by K. J. Young
As Mark makes his way down the hall, he notices a sliver of light under one of the doors ahead. Roy and Alma would already be in bed. It has to be Lisa in the blue room, as promised. He is painfully aware of the brush of his footsteps against the hallway runner and the rumble of thunder outside. He lifts his hand to knock on the closed door, then thinks better of it and turns the knob. Upon opening the door, he sees Lisa sitting in one of the tall-backed chairs. A tableside lamp next to her is the sole light in the room. She has a book spread open in her lap. “You’re late,” she says.
The admonition annoys him, but Mark brushes it off. He steps inside the room and whispers, “Take it up with the bus company.”
She closes the book and sets it on the table. “I wasn’t sure if you were going to show.”
The implication stings. The inference is too close to his stepfather’s description of him as unreliable. “I said I’d come back, and I did.”
Lisa nods in resignation and gets to her feet. He sees now that she has a flashlight in her right hand. “Well, it’s getting late. Let’s get this over with.” As if he’s been pestering her and she’s doing him the favor.
He follows her out of the room and down the corridor. The flashlight is their only light now, a beam that leads them through the house to the staircase. Without even pausing, she takes the steps two at a time, and he trails her up the flight of stairs, running his hand along the smooth banister for guidance. At the top, she stops on the large landing and opens the double doors. A whiff of dust tickles his nose, the musty smell of a place that has been closed off for a long time.
She continues on down a long, expansive corridor, past closed doors on either side. The walls are lined with framed paintings. Some of them are landscapes, while others are portraits of people from long ago, but he can’t get a decent look while still keeping pace with Lisa. The hallway ends at another set of double doors. She opens one and steps inside, beckoning him to follow.
Once inside, she shines the light in all directions, giving him a sense of the space. Mark wasn’t sure what to expect, but it sure wasn’t this. This room is enormous, ballroom-sized, the ceiling rising at least eight feet higher than in the hallway. The floor is made up of multicolored mosaic tile. “Is there some reason we can’t turn on the lights?” he asks, whispering.
“They don’t work up here,” she says. “Believe me, I checked. I even went down in the basement to check the fuse box. There are no fuses in place for the second or third floor. Someone took them out.”
“Oh.” As she waves the light in a wide circle, Mark takes it all in. The room is oddly naked, unfurnished except for a plain wooden table in the middle of the room. On the far end is a platform with a huge desk-sized podium facing outward, as if this was once a hall where speeches were given. Behind the podium, sitting farther back on the platform, is a large black box, the same size as the box that held the punching bag his brother got one year as a Christmas present.
The walls on each side are lined with dozens of pictures, crowding the spaces between the windows. This ballroom, if that’s what it is, is interesting in its own way, but nothing about it is disturbing, unless you count the fact that he’s standing here in the near-dark with this odd girl. “So what specifically did you find so upsetting?”
Lisa says, “Just take a look around first. I want to see if you have the same reaction.”
Guessing games are not usually something he enjoys, but he is willing to play along. He holds out a hand. “Flashlight, please.” She hands it over, and methodically he begins to assess the room, starting with the black-and-white photographs hanging on the left wall. The first photograph, closest to the door, shows a group of eight people sitting around a dining room table, lifting champagne flutes. The caption underneath reads, 1902, The Redevine Society.
He focuses the beam of light on the group and peers at those in the picture, four men and four women, all of them middle-aged, each one smiling with delight. “The Redevine Society?” He turns to Lisa. “Isn’t that the club you said Alma and Roy belong to?”
“That’s the one.”
The photos seem to be arranged by year, and each one is of the Redevine Society. As he walks, he reads the dates aloud. “1908. 1912. 1919.” In every picture, the members who are posing are clothed in what has to be the formal wear of the time. Mark scans the faces. No one looks familiar, but of course, that was a given. It wasn’t as if Theodore Roosevelt or Harry Houdini would have attended a soiree in Wisconsin.
