The Magician's Lie (20 page)

A chime played to indicate that it was almost time to raise the curtain. The bustle slowed and stopped, the only movement a set of ushers who locked the gates between the levels to keep patrons with cheaper tickets from sneaking into the more expensive sections. But even though everything was still, even when the lights went down, you could still hear the enormous audience breathing in the darkness. It was impossible to keep such a crowd completely silent.

The orchestra played its merry fanfare and the show began. Again, I was overwhelmed and impressed. The bounty onstage was enormous, all colorful costumes and fast movement. The children in the audience roared with laughter at all the right moments. I'd never seen so many children in one place at one time—school must have been shut for the Christmas holiday, because these were children who should have been in school—and it was a strange sight to me. Then the sound of the calliope caught my attention, and I looked up at the pageantry on the stage, and I lost myself in the magic of the theater.

Midway through the second act, it started, with a soft roar. Quiet at first, but growing louder.

I couldn't see anything out of the ordinary, but the sound built and built until I couldn't ignore it. I looked around. What was going on? What wasn't right? At first, everything looked as it should have. An octet stood on the stage, four men and four women, singing a lovely ballad about moonlight, the stage lighting tinting their white garments softly blue.

I returned to the sound, trying to remember where I'd heard it before, imagining what it might possibly be. It wasn't the children laughing, and it wasn't the audience applauding, and it wasn't some kind of effect, like the metal sheets sometimes hidden behind the curtains and shaken to imitate the sound of thunder. It was softer than all that.

Then the smell reached me, about a minute into the roar. The smell of smoke. Right after that, I saw the bright light, and with the evidence of my eyes and ears and nose all together, I knew what was wrong.

The curtain was catching fire.

The flames were roaring upward, and the sound was the air they ate as they soared up faster than any human could go.

Panic spread in an instant.

As soon as ten patrons stood and fled, it was twenty and then a hundred; women in the gallery were running before they could have possibly realized what they were running from. But the truth was clear to everyone soon enough. The fire leapt from the curtain onto the hanging sets that were waiting above the stage, and dozens of yards of painted canvas were swallowed up with hungry tongues of flame. The crowd surged away from the stage, away from the fire, in a blind scrum. Quickly people realized that the aisles were clogged, and they began to surge over the seats as best they could, stepping on seats and backs of seats and in some cases other people, too panicked and desperate to know the difference. They surged for doors—or what seemed at first to be doors but were only glass-paned decorations meant for show, an ornament no one could have guessed would turn cruel.

I stood stock-still, terrified, not knowing which direction to run. The smoke had descended on me almost instantly, and my eyes burned with ash. I heard the sound of hundreds of feet. A boom sounded from somewhere distant—had a metal door been flung open? Had the windows burst? The smoke began to rise, lifting and rolling with the air currents, and the scene became clearer. I wished it hadn't.

The fire was spreading to the wooden trim on the boxes and the walls, and the audience was fleeing toward the sides of the theater where they'd come in. But the gates across the staircases were still locked, trapping the crowds in place. And there were too many of them. They were tripping over each other, searching for a way out in any direction, and in some places, people were horribly, horribly still because there was nowhere to go. Large bodies and small ones, tangled. To my left in the orchestra section, I could see people pressing against a closed door, pressing and pressing, but going nowhere. Smoke hung low over everything and everyone.

The screams were loud and alien, and it was raining fire.

Behind me, I heard a single voice, the only one shouting words: “Get out! Get out!”

I turned. The stage itself was right behind me, and unbelievably, it was not burning. One of the members of the octet who had been singing was still there, dressed in white, and she beckoned to me. Behind her, a stream of performers—shepherdesses, gypsies, knights, men and women costumed as animals of all kinds—was moving toward a single destination.

There was a way out.

I didn't want to die. The stage in front of me was too high, but I could see a half staircase at the side of it, and clambered up the stairs before leaping across the gap onto the stage. I hit the wood of the stage hard on my knees, one foot dangling back over the orchestra pit below, but I made it.

I scrambled to my feet. The smoke was thicker again, heavy and gritty and everywhere, here where the fire had begun. I felt my lungs fill with it, my throat close. I coughed out what I could. I swatted the air around me as if that could clear a path, but I was still disoriented and could barely tell up from down, let alone downstage from up. My eyes failed me, so I focused on my ears, which picked up the sound of footsteps, headed all in the same direction. That was the back of the stage. I scanned in that direction with all my senses, knowing there must be a way out. And then I might have been imagining it, it was so very faint, but I thought I could smell fresh air.

Foolishly, I turned one last moment to look out at the auditorium again, seeing at a glance scores of people, scores of bodies, those who would never escape. Too much stillness under the smoke.

I swayed and fell.

