*Credit to AP Matt on Facebook*
Don’t go, they said.
He isn’t real, they said.
My colleagues had said it was a hoax – an urban legend that old illusionists tell younger ones to spook them. If it was real, certainly no one was ever given an invitation to be a part of Emil Valducci’s show, especially not a girl. Women aren’t allowed to be magicians. Women are only allowed to be the beautiful assistants or quick-change artists. This was the way. But this is a new age and even the old, unchanging traditions of magicians were open to new interpretation.
I’d been studying illusion for almost a decade when I got the invitation. Even after years and years of dedication, I wasn’t really accepted by the others. I’m quite good, I really am. I do some wicked slight-of-hand and I’m even proficient at escapology, even though it’s a dying art form. As a girl, I’m more flexible than other magicians, which really helps me out of the straight-jackets and handcuffs. I was good enough. I decided to go to the show, hoping that it was a demonstration of his skill instead of an audition of mine.
The place wasn’t hard to find. It was the kind of place you would normally overlook, just a little hole-in-the-wall movie theater, the kind where the glassed in ticket booth had enough room for one man to stand and take your money. The glass booth was empty and stained with yellow-brown tar from years of someone smoking a cigarette inside it. I decided to go inside in spite of the empty booth – I had been given an invitation, after all.
The front door opened to a long, dark hallway. The pairs of old fashioned lamps lining the walls of the hall were dim, barely glowing. I heard the muffled rumbling of an excited audience whispering to one another coming from the end of the hall.
Everyone else must have been seated already. Two velvet curtains were loosely gathered up at the doorway; I ducked to enter.
When I entered the auditorium, I was first struck by the silence. I had just been hearing the low din of a hundred people whispering and muttering. And now… silence. My ears felt heavy, like they were full of water. A knot began to turn itself over in my stomach.
I looked around at the others in the audience. They were sitting perfectly still, staring patiently up at the stage. Every seat was taken – every seat except one in the middle of the front row. It must be mine, I thought. I approached the first row, passing the eerie, glassy-eyed audience. I tried to take in as much as I could as I walked slowly toward my seat.
A portly, chubby man in turn of the century clothing – thick black walrus moustache hiding his lips, a vest with a pocket-watch chain and a monocle over one eye. He spilled over into the seats around him, pressing into the patrons to his left and right. No one seemed to mind. They stared forward blankly.
A young boy with a thick striped black and yellow shirt sat a few seats over. He wore a small cap with a propeller on his head. I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen anyone wear that before, I thought to myself. He sat with a paper cone full of pale pink cotton candy in both of his hands. He didn’t touch it. I shook my head slightly. No boy his age would be staring at the stage instead of eating that sugary fluff. The vacant smile on his face gave me chills.
An old woman in a pastel turquoise pant-suit from the 80’s sat beside the boy. Her hair looked like a poodle sat on her head, tight curls of platinum blonde in a round poof. Her teeth looked like polished stones and were the same color as her twisted ropes of pearls. Some tacky gold brooch was pinned to the lapel of her mint-green suit. The loose flesh under her chin looked like the skin of a plucked, uncooked chicken.
My cell phone chirped. I jumped. The buzz in my vest pocket startled me and the sound of the text message tone was deafening in the silence. Letting out an exasperated sigh, I took a glance at my phone. The harsh white light nearly blinded me. A text from one of my colleagues: you didn’t actually go, did you? I frowned and ignored the message. A terrible feeling washed over me and I looked up.
Every face in the auditorium was facing me and cold, hateful stares were directed at me. The fat, walrus man with the monocle. The boy with the cotton candy. The old woman with the poodle hair. They all sneered at me with contempt. I muttered a half-hearted apology and set my phone to silent. The bright, modern light was extinguished and hidden away in my pocket. The darkness of the theater entered my eyes once again.
My seat was made of red, button-tufted leather. The edges of the chair were outlined with brass tacks. I carefully took my seat and remarked at the dust that kicked up into the air. I coughed. The palms of my hands felt gritty from touching the arms of the chair. It was covered in dust. I tried to wipe my hands off on my legs, but instead, I left a pale smudge of gray on my black pants. My hands still felt dusty no matter how hard I wiped.
The lights on the walls died down to a useless flame. For a moment, I was sinking into darkness. I heard a small hiss of gas as the soft orange kerosene lamps at the front of the stage bloomed into life. I could smell the gas and I wasn’t sure what it had reminded me of. Some distant memory of camping, maybe. The stage was ancient and much, much larger than I’d first thought.
Then, he appeared.
