Before We Disappear, page 1
Dedication
For those who came before.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
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Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Books by Shaun David Hutchinson
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Copyright
About the Publisher
Jack
Paris, France—Le Théâtre d’Enfer
Friday, October 9, 1908
THE ENCHANTRESS STOOD under the proscenium arch—holding her willowy arms aloft as if she were preparing to conduct an orchestra, wearing a gauzy mauve gown that moved like morning fog—and dared the audience not to love her. None could resist. The Enchantress had taken me into her care after my mother had died nearly ten years ago, and I loved her. Even when I hated her.
Slowly, the Enchantress turned from the audience, revealing the drape of her gown around her shoulders that exposed the smooth skin of her back. Her costume would have been considered indecent in London or New York or Chicago, but it barely raised an eyebrow in Paris. Especially among the colorful crowd of the Montmartre theatre where the Enchantress had performed to a full house for the past four weeks.
The electric lights cast a flickering, ethereal glow across the stage. The Enchantress bent backward, curving like a gentle hill until she could press her palms against the stage and face the audience again. “Come,” she said in a husky, gravelly voice. “See for yourself that there are no wires. Touch everything.”
Holding her arched shape, the Enchantress waited, appearing bored, while a few brave souls climbed the steps to the stage to peer through the space made by the Enchantress’s body, to examine the air around her, to search for a platform or any type of mechanical apparatus. A brutish hired man remained nearby to discourage anyone foolish enough from taking the Enchantress’s invitation to touch too literally.
I stood in the shadows of the wings waiting. Chewing my nails to the quick. This part always made me nervous. If anything went wrong, it would shatter the illusion, and this particular illusion was why most had purchased a ticket and crowded into the theatre.
La Complainte de la Sirène. The Lament of the Mermaid. The first night the Enchantress had performed it was the last night there’d been any empty seats in the theatre. Word had spread like cholera of the Enchantress and her beautiful magic. Le Théâtre d’Enfer was no Odéon, but the stagehands were generally sober, the audience generally was not, and the proprietor hardly cheated us on the receipts.
Throughout her act, the Enchantress wore an expression of disinterest bordering on disdain, as if she were doing the audience a favor by deigning to appear and might leave if they disappointed her.
No one wanted to disappoint her.
The Enchantress mesmerized the audience from the moment the curtain rose until the second it fell. She held them captive as she performed one illusion after another, each more wondrous than the last, and following their release, they were never the same. Unlike some magicians, she earned her nom de théâtre every night.
Like I said before, I loved the Enchantress, though we’d spent so long together that I’d grown inured to her glamour. Even the Mona Lisa begins to look a bit plain-Jane and no-nonsense when you pass her every day. Yet I understood the longing the Enchantress inspired in all who laid eyes upon her. I sympathized with the hearts she broke in each city we swept through. The Enchantress was a force of nature, and most were simply caught in her wake, trying to not drown.
As the audience members who’d climbed on stage returned to their seats, I nodded to the stagehands that we were ready to begin. The Enchantress, still bowed backward, lifted her right leg. Followed by her left arm. She was taller than most realized, with long limbs that she moved so gracefully that they didn’t seem to bend at the joints so much as curve. Sometimes she seemed more ballerina than magician.
Their collective breaths held, the audience watched the Enchantress balance impossibly on one leg and one arm upside down, holding the pose with a preternatural ease. When the Enchantress was certain she had their full and unwavering attention, she raised her left leg. Only her right palm remained in contact with the stage. The rest of her body defied Newton’s laws, hanging suspended like an inverted hook. It should not have been possible, it frustrated the senses, and yet the audience couldn’t deny what they saw with their own eyes.
The Enchantress knew exactly how long to let the anticipation build. She possessed a natural gift for prolonging the audience’s ecstasy and anxiety as they waited, gripping each other’s hands tightly in the dark, for what came next. She guided them to the edge of their seats, forcing them to balance over the chasm, and then . . .
With no warning, the Enchantress rose into the air as if drawn upward by a line attached to her torso. Audience members gasped, one frightened person bit off a scream. The Enchantress floated nearly two yards off the stage. Her pale hair drifted around her head like seaweed, and her arms and legs moved languidly as if the space around her had been transmuted into water.
The Enchantress was beautiful and dreadful and tragic. Her body told the story of the mermaid with the broken heart who could breathe underwater and yet had still drowned. She drifted over the stage, allowing all to watch and to grieve for her lost soul.
“Thief! She is a thief!” A man’s nasal voice sliced through the thalassic silence. And what he actually said was, “Voleuse! C’est une voleuse!” but it’ll save some time if I translate his words directly to English.