***

Someone carried me. In moments, I was aware. Desperate men ripped the hinges off the stage door. A horde of survivors huddled in a frozen alleyway. Performers scrambled up out of the coal chute, their spangles smeared with coal and ash. Then the moments were shorter, punctuated with darkness between. The horns of the fire companies arriving, steam from the horses' nostrils looking like smoke in the frigid air. Near the exits and at the bases of the unfinished fire escapes, dark clusters of bodies heaped like flies.

After that, when the darkness swum up at me again, I welcomed it.

***

When next I woke, I lay on a cold stone floor. The smell of smoke and ash was less but unmistakably present. A basement? As dim as one—a room with few windows, small and placed high on the walls, giving very little light. Perhaps it was evening, or even night. Stacked wooden crates lined the walls, but they were too far away for me to read the lettering in such low light, so they might contain anything. It seemed like some kind of storeroom. I redirected my gaze nearer and felt reassured when I saw another woman's face sleeping peacefully close to mine, only to recoil in horror when I realized she wasn't sleeping but dead.

I tried to scramble up, but my body failed me, my lungs and throat still seared with smoke. I had been carried to this place and laid down next to a dead woman. And next to her was another dead woman, and another, a whole roomful of the dead, and I lifted my arms, as heavy as lead, and covered my face and prayed it was only a terrible dream.

When I let my hands fall again and dared to look, my awful company still surrounded me, so I turned my attention to my own body to try to shut out the horror of this place of death. The interior of my throat felt burned away. My eyes stung. A pervasive ache had settled in my veins. But on the whole, none of this mattered. I was alive, and safe, or so it seemed. Where to start? I wished soundlessly that my throat would heal itself. One step at a time.

The door opened and closed, and I discerned a shape in a white coat. A doctor. Familiar somehow. He drew nearer, smiling at me with a broad, open grin. The sight of a living, breathing person was almost as welcome as the scent of fresh air in the burning theater had been, and I thought,
Thank
goodness, this isn't just a nightmare
, and I smiled at him until I heard him speak.

“Ada.” He breathed out, and the longing and the triumph in that single word, it nearly destroyed me.

My joy fled and left me hollow. All the pain, and more, returned.

Even if I'd wanted to return the greeting, to call him by his name, I couldn't. I couldn't speak. My burned throat, healing but not healed, wouldn't yield up any sound.

My smoke-stung eyes, however, could see well enough who it was. The years had changed him, weathered him. His hair was cut shorter but still showed the wave of the ringlets he'd worn in his teenage years. The thickness of his limbs was still evident. He'd grown larger and stretched out somewhat. He was taller. And, I suspected, even stronger.

Ray had finally found me.

1903

Feathers without Birds

“I can't believe it's you,” he said, falling on his knees next to me, reaching for my face but not touching it, just like all those years ago. “I knew it was, once I saw your posters, even though the name wasn't yours. Who else could it be? But I thought maybe somehow I was mistaken. I was afraid of that, deep down. But it isn't so. My God, Ada, I've missed you so much. You're my other half. The only one like me. I haven't felt complete without you.”

I was glad in that moment for my wrecked voice, as I didn't know what to say. My mind reeled. Maybe I was dreaming. I prayed I was. But as long as I'd feared Ray, as many years as the memories of what he'd done to me had haunted my waking hours, he had never appeared in my dreams. This was all too real.

“You'd be proud of me,” he went on. “I'm a doctor now. I told you I was a healer. I came here to Chicago since I knew you'd been here…”

The card to my mother, I realized.
I
am
well
. I'd sent it from here. Years ago. All unknowingly, I'd brought us both to this moment.

“…but then you weren't, but I just trusted to fate and stayed. It's been years, you know, but this place was as good as any other. I worked and waited. Then finally I saw the posters for the Amazing Arden. And I knew it was you. You were coming back to me, and I'd be complete at last again. I bought a ticket for your show. I knew we were about to be reunited. But I didn't know it would be today. Today—today is unexpected.”

I croaked out, “Today is horrible.”

“Oh—well, yes,” he said, seeming to sober and take in our surroundings, as if seeing them for the first time. “I'm sorry I had to put you in here with these people. I came to help, we all did, and there were so many we couldn't save, so there had to be a place for them. And someone brought you to me, they weren't sure if you were alive, and I saw my chance. It was like it was meant to be. I planned to be back before you woke up. I'm sorry I wasn't here for you. But now it's all right. Here we are.”

I closed my eyes.

“Ada?”

I didn't, I couldn't, respond.

“Open your eyes,” he said, “or I'll open them for you.”

I complied.

He shed his doctor's coat. He rolled up one sleeve and showed me the scars on the inside of his arm, a solid mass of lines that followed the bone of the arm, right up the center. He unbuttoned his collar and other cuff and reached one hand up to the back of his neck to grab his shirt and then pulled it off in a long single stroke, and I was powerless to look away.

