Joey noticed Redondo’s face had turned as white as his tuxedo shirt. “I know it’s bad. We didn’t mean for this to happen, but we need you to fix it. Shazad needs you. Do you think you can get him out of there? Can the wand help?”
Redondo shook his head slowly. “You shouldn’t have brought this here.”
“Shouldn’t have—” Joey frowned. “We were lucky to get away with it. What were we supposed to do? Leave Shazad behind?”
“No. You shouldn’t have been there in the first place.”
“What is it?” Leanora asked, looking back and forth between Redondo and the top hat lying sideways on the floor. “What’s the problem?”
Redondo took a deep, apprehensive breath. “The problem is, that’s not a hat. It’s a doorway. A mystic portal. And now it’s in here, like a Trojan horse slipped past my defenses.” He gestured to the locked theater doors as if they were useless to him now.
“What does that mean?” Joey asked, a cold feeling growing in his stomach. “What are you saying?”
“I know that hat very well, young Kopecky. It belongs to me. That is, it used to. I haven’t seen it in twenty years. I gave it to Grayson Manchester the last time we shared a stage together.”
“What?” Joey asked, squinting hard at Redondo. That didn’t make any sense. Joey thought back to the vision in the crystal ball. He remembered Redondo handing young Grayson his hat, but how could the hat have survived the fire when the boy didn’t?
“That can’t be,” said Leanora. “The hat would have burned up in the box with the rest of him.”
“You’re assuming he was in the box.”
“I saw him in the box,” she said.
“Looks can be deceiving.”
The hat shimmied and rolled on the floor without anyone touching it. A hand sprang out from within. “Ahh!” Joey exclaimed, scrambling to his feet as the hand pawed around, searching for something to grab hold of.
“Behind me,” Redondo said, steeling himself for what came next. Another hand emerged, followed by a reaching arm. Both hands soon got a firm grip on the brim of the top hat and pushed down hard. Joey’s stomach did somersaults. He retreated to join Leanora at the steps as the dark magician from the Invisible Hand squeezed his way out of the hat like a genie escaping a very tight bottle. He stretched his large frame, picked his hat back up off the floor, and returned it to his head.
Joey and Leanora stared at the man in stunned silence. Redondo put an arm out in front of Joey and Leanora, silently telling them to stay back. No one said anything. The man from the Invisible Hand took a moment to get his bearings, paying more attention to the lobby than the people in it. He circled the room, examining the framed lobby posters, eventually stopping at the one with a picture of Redondo sawing his assistant in half. “Look at that,” he said, appraising the image as if it belonged in an art museum. “Brings back memories, doesn’t it?” he asked Redondo.
“Better days,” Redondo said. “Speaking of bringing things back, where’s Shazad? What have you done with him?”
“Shazad… Is that the boy’s name? Don’t worry. We’ll get to him soon enough. First things first.” The man began to unwind the scarf that up until that point had served him well as a mask. The face beneath the scarf shocked Joey more than any magic trick could have done.
“Mr. Gray?” he blurted, recognizing the NATL’s eccentric director of alternative testing.
Leanora looked at Joey, stunned. “You know him?”
The man Joey knew as Mr. Gray grinned a wicked grin. “Not exactly. Redondo, where are your manners? Introduce me properly. You don’t want to hurt my feelings, do you?”
Redondo made a queasy face like he’d just thrown up in his mouth. “Everyone, this is the person you were asking about earlier. My former assistant, Grayson Manchester.”
Joey felt like his brain was broken. “Grayson Manchester?” he repeated, completely flabbergasted. “I—I don’t understand.”
“Of course you don’t,” Manchester said with a laugh. “That’s why this worked so well,” he added in his American accent, trying on the “Mr. Gray” persona once again. “You were able to see through all the tricks, Joey, but you didn’t see through me. Maybe if you’d had a better teacher. Or any kind of teacher, really.”
“You can’t be Grayson Manchester,” Leanora said, her voice drifting. “You died. We watched… We saw—”
“A trick,” Manchester said in his normal voice, finishing Leanora’s sentence for her. “A bloody good trick too. You saw what I wanted you to see, just like Redondo did all those years ago. Tell me, old man, how long did it take for you to figure out what really happened that night? I’ve always wondered.”
