The Masquerading Magician Read online

  Persephone bantered with the crowd while she peeled the orange she’d plucked from the miraculous orange tree. This wasn’t as elaborate an illusion as Robert-­Houdin’s original, but the audience was captivated. Persephone threw the peeled orange into the audience. A young man I knew caught the fruit.

  “It’s real!” he shouted, holding up the orange.

  My young neighbor Brixton was attending the show with his friends, sitting several rows in front of me and Max. Dorian had gotten both of us excited about the classic magic act, and Brixton had convinced his friends Ethan and Veronica to attend the show.

  Fourteen-year-old Brixton was the one person in Portland who’d learned my secret and Dorian’s. It hadn’t been on purpose, and I’d been terribly worried about it at first, until events that winter had cemented his loyalty. At first he’d tried to convince Ethan and Veronica that he’d really seen a living gargoyle, but that was long behind us. I hoped.

  “May I ask,” Persephone said, “if there is someone here tonight who would like to escape from Prometheus’s trickery? I can send you away to the Underworld, where you will be safe.” She paced the length of the stage, the spotlight following her deliberate steps. “In this early part of the evening, the spirits are only strong enough to carry one of you. I’ll do my best to protect the rest of you. A volunteer?”

  “Brixton volunteers!” Ethan shouted, raising Brixton’s arm for him. Brixton snatched it back and scowled at Ethan.

  “Thank you, my young friends,” Prometheus cut in, “but in this modern age, unfortunately I must insist on a volunteer who is at least eighteen.” The mechanical orange tree was now gone from his head. I didn’t see it anywhere. We’d all been paying attention to Persephone.

  “How about closer to eighty?” The spotlight followed the voice and came to rest on two elderly men. A bulky man with gray hair and huge black eyebrows was grinning and pointing at his friend, a skinny throwback to the 1960s in a white kurta shirt and with long white hair pulled into a ponytail.

  Persephone ushered the smaller man to the stage and asked him his name.

  “Wallace,” he said with a calm voice that struck me as out of place on the dramatic stage. “Wallace Mason.” He wore the Indian-style cotton shirt over faded jeans and sandals. While most of the audience had dressed up, he looked like a man who thought the embroidered neckline on his shirt was dressing up.

  Persephone continued an easygoing patter with the crowd, the spotlight remaining on her while Prometheus prepped the man. A minute later, the stage lights flickered. As they did so, an astringent scent assaulted my nostrils.

  “The spirits are ready,” Persephone said. “They have sent ether to carry my friend here to safety.” She raised her arms, and Wallace Mason began to float. His white hair fell free of its ponytail and flowed past his shoulders. As his feet left the stage, the image of a flowing evening gown appeared over his clothing. The audience laughed.

  “Forgive the spirits,” Persephone said. “They think women are most worthy of saving.”

  I knew what was happening. I’d seen various versions of the Floating Lady illusion over the years. All of them involved someone—or their image—hovering high above the stage. Unfortunately, it was the worst possible illusion for keeping Dorian hidden from view. One of the audience members was sure to spot him.

  The theater plunged into darkness. All that was visible was the ghostly, floating form of a confused man—and, for anyone who looked up, the shocked gargoyle above him.

  A ripple of murmurs from the crowd followed. I looked around to see what people were looking at. When I looked back up, Dorian was gone.

  I jerked my head around, searching for the gargoyle. Since a hefty stone gargoyle hadn’t crashed onto the stage or into the audience, that meant Dorian must have freed his foot and scampered to safety. I hadn’t imagined his presence, had I?

  Max put his hand on my arm. “Don’t worry,” he whispered. “He’s not going to fall.”

  I tensed, then realized Max was talking not about the missing gargoyle but the volunteer floating above the stage.

  “I’m just tired,” I whispered back. Max knew how hard I’d been working lately. He was under the illusion I was busy with my job and fixing up my crumbling house, not my true actions of working to save Dorian’s life. Lying to those you care about is one price to pay for immortality.

