Chloe was squeezing her temples as if to ward off a migraine. “Regardless of the details,” she said, and everyone looked in her direction, “we’re all agreed that we should leave Ivan where he is for the moment and concentrate on trying to figure out exactly what’s going on. Right?”
Everyone nodded.
“All right, then. We’re going to have to open Crandall’s—we can’t close up shop every time something dreadful happens or we’ll all be bankrupt. We’ve still got a little while. Seth, I guess you should go back and check on Franklin. The rest of us have got some digging to do.”
* * * *
By the time the first patrons of Crandall’s began streaming in the door, Martin was an irritable ball of frustration. He burned himself while pulling a sheet of cookies out of the oven, and then, yelping in pain, backed into the cappuccino machine and nearly knocked it off the counter. By the time he had finished screaming out a colorful string of curses, he was almost out of breath.
The last few hours of research had yielded very little information. They already knew that the house sat empty for a long time before they bought and restored it. The deed had been in the possession of the county, presumably because its previous holder was dead. Of the man who once lived in the house—William Amory Crandall III, a.k.a. Crandall the Conjuror—they turned up nothing of particular interest. Apparently, he’d been a minor vaudeville stage magician, touring state fairs and small theaters throughout most of the 1930s before retiring to the house in 1942 and becoming a hermit. Chloe remembered the man at the records office mentioning a scandal, but there was no whiff of the specifics in any of the online sources they searched. In fact, no one knew ultimately became of Crandall, but then, the man was hardly Blackstone or Houdini, so it seemed no one had probed too deeply.
About the strange church called Bellwether and its two frightening gurus, they turned up nothing at all.
Martin could hear music and voices from the front room, subdued, but still calming. The presence of the open hole over his shoulder was constantly making the hairs prickle on the back of his neck. He considered getting a garbage bag to tape over it, but that would mean going near it again, possibly looking inside, and he really didn’t want to do that. Already the memory of touching that slack, dead face in the dark was making his hands tremble.
The kitchen door swung open and one of the guys from Seth’s punk band came in. Martin thought his name was Yancy—a scrawny guy in his mid-twenties with a ragged goatee, his arms and neck dense with tattoos. He was chewing on an almond biscotti. “I heard what happened to Ivan, man,” he said, shaking his head. “Same shit with Franklin. Seth told me to come tell you. We kept the kid in the apartment, locked in his room, tried to reason with him. He just wasn’t having it. He busted out this afternoon, took off running. Probably back to that damn church.” Yancy bit off another chunk of biscotti and chewed it morosely.
“Are you guys going back for him?” Martin asked.
“No. Not yet, anyway. Not much point, is there?”
“Probably not.” Martin remembered the flash of white light, implanting Franklin’s face into his memory at the moment of conversion. The poor kid never had a chance. If that crazy woman at the church had perfected that little trick, then it seemed like none of them did.
Chapter Twenty-Four
When Ivan came out of the back room, Lily planted herself in front of him so that there was no way he could ignore her. She was so happy to have him back that she could hardly contain herself. One of the other new boys had come back, too, and, of course, that was wonderful, but to her Ivan was special.
“So, what happened?” She put her hands on her hips and stood fast, blocking his path.
He looked down at her, the hint of a smile playing at the corners of his mouth. “Just some news that I hope will help us out,” he said.
He tried to step around her, but she matched him, blocking him anew. “Was it terrible, Ivan?” she asked breathlessly. “Those people—did they torture you?”
He chuckled, though his eyes remained serious. “Of course not, Lily. They used to be my friends.” Ivan looked up and past her, out the glass front windows of the church. It was dark now; all he saw was his own pale reflection. “They just don’t understand what we’re trying to do here,” he finished.
“No one understands,” said Lily, pouting and crossing her arms. “I can’t get anyone to listen anymore.”
Ivan patted her on the shoulder. “Don’t worry about it, Lily. Everything will be all right. You’ll see.”
Father and Mother emerged from the back room. All of the murmured conversations going on among the followers ceased abruptly. All faces turned toward the masters.
“We have some very important business to attend to on the outside,” Father said, standing very straight with his hands clasped behind his back. “We do not need any of you to accompany us at this time. However, we would like you all to remain here while we are gone, and keep watch for anyone who might mean us harm. You have our permission to deal with intruders as you see fit.” Her gaze focused pointedly on Ivan. “Does everyone understand?”
Solemn assents rose from around the room.
“Very good. We should be back before morning.” Father lumbered out through the glass door, Mother’s shrouded form shuffling along behind him.
Lily went to the door and stood on the threshold, watching until Mother and Father were nothing but tiny black figures. Something momentous must have happened, surely—Mother and Father rarely left the church these days, usually sending the followers on any errand that needed doing. She wondered if their strange behavior had anything to do with what Ivan had just told them—it must have, she figured, for the timing could be no coincidence. Lily looked sidelong at the handsome, blond-haired Ivan. She’d gotten the feeling that he didn’t want to tell her what the news was. Perhaps he liked having the secret all to himself.
