It was obvious, though, that she had to know the stooge’s apparel before the illusion began. He knew he had no twin, but maybe she could make one. No one came to take an impression of his face beforehand, but makeup people could do incredible masks even from photos these days. It was more and more special effects instead of old-fashioned magic, like everywhere else in the entertainment industry.
He was even announced on the program, a parchment flyer tucked into the glossy photo-book about Majika and her show that cost the marks nine bucks a throw: Special Guest Appearance of Merlin the Magnificent by arrangement with the Goliath Hotel and Casino.
He sat down front, cricking his neck to look up at a stage he was used to looking down on people from. He felt like a kid dragged to a cultural outing, the local symphony maybe. There was a lot of show to sit through, and for a pro, it was all routine stuff, although the audience around him gasped and applauded.
He patted his palms together; no stinging claps from him. The racket, music to his ears when he was onstage, only hurt them now, especially the enthusiastically shrill whistles. His act never got whistles, but that was because it offered an old-fashioned dignity. He shrank a little in the disconcertingly mobile seat. Old-fashioned dignity did not sound like where it was at these days. He wouldn’t outright copy Majika’s mirror illusion, but borrow the best of it. And being part of it, going through it, was the easiest way to master another magician’s illusion. You saw how it was done in an instant. Amazing that none of her audience stooges had been tempted to give away the trick, since it was the talk of Vegas and exposing it would cause a media frenzy. He was surprised that the Cloaked Conjuror at the New Millennium, who specialized in laying bare the mechanisms behind the magic, hadn’t touched Majika’s Mirror Image illusion.
When the mirrored cabinet was finally whisked onstage by the black-Spandexed minions, Marlon stared hard at the space above the wheels. No mirror halfway back to reflect the front wheels as the back and disguise an escape or entrance through the stage floor. In fact, Majika writhed underneath the cabinet like a sex kitten… or Eartha Kitt in heat, just to show the space was open and empty.
But not to worry. He’d soon know the way his “twin” would enter the box, although how she got that “two-melt-into-one-before-your-eyes” effect would be interesting to know. Probably mirrors again. So embarrassingly often, it was mirrors.
When she singled him out in the audience, he stood, nervous as a schoolboy at his first magic show. He was used to being in control, the king of the board, not a pawn.
As he headed for the six stairs to the stage he heard an audience member hissing, “Look at that kooky old guy, that big white hair! Televangelist Showman. Las Vegas!”
He held his cherished snowy pompadour high. It gave him an ecclesiastical air, he thought. He liked to consider himself as the high priest of magic in a town riddled with cheesy acolytes.
Chardonnay went through the usual chitchat with him: name, where he was from, what his hobbies were. The audience quickly caught on that he was more than the nightly guinea pig, that he was a noted magician himself, and laughed at his coyly truthful answers.
“Are you ready to face my mirror of truth and consequences?” she asked last.
He glanced over his sober, caped, black shoulder at the gaudy thing. “Of course. I am even more ready to meet myself coming from it than going into it.”
That earned a few titters from the audience and then the giltframe door was swinging toward him like a horizontal guillotine aiming at his sutured neck. He ducked when he stepped up to enter the dark space behind the silvered door, thinking the opening might be too small for his height.
But nothing impeded him and in a moment the door had swung its matte-black painted interior shut on him with a finalizing snap.
He turned at once, feeling up… down… around for any panel that might give.
Nothing did. In fact, he felt no edges of anything, no limits.
Surprised, he took a step or two forward. Or four or five. Six, seven, eight! Backwards. Sideways. Nothing. And he could hear nothing, no muffled covering lines from Majika while the transfers were accomplished inside the mirrored cabinet. No transfers were accomplished. He couldn’t even feel the cabinet jolted and manipulated by her accomplices as they spun the unit on the stage.
Nothing spun but his own baffled speculations. No way could such a paltry cabinet be so vast inside. No way, no illusion…
He was in a void. A soundless, motionless void. Not a hair’s-width of light entered or escaped that void. It was as pitch black as a childhood confessional booth.
Used to mentally tracking time, Marlon tried to tote up the seconds, minutes he had been thus isolated. He couldn’t compute it. Had no idea. His every expertise failed him here.
He would have pounded on the cabinet walls, broken the illusion, if he could have. But there was nothing to pound upon except the solid floor upon which he stood. Upon which he stood. He stamped an angry foot, a child having a tantrum. No sound, not even the pressure of an impact.
He searched his throat for a cry of protest or fear, but found it too tight and dry to respond to his panic.
And then, just like in that long-ago confessional, a small square of gray appeared in the darkness.
“At last! Where have you been?” he demanded. “There can’t be much time to make our reappearance together.”
“Time?” asked an odd, wheezing voice. “What’s that? Be still. I need to absorb you.”
Absorb him? “It’s a little late for Method acting,” he fussed. “If you can’t do a reasonable impression of me right now this entire illusion is ruined.”
Hmmm. A botched illusion wouldn’t do much for Majika’s hot new career. Perhaps this mess-up was for the best. One less rival was one less rival. “Where do we exit this crazy thing? I’m first.”
“And the first shall be last,” the wheezing voice noted, laughing soundlessly, or rather, with something like a death rattle.
“I don’t understand,” he said.
“This is where she fulfills her bargain. I have provided the faces and bodies of hundreds of mortal souls for her nightly exhibitions. It was always understood that I, the eternally shifting one, should eventually acquire a mortal body and soul of my own and escape this endless lonely dark.”
Perhaps his eyes had finally adjusted to the sliver of gray light that shared the darkness with him. He imagined a wizened, warty figure not at all human, as perhaps the cat-suited and masked ninjamen might look if stripped of their shiny black skins.
The glimpse was enough to convince him that this was no derelict hired double, but something far less ordinary.
“You’re a genie,” he guessed, “like in a lamp, only in a mirror. And she found you somehow and you gave her a wish, her resurrection as a youthful woman and a magician, only she had to promise you… something.”
“Not very much.” The tone implied the creature had been studying him and found him wanting. “I did require a soul that had squeezed itself bare of attachments to this world, that had shriveled enough that there would be room for me to expand.”
“You can’t just… take me over!”
“Ah, but I can. That is my sole talent. I can replicate any being, any body. I got into trouble about that millennia ago, and some wicked magician-a real one-sentenced me to my lonely mirror.”
“What kind of demon are you?”
“Explaining that would take too long. Although time is endless for me, I see by the spinning of my senses that we are expected to make our appearances upon the stage. I will warn you about one thing: my gift of replication responds only to the genuine. I can’t control that. So it is and so shall you be and so shall I be when I become you. But freedom is worth the price.”
“Freedom! And you would imprison me in your place? For eternity? No mortal soul deserves that.”