In the intervening years, he had made a project of his scars. Now they showed every bone. Not just the rib cage but the breastbone, the shoulders, everything. The pale, clustered shapes outlined his whole skeleton. He turned slowly so I could see the scarred curves of each knob in his backbone, the wide triangles of his shoulder blades. Either he was infinitely talented and patient with the razor or he'd had help. He shrugged back into his shirt again and then his spotless white coat, and no one looking at him now would know what a danger he was on the inside.

“You're not impressed?” He sounded petulant.

I only said again, “Get the hell away from me.”

He shook his head. “I can't do that, Ada. I've been searching for you all this time. And now I've found you.”

I made to sit up, and he put the palm of his hand in the center of my chest and pushed me back down.

“Now,” he said, “let's catch up.”

And in his other hand was the old straight razor with its worn bone handle and its sharp square blade.

I couldn't fight anymore.

Lying on the floor of that room, the life force drained from me. The world shrank and almost disappeared, and all I could feel was an enormous ache wrapped around my skull and the cold bare floor under my broken body. I'd fallen too low and could see no way out. It was all I could do not to stretch out and surrender to sleep, like a girl in a fairy tale who would either awaken transformed, or not at all.

He leaned over me with the razor, pushing my dress and underskirt up almost to my waist, and began to cut into the flesh of my thigh. I didn't move. It must have disappointed him, my lack of reaction, because he lifted the razor and brought it toward my face instead.

“You're hurt. Let me fix you,” he said in that old long-ago voice, and that was what gave me the strength to move. Just one more time.

I moved fast.

I closed both of my hands over his fist with the razor in it and immediately shoved as hard as I could, bending his arm back toward his body. Surprise was on my side. The upturned razor blade slashed across the front of his neck, and blood immediately began to fountain out.

His eyes were stunned, unbelieving. He dropped the razor, and his hands went to his throat, clutching at the wound. The blood still seeped out between his fingers, running over his white coat and shirt, running everywhere.

I threw my body sideways. With what little presence of mind I still had, I grabbed the discarded razor so he couldn't use it on me. I pushed it against the stone floor to fold it and tucked it into my bodice. There was so much blood.

And then I looked at Ray. His eyes were wild, panicked. I knew who he was, and I knew he'd caused me so much pain and anguish. He'd driven me from my home when I was little more than a child. He was damaged and he was dangerous. But he was also a human being, frightened for his life, and I felt no joy at what I—I!—had done.

Desperate to take it back, to do whatever I could, I pressed my hands over his hands, the slick blood coursing, and said out loud, “I wish you well again.”

Nothing happened.

The blood kept coming, red and warm. The calm that had come over him when I spoke quickly disappeared, and his eyes were even wilder. He opened his mouth to speak but of course he couldn't. And I, horrified, knew that if I couldn't heal him, there was only one thing I could do. Escape.

I left him there. I dashed up the stairs. There were two doors at the top. I opened the colder one. This took me outside, and I slammed the door behind me, exiting into an alleyway between the theater and the restaurant next door. Standing next to the restaurant's window, I could see the entire room was full of survivors from the fire, standing or crouching or laid out on tables, and white-coated doctors were moving from person to person, giving directions, pointing, shouting. It seemed clear they were separating patients into those who could be helped and those who couldn't. I'd been in the restaurant's storeroom. The warmer door would have taken me inside. Someone might use it at any moment to take more of the dead down into that awful room. I couldn't be nearby when they found Ray, untouched by smoke or ash, dying or already dead.

I plunged my hands into a snowbank to wipe away as much of the blood as I could. I looked around to see if anyone was watching me, but the scene was so frenetic that no one had time or inclination to take any notice of someone who wasn't visibly injured. The fact that I was on my feet and moving meant I could safely be ignored, and so I was.

I forced myself to walk, heading up the alleyway toward the street, and stared for a moment at the firefighters, still battling the blaze. From here, I could feel the dreadful radiant heat of the fire on my face. The firefighters were curiously silent. Then I realized I couldn't hear anything at all, as if the sound of the world had been wiped away. I wished everything else were as easily gone. With no warning, I vomited on the stone of the alleyway.

I felt my life would now be divided in half: everything that came before this, and everything that came after. I didn't want everything after to begin.

***

After an infinite amount of time, when I could hear again, I toddled like a child to the street. Someone in a dark blue uniform with a high collar asked me where I lived. I whispered the name of my hotel.

When next I thought about it, I was there. I lay sprawled across the bed on my back, still wearing the soot-smudged dress, surrounded by smears of ash on the white coverlet. I closed my eyes, and when later I opened them, I saw I was no longer alone: Clyde had arrived.

