Since I was a kid, my dream was always to be a magician. I grew up watching David Copperfield specials and reading books about Houdini, but I also devoured fantasy and horror books dealing with their versions of real magic. Like lots of children, I got a little magic kit for Christmas one year, full of sponge balls, a wand that would push out silk flowers, and a small stuffed rabbit that would hide in the inner pocket of a small, collapsible polyester top hat. Unlike most children, I stuck with it, and any family vacation led me to begin meticulous research of any magic shops on the route, followed by a campaign of whining and extra diligence in my chores to ensure I got the necessary detours to pick up some new book or item.
Even at 35, I still truly love magic. Believe in magic. Want to hone my craft as a stage magician, which has been my trade for the past few years, and still hold out some dim hope in the deepest recesses of my heart that one day, just maybe, I’ll see real magic instead of the illusions I perform. But I know that’s not realistic or likely, so I practice stage magic in its place. Pick up new tricks where I can by working as back-ups and assistants to more well-known and experienced illusionists. And that’s how I got here. Holding a noose out for this fat, drunk fuck known on stage as the Great Sadir.
It’s very much up to debate if the Great Sadir was ever actually great. From what I hear, he was never very original or talented, but early in his career he had a whole Indian mystic theme going that was unique enough to draw in decent crowds. Then he got bit by a snake, spent a week in the hospital due to infection, and after that he apparently pretty much said “fuck it.” Good-bye cool turban with mysterious sitars playing in the background, hello cliché top hat and weird 80s synth music blaring like A-Ha and Depeche Mode on a slow train to hell.
When I got to him, he was a bad alcoholic and a worse stage performer, but the tragic thing was that he did have a lot of knowledge and some talent. I saw an opportunity to learn, so I joined up with him. And he has taught me a few things, though he doled them out with agonizing slowness to ensure my continued indentured servitude.
But fuck me. I think I’ve learned all I can and I’m at my limit. He is half in the bag already, and it’s the early show. When I finally cinch the fake noose around his fat neck, I find myself wishing he didn’t have the harness.
Afterward, I hit the alley behind the lounge we’re playing at full speed, still trying to decide if I’m going to get dinner or to pack my shit and head out. That’s when Johnny Quick comes up to me. If you don’t follow magicians closely, or didn’t a few years back, you probably don’t know who Johnny Quick even is. But there was a time where he was a BFD in certain magician’s circles. He was never flashy and he never played big venues, but he always had money and he could do tricks that other magicians couldn’t spot. People just chalked it up to how fast and nimble his hands were, which was where his name came from. It stuck, and he started using it as his stage name until he suddenly fell off the map a couple of years ago.
I knew all this because I’m obsessed with magicians, not because I’ve ever met him. And meeting him, dirty alley or no, was a huge deal for me. After a moment of stunned, idiotic silence, I stepped forward and shook his hand. I was about to launch into some embarrassing gushing about how awesome he was, when he beat me to it.
“Hey, I’m Johnny. Your name is Keith, right?”
I nodded, beaming like the girl with the bedazzled head gear who just got asked to prom.
“I saw your show. Christ, Sadir really is shit, huh?”
I laughed. “You have no idea.”
He grinned. “Well, your stuff was good. Especially your close-up work with that woman from the audience.” I felt myself flushing at the compliment, but he was already moving on. “Good, but not as good as it could be. I can help you get better. Way better.”
I felt light-headed. Was this some kind of prank? “Um, really? You’d do that?” He nodded, and I went on. “Well, sure. That’d be awesome. What did you have in mind?”
He glanced up and down the alley with a theatricality only a magician can muster before leaning in towards me. “How would you like to learn real magic?”
Over the next week, Johnny taught me what he knew. And what he knew, surprisingly enough, was actual real magic. Specifically two tricks. He could make things appear and make things disappear. At first I thought it had to be an illusion, of course. But over time, as he showed me how to increase my speed, the proper angles to hold my hands, the images and words I had to hold in my head depending on the object I was working with, I realized it was real. It was actual fucking magic.
The funny thing is once you know how to do it, it’s easy. It really just feels like a natural extension of normal ledgerdemain aka slight of hand. But instead of palming an object or pulling it from a hidden pocket, you were literally pulling it out of thin air. Within some limits, you could pull any object you could clearly imagine into the world and you could make most objects you could lay your hand on disappear.
