Carter Beats the Devil

by Glen David Gold

  “What’s that book?”

  “It’s mine.” But James had to retrieve his quarter from under the carpet and he left the book open on the couch.

  Charles stared at it. It had illustrations, like a child’s book, but it also had dense text. The page James had opened to showed a series of diagrams: a hand with a coin in its palm; the hand closing; the hand opening with the coin gone.

  Charles had only to take one step toward the book before James slammed it against his chest. “I’m not done,” he said.

  “All right,” Charles said, so calmly it surprised him. He felt such a crushing ache to see the book, he was weirdly willing to wait for it.

  Making a coin vanish was difficult for James, even when weighed against the promise of annoying his older brother. Charles sat quietly, looking out the window at nothing in particular, until he heard James cry, “This is stupid,” and throw the book to the floor.

  Charles didn’t move until he heard the door to the toilet slam shut. Then he picked the book up. It was cloth-bound, with splits in the seams; the pages were yellowed around the edges. The title, The Practician’s Manual of Legerdemain, by Prof. Ottawa Keyes, was embossed in metallic gold on the spine.

  This book would explain how the giant had taken his Racketeer nickel. He let it fall open randomly, reasoning that he could guide it, magically, to the right page.

  He read the line his finger pointed to. “If you purchase used equipment, varnished surfaces may be made to look like new with a pound of wheat bran boiled in a gallon of water.”

  Wheat bran? No sentence had ever disappointed him more, not even those in the Electric Vibrator brochure. He flipped a few pages, to a drawing of a candle.

  To produce a lighted candle from the pocket, one of the illusions most pleasing to the eye, prepare the candle using a wax match as the wick. The best waxes are tropical in nature. . . .

  He shook his head. This was an awful kind of book. But he wasn’t ready to let it beat him, for he had started to sense that the world was at its best moments a place for crafty men to explore. The book had no apparent organization, Professor Keyes intermixing methods for specific illusions with his general philosophy.

  A master conjurer must have spirit and will-power. Above all, he is in control. How else can he command an audience’s attention?

  He read that twice. It sounded better than wheat bran.

  When performing the coffin illusion, and you are in that confined space, do not panic, as no magician has ever escaped by panicking.

  He held his arms rigidly at his sides. He breathed though his nose, slowly. He decided he would be good at not panicking.

  The rarest need in life is the one met suddenly and completely. This is how it was with Charles Carter and the art of magic. Had he easily found the diagrams showing how to vanish a coin, he might have just examined the method, confirmed that it could be done, and moved back to looking out the window. However, looking for an index—there was none—Charles found a page in the back of the book that changed his life.

  The page was bordered with a lovely tangle of roses, flags, doves, and decks of cards. Unlike the rest of the book, it was printed with red highlights so that the flowers, the diamonds, and the hearts glowed. At the top, written in tiny cloister text, was a colophon:

  If you have diligently worked through this humble tome, perhaps you have the disposition to be indoctrinated into the mystery. Here are the rules—seven positive commands, seven negative—that each master conjurer should follow.

  Below were two columns of commands. Carter was sure he could obey if not improve on each rule. But Professor Ottawa Keyes had outsmarted him, for the rules were written in French.

  Adding to the torture, Carter knew a little French, enough to see that the first column, headed “toujours,” showed what he should always do, and “jamais” everything that was not allowed.

  Frustration rose in his throat, but then he remembered he was good at not panicking. He understood why the Professor put the rules in French. Of course he wouldn’t hand out secrets like caramels—you had to work at them, pry them loose.

  His father had a French dictionary and so, with a pen and a little patience, Carter began a translation. For long minutes, he was absolutely silent, because he was already practicing discipline. He allowed himself, when particularly excited by making an entire rule give up its meaning, to raise his eyebrows. James came in once, causing Carter to look up, then immediately look down again. Whatever James wanted, it would wait, for, upon seeing his brother’s expression, he turned around and left.

  By the time the clock chimed 6 P.M., he had put most of the page into English:

  ALWAYS!!!