“It took some time,” Redondo admitted with all the energy of a dying man (which, of course, he was). “Too long.”
Manchester smiled, clearly pleased. “And when you finally put it together…?”
Redondo’s expression remained dour. “I didn’t feel any better about it, obviously.”
As they spoke, age crept back into the lobby walls. Wallpaper peeled, lights faded, and plants shriveled up.
“Obviously,” Manchester agreed, noting the changes with a critical eye. “This place has seen better days. Not that I’m complaining. It may not be the illustrious playhouse I remember, but it’s still a hard ticket to come by. You need to know someone to get in here.” As he spoke, he shook a grateful finger in Joey’s direction. “I owe it all to you, young Kopecky.”
“What’s he talking about?” Leanora asked Joey. “How do you know him?”
“I don’t!” Joey said as he tried to trace back in his mind just how long Manchester had been playing him. “I just… I met him once! He tricked me. He pretended to be someone testing me for school.”
“I was testing you, Joey, but not for school—although we do that too. The Invisible Hand, I mean,” Manchester explained. “It might interest you to know we’ve been running the National Association of Tests and Limits since the organization was founded. One of our many institutional arms. The dedicated staff working at the NATL don’t know about our ‘partnership’ with them, but that doesn’t make them any less effective in their work. Controlling standardized testing is a very effective way to influence entire generations of students. Take that PMAP test you were supposed to do, for example—that helps us guide children into lives and careers where they won’t make waves or upset the status quo. Of course, we weren’t about to let you take the PMAP and head off to Exemplar Academy, were we? Not with your test scores. Who knows what you might have grown up to be without our guidance?”
“What I might have grown up to be?” The implicit threat in Manchester’s choice of words made Joey uncomfortable. He didn’t know how to take it, still struggling as he was to try to understand the way Manchester’s mind worked and what his plan had been. “This doesn’t make any sense,” he said, reeling. “You were the one who gave me the Mystery Box. The Invisible Hand didn’t want me to go to Exemplar, so they sent me here instead?”
Manchester grinned. “Actually, that was a bit of improvisation on my part. I sent you here. The official plan was to retest you with harder exams and send you back where you came from, but something happened when you walked in the door. Magic came in with you. Needless to say, I got curious.”
“What are you talking about? What magic?” Joey thought back to the previous morning. Magic was the last thing on his mind walking into the NATL. On the train coming into the city, he had told his father he wanted to be a boy wizard, but that was just a joke. “I didn’t even believe in magic before I came here.”
“You’ve got that backward,” Manchester said. “Belief in magic is what got you here. Call it what you want, a certain affinity for magic… your potential… I felt it. When you’ve been around magic long enough, you develop a sense for this sort of thing. I took a personal interest, and it’s a good thing too!” Manchester went on, ignoring Joey’s denial. “You were everything I hoped for and more.
I couldn’t believe my luck, but then what’s luck but a touch of magic, eh, Redondo?”
“Are you finished?” Redondo asked Manchester, scowling.
“What’s your hurry, old boy? This is fun catching up like this. I know you’re not one for explanations, but Joey here deserves a full and frank accounting, I think. It’s the least I can do for my partner in crime.”
“Stop saying that,” Joey said, balling a fist. “Don’t listen to him. We’re not partners. We’re not anything.”
“Joey, Joey, Joey…,” Manchester said in a wounded voice. “Why deny it? We did this together. I told you, I’m your benefactor. And you were mine. I couldn’t get at Redondo as long as he was hiding out in this theater. Alone I was helpless. I needed someone like you to open the door and let me in.”
“Why me? Why did…? What makes me so special?”
“Nothing,” Manchester said happily. “Nothing at all. You’re not special, Joey. You’re almost special. I recognized it the first time we talked in the office across the street.” He looked out through the glass lobby doors at Redondo’s dark, cloudy realm. “Well, not this street, but you get the idea. You were different, Joey. The way you saw the world… You noticed things, details other people missed. And you had just enough imagination to inspire something in Redondo. I set things up so the two of you would meet, and by God, you didn’t disappoint. You got him back onstage, thinking there was hope for people like you—for the world—but I knew you’d sabotage yourself in the end. I knew you’d sabotage him. You wanted to believe in a chance for a better future—to escape into something fantastic—but you couldn’t. You were different enough to catch a glimpse of magic but too normal to fully embrace it.”