  I forced my shoulders to relax. Once Max’s attention was back to the illusion, I looked up, toward the spot where I’d seen Dorian earlier. There was still no gargoyle. Only the ghostly image of the volunteer in a superimposed evening gown. Wallace Mason’s floating image reached the catwalk—and disappeared into the ether.

  The lights went out again. A moment later, Prometheus and Persephone stood in the center of the stage, the volunteer in between them. The magicians took his hands in theirs, raised their arms above their heads, and gave deep bows. I applauded enthusiastically, clapping as much for Dorian’s escape as for the illusion.

  During the brief intermission, I excused myself to use the restroom, when in truth I wanted to make sure there was no sign of Dorian. I knew Dorian, so I knew the types of places he liked to hide. There was no balcony in this theater, so I went to the adjacent alley but saw no sign of him. Hitching up my dress, I climbed the fire escape to the roof. No sign of him there either. I hadn’t found him when the sound of accordion music wafted up through the vents, signaling that it was time to return to our seats. Where was Dorian? I reached my seat as the lights were falling.

  “I really wish you’d leave your cell phone on,” Max said, looking slightly annoyed.

  “Didn’t you see the signs in the lobby? Using a cell phone here is punishable by death.” At least that got a smile out of him.

  For the rest of the act, the magicians told the story of Persephone’s powers as the Goddess of Spring Growth, who possessed the ability to bring the dead back to the living. A good story is one of the secrets of a successful magic show. Illusions are simply tricks if they don’t tell a story. Persephone & Prometheus’s Phantasmagoria was a dark fairy tale. The magicians knew how to lead their audience where they wanted them to go. I wished I could relax and enjoy the show.

  When the lights went up at the end of the performance, I turned to Max, trying to think of how to excuse myself to look for my living gargoyle.

  Max and I had met that winter, the very day I moved to Portland. It was now the start of spring, and Max had missed the first blooming flowers while he’d been out of the country in China to celebrate his grandfather’s 100th birthday. When he’d returned a few weeks ago, there had been a change in him. He said he’d been busy with a case at work, but was that all it was? Going to the magic show together was our first date in over a month. But if Dorian was stuck somewhere because of his unmoving stone leg, unable to make it home …

  “How about I make us a pot of tea back at my place,” Max said. “I brought back some oolong tea from China with a flavor that’s the most perfect blend of peaches and honey I’ve ever encountered.”

  The warmth in his dark brown eyes as he talked about one of his passions made me temporarily forget about Dorian. Max’s straight black hair flopped at an angle over his forehead, reaching past his eyebrows. The unkempt look was sexy, but also unlike him. What had happened in China?

  “I’m really tired,” I said. “I know we haven’t had a chance to catch up much—”

  “Yeah, you’ve been distracted for half the night.”

  “I’m sorry, Max. I—”

  “It’s okay, Zoe,” he said with a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “Besides, I’m sleep-deprived from a case I’m working.”

  I looked down at the green silk dress I hadn’t worn in years. I’d pulled it out especially for this evening that I’d wanted to be special. The dress was one of the few items of clothing that hadn’t been ruined when part of my roof collapsed durin
g a brutal winter storm, only saved because it had been in storage in my Airstream trailer. The material was only slightly disheveled from my rooftop jaunt. I’m used to being careful with clothes, a habit from a time when they weren’t so easily replaced. Max had dressed up too, in a slim-fitting black suit and the black-and-white wingtips I loved.

  “It’s supposed to be a gorgeous weekend,” I said. “Why don’t you come over for a barbeque in my garden tomorrow afternoon?”

  At that suggestion, Max’s withdrawn expression transformed into a genuine smile.

  And so it was that instead of staying out with a man with whom I could never be completely honest, no matter how much I wanted to, I went home to a crumbling house where I hoped a gargoyle with a failing stone body would be waiting for me.

  Three

  I drove through the Hawthorne district of northeast Portland and eased my old truck into the driveway. I sighed as I looked at the gaping hole in the roof, covered with a tarp that flapped in the wind. One day I’d have time to fix the old Craftsman house.

