Richard Montanari: Four Novels of Suspense: The Rosary Girls, the Skin Gods, Merciless, Badlands

by Richard Montanari

  The man considered Karl for a few moments. “Where are you from?”

  “Kensington,” Karl said. “From Emerald Street.”

  “No, I mean where were you born?”

  Karl did not know if he should say, the war being the war, still so alive in everyone’s mind. He trusted the man, though. He was clearly of German extraction. “Hanau.”

  The man nodded. “What is your name?”

  Karl squared his shoulders, set his feet, just as his father had taught him. He extended his hand. “My name is Karl Swann,” he said. “And yours?”

  The man took Karl’s hand. “I’m Bill Brema.”

  For the next two years, Karl apprenticed with Bill Brema, working in the brass works, helping to produce some of the finest brass apparatuses in the world.

  But the real benefit to working there was the people Karl encountered. Everyone came to Kanter’s, and Karl met them all; acquiring moves, pieces of patter, a well-used silk, a battered wand. His magic box grew. His understanding of misdirection flourished.

  At twenty, it was time to perform professionally for the first time in the United States. He called himself the Great Cygne.

  FOR THE NEXT TEN YEARS the Great Cygne toured the country, performing in towns large and small. Although not a strikingly handsome man, at six-two he was a commanding presence, and his courtly manner and piercing eyes drew women to him in every venue.

  In Reading, Pennsylvania, he met a German girl named Greta Huebner. Weary of finding love on the road, Karl proposed to her within one month. Two months later they were married.

  Back in Philadelphia, when his father’s estate was finally settled, more than fourteen years after the end of the war, Karl received a check for nearly one million dollars. With it he bought a house in North Philadelphia, a sprawling twenty-two-room Victorian mansion called Faerwood. He surrounded it with trees.

  For most of the next decade the Great Cygne continued to ply his trade. Childless, the couple had all but given up on a family. Then, at the age of thirty-eight, Greta Swann became pregnant. It was a difficult pregnancy, and on the morning of October 31, 1969, Greta died from complications of childbirth. At 7:00 AM, a weeping midwife handed Karl the swaddled baby.

  Karl Swann held his infant son for the first time, and it was in this moment, when the child first opened his eyes, that Karl saw something that chilled him to the bottom of his soul. For a moment, his son’s eyes were a blinding silver, eyes that held the very cast of Hell.

  It may have been an illusion, he thought a few moments later, a trick of light coming through the high windows at Faerwood, for soon the vision was gone. The baby’s eyes were an azure blue, like his father’s.

  Karl Swann named his son Joseph.

  | 1973 |

  AT FAERWOOD, JOSEPH’S WORLD was a labyrinth of small, dark rooms and hissing whispers, a place where specters coiled behind the wood lath, and shadows darted and gamboled in the halls. Joseph played his child’s games by himself, but he was never alone.

  Without a mother, the only woman in young Joseph’s life was his father’s stage assistant, Odette. Odette cooked for him, bathed him, helped him with his lessons. In the end, it was Odette who knew his talents.

  As a young boy Joseph Swann proved to be far more dexterous than other children his age, far more nimble with his hands than even his father had been as a child. At three he was able to perform all the fundamentals of coin magic—palms, switches, vanishes—simply from observation, being particularly adept at Le Tourniquet, the classic French drop. At four he mastered the Okito, the small brass box it had taken his father the better part of a decade to perfect. Given a bridge deck—to accommodate his small hands—he could fluidly perform any number of card basics: false shuffles, Hindu shuffles, double lifts, false counts.

  In these early years, as Karl Swann struggled to remain relevant in a changing world of magic, as madness began to seed his mind, instead of pride he developed a profound resentment toward his son, a bitterness that at first manifested in abuse, but soon matured into something else.

