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THE UNSEEN REALM
JANUARY 13, 1924
Damiola had doubts.
He had walked a full circuit around the perimeter of the veil—where this London and the mists of the Annwyn brushed up against each other with their barriers at their thinnest. The implications of what Lockwood wanted him to do were dire and he couldn’t pretend otherwise. He barely grasped the full weight of the magic he’d tapped into, though best he could tell the anchors he had developed would force the veil between here and there to be held open on that side while closed at the same time on this. In itself that wouldn’t have changed the city, but with his manipulations to push Ruben Glass’s failed studio through the veil and act as a bridgehead into the underworld, those anchors would effectively banish the place into limbo forever. Limbo. Purgatory. Hell. The Otherwhere. The Otherworld. The Underworld. There were so many names for what lay on the other side of the veil. He thought of it as a shadow world, or half world, even called it Mist World for that was all he ever saw of it; rolling endless mists. It was Damiola’s belief that those mists had last impacted upon this world in the days of myth and were responsible for the dragons and demons of all of those impossible stories, but he had no way of proving that. The veil itself ran along intersecting ley lines, which themselves tapped into the elemental power of the land itself, the raw earth magic that was being mercilessly consumed by the revolution of mankind—marking out the anchor points where the lenses would be placed. The planning was meticulous. It had to be. Even a fraction of an inch, an eighth, or sixteenth variation and the light paths would be off and the weave would fail. It was that precise. And he couldn’t afford to be wrong. Lockwood would kill him if he was.
Again.
Kill him again.
It wouldn’t be the first time.
Lockwood had come to him three months ago with a proposition: He had money behind him, and wanted to use it to make Damiola the most famous performer in the country. He should have been suspicious. All of those clever words and dangled promises, temptation that played on his vanity, the idea that everyone would know him for the innovator he was, putting him up there with the likes of Thurston; Houdini; Robert-Houdin, the man Houdini took his name from; the Great Lafayette; even Thurston’s prodigy, that damned Dane, Harry August Jansen, who wasn’t half the magician he was. Cadmus Damiola would have—in a very real way—immortality. Offer the world, you want something major in return. It’s simple economics. What Lockwood wanted, no more, no less, was the girl.
To think this all started with something as pure as love.
They were barely kids, the pair of them, Isaiah and Eleanor, but it had been doomed the moment Isaiah’s older brother Seth had decided he needed to take the one thing that made his brother happy and make it—her—his own. He didn’t care about the cost, figurative or literal. It had started with pretty trinkets and flattering words, turning her head with promises of fancy restaurants and West End dance clubs, then diamonds and pearls, and then the ultimate play, once he’d learned the secret yearning of her heart, stardom.
She had dreams of the silver screen that eclipsed walk-on parts in low-budget movies and wanted to stand side by side with Valentino, Flynn, Garbo, and Myrna Shepherd, who she’d met on the set of Number 13, the one day Shepherd was there. They’d barely exchanged a word, but Eleanor Raines had fallen in love with the star every bit as obsessively as Seth had fallen for Eleanor. That was when Seth had thrown his lot in with Ruben Glass and used his connections to help the entrepreneur crystallize his dreams of Glass Town, a huge theatrical studio in the heart of London, and grease the right palms to make it happen. The city was corrupt, everyone understood that, that there were levels of power that couldn’t be reached without a certain amount of ruthlessness, where cash was king and violence its bagman. Seth controlled the streets in the ways that councilmen and cops could only dream, and he offered his influence to Glass in return for one thing, the promise that Eleanor Raines would have the bright lights and leading roles. Glass wanted his dream so badly he’d agreed, and Seth had taken the promises to his brother’s girl. Of course she had been tempted.
He’d given her everything she had ever dreamed of, surpassing any promises his younger brother could ever make good on.
But Seth hadn’t banked on love.
She’d refused him.
There was one thing she wanted more than fame, more than the bright lights and the promises of stardom: Isaiah.
That should have been an end to it, but men like Seth Lockwood didn’t take no for an answer. That was how they had got to where they were in this life.
That first night when he’d turned up at the stage door, Damiola had thought he was a fan looking for an autograph, or perhaps to discover the secret of magic, so he’d greeted him with an indulgent smile.
He’d listened, but unlike the girl, he’d fallen for the promises and pretty lies, and believed in the illusion Seth wanted him to create. He should have known getting into bed with men like Lockwood and Glass his life could never be the same again. He had, to an extent. He wasn’t naïve. What he hadn’t grasped was the fact that his death wouldn’t be, either.
Damiola couldn’t think properly.
He had a show to put on tonight, his swan song.
He’d never intended it to end this way, but there was no way he could stay in London after tonight. He needed to get away; anywhere, it didn’t matter, just far away from this place. Far away from Glass Town.
From the outside looking in, Cadmus Damiola had it all. He was on top of the world. The write-ups in The Evening Standard and the London Post had been incredible. The good people of London had fallen for the wonders he had to show them. They gasped in awe at the new worlds the Opticron offered up, not understanding that they were truly seeing other worlds through the lenses that pierced the veil and offered glimpses of paradises and purgatories. They queued around the block for hours for tickets to the matinee performances, hoping for a glimpse of the miraculous.
