The Spirit Cabinet

by Paul Quarrington

  He completed the somersault and landed upright on his paws. His mouth was wide open, the skin pulled back so far that it gathered in tight folds just under his eyeballs and revealed much glistening pink gum and many white teeth. Samson made a sound that he’d never made before—and has never made since—a musical howling that seemed to make the bars of the cage vibrate, to make the air sound with eerie polyphony. Then he rushed forward. That is, he rushed in the sense that he covered the twelve feet that separated him from General Bosco in a thrice, although his motion was very methodical, gross muscular actions that rippled the sinew.

  General Bosco attempted to crack the whip again, but he was clearly flustered, and the snap came well above Samson’s head. Or perhaps the General was desperately trying to demonstrate that he still possessed the lion tamer’s knack, using the whip to startle rather than hurt, but Samson was beyond caring. He sank his teeth into General Bosco’s leg and clamped his jaws together with all the force he could muster. Indeed, the bite itself was not the most serious aspect of that first injury, even though the teeth ripped apart the beautifully defined calf, making it pop and deflate like a balloon. More serious from a medical point of view was the fact that Samson had cracked the tibia, webbing it with fractures. General Bosco screamed, not just from the excruciating pain, but also from the realization that he would now be cursed with a gimpy and embittering gait.

  “Das genügt,” said Rudolfo gently, and he watched the tension disappear from Samson’s body. Samson removed his mouth from around General Bosco’s leg, walked away and then sagged to the ground, laying his pale head upon the sawdust disconsolately. General Bosco, in the second he had left before fainting, turned and speared him with a hateful look. As Bosco collapsed, Rudolfo understood that he’d spoken too calmly; at least, too calmly for Bosco’s liking, although if you want to quiet a panicking animal, it is much better to whisper than to shriek. His choice of words could have been better, too, Rudolfo supposed calmly. Das genügt, as though some measure of the torture were acceptable, even called for.

  The other big cats roiled and writhed upon their stands. They were reared up onto their hind legs, their upper bodies twisting in serpentine undulations. Their master was down, dead apparently, and they were an inch away from rioting, from destroying the cage and running wild in the howling streets. One—it was Frederick, the last lion Rudolfo would have expected to behave this way—slinked down from its stand and batted General Bosco across the head, leaving behind three neat rows of gash. The sawdust darkened with blood. General Bosco woke up momentarily, sat bolt upright. Some part of his system must have deemed the situation hopeless, because he immediately lay back down again and closed his eyes, seeking refuge in a black coma.

  Rudolfo kicked Frederick in the snout and called, “Back!” Frederick, startled, obeyed. Rudolfo surprised even himself with the evenness of his tone; then again, he didn’t fear death in any profound manner, having never found life that precious a gift. So when Helmut bounced down from his stand almost playfully, Rudolfo swung around to confront the cat and momentarily stilled the beast with a look of almost holy quiescence.

  Now, Helmut, he was the first lion you’d expect to take part in an insurrection. He had always been recalcitrant, ever since he was a cub; indeed, Helmut hadn’t been trained to any real degree. He could leap on and off his half-barrel, but he would do this almost at his own discretion. Whenever another cat performed a stunt, Helmut would hog a portion of the applause, jumping down, roaring briefly, leaping back aboard with more lethal grace than his companion. The rest of the time Helmut spent in restless motion, picking up and replacing his huge paws on the smallish circle that was his roost. The only time he quieted was when General Bosco performed the old head-between-the-jaws routine, when Helmut would stare at Bosco and Gregor—old Gregor, hoary and grizzled and virtually toothless—with a look of calm menace. Hey, Helmut’s eyes said, try some of that shit with me.

  So that explains the eagerness with which he descended to the ground. When Rudolfo snapped his whip and stung the tip of his ear, Helmut pulled back his lips and grinned. Rudolfo continued to snap the whip as Helmut crossed over and gingerly mouthed Bosco’s foot, testing it for tenderness. He spit it out disdainfully, roared at Rudolfo, crossed over to the other side of Bosco’s body and tenderly licked at the hip.