Tears welled up in Joey’s eyes. “That’s not true.”
“Oh, but it is, Joey. You didn’t want to fly close to the sun for fear your wings might melt. I see you. Head in the clouds, flailing about with no direction. You want big things out of life, but you try so little, because ultimately you don’t believe in yourself. You got Redondo going again, but your doubt and fear touched everything around you. Your actions literally created the opening I needed.” Manchester doffed his hat and motioned to the space inside that he had just crawled out of moments earlier. “With you as my secret weapon, it was only a matter of time before we ended up right here.”
Joey choked on the realization that Manchester was telling the truth. Whether Joey knew it or not, the dark magician had been manipulating his actions from the moment they had met. He had let him take the hat in Siberia. That was just the finishing touch on his con. The one that had gotten him in the door.
“How did you keep finding me?” Joey asked. “It was when you poked me in the forehead, wasn’t it? What was that? Some kind of tracking spell?”
Manchester laughed. “Ha! That’s very good, Joey, but I was just messing with your mind there. It was your cell phone. You’ve got location services enabled. You’re walking around with a GPS device in your pocket.”
“What?” Joey’s hand instinctively clawed at the pocket with his phone. Redondo had been right about the Invisible Hand and technology. He felt like he’d been punched in the stomach. Leanora looked at him like he deserved to be.
“Why are you doing this?” Leanora asked Manchester. “If you were Redondo’s assistant, you were part of the Order of the Majestic—sworn to protect magic! How could you side with the Invisible Hand? What happened to you?”
“Redondo happened,” Manchester spat. “Years of waiting for my time in the spotlight. Night after night I let Redondo cut me in half, throw knives at me while blindfolded, trap me inside mirrors, and swarm me with bees.” Manchester gritted his teeth. “I’m allergic to bees, not that he ever cared. It was awful. All that work… all for his greater glory. The magician gets the applause. The assistant takes the risk, and if things go wrong…? It’s the assistant who pays the price. Time and time again, I avoided death through sheer willpower. Eight shows a week, counting the Sunday matinee. I ask you, what was the point? All that power at his fingertips! Power he loved to put on display but refused to share or clearly teach. When I think of the lengths he went to just to keep it all to himself… Picture us, traveling from show to show and town to town, packed into trains and buses, when all the while he had the power to magically transport us. It was absurd. Almost as ridiculous as the performances themselves. Playing for the people… vying for the affection of strangers… trying so hard to convince himself he mattered…”
“That’s not what the shows were for,” Redondo said.
“No, of course not,” Manchester said facetiously. “The man who strutted about the stage calling himself ‘Redondo the Magnificent’ didn’t have anything to prove to anybody. Wherever did I get that idea? Stop lying to yourself, you old fraud. I know what you are. And, unlike you, I know what magic is—what it’s really all about.”
“And what is that?” Redondo asked.
“I’ll tell you what it’s not,” Manchester snarled. “It’s not something we use to entertain the norms in some embarrassing quest for validation. It’s something we use period. A free pass for whatever we want, whenever we want. It’s ours. Not theirs. Ours alone.”
Redondo shook his head sadly. “You’re wrong, Grayson. Everyone deserves magic. I tried to teach you—”
“You never taught me anything,” Manchester rasped, baring his crooked teeth. “I mastered my craft in spite of you, not because of you. Can you blame me for leaving? Honestly, can you?” He looked to Joey and Leanora. “I had to free myself from life as his indentured servant, tortured for the amusement of normal people in the audience. I faked my death to give him a taste of the stress and fear I felt every night at showtime. The Invisible Hand showed me the way. They actually taught me magic, if you can imagine such a thing! It was my reward for taking Redondo out of the picture. Thanks to them, I grew strong, pulling whatever I wanted out of his old magic hat, but I could have been stronger. I should have taken Houdini’s wand with me when I left. That was the real prize. Twenty years I’ve waited for this opportunity.” Manchester sneered at Redondo. “I would have come back sooner, but you were so melodramatic, taking the theater off the map like you did. I couldn’t get back in… until today.” Manchester held out his hand. “I’ll have the wand now. It’s either that, or you’ll never see poor Shazad again.”
