The Magician's Lie by Macallister Greer

Author:Macallister, Greer [Macallister, Greer]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781402298684
Publisher: Sourcebooks Landmark
Published: 2015-01-13T08:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eighteen

Janesville, 1905

Three o’clock in the morning

She looks distraught now. The tears on her face are different from her earlier tears. Her whole face seems to blur with sadness. He reaches out with his handkerchief to dab her tears without being asked. She doesn’t thank him.

“Was it real?” he asks intently, standing over her, staring down.

“I thought about it a lot, for a while,” she says. “That man, that answer. I don’t know how she could have known what he was asking, but she did. On the other hand, none of the rest of her magic was real, so why would that have been?”

“None of the rest was real?”

She nods. “Nothing she did onstage, none of her illusions. Lady to Tiger, the Dancing Odalisque, Light and Heavy Chest, all of them were mechanical. Different secrets, but knowable ones. Mirrors, misdirection, sets, costumes. She taught me the tools to manipulate the audience’s reality. It’s amazing how you can make people think they’re seeing something they’re not. Especially when they want to believe. Then there’s nothing easier.”

He prods, “And then what happened?”

“After the second sight act?”

“Yes.”

Her shoulders sink. “Nothing was the same. Adelaide just—she just—didn’t care anymore. She didn’t say why, but it was obvious. Two people had died because of her words. Because of what she’d said to him in that theater. Had she said something different, or nothing at all, he might not have killed himself and that poor young woman.”

“She thought it was her fault? But she couldn’t know for sure, could she?”

“She was sure enough,” she says grimly. “It was like a light went out inside her. She did all the same illusions, with all the same results, but they didn’t make people want to stand up and applaud. Audiences lost interest. Somehow there was no magic in her magic. And of course, she never did the second sight act again.”

“But what happened? Did people stop coming to see her? Did she quit? Did something else happen to her, once she stopped caring?”

The magician gathers herself and speaks more crisply, shaking off the rough, wet sound of her earlier tears. “What happened was nothing. She performed the shows that were already booked, but she didn’t book any new ones. She wrote off the future. I asked about it once, and she told me to mind my own business, that if she wanted to drop off the edge of the world, she’d drop off on her own time and thank you very much, so I never asked again.”

His exhaustion strikes him then, out of nowhere. The adrenaline and the story have been carrying him. But there’s something about knowing that a successful woman like Adelaide Herrmann—the name sounds familiar, this part of the story must be true—could just crumple into nothingness. It reminds him that he, who is far less, has little to hope for.

He thinks about sneaking a look at his pocket watch but resists. He knows what he needs to know about what time it is. Evening is long gone and the night is headed toward morning.

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