She was his special friend, wasn’t she? Surely, she could convince him to spill his story, especially if she promised not to tell anyone else. She wouldn’t tell anyone else, not even Rose, whom she didn’t talk to much anymore as it was. Then she had another thought, one that made her suddenly nervous. What if Mother and Father were simply disgusted by the followers’ failure to bring in any new recruits? Perhaps they really had gone to start recruiting members themselves. Lily told herself she didn’t believe it, but her throat tightened nonetheless. What would become of her and the other followers, if they were no longer needed?
Her tension had not abated by the time the moon had risen to the halfway point in the bowl of black sky outside the church windows. She had spent most of the evening pacing up and down between the rows of folding chairs, trying to ignore the glum stares of the other followers, who sensed the same thing she did. Ivan’s big secret was momentarily forgotten; when he told her cheerfully to sit down and relax, she ignored him.
Just as the sky turned from black to the dusky purple that heralded the dawn, Lily heard footsteps on the sidewalk outside. She whipped toward the door just in time to see Mother and Father gliding through it, walking quickly, their very bodies seeming to glow with triumph. Lily was happy to see them so obviously satisfied with themselves, but the seed of apprehension was still growing inside of her.
The others had all turned their expectant faces toward the leaders, waiting for news. Instead of speaking, Father merely smiled, then stood aside and held the glass door open with the flat of his hand.
People began to stream into the church, expressions of wondrous awe on their faces as they surveyed their new environment. From the looks of them, one would think they’d just wandered into the Sistine Chapel.
Lily could hardly believe her eyes. Mother and Father must be far more powerful than even she had imagined, in order to recruit so many new followers in so brief a time. The flood of them through the door seemed endless, hu
mans of all colors, sizes, and ages, united only by the common fire in their eyes, the willingness to die for the cause of Bellwether. Lily was terrified and awestruck, all at once.
Finally, the deluge slowed to a trickle, and when the last recruit had filed in, Father allowed the door to swing silently closed. There was a little jostling and confusion as people found seats or claimed stretches of wall to lean against. Sensing an announcement, Lily scurried to an empty chair three down from Ivan’s. She stole a sideways glance at him, but he was staring straight ahead, to the makeshift altar where Father now situated himself. Mother, as always, disappeared into the back, her shawls whispering around her birdlike limbs.
Father held his hands up for quiet, although all the noise had already died down by that point. “Please make our newest members feel welcome,” he said in his deep, resonant voice that carried over the countless heads like the edict of a deity. “They won’t all be staying here, of course, but most will be reporting here every day, as many of you already do. Those new recruits who choose to reside on the premises will sleep on the floor in the main room until we can obtain more cots.” Practical aspects taken care of, Father paused and surveyed his audience with a regal air, his formality belying the palpable sense of excitement radiating from his pores.
At last, he said, “The time is very near when Bellwether will be powerful enough to convince the world of the righteousness of our ways.” He smiled as warmly as his harsh, stoic countenance would allow. “You have all been a tremendous help to us in spreading the word. We will still need your help in the days and weeks to come, though from now on your duties may be somewhat different than previously.”
There was a slight rustle in the crowd at this last pronouncement, but no one spoke. Lily felt some of her anxiousness dissipate, but not all.
If Father had noticed the movement, he failed to acknowledge it. “Our church,” he said, “is currently three hundred members strong. This is a formidable force, but in the next few days, we wish to triple our recruiting efforts, and to grow Bellwether by leaps and bounds.” He dropped his voice, as if conveying a dark secret. “I do not wish to alarm any of you, but there are forces out there that want to destroy us. We had just a taste of their vengeance a few nights ago. We must not let them do their evil upon us. We will build a bigger army, and we will fight them. If necessary, we will go to them and destroy them first, so that we might be free to expose the world to the teachings of our One True Church.”
This time, the swell of pride in Lily’s chest overrode the flutter of fear and uncertainty that still nested there. She noticed that the other followers, Ivan included, were all sitting very straight in their chairs.
Father cleared his throat. “There are many changes on the horizon,” he said. His muscled arms were crossed, his bald head shining under the lights. “Very soon,” he went on, “we will all find ourselves tested in a most dramatic way. In the meantime, though, I don’t want your recruiting efforts entirely ignored, I would prefer you to spend the majority of your time preparing yourselves, both physically and mentally, for battle.”
At this, he surveyed the room once more, then nodded and stepped down from the platform. He had disappeared into the back room before anyone could say a word.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Late that night, after Crandall’s had closed up and everyone had left or retired to bed, Martin lay wide awake, listening to Chloe’s deep, even breathing in the darkness beside him.
He found that as tired as he was, he couldn’t stop thinking about Ivan, and the invisible corpse hidden behind the wall downstairs. These thoughts, as all consuming as they were, weren’t entirely the ones keeping him from slumber.