“What do your friends say about that?” Redondo motioned to the lobby doors, where the shadows of the Invisible Hand were watching. “They’ve been out there waiting patiently to ransack this place immediately after my demise. I don’t think they’re going to appreciate you cutting the line like this.”
Manchester barked out a laugh. “They’re not my friends; they’re my followers. At least, they will be. Once I have the wand, I’ll be leading the Invisible Hand, and I’m going to make some changes. It’s time for us to come out of the shadows, Redondo. Time to tighten our grip on the world.”
“I see.” Redondo grimaced. “You’re still not satisfied with your role, even after all these years.”
“Why should I be satisfied with anything less than greatness? The Invisible Hand may be content to wait for the walls around this place to crumble into dust before storming your castle, but I don’t care to wait. I’m here now. First. The leaders of the Invisible Hand suffer from the same lack of vision you do. You used to hide magic in plain sight. They hide it away completely.…” Manchester clicked his tongue and shook his head in a disapproving manner. “I’m tired of being behind the scenes. Ruling the world is a center-stage, top-billing kind of job, if you ask me.”
“You’re going to rule the world, are you?” Redondo raised a hand, plucking Houdini’s wand out of thin air. “And you think this can help you turn the Invisible Hand into an iron fist?”
“I’m going to remake the world in my image.” Manchester bared his teeth in a crooked smile. “My only regret is you won’t be here to see it.” He held out his hand. “Now give me the wand.”
&n
bsp; “Aren’t you forgetting something?” Redondo scanned the room. “Where’s Shazad?”
“That’s right,” Manchester said, taking off his hat and scratching his head absentmindedly. “He’s in here. Have a look.” Manchester lobbed the hat across the room. Redondo batted it back with a swipe of his hand.
“Keep that thing away from me. Heaven only knows where it’s been.”
Chagrined, Manchester bent down to pick up his hat and put it back on. “It was worth a try.”
“I’m not the trusting fool you think I am, Grayson. If you want to trade Shazad for the wand, he needs to be here. Let’s see him.”
Manchester slid his jaw around like he was chewing a tough piece of meat. “I’m afraid that’s going to be a problem,” he said eventually. “You see, I stuffed him way, way down at the bottom of my hat, where even I can’t reach him. Not until later tonight at the earliest. That was my insurance policy. Just in case you were able to somehow compel me to release the boy before I got what I came for.”
“Very clever, Grayson,” Redondo said in a mocking tone. “Congratulations. You’ve outsmarted everyone, including yourself.”
Manchester looked daggers at Redondo, knowing he was right.
“As far as I’m concerned, this conversation is a waste of time.” Redondo pressed the tip of the wand into his palm and brought his hands together. Just like that, the wand was gone. “And I don’t have time to waste. Get out of my theater. Come back with Shazad, or not at all.” Redondo turned around to head up the stairs.
“Stop right there,” Manchester called after him. “Don’t you turn your back on me. I’m no fool either. It took me twenty years to get back inside this place. I’m not leaving empty-handed.”
“You don’t have to worry about getting back in. Not as long as you’ve got Shazad with you. Bring him back tonight—unharmed. I’ll be waiting, same as always.”
Redondo gave Manchester a hard, unwavering stare. Manchester glared back at him, but in the end he was the one who blinked. “You’re not waiting. You’re stalling,” he said in a cutting tone. “It won’t do you any good. What do you think? You’re going to find the courage you’ve spent the last twenty years searching for now that it’s come to this? Do make sure you check underneath the couch cushions. It’s always in the last place you look.” Manchester laughed at his own joke. Redondo kept quiet, refusing to let Manchester bait him. “Have it your way,” he continued. “We’ll finish this tonight, but don’t get any ideas. If you try to run, or keep me out of here in any way, that boy is going to suffer for it.”
Order of the Majestic Page 19