The Masquerading Magician

by Gigi Pandian

  “Alors,” Dorian said, purposefully widening his liquidy black eyes so he looked like a teddy bear gargoyle, “he is merely trying to find what is rightfully his. That does not sound like such a bad man.”

  “Dorian!”

  “Yes, yes, the murders he committed—”

  “Sounds like it was only one accidental murder.” I cringed. Was I trying to excuse him?

  Dorian’s wings slumped. “I am sorry to pressure you into speaking with the alchemist, my friend. I wish for no harm to come to you. Yet if there is a way this man can help me without hurting yourself, do you not wish to explore it?”

  “Of course.”

  “Bon. We can at least hear his side of the story.”

  “We?”

  Dorian looked up at me with innocent eyes. “Alchemists who have discovered the Elixir of Life would not be afraid of me. I am going with you.”

  Eleven

  An hour later, I dropped a hefty duffle bag at my feet and glanced around.

  We would have been there sooner, but Dorian insisted on cooking us an early lunch to “keep our energy up.” I didn’t object as soon as I tasted his newest version of macaroni and “cheese” made from cashew cream.

  “We’re alone,” I said as I unzipped the duffle bag. Sweat trickled down the side of my temple. That gargoyle was heavy. “But you should hurry.”

  “Mais oui.” Dorian stepped out of the bag, asking for my assistance with his left foot, then got straight to work on the lock in front of us. He had it open in less than a minute.

  “Merde,” he whispered. “I do not think I will be able to relock this door from the inside.”

  “As long as we can get back out, that’s fine with me.”

  I grimaced at the sound of the door’s screaming hinges, even though rationally I knew that we didn’t need to be quiet. Not yet. The front of the theater was locked up. The staff and performers hadn’t yet arrived to prepare for that evening’s performance. I’d had Dorian pick the lock of the side door, located on a deserted alley that led to a backstage area.

  With the dexterity of Dorian’s clawed fingertips, it was like having my own personal locksmith. I thought of him as a “locksmith” rather than “burglar” because my intentions were pure—I wasn’t planning on stealing anything. I wanted to take a look around to see if anything suggested these magicians were more than they seemed. Before confronting a potential murderer and showing that I knew his secret, I insisted we do reconnaissance. This was a long shot, since alchemists know how to be careful. But at the same time, since nobody expects alchemy to be real, it’s tempting to let your guard down. That’s what I was hoping Prometheus, aka Peter Silverman, had done.

  Dorian could see in the dark, so he didn’t need to turn on any lights. I, however, did. At least, if I was going to be of any use. But I found there was already a light burning.

  “Zoe!” Dorian whispered in the deep, gravelly voice he erroneously believed was quiet enough not to be overheard. “We are not alone!”

  “It’s okay, Dorian. It’s a Ghost Light.” I pointed at the solitary bulb on a standing lamp in the center of the stage. It didn’t mean someone was inside the theater. The theater tradition was an old one. The solitary burning bulb was meant to ward off ghosts. Or to protect the safety of anyone working late. The rationale depended on who you asked. The point was that it was an old tradition no longer needed with modern lighting. A few theaters still used it, but it would be second nature to someone who had worked in the theater a hundred years ago.

  Dorian didn’t notice my worry. He got to work exploring the theater by the light of the unadorned, ghostly bulb.

  “Everything is locked!” he declared indignantly.

  “Isn’t that what I brought you along for? It was difficult lugging you inside that bag. I think you’ve been eating too many of the pastries you’re cooking for Blue Sky Teas.”

  Dorian wrinkled his snout at me. “An important role of the chef is to taste his own creations! How else would culinary progress be made? Especially with these complicated vegan rules you impose.”

  “How can you say the rules are complicated? The only rule is no animal products.”

  “Semantics,” Dorian mumbled. “Alors, these are locks beyond what my claws can unlock. I cannot imagine what foul magic lurks beyond these chains.”

  I knelt down to inspect the chain wrapped around a traveling trunk, then eyed the dramatic little gargoyle. “They’re performers, Dorian. You know very well from your father that stage magicians are careful to protect their illusions. All this tells us is that they’re magicians who create their own illusions. Which we already knew from seeing their show.” I wished I was as confident as my words indicated.

  I walked around the trunks, crates, and cabinets that had been locked with complex sets of metal chains. They were perhaps a bit on the paranoid side, but nothing out of the ordinary for stage magicians.

  In the 1800s, several famous magicians stole cutting-edge acts from each other. Many magicians filed patents for their inventions, such as the Ghost, but spies infiltrated crews to gain enough knowledge to pretend they’d invented similar illusions on their own. I must have been lost in my memories, because I didn’t hear anything until a voice rang out.

  “Who left the lights on?” A deep female voice echoed through the theater.

  “Perhaps it was the ghost,” a male voice answered.

  Dorian and I slunk into the shadows at the back of the stage as Prometheus and Persephone, sans costumes, strode down the center aisle toward us. If they turned on any spotlights, we’d be seen. I pulled Dorian behind a section of curtain and opened a fold just enough to peer out.

  “Very funny, darling,” Penelope said.

