Magic Mansion (45 page)

Was there?

“And they’re off!” Monty called out…and John reminded himself to struggle.

His upper arm would loop over his head without a problem. Then it would be a matter of slipping his arms out of the sleeves and threading them through the jacket’s lower opening. He rocked forward and back, struggling, making a show of the restraint. Sand sifted down from above in a steady stream. The dry, rasping noise it made as it hit the padded hourglass floor was shockingly loud.

“Ricardo the Magnificent slips his arm over his head,” Monty said. “Jia Lee right behind him.”

John continued to struggle. Sand pinged off his elbows and sprayed the glass walls. “Kevin Kazan almost has an arm free.” John was willing to put forth a few extra seconds of theatrical struggling, but he didn’t want to fall into last place this early in the challenge. Hopefully the struggling he’d done was enough for Ken. He forced his arm over his head, and then disentangled it from his other arm, freed himself from the sleeves and reached for the buckle between his legs. “And Professor Topaz breaks loose from master escape artist Ken Barron’s straitjacket.”

Not quite yet, but almost. He worked open the buckle that held the strap threaded between his legs, and the whole straitjacket fell to the floor. John hung for a moment to gather himself, but only a moment—and then he heaved his body up toward the gravity boots. He grasped himself behind the knee, which would leave his other hand free to tear the hook-and-loop straps open—and a stream of sand hit him in the face, startling him. Was that a key that had pinged off his goggles? He couldn’t tell.

“Ricardo is right-side up. Jia Lee is struggling with her boots—as is Professor Topaz. Kevin Kazan is still working on getting his arms out of those sleeves but he’s wrapped up tight.”

John wasn’t struggling, actually. He was planning where to grab on to the gravity boots when he swung down. While it was a strain to jackknife himself long enough to undo the second gravity boot cuff, he hardly felt it. Everything else paled in comparison to the sheer adrenaline coursing through him. A final tug, a rip, and— “Professor Topaz rights himself. Jia Lee still upside down, Kevin Kazan still in his straitjacket!”

John’s feet hit the hourglass floor with a padded
whumpf
. The dense stunt foam wasn’t easy to stand on, but it was no worse than a surfboard. Plus, he was sure anyone who fell on it would be grateful for the padding. Sand hit the top of his helmet, disorienting him, and the monitor near his ear went crackly.
 

“
bzzt
—Kazan, really struggling—
jshht
”

How long had John been upside down? Not long, less than a few minutes. He got his bearings, found the door, then located the locks. Four. One on each side, keeping the plexi panel in place. All he needed was a key. He dropped to his knees and began searching. And as naturally as someone might flick on a light to allow themselves a better look, he very nearly reached out with his True magic…but then he stopped himself.

He was already ahead of everyone but Ricardo, and in every other challenge when he’d given in to the heat of the moment, he’d soon regretted his impulsiveness. It would be greedy to tempt fate. Greedy, and foolish.

And so, instead, he simply dug.

Sand had accumulated on the floor, several inches deep now. It pounded the back of John’s helmet like an unrelenting downpour. It sifted down the back of his shirt, and jammed itself beneath his fingernails as he dug. He ignored it all, and put all his focus into his fingertips as he swept through it, fanning his arms out in wide arcs, covering the area in which he thought a key might have landed…if it had, indeed bounced off his head as he hung upside-down. Which he couldn’t even say for sure was the case.
 

“
crackle
—Lee is down…and what’s she doing?—
bzz
”

Was that a key? Or that? Or that? A pebble. A twig. John combed his fingers through the rough sand, searching. It felt unnatural to restrain himself from reaching out with the Truth, like writing with his left hand. Which made John wonder, if only briefly, how often did he actually call upon it? Nearly as much as all his other senses, it seemed, now that he was forcing himself not to.

What about Ricardo? Would he even bother holding back?

John looked up and found Ricardo standing, stretched the length of his hourglass enclosure, with his fingers hooked into one of the holes where the sand sifted through. He dug at it, encouraging it to pour through faster. And if the piles at his feet were anything to go by, his method was working. Though whether he was using any talent beyond ingenuity and determination was anyone’s guess.

