Story: Smoke and Mirrors

After the main show—the sleight of hand and the misdirection and the card gimmicks—that was when the real show started.

That was when he went from scruffy street-rat magician to something I wasn’t sure I had words for.

It was starting to get dark out, sky edging to dusky grey, street lights buzzing to life around us. But one complicated little card trick later, the lights started flickering erratically.

And then they all went out at once.

Misdirection.

Because in the seconds it took the audience to glance up at the streetlights and then back at him, he was gone.

*** 

He had a different name in every area we passed through.

In California, it was Malachai. Orion in New York City. Santiago in Vegas. In Florida, where I’d found him, his name had been Crispin—but after I’d followed all his shows for weeks and weeks and he’d finally caved and said I could be his assistant, he’d told me to call him Kohl.

I had been for three months now, but for all I knew, it was as fake as all the others.

After he’d pulled his streetlight trick and disappeared, I hung around to wait out the rest of the audience, zipping up my jacket against the chill. Even once everybody realized his disappearance hadn’t been just another trick and that the show really was over, they milled around for a while, discussing their favorite tricks, trying to figure out what had or hadn’t been real. Wondering who this guy was and where he came from.

In a way, wondering who he was seemed a lot like another version of asking what what had or hadn’t been real, but I never said so.

Once everyone else had left, it was just me and a lady in her mid-thirties. She kept glancing around and adjusting the sleeves of her sweater, the straps of her purse, running her hands through her red hair. After a few minutes, she hesitated, then approached me.

“Excuse me,” she said, gripping her purse strap tighter. “Are you...Nicole?”

“Nico,” I said reflexively, because no matter how long she’d been gone, Nicole would always be my mom, not me. “Anyway, who’s asking?”

She almost answered, then pursed her lips instead. “I’d rather not say,” she admitted. “But I was told you could take me to see Killian.”

Killian. So that was what he called himself here.

“You just saw him,” I said.

“I mean the real Killian,” she said, which was kind of a joke in itself. I started to say as much, but then she reached into her purse and took out a wad of cash. “Please. I need his help.”

I stared at her for a minute. Kohl didn’t need an assistant, not in the traditional sense—so this was what I was for. Weeding out the good from the bad. But she just stood there quietly, even though she couldn’t have appreciated answering to an eighteen-year-old girl who looked almost fifteen, and she seemed decent enough.

“Okay, then,” I said, rising. “Come on.”

I led her around a Chinese restaurant and a tiny used bookstore, to a narrow alley out back. Kohl was leaned against a building a few feet away, watching moths flutter around the single streetlight.

“Hey,” I called. “Killian.”

He turned. Away from the lights, away from the crowds and his tricks and the applause, his smirking charm was gone. It left him looking hollowed-out, wasted. Like the Grim Reaper had pulled back his hood to reveal a nineteen-year-old kid. His brown curls looked black, his skin so pale it was almost blue-tinted, like skim milk.

“Someone here to see you,” I said.

He glanced over at me, dark eyes impossible to read, and then at the lady. After a second, he cast one last look at the moths and stood, brushing himself off.

“Okay, then,” he said. “Let’s do this.”

*** 

Kohl went around to the front of the tiny bookstore and did something—God knew what—to take out the security system. Then, when he’d texted me the okay, I broke us in through the back of the store, and we met him in the tall, narrow storeroom that led to the exit.

There weren’t any windows here, so I used the flash on my phone to find the overhead light. It was flickery and anemic, and in it, Kohl looked halfway dead.

The lady, maybe because she’d noticed it too, hesitated in the doorway. But Kohl sat and pushed up the sleeves of his sweatshirt, waving her forward. “What’s your daughter’s name?”

She took a few steps towards him. “Melissa.”

“And how’d she die?”

This was the hard part. The part that decided whether a person was going to go through with this or practically trip over themselves backing out. But Melissa’s mom lifted a hand to her trembling chin and whispered, “Drowned.”

He gave her a long, level look. “Then this won’t be pretty.”

“I don’t care,” she said, coming to kneel across from him. “I just need to say goodbye.”

He held out one pale hand, and she took it.

In the back-alleys of Brooklyn, they said that once upon a time, Orion had died too. San Diego said Malachai had gotten sick as a little boy; Los Angeles whispered that he’d been killed. Vegas was sure Santiago had made everything up and never died at all.

I guess none of that really mattered. In Florida, where I was from, the stories called him the moth prince, said he could bring back the dead. A street-level necromancer, half-dead himself.

“She’ll only be back for a few minutes,” Kohl warned. “Then I have to send her back.”

The mother nodded, mouth set but eyes terrified, like she wasn’t sure what she was looking at, but it wasn’t a boy.

But whenever Kohl dropped the cons and the showmanship and brought our dead back to us, I always understood all over again.

This was who he was.

Author's Note: This week, my story was based on an Egyptian myth called "The King of the Dead," about the god Osiris, who was wrongfully killed by his evil brother. Eventually, some of the other gods succeeded in finding his body and bringing him back to life, and he became Judge and King of the Dead. I liked the idea of someone being raised from the dead and then having power over the other dead after that, though I didn't have room to really get into the raised-from-the-dead backstory here. Instead, I took the necromancy powers and gave them to a street-rat magician to see what he'd do with them.

Bibliography: "King of the Dead," from Egyptian Myth and Legend by Donald Mackenzie. Source: Mythology and Folklore UN-Textbook.

Image Credit: "The flickr of the moth" by Steve Jurvetson. Source: Flickr.