When he grasped the handles of the double doors, his heart was already like a lump of lead in his chest, and the foreknowledge of what he would see flashed upon him the second before he saw it: Emily lay in an ungainly heap on the floor of the cabinet. “Emily,” he gasped, and then the dread burst inside him, in his throat, and for several moments he couldn't speak. He reached inside the cabinet, shifted her carefully so he could get his hands under her arms, and drew her out onto the stage. A sob opened his throat, and without taking his eyes off Emily he said to Lena, “Get a doctor.” She started offstage, but he was concentrating now, he knew how to concentrate under pressure, and he said to her in a tone of clearheaded command, “No. Not the telephone. Dazz was in the front row. He’s with a doctor. Get him.”
Obeying wordlessly, Lena passed through the curtain. Michael removed his coat, folded it into a pillow for Emily’s head, shrinking from her blank, wide-open eyes. Both her hands were clenched into fists, one resting on each breast; Michael felt in vain for a pulse or a heartbeat. Her skin was cool. He wanted to go and find something to cover her with, to keep her warm, but he couldn't bring himself to leave her, so he knelt wretchedly beside her, uncertain of what to do. He passed his hand in front of her staring eyes; there was no response, and, pressing his fingertips on her eyelids, he drew them shut. She must be in shock; she couldn’t be dead.
It seemed the applause had stopped a long time ago, he could hear the sounds of people leaving the theater. The curtain moved, and he looked downstage to see Lena enter, followed by the tall blond man Michael had seen with Dazz and Sami. Pale blue eyes, horsey face, not particularly friendly on the few occasions when they had met. What was his name? Mortimer, that was it, Mortimer.
With a curt nod, Dr. Mortimer knelt beside Emily, facing Michael across her body. He felt for her pulse, put his fingers on her throat, her temples, pulled back one of her eyelids, shone into the eye a small flashlight he had taken from an inside pocket, shut the eye again, moved her hands aside and laid his ear against her chest; then he looked at Michael with an expression of mingled rage and dismay. “I’m afraid she’s dead,” he said.
Lena cried out softly and knelt beside Michael, her hand on his shoulder. Michael shook his head, returning the doctor’s stare. “She can’t be,” he said evenly. “It’s not possible. How can you be sure?”
“In some cases it’s hard to be sure, but I’m sorry to say this isn’t one of those.”
“But how? What could have killed her?”
“That I can’t tell you. But we’ll find out.” He rose to his feet and loomed over them. “Meanwhile I must inform the proper authorities. Where was she when you found her?”
“In the cabinet.”
“Ah. And where is the older gentleman, the one I take to be responsible for this”—he paused briefly, but seemed unable to restrain himself any longer—“this outrageous spectacle?”
“I don’t know. I can’t find him,” Lena said in a voice broken by sobbing.
“I suggest you try again. The police will certainly want to talk to him. I’ll come back shortly.” He started to turn away, but stopped and looked sadly down at Emily’s body. “What a terrible shame,” he said, not attempting to disguise the anger in his voice. “Please cover her up.” He gave the two of them a contemptuous look and left the stage.
As the doctor exited, Michael turned to Lena. “Have you looked upstairs?”
“No,” she said weakly.
“I think you should take a look up there,” Michael told her, patting her hand. “Maybe that’s where he went.”
“Maybe,” Lena said, unconvinced and tearful. Bracing herself against Michael’s shoulder, she rose heavily to her feet and padded toward the wings.
Alone with Emily, Michael knelt quietly beside her and stared at her body. A line he had read somewhere came to him: “No motion has she now, no force.” How could she be dead? She looked beautiful, he realized, more beautiful than ever; her face was serious and serene, her lips tightly closed, her jaw set in that determined way she had, her hair startlingly black against the pallor of her skin. Overcome by sadness, Michael rocked back on his heels and moaned. He remembered what the master had taught him about the magic will, how the magician must perceive the will of others and attune his own will to theirs. He seemed to feel the strength of Emily’s will to live, even as she lay there lifeless, and he closed his eyes and concentrated, focusing his entire consciousness, every ounce of his force, on the single object of his desire: that Emily might live. He could feel the power radiating from him, flowing out of him in a surge that burned his cheeks and blurred his eyes, and he leaned close to her ear and whispered her name, once, and waited, and then again.
