Tom appeared after a while, devoid of his Mandrake suit, and sat across from us with a large bottle of soda. “I’ve taken an hour break,” he announced. “Got a few private reading lined up then. A lot more bread in the private readings: up to two bucks a throw.”
“Is that why you don’t announce a price outside?” I asked.
“Sure,” he said. “I size them up when they come in: suit, haircut, jewelry, mannerisms; I can peg down to a penny what they’ll spring for. Sherlock Holmes would be proud of me.”
“Ah!” I said, shaking my head. “The world lost a great private detective when you became a performer, Mr. Waters.”
Tom pressed a finger alongside his hawk-shaped nose. “Ah, Watson,” said he, “I commend to your attention what the dog did in the nighttime.”
“But Holmes,” I protested, “the dog did nothing in the nighttime.”
“You are mistaken, Watson,” my old friend declared, “and if you would examine your shoe, I believe you will find traces of it there.”
I examined my shoe. “Astounding, Holmes,” I said.
“Elementary, my dear Watson,” he replied.
Sylvia was staring from one to the other of us like a referee watching a hot ping-pang match. “You’re going to drive me crazy,” she announced. “Is that, perchance, another of your vaudeville thingies?”
Tom looked at her in amazement. “You’ve never heard of Sherlock Holmes?” he asked.
“She’s not illiterate,” I assured him. “I’ll explain.”
“Do,” Tom demanded. “And, along with that, explain what you said before about this not exactly being the past. Here I thought I was giving the rubes a clear steer into the future because I honest-to-God knew it.”
“I promise,” I said. “But you first. I have a feeling yours is simpler.”
“All right,” Tom agreed. He took a deep swig of soda. “It all started the last night I saw you. That is, I saw you that afternoon, and then came the last night. You know what I mean?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Good. I don’t, not anymore. Anyway, a friend of mine, Dr. Dee by name, had just perfected a new version of the Girl in the Trunk illusion; you know the one?”
“I do. It was Houdini’s favorite for many years, except with him it was a man in the trunk.”
“That’s it. It can be used either as a great illusion or a great escape. This time it was again to be the man in the trunk. No illusion, just escape. The difference,” he explained to Sylvia, “is in the presentation. If a girl enters the trunk, is sealed in, then the magician waves his magic thing around several times and the trunk is revealed empty, with the girl standing outside and every lock and seal intact, including the ones with the spectator’s initials, it is an illusion since the magician is thought to have worked the magic from outside the trunk. If the magician, heavily manacled, is placed inside the trunk, which is then sealed as above, and after several heart-stopping minutes (because there is only a limited amount of air to breathe inside the sealed trunk) he appears outside the still-sealed trunk and the manacles, still closed, are found inside; it’s an escape. A great escape. It’s all in the presentation.
“Anyhow, as I said, it was to be the Man in a Trunk. Me. Dr. Dee has gained a bit of weight over the years, and he found that he couldn’t fit inside the trunk any more; and it’s hard to escape from a trunk unless you first get into it. So he asked me to assist him. Having nothing on for the evening, and happening to have the traditional tuxedo freshly back from the cleaners, I agreed.
“It was, I remember, about ten o’clock when Dr. Dee called me on stage and introduced me to the substantial audience. Professor Waters, he declared, the world’s foremost escape artist, just back from a triumphant tour of the finest prisons in the world. I bowed to the audience and explained a little about the history of escapes, the glorious tradition that demonstrates to every man that stone walls do not a prison make, and that the greatest obstacles can be overcome with a little knowledge and the strength and persistence of man’s great will to survive. I didn’t mention, of course, that a few lock picks carefully secreted about the person might be of more help.
