The Best Paranormal Crime Stories Ever Told

Special Surprise Guest Appearance by… by Carole Nelson Douglas

“Magic is a man’s game,” he told the reporter for the Las Vegas Review-Journal who sat beside him in the audience.

“In this town, for sure,” she answered. “Except for Melinda at the Venetian, a female illusionist has never headlined in Vegas before. That’s why I’m interested in your take on this one.”

His “take” on this one was he could take her or leave her, and she had left him, long ago, not on her terms.

“Even you must admit,” the reporter said, eyeing him slyly, “that her Mirror Image trick is a winner.”

“It’s all mirrors,” he answered, snorting ever so slightly. No sense in demeaning his own act while dismissing that of a rival.

Rival?

Chardonnay LeSeuer was one of those tall black women with a whole lot of cream in her coffee. Looked like a freaking supermodel. Now she was “Majika” and making hay by playing both the sex and the race card: not just the second woman ever to headline on the Strip, but also the first black magician.

She was also an ex-assistant he had sent packing years ago for packing on a bit too much poundage. Sure, she looked pretty sleek now, but usually it was all downhill with women once the weight started piling up. How was he to know she’d get over putting on fifteen pounds because her kid had gotten that annoying disease? She’d missed a lot of rehearsals with that too.

Time had added assorted swags and sags to his six-foot frame as well, as if he were an outmoded set of draperies, but his magician’s costume could be designed to hide it, as did the ignominy of a custom corset that also doubled as a handy storage device for assorted paraphernalia that shall remain nameless, at least to readers of the Review-Journal.

“Actually,” he added, trying to sound affable, “I haven’t seen this infamous Mirror Image trick yet.”

“Why do you say infamous?”

“From what I’ve heard, it smacks more of a gimmick than legitimate magic.”

“Aren’t all magic tricks a gimmick?”

“Please. Not ‘tricks.’ It makes magicians sound like hookers. We use the term ‘illusions.’ We are frank about what we do but we don’t debase it. There’s a fine line.”

“And how has Majika crossed over it?” the reporter asked, pencil poised. She was a twenty-something twerp with an overstudded left ear and an annoying manner, as if she knew something about him that he didn’t.

By overstepping her bounds, he wanted to snap. Instead, he displayed that mysterious and vaguely sinister smile that was pasted on billboards high above the Strip and had been for fifteen years. It was pasted on his face now, too, thanks to Dr. Mengel. “We’ll find out tonight, I’m sure.”

Marlon Carlson sat back in the seat, startled when it tilted back with him. The damn Crystal Phoenix Hotel and Casino had gone first class in designing a house for this upstart woman. He’d had an exclusive gig at the Oasis down the Strip-as Merlin the Magnificent-for years, but the fact was the joint was getting a bit tacky. Every older stage show seemed shabby after Cirque du Soleil had hit town. That was the trouble with Vegas: it took millions to set up a theater specifically for a designated show meant to run for decades since the star got millions.

Refurbishing in mid-stream was the name of the game and he was getting tired of it, personally. He was getting tired, period, especially of the cosmetic surgery that had tilted his eyes to a Charlie Chan slant and drawn his neck skin back like a hangman’s noose. At least he didn’t look as artificial and aerodynamically taut as the eerily ageless Siegfried and Roy down the Strip. Yet. And at least he didn’t have to work with cats, animals almost as annoying as the clichéd rabbit. He understood that Majika still resorted to producing the expected (another word for rabbit) in the illusion trade.

When he couldn’t help shuddering at the indignity of resorting to the rabbit, which was literally old hat, the snippy young reporter had the gall to ask if he were cold, like he was somebody’s Uncle Osbert instead of a first-rank stage magician at the top of his game.

He forced his attention to the stage, where the woman who now called herself Majika, slim and limber in spangled leopard leotard, was going through the motions of various sleight-of-hand illusions.