I asked Johnny how he had learned how to do it, and he was always vague, but after I had it down, he told me a bit more. He said he had used to run with a “pretty eclectic crowd”. Magicians tend to draw some odd birds from time to time. He had a buddy that was in some kind of secret society or cult supposedly, and whatever bullshit that might have been, he had apparently picked up some real power along the way. He wouldn’t tell Johnny much, but he did teach him how to make things appear and disappear.
Johnny said the guy had told him that you weren’t really conjuring new objects or destroying old ones. You were just pulling them from or sending them to a different plane of existence he called the Nightlands. He never told Johnny more about the place, but he did say there were rules to using that kind of magic.
First, if you make something disappear, you need to make it or something of “similar value” reappear within an hour. Second, if you make something new appear, you needed to make it or something else of “similar value” disappear within an hour. When I asked what he meant by “similar value”, Johnny shrugged. Best he could tell, it didn’t have anything to do with the size of the thing or how much money it was worth. He said you got a feel for what was needed over time, but when in doubt, just keep your mind blank when you were doing the balance and the trick would bring or send something that was appropriate on its own.
That’s what he called it. Doing the balance. He said that you always had to do the balance or it created problems. When I asked what kind of problems, he looked at me for a long time.
“Let’s say you pull a coin and you just say fuck it, I’m not doing the balance. Well, a few hours later, your car keys might disappear. Or your cat. Now let’s say you make something disappear once or twice without doing the balance. Maybe you find a random shoe that doesn’t belong in your house sitting in the middle of your living room. Or a tree. Or something that looks like a spider mated with a mole rat. These are all real examples I’m giving you from times I decided to test the limits of not doing the balance. It’s a bad fucking idea.”
“Okay, got it. Always do the balance.”
He nodded. “Exactly. Which brings me to my next point. I need your help.”
Two hours later we were standing on the stage of the Burnt Rabbit, a industrial music club that had become some kind of neo-goth grotesquerie before finally going bankrupt a few months earlier. Unbeknownst to me, when it was still open, the Burnt Rabbit used to host underground magic competitions. Most of it was more shock magic and body horror spectacles, but occasionally you would get a real artist like Johnny to show up as well.
Unfortunately, Johnny, who through the smart use of his magic and diligent doing of the balance had amassed a small fortune, had also amassed a large heroin addiction. When he showed up the night of the magic competition with Juliette, his girlfriend/assistant of the month in tow, he was high as a fucking kite.
But that didn’t stop him. He leapt up on stage to thunderous applause and screams, going through a series of small tricks with such ferocity and speed that the crowd continued cheering like it was a rock show. This only encouraged him, of course, so he decided to up the ante.
Swaying on his feet, he swirled his hands around and then tapped Juliette on the head. She popped out of existence like an overripe soap bubble. The crowd fell deathly silent, and then they began to roar. He turned to face them, his arms raised in triumph. The plan was he would pump the audience up for a few seconds and then bring her back. Instead, as he started to yell out to the people packed into the small club, he distantly felt himself stumble and then fall.
When he woke up, it was two days later and he was in a hospital room. He learned he had almost died of a heroin overdose. Police had asked him a few questions about Juliette, but given that nearly a hundred people had seen him collapse and be put in an ambulance, there was no real suspicion he had anything to do with her disappearance.
I asked him if he tried to bring her back and he lowered his eyes. “I…no. I didn’t. I’m a piece of shit, and I know it, but I felt sure there was no point. We had done it before, see. Twice before I had disappeared her and brought her back a few seconds later. The place she went…she said she could breathe there, but the air was bitterly cold and stale, and everything was dark except for lights far away in the distance. The first time she handled it okay, but the second time she had come back terrified, saying she’d never do it again.”
I shifted uncomfortably. “Did she say why she was so scared?”
He glanced up at me, his face drawn. “She said she heard things in the dark. She wouldn’t say what, she just kept saying “I could hear them in the dark, Johnny. Bad things. And I think they were reaching for me.” His face crumpled. “Shit, how the fuck could I have left her there? I figured she would be dead after two days, that’s what I told myself at least, but who knows? I left her there to die because I’m a coward and I didn’t want to deal with the consequences.”