  BEFRIEND OTHER MAGICIANS

  MAINTAIN A CALM DISPOSITION

  PUNISH MEDDLERS

  THINK ON YOUR FEET

  IRON YOUR SILK HANDKERCHIEFS AND POLISH YOUR SHOES

  RESPECT YOUR AUDIENCE

  If volunteers have joined you onstage, politely bid them au-revoir and TAKE YOUR FINAL BOW ALONE

  NEVER!!!

  EXPLAIN OR REPEAT A TRICK

  GAZE WHERE THE AUDIENCE SHOULDN’T

  MISTAKE OBNOXIOUSNESS FOR AUDACITY

  STEAL ANOTHER MAGICIAN’S EQUIPMENT, PATTER, OR PAPER

  CALL YOURSELF “————— THE MARVELOUS” IF YOU ARE NOT YET MARVELOUS

  SHOW FEAR

  FAIL

  He translated until the phrases made sense, but he paid no attention to what they meant. And though he returned to it repeatedly, he had to leave his work incomplete for the night. There was a final note, alone, bold, and in a monkish font, that he couldn’t translate. “Puisque toutes les créatures sont au fond des frères, il faut traiter vos bêtes comme vous traitez vos amis.” It was something about animals and brothers and friends, but the specifics eluded him and so he put it aside.

  He put more wood on the fire. James appeared several times, once with food, but Carter paid him no attention.

  When he felt it was exactly the right moment, Carter, by the light of the fireplace, opened the book to the beginning. He fanned a deck of cards.

  CHAPTER 5

  “Look, James. Is that your card?”

  “No!” James whined.

  “You aren’t even looking. Now, we have to start over.”

  “I’m tired. What time is it?”

  Their plan had been to toast in the New Year with cider, but James had complained at ten o’clock, three hours ago, that it was already too late, so Carter had stopped all the clocks in the room. “It’s ten-thirty. Now, pick a card.” He fanned the deck.

  “I can’t stay up until twelve o’clock,” James moaned.

  “You can go to sleep when I’ve done this right.”

  “When is that?”

  “When I guess your card.”

  James looked at the card and put it back in the deck.

  Carter shuffled the cards. “Tap on the deck twice.”

  “Why?”

  “Just do as you’re told, and stop complaining.”

  James reached out and touched the deck with his finger as if it weighed a thousand pounds. “There.”

  Carter revealed the top card. “Was it the six of spades?”

  James shrugged, “I don’t remember.”

  “James!” A good pinch to James’s cheek would wake him up no doubt, but then he remembered: James was a volunteer and should be treated grandly. He took a deep breath. “I’m sorry. We need to make this trick work. We’ll do it once, and then—then I’ll give you a surprise.”

  “What kind of surprise?”

  Carter hadn’t expected this question, and had no ready answer. “It’s a surprise.”

  “You aren’t going to hit me again, are you?”

  “No, it’s a good kind of surprise.” Carter shuffled the cards and fanned them. “This time, concentrate on your card. We’ll both concentrate.” After James had selected and replaced the card, Carter shuffled.

  “I’m concentra
ting,” James said quietly.

  “So am I. Tap on the deck.”

  James did so. Carter turned over the top card, a nine of diamonds.

  “Hey!” James picked up the card. His back straightened. “How about that?”

  “That was a good one, eh?”

  “Do that again.”

  “All right, I—” His hands froze as he was about to scoop up the deck. “I can’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s one of the rules.”

  Since Carter had been referring to the rules for hours now, James nodded sagely. “And you can’t tell me how you did it.” He picked at the edges of the cards. “Like when you cut the rope and put it back together again.”

  For a moment, James had seemed excited; he was now on the verge of becoming cranky again, and Carter did not want to lose him. “But there’s the surprise.”

  “What is it?”

  Carter wished he knew how to bend people to his will, like a master conjurer. He gathered what natural gravity he had and said, “I don’t know if you really want it—”

  “Charlie!”