She was sleight of form again, he noted nostalgically. Always a looker, but not very cooperative. Usually his assistants considered it a signal honor to sleep with him. Well, maybe it was a less signal honor these days, but it was still a tradition at least.

She had no real assistants, except for various members of the audience she called onstage.

That’s what was wrong with magic shows nowadays. They had all gone over to the proletariat. There was Lance Burton with his kiddie brigade at the Monaco, as if magic were still something meant to amaze and amuse the pre-teen set instead of a multimillion-dollar con game with almost forty million tourists a year to milk and bilk. There were the afore-considered Siegfried and Roy, in their off hours breeding rare albino lions and tigers and, perhaps someday, even some bloody bears. Oh, my. All for the good of the planet and mankind.

All Merlin the Magnificent did was mystify and collect his millions. At least Majika had no politically correct cause on display along with her lean form and her skimpy magical prowess.

His nose wrinkled despite itself, quite an achievement given his last surgery, as she coaxed a shy, fat middle-aged woman in a (sigh) floral-decorated sweat suit from one of the first rows of the audience onto the stage.

The usual cabinet had been wheeled center stage by the blackclad ninja stagehands Majika used for assistants. They came and went like ebony fog, no posing, no muscle-flexing. In fact, there was something weirdly boneless about their silent, supple forms, like electric eels gone upright. Frogmen in wet suits, that’s what they evoked in their shiny Spandex jumpsuits covering head to toe to little finger. Disgusting.

This time the eternal magician’s prop was presented with the mirror in plain view on the outside front, even framed in ornate gilt wood, as if it were made to hang on a wall. The simpering cow from the audience, obviously a plant, was finessed into the cabinet by the door swinging open on a dead matte-black interior.

Once the dupe was inside, the shadowy ninjas sprang from somewhere to spin the cabinet sideways. Majika stood proudly edgeways behind it, her figure as sleek as a diver’s.

To the uneducated eye, the cabinet looked no more than two inches wide, like an ordinary mirror frame. Please! Marlon was getting a headache.

“How does she do that?” the reporter was whispering, nagging in his ear.

“Mirrors!” he snapped.

But he wasn’t sure. How irritating.

The frogmen spun the cabinet… once, twice, three times.

Its side profile was always as black and narrow as a dagger’s and Majika made sure to stand behind it fully visible, as if it were really that thin an edge.

He rapidly calculated angles, checked the wings and floor for hidden mirrors.

The audience gasped…

… for out of the narrow edge of the dark mirror the woman in the gaudy sweat suit stepped, blinking as if emerging from the dark.

“My goodness,” she murmured like the tourist born she was.

What a stooge! So annoying as to appear absolutely natural. He wondered what casting director Majika used.

The lithe magician gestured the woman to stand at her right side, then nodded to the dark men to spin the mirror again.

And this time the very same image of the sweat-suited woman stepped out from the other edge of the mirror. Majika moved between them, her own figure reflected to infinity in the bland mirrored face of the cabinet front.

The split images of the woman from the audience eyed each other, and then began addressing each another.

“You can’t be me.”

“You must be me.”

Twins. Simplest trick in the book. One backstage waiting to go on, the other planted in the audience. What a sucker ploy!

“How’d she do that?” the reporter prodded, her pencil waving in his face.

Watch the fresh peel, baby!

He leaned away from the unwanted contact. Twins, he was about to say, when Majika waved the two women together and they slowly converged until they melted into each other and only one stood there, looking like she needed to be pinched to wake up.

“How’d she do that?” the reporter persisted, insisted, as that ilk will.

“Mirrors,” he said shortly, rising so he could beat the rest of the audience to the exit doors. It was hard work. They were all standing, blocking the rows and the aisles, giving Majika a standing ovation for the final illusion of her act. He didn’t even glance stageward to catch the vaunted final fillip of the show: a white rabbit pulled from a black top hat that moments before had been flatter than a Frisbee. Even flatter than the edge of a spinning mirror.