His eyes were red-rimmed and fiery as he went on. “Well I’m dealing with them now. I didn’t do the balance on this. I can’t. I’ve tried sending different things over, but nothing works. And I think the magic has sent something over to balance it for me.”
“What do you mean, ‘sent something over’?”
He scrubbed his hand through his hair. “Just what it sounds like. Something has been stalking me the last few weeks. I get glimpses of it sometimes, and I don’t know what it’s waiting for, but I think maybe it’s just playing with me. From what little I’ve seen, it’s not something I want to play with.” He gestured around at the stage. “I came back here the night before I met you and tried to bring her back, tried to do the balance. It sometimes works better in the same spot if you’re trying to bring back or send the same thing, so I thought it was my best shot. But I couldn’t get it to work. I don’t know if it’s because of how much time has passed, or what the problem is, but I couldn’t pull her back.”
I was going to ask why not when I heard thunder coming from outside.
“Oh, shit fuck. That’s it. It’s here.” His eyes were stretched wide with fear. “You have to help me. We have to try again. I think if we both do it together, we can pull her back through.”
BOOM
He looked across the darkness of the club to the far end, where I could barely make out large double doors jumping inward from some massive impact outside. If not for the chains run through the handles, they would have burst open already.
“Okay, okay. Fuck. Let’s try.”
BOOM
He nodded and hurriedly we got into position. Johnny had never showed me how to pull something with another person, and I wasn’t sure he knew how either, but after a couple of false starts I felt it starting to work.
BOOM and then a metallic wrenching sound as the doors finally gave way. I glanced up to see a large silhouette framed in the dim light filtering in from the lobby windows. I couldn’t see much, but it was enough to know I was giving this five more seconds and then I was gone.
I turned back to the task at hand and felt something give, our combined efforts finally synchronizing to pull the poor girl back.
Her body thudded to the floor like a carcass on a butcher’s floor, and I felt my gorge rising at my first glimpse of her. I remembered the thing approaching us and looked back up, but it was nowhere to be seen. It seemed like bringing her back had done the trick, and I felt a surge of relief mingling with my fear and disgust.
Johnny was on his knees beside her, weeping. He reached out as though to cradle her head, but half of it was gone, along with a good portion of her left side. It looked like it had been torn away by something large. As for what was left, her flesh was torn and cracked in various spots, patches of her skin various shades of light blue veined with bruises and lines of black. I saw something gleaming on the patch of shirt that was left to partially cover her remaining breast and I felt my anger building when I saw what it was. It was a cheap little brass pin that showed a lightning bolt with three stars around it, and in the center it said “Johnny Quick, Master Magician”.
I took a couple of steps back. “You’re a fucking asshole.”
Johnny said nothing. He just kept crying, his thin hands, usually so supernaturally sure and fast, fluttering back and forth over her ruined body like troubled birds looking for a place to light. I wanted to feel sorry for him, but I didn’t. I wanted to thank him for what he taught me, but I wasn’t sure it was much of a gift.
That was all six months ago. I have my own stage show now, and I’m doing really well. At first I swore I would never use what Johnny taught me. I told myself it was tainted, and far too dangerous. But then I had a really bad set. The crowd hated me, and a group of drunk college kids were down front heckling. I just needed to shut them up.
So I pulled a sword out of thin air. Then I pulled a suit of armor to go with it. I sent it back--got to do the balance--but the roar of that audience had told me what I already suspected. The next night, the audience was twice as large, and by the end of the week my shows were sold out.
Everyone has their addictions. And I’ve found mine. I can’t stop using it, and I’m trying to do the balance, but sometimes I’m not sure what that even means. Just because I can use magic doesn’t mean I understand it, and just because I try to balance things doesn’t mean I really know the price to be paid.
I heard last week that Johnny was found outside his condo, his head caved in and his chest ripped apart. They have no suspects of course.
I keep telling myself that he was self-destructive. That he probably couldn’t live with what he had done to that girl, so he brought something over or didn’t balance again just so he could die. And maybe that is what happened.
Or maybe I’m standing at the edge of a black pit, pretending I know something that is unknowable. And as I look down into that darkness, reaching out my hand to touch that wonderful magic, something is crawling up to meet me and take my hand in kind.
I have to go. There’s a knock at the door.
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