  Something closer to fear.

  | 1975 |

  ONE NIGHT, WHILE on a brief tour of small towns in southern Ohio, Karl Swann locked his five-year-old son in back of the battered step van they used for traveling, leaving the boy to amuse himself with a 250-piece jigsaw, a rather difficult puzzle depicting a pair of eagles high in the clouds. When Karl returned to the van to retrieve a forgotten device, eight minutes later, the puzzle was complete. Joseph stared out the window.

  | 1976 |

  WITH THE SUCCESS of The Magic Show—a magic-themed Broadway musical featuring an overly grand, aging alcoholic, a character not all that different from the Great Cygne—the world of parlor and stage magic all but changed forever. It was now the large scale Las Vegas show that the public demanded. For the Great Cygne, the venues got smaller, the road longer.

  At the age of seven, it was evident that Joseph, despite his almost preternatural skills, and his integral part in the stage act, had no interest in following in his father’s footsteps. His true interest was puzzles—word puzzles, jigsaws, cryptograms, riddles, anagrams, rebuses. If there was a maze, Joseph found its entry, its egress. Deduction, truth, deception, paradox—these were his sacraments.

  But if Joseph’s mastery of things enigmatic was evident, so had become the darkness which had taken hold of his father. Many nights Karl went down to Faerwood’s basement in the middle of the night, constructing partitions, building and erecting walls, making rooms that mirrored the growing divisions in his mind. He once spent six weeks manufacturing a magic apparatus only to set it afire in the middle of the road in front of the house.

  Every night, before Joseph went to bed, Karl played an old French film called The Magic Bricks. The silent three-minute film, made in 1908, showed a pair of conjurers making people appear and disappear, using boxes, bricks, and other props, mostly with rather crude special effects.

  By his tenth birthday Joseph knew every illusion in the film, every trick of the lens, every hand-colored frame. He saw it nearly one thousand times.

  | 1979 |

  KARL SWANN GLANCED at his image in the gold-veined cheval mirror. They were in a shabby hotel, in a small town in Bell County, Texas.

  “Watch,” Karl commanded.

  He turned with a great flourish of his cape, extended his right hand, and in an instant produced a seemingly endless number of cards, dropping them into a silk hat on a nearby table.

  “What did you see, Joseph?”

  The ten-year-old Joseph stood at rigid attention. “Nothing, sir.” It was a lie. His father had flashed, a term in magic meaning the illusionist had accidentally revealed part of the method. Karl Swann had begun to do it quite a bit of late.

  “No flash?”

  “No sir.”

  “Are you certain?”

  Joseph hesitated, and thus sealed his fate. “Yes, sir,” he said. But it was too late. There came into his father’s eyes a tempest of disapproval. Joseph knew this would mean a night of terror.

  For his punishment, his father brought him into the bathroom, where he strapped him into a straightjacket. It was an adult straightjacket, and within minutes of his father leaving the room for the hotel bar, Joseph was able to maneuver his arms to the front. He could have easily worked the buckles free, but he dared not.

  And thus he sat.

  At midnight his father returned and, without a word, unlaced the straightjacket, and carried the sleeping Joseph to his bed. He kissed the boy on the top of the head.

  IN THEIR TOURS OF TEXAS, Oklahoma, and Louisiana they would often encounter the young people who drifted along the fringes of the shows, which were mostly county fairs. These were the strays, the unwanted, children who were not missed at home. These runaways, most often girls, became Joseph’s playmates during the long hours when his father was drunk, or searching for the local brothel.

  Molly Proffitt was twelve years old when she escaped her abusi
ve home in Stillwater, Oklahoma. Slight and agile, a tomboy with cornflower eyes and sandy hair, she joined the Great Cygne’s traveling show at a stop in Chickasha, having been on the road herself for more than a month. Karl Swann introduced her to everyone as his niece, and Molly soon became a vital part of the show, helping to dress Odette, cleaning and polishing cabinets, even passing the hat after impromptu performances on town squares.

  Karl lavished attention on the girl, as if she were his own. She began to replace Joseph not only in his father’s act, but also his life.

  Within weeks Molly lobbied for Joseph’s spot onstage in a particularly complex illusion called the Sea Horse, an escape trick featuring a large water tank. Every evening, before dinner, she would get on and off the platform hundreds of times, even going so far as to practice her curtsy at the end.