“Chardonnay,” he greeted Majika when she finally returned from the multiple bows to her dressing room, which he had managed to enter as if he had appeared there by design. It stunk of opening night floral arrangements, but the show had been running for eight months.

“Merlin,” she answered. ”I mean, Marlon. Dare I ask how you got in here?”

“Started early, honey. Shut the door. We have things to discuss.”

She obeyed, just as she had used to when she’d needed the paycheck.

His confidence perked up. He was the maestro, she the upstart. “That mirror thing is a fairly effective trick,” he said, smiling. God, it hurt.

“Works for me.” She sat at her dressing table to swipe the glitter highlights from her face.

He wished she would wipe off that new expression of elegant self-satisfaction. Or had she always looked that way?

“Seriously,” he added, “I think you might have something there.”

“Really?” She spun toward him, bare-faced, looking as taut as a teenager.

He blinked like a tourist in the limelight. Something was wrong here. Unfair. Why should she be slim and unwrinkled, when she’d passed off his Babe-scale years ago?

“So how’s your kid?” He had searched for the given name and given up.

“He died.”

Silence always made him uncomfortable. He supposed firing her in the middle of that medical melodrama could have made it hard on… someone. He didn’t like to hear about people dying. He never knew what to say, so he said nothing.

She seemed to expect no less from him. “So, did you like the show?” she asked.

“What’s not to like?” Everything. “Glad you made such a great… comeback. You look terrific.” Spoken softly, like an invitation.

“Thanks. It’s good to see you again too.” She seemed pleased that he was here.

Oddly, that cheered him. He hadn’t realized he’d needed cheer until now. “Really?”

“Well, you are the maestro. I’m flattered that you bothered to see my show.”

“It’s that Mirror Image trick that’s the draw.”

“Illusion,” she corrected as swiftly as he had corrected the reporter.

She leaned an elbow on the dressing table, then her chin on her fist. Her image reflected to infinity behind her, thanks to the room’s traditional parallel aisle of dressing table mirrors. It was all done with mirrors, and he was never done with mirrors, for he saw himself, small and wee, in a tiny corner of the reflected room behind her. His trademark mane of hair, now a dramatic white, was mostly extensions now. He was the sum of all the parts of his former illusions.

His heart fluttered. This moment was important. He knew it. For her, for him. He couldn’t tell for which one it was more vital, just as one couldn’t tell the twins from the Mirror Image illusion apart, even when they merged at the end.

“It’s twins, isn’t it?” He spoke without wanting to, hungry, urgent, worried.

“No, not twins.”

“Not twins?”

She smiled, gently, as at a slow-witted child. “This is something totally new, my illusion.”

“Nothing’s new in magic. Nothing! It’s the same dodge and burn the photographers used do to enhance photographs, only it’s performed on the audience’s eyes instead of a negative.”

“Dodge and burn,” she repeated. “I like the way you put that.”

“Listen. I’m curious as hell, and I admit you’ve got me wondering. I really want to know how you do that.”

She was silent. Signature illusions were a magician’s bread-and-butter, big-time.

“A million dollars,” he said, unable to stop himself. “I’ll give you a million dollars if you show me the secret of that trick.”

His words had surprised her as much as they had him.

“A million dollars.” She savored them like bittersweet chocolate. “A million dollars would have saved Cody’s life.”

“Cody?”

“My son.”

“Oh. Sure. Sorry. Sorry about that. So the disease, whatever, was terminal.”

“Then it was. Not now.”

He didn’t know what to say, so he left his offer hanging there.

Apparently she saw it still twisting in the wind. “You have to promise not to tell anybody.”

“Sure. I mean, no. Not ever.”

“And you can’t use it yourself without paying me a… royalty.”

“I wouldn’t want to use it. I mean, I’m not a copier. Haven’t ever been. I just want to know.” He realized this new, unexpected need was the deepest he’d felt in some time. “I don’t understand it. It’s not magic like I know it. I need to-”

“I understand need,” she said, cutting him off as if uninterested in the sudden flood of genuine feeling that engulfed him. “I’ll show you how the trick works.”