He leaned in and cradled my face and whispered, “Oh, thank the good Lord. Beloved, come join the world.”

“No,” I said. “I can't.” It felt too soon.

“You have to.”

“No.”

“Are you hurt?” he asked and pointed toward the front of my dress. I looked down at a great dark streak of blood all the way across my bodice, and all of a sudden, I stank of death. Was it Ray's blood? My own? Another victim's? Was it the blood of a living person, or a dead one? I leapt out of the bed and attempted to tear the dress off my body, my shivering fingers fumbling with the buttons.

He said, “Let me help you,” and reached out for the buttons, and I slapped his hands away, even though I was shaking too hard to manage them. One at a time, struggling every moment, I tore at them, breaking the button or tearing the fabric more often than not. When I finally got the dress off, I threw it on the floor and stepped away from it. I backed away and backed away until my body bumped into the wall and there was nowhere else to go. I huddled against the wall, half naked, shivering in my undergarments and not just from cold. Clyde wrapped his arms around me, and I sagged against him, crying.

“Here,” he said. “Here.”

I sobbed in his arms. It already would have been the worst day of my life, the horror of that disaster, all those dead mothers and children, and then Ray had found me. And I had done what I had done. I could still feel the folded straight razor inside my corset, cold against my skin. It was too much. All of it.

“Here, get back in bed,” he said, and he helped me lie down and pull the covers up over myself. He sat on the edge of the mattress, looking down into my face and brushing my tangled, stinking hair away.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “This is so awful. I'm so sorry. What can I do?”

The answer sprang to mind immediately. “Cancel the next month of shows. Take me off the road.”

It was plain my answer had shocked him. He had probably been thinking I wanted tea. But I'd almost died because he'd sent me there, all unknowing. I could feel a faint burning still in my throat and lungs, and only because of my gift did I have a voice at all. If I hadn't been there, the fire would have been only a headline, not a memory. It would have been someone else's tragedy. Now everything was different. My life was horror, and I was a murderess. I couldn't tell him what I'd done; I never could. We were well beyond tea.

Quickly, he was all business. “We can't cancel. You know how much that costs?”

“No,” I said honestly.

“I suppose that's why you have me,” he said. “The answer is too much. It's not even the money. No one will trust us again if we cancel so many shows on such short notice. Word spreads like wildfire when you go back on a booking. We have to protect your reputation.”

“Less, then. What about three weeks?”

I could see him calculating. “No.”

“Two weeks, then? I can't. I'll panic.” Even just thinking of the hardwood boards of a stage, I could smell the smoke. My knees ached, and I felt the hard landing from my leap over the orchestra pit all over again. Then I saw Ray's face looming above me, and blood, a fountain of blood. I backed farther into the bed, clutched the pillow across my chest like a shield.

“No.”

“You can't force me,” I said a little hysterically. “Let someone else do it.”

“No one can take your place. You're the one people come to see.”

“Dress someone else up like me. Tell them it's me. How will they know?”

He said, “They'll know, Arden. Maybe we should wait and talk about this later, when you've had some more time.”

“No, now,” I said firmly. “I won't change my mind.”

He thought about it. Nervous, still trembling, I watched him think.

“Ten days,” said Clyde at last. “We can cancel the next show, the one in Moberly. It's a small venue and they don't talk to anyone. And of course the show here is canceled.”

“They won't shift it?”

“The mayor closed all the theaters in Chicago. For six weeks. I don't think you realize how bad it was.”

“I know how bad it was!” I yelled, angry at myself and him and the world. “I was there! I watched people die! I could have died, because you sent me there! Don't tell me I don't know!”

“Do you know how many people are dead?” he yelled back. “Six hundred! The world didn't stop for them, and it's not going to stop for you.”

On any other day, I would have found it a stunning number. Today, it didn't even make a dent.

But I could hear the anger in his voice, and if both of us flew off the handle, things would come to a bad end. I couldn't take that on top of everything else. I was sad and furious, but I knew what I needed to do next, and shouting wasn't going to accomplish it. I could only tell him the truth.

“I don't know if I can do this anymore. I need to go back to New York,” I said. “To rest. To think.”

He sighed and said, “Okay. I'll change my plans. Canada can wait.”

“No.”

“But you can't be alone.”

“I have to.” With effort, I set the pillow aside. I reached for his hands and held them. His fingers were cool and dry. “I would love to go to Canada with you, but I can't. And I can't stay here. I can't be on the road right now. I need to be alone with my thoughts. New York is the best place for that. I need to go, and I need to do it today.”

“Tomorrow?” he said, ever the negotiator.

I relented in the one small way I could. “Tomorrow.”

He brushed his lips against my forehead with such a gentle, feathery touch that it made my whole poor body dissolve.