  One evening Joseph spied on the girl. He watched her walk up the stairs to the top of the tank, pose, and walk down again. Over and over she practiced her moves. At 7:00 PM she went to dinner—a meager bill of fare consisting of beans and salt pork, eaten in the step van—then returned. She climbed the stairs again. This time, when she reached the top, the platform collapsed.

  Molly fell into the tank. On the way down, she hit her head on the sharp edge of the glass, opening a huge gash on her forehead, knocking her unconscious. As she slowly descended to the bottom, Joseph approached the tank, bringing his face to within inches. The sight fascinated him, especially the plait of blood that floated above the girl’s head, the undulating scarlet shape that, to Joseph’s eye, did not look unlike a sea horse.

  Later, long after the air bubbles ceased rising to the surface, long after the water turned a crystalline pink, Joseph climbed the stairs and replaced the four bolts that originally held the platform in place.

  At just after midnight he peered out of the hotel window. In the dim streetlight he saw his father and Odette carry a large canvas bag out the back door. They placed it in the trunk of a black sedan, then sped off into the night.

  It was the first of many times this scenario was to be repeated. For Joseph there were yet to come myriad rivals to his place in the Great Cygne’s show, as well as his father’s heart. One by one Joseph saw to it that no one replaced him.

  By 1980, when magic was relegated to television specials and big Las Vegas acts, the Great Cygne had become a relic, a man reduced to roadhouse comedy routines. Karl Swann was drinking heavily, embarrassing himself and Odette onstage, sometimes missing performances altogether.

  Then came “The Singing Boy.”

  | 1982 |

  JOSEPH SPENT MOST of the stifling summer in the basement workshop at Faerwood, a spacious room fitted with a lathe, table saw, drill press, as well as a peg-boarded wall of the finest hand and power tools. For more than three months he was not allowed to leave the basement, although every time his father left Faerwood, Joseph picked the locks within seconds and roamed the house at will.

  It was during this summer he learned the craft of cabinetry.

  THE SINGING BOY was an illusion of Karl Swann’s invention, a trick wherein three boxes are rolled onto the stage, each in its own spotlight.

  In the illusion, the magician opens each box, showing them all empty. A boy then walks onto the stage, enters the center box. The magician closes the cabinet as the boy begins to sing, muffling the sound. Suddenly the voice is thrown stage left. The magician opens the box on the left to reveal the boy, who continues the song. The illusionist closes the door, and the voice instantly travels to stage right. Again, the boy is seen in the box. The magician closes the door one last time, then waves a hand. In a spectacular flourish, all three boxes collapse to reveal six doves in each, which immediately take flight.

  But the singing continues! It comes from the back of the theater where the boy, now dressed in pure white, stands.

  AFTER NEARLY EIGHT MONTHS of work, the effect was complete. On a brutally cold January evening, with snow drifts halfway up the windows at Faerwood, Karl Swann entertained two of his friends in the great room. Wilton Cole and Marchand Decasse were other has-beens of the magic world, a pair of third-tier card and coin men. That night they drank their absinthe poured over sugar cubes, shared more than one pipe of opium. Joseph watched them from one of the many hidden passageways at Faerwood.

  At midnight the Great Cygne, in full costume, presented the illusion. Joseph—already far too big for the role of the Singing Boy—fulfilled his role. He entered the room, and stuffed his growing body into the center box. His father closed the door.

  Joseph waited, his heart racing. The air became close, rich with body smells, dank with fear. He heard a muffled burst of laughter. He heard a loud argument, breaking glass. Time seemed to stall, to rewind.

  The bottom of the box would drop any second, as they had rehearsed. He waited, barely able to breathe. He heard sounds drifting in, the two men discussing stealing the illusion from Joseph’s father. It seemed the Great Cygne had passed out, and the men found the prospect of the boy spending the night in the box amusing.

  An hour later Joseph heard the front door slam. Faerwood fell silent, except for the skipping LP record, a recording of Bach’s Sleepers Awake.

  Blackness became Joseph Swann’s world.

  When his father opened the box, eleven hours later, the daylight nearly blinded him.