“What the devil is going on?” Lucia d’Alessi appeared beside me. She was my age, small, with a stormy complexion and a perpetual scowl. Like me, she was an orphan who had been taken in by the Enchantress. We could never pass for actual siblings—I was as pale as an egg while she had the darker skin of her native Italy—and neither of us looked enough like Evangeline to convince anyone we were her biological children. Still, I loved her like a friend and hated her in the way only siblings could. Feelings that I assumed were mutual.
I peeked around the curtain, searching for the source of the interruption. Most of the audience was still watching the Enchantress, who had given no sign that she’d noticed anything was amiss, but a few had turned to the man at the rear of the theatre.
“She is a thief and a saboteur!”
“Chabrol,” I said, and swore under my breath.
Lucia gripped the silver end of her cane. “How many times did I say we should leave Paris before incorporating Chabrol’s illusion into the act?”
“Many times.” Henri Chabrol was a talented magician with absolutely no flair for the dramatic. His greatest trick was how quickly he could put his audience to sleep. His second greatest was an illusion unimaginatively called La Femme Flottante, during which Chabrol’s young assistant lay on a table, floated up, remained suspended in the air for a count of ten, and then drifted back down. I had seen Chabrol perform it a dozen times, and it’d rarely elicited more than tepid applause from the audience. Henri Chabrol had designed an illusion that had never been seen before, one that should’ve made him a legend, yet few outside of Paris knew he existed, and the few inside who did hardly cared.
The Enchantress immediately understood the illusion’s true potential and sent me to discover how it worked, which I did. There was no magic trick I could not unravel, no secret I could not discover. I also possessed other dubious skills, such as picking locks and pockets, and scaling buildings. I was a good magician’s assistant, but I was a better burglar.
When I returned to the Enchantress with the designs for La Femme Flottante, Lucia built the apparatus that made the illusion possible while the Enchantress added the spectacle people would pay to see. Shortly thereafter, the Enchantress introduced The Lament of the Mermaid to Paris, and it was hailed as a marvel. The money flowed in, and we lived in the manner to whi ch we had grown accustomed and felt we rightfully deserved.
Yet Lucia was correct. We should’ve taken the illusion to London or Frankfurt or Rome. Stealing from Chabrol and then remaining in Paris to perform it had been courting disaster. And disaster had arrived, though fashionably late.
“Did you really sabotage his equipment?” Lucia asked.
“Only a little.”
“Jack!”
At the back of the theatre, two police had entered to stand beside Chabrol. He continued to accuse the Enchantress, loudly, of being a thief, and the audience was beginning to pay attention.
Through the commotion, the Enchantress maintained her illusion. She remained suspended in the air, never acknowledging the disruption, never so much as twitching a muscle in a manner that wasn’t rehearsed. As far as she was concerned, the show would go on until the curtain fell.
We were cooked. I doubted Chabrol could prove his accusations, but proof was rarely a barrier when the accuser was a man like Chabrol and the accused was a woman like the Enchantress.
I turned to Lucia. “It’s time for a fire escape.”
Lucia leaned heavily on her cane. “Do we have to?”
“Sorry, Lu.”
With little more than a sigh, Lucia disappeared into the shadows. A moment later, shouts of “Fire!” began. The word spread through the audience, their terrified cries drowning out Chabrol. They became an ocean wave surging toward the exits in a panic to flee, and Chabrol couldn’t fight them.
I lowered the Enchantress and helped her out of the harness that had held her aloft.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know what else to do.”
Lucia was already directing the confused stagehands, gathering what we could easily carry with us as we retreated.
“You did adequately, Jack,” she said, offering an insouciant shrug. “I’ve grown bored of Paris anyway.”
Jack
Paris, France—Twelfth Arrondissement
Friday, October 9, 1908
I KISSED THIERRY in the shadows in the alley behind his parents’ fromagerie. He smelled of Roquefort and Laguiole, and he tasted of Bûcheron and figs.
“Take me with you,” Thierry whispered into my ear. His lips were warm and his hands were consumed with wanderlust, respecting no borders.
A low chuckle rumbled in my chest. “Evangeline would never allow it.”
Evangeline Dubois was the name the Enchantress wore when she wasn’t performing on a stage. It wasn’t the name of her birth or even the name she’d gone by when she’d first taken me in—back then she’d been Victoria Harcourt—and I’d known her by other names still, but she’d been Evangeline Dubois the longest.
Thierry raked his fingers through my hair. “You owe her nothing.”
I caught Thierry’s wrist and pulled back to peer into his eyes. “I owe her everything.”
Thierry’s lip trembled. He was a soft, gentle boy, easily bruised. He hadn’t taken the news well that I was leaving. Especially after I’d explained the circumstances under which we were being forced to flee. Lucia and Evangeline were at the hotel packing, and I had slipped out unnoticed to say goodbye to Thierry.
“She doesn’t care about you, Jack. Not the way I do.”