Ever since Lisa handed over the flashlight, she’s been at his elbow encroaching on his space. She’s afraid, he thinks. If he were with any other woman, he’d be tempted to tease a scare out of her, but he senses that Lisa isn’t the type to take that kind of thing well. “I guess the Redevine Society has been going on for a while, then.”
He stares at the photo. Happy rich people, dressed up and eating delicious food and drinking champagne. Not a care in the world. Must be nice, he thinks. Maybe someday that would be him. No, nix that. Someday that will be him. He will order the finest bottle of champagne and order from the menu without even looking at the prices. Mark can envision it—now all he has to do is make it happen.
A burst of lightning outside lights up the side windows and illuminates the room for a split second. Mark, suddenly aware of the claustrophobic pressure of the stifling air in the room, asks, “Can we open one of these windows?”
“They’re all locked.”
“Really? That’s odd.”
She doesn’t reply. Sweat trickles down between his shoulder blades, making his T-shirt cling uncomfortably to his back. He wipes his forehead with the back of his hand. That shower with Monica is sounding better all the time.
He studies the photos again, noting the progression of the group as they age from photo to photo, getting older and older, until finally they’re all senior citizens. He peers at one that is dated 1921. Though the people are still fashionably dressed, the photos time-stamp the ravages of age. The men with their thinning hair, paunchy guts, and sagging jowls; the women dressed to disguise their spreading midsections and dropped bosoms. The women come off somewhat better, probably because they can camouflage their changed appearance with hair dye and glittery jewelry. Still, to him they look like hags. “It must be hell to be old,” he says. Lisa offers no response.
And then suddenly the next Redevine Society photo, dated 1922, pictures an entirely different set of people. Still four couples, but much younger, as young as Mark himself. They sit at the same table, with wide smiles, glasses raised to whoever was taking the picture. “That’s weird,” he says, taking a closer look.
Chapter Eight
“What’s weird?” Lisa asks.
“The Redevine Society. It’s like one group retired and then another bunch of people took over. That’s unusual, don’t you think?” He turns to Lisa, who just stares, a blank look on her face. “With clubs, aren’t there usually transitions? I mean, wouldn’t the new people join the former members and learn the ropes?”
She shakes her head. “I’m not a society girl, so I wouldn’t know.” Her voice is loud, echoing between the tile floor and the high ceiling.
Alarmed, he lowers his own voice in response. “Don’t you think we should keep our voices down? Alma and Roy might wake up.” He glances down at the mosaic tiles below his feet, each piece no larger than a playing card. Together the tiles create a pattern, which starts at the center of the room and radiates outward like the rays of the sun. It’s possible the old people are sleeping right below where they now stand. Easy enough for one of them to be awakened by their voices or the creaking of footsteps overhead. If they call out for Lisa and she doesn’t come, what next? Would they get up and phone Dr. Cross? Or would Roy feel spry enough to search the house? How would Mark explain his presence?
He feels his stomach lurch, sickened by the risk he’s taking. This whole ordeal has become a fool’s errand. There’s nothing disturbing here. Lisa lured him back at night by
promising something that turned out to be nothing, and stupidly he fell for it. His error in judgment might just lose him a good job. “Maybe I should just leave now,” he says, handing her the flashlight. “I don’t care how soundly they’re sleeping. They’re bound to hear us walking above them. I’m going to go.”
“No!” She pushes the flashlight back at him. “They won’t hear us—you can trust me on that.”
“How can you be so sure?”
Lisa laughs, a brittle sound in the empty space. “Because I’ve been living here for four months. Every night after dinner, they have three or four manhattans, and after that they sleep like the dead. Alma sometimes gets up and wanders around confused, but that’s usually later, around three a.m. or so. Believe me, at this point, they’re out cold.”
“Three or four manhattans?” Is that a lot for old people to drink? He thinks it might be, especially for Alma, who’s a small woman.
