Existentially Challenged, page 6
After a recorded snatch of introductory music that sounded to Alison like someone trying to re-create the Doctor Who theme song by smashing the keys of a cheap electronic organ with a theremin, the spotlights on the stage intensified and the man Diablerie had addressed as Terence emerged from the curtains, smiling nervously like a man in the headlights of a car that may or may not be coming to a stop.
“Hello, everyone,” he said, into a waiting mike. “Thank you all for coming to another night of amateur mag—er, sleight of hand and optical trickery entirely unrelated to extradimensional forces. Here at the Builder’s Arms!”
He raised his voice slightly to provoke a round of applause, and the resultant smattering was clearly briefer than he would have liked. He peeled a piece of paper out of his sweat-sodden shirt pocket, absent-mindedly mopped his brow with it, then squinted at the handwritten words.
“Our first act tonight is . . . oh. Um.” He adjusted his spectacles. “It’s the . . . entirely mundane . . . feats of spiritual . . . guesswork by the ever-popular Blake Shadow!”
Another token round of applause went up, with a noticeable increase of enthusiasm among the elderly component of the audience, and Terence retreated behind the curtain, to be replaced with another man. This one had a shaved head and a triangular beard, and was dressed in accordance with the style of the magic hipsters—black suit with black polo neck, and a single red rose stuck into his lapel to indicate his higher status.
“Thank you, Terence,” said Blake Shadow, a little sarcastically. His fists were clenched and his posture was somewhat uptight, giving him the air of a man who had just been the subject of a very severe talking-to. “I am Blake Shadow, and tonight I will guide you once again on a spiritual voyage to the other side—”
“no he won’t!” yelled Terence, barreling back out onto the stage and grabbing the mike. “He’s just going to do some cold reading! Nothing magical at all!”
Blake wrestled the mike back. “Yes, fine, it won’t be magic the way the government officially defines it these days,” he said quickly, before returning to a more pretentious, airy tone. “But with an open mind, perhaps you’ll discover a new kind of magic—”
Terence yanked the mike back. “you will not! no kind of magic at all! it’s—”
A brief scuffle broke out between the two men before Blake pushed the microphone out of the range of both mouths, and an angry exchange of whispers took place. Terence seemed to finally impart something important, and Blake looked worriedly into the audience, directly at the booth where Diablerie and Alison were sitting.
Alison risked a quick look at Diablerie. He was still smiling at how much chaos he had caused with such a small amount of effort, but there was impatience in his eyes.
Some kind of agreement appeared to have taken place onstage, and Terence retreated through the curtain. Blake coughed to silence the murmur of the increasingly confused crowd. “Um, yes. As I was saying, I will now astound you with . . . some cold reading. Which doesn’t involve magic at all.” He placed a hand to his forehead and closed his eyes with a mixture of fake mysticism and despair. “I am getting the letter H. For no particular reason I am thinking about the letter H. Does that mean anything to anyone here?”
“Yes!” came the cry of an elderly woman not far from Alison. “My husband’s name was Harold!”
“That’s an interesting fact, madam, thank you for sharing,” said Blake. “It is, however, a complete coincidence. Would I be right in saying that Harold passed away recently? This is entirely an assumption on my part.”
“Oh yes,” said the audience member sadly. “Is he in a better place, Mr. Shadow?”
“I have no idea, and no way of finding out,” said Blake through his teeth. “But I don’t think anyone could possibly object to you assuming as much. Unless they could?” He directed the question to where Diablerie was sitting. “Are we going to have a problem with that? Maybe assume the opposite as well, madam, just to be safe.”
“Thank you, Mr. Shadow,” said the woman. “Could you let him know that we all miss him?”
“I am completely unable to do that,” said Blake, apparently gaining confidence. “But I can wildly guess on a basis of nothing at all that he either is or isn’t aware of your feelings. Shall we move on?”
The woman sat down, and Alison overheard one of her nearby friends whisper excitedly, “He’s very good, isn’t he?”