“I’d be dead without Evangeline. She took me in after my mother died and—” I stroked Thierry’s cheek with my thumb. “Traveling with her, I’ve seen more of the world than most will ever see. I’ve dined in the company of royalty.”
“But does she love you?”
“Of course.”
Thierry’s eyes softened with pity. “No, Jack. I love you; she uses you.” He wrapped his arms around my waist and pressed his body against mine. “I would love you for the rest of my life if you stay with me.”
I laughed until I realized he wasn’t joking. Thierry’s sincerity gutted me. I had been charmed from the first moment I met him—by the sunset hue of his eyes, his long lashes, and the way his front teeth pushed his lips slightly open—but it was his naked earnestness that had captured some small part of my heart and made me briefly consider his offer. “I doubt your parents would approve.”
“Then we’ll run away,” he said.
“To where, little mouse?”
“Anywhere.”
I sighed and leaned my head against his chest. “I’m only fifteen, you’re just seventeen. What would we do for work? Where would we live?” Thierry tried to answer, but I pressed my finger to his lips. “Your place is here, and mine is . . .” I paused and looked toward the end of the alley. “Not here.”
“My place is wherever you are.” Thierry squeezed me tightly as if unwilling to let go. “I would live in the sewers and steal food if necessary to stay with you.”
And I had no doubt he would. But while Thierry’s family wasn’t wealthy, he had grown up well fed and loved. His life had been free of true hardship. He was generous and kind, and had never been exposed to the cruelties of the world, while I knew them all too intimately and would do anything to avoid them.
“Evangeline and Lucia are my family,” I said. “I can’t leave them.”
“But I love you, Jack Nevin. I’ll never love anyone else.” Thierry lifted my chin and looked into my eyes. For a moment, my conviction wavered. I considered the life we might lead together. A life of poverty and hardship. A life of pain that might harden our hearts toward one another as resentment reminded us of the lives we’d left behind to be together. With Evangeline, I ate the finest food, slept in a soft bed in my own room. The day she had pulled me out of the gutter, she’d promised me I would never know hunger again, and she’d kept her word. In the end, the choice to stay or go was no choice at all.
“I know,” I said. “Goodbye.”
Jack
Paris, France
Saturday, October 10, 1908
PARIS VANISHED BEHIND us like a dream as the train picked up speed. Already the city and Thierry were fading from my memory as I looked eagerly ahead to the next adventure. Life with Evangeline was many things, but it was never dull. Since Evangeline had taken me in, we hadn’t remained in one city longer than a few months. We traveled across Europe, performing for rough crowds and royalty, honing our skills on and off the stage, meeting the most fascinating people and often stealing everything they owned. We were a motley family with an unconventional life that I loved, yet I couldn’t help wondering, if only for a moment, what it might have been like to stay in Paris. To attempt to put down roots and build a future. I wasn’t sure I was suited to that kind of life, not after all I’d done and seen with Evangeline, but still I wondered.
Evangeline Dubois was seated across from me in the roomy train compartment. Out of the costume of the Enchantress, Evangeline was still beautiful and beguiling. On stage or off, she commanded every room.
Beside me, Lucia drew in her sketchbook. She had been quiet since leaving Paris, but that was hardly unusual. Lucia was introspective, always dreaming up a new illusion or contraption with that gifted mind of hers. When she began chasing some idea or another, she could get so caught up in it that she forgot to eat or sleep.
“It’s a pity we had to leave,” Evangeline said.
I hung my head. “I’m sorry. Henri Chabrol brought the police, and—”
Evangeline waved me quiet. “You did the right thing. Though you must have been careless in his workshop for him to have found us.”
I hoped Lucia would bring up that Chabrol had found us because we’d performed the illusion we’d stolen from him in his own city, but she remained silent.
“Must’ve been,” I mumbled. “I’ll be more careful.”
“See that you are.”
My cheeks grew hot and my ears burned. It wasn’t fair that I was taking the blame, but experience had taught me that it was no use arguing with Evangeline. There were consequences to challenging her, and I had no interest in starting a fuss on the train.
I was grateful when Lucia asked, “Where should we go next?” drawing Evangeline’s ephemeral attention away from me.
After a pause, Evangeline said, “I’ve had a letter from Mr. Gleeson about a potential opportunity in America.” Alister Gleeson, Evangeline’s booking agent, managed to keep us employed despite the dubious circumstances under which we were often forced to flee.
“America?” I’d been born in New York City. When Evangeline had found me on the streets there, I was a scrawny, starving orphan of seven who likely wouldn’t have survived the winter. She had lured me in with warm soup and clean clothes and had promised to show me the world. We’d left New York for London shortly after that, and I hadn’t been back to America in the eight years since. I wasn’t sure how I felt about returning. It wasn’t my home, not really; but then, I didn’t know where home was. I had no idea where I belonged except with Evangeline and Lucia.