“Yeah, they hit the sauce pretty hard. It’s a big house,” she adds, sensing his uncertainty. “And believe me, their hearing isn’t all that great.”
“As long as you’re sure we won’t get caught up here.”
“I’m sure.”
He turns away and resumes studying the photos. The second set of Redevine Society members carries on in much the same way as the previous group. Dressed in evening attire, they sit at elegantly set tables, imbibing champagne and enjoying various delicacies. A few of the pictures are taken in restaurants, the waitstaff standing in the background, folded linen over their arms. All of the photos are labeled with the year and the words The Redevine Society, and a few of them have something handwritten across the top as well. To never growing old. Huh. Judging by the raised glasses, that had to be their toast. He nods approvingly. It’s better than toasting to world peace or good health. Given the choice, who wouldn’t want to avoid the eventual slide into decrepitude?
He keeps going until he nears the end, the last photo taken in the dining room at Alden Manor showing the same eight people in 1969, but this time all of them are casually attired and not looking nearly so happy. Clearly, the years had worn them down. He’s not surprised to see that two of the members are Alma and Roy. The others are elderly, with no sign of the new members, the ones who currently meet.
Backtracking, he goes from picture to picture, watching as the years photographically melt away. Amazing how age could change someone so entirely. In his youth, Roy had a full head of dark hair and a strong jawline. His smile curved slightly, as if he had a secret, while his eyes were wide and bright. His clothes had a tailored fit. It was clear that Roy had once been a man of vitality, one with a bright future. And his sister? If you could look past the dated clothing and hair, she’d been a total fox. How sad it was to see them now, needing help to do even the simplest things.
He’d die before he let that happen to him.
“There are pictures on the other side too,” Lisa prompts.
He crosses the room, Lisa on his heels. The photos lining the wall on the other side feature two people, performers of some kind. The man seems to be the star of the production, while a young female stands nearby. A circus act? No. Not a circus act at all. These two are part of a magic act. The man, dressed in a tuxedo, is the magician, the woman his assistant. With a start, Mark realizes that the pictures are of Roy and Alma in their younger days. “Holy shit,” he says, tapping the glass with one finger. “It’s really them.”
“It’s really them,” Lisa repeats. “Can you believe they kept this from me? I asked Roy once what they used to do before they retired, and he said he was a salesman and that Alma kept house for him. And when I asked Alma, she told me some story about working as a seamstress.”
“Weird.”
“Right?” She shakes her head. “I can’t believe they lied right to my face. And they didn’t even get their stories straight.”
“Maybe they were afraid you’d ask them to do a magic trick,” Mark says, not taking his eyes off the photos. He marvels at the Walgraves’ earlier youth. In the photos, Alma has on what would have been a revealing costume at the time, and from the look on her face, she is relishing her role in the show. In the photo labeled Milwaukee, Wisconsin, she’s inside a wooden box, only her head and feet sticking out on each end while her brother saws her in half. In another she’s on a different stage in Omaha, Nebraska, holding out a black top hat while Roy pulls out a white rabbit. Definite old-timey shit. Later on down the row, the photos show tricks that are more impressive, while the locales become more far-flung. New York. London. Rome. Paris. With each successive picture, the costumes become more elaborate and the venues larger.
Lisa taps a finger against the glass. “The box they used to cut her in half is over there.” She gestures toward the stage at the box Mark noticed when they first entered. “It has openings for her head and feet.” Shuddering, she adds, “It reminds me of a short coffin.”
He stops at a photo where Roy has one arm in the air pointing at Alma, who levitates over his head. “How did he do that?” he asks incredulously.
Lisa says, “I don’t know, but you see that kind of thing all the time in professional shows. People appear and disappear and float and all that stuff. If you ask me, there’s something unnatural about it. It’s not what people should be doing if they want to live a righteous life.” Her voice is disapproving.
So that’s it. She sees a magic show as something wrong. Sinful, even. “They’re just tricks done for entertainment purposes,” Mark says. “If we knew how they were done, we could re-create these tricks ourselves. It’s not any different than working as an acrobat or a singer. Pretty standard stuff.”