He squeezed his eyelids together to clear his sight, and when he opened them again he saw that her lips were slightly parted, and when he moved his face close to hers he felt something warm, like a soft puff of breath, against his cheek. Straightening up a little, he saw that her eyes were still closed, but at the edge of his vision one of her arms twitched. He thought his brain would burst with the effort he was making, he clutched at his throat, at his clamped jaws, and raised his head, and then her eyes opened, not fluttering, not blinking, but all at once; he saw anger in them, and something like disappointment, but when they met his they filled with joy and a smile of ineffable sweetness spread over her face. “You’re safe,” she said. “I’m so glad. I thought you were hurt.” Her voice was strong and natural, a hint of color tinged her cheeks.
“I’m safe,” he said gently. “But what about you?”
“I’m all right. Just a little tired.”
He put his hand over her breast and felt its soft curve, and underneath, her beating heart. “I was afraid you’d left me.”
“I’ll never leave you, Michael,” she said. “But I think I have to rest a little.”
“No!” he cried. “Don’t! Stay here with me!”
She raised her left hand and stroked his cheek, then slowly drew her fingers across his lips. Her eyelids looked heavy. “Just for a little while,” she said. “I’ll be back soon.”
She closed her eyes, and her body seemed to stiffen slightly under his hand. He tried to concentrate again, tried to will her back into consciousness, but he was exhausted, the power had drained from him. He snatched her up in his arms and knelt there swaying, rocking her gently, cradling her head against his chest as his tears fell onto her face.
There were sounds, footsteps, movement. Tenderly, he laid Emily’s head back down on his folded coat. When he looked up, Dr. Mortimer was standing over him again. “The police will be here soon. Why haven’t you covered her?”
“She was alive, Doctor,” Michael said hotly. “I mean—she is alive. She opened her eyes and spoke to me.”
“Please,” Dr. Mortimer said. “This whole affair is absurd enough.”
“But she spoke to me.”
“She’s been dead for at least half an hour,” the doctor said, crouching down beside her. He touched her clenched right fist, paused, began to pry open her fingers. “What’s this she’s got in her hand?” Grimacing a little, he released the object she was clutching, but it eluded his grasp, fell to the stage, bounced, rolled a few feet, and stopped, shining dully in the lights. Mortimer, drawn by curiosity, stepped over to it, bending down to pick it up. While Michael watched him, the doctor extended his hand, then abruptly pulled it away, as if unwilling to touch the thing, whatever it was. From his place beside Emily’s body, Michael scrutinized the object for several seconds before, with a shudder, he recognized what he was looking at: the master’s glass eye.
EPILOGUE
THERE WERE PLENTY OF offers, but after two frustrating though successful outings, Michael made up his mind; he wasn’t doing television. It was like having a stone wall between himself and his audience, he told Lena. He needed to hear them breathing.
He did a few interviews for magazines, with the understanding that Emily’s name was not to be mentioned. Sometime
s these were gratifying. The interviewers were well informed about the history of magic and enthusiastic about Michael’s place in it. “Your work is definitive,” one wide-eyed young woman told him as they sat over yet another cup of coffee in the little place across the street. “There hasn’t been anything, I mean anyone, like you in a hundred years.”
He toured for a while, greeted at each stop by two or three of the best magicians in the area, and these were often charming, competent performers, typically much older than Michael, but deferential, even respectful. His reputation preceded him, and there were times when he tired of the role assigned him, the wunderkind, the young master. After such excursions he was eager to get back home to his quiet, simple room at Lena's, to her heavy meals, endless cups of coffee, dull evenings in front of the television.