  “No, honest. You might hate it. But you could know how all the tricks work. You could never tell anyone, but you’d know. The surprise is, I want you to be my assistant.”

  “What assistant? Assistant for what?”

  “For the magic shows I’m going to do.”

  “That’s not a good present. Why can’t I be the magician and you be the assistant?”

  Carter bit his lower lip. That would never do. But James had asked a very good question, one that demanded respect. “I’ll be your assistant sometimes. We’ll switch.”

  James considered this. “That sounds fair.”

  “Do you want to practice now?”

  “I’m going to sleep. Tell me when it’s 1898.”

  Soon after, James’s eyes closed.

  Professor Keyes, it turned out, had advice about assistants. “If you can, select a man who looks so stupid that a hundred magicians working for a hundred years could not teach him the simplest French drop.”

  Carter appraised James and concluded, sadly, that his brother was far too intelligent looking to make a good assistant. On the other hand, he was unbeatable at being stubborn, and that would have to be an asset.

  When Carter was finished for the night, he nudged his brother to tell him it was the New Year. James only murmured, “That’s lovely,” and continued to sleep.

  . . .

  Each morning started with James running outside to see if the snow was still there. Periodically during the day, he would say he thought he heard horses or even a motorcar, and he would run outside again, returning discouraged. The snow grew gritty and brown, receding into shadows. By the fifth morning, January second, the snow was gone, and wagons and carriages passed their house ten times a day, but James no longer raced to see them.

  “We mustn’t attempt tricks publicly if we haven’t mastered them privately,” Carter said, holding the Keyes book on his lap.

  There were seven types of tricks: the antiscientific demonstration, the disappearance, the mentalist demonstration, the penetration, the production, the transformation, the transportation. Some of these involved special apparatus—collapsing birdcages, carpets with trapdoors—that had to be ordered from Europe, and so the Carter boys simply pretended to levitate each other, or to produce doves on command.

  They could do none of the advanced tricks correctly. When James grew tired of trying to hold a card by its edge, just so, his brother asked him to find in their parents’ rooms a suitable costume for their impersonations of Phillippe the Court Conjurer.

  While he was gone, Carter tried and failed to get the proper knuckle grip on the playing card. Keyes’s book had a rhyme that went straight to the point:

  You must practice and practice and again till sore

  Only then are you ready to practice once more

  So he continued to practice for long minutes.

  Because adversaries will challenge him outside the theatre just as much as inside, a master conjurer shall always carry each and every one of his trinkets with him, lest he otherwise be ashamed.

  Carter laid out on the table a length of cored rope, two torn-up aces of hearts, the rock that stood in for the egg, and crumpled-up red tissue mounted on a stiff wire that he would pretend was a rose.

  “James?” he called. He listened carefully, as his brother had been quiet in the other room for too long. He walked down the hallway to their parents’ bedroom. The doors to an armoire stood open, several of their father’s suits and mother’s dresses heaped on the floor. James sat among them.

  “It smells like them,” he whispered.

  “It’s going to be all right. They’ll be back.”

  “When? It’s been five days. Everyone forgot us.”

  “They didn’t forget us.”

  “How do you know?”

  “We have to put on our show when they come back, so they’ll see.”

  James rubbed his nose. “See what?”

  “That . . . that we survived.”

  After a moment, James sniffled, “We have to practice for them.”

  “That’s the spirit.”

  “We need an audience. The book says we should have an audience before the really important shows.”

  “And who—” Carter stopped. He knew exactly who his brother meant. Carter knew better, but could not bring himself to crush James when his wings were already so close to broken. With a strange thrill, he knew it was an awful idea, and irresistible. Mechanically, he nodded. “Yes. We’ll get good and ready. And we’ll perform for Jenks.”

  . . .

  Jenks slept in the half-light of his cottage, heavy and awkward as if thrown on his bed by the sea. He was dreaming of splitting timbers and collapsing mine shafts. An incessant ringing in his ears.

