The Ghost-Eater and Other Stories (12 page)

Wolkie clicked into his own statistics and there, next to his quite high and flashing heart rate, was
14y00m01d05h12m30s
.

‘By the way, the boys came through the tunnel during the fever. They're on the dunes somewhere, heading for a town. Maybe they got tired of you making them slow … especially now that you don't get outschool quota. They will have to find another guy under age, if they even stay together. You did divide up all your trapps before you came here, right?'

Wolkie knew that Gideon wanted it to be true, but from everything he knew about the boys, it was true. It took being alone for it to make sense. Hannes, Gweilo and Mansoor were the most efficient people he had ever met. He knew that a great sadness was coming to him, but that it would take weeks to really arrive.

Gideon turned to him, his face very bright and large in the moonlight. ‘Let's upload. I mean, let's really go into the cloud. No more dunes and rust town and eating gulls for a treat, none of that. We can have
quality
. Good colours, good speed, no bodies, no getting sick. We can know everything. We can talk to everything. We can go everywhere. You haven't got anything but the Yards after this, cloud man.'

‘But we can't
change
anything,' Wolkie answered fairly softly. Maybe Gideon heard him over the waves and maybe he didn't.

The knife that had cut the seagull was in Gideon's hand. ‘Let's go, Wolkie,' he said, and stepped closer.

 

By rights, Sebastian should have been the one to leave town when Clara left him – gone north, into the comforting brace of family and nostalgia – but she had beaten him to the punch by taking a road trip with some exchange students he had never heard of. Not wanting to seem unoriginal, he had stayed put.

Something needed changing, though, and since all of his old bars were now off limits – haunted either by memories or by friends with a habit of taking Clara's side – he had taken to straying further and further downtown. Beyond the strip of varnished-wood boutiques near his flat, beyond even family-owned late-night cafes, his nights now took him down the narrow, poorly paved roads whose names he hadn't known six weeks earlier, to the dive bars and speakeasies cut out of former residential units, identified only by flickering neon signage, if that.

Not that Sebastian noticed his downmarket trajectory. He spent most of his time reflecting on how his new breakup beard looked, or if it would be okay to wear sweatpants at a bar. The kinds of places he was going to, it typically was.

It was in one such bar that Sebastian met the only real magician in town.

It was a poorly lit place that held two-for-one specials and open-mike performances on the same evening, so as to flush the scum out in one fell swoop. The bar was a mess, but Sebastian reasoned that that was fine, because he tended to be one too.

An all-ukulele Billy Idol tribute band was in the middle of their set when Sebastian, on his third happy hour already, stumbled in and tightroped over to the bar. Finding safe harbour on the varnished wicker of a barstool, Sebastian sat and regarded the three-woman band innocently slaughtering ‘Hot in the City' at the back of the room; they were reasonably awful, he decided, but since he was wearing sandals, he figured that he didn't get to have an opinion. Even so, he was surprised by the size of the crowd. A drink materialised before him and a little money disappeared from his pocket. He slumped forwards.

The breeze coming in through a busted window sobered him up a little; Sebastian found himself raising his head above his drunk waterline to watch the bar's other patrons. He couldn't tell if they were regulars or not; his brain did him the courtesy of emptying itself most nights. Some of the people were dressed up – not just relative to the bar in question, where matching socks would've been fancy, practically
dressy
. Jackets, suspenders, the usual number of teeth. Knee-high dresses.
Women
in knee-high dresses; one such was seated next to Sebastian, typing out a message on her phone at speed. The blue-green light illuminated her torso; the angles of her collarbone jutted visibly out of the straps of her leopard-print dress. On the edge of her nose rested thick-rimmed glasses, and on her mouth, a cherry-red splotch. She did not look up from her phone while Sebastian took these features in.

Sebastian felt like maybe he should warn her, let her know that somebody had given her bad directions, but the effort of keeping his eyes from rolling into the back of his skull was becoming distracting.

He was kept quiet, in any case, by an abrupt silence following the tribute band's final song, and a dimming of the lights that shut up anybody insincere enough to try and applaud. A susurrus moved through the crowd.