“
bzz
—no key, and Kevin Kazan looks like he’s in trouble—
zzt
”

Trouble.

The single word, fuzzy and distorted as it was, rang through John’s consciousness as resonant and foreboding as a gong.
 

LAPD—hello? Sir, is this the residence of Casey Cornish? And your relationship to him? I see. Trouble? Well, there’s been an accident at the post office. You might want to sit down.

John turned on his knee, away from Ricardo (who was obviously fine), to face Kevin instead.

Kevin was still strapped into his gravity boots, rocking wildly. The long arms of the straitjacket flailed, buckles rapping against the plexi sides of the hourglass as they struck it. Kevin had the abdominal strength to pull himself up and release himself from the boots, no doubt. He’d constantly bragged about how many crunches and pull-ups and whatnot he’d done that morning. But now it seemed as if he wasn’t even able to get his hands free. He just hung there, flailing, like a butterfly trapped in its own cocoon, batting at his face with his canvas-covered hands.

A seizure? A panic attack? John hesitated from reaching out, from seeing…but only briefly. Because in his gut, and in his heart, and deep within his marrow, he knew—something was wrong. Ducking out from the steady stream of sand, pressing himself up against the side of the plexi enclosure, he focused entirely on Kevin Kazan, and he sent forth the faintest tendril of his True magic, and touched it to the struggling magician.

As if Kevin’s Truth could amplify John’s, the two seized upon one another, doubling, tripling, building upon one another like feedback. John’s chest constricted. His stomach clenched. His heart raced. But mostly…his eyes burned. Not both of them. Just one.

It was more than just a burn. A burn would have been a relief compared to the sensation he was experiencing. It felt more like someone had shoved a red-hot poker into his eye socket.

John brushed Kevin’s True magic away from his own, regretfully, as he might shed a clingy fan, and he attempted to pull back enough to gain some perspective on what was happening.

“
gzzt
—stops digging to see what’s going on with Kevin—
crackle
”

Every time John attempted to touch on Kevin—his face, his eye, any part of his body—Kevin’s True magic threatened to suck his awareness back in, to attempt to ameliorate its agony by forcing John to shoulder some of the pain and panic. There was no reasoning with it—the Truth was not exactly sentient. And then it occurred to John to check in with something that was just as close to the problem as Kevin’s physical body, without being part of that body itself.

His contact lens.

John narrowed his True awareness down to a pinpoint focus, and he searched.

And he found it.

What’s happening?
He conveyed.
What’s wrong?

Sharp. Burns. Help.

Although in the lens’ impression the source of the problem was huge, John immediately knew it for what it was: a single grain of sand. How it had forced its way past the helmet and the goggles was anyone’s guess. Perhaps in the same way the silver sedan had found itself up on the sidewalk by the post office when its front axle snapped.

“
bzz
—the Magnificent finds a key—oh, he drops it!—
clatter-pop
”

Kevin jerked hard now, swinging his whole body until his helmet rapped against the side of the hourglass, but it wasn’t the special “get me out of here” nod. It was something more desperate and primal. Maybe it was even enough to free him from the gravity boots, to get him right-side up, so he could at least focus on freeing his hands. John looked up at Kevin’s gravity boots to gauge how close they were to coming undone, and saw, instead, a bracket in the hourglass that was working itself loose. The screws and bolts that held the plexi panels should have been sturdy enough to hold a magician and a few hundred pounds of sand, but evidently they were not enough to resist the torque of a two-hundred-pound man flinging his body with all possible force and momentum from a point of contact only a few inches square.

An L-bracket held the center divider disc from which Kevin dangled in place. Not only was the divider disc holding up Kevin—it was containing all that sand. John looked at the weakened bracket, and then looked harder, with his Truth, and he knew exactly how it would unfold.

“
gzzt
—finds the key again, but Jia’s in the lea—
brrt
”

The divider plate would snap loose and Kevin would fall, the sand surging down all at once on top of him. He wouldn’t fall well—in fact, he might even black out, despite the padded floor. The respirator would stay in place. But covered in sand, it would cease to function. And without the use of his hands, even if he did regain consciousness, Kevin would have no way of getting that respirator off.