They had only really done a perfunctory search of the house’s history, he knew, enough to figure out that there wasn’t a hell of a lot of information on it. Crandall had been marginally famous, but not enough to warrant huge media scrutiny, and the house itself, setting aside the mysterious sealed off room on the blueprints, seemed otherwise remarkable only for its utter ordinariness. The little they discovered still nagged at him. There had to be more to it than they were able to find out. The question that nagged Martin the hardest concerned the final fate of William Crandall, the man who had built the house, lived in it for an untold number of years, and then apparently vanished off the face of the earth. What had happened to him? Surely, it couldn’t be his body sitting calmly in the underground chamber—a quick calculation assured Martin that even if the man had lived to a hundred, his body would have been reduced to a skeleton long ago.
Then again, he thought, the guy was a magician.
Martin wasn’t sure where this ghost of an idea had come from, but he scoffed at it nonetheless. Magicians, after all, were only conjurors, illusionists—everything was done with clever trickery. No magician, no matter how talented, could cheat death, or at least delay putrefaction. No, there had to be another explanation. Maybe the body that was down there wasn’t a real body at all, but a mannequin he’d used in his act. It had felt like a real body, Martin remembered, his skin crawling unpleasantly, but perhaps he was mistaken in his panic. Then again, maybe the corpse was Crandall’s, but the conditions of the basement had somehow preserved it, mummified it. Or maybe a friend of his had preserved the body after his death, as a condition of his will. It had to be something reasonable like that.
Then how were the chambers made invisible? The ghost voice pestered him again. Why did the body feel almost alive—not mummified—when you touched it?
Martin tried to dismiss the questions, but they wouldn’t be gotten rid of so easily. The invisibility of the chambers could perhaps be explained away as an elaborate optical illusion, but the possibility seemed a weak one. For one thing, Martin reasoned, the top chamber itself looked too big to be situated where it was. Even the room on the blueprints, according to Chloe, had been no more than six feet by six, tops. The chamber, as he and Chloe navigated it, had been easily three times that size, perhaps more. Martin’s head began to hurt. Even if there was a rational explanation for what was going on, he certainly couldn’t imagine what it might be.
Sighing, he slid out of bed, taking care not to disturb Chloe, who merely turned over and groaned, probably in the grip of the unpleasant dream. He began to tiptoe across the room in the dark, finding his way by the cracks of moonlight sifting in around the curtains. Even though he was physically exhausted, and felt as though he hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep in months, his brain simply refused to tone down its hyperactive theorizing long enough to let him rest. So, he figured he might as well put his spare energy to use, perhaps burn it out enough so that his racing thoughts would shut up for a little while.
He crept downstairs and through the kitchen, considered brewing come coffee, but then decided against it. The aroma might wake the girls, and besides, he didn’t really need the caffeine—his head was already buzzing.
Martin switched on the computer in the little alcove off the dining room. Planting himself in front of the pulsing blue screen, he was soon immersed in his single-minded search for any information, no matter how trivial, about William Amory Crandall III.
When he finally looked up at the clock, bleary-eyed from focusing on so many shifting pixels, he was startled to find that nearly two hours had passed—it was almost five in the morning. Then he realized he felt even less like sleeping than he had when he’d first come downstairs.
Martin’s searches had yielded only a little more than his earlier haphazard ones. He had seen the same archival newspaper articles about Crandall’s shows, read a few excerpts from books that mentioned him. He was a fairly well-known figure at the time, invited to society parties and generally highly regarded by his colleagues and contemporaries. Martin skimmed through the information quickly, looking for something new.
At the end of the tenth page of his Google search, he found it.
There was
a listing for a book he missed before, a manual on magical techniques written in 1953 by a man named James Morley, otherwise known as Morley the Magnificent. Morley apparently knew Crandall quite well, and mentioned him in the book, which was long out of print. Martin clicked on the link and found himself on the website of a used bookstore, which carried a copy of Morley’s book for only a few dollars. Intrigued, but not expecting much, Martin ordered it, then noticed an excerpt of the introduction was available for immediate perusal. He clicked that link, and read the few paragraphs with growing interest, the darkness like a vast protective shield around him.
Though the book was meant for aspiring magicians and apparently focused on perfecting various tricks and techniques, the introduction was largely autobiographical. “I owe a great deal of my success as a magician to my very good friend and mentor, William Crandall,” Morley wrote. “Though he never achieved quite the level of fame that I thought he deserved, he was easily the best, most skilled illusionist I have seen, either before or since. He taught me a great many tricks, but most of his best ones remain a mystery to me to this day. Some of them seemed almost supernatural in their astounding execution.”
Martin sat and pondered that for a minute, a tiny finger of ice trickling down his spine. The chill only increased as he read the next few lines.
“Indeed, Crandall always believed wholeheartedly in the supernatural, and constantly strove to command its forces. After he moved to his house in the south,” here Martin gasped aloud at Morley’s words, “he became ever more secretive, involved in various projects to control minds and achieve immortality. He shared little of this pursuit with me, and I regret to say that our friendship eventually dissolved. I had not seen or spoken to him for several years before his disappearance. Despite this, though, I still consider Crandall a great magician, a great teacher, and a great man, and I therefore dedicate this book to him, hoping that wherever he is now, he will find it does him justice.”
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