  A skinny figure dressed in jeans and a hideous velvet smoking jacket was waiting for me in front of the house.

  “Zoe!” Brixton said. “It took you long enough. You have to listen to this.”

  Since Brixton wasn’t my kid, I hadn’t been expecting to see him in my house at ten o’clock at night.

  “One minute, Brixton. Let’s get inside. What are you wearing? You look like Hugh Hefner.”

  “Who?”

  “Never mind.”

  I stepped across the creaking porch and opened the front door of my house. The diffuse light from a gold-colored Chinese lantern illuminated the corner of the living room, casting a mix of light and shadows across my green velvet couch and Dorian’s stack of library books, which was nearly as tall as he was.

  “Dorian?” I called out after Brixton closed the door.

  A light peeked through the kitchen door, and I heard a rhythmic scraping sound.

  I pushed through the swinging door and found Dorian stirring a steaming pot. As usual, the gargoyle stood on a stepping stool to reach the stove. He’d become a chef after serving as a companion to a blind former chef in Paris, who believed Dorian to be a disfigured man. Now the gargoyle was my roommate. A secret one who didn’t need a bedroom, but a roommate nonetheless.

  I was glad to see him safe, but his calm countenance made me question what I thought I’d seen that night. A flash of irritation rose within me. I’d been abrupt with Max because I was worried about Dorian, and here he was acting as if nothing had happened.

  “You’re all right, Dorian?”

  “Ce n’est rien,” Dorian said, continuing to stir the pot. “It is nothing. My leg merely stiffened from standing still above the stage for so long.”

  “You shouldn’t have been there in the first place! What were you thinking?”

  “Hey,” Brixton said. “Didn’t you hear me outside? Don’t you want to hear this?”

  “I have lived safely in the shadows for over one hundred and fifty years,” Dorian said in his thick French accent, ignoring Brixton as well as he turned to face me. “I know what I am doing.”

  “But you’ve never had your body start reverting to stone before.” I studied Dorian’s legs. His left leg was a darker gray than the rest of his body and hung at an awkward angle with his clawed foot turned outward. Something was happening that we didn’t yet understand. “You almost fell. And anyone could have seen you.”

  “Yet I did not fall, nor did anyone see me.” He turned back to the stove and switched off the gas flame.

  “You were at the show?” Brixton asked.

  “It was not remarkable, yet it had some high points. Now will you fetch three mugs?”

  The sulking teenager obliged, shoving his cell phone into his pocket and selecting three handmade pieces of pottery, painted with vibrant reds and oranges. I’d bought the mugs in 1960s New Mexico from the craftswoman who made them. I smiled to myself in spite of the situation. I had a small collection of mugs, but those were the ones most people were drawn to. They were my favorites as well. The craftswoman had instilled a loving energy into the clay, transforming a lump of raw materials into something both beautiful and functional. I thought of craftspeople like her as artisan alchemists.

  Dorian poured the thick steaming liquid from his pot into the three mugs. He gave a start when he looked up at Brixton. “What is this vulgar jacket you are wearing?”

  “Like it?” Brixton asked, his earlier agitation suddenly forgotten. “Veronica thought we should dress up for the show. I found this in the back of my mom’s closet.”

  “Hmm … ” Dorian handed Brixton his mug.

  Brixton took a sip. “I don’t know how he makes hot chocolate taste so good without milk or sugar.”

  “Cocoa elixir?” Dorian looked at me with innocent black eyes that wouldn’t have been out of place on a puppy dog. “I know you have been feeling sick. Alors, I made your favorite.”

  “It’s a good thing you’re such a good cook,” I said, accepting the mug. “You know how to bribe me.” I took a sip of the rich, chocolatey drink. It had hints of coconut and cinnamon. “See, I’ve already nearly forgotten you almost got yourself found out tonight.”

  Dorian grinned and jumped down from the stool. He stumbled, but caught himself before he fell flat on the linoleum floor. “Merde,” he mumbled.

