The wind gusted just then, and when it did it made sounds like howls and moans. I wanted to cover my ears. Cover my eyes, too, to keep from seeing what was in the grass. But I didn’t do either one. All I did was stand there shivering with my eyes wide open, trying to blink away some of the shimmery haze that seemed to have crawled in behind them. Nothing much was clear now, inside or out — nothing except the dead guy.
“Joe!”
Barney, somewhere behind me. I didn’t turn around but I did back up a couple of steps. Then I backed up some more, until I was past the comer and couldn’t see the dead guy anymore. Then I swung around and ran to where Barney was in the shop doorway.
“He’s there, Barney, he’s there he’s there—”
He gave me a hard crack on the shoulder. It didn’t hurt; only the cold hurt where it touched my face and hands. He said, “Get hold of yourself, man.”
“I swear it,” I said, “right where I saw him before.”
“All right, take it easy.”
“I don’t know how you missed seeing him,” I said. I pulled at his arm. “I’ll show you, come on.”
I kept tugging on him and finally he came along, grumbling. I led the way out behind the shed. The dead guy was still there, all right. I blew out the breath I’d been holding and said, “Didn’t I tell you? Didn’t I?”
Barney stared down at the dead guy. Then he stared at me with his mouth open a little and his nose dripping snot. He said, “I don’t see anything.”
“You don’t... what?”
“Grass, just grass.”
“What’s the matter with you? You’re looking right at him!”
“The hell I am. The only two people out here are you and me.”
I blinked and blinked and shook my head and blinked some more but the dead guy didn’t go away. He was there. I started to bend over and touch him, to make absolutely sure, but I couldn’t do it. He’d be cold, as cold as the wind — colder. I couldn’t stand to touch anything that cold and dead.
“I’ve had enough of this,” Barney said.
I made myself look at him instead of the dead guy. The cat-piss smell had gotten so strong I felt like gagging.
“He’s there,” I said, pleading. “Oh God, Barney, can’t you see him?”
“There’s nobody there. How many times do I have to say it? You better go on inside, Joe. Both of us better. It’s freezing out here.”
He put a hand on my arm but I shook it off. That made him mad. “All right,” he said, “if that’s the way you want it. How about if I call Madge? Or maybe Doc Kiley?”
“No,” I said.
“Then quit acting like a damn fool. Get a grip on yourself, get back to work. I mean it, Joe. Any more of this crap and you’ll regret it.”
“No,” I said again. “You’re lying to me. That’s it, isn’t it? You’re lying to me.”
“Why would I lie to you?”
“I don’t know, but that’s what you’re doing. Why don’t you want me to believe he’s there?”
“Goddamn it, there’s nobody there!”
Things just kept happening today — bad things one right after another, things that made no sense. The cold, Madge, Barney, the dead guy, the haze, the cat-piss smell, Barney again — and now a cold wind chilling me inside as well as out, as if icy gusts had blown right in through my flesh and were howling and prowling around my heart. I’d never felt like this before. I’d never been this cold or this scared or this frantic.
I pulled away from Barney and ran back into the shop and into the office and unlocked the closet and took out the duck gun he lets me keep in there because Madge don’t like guns in the house. When I got back to the shed, Barney was just coming out with a Ford oil pan in his gnarly hands. His mouth pinched up tight and his eyes got squinty when he saw me.
He said, “What the hell’s the idea bringing that shotgun out here?”
“Something’s going on,” I said, “something crazy. You see that dead guy there or don’t you?”
“You’re the one who’s crazy, Joe. Give me that thing before somebody gets hurt.”
He took a step toward me. I backed up and leveled the duck gun at him. “Tell me the truth,” I said, desperate now, “tell me you see him lying there!”
He didn’t tell me. Instead he gave a sudden lunge and got one hand on the barrel and tried to yank the gun away and oh Jesus him pulling on it like that made me jerk the trigger. The load of birdshot hit him full on and he screamed and the wind screamed with him and then he stopped but the wind didn’t. Inside and out, the wind kept right on screaming.
I stood looking down at him lying in the grass with one leg drawn up and his face blown away. I could see him clear, even through that shimmery haze. Just him down there. Nobody else.
Just Barney.
Vanishing Act
(with Michael Kurland)
The three of us — Ardis, Cedric Clute and I — were sitting at a quiet comer table, halfway between the Magic Cellar’s bar and stage, when the contingent of uniformed policemen made their entrance. There were about thirty of them, all dressed in neatly pressed uniforms and gleaming accessories, and they came down the near aisle two abreast like a platoon of marching soldiers. Most of the tables that front the stage were already occupied, so the cops took over the stack of carpet-covered trunks which comprise a kind of bleacher section directly behind the tables.
I cocked an eyebrow. “Most saloon owners would object to such an influx of fuzz,” I said to Cedric. He owns the Cellar, San Francisco’s only nightclub devoted to the sadly vanishing art of magic.
“Policemen have a right to be entertained,” he said, smiling.
“Their lot, I understand, is not a happy one.”
Ardis said speculatively, “They look very young.”
“That’s because they’re most of the graduation class of the Police Academy,” Cedric told her. “Their graduation ceremony was this afternoon, and I invited them down as a group. Actually, it was Captain Dickensheet’s idea.” He indicated a tall, angular, graying man, also in uniform, who was about to appropriate a table for himself and two other elder officers. “I’ve known him casually for a couple of years, and he thought his men would enjoy the show.”
“With Christopher Steele and The Amazing Boltan on the same bill,” Ardis said, “they can’t help but enjoy it.”
I started to add an agreement to that — and there was Steele himself standing over the table, having appeared with that finely developed knack he has of seeming to come from nowhere.
Christopher Steele is the Cellar’s main attraction and one of the greatest of the modern illusionists. I don’t say that because I happen to be his manager and publicist. He’s also something of a secretive type, given to quirks like an inordinate fascination for puzzles and challenges, the more bizarre the better. Working for and with him the past five years has been anything but dull.
Steele usually dresses in black, both on stage and off, and I think he does it because he knows it gives him, with his thick black hair and dark skin and eyes, a vaguely sinister air. He looked sinister now as he said, “The most amazing thing about Phil Boltan, you know, is that he’s still alive. He does a fine job on stage, but he has the personal habits and morals of a Yahoo.”
Ardis’ eyes shone as they always did when Steele was around; she’s his assistant and confidante and lives in a wing of his house across the Bay, although if there is anything of a more intimate nature to their relationship neither of them has ever hinted at it to me. She said, “You sound as though Boltan is not one of your favorite people, Christopher.”