The evening’s show, three weeks before the final curtain call of the tour, had been sold out for months.
Life didn’t get better than this.
Life didn’t get worse than this.
Satisfied with the sigils and the alignment of the lenses, there wasn’t much left for him to do except prepare for the greatest vanishing act of his life—and he wasn’t talking about making part of the city disappear. He headed back to the workshop to run through the tricks one final time, before going to the theater. He walked quickly through the rain-swept streets toward the Adelphi Theatre down on the Strand, the steel tips hammered into his heels clicking on cobbled stones as he did.
The playbill beside the theater’s glass doors promised the Lord of Illusions would confound the mind and delight the heart. The illustrations, meant to hint at the tricks to come included self-decapitation, levitation, ghostly spirit faces of fallen soldiers, and at the center of them all, the Opticron. The poster boldly proclaimed: Witness the Wondrous Opticron! Watch As It Opens Windows into Fabulous New Worlds! Marvel at the Miraculous Sights It Has to Show You! You Cannot Believe Your Eyes!
If only they knew, he thought to himself, going inside.
The stage manager nodded to him, offering a polite, “Evening, Mr. Damiola,” as the magician swept through the foyer toward the main theater.
The lights were low, the stage clear.
Hands worked quietly in the background, securing the traps, checking the acoustics and the rigging and every other eventuality that needed to be in place before the curtain went up. He might be the star of the show, but there were more than a dozen stagehands behind the scenes making sure the tricks went off without a hitch.
The main attraction hung suspended from the ceiling on steel cables: the Opticron.
He caught a stagehand’s eye and told him to lower it so that he could give the machine one final check. It took three men and twice as long to lower the huge contraption down onto the main stage a
s it took to raise it. It looked like a huge water boiler with a dozen peculiar appendages and apertures like a metallic octopus. There were levers and dials, and valves to vent steam when the levers were pumped. It was all smoke and mirrors. None of it was necessary. It was all about putting on a show for the audience, giving them what they expected, which was a huge and powerful machine to look into the future or the past or wherever wonderful he chose to direct their attention. The truth was he didn’t need tricks. He was what made the machine work. And he could only do that because of what Lockwood had done to him that night down by the Thames Embankment, pushing him down beneath the ice, chained up, mocking him to the point of death and beyond, only to have his goons bring him back, coughing and spluttering into the world he’d left behind. The natural laws of the universe didn’t apply to the unnatural—which was precisely what he had become, a living dead man.
Lockwood had never understood his role in creating the Damiola that stood center stage now. Something had happened in that icy water. It wasn’t simply a case of drowning, though that was what had happened. It was the coming back that had changed him. He’d been there, in the darkness, in the mists, newly dead, taking his first steps toward what came after, when he’d been pulled back to this life, the river pumped out of his lungs. And as he’d choked on that first reborn breath he’d become a different man. He had seen the face of creation, what some called God, but which was so much more than that, had been touched by the threads of life and death that run through all things, the spark that is the magic of existence, the ancient energies that hold the world together, and he had grasped his own insignificance in the scheme of things; his place in the mosaic of eternity. He understood now what God was; it was everything, all of us, every life lived, every magical spark, every soul, that at the end came together in the raw energy of the universe and simply was, the beginning, the end, and everything in between. He had taken up his place in the pattern only to be ripped out of it and dragged back down to earth, forced to live on.
How could he not be changed by that?
It was late at night, the same night that he had died and returned, and Damiola had been in his workshop when the white gloves he wore on stage for close-up magic had begun to twitch on the tabletop and move of their own accord. He’d been thinking about an elaborate reworking of the classic rabbit in a hat trick, this one with white doves, and the gloves had responded to his imaginings: the thumbs tangled and knotted, forming a crude head with fingers for wings. The satin bird tentatively took flight, struggling to lift itself at first, as though his doubts held it back, but gradually grew more confident and circled the workshop, with each circuit becoming more and more dovelike in appearance until finally he threw open the small window upstairs that overlooked Glass’s film set, and the impossible bird disappeared through it, banking in the dark sky before it flew off over the make-believe rooftops of that fake city.
That was the first time something in his mind came to pass, but it was by no means the last. It was all the little things at first, vague thoughts in his mind that seemed to cause the world around him to suffer until it danced to his tune. The police-issue handcuffs that were the stock-in-trade of his escapology act simply fell away from his wrists; the padlocks securing the buckles of the asylum-stamped straitjacket sprung open, the leather straps melting away from the metal buckles. Nothing could contain him. Not even a locked coffin. He began to test the limits of enchantment, working through his repertoire of illusions and grand tricks one by one until he drove swords through his own body and lived, and locked himself in the water torture cabinet with no hope of escape—and didn’t need to because the water couldn’t kill him twice. That was when he knew for sure that the stage magician Damiola, Lord of Illusions, was no more. He had died forever in the river. And at the same time Damiola the magician was born.
But it wasn’t until he grasped the fundamentals of where that magic was being drawn from that he truly understood the extent of his gift.
He was tapping into the mosaic.
He was drawing from the divine spark.