  “You’re due for another infusion of alchemy,” I said, knowing better than to ask if he was all right. “The garden is doing well enough that I’ve got plenty of plants to create salts for your Tea of Ashes.”

  “I much prefer the flavor of my cocoa elixir,” Dorian said.

  Using a combination of mercury and sulfur, I was able to turn my hand-grown plants into a salt-like ash through an alchemical transformation described in Dorian’s peculiar alchemy book, Non Degenera Alchemia. Salt was one of the three essential elements for alchemists. Mercury is the spirit, sulfur the soul, and salt the body. Dorian’s soul and spirit were intact. It was his body that was failing him. My Tea of Ashes worked by temporarily fooling Dorian’s body into thinking it had been rejuvenated with a true alchemical salt.

  Alchemy is usually a long, drawn-out process. It can’t be rushed. The discipline of alchemy strives to turn the impure into something pure, be it transmuting lead into gold or turning a failing body into an immortal one. It’s as much about the alchemist as it is the ingredients. It’s a personal transformation, done in isolation in one’s own laboratory while following a series of natural steps that transform the elements. Using earth, air, water, and fire, you calcinate, dissolve, separate, conjoin, ferment, distill, and coagulate. You get out what you put into it. And alchemical transformations of the body can’t be transferred to others—a lesson I learned the hard way a long time ago.

  That’s the way alchemy is supposed to work.

  But the book that brought Dorian to life wasn’t like that. Non Degenera Alchemia was backward alchemy, a dangerous alchemical idea that involved quick fixes. I speculated that’s why the title wasn’t simply True Alchemy, but instead the convoluted double-negative Not Untrue Alchemy. Drawing upon external life forces to shortcut nature, backward alchemy was the antithesis of true alchemy. The “death rotation” described in the book’s coded illustrations and Latin text told of backward actions that took minutes instead of months, and began, rather than ended, with fire.

  The quick fixes in the book showed me that I could use my energy, along with that of the plants I’d lovingly tended in my garden, to hastily produce the end product of ashes. But it wasn’t a permanent fix. I had only scratched the surface in my understanding of the book.

  “Is there enough for seconds?” Brixton asked.

  Dorian smiled and topped off Brixton’s cocoa. “It is too bad the magicians selected the orange tree automaton,” he said.

  “I
thought that was pretty cool,” Brixton said. “That was a real orange that grew from the metal tree.”

  “It was nicely done,” I agreed. “You take offense that they stole the idea from the great Jean Eugène Robert-­Houdin?”

  “Non. I would have much preferred them to have re-created Father’s pastry chef automaton.”

  “Of course you would,” I said, barely able to suppress a smile.

  “Bon soir, mes amis,” Dorian said, leaving his empty mug on the counter. He limped out of the kitchen. I presumed he was heading out on his nightly excursion. Since it wasn’t a good idea for him to go out during the day, when it would be too easy for people to see him, he explored the city and surrounding forests at night. Lately his nocturnal jaunts had been limited because a portion of the city’s forests had been overrun by treasure hunters. The brutal winter storm that wrecked my roof had also caused a mudslide that unearthed a portion of hidden jewels from a decades-old train heist. Poor Dorian now had to share the woods with clandestine treasure hunters.

  “That was weird,” Brixton said.

  So much of my life was weird that I couldn’t be sure which part he was referring to.

  “Doesn’t he always insist on cleaning up ‘his’ kitchen?” Brixton continued.

  “I think he’s embarrassed that we saw him lose control of his body.”

  “That’s exactly why I thought you’d want to hear this.” Brixton attempted to raise an eyebrow enigmatically, but ended up lifting both of them.

  “Right! You wanted to tell me something. Sorry, Brix. What is it?”

  “The magician Prometheus”—he paused for dramatic effect—“is an alchemist.”

  I let out my breath and smiled. Brixton had an active imagination. Ever since he’d broken into my house and learned I was an alchemist, he’d seen alchemists everywhere. Well, perhaps not everywhere. But it had happened on more than one occasion.