Magic absorbed and sustained him, as he had always known it would. He kept to a schedule of two shows a month at the theater. This seemed adequate to satisfy his faithful audience as well as the steady supply of newcomers, tourists, mostly, who had read about him, and students. He concentrated on refining his act, making it cleaner, using fewer props, less patter, but at the same time his love of theatricality kept him constantly on the alert for more dramatic effects. His audience was never bored, no matter how often they saw him. There was always something new, unexpected, and startling in his performance.
One evening, after a quiet dinner with Lena, he went to the theater downstairs, and then backstage, where he decided to go through his growing collection of music tapes in search of something delicate and suggestive for an illusion he had perfected, which used candles and mirrors. He never could, Lena said indulgently when he showed it to her, stop playing with fire. It was true, he thought, pulling out a rack of tapes he hadn't looked into for some time, he never tired of fire. Its paradoxical appeal was irresistible to him, as it was both a source of comfort and of danger, the perfect metaphor for magic.
The tapes were dusty from disuse, but he saw at once that they were unlikely to contain what he was looking for; they were all operatic overtures. He pushed the rack back into its space on the closely packed shelf, but it didn’t go in all the way, something was blocking it. He pulled it out again, then reached into the space, fumbling at the back of it. As he suspected, there was a loose tape. He grasped it, pulled it out. It was dusty, like the others. As he turned it over to read the label he felt his heart sink, for in the moment before he saw the words Grand Finale, in Lena’s fine, careful handwriting, he knew what it was.
Though he tried never to think of it, and refused ever to talk of it, Michael knew there was a way in which he never stopped thinking about that night. It had informed his life with two absences, a core of loss around which he fashioned a new life. He’d got through the inquest, the publicity surrounding the show, which, curiously enough, was largely positive, by saying as little as possible. Lena spoke for him when necessary. Max Wurlitzer was officially missing, though no one was really looking for him, and Emily’s death was determined to be the result of natural causes. Though it was certainly unnatural for a strong, healthy young woman to suffer a massive cerebral hemorrhage, such things happened now and then, against the odds.
It was one of Michael’s pleasures, one of the few, he thought, to sit at night on the stage of his empty theater and turn the music up so that it filled the place. He examined the tape in his hands, dusted it off against his pants leg, flipped open the plastic case. Why not, he thought, as he slipped the cassette into the player and adjusted the volume. Then he flicked the light switches so that the houselights were down and a single spot illuminated the center of the stage, like a disk of silver. A series of beeps issued from the powerful speakers as he dragged a wooden chair onto the stage and took his place, his familiar place, in the spotlight.
First came the stately, pompous Music for the Royal Fireworks, which the master had chosen himself as appropriate for their entrance. Michael could see him as he was that night, so confident, so pleased with himself, his hands flashing like precision instruments as he moved noiselessly across the stage to stand side by side with his protégé. His timing really was a miracle, or the opposite of a miracle, Michael thought, whatever that was. Then, as always when he thought of Wurlitzer, a sensation of bitterness mixed with awe made him clench his teeth. He battled down his anger and outrage at having been betrayed, because it was useless to be angry, as the master had taught him; anger diluted power, which was always focused and calm. Would he have gone through with it, the endless hours of preparation, the grueling practice, the concentration of will and energy that had resulted in the triumph of the Grand Finale, would he have done it if he’d known that on the other side of that triumph there was to be so much sadness, loss, and loneliness?
Probably not, Michael thought. But then there was the deeper question of whether he had really had any choice, ever, from that first moment when he had looked up into the wizened, comical face under the umbrella and pretended, for his own amusement, to be a frog. He still didn’t know where the master’s power had left off and his own begun. The music swelled around him, becoming more and more explosive, and Michael recalled the enormous satisfaction he had felt as he stood shoulder to shoulder with the Great Wurlitzer, the colored smoke billowing around them while the audience roared with pleasure.