“A select committee of volunteers was called up from the audience, with nary a stooge among the lot. They examined me and the trunk with the most minute care, noticing everything but what mattered. Satisfied that in their collective wisdom—one was a doctor, one a lawyer and one the sheriff of the county; all very carefully trained to observe—as I say, satisfied that they had missed nothing, they manacled me with handcuffs and leg irons that the sheriff, who had probably never seen a leg iron until that second, pronounced legitimate and secure. I hobbled over to the trunk and stepped inside, informing the audience at this point that Dr. Dee would stand by with an axe to chop me out quickly if anything went wrong, as there was only enough air in the closed trunk to support life for between four and five minutes. Then I sat down in the trunk and doubled over so the lid could be closed.”
Tom stared moodily into the little hole on top of the soda bottle. “Then came the first problem. While I could still hear the committee outside fastening the seals, I set to work on the manacles. The first three, the leg irons, presented no problem, and I was out of them in less time than it took to fasten them around my legs.”
“Oh,” Sylvia said, fascinated. “How did you do it?”
Tom fixed her with a steady look. “Years of practice and self-denial,” he told her earnestly, “and eating yak dung in the Orient. The yak dung, I think, was the deciding factor.”
Sylvia shrugged elaborately. “Magicians!” she said, from the bottom of her circus soul. “I should have known. Aerialists, animal acts, jugglers, clowns; everyone else in carney is delighted if you’re interested in their grift. Magicians won’t even let you unload their props. You’d think what they did was magic, or something.”
I laughed. Tom looked at Sylvia with something approaching respect. “Where did you pick her up?” he demanded.
“Later,” I said. “Finish the yarn.”
“Righto, mate. Where was I? Oh, the yak dung, yes. The leg irons were off before the committee had retreated to behind the screen which now, I assume, shielded the trunk from the audience. The first handcuff wouldn’t yield to the most, er, elaborate persuasion. Gently cursing Dee and berating myself for not having taken the elementary precaution of checking the things before the show, I went to work on the other three. Two of them slid smoothly open like a safe door under the fingers of Willie the Actor Sutton.”
“I think Sutton just robbed banks,” I said. “I don’t think he cracked safes.”
Tom favored me with a withering glance. “Similes and legends,” he informed me loftily, “take on a life of their own. Now: the two remaining handcuffs, both bright and shiny so they probably weren’t rusted closed or sprung-jammed....”
“How could you tell in the dark?” Sylvia asked.
“I shine with the radiant light of the good at heart. As I say, these two cuffs wouldn’t open for love or money. I started sweating. I could have worked the gimmick and left the trunk with the cuffs on my wrist, but my professional pride prevented me from doing that. It would be better to let Dr. Dee swing that axe and cut me out half asphyxiated than to come out half-escaped. But I didn’t want to ruin Dee’s trunk. Besides, there was a good question as to whether that ancient fire-axe could make a dent in the iron body of the trunk. If it did, he’d probably bash it into the side of my head, which wasn’t too many fractions of an inch away from the trunk wall. By now four minutes had passed.”
“Was the air starting to get bad?” Sylvia asked.
“No,” Tom told her. “I was using an ancient Yoga system of breathing which would enable that feeble air supply to last me for an indefinite length of time. I struggled on with the cuffs, wasting about half a minute getting angry and yanking them from side to side until I had thoroughly bruised my wrists. Then cool reason prevailed. I returned to gentle, scientific techniques; and in a moment discovered
my mistake with one of the cuffs. In another moment it was off, and I attacked the remaining one with renewed vigor. Suddenly there was an earthshaking jolt. For a minute I thought Dee was attacking the trunk with his axe. Then I realized that it would take a dozen men with axes to make that much din and vibration. I decided that’s what it was—twelve men with fire axes attacking my poor trunk. I drew myself into a corner as much as I could, which was damn little, and waited for the first chop to go through my leg.
“Then it was over. All was silent. And my trunk was upright where before it had been flat on the floor. Wondering exactly what had happened, I let my subconscious work on the cuff. My subconscious, always better at these things than I am, had it off in a few seconds. I reached around for the cleverly-disguised lever that activated the gimmick.
“It wasn’t there!