“A million dollars,” he repeated, awash in a foreign wave of gratitude.

He really had to know, more than anything in his life. What life? It was all magic show. She’d probably give the million to some foundation for the disease that had killed her son. So he’d have helped her after all. Life was strange, but magic was even stranger.

It would be quite an event. She would only reveal her illusion by using him in it. He was to be the prearranged stooge hauled from the front rows of the audience. His hotel and her hotel had agreed to co-promote the one-time union of two major Strip magicians as if they were world-class boxers having a ballyhooed rematch.

Maybe they were.

She also stipulated that he wear his stage costume: glittering black sequined vest and satin cummerbund, the vaguely frock-coat-style jacket with the capelet built into the back. Even his corset. He had felt like blushing when she mentioned it. How did she know?

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.”

“You are right.” The creature’s gray aura faded as it appeared to think.

Marlon knew a moment’s relief and a sudden surge of hope for a new life, a better life, a kinder, gentler life. It was not too late…

“I will not abandon you to the dark,” the croaking voice whispered, very near now, but no more visible. “I will not deprive you of your beloved limelight. I am a master of transformations, and I can manage that. Watch and believe.”

Marlon… Merlin the Magnificent… found himself blinking like a tourist under a bank of gel-covered spotlights. Red, blue, green they blazed, Technicolor stars in an artificial sky.

He was… himself. Standing on a stage as he did almost every night, and Majika was lifting one graceful arm to indicate his presence. His reappearance from the box. His deliverance. His rebirth. I will be good, I will, I will. Well, better.

He took the stage, spread his arms and cape, rejoiced in the magic of his vanishing and recovery.

Applause.

And then more applause, accompanied by fevered whispers and then shouts of wonder.

Majika had thrust her left arm out to introduce the second half of the illusion, the other Merlin the Magnificent standing on her other side.

Marlon turned his eyes uneasily, expecting to see the gray, shriveled, scrofulous thing from the dark.

Instead he saw a tall, white-haired man in fanciful evening dress… a man whose snowy mane had dwindled to a few threadbare strands… whose lumpy frame slumped like an overstuffed sack of extra-large baking potatoes… whose neck had become a jowly wattle, whose eyes were sunk in ridges of suet flesh.

For the first time he truly felt the horror in the story of Dorian Gray. Gray!

And before he could do or say anything, or even make a few more frantic mental promises to what or whom he couldn’t say… before he could even take in the enormity of it all and the loss that loomed before him, the foul thing moved toward him-the man he was before he had changed his own mirror image-and sank into him like fog, or like an exiled part of himself.

Marlon drowned in the engulfing presence of Merlin, a Merlin cursed to live and die looking exactly as Marlon had not allowed himself to look, and happy for that.

Where Marlon went he couldn’t say. It was dark. And narrow. And he heard and felt nothing and knew he’d go mad if he was kept here.

And then… slap! Snap! A sharp small sound and the world exploded again with light and applause. He gulped a deep, anxious breath of light-heated stage air, lifted his head and almost sniffed the sound of the applause. It was thunderous. Better than ever. He’d survived whatever nightmare the mirrored box had put him through.

Then, it became too much. The continuing racket crashed on his sensitive ears. He shrunk again, cowered, even as Majika lifted her arm the better to display him to the admiring audience.

His heart pounded against the palm of her hand.

His long white hair was full and thick again, luxurious, and she stroked it with her other hand.

Majika’s giant face stared down with piercing eyes. His sensitive ears flattened at the horrid screeching of her voice in the microphone as she displayed her triumph of illusion: him.

Her face came close, smiling.

“You’ve been such a good boy tonight, Marlon,” she whispered giddily as if to a confrere, “you’ll have extra veggies in your aftershow supper, and maybe even a big carrot from Mr. MacGregor’s garden.”

While his ears and tail drooped with self-recognition, he spied his former form, now bent and shuffling, hastening out of the theater before the crowd began its rush for the exits.