  OVER THE NEXT SIX WEEKS, after school, Joseph followed the two men, noting their daily routes and routines. When their houses and places of business were empty, he learned their locks. In late February, Wilton Cole was found by his wife at the bottom of the stairwell in their home, his neck broken, apparently the victim of an accidental fall. Marchand Decasse, who owned a small electrical-appliance repair shop, was found three days later, electrocuted by faulty wiring in a thirteen-inch Magnavox portable television.

  Joseph kept the news clippings beneath his pillow for two years.

  THE GREAT CYGNE never performed the Singing Boy illusion in front of a live audience. Instead, he sold the drawings and schematics to magicians all over world, claiming exclusivity to each of them. When his ruse was discovered, he became an exile, a recluse no longer welcomed or wanted on any stage. Karl Swann began his final spiral.

  He would never set foot outside Faerwood again.

  | 1987 |

  IT WAS A YEAR of transformation for both Joseph Swann and Faerwood. As the exterior continued to fall into ruin, the interior went through many renovations, changes to which Joseph was not privy. He entered through the kitchen, ate his meals and studied in the dining room, slept on a cot in one of the many rooms in the warren-like basement. Month after month the cacophony was endless—sawing, sanding, nailing, demolition, construction.

  Finally, in September, the canvases and temporary partitions came down, and what Joseph saw both excited and confused him. Where there had once been a wall there was now a mirror, a silvered glass panel that turned on a central pivot. Cabinets opened into other rooms. In one of the bedrooms, the switch plate set the walls in motion, forming a separate room, bringing up electric lights outside the frosted windows, giving the room the appearance of being at a seashore, complete with the recorded sounds of gently crashing waves just beyond the glass. In yet another room on the third floor, the movement of a lamp opened a portal in the floor; the movement of a sconce lowered a panel, revealing a round window.

  Faerwood had become an echo of the fury swirling inside Karl Swann. On that day Joseph saw his father standing at the top of the stairs, wearing his stage costume for the first time in years. Karl Swann looked like a ghost—his pale skin and dyed hair giving him a funereal look that young Joseph had only seen in horror films.

  ON HIS EIGHTEENTH BIRTHDAY, with news of his acceptance to college in hand, Joseph returned to Faerwood to find his father in the attic, hanging from the roof beam. He had used the same noose Artemus Coleridge used nearly eighty years earlier.

  Joseph cut his father down, then took a secret staircase to the kitchen.

  Faer
wood was his.

  IT TURNED OUT that his apprenticeship to Karl Swann, building finely crafted magic boxes, served Joseph well. After college he began a small business building one of a kind custom cabinets and furniture. He worked with the finest materials, sometimes not emerging from the workshop for weeks on end. He soon found that his passion for cabinetry and furniture making sprang from his obsession with puzzles, that the elements of joinery—from dovetails to mortise and tenon to dowel joints—all fed his passion for the solving of conundrums, and yet he knew all the while that there was within him a magnum opus, a great and terrible creation yet to come.

  | JANUARY 2008 |

  NOW IN HIS LATE THIRTIES, the dark exhortations of Joseph Swann’s youth had passed into the realm of sporadic flame, but he had not forgotten the fascination of that day so many years ago, the shimmering chimera of Molly Proffitt and all who came after her. There were small patches of brown grass and mounded earth on the Faerwood grounds that would attest to this.

  In late January, while cleaning the attic, he came across a box he had not seen in many years. Among the books on magic and illusions, beneath his father’s many notebooks of gibberish, he found the old eight-millimeter film The Magic Bricks. He ran the movie in the attic at Faerwood, not far from where his father had thrown a rope over a roof beam. Tears streamed down his face as he was coaxed down a long corridor of remembrance.

  The seminal film had been made in 1908. One hundred years, Swann thought. The significance of this centenary was lost on him until, just before dinnertime, the doorbell rang. On the way downstairs he made himself presentable.

  On the porch was a girl, a maiden of sixteen or so, soliciting for a nonprofit human-rights group. She had short brown hair and roan eyes. She talked to him, trusted him. They always did. Her name was Elise Beausoleil.