“I felt around the area where it should be, and my questing fingers encountered plush; nice, soft plush, where but moments before the hardwood inside of the Dee escape trunk had been.
“The next few minutes, I confess, are a haze. I didn’t flip out or panic or anything like that. I just went into a small, red haze. When I came out of it my subconscious again came through for me. Without thinking, I prodded in a certain direction and twisted in another. The side of the trunk swung open like the top of Dracula’s coffin, and I stumbled out onto the hardwood floor. I realized what had happened as I left the trunk: my fingers, unbidden, had pressed the sequence for releasing the Houdini trunk escape, and mind you I haven’t so much as seen a Houdini trunk (which was not the one used by Houdini, but a trade name adopted for a much older one by the new manufacturer after Houdini was where he couldn’t argue) in fifteen years.
“Then I realized something else. The hardwood floor I had stepped out onto was not the highly-polished floor of the theater stage, but an unfinished-wood slat platform. To be exact, it was the baggage platform of the train station in Ogallala, Nebraska.
“My first thought was a vast practical joke. I had been drugged and taken out here, at great expense, to amuse my friends. Then, after closing the trunk and entering the station, I learned that it was something else. I, Tom Waters, had traveled through time over fifty years,” He took a few deep breaths and finished the soda. “That’s my story.”
“How’d you get here?” I asked.
“You mean the carney?” Tom smiled. “What else could I do? I didn’t have a dime, I was dressed in a fancy tuxedo, and I was thrust deep into the past. I needed someplace where I could sort of disappear for a while and sort things out; to try to find out what had happened and what I could do about it. Also, I needed bread. The only place where I could find both bread and invisibility was a carney, where nobody asks questions and where I had a marketable skill. If worse came to worse I could always pitch the old ace in the hole.”
“The...?” I asked. I had never realized how deep in the lore of both magic and carnivals Tom had immersed himself.
“The ace in the hole of every professional mystic is peddling fortunes, usually astrological. William Lindsay Gresham, author of Nightmare Alley, one of the finest books ever written about carney, put it this way—or will put it this way, this time business has me confused:
Some ladle out the blarney
In the mitt camp of a carney
And some lecture on the Cosmic Oversoul
But their names would be mud
Like a chump playing stud
If they lost that old ace in the hole.”
“That’s very pretty,” Sylvia said.
“I thank you,” Tom said, “and Bill Gresham thanks you. Now, let’s hear it. How’d you get here?”
“You’d better get another soda, or maybe two,” I warned him. He took me at my word and went off for two more bottles.
Sylvia replenished our mugs of hot mud, and we settled back down.
“It started about a week ago,” I told Tom. “Time gets a little confused around here, but anyway it’s about two weeks after you disappeared.” I went on to relate just what happened to us since Sylvia misplaced her unicorn. I drew as detailed a picture as I could pluck out of my memory, since I wanted Tom to have every clue, every scrap of information, to see if he could come up with any additions or changes to my basic conclusions.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“Hmmm,” Tom said some time later. “Yes. Well. So Chester’s gone off to meet the, ah, final conductor. I’m sorry to hear that. Done in by a tank. He would much rather have died in bed, or even in Philadelphia. Unicorn, huh?” He took a final swig on the latest bottle of soda. “Flying saucers. That’s something to think about. And I think I can give you something to think about.” He pulled away from the table. “I have some, ahem, clients to see now: private readings. I’ll be back in about an hour and a half.”
“What are you going to give us to think about?” I asked.
“I’ll tell you when I get back. Think about it while I’m gone.”
He left and we thought about it. While we were thinking, the cook tent started to fill up: muscular men and women in brightly-spangled costumes who walked on the balls of their feet; ape-like weight lifters in tights; clowns; midgets; ballerinas; hard faced men in riding dress who walked with short whips clenched under their arms like British colonels; roustabouts and ringmasters: the kaleidoscopic variety of people that make up the normal circus world perched themselves on tables and benches all around us, and loud and happy conversation filled the air. Sylvia smiled and relaxed; she was at home. I couldn’t understand a word of it.