Diablerie kept up his faint smile through the rest of the act, which continued along the same lines for the next ten minutes, but the drumming of his fingers on his walking cane became more and more heavy and deliberate, until it sounded like someone was repeatedly throwing basketballs down a wooden staircase.
Blake Shadow’s act seemed to be targeted squarely at the elderly locals, as everyone else in the audience had settled into a patchwork soundscape of disinterested murmurs, but this began to abate as the ten-minute mark rolled around and Blake had to hurriedly wrap up his segment, cutting short a moment wherein a father either was or was not reassured that his estranged son was still alive or dead but who could say.
An extremely mixed round of applause saw Blake back behind the curtain, and Terence came out again. His skin was by now extremely flushed, and his pink face and hands poking out from the ends of his cream-colored shirt gave him the appearance of an undercooked sausage roll. “Erm, thank you, a big hand for Blake Shadow,” he said, prompting a brief upsurge of the dying applause that failed to get it off life support. “I think our second act is ready, now, so please enjoy the . . . uh . . . mundane activities of Abdul the Astonishing!”
Terence darted offstage as the curtain was whipped aside to reveal a stage with a table covered in standard magical props—cups, rings, playing cards, a white bird in a cage, swaying under some kind of heavy sedation—behind which stood a man whose appearance drew a gasp of shock from the younger sector of the audience.
He had black hair and a coffee-colored skin tone, and since that apparently hadn’t been enough to establish his Middle Eastern background, he was also wearing a turban the size and color scheme of a beach ball, a glittering sleeveless robe, and sandals whose toes curled so deeply that they came back around to pointing forward again.
“I am Abdul the Astonishing,” he said, throwing wide his arms. He had a curly black mustache that Alison felt sure she could have wound around her hands twice, and he spoke in a comically overdone Arabian accent worthy of a production of Aladdin in a particularly out-of-touch part of the country. “And tonight, I shall astound you with feats of magic and mysticism from the East.”
Alison heard a strangled noise that sounded like it was coming from Terence’s throat, and caught a glimpse of a cream-colored figure sprinting toward center stage.
Abdul simply clapped his large hands, and a ring of fire burst into life around him and his table, immediately climbing to several feet high and stopping Terence in his tracks. An appreciative gasp went up.
“Yes, expect nothing less than the true magic, the old magic,” continued Abdul, flexing his fingers over his table of apparatus. “Real magic, like the supernatural mystery of the rings!”
He grabbed a trio of metal rings and launched into an extremely fast routine, during which every part of his body other than his arms remained ramrod stiff and unmoving. It wasn’t a very good version of the interlocking-rings trick, as it ended with only two of the rings interlocking, and the other one rattling to the floor somewhere near Abdul’s feet. But his face wore an expression of such furious concentration that when he thrust the rings forward with a grunt of triumph, half the audience burst into applause just on reflex.
“How can it be explained?” He threw the rings to one side with a clatter, then pulled a line of colored scarves from thin air. At least, Alison assumed that was the intended effect. In reality, she could clearly see that they were coming out of the back of his robe. “It cannot be explained! Surely I must possess powers beyond the wit of mortal man! It is the only explanation!”
A shrill “no it isn’t!” rang out from the direction of Terence. Abdul simply clapped his hands again, prompting another surge from the ring of fire that still surrounded him, and Terence was drowned out by the earthshaking sound of a gong.
“Yes, it is!” affirmed Abdul. He pulled one of the scarves off the string and tucked it showily into his closed fist. Then he tapped the hand once, twice, three times, and opened it to reveal that the scarf was gone. Although something looked very much as if it fluttered to the floor behind him and was set alight by the ring of fire. “Tremble before my mystical power!”
He continued in this vein, quickly rattling through extremely standard tricks performed very shoddily while aggressively asserting his magical power. Going by the increasingly absent applause and the open mouths around her, Alison got the sense that the audience had no idea what to make of this.
