he could possibly be behind crimes over half a century old. That was the one good thing about Damiola’s mess. A thirtysomething? Only weeks ago in the
timeline of his life he’d been a twentysomething. That time was gone, robbed from him.
He crouched down, setting the praxinoscope on solid ground, and took a moment to pick an appropriate inlay. He eased it into place on the carousel and, lighting a candle in the centerpiece, began to crank the handle, causing the drum to spin faster and faster and the flickering image of the kid from the Charlie Chaplin movie begin to take on substance in the street in front of him.
It wasn’t as realistic as he might have hoped. The image was good, if a little disjointed and blurred around the edges, but as the candle flickered within the carousel so, too, did the figure of the kid in the street, appearing to phase into and out of existence as the drum slowed.
He cranked the handle again, faster this time, and something incredible happened: the figure of the kid took on a more substantial form, becoming more realistic the faster the drum turned until it was fully formed and seemed to detach itself from the background that spun around it.
Seth stared at the Reel for a moment, not sure what he was seeing, and then it turned its back on him and loped away toward the edge of Glass Town with a curious, juddering gait. The kid turned to look at him, hesitant, as though waiting for orders. “Aren’t you a peculiar thing,” Seth muttered, pushing himself up to his feet. He walked up to where the thing waited, and reached out tentatively to touch it. His fingers slipped easily through the projection, causing the kid’s body to ripple around his hand. The effect was curiously hypnotic. The illusion was almost convincing, but like most tricks failed at the last. Above all else, it was a projection. Something conjured from film, tied somehow to a reel of film. He started to think of it as a Reel, linking the two things together in his mind.
A burst of static echoed out of the tortured figure’s mouth as its jaw dropped wide open.
It was quite the worst thing Seth Lockwood had ever heard, and he’d stood over people soiling themselves as they begged for their lives. That desperation didn’t come close to this. He felt a twinge of pity for the thing, then laughed at his own stupidity. “It’s not like you’re real,” he muttered, shaking his head. “Go on, get out of here.” The apparition of the kid inclined its head, giving an eerily accurate impression of listening and thinking, then turned and dashed off down the street. Seth couldn’t help it: he laughed and set off after the apparition, while behind him the drum rattled on and on, the candle’s flame keeping the Reel alive.
He followed the kid to a painted doorway. He’d walked past the spot more than a thousand times. He knew that it didn’t open. He knew that there was nothing behind it. Yet, the kid walked straight through, its body crackling with static discharge as it disappeared. Seth stood there stupidly, hands on his knees, shaking his head. He thought about calling it back like some sort of runaway dog, but for some reason he couldn’t explain, he reached out for the door handle and it opened.
Seth was confronted by a wall of mist so thick he could only see a dozen or so yards into it before shadows became diffuse and lost all definition. He saw the kid scurrying away and chased after it, more out of curiosity at this new facet of his prison that the Reel had led him to than anything else. But two steps over the threshold was more than enough. The ground felt like shifting sand beneath his feet. He stopped. A chill gathered around his heart. The kid was already far out there in the mist, slipping out and back into focus as it moved. Out beyond the kid he saw another shape. A woman dressed head to toe in white, a lantern in her hand, beckoning to the kid to follow her as she turned and walked away into the mist. She faded from view like dust motes drifting across his eyes. For a few minutes he watched the yellow light of the lantern slowly fade to nothing, swallowed, as she walked into the distance. He heard the gentle lap of water against an unseen shore. The kid cried out with another burst of static. The mist answered with a melancholy cry of its own that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once.
For the first time in his life, Seth Lockwood was frightened—properly frightened.
Nothing about this place was right.
There was nothing of substance out there. No landscape to speak of. The world was reduced to the gray of the mist banks. Nothing existed beyond them. He watched the kid phase out of sight once again. This time a few moments passed before it reappeared, and when it did its head lolled awkwardly on its neck as though it had regressed and, like a baby, its neck couldn’t support its weight. The kid lolloped toward him, arms dragging lifelessly. Something had happened to it out there. As if to emphasize this point the baleful cry came from the mists again. The kid slouched on, dragging its feet. Seth couldn’t hear the drag-scuff of the Reel’s worn-out shoes because ghosts—if that was what it truly was—made no sound in any world they inhabited. Coming into range, the Reel stiffened, straightening its body and bringing its head up slowly until it looked at him somewhere close to his eyes. Had he been a religious man Seth Lockwood would have offered a prayer then, but there wasn’t a bone in his body that believed in anything he couldn’t control. “What are you looking at?” Seth demanded. The Reel inclined its head again, a couple of inches to the right, as though considering him. “I’m talking to you.”