  Only then, and with some reluctance, did Rudolfo draw his weapon, the war-vintage Luger that hung at his side. He had never used the gun, was afraid of back- and misfirings, and he was fond of Helmut, for all his faults. But he raised the gun and aimed it as best he could, concentrating on Helmut’s head. The head, after all, was the largest target. Rudolfo might have preferred to shoot at the hindquarters, to cripple young Helmut rather than destroy him, but that might only anger the cat, leaving him with enough rage-filled life to kill not only General Bosco but Rudolfo and all the other cats as well.

  Rudolfo turned toward the rest of the lions, who were now sending up a unified howl, an eerie chorus. He hushed them sternly; they lowered the volume but did not stop.

  Then he pulled the trigger.

  Rudolfo’s memory of the event is made up of a series of stark images, Rudolfo’s logic forcing them into order. First, there’s a picture of Helmut chewing into the General’s chest, apparently having elected it as the choicest cut. The image of Helmut lifting his head with nothing but a shiny gold button caught between his teeth comes next and must coincide with Rudolfo’s pulling of the trigger.

  Which means, of course, that the lion’s head was no longer Rudolfo’s target.

  What he hit instead was General Bosco, exploding the brocaded jacket that covered his heart and sending up a geyser of blood. He then aimed once more at Helmut, knowing that the cat was about to explode, just as all the cats would, driven senseless by the proximity of death.

  But Helmut instead turned away indolently and remounted his stand. He collapsed his bones with feline laziness and dropped the gold button daintily between his forepaws.

  Rudolfo glanced down and saw that the albino leopard was beside him, quivering with fear, pressed up against his leather boot. “Yeah,” said Rudolfo, one outcast to another, “let’s get out of here.”

  The cab rolled to a stop, the tires crunching heavily on the drive. Rudolfo had a small tote bag cinched around his waist; he unzipped it and fished out one of the hundred-dollar bills that were always there. He handed it to the driver and waved his hand brusquely, indicating that the man should stop looking for change. The man, actually, had been doing no such thing. He had lifted the bill up until it was but inches away from his face, flipping it over and over. He was, likely, examining the bill for signs of counterfeiting, but it seemed somehow conceivable that he’d never seen one before.

  Rudolfo pushed open the front door of the mansion, startled at how easily it moved. He and Jurgen had paid something on the order of a hundred thousand dollars for their security system, but far from being an impenetrable fortress, the mansion seemed as accessible as a derelict barn. The hinges howled; there was a creaking sound like the cracking of old bones. And then silence. He was reminded briefly of the discovery of his dead mother—the dead thing that had pretended to be his mother—how the silence had hunched over her, as though the silence itself were the culprit and had been caught red-handed.

  And where, it occurred to him, were the underlings? Where was, for example, Tiu, a young women curiously obsessed by dust and dirt? She should certainly be hovering about, a feather duster trembling in her hand, her lips set with grim zeal.

  His stomach, already made tender by the single glass of champagne, suddenly soured and crumpled. He made a low sound, a musical hum of misery, because he was not far away from hopelessness, and never had been. The sound lasted many seconds, and just before it died away, Jurgen appeared.

  He emerged from the gloom just in front of Rudolfo, walking out from behind a curtain of shadow. Rudolfo was both relieved and startled, an odd combination that left behind a residue of a
nnoyance. When Jurgen said, “Hi,” Rudolfo sidestepped the greeting with the grace of a matador.

  “Jimmy the headfuck never at the airport showed up,” he snarled. “That headfuck is fired.”

  “Jimmy is confused,” said Jurgen. That gave Rudolfo pause, and he tilted his head and stared at his partner. There was something not right. For a moment he thought it was simply that Jurgen was smiling, when ordinarily he maintained a visage of stern propriety. Or perhaps it was the eyes, which were contained in little nests of wrinkles. This was due in part to the smile, Rudolfo thought, but there were clear signs of fatigue, even ill-health. Jurgen had lost all control of his eyelids, which were raising and lowering at random intervals and frequencies.

  But as odd as all that was (very odd), it was Jurgen’s hair that caught and held Rudolfo’s attention. It was messy. The curly fringe that ordinarily lay across his square brow with such precision was bolt upright and fashioned into a series of little tufts and horns. And the whole disaster area was pointed with more little white hairs.

  “Guess what?” asked Jurgen, still smiling.

  “What?” snapped Rudolfo, craning his neck this way and that, disturbed at the stillness that existed inside das Haus.