He was leeching off the raw elemental magic of creation.
Damiola possessed a keen scientific mind. He was rigorous in his planning when it came to his act, and methodical in its execution. He needed to understand the mechanicals. That was the way his brain worked. So, he approached his new gifts with the same scientific grounding, seeking understanding. In the days after his rebirth, he approached Alkeran, a fakir touring the country with a show that promised to unravel the mysteries of the subcontinent. His own act might have been little more than smoke and mirrors in the early days, but Alkeran offered him his first glimpse of what could only be called true magic, the greatest of which allowed him the grace to leave his body and soul and walk a short way. He studied for two months with the fakir, who himself had died and returned in a ritual of rebirth practiced by his people. That was how he knew the secrets of the mosaic, though he had a different name for the Annwyn, naming it Alam Ghaib, the Unseen Realm. Alkeran taught him that there were certain places in the world where the veil between the Unseen Realm and their own world was perilously thin, and other places where the sacred geometries intersected in nodes of power. These sacred geometries as he understood them followed what the British called ley lines and were more potent in the open air with grass or dirt underfoot, not the concrete and steel of the new world. The ancient fakir’s wisdom humbled Damiola. He learned everything he could and still felt like he was barely scratching the surface of the old man’s knowledge when it came to the old earth magic, but even so he couldn’t truly believe until his first opiate-induced soul walk where his consciousness left his body and rose higher and higher into the heavens and beneath him saw all of the shimmering energies of the land rippling out in the vibrant colors suffusing the landscape.
Then he truly understood the magic of creation and just how insignificant he was.
Even so he wasn’t brave enough to stand against Lockwood.
The man was a brutal idiot. He couldn’t tell the difference between sleight of hand and proper, genuine, laws-of-physics-defying magic. How was he expected to grasp the idea that by taking Damiola to the Otherside then dragging him back again, his thuggery had opened doors that couldn’t be closed again?
Damiola checked each of the optics in turn, moving around the Opticron slowly, content that the world they offered was no farther away than a few streets beyond the theater’s walls. Each of the thirteen street corners that formed the perimeter of Glass Town and the anchors for his grand enchantment were reflected in the lenses.
Everything was in place.
All that remained was to wait for the final curtain.
Damiola stood in the center of the stage, looking back toward the doors. Banks of red-velvet seats tiered up away from him toward the gods. Gilt statues peered on from the sidelines, their golden faces imperious. The place smelled of magic. It was the one place in the world he truly felt alive. Damiola smiled to himself, offering a few practiced flourishes toward the bank of seats, going through the motions. It was hard to imagine that after tonight he would never set foot on a stage again.
But, in the immortal words of the Sufi poet, Rumi, “It is what it is.”
God help him.
There was still time to stop Seth, to back out. Her fate wasn’t sealed yet. It was still in his power to influence the outcome of the evening. If he didn’t play his part, Lockwood would fail. But what price his betrayal? He wouldn’t be any more likely to return to the stage and enjoy the adulation of the crowds. He would never rise to the ranks of the true greats as his gift so richly deserved. He would become a footnote on the criminal history of the city; a performer fitted for cement shoes and left to feed the fish in the polluted river. Any victory could only ever be pyrrhic. But was that better than absolute failure and being party to Lockwood’s vile enterprise?
Yes. Undoubtedly. But did he have the balls to go up against the gangster? That was a different ques
tion. He’d only know the answer when it came time to act, but had no faith in his own resolve.
He was a weak man.
He saw the silhouette of a man waiting in the wings. It took him a moment to make out the familiar features. Seth Lockwood. Damiola breathed deeply—once, twice, three times—steadying himself before he left the stage.
As he descended, Damiola cast one last lingering glance up toward the Royal box where more of his backstage team were finishing resetting the props for the evening’s penultimate trick in which a flaming bird—a phoenix—would fly across the stage and disappear as he clapped his hands, bursting into a shower of burning confetti. It was all about timing. There was no magic to it, only artifice, but it was pleasantly visual and grand.
“What are you doing here?” Damiola asked, not waiting for his visitor to announce himself.
“I didn’t trust you to go through with things on your end, so I decided to make sure you didn’t have a change of heart.” There was no mistaking the menace behind the words.
“Everything is in place,” he assured Lockwood. “I’ve paced out the perimeter, I’ve checked the sigils, I’ve calibrated the lenses and run the calculations to the nth degree, backward and forward. The numbers are right. The alignment is set. Come midnight there will be a window of time, an hour, no more, when Glass Town exists in our time stream and out of it, but then as the hour passes the anchors will weigh it down one by one and time will begin to slow within its boundaries. Once that happens, you won’t be able to cross in or out of it. You’ll be forced to live out your days within the streets of Glass’s movie world.”
“I know all this,” the gangster said impatiently.
“I’m sure you do, but it bears repeating. Are you sure this is what you want?”
“I know my own mind, magician.”
“You are consigning yourself to Hell, do you understand that?”
“Where I shall be the Devil, not one of his pitiful penitents. Believe me, I am aware of your superstitions. I shall be king there just as I am king here, wherever there may be.” And that was the end of the argument.
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