There was no way that the bar could afford spotlights, and yet a white beam of light shone on the space where there had once been a makeshift stage, backed now by high, blue velvet curtains. One of the Billy Idol tribute band's members appeared from behind them, now dressed in something pink and frilly. She grinned and curtseyed at the audience, transformed from the dour performer of a few minutes before. She spoke: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, would you please put your hands together for the only
real
magician in town – Andre!' The girl stepped to one side and gestured towards the parting in the curtains from which she had emerged.

Sebastian was surprised by the frills and the glassy look in her eyes, but applauded along with everybody else, although with less vigour than the leopard-print girl next to him.

An unseen hand took hold of one end of the velvet curtain and wrapped it around the ukulelist-turned-magician's-assistant. A man in a black waistcoat stepped out into the light, his back to the audience, and whipped the curtain away, revealing – nothing. Or – no, there was movement where the assistant had been, a shuffling of wings. Sebastian craned his neck to see. A pigeon, mottled and harassed, shook itself, cocked its head to one side, and took off. The man with the waistcoat turned to watch the bird go, submitting gaunt cheeks and a patchy beard to the spotlight's attention. The audience began to applaud. Sebastian smacked his hands together with the audience, watching the pigeon make two full circles around the dusty interior of the room, and fly directly into a windowpane. It crashed to the floor with a wet sound. Sebastian leaned over to see where it landed, but this made the bar tilt dangerously around him, so he stopped. Nobody else noticed; Andre the magician had moved on to his next trick.

There was no music, no new legerdemain with the lights; just Andre, and his greasy, shoulder-length hair, baggy trousers, bleached-white shirt and black waistcoat, standing under a spotlight whose origins Sebastian still could not trace, performing sleight-of-hand and projecting his voice poorly. Some tricks were impressive: he managed a half-dozen card shuffles whose complexity Sebastian was in no state of mind to appreciate, but the look of triumph on the performer's face compelled Sebastian to applaud. Other attempts, like when the bouquet of roses that he was meant to pull out of thin air got stuck halfway out of the magician's inner pocket, were somewhat less proficiently handled.

Sebastian wouldn't have minded so much if the audience hadn't seemed intent upon responding to every single trick, successful and otherwise, with loud whoops and cheers. The leopard-print girl had been on her feet for the entire show, making wolf calls.

Still, somewhere around the third vanished coin and second infinite handkerchief, the audience began to show signs of fraying at the seams. Some bow ties had come loose, and one muscled youth had lurched to his feet for long enough to yell, ‘Get to the real part, you shi—' before being yanked back down by a friend. Andre faltered at this, biting his lip and fumbling the intricate knot he'd been presenting to half of the audience. Even so, the crowd cheered.

Sebastian turned around in his chair to face the bar – receiving scandalised looks from his neighbours – to concentrate on the task of staying drunk enough to keep his mind from going to unpleasant places while remaining sober enough to avoid passing out. It was a subtle sort of procedure, and Sebastian lost consciousness almost immediately.

He dreamed in quick, short bursts: spinning rooms, the strip of bars around him, Clara with him, Clara leaving, Clara gone. Then merciful dark swept in around the corners and he didn't dream at all.

He was startled awake by that sudden inexplicable vertigo that sometimes jarred him out of his dreams – although in this case it was an entirely explicable vertigo, as his barstool had tipped over, which he realised a couple of seconds after hitting the floor. Sebastian got to his feet hurriedly, hoping to demonstrate to the world at large that he wasn't yet drunk enough to get thrown out – but the world at large was looking elsewhere. The magician was saying something onstage, and, at last, he had his audience's full attention.

The stage's sole occupant was perched on a thickly stuffed armchair that hadn't been there before. He had his fingers steepled in front of his thin face, and a black hat sat on his lap: the magician's hat, squat, cylindrical, midnight-coloured and velveted. The kind of hat that novelty costume shops have made an industry out of failing to reproduce accurately.