  Peter shrugged. “I don’t remember doing it, but you’re right. It was probably me. Old habits … ”

  I felt my heart racing. Old habits.

  “I thought you were over the need to leave a light on for the ghosts of the theater.”

  The two magicians hopped up onto the stage, just a few yards away from us. Though they were both dressed casually in paint-stained jeans, their hairstyles were already in place for their characters that night. Penelope’s highly stylized curls pressed along the sides of her face, and Peter’s flame-inspired spikes were stiff enough to impale someone.

  Peter ran his hand across the edge of a beaten-up trunk wrapped in chains. “Being back in Portland has brought back a lot of memories, Pen.”

  Dorian tugged at my hand. The magicians were close enough to us that I dared not whisper a reply, or even shift to look at him.

  “Nobody has messed with these locks,” Penelope said. “I don’t know why you insist on locking up everything like this. It takes so long to open.”

  “You know why.”

  “I swear,” Penelope said, “I’d like to clock the person who started that damn rumor about ‘The Scottish Play’ being cursed and Gaston Leroux for writing The Phantom of the Opera.”

  “Right. Let’s focus. We don’t have much time. The crew will be here soon. Let’s get this trunk open and get out of here.”

  So Peter didn’t trust the crew. I thought about the illusions the magicians had performed. Though the tricks were detailed and involved precision, they didn’t require many players to implement them. I’d learned from Dorian (who’d learned from his father) that there were many ways to perform the same trick. Instead of using complicated rigging as some performers did, the illusions I’d seen the previous night involved ingenious tricks of light. The magicians hadn’t used real fire, so they could have made do with one or two local stagehands.

  Penelope opened two combination locks that held the chains in place around the storage trunk.

  “Just one more—” Peter broke off. “Did you hear something?”

  “The ghost, perhaps?”

  “I’m s
erious, Pen. I think I heard something.”

  “I wish you didn’t have to be so secretive.”

  Peter stood still for a moment, listening, then sighed. “You’re right. It must be getting to me. I must have imagined the sound.”

  Only he hadn’t imagined it. Dorian pointed up toward the catwalk above the stage. Two figures, barely visible in the shadows, were making their way across the walkway that held the stage lights.

  Twelve

  The area above the stage was cast in shadows, and I couldn’t make out the faces of the two figures who crept along the catwalk. Yet from the glimpses I caught of the long-haired man, he looked vaguely familiar.

  As he stepped past a set of metal lights and into the dim glow cast by the Ghost Light, I got a better look at his face. I stifled my gasp. It was the elderly volunteer from the show the previous night. Wallace Mason, who’d played the Floating Lady!

  Between Peter and Penelope’s strange actions and the lurking figures above us, I was more confused than ever. What was going on here? Stage show “volunteers” were often planted in the audience, themselves performers who were part of a show. It was an easy way to be sure the volunteer would behave exactly as they were supposed to in a complex illusion. But Wallace and his accomplice weren’t revealing themselves to Peter and Penelope. They weren’t part of the act.

  As soon as Peter lifted the lid of the trunk, I temporarily forgot about the men spying on the magicians. Stuck to the inside of the trunk’s lid was a poster for the Queen of Magic, Adelaide Herrmann. That’s who Persephone had reminded me of the previous night. Adelaide Herrmann was the first famous female magician who had equal billing. Along with her husband, Alexander Herrmann, she had captivated audiences across Europe and America in the late 1800s.

  The two magicians removed a child-size backpack from the trunk, secured the lock, then left. A heavy door clanked shut. It echoed through the empty theater.

  Dorian and I didn’t dare move. Any sound we made would alert the other intruders to our presence.

  “They’re gone,” a somber voice said from above.

  “Shhh.”

  “You’re too careful.”

  “And you’re not careful enough. I bet they’ve got it with them. There’s no use staying here.”

  “We might as well look around. Since we’re here.”

  The men climbed down from the rafters. They made enough noise on the rungs of the narrow metal stairs that Dorian and I nodded at each other and crept from our hiding spot behind the curtains. Dorian scampered toward the back door, but I hung back when I saw what he’d left in his wake. Another small piece from his left foot had fallen off and was rolling along the floorboards. Another claw? I had no idea if stone claws could grow back on their own, so I ran after it. If I was able to save Dorian’s life, I wanted him to be as whole as possible.

  Where had it gone? Footsteps sounded behind me. I didn’t have time to find it.

  I caught up with Dorian just inside the back door. He climbed back into the duffel bag just as the lights clicked on above us.

  “I told you I heard something,” Peter’s voice said. I turned and saw him and Penelope staring at me and Dorian.

  “What have you got there?” Penelope asked, indicating the lumpy sack that contained Dorian.

  “She’s stolen something. Only I can’t tell what would be that shape.”

  “Stolen?” I said. “I wouldn’t dream of it. I knocked and nobody answered, so when I found the door open—”

  “The door is locked,” Penelope said.

  “Maybe one of your crew forgot to lock up,” I said. “It was wide open. Try it yourself.”

  “Why would we do that?” Peter said. “If it’s unlocked, all it means is that you’re a good burglar. Pen, why don’t you search her for lock picks.”