  “I got new card trick.”

  “How nice is that for you.”

  “Say the name of a card. Any card.”

  “Nine of diamonds.”

  “Ta da!” intoned Jurgen tunelessly. He snapped his thick fingers in the air and the nine of diamonds appeared there.

  “Good,” muttered Rudolfo, but he didn’t really give a fuck. Why would all the animals be sleeping at this time of day?

  “I could do it in die Schau,” suggested Jurgen shyly.

  “You do it die Schau already.”

  “In Up Close and Personal, you mean? Nein, nein. Is not same trick.”

  Das eindrucksvollste Haus im Universum should have been echoing the soft, rhythmic sounds of little padded paws. “Holy Jesus,” Rudolfo said suddenly. “You didn’t feed the animals.”

  “Uh-oh.” Jurgen looked instantly remorseful, although the grin remained carved into his face. “I lost track of time.”

  Rudolfo stormed away. As he went he let out a series of whistles and grunts, and animals rose out of their torpors and began to gather behind him. They followed with dangling, dry tongues and wet eyes. Those that had tails wagged them weakly.

  Samson climbed down from the sofa in front of the huge television. Actually, he didn’t climb down so much as fall off, his old bones sending up a clatter. Then he stretched, achingly, because he hadn’t moved from the sofa since Rudolfo had left. He’d watched old movies and black-and-white sitcoms. Toward the middle of the third day, just before Rudolfo’s reappearance, Samson had begun to think just how appealing Mary Tyler Moore looked, appealing as in succulent and juicy. But here was Rudolfo, his love and his life, so Samson fell in behind. They walked through the house and out onto the grounds beyond.

  The big cats were howling.

  Chapter Ten

  It was unusual, this rehearsal, but Miranda didn’t mind. Anything to break up the day, that was her thinking. It was almost her motto. From the time she awoke—sometime around nine a.m., absurdly early by Las Vegas standards, shamefully late by her parents’—until the Show at ten p.m., the day stretched out, empty as the Saskatchewan prairie she’d grown up on.

  Lately she’d been going to churches, churches of all sizes and denominations, but there were few services held in the late mornings and early afternoons of weekdays. And those that she had found were decidedly weird. They featured either gamblers inveighing against their ill fortune, demanding angrily that God get with the program, or else gaunt men and women who spoke of the meads of asphodel and held their brass crucifixes upside down.

  The traditional time-waster of her ilk—her ilk being known in the trade as a box-jumper, although she wrote thaumaturgical assistant on credit card applications and such—was, of course, keeping in shape. But such was the nature of Miranda’s body that flabbiness could be erased with just a couple of snappy stretches. She still belonged to Shecky’s Olympus—the shadowy Hades where she’d first encountered Rudolfo—but only needed to go a couple of times a week. Actually, she didn’t really need to go at all, but she sometimes craved the human company, even if it was silent and surly. (The bodybuilders worked with grim industry, exhaling heavily with exertion so Miranda was buffeted by many small winds. She’d first noticed Rudolfo, Miranda remembered, because he alone acted otherwise, driving upwards from his squat with a long howl of ecstatic pain, ending with a rapid series of grunted jas.)

  Miranda also never seemed to gain weight and sometimes resented the fact, because that would at least give her a foe and a fight. She did sometimes go for runs in the desert, but the Bod usually located whatever little pockets of fat existed, tossing them out in desperate appeasement.

  Miranda was perforce a hobbyist, one with an artistic bent. Watercolours, wood carving, photography. Her hotel room—she couldn’t bring herself to consider it an apartment, what with the furniture being bolted to the floor and all—was crowded with an easel and drawing table, the walls adorned with prints and parchment. None of it, Miranda knew, was much good. Some of the photographs were all right, the bloodless landscapes of the desert, and she’d once done a fine painting in the Chinese style, sitting cross-legged for thirteen hours and then lowering the brush to the rice paper, scraping it across and leaving behind a line that came from deep inside. Basically, though, she was a hacker. Her work was all just one step removed from jigsaw puzzles and paint-by-numbers.

  All of which left her in a vast desolation of neon-lit timelessness, which is why she welcomed this rehearsal.