‘I told you I wouldn't do this again,' Andre was saying. His voice was low, and cracked – either with emotion or an unfinished battle with puberty – but the morgue-like silence of the room carried the magician's voice further than it would otherwise go. ‘I'd like that to be clear, all right? I don't like doing this.'

‘Get on with it,' hissed somebody in the crowd, quickly hushed by his neighbour.

‘No, no, he's right,' said Andre. ‘It would be better to get this finished.'

He took hold of his hat with his left hand, and placed his right arm inside of it, dug around for a second, and without any of his earlier flourishes or smiles, pulled out a gold watch with a brown band. He held it up to the light.

Andre regarded it for a moment, then looked out over the audience. ‘To Heidi, with love. 10/10/86,' he read. ‘Who here has lost a watch?'

A young woman's hand shot up; she stood, picking her way past the crowd with nervous energy and bounded up to the stage. ‘Thank you,' she said when Andre dropped the thing in her cupped hands. She turned, her loose green dress twirling a little with her, and ran out of the bar. Some audience members watched her go, but the rest were focused on Andre and his hat. Sebastian clapped once, then stopped. Nobody else made a sound.

Andre dug into his hat again and seemed to find what he was looking for almost immediately: a bar napkin, with some writing on it. He held it up to the audience. ‘It's a phone number. For Nicola?'

A squeal broke out from the leopard-print girl who jumped up and then – remembering herself – strode carefully to the stage, took the proffered piece of paper gently from Andre's hand and walked out of the bar, phone already lit up, her red splash of mouth curved into a crooked grin.

The show proceeded like this for some time; Andre would pull out jewellery, or a photograph, or a book from the depths of his dull-black hat, and somebody from the audience would jump up to claim it. Some would return to their seats to see what else would come up, but most of them walked out of the bar, looks of satisfaction or relief dancing along their faces. The place was still crowded for a dive bar on a weeknight, but it was emptying out.

A book, a couple of photographs, a lot of jewellery, almost all of it cheap-looking. A sword, twice as long as the length of Andre's hat, which was claimed by a young man wearing a baseball cap. One time, Andre put his ear to the hat, and, nodding, indicated to an old man sitting along the back row to approach. He whispered whatever he had heard, or pretended to have heard, to the man. He was one of the few who returned to their seats; in the half-light it wasn't clear, but Sebastian thought he saw tears on the man's wrecked old checks.

Following the leopard-print girl's departure, Sebastian had quickly grown bored and was watching the proceedings with a frown. ‘Is this performance art?' he hissed to a bartender, who grimaced and brought him another beer.

A prolonged silence dragged Sebastian's attention back to the stage, where Andre held something cupped in his hands. His mouth worked as he chewed at his upper lip, and then he brought a pair of keys to the light. ‘Whose are these?' he asked. A muscled blond man jumped up and strode towards the stage. ‘Hello! Those are mine.' His accent was vaguely European. Sebastian, reminded of exchange students, hated him instantly.

The tall blond reached towards Andre, who still held the keys up to the light. He looked back at the audience with a grin, then back towards the magician. ‘Thank you?' he said, jiggling his fingers.

Andre didn't look at him. ‘These are car keys.'

‘Yes,' said the blonde. ‘My spare keys. I thought they were under the couch, but I couldn't find them.'

‘So – let me be certain that I understand you. You come to my show, in this horrible bar, to see if I'd start bringing back lost things, and find your keys for you?'

The blonde shrugged. ‘Pretty much, yeah.' He reached up, took the keys out of Andre's hand and lightly punched his shoulder. ‘Thanks, brother.' He jangled the keys, dropped them in his back pocket and began to walk out of the room.

He made it halfway to the door before Andre called out, ‘Wait.'

The blond turned, grinned. ‘I haven't lost anything else, man. Thanks.'

Andre stood up, and stretched, placing his hat carefully on the arm of his chair. ‘Actually, yes, you have,' he said through a yawn. ‘You remember that girl, in Brussels, and what you did to her? Well, no,' he put up a hand, ‘no, you don't. Not really. You've managed to lose that. But I could bring it back. I could even bring the girl back. Would you like that?'