She glanced at Diablerie. His grin had returned in full force, and the tapping of his fingers upon his walking cane had upgraded to a full-on grope. He was shifting in his seat like a famous actor at an award ceremony in the pause before a name gets read out.
Abdul fanned out a deck of cards, picked one, and showed it to the audience. “This is your card!” He then placed it back on the top of the deck and proceeded to slowly and fumblingly shuffle, in a way that made it extremely obvious he was keeping the audience’s card on the top of the deck. Then he passed it behind his back a couple of times and threw all the cards in the air, leaving only the top card in his hand. “Is this your card?” he exclaimed in triumph as the scattered cards started a few additional fires around the stage.
Alison looked at Diablerie again, and somehow, at that moment, the situation made sense to her. This wasn’t an attempt at a serious conjuring act. This was a protest. This was a challenge. And Diablerie had the look of a career duelist who had found a worthy opponent.
“It’s magic!” reiterated Abdul. He had thrown his hands wide again and was now staring directly at Diablerie’s booth. “It’s real magic from the unknown realms of mystery, and there is not a man here who can say otherwise!”
That felt suspiciously like a cue. Diablerie slapped his hands upon the tabletop, making the drinks rattle, and began to rise.
“boooo!”
Diablerie hesitated in surprise. The boo had come from another part of the seating area, in a deep shadow near stage left. Abdul seemed to have been caught off guard as well, as he had paused his act to stare at the source of the voice with boggling eyes.
After the kind of pause that holds the entire room on tenterhooks waiting to see what would break it, Terence burst onto stage one last time clutching a fire extinguisher, with which he proceeded to douse the burning ring with several white coughs of carbon dioxide. At the same time, the theater lights came on and the soundtrack was abruptly silenced. Abdul’s spell was well and truly broken.
“Boo! Disgraceful!” came the voice again. With the lights up, Alison could now see that it belonged to a woman wearing a khaki T-shirt and a red beret. She was advancing on the stage in a fighting stance—fists clenched and elbows apart as if she was carrying two rolls of carpet under her arms. “Boo! Magic appropriation! Boo!”
She placed one foot on the stage, then turned to address the person directly behind her. He was a man with a similar T-shirt and long hair in dreadlocks, who was holding out a phone to record.
“We’ve just interrupted a so-called magic act that was being blatantly X-ist,” she said, in the kind of hushed tone that was clearly audible right to the back rows of the theater. “Excuse me, sir? Are you aware that you claiming to be doing real magic is extremely offensive to extradimensionals and persons of extradimensional infusion?”
Robbed of his special effects, his stage lights, and his backing track, Abdul the Astonishing had been reduced to what he was—an ordinary man of Indian or Pakistani descent, dressed like a pantomime genie. Still, he drew himself up to his full height and folded his arms with dignity. “Abdul claims nothing,” he boomed. “I say that I am in command of magical forces, and this is no lie.”
“Ooh!” barked the girl, stepping further onto the stage. “Ooh! Did you get that?” She addressed her camera operator again. “That was live! Someone clip that! I am now admonishing Abdul the Astonishing.” She turned, then almost immediately turned back. “That’s good. Clip that as well. That’s a meme. Well, Abdul the Astonishing, which I do not believe to be your real name, were you aware that X-appropriation is now an actual crime with a real, actual law against it?”
If he wasn’t, Abdul let the news wash over him like low tide over a half-buried stone. He made a show of glancing around. “I see no police.”
The girl was trying to step into his personal space, but his folded arms and proud stance didn’t crack, so in the end they were making nose-to-nose glaring eye contact. “Well!” she said. “You’ll be in real trouble when the Department of Extradimensional Affairs hears about this!”
“Erm, perhaps we should . . .” whispered Alison to Diablerie, or rather, to the space that Diablerie had occupied the last she had checked, because only then did she notice that Diablerie had since vacated it.
She was still processing this when she heard a familiar hissing noise and saw a spherical smoke cloud burst into existence on the other side of the stage, mingling with the wisps of smoke and fire extinguisher exhaust that were still drifting around. Alison hissed a demure little oath and began the process of working her legs out from under the table.