“So this frail miffed on the catch-out, see, and I was left gawkers....”
“When Reuben brought the arm and papered us and we had to take it on the uppers....”
“I’m taking my stint on the box when I glom this makeup keeping it cozy. First off I think she’s shilling, but the man says I’m cold-decking it, so I figure it must be my swells....”
“You understand any of this?” I asked Sylvia. “I feel like it’s my first day in French class.”
Sylvia gave a wide shrug that encompassed the universe. “The same as any other group,” she told me. “They’re either talking about work or women.”
“Oh.” We drank some more coffee and joined into a few of the conversations when people sat at our table. They quickly lost interest when they found we weren’t with the circus and they had never heard of the circus Sylvia had been with (surprise, surprise!), but they were all friendly and jovial. Fran, the fat lady and today’s cook tent minder, was going from table to table plunking down large bowls from a gigantic tray. When she reached our table, two of the bowls were plunked in front of us. Meatballs and spaghetti filled them almost to the overflow point, and they smelled delicious.
“Thank you very much,” I said, looking down regretfully, “but we can’t....”
“Shut up,” Fran announced. “Eat!”
We did. Somehow, during the course of the meal someone managed to sneak mugs of red wine by our plates. Knowing better than to argue, we finished these without protest. Half an hour later we were relaxed, happy and full.
A man with a bushy moustache and an air of command sat down opposite us. He was reading a letter and making occasional mumbles of indignant outrage. “I ask you,” he suddenly shouted, waving the letter to my left. “I ask you, what am I supposed to do with this?”
I looked to my left and discovered that Tom had quietly seated himself and was munching a peanut butter sandwich. “With what?” he asked.
“Thissere letter. What are they telling me? Who do they think I am?” He thrust the letter at Tom, who took it and began reading. The man transferred his attention to me. “I wrote asking what happened to my subscription, see? Like I subscribed months ago, and I never got more than one issue. So they sent me this letter.”
Tom passed me the letter. Under the heading
CRAWDADDY!
the magazine of grok,
was the following text:
Dear Mister Throck,
We are
sorry to inform you that our frog is sick. We used your subscription money for cigars (we’ve been really short on cigars around here), and now the frog. Its difficult to express our sense of regret in one letter, what with the frog lying fallow in the Bide-a-Wee. We toss sleeplessly each night, not knowing if his merry croak will ever sound again or if he will go off to that great lilypad in the sky. And then there’s the matter of the cigars, which it turns out the frog has been munching on for some time.
Until we can get more money from gentle people like yourself, it seems unlikely that anything can be done, as both the veterinarian and the tobacconist have rather callously cut off our credit. We are presently advertising like mad for new subscribers, and as the local papers don’t know as yet of our plight, we expect to be able to continue this ruse for several weeks, by which time we hope to have the frog back and the tobacconist’s friendship intact.
Thank you for your courteous inquiry. We hope this answers all your questions.
Sincerely,
Carol Hunter
Explanation Editor
P. S. We have just been informed that the frog was unable to digest the cigars and is now comatose. An X-ray (at remarkably high cost) reveals that he swallowed them whole and, since the amphibian digestive system seems unable to cope with tobacco, he is not expected to live.
The problem now is whether to cut him open and retrieve the cigars, or merely light one end and pass him among a few intimate friends. You realize how serious this could become.
We’ll get back to you soon.
“I’m sorry, Throck,” Tom said. “I have no idea of what to advise. These people seem to have a mind of their own.”
“Yeah,” Throck said, snatching the letter back from me and stuffing it into a pocket, “and I’ll bet they keep it in a little glass jar. They sound like a bunch of perverts.” He got up and stomped off.
“Well,” Tom said, hunching across the table like a large hawk, “the question is, what now?”
“What did you have to tell us before you left?” I asked.
The Unicorn Girl Page 13