He was tall, made even taller by the top hat on his head. A messy frizz of gray, wiry hair jutted out from under his black, red-ribboned hat. His tuxedo was not baggy on him, yet somehow didn’t look tight or restricting either. It looked like it was a part of him, coat tails and all. Under the coat was a thick, red sash made of silk around his waist. Something about seeing him – actually seeing Valducci, the urban legend, the man who wasn’t real – took my breath away. My stomach churned and I felt hot, stinging bile rise up in my throat. Why was I so scared?
Valducci, the Magician, was silent and fluid as he gestured to a small, round table – I swear, it hadn’t been there a moment ago. The red tablecloth looked like the dull color of dry blood under the dim orange kerosene lamps – which did little to light the large stage. The blackness of his tuxedo melted into the darkness of the stage behind him and only the red sash, white shirt, chalky gloves and red bowtie remained to reveal his position. He removed his hat and took a bow. His steel-wool gray hair was matted down from where the hat had pressed into his scalp, the rest of his hair curling out to the sides like the wings of a bird.
Valducci twirled his tall top hat gracefully between his fingers. The tall magician stood stiffly as he passed the bottom side of the hat across the room, showing it to be empty. He placed the hat upside down on the table and faced the silent audience. Valducci put his hands together before him as if praying – and with a quick movement, he pulled his hands apart. Now, between the palms of his two hands, was a long, old fashioned wand. Very good, I thought to myself with a nod. Valducci seemed to notice me nodding. His cold black eyes twinkled as he met my gaze. He twirled his white-tipped wand above the large black hat a few times before tapping the wide brim with the slender shaft.
He held his wand over the opening of the hat and, as if it were a fishing rod, began to pull at something with invisible thread. I knew better than to be fooled. I did not, however, expect to see the rabbit poke its head out of the hat. A white rabbit? Out of a hat? It was too cliché, too... old. The white rabbit peeked over the brim of the hat but did not rise any higher.
Valducci, the Magician, smirked a little – I thought he was glancing at me as he did it – and tucked the wand away under his armpit. The rabbit didn’t move as he did this; maybe there wasn’t a string attached after all. I frowned. With his dusty, white-gloved hands, the magician worked his fingers over the top of the rabbit. An ear twitched as he lifted a finger up. With each movement of his long, spidery fingers, the rabbit moved. How was this possible? Had he trained the pet to react to his slight gestures? It sat up higher in the hat and craned its neck around to look out into the crowd.
I looked around at the audience to see their reactions. No one moved or clapped. The entire audience was stone faced and unresponsive, staring blankly ahead with mute disinterest. I felt my face twist with confusion.
Valducci continued to work the rabbit until it leaped out of the hat and sat politely on the red clothed table. The magician seemed to be playing an invisible piano a foot above the body of the soft white rabbit. With each finger that pressed down, the rabbit lowered an ear or a foot and with each finger that lifted upward, the rabbit bobbed its nose up or wiggled its tail.
It was incredible.
My mind raced with ways that he could be doing this. It was impossible. No strings… could there have been strings? The bunny was too life-like to be an automaton. Its pink nose pumped up and down and its whiskers twitched. Too real…
I must have zoned out for a moment. When I glanced back up, Valducci, the Magician, was standing at the edge of the stage, smiling down at me. His smile was wrong. His lips parted, his cheeks lifted, his teeth were big and white and straight, but something about the smile seemed off. There was no joy in his eyes. His glassy black eyes fixed on me the way a dead fish would stare. He swept his arm across the stage with one hand and offered his other down to me. The smile took on a new meaning, a menacing new thought.
He was inviting me up to the stage. Did he need a volunteer, maybe? Or was this a challenge? Surely, Valducci wasn’t asking me to come on stage, he must have been asking someone else. Surely, he couldn’t have been referring to me.
I looked around.
I looked around and shuddered, goose-pimples breaking out across my arms as a shiver of cold ice-water ran down the length of my spine. The seats were empty. Every seat in the theater was empty and cold and covered with dusty cobwebs. I blinked hard and looked again. This was no trick. The guests were gone. The man with the monocle a few rows back, the woman with the poofy poodle hair, the boy with the propeller hat… all of them were gone. I looked up at Valducci, the Magician, with a new sense of terror. His smile was more than just a smile – it was a mask of politeness hiding a sinister face – and his simple gesture was more than an invitation – it was a command.
Like the rabbit, I felt myself obey.
I was on the stage standing beside Valducci, the Devil. I felt my breath choke on the dust I had stirred by walking up the stairs, dust that had been undisturbed for years – decades or even centuries. My legs did not want to stand anymore and I almost went down.
I stumbled to the right and caught myself on the small, round table where his hat and rabbit sat. My tingling hand tugged at the red tablecloth and everything slid a little. The hat wobbled a bit, the wand rolled and the rabbit… the rabbit tipped over. The beady eyed little bunny tipped onto its side with a soft thud, its legs and body still in the same sitting position it had been. I saw the fine stitches on the underside of the belly. The rabbit was taxidermied. It had been dead and stuffed the entire time.