  Penelope crossed her arms and leaned against the black wall. She smiled as if she was watching an amusing television show she wasn’t participating in. “If she’s that good, Peter, I’ll never find the lock pics. They could be under a fake scar, hidden in her mouth. She might even have swallowed them if she’s a regurgitator.”

  Dorian made a gagging noise as she spoke the word “regurgitate.”

  I quickly coughed to cover up the sound, but Penelope looked to the duffel bag.

  “I’m terribly curious,” she said, “about what you’ve got in the bag. We like our possessions to remain inside the theater. I’m sure you understand.”

  “I’m sorry. I think we got off on the wrong foot. I live locally and run an online business called Elixir. We’ve got lots of really cool antiques that I thought could serve as props in your stage show. I brought over one of my statues to show you. Just to give you a sense of the kind of things I’ve got.”

  I hoped Dorian was up for playing dead as a stone gargoyle. I unzipped the bag. Inside I found a stone gargoyle, his snout flared more than usual and his face set in an angry scowl.

  “Remarkable,” Penelope said. “Peter, are you looking at this?”

  He wasn’t. He was tapping the screen of his phone. “Elixir, huh. This is your website?” He held up the screen.

  “That’s right.”

  “You expect us to believe you make a living off this site? It’s not even mobile friendly.”

  “I set it up before smartphones,” I said.

  “How is that possible? You can’t be older than twenty-five.”

  “I’m twenty-eight, actually.” That was the age I was when I accidentally discovered the Elixir of Life.

  “We’ll take him,” Penelope said.

  “What?”

  “The gargoyle. The reason you’re here. We’ll take him.”

  “Oh! Oh. This is an example. A prototype. He’s not for sale. You can order a custom carving through me, to your specifications.”

  “We like this one.”

  “Great. I can have one made that looks identical.” I named a price, hoping it would be too high.

  “Perfect.”

  “Perfect?”

  “Is there a problem?” Penelope asked.

  “Of course not,” I stammered, thinking I would have been better off letting them think I was a thief. Where was I going to find someone who could make a cast of Dorian? “I’ll come by on Monday with some paperwork and to discuss materials options.”

  “We look forward to it,” Peter said.

  I cringed when the exit door squealed as I departed, even though there was no longer any need for secrecy. In the alley, I hesitated. Why hadn’t they called the police? Isn’t that what people would do if they found a burglar in their place of business? Unless they really did have something to hide.

  But there was something more important than worrying about the magicians’ motives. To hide, Dorian had turned himself completely to stone. Would he be able to bring himself back to life?

  As I lugged the duffel bag to my car, I got my answer. The bag kicked me.

  “That hurt,” I said.

  “Not as much as it’s going to hurt me to have a plaster cast made of my body,” the bag mumbled.

  “You’re lucky they didn’t see you moving.”

  An older woman passing by on the sidewalk gave me a strange look. Better wait until we were inside the car to say anything else. I squeezed the bag into the space in front of the passenger seat on the floor of the pickup truck. Once we were both safely inside, I leaned over and unzipped a few inches. A pouting gargoyle looked up at me.

  “You okay?”

  “Why,” he said thoughtfully, “did they not call the police when they saw you inside their theater?”

  “That’s what I was wondering.”

  “And why did you not tell Monsieur Silverman you know him to be an alchemist? This was the point of our expedition!”

  “Hey, what are you doing? You need to stay inside th
e bag until we get home.”

  “I am attempting not to get out of the bag, but to stretch. I cannot move my legs.”

  My own legs felt weak at that news. “Let me get you home.”

  “Non!”

  “What do you mean, no?”

  “Do not worry about my present state. It is not what happens to me today that matters. The feeling is already beginning to return to my legs.” He wriggled inside the bag. “It becomes more difficult each time, Zoe. You must confront the magician.”

  “You’re forgetting something.”

  “I forget nothing. I simply do not say everything at once. I am a civilized Frenchman,” added the face peeking out from the old duffel bag.

  “The two intruders,” I said.

  “Yes. I recognized them as the volunteers from the performance last night.”

  “There was only one volunteer. The man with the long gray hair was The Floating Lady.”

  “The other man,” Dorian said, “was the friend with whom he sat in the audience.”

  Where had the other trespassers gone? What were they after? And what was the item Peter and Penelope had removed from the trunk that Wallace and the other man had noted? I bet they’ve got it with them, he had said.

  “I’m not going to rush off and confront anyone without knowing what’s going on,” I said. “I’ve got a better idea.”

  Dorian didn’t experience heat and coldness the same way people do, so I left him inside my locked truck, hoping he didn’t stretch so forcefully that he’d rock the truck and draw attention to himself.

  I was in luck. The box office was opening. Opening night had been sold out, but I hoped the early box office hours meant there were still tickets left. I approached the ticket office and bought myself a ticket for that night’s performance.

  Thirteen

  It had been a long day already, but it was only mid-afternoon when I heaved the heavy duffle bag containing Dorian up my driveway. I set it down abruptly when I saw who was waiting for me at my front door with a bag of groceries in his hand.