  He grunted, pulling himself up from sleep. The ringing continued. His mouth hurt. He touched the puckered edges of his cheeks. He was awake: the main house was ringing for him.

  He slapped at the wall until he found the switch that stopped the buzzer. Dizzily he straightened all the bottles that made a half-circle around his bed, as if expecting company.

  But no—he would be seeing people outside, in the main house. He dipped his fingers into a washbasin to finger-comb his hair. His clothes smelled of mildew. He couldn’t go to the main house that way. So he struggled into his better shirt and trousers carefully; they were worn in many places but not split.

  For the first time in days, he opened the front door to his cottage. His eyes stung in the sun. He was out of food and liquor and his head pulsed with each heartbeat. But that didn’t matter. The buzzer meant Mr. Carter had returned, and had his pay ready.

  The kitchen door was open. Jenks wiped his feet. He nervously ran his fingers through his hair again, tucking his chin down to better throw his face into shadow.

  He found a place to knock on the edge of the door frame. There was no response. He knocked again. Speaking required a great deal of concentration; Jenks started to form a word, and then a figure flew toward him so fast he jerked backward.

  It was Charles Carter sliding down the hardwood in his stocking feet. “Preee-senting James! The Mystic Apprentice!”

  James tottered out from behind the pantry door. He wore a conical paper hat with a long ostrich feather, his father’s pinned-up nightshirt, and a collection of silk scarves around his waist.

  Jenks covered the most ruined part of his face with his good hand. “Boys,” he managed. What were they doing? Where was Mr. Carter?

  “Take a seat,” Charles cried, “for the Wonder Show!” He reached out toward Jenks, who, not wanting trouble, met Charles’s hand with the stumps of his fingers. Charles flinched.

  “Welcome, Mr. Jenks.” James grinned. “For my first trick!”

  “Wait, James, wait for me to . . .” Charles put his hands on Jenks’s shoulders, easing him into a kitchen chair.

  Jame
s pulled the paper rose from his sleeve.

  “James!” Charles slapped his palm against his forehead. “Misdirection, James! You’re supposed to—”

  “Here you are, Mr. Jenks.” James handed over the paper rose. Jenks took it between his thumb and forefinger. Sitting stiffly, he was ready, at any moment, to be teased or worse. He watched James, who pretended to twirl a mustache applied with charcoal that would have been more effective had he been less dirty elsewhere. Charles, too, looked filthy, like he hadn’t been groomed in weeks.

  “Annnd my second trick for Mr. Jenks.” James waved a scarf in the air, then wrapped it around his fist. When he unwrapped it, there was a white rock in his hand. “Behold the egg!” He handed the rock to his brother. “Now, Mr. Jenks, just you wait for the third trick, the great card trick.”

  “No, James, do the coin palm.”

  “It’s the card trick. Get the deck of cards, assistant.”

  “You’re supposed to—oh, you’re hopeless.” Charles handed James the deck of cards.

  “Now, pick a card, any card, Mr. Jenks.”

  While staring at the fan of cards, Jenks realized he wasn’t getting paid. He wanted to leave, but he was sitting, and they were standing between him and the door. He was somehow overmatched. He picked a card.

  James tilted his head back and forth, smiling. “Look at the card carefully.” Charles, who stood next to James, smiled until he grimaced. It was very hard for him to be the assistant, but he wasn’t the one who would have otherwise thrown a tantrum. He watched his brother misapply the overhand grip.

  “James—”

  “I’m doing it right. Now, Mr. Jenks, put it back in the deck. Right. Is this your card?”

  Jenks nodded, hoping that was all. He needed to leave.

  “A-La-Ka-Zam!” James cried. “Good work, Mr. Jenks!”

  “Now, the coin palm,” Charles added.

  “Oh, that’s later. Oh, Mr. Jenks, no, don’t leave yet, stay here, there’s more. Please.” James gently put his hand on Jenks’s knee, which seemed to keep him in place.

  Charles wasn’t about to let his brother change the act. “If you don’t do the coin vanish—”