I felt myself go reeling backwards. Valducci steadied me with a stiff hand – a strange corpse hand beneath the chalky gloves – and I made the mistake of looking into his eyes. The cold black eyes seemed to hide something deeper within, something flickering and bright. A far away flame of pale green danced inside his black eyes.
He was a being of immense power. I knew that then. I got the feeling that, on a whim, he could destroy everything in the room with only a thought. He was capable of bending the world to his will. He didn’t need flash paper to create a fireball or invisible thread to make things levitate. He could, if he chose to, turn his wand into a poisonous viper. With his will alone, he could make it so. But instead, he chose restraint. He chose to keep his power bottled up. Why? For his own, immortal amusement, I realized. The audience, I suddenly knew, couldn’t leave. They had disappointed him somehow, perhaps failing to amuse him during some time or another. They were here to entertain Valducci for eternity.
My lip quivered and I realized my mouth was hanging open. Valducci bent his head down level with mine and gave me a serious look, one that seemed to urge seriousness from me, too. He lifted a gloved hand and took my little chin, closing my mouth for me. He forced a tight-lipped smile onto his face and patted me on the head. Valducci swept an arm deeper into the stage and I looked to see what he was pointing to.
A water tank. Chains. A straight-jacket.
Oh, God… He wanted me to perform. He was going to put me in the tank. My thoughts raced as I tried to make sense of it. Why would he do this? He must know that it takes practice and familiarity to pull of an escapology stunt like this. I didn’t know how those chains worked – they weren’t mine. I didn’t know the secrets of that straight-jacket – I’d never worn it. Did he really expect me to do this?
I was already in the straight-jacket before I realized it had been slipped over my head. My arms were drawn across my chest and I felt a tugging as the straps were tightened. Chains were draped across my shoulders in unforgiving directions. I tried to think of how to move, how to twist out of the chains and free myself. A wooden plank was fastened around my feet and locked. The lock looked old and foreign.
I looked to my right. There must be something that could help me. Off to the side of the stage, away from the view of the audience, was a mess of discarded tricks. A wooden coffin had been sawed in half – and from what I could see of the inside of the box, someone had been inside. Dark brown stains leaked down the sides of the coffin and had pooled and hardened on the floor. It wasn’t a trick. If they hadn’t been dead before the trick, they certainly were now. Suddenly, I knew that the man in the coffin had been another magician, here to audition as I was about to... someone who had failed the audition.
To my left, a row of glassy-eyed ventriloquist dummies stared at me with their wooden, shiny mouths hanging open in a terrible, false grin.
I felt the color drain from my face and I looked out into the auditorium. The crowd was back, now. They were staring at me with an excited hunger in their twinkling eyes. I thought I could see the same green flame dancing in each of their eyes. They were all smiling cruelly.
I was upside down. I looked up – down – at the long, narrow box full of water. I normally knew exactly when my assistant would drop me in, but this time, I had no way of knowing when I would be plunged into the dark, murky green water.
It happened fast. The water was surprisingly warm. I squinted my eyes shut from the stinging water and felt my nose fill and burn. I hadn’t taken a deep enough breath. I was going to die.
I struggled against the restraints. The chains began to slide off my shoulders. I rolled my head to the side and slid one of the long sleeves over my head. It was working. I was freeing myself. I grunted, bubbles escaping my mouth as the sour, stale water entered my mouth. I fought back against it. The straight-jacket was off and I curled myself up. With stinging, blurry eyes, I reached for the padlock. How…
A bobby pin. I had a bobby pin in my hair. Maybe I could do this after all...
Finally, after everything began to grow dark, I was free. I pulled myself out of the water. I fell to the stage floor with a sharp, wet thud, coughing up a throat full of dusty old water. Panting, I looked up.
Valducci’s face was blank, his mouth slightly open. The audience was silent and motionless, their face the same as the evil magician’s. All at once, Valducci, the Magician, broke into a smile. It wasn’t the same, pitiless smile from before. This one rose to new heights, crinkling the sides of his eyes. He was pleased. Somehow, I knew that was a good thing, that it meant I would continue living.
He knelt down beside me and helped me to my feet with a gentleness I hadn't felt from him before. Valducci walked me out to the front of the stage and grabbed me by the wrist. The tall magician lifted my arm into the air ceremoniously and victoriously. The crowd erupted in applause.
I had passed, I realized. I passed an audition. Against all odds, I'd done it. My years of practice had come to me in my time of need. Through this Hellish, cruel trick, this infernal baptism, I was reborn anew. I was now the apprentice to Valducci – the Magician, the Devil.