“—making short work of those locks—
bzz
”

“Would you shut up for a second so I can think?” John barked out, and Monty’s crackly commentary paused.

And then John remembered…he was miked.

“Kevin’s in trouble,” he said. “Get the stunt techs—get the medics. His rig is coming apart.”

Iain’s voice came through the monitor, much louder than Monty’s. “Kevin, hang tight, we’re getting you out. Ricardo, Professor…keep going. One of you needs to grab second place.”

John swung around and saw Ricardo crouched in the sand, watching him through the respirator, helmet and goggles. Ricardo stared for a moment, then started digging, hard.

John checked Kevin again. The stunt coordinator was already at Kevin’s hourglass, removing an emergency panel. Kevin had stopped struggling. John looked up at the bracket. It was bent. But it would hold.

Just as he noticed that, something hard and loud pinged off the top of his helmet, bounced, and clacked off the plexi wall.

A key.

“And Ricardo recovers his key!” The rap on the helmet must have realigned whatever wiring had shorted out, because now Monty’s voice was crystal clear. John dove for his own key. “And the Professor’s found something too. He picks it up just as Ricardo fits his key into the first lock, while Kevin Kazan is out with an injury. He forfeits his chance at the prize.”

John pulled his key from the sand, and the knowledge that Kevin was now safe steadied his hand. He thrust the key into the first lock on the first try, and it slid home smoothly, and turned. The second lock was the same. John didn’t spare a glance for Ricardo. If he was to have any chance of being the next magician to finish, he needed all of his focus for the task. One more lock to go, and….

“Ricardo the Magnificent is free, Professor Topaz right on his heels. Well done, magicians! We’ll find out what our judges make of Jia Lee’s unconventional strategy, and hear the final scores…after this commercial break.”

“Everyone take five,” Iain called through his bullhorn, then headed over to check on Kevin. The stunt tech peeled off John’s sweaty helmet and relieved him of his goggles and respirator. Another tech did the same for Ricardo.

“Why are they talking to judges?” Ricardo asked his tech.
 

John looked over to Jia, who stood at the far end of the lawn with her hair now hanging loose in sweaty hanks, hands on hips, scowling. “We were not specifically told how to open the locks,” she insisted to no one in particular. “The exact words were that the key fit all four locks, and that the first magician to open the door and step onto the platform would win. That’s all. Nothing about being required to use the key.”

“She picked the locks,” Ricardo said with a dazed smile, shaking his head. “Hairpins.”

He stepped over to John and stood close at his side, not touching, but almost. There was sand in his hair. John brushed a few loose grains off his sweaty cheek from a spot that neither the goggles nor the respirator had covered. “If the judges disqualify her,” John said, “you know what that means.”
 

Ricardo searched John’s eyes. “You don’t sound very happy about it—or are you just worried that I’ll be crushed if I get my hopes up and then Jia wins?”

Maybe it was best to agree. The last thing John wanted to do was sour Ricardo’s potential victory. “As far as I’m concerned, you are the winner.”

Marlene crossed the lawn and told them, “We’re checking with the legal department and running through the tapes. It’ll take a few more minutes. Come sit down, we’ll have the stylists touch you up. There’s plenty of shots of you under the scaffolding anyway…and the way things have been going, I wouldn’t be surprised if it collapsed on the bunch of you.”

Might John have performed better if it weren’t for Kevin’s predicament? Possibly. He swore there was another key that had sifted through the opening while he was still upside down, and maybe he would have found it if he’d tried harder, even without his True magic. Nothing to be done for it now, he supposed. He’d allowed himself to be distracted, and now it was time to see what his distraction would cost him.

The lighting director selected a spot to film the final segment against the side of the mansion where the landscaping looked a bit haggard, and the greensman’s assistant hurried to snip off brown fronds from the palms and pick shreds of plastic shopping bags from the bushes. When one of the crew bent back the undergrowth, sun glinted off a pane of glass, and John realized…that glass was the window to his room. The room he shared with Ricardo. And suddenly the afternoon seemed incredibly surreal.