“If it’s all so innocent, why keep it a secret? They obviously did this magic act for years and years.”
She’s right about that. The photos of the two of them progress to show Roy and Alma as they got older and the tricks more complicated. In one of them, Alma’s headless body sits primly on a wooden chair, her hands folded in her lap, while Roy holds her head under one arm like a basketball. Eerily, her tongue hangs out and her eyes pop out of their sockets. In another, she has inexplicably become triplets, two versions of herself standing on either side of her brother, while a third sits on the floor looking up at him with a huge smile on her face. All three Almas look delighted.
“I’d love to know how that was done.” Mark leans in to take a closer look.
“I don’t know. Mirrors? Some kind of projector?”
“I can’t even imagine.”
At the halfway point he comes to two small framed posters, both illustrated in color: Walgrave’s Astounding Wonders—Performing daily at three and eight. The first one shows a drawing of a mustached Roy shooting a bolt of electricity out of his palm and aiming it right at Alma. Mark reads the caption at the bottom. Prepare to be amazed! You won’t believe your eyes! He grins at the hyperbole. The second poster shows a simulated time lapse of Roy deteriorating from a man into a skeleton. The caption at the bottom says, The amazing Roy Walgrave manipulates time right before your very eyes. Watch as flesh decays right off his bones!
Mark pokes a finger at the glass. “Now that had to be impressive.”
“I wouldn’t call it impressive. I’d say it’s evil.” Her voice quavers, on the edge of crying.
“You okay?”
She exhales. “Not really.”
“You know that he didn’t actually decay in front of an audience, right? It was just a trick. I’m sure they used a fake skeleton.”
“Even so, who thinks up a trick like that?” Her grimace conveys her disgust. “It’s just wrong. It goes against God to do something like that.”
It’s clear to him that she’s being overly dramatic. Not wanting to prolong the discussion, though, he nods and continues on. Beside the two posters is a series of photographs. He shines the flashlight on each one until he gets to the last one, dated 1954. This one is different. Roy and Alma are older, not performing but sitting at a linen-topped table at some kind of
banquet or fancy restaurant. The caption on the bottom of the photo lacks a location or date. It simply says, Until we meet again. They look to be much older—not ancient, but certainly well past their prime. It strikes him as sad. “What was it all for?” he murmurs under his breath. They traveled and performed their act all over the world. From the looks of it, they had the time of their life and then it just ground to a halt.
“What?” Lisa’s voice rises to a high pitch. “What did you say?”
For a moment he considers telling her it was nothing, but it’s just as easy to repeat the question. “I was asking what it was all for. I mean, what’s the point?”
“The point of what?”
“Of all of it. You’re born, you live, and then it’s over. What does any of it matter?” He gestures down the row of photos. “At one time they probably thought they were hot shit, traveling all over the place, amazing people with their act. And now they live in a run-down old house and need help with everything. Who even remembers what they did or who they were? It’s just over.”
“But that happens to everyone,” Lisa says quietly. “That’s life.”
“I guess.” Mark walks around the edges of the room, aiming the light as he goes. Overhead three different chandeliers, each one the size of a VW Bug, hang equidistant from the ceiling’s center, creating the points of a triangle. The front wall is centered by the platform and massive podium. Behind him is the double-door entrance, while the two side walls are covered by the photographs he just examined. In the center of the room stands the wooden table, a basic rectangle the size of a family’s dinner table, nothing fancy about it. This space, this ballroom—if that’s what it was intended to be—has an odd setup, but nothing about it strikes him as disturbing. He imagines that Alma and Roy once used this room for parties or presentations, maybe even doing their act for guests. He turns to Lisa and says, “I’m sorry, but I don’t see anything upsetting here. I mean, the pictures are a little unconventional, and their magic act had some weird stuff in it . . .” He wipes his forehead with the back of his hand.