“The summons is issued!” announced Diablerie, his voice carrying easily throughout the room. “Let they who invoketh the name of the Department of Extradimensional Affairs behold the form of Diablerie!”
It was one of his better entrances. He timed the flash and the burst of glitter perfectly to cast his body into silhouette just as the smoke had died down enough to reveal it. It was slightly spoiled when, as the smoke was fully clearing, Terence ran up and blasted Diablerie’s shins with the fire extinguisher, leaving a white powdery residue on his black silk trousers.
“Sorry,” said Terence, running back. “Panicked.”
“Who are you?” demanded the girl in the red beret.
Diablerie pulled his signature move: gathering up his cloak and flinging it around himself, covering all of his face but his eyes. “You are addressing none but Doctor Diablerie! Known by mortal agencies as the Department of Extradimensional Affairs Officer of Skepticism!”
There was another of those tense silences that are defined by the thing that breaks them. In this case, it was the man in dreadlocks peering out from behind his phone camera to simply say, “Bollocks you are.”
“I am!”
“Erm, he is,” called Alison, still picking her way through the chairs and tables to the stage. “Sorry, sorry, excuse me, sorry. We are from the Department. I’ve got our IDs here.” She was holding out the laminated identity cards for both herself and Diablerie, the new ones with the purple stripes. Diablerie never kept his own on him, because a self-styled “man of mystery” carrying an ID card was completely off message.
The activist girl squinted as she read the cards. “Oh. Okay then.” She uncertainly moved into the kind of stance that one associates with the phrase “officers, arrest those men” but then came out of it and inspected the cards again. “Wait a minute. Alison Arkin?”
“Yes?”
“Arkin the Mind-Taker?”
Alison sagged. Danvers had reassured her some time ago that the media would move on to the next scandal and it was only a matter of time before everyone forgot about how she had used a magic-cancellation ritual on a dual-consciousness person and reduced them to a drooling vegetable, and she’d made the mistake of believing him. “That was an accident.”
“So we’re now seeing exactly who your kindly government thinks is appropriate to send after harmful X-ism,” said the girl to her cameraman, pointing a finger into Alison’s face. “The mind eraser from the news and”—she waved a hand at Diablerie and let her jaw flap for a moment as she sought the words—“and him. We’ve found an actual breach of the X-Appropriation Act that everyone witnessed, and the people want to know if you’re going to do anything about it?”
“Er, yes, of course,” said Alison.
“Well?!”
Alison looked back and forth, feeling pressured. With Diablerie and Abdul on one side of the stage and the activists on the other, they rather looked as if they were squaring off for a volleyball match, in which Alison had just volunteered to be the ball. “We . . . we can probably arrest him,” she hazarded, looking to Diablerie for support. “Can’t we?”
She had to do a double take, as Diablerie was staring at the floor with an expression of wonder on his face. He took a moment to process Alison’s words, then turned his widened eyes to her.
Then he began to laugh. It began with a breathy “Hm, hm, hmm” and quickly expanded along with his mouth to become a hearty cackle that would not have been out of place being delivered over a stitched-together corpse on a laboratory slab. “I’m afraid we must disappoint, girl,” he announced, eyes twinkling. “We have no power here.”
Alison frowned, then stared down at the stage. Diablerie tapped his foot to indicate where she should be looking.
It was the circle that Abdul had used to create his ring of fire. It wasn’t a gas pipe or anything like that. It was a simple loop of plastic tape, upon which was inscribed a repeating pattern of hand-drawn black symbols.
“It’s . . . a rune circle,” she realized aloud.
“Rune magic!” said Diablerie, laughing anew. “Skepticism is confounded this day!”
“What the hell’s going on?!” demanded the girl in the red beret. “What does that mean?”
“Um.” Alison turned, feeling like a volleyball again and sensing a vicious spike in the near future. “He’s a runecrafter. He used rune magic to make the fire appear. So we can’t arrest him for magic appropriation because he’s using actual magic.”