There was a break in the music, then the cheerful fountain theme began, lighthearted and silly, as if to mock him.
“What a fool,” Michael said. Emily had been right, the old man was using him all along. What Michael had perceived as affection, even admiration for his cleverness, his aptitude, was just relief at finding someone gullible enough to walk into his trap. As in some cosmic game of tag, Michael was now “it.” The Great Wurlitzer had wanted to leave, and Michael was his avenue. How it must have amused him to see Michael’s avidity, his greed, so undisguised and all-consuming, for power.
And he had given it to him, Michael admitted, that much couldn't be denied. It was the master, not Michael, who had made him what he was. He knew things ordinary people didn’t, he saw things they would never see, could do things that astonished them, that challenged their disbelief. That had become vividly apparent to him from the first moment the Eye of Horus was placed around his neck, when its memory became his as well. When he walked into a room, he took the room, and when he left it, there was one subject on everyone’s mind: Michael Hawke, who was he, what was he, where did such power come from? Was it natural or unnatural?
An interviewer had asked him that once. He smiled, feeling smug, as he recalled his answer: a little of both. It was ironic, also, that in another day and age, he might have been burned as a witch. Now, he was merely a celebrity.
Then the fountain music ended, there was a pause. The next sound drove the self-satisfied smile from Michael’s lips. It was a high, almost shrill note, held, then dropped suddenly, entirely, to be replaced by another, a little lower, fuller, then a phrase of three notes, that declared to even the most unsophisticated listener its Oriental origin. It was the sound of Emily’s flute, carried into the air by Emily’s breath, as clear and direct as she had been. Michael groaned and covered his eyes with his hand, slouching in his chair as if recovering from a blow. Why hadn’t he remembered that this was on the tape?
He listened quietly, helplessly, and the music was like a floodgate that opened and poured in images of Emily. He could see the slight, ironic elevation of her eyebrows as she turned off the tape the first time she played this music for him, explaining that she had chosen it and arranged it in just this way because she thought it was “uplifting,” didn’t he agree? Then his memory wound backward, and he saw her as she was the night of Sami’s party in her princely Tamino costume, her thick hair drawn up under the huntsman’s cap, her flute carried jauntily in one hand; and as she appeared, breathless and indignant, that night she had tracked the master halfway across town only to lose him; and again as she leaned over him, her expression complicated by anxiety and love, as he struggled ba
ck to consciousness on the lawn in Central Park the day when she had stood by while he succumbed for the first time to the spell of the master. How brave she was, he thought, how strong and how honest. No one had ever loved him as she had, so sincerely, without question, though not without skepticism, for she knew him and she knew what he wanted and why, just as she knew, instinctively and surely, the difference between right and wrong.
And then the thought of that night, and of how she had looked, so peaceful and serene, when his will and hers had coalesced and she spoke to him for the last time. He didn’t, wouldn’t ever know how much of that strange, impossible event was attributable to his power, the power he had been given by the master, and how much of it was Emily’s own fierce and determined spirit, her will, which was stronger than he had ever, until that moment, understood.
Useless tears filled his eyes, and he dashed them away with the back of his hand. How beautiful this music was. How he longed for her. Hardly conscious of what he was doing, he slipped one hand inside his jacket pocket and withdrew the pack of cards that was always there. There was a trick, a simple sleight, that she had always loved. His hands worked the cards without his really attending to them; it was so easy, and he could see her delighted expression. She never tired of this trick. The cards spread out, stood on edge, appeared to collapse one way, but then, when it seemed he’d lost control and they must cascade onto the floor, they leaped back into his palm as if on command. “Do it again, Michael,” she said, as incredulous as a child. “How do you do it?” “It’s so easy,” he said softly into the dark that hemmed in his spotlight, into the still theater, while the delicate, ethereal music continued, and the tears rolled down his face, and his hands worked the cards, back and forth, skillfully, magically, for the only audience he really wanted now.
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