Play dead

1973

At Faerwood, Joseph's World was a labyrinth of small, dark rooms and hissing whispers, a place where specters coiled behind the wood lath, and shadows darted and gamboled in the halls. Joseph played his child's games by himself, but he was never alone.

Without a mother, the only woman in young Joseph's life was his father's stage assistant, Odette. Odette cooked for him, bathed him, helped him with his lessons. In the end, it was Odette who knew his talents.

As a young boy Joseph Swann proved to be far more dexterous than other children his age, far more nimble with his hands than even his father had been as a child. At three he was able to perform all the fundamentals of coin magic-palms, switches, vanishes-simply from observation, being particularly adept at Le Tourniquet, the classic French drop. At four he mastered the Okito, the small brass box it had taken his father the better part of a decade to perfect. Given a bridge deck-to accommodate his small hands-he could fluidly perform any number of card basics: false shuffles, Hindu shuffles, double lifts, false counts.

In these early years, as Karl Swann struggled to remain relevant in a changing world of magic, as madness began to seed his mind, instead of pride he developed a profound resentment toward his son, a bitterness that at first manifested in abuse, but soon matured into something else.

Something closer to fear.