The kid offered no answer.
He realized then that it was considerably more substantial than it had been. He could no longer see through its black-and-white “flesh” to the mist beyond. Something had happened to give the Reel solidity. There was intelligence behind its movie-star eyes that hadn’t been there before.
The kid tried to talk to him, another shriek of white noise crackling out of its mouth as it spoke.
Inexplicably, Seth understood what it was trying to say to him.
It existed to serve him. Whatever it had been before was forgotten. The Reel had given it a body of its own so that it might finally leave this place between places. It was no longer simply the ghostly twitch of light Damiola had harnessed for his trick, there was more to the thing before him than that. By letting it loose in this place, hidden away between two worlds, the place for gods and monsters both, something had taken possession of the Reel and rode in it now like a hermit crab, using Damiola’s conjuring to escape this Hell. He felt the weight of eternity looking back at him through the kid’s eyes and couldn’t begin to imagine how long it had waited for a chance to be free of the mist.
Forever felt like an appropriate word.
He wasn’t sure how he might best harness the Reel now, or how he might use it to his advantage, but there was no doubt in his mind he was in possession of a weapon unlike any other, and that excited Seth. When he looked back over his shoulder there was no sign of the fake building or painted door. Instead he saw the stone walls of a high tower, like something out of a pseudo-medieval Errol Flynn flick full of swash and buckle. He backed up first one step then another, back into the safety of Glass Town. The kid followed him.
The candle had burned down to a stub when he returned to the praxinoscope, and the drum had long since come to rest—and yet still the Reel existed in this place, no longer dependent upon Damiola’s device for its ungodly life.
That was interesting.
Did that mean he could conjure the Reel in one place only to unleash it in another? That he could send it forth with instructions to do his bidding?
He snuffed out the candle, and with it the kid flickered and failed.
Interesting again. He struck a match to light what remained of the candle’s wick, and cranked the handle to send the drum spinning faster and faster until the Reel began to take shape in the street before him again. Even before it had fully materialized the words formed in his head: what do you want from me? It wasn’t exactly a genie in a lamp offering three wishes, but there was no denying the fact that the thing was communicating with him.
“You’ll know soon enough,” Seth promised, snuffing out the tiny flame once again.
The door, he realized, was no longer a door. It was back to being a badly painted prop. Part of the black around the golden door handle had begun to bl
ister and peel away from the wood where his hand had rested on it.
He didn’t understand what had happened here, or what that place was, but his mind was alive with the possibilities the Reel presented. Maybe, just maybe, it was the answer to finding Damiola? Could he unleash it like some preternatural bloodhound?
It might have even worked if Eleanor hadn’t found the fissure and slipped through into London. That changed everything. January 12, 1994. A Wednesday that was unremarkable in every other way. He followed her into an alleyway off Spitalfields—which had changed so much in the time he had been gone. It was at once familiar and utterly different. Kids in plaid shirts and torn jeans walked hand in hand, the men with longer hair than the women. Eleanor was easy to follow as she pushed her way through the people coming and going from the market; her red dress was a beacon. Seth stopped dead in his tracks. Less than half a dozen paces away from him, out of the mouth of the alleyway and across the narrow, cobbled street, an old man stared at Eleanor like he’d just seen a ghost.
He crossed himself.
He couldn’t look away.
Seth watched him from the shadows, all the resentments he thought he’d outgrown bubbling up again. The years hadn’t been kind to Isaiah. Death walked a step behind him, just waiting to introduce himself to the old man. His brother had transformed into a statue in the midst of all of the shoppers. He was absolutely still for the longest time, then he began to shake.
Seth needed to get her out of there.
He cursed the stupid, stupid woman as he ghosted up behind her and whispered into her ear, “Just keep walking. Don’t turn around. Don’t look back.” He felt her stiffen as he placed his hand on the small of her back and steered Eleanor away from the safety of people.