  The two men were standing together on the stage, but each was so thoroughly up to his own business that they looked, even from four hundred feet away, to be in totally different worlds. Rudolfo was directing the lighting guy, gesticulating at the ceiling as though he were God creating the universe. “Okay, blue,” he commanded, and the air became suffused with azure. Rudolfo stared through the shafts of illumination. “Nein, nein, nein!”

  Jurgen’s business was much harder to define. He seemed to be investigating the air itself, wiping a hand through the emptiness and then examining his fingertips as though there might be residue. Miranda was not so quick to notice his white hairs, nor the fact that his once-orderly locks were rebelling atop the blocky head, or that his tan, so deep a few days before, had faded away. But she did notice the odd expression he’d adopted, at once both somber and addled, as though Jurgen were at the same time pondering the universe and having his belly tickled.

  Miranda leapt up on the stage. “Hey,” she said. “What’s up, guys? You got something new for me?”

  “I don’t know,” said Rudolfo churlishly. “Is Jurgen’s idea for rehearsal.”

  Jurgen nodded. “Ja, I got something new.” He turned, placed thick fingers in his mouth and whistled like the beer-swilling football fan he had been all those years ago.

  “More, what the fuck is it called, lavender!” sang out Rudolfo, and he trusted that his disdain was manifest. He became aware of some disgruntled trudging across the stage, a few workmanlike grunts, a creak and some clumps. Rudolfo turned to see six unionized stagehands unloading what looked to be a huge old steamer trunk.

  Jurgen rushed over, locking his fingers together, twisting his arms like a small girl who has just received a puppy. “Beautiful!” he enthused.

  “Jurgen,” said Rudolfo patiently—he was determined to maintain his calm here— “what the fuck-shit is that?”

  Rudolfo knew what it was, more or less—it was part of the Collection, a piece of junk that his partner had paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for, but he didn’t know what it was doing on the bright shining stage at the Abraxas Hotel.

  “Is new Substitution Box!”

  “It’s not new,” noted Rudolfo. The wood was pale and green with age. The leather straps had been fed
through the buckles so many times that the edges had been tanned to near-suede.

  “This Substitution Box,” explained Jurgen, pointing helpfully, as if the stage were littered with Substitution Boxes, “is same one Houdini used.” Jurgen turned and gazed at Miranda. “You know routine?”

  Miranda nodded. “Sure thing, boss. I used to do this chestnut with the Amazing Leonidas.” Miranda threw open the trunk and pulled out a huge canvas sack. (Rudolfo reeled, because the sack smelled as if it had been kept in Hell’s musty rec room.) “I cuff you. You get into the sack, I tie it, I close you and the sack inside the box and do up the padlock. I climb up on top, pull up a curtain. Meanwhile, you lose the cuffs. You cut through the bag at the bottom.” Miranda walked behind the trunk, reached out with her left big toe and pulled the lower part of the back wall away. “You roll out here, reach out and take the screen, I drop and crawl into the box. You drop the curtain, bang. Inside the box, I climb into the sack, I hold the bottom of the bag closed with my toes. You unlock the padlock, open up the box, untie the bag and pow, there I am. Metamorphosis.”

  “Okey-dokey,” said Jurgen. “That sounds easy enough.”

  “It’s kind of,” said Miranda hesitantly, “a corny bit.”

  “Ja!” said Rudolfo, even though he was trying not to pay attention. “Is corny like piss.” Rudolfo turned away and continued screaming at the lighting guy. “Put another gel on the spotlight right away now!”

  “There’s a lot of acts with a sub box in it,” Miranda went on. “The Pendragons are the best. They do the switch so fast, it’s amazing. Our routine won’t be anything special.”

  “Miranda,” said Jurgen seriously, “it gonna be special; you better believe it.”

  “Well, okay, sure, let’s try.” Miranda bent down and dug through the stuff in the trunk, finally coming up with a pair of old handcuffs and snapping them around Jurgen’s thick wrists. The handcuffs were gaffed; all Jurgen had to do was knock the sides together and they would open and fall away. Jurgen stepped inside the canvas sack; Miranda raised the material over Jurgen’s head, pulled it tight and cinched the ropes. Jurgen folded himself into the Substitution Box and Miranda closed the lid, snapping the oversized padlock that fastened the latch.