A Touch of Magic
18 Showtime!
21 September 1974, The Showbox, Minneapolis
“I SEE YOU HAVE a salt shaker on your table, sir. May I borrow it?” The man in the front row handed the salt shaker up to Paris on stage. Paris removed the cap from the shaker. “I think salt is an amazing thing. They say we need salt to live, but where does it go?” Paris made a fist of his left hand and poured the contents of the salt shaker into it before setting the empty container on his table. “We put it into our bodies, but what happens to it then?” He held up both hands empty and then made two fists from which he poured the salt back and forth, each time showing that his hands were empty. He made a production of thinking he’d emptied his hand and then having more to pour into it. It was a good warmup for the second act and finally he approached the empty shaker at his table and began pouring salt into it. He filled the shaker to overflowing with salt that came from his apparently empty hand. Finally, he brushed the excess off the top of the shaker, recapped it, and handed it back to the man at the first table. The guy poured out a little and tasted it.
Serepte, Judith, and Lil were laughing at the side of the stage when Paul glanced toward them. He smiled, knowing they were enjoying the show even from this odd angle.
Paris brushed the salt remaining on his table into a pile and pulled a scarf from his pocket. He showed both sides of the scarf and then let it settle over the pile of salt. There wasn’t as much patter to the performance now as the lights narrowed over the table. As Paris held his hands above the scarf, it began to wiggle. Soon Alex, his rabbit, poked his nose out from under the scarf. The audience always had a special reaction to animals that Paris had learned to enjoy. He lifted the scarf off the rabbit.
“All from a pile of salt,” Paris said. “I used to do this trick with beans, but my mother insisted I would never amount to a hill of beans, so I switched to salt. Now Alex here needs a better stage to perform on. Something with a curtain. He probably wants a girlfriend watching him from the wings, too,” Paris wiggled his eyebrows and glanced over at Serepte. “Now what would turn this little table into a theater for a bunny? I know! Curtains!”
Paris gripped the scarf in his left fist with the tail trailing down. Forcing two fingers into the fist, he tugged and began drawing the scarf through his hand. The tail hanging down appeared from his fist, but when it emerged as a full scarf, another scarf was tied to it. Paris continued to pull scarves from his hand until they were piled on the table around Alex.
“What do you think, Alex? We have curtains but they need to be hung.” Paris held his hands above the table and the scarves began to move and dance. As the audience applauded, the scarves formed themselves into a little theater around the rabbit. Paris looked up from the miniature stage to see the audience reaction. His own was quickly muted. A mirror behind the bar reflected his image on stage. He had never noticed a mirror staring back at him before this moment. And not at one of him, but at a dozen. Each panel of the bar mirror reflected a new image of himself as if each had been focused directly on his line of sight. As he hurriedly moved to catch an escaping Alex, much to the audience’s delight, a dozen of himself moved at the same time—facing him moving with him, catching him off guard.
Paris felt the first tickling of a headache as the light from the mirrors hit his eyes.
The rabbit settled back on the table and Paris pulled the corner of one of the scarves. The others all collapsed in place. Showing both sides of the one scarf in his hand, Paris let it gently settle over the rabbit until it lay flat on the table. Paris lifted the scarf and showed it to the audience. A black image of a rabbit on the white scarf brought applause from the audience. Paris flipped the scarf around and showed a white image of a dove against a black scarf. He shook the scarf and out flew Sandra, his dove. The audience applauded and Paris looked up at them again.
A dozen doves flew in circles in front of him. They were hypnotic. For an instant, Paris could not distinguish his dove from the flying reflections in the bar mirror. A dozen plus one dove circled the room and swept in to grab a corner of the scarf lying on the table. All the scarves followed the dove like the tail of a great kite as Sandra swept around the room, her flight dizzyingly duplicated by the dozen reflections. He wondered if all the doves would land on his shoulders, or if the reflected magicians would recapture their own.
“Come on, Sandra,” he whispered, and felt the light touch of the dove on his shoulder as the other twelve lit comfortably on the shoulders of the other dozen magicians. In the reflection, Paris had seen the head of his dove poke up out of his breast pocket just before he shook the scarf as her cue. He would have to work on the timing of this act before he performed again. He took some satisfaction in the fact that all twelve other magicians facing him had made the same mistake.
They’re not real. It’s just a mirror. Why does it make my head hurt?
He had to break the hypnotic effect the mirror was having on him and the best way to do that would be to return to an audience interaction trick. He quickly flashed half a dozen oversized cards at the audience as Sandra disappeared from his shoulder and the scarves dropped to the floor. Seventy-two cards flashed in the mirrors in front of him. He showed an identical set of cards in his other hand, flipping them to show front and back. One deck had a red back and one a blue back.
He kept explaining why he was using such a simple deck and how the audience was only seeing an illusion, but his mind was elsewhere as his mouth worked on. His eye had strayed to the reflections once more and he was momentarily blinded by the light. Wayne must have turned something on by mistake. The lights seemed to come from the stage behind him and were reflected into his eyes. He didn’t dare to turn away to look, but willed Wayne to cut the offending lights. Nothing happened. He needed to get rid of those lights.
The audience seemed to be entranced as he selected a volunteer for the trick. But one person seemed not to be paying attention. He sat at the bar with his back to the stage, his shoulder hunched forward as he focused on his drink or something in front of him. Before all his senses had caught up with what he was seeing, Paris realized the man was watching the show—watching the twelve mirrored magicians performing in synchronization. The light Paris saw flashing behind him in the mirrors—it was the man’s eyes. They, too, were broken down and reflected, multiplied by the twelve panels, staring at him from behind the bar. Each of the two dozen eyes watched as if independent from the others.
He shook the vision from his eyes and felt as if his brain had struck the inside of his skull. Pain lanced up from the base of his neck and nearly blinded him. He fought to focus on the cards. The audience had seen the card she selected from the deck was the jack of diamonds. She placed it in the rack facing away from the audience. Everything was in place. The audience laughed as Paris showed the audience that the pack contained only jacks of diamonds. They were certain the assistant would be tricked into believing he had guessed the right card. But Paris had a different trick in mind.
“Now would you please tell the audience what card you have chosen?”
“The two of spades,” she answered. Paris acted put upon and quickly ran through the cards remaining in his hand.
“Seriously? I’m supposed to be the only one who makes jokes in this show. Please tell me the card you really selected.” She looked at the card again.
“The two of spades.”
“You’ll have to prove that.” Paris had an uneasy feeling. The trick was taking too long. He could feel a disaster brewing. “Would you please show the audience the card you chose?” She showed the card to the audience. They shouted in unison, “Two of spades!” At least someone is having fun. “Unless something very strange has happened, we have gone awry on this trick. You see, the audience saw you put a jack of diamonds up here in the rack.” He turned the card around and showed that it was a two of spades.
“It’s all an illusion,” Paris explained to the woman. “You were close enough to see exactly what you drew, but the audience was blinded. I showed a hand in which every card was a two of spades, but they all thought they saw a jack of diamonds. Now, let’s unblind everyone and you will all see what was really in my hand.”
He flicked his wrist and spread the cards to the audience to show how they had been fooled. The five cards in his hand were multiplied to sixty in the mirrors—sixty jacks of diamonds. He had opened the cards the wrong direction. He needed to pull the trick back together quickly.
“Not all my spells are working correctly tonight. There is an alien force in the theater,” he intoned in as spooky a voice as he could muster. “We have the two of spades with a red back in your hand. We have the two of spades with the blue back on the rack. I would like you to place one on top of the cards in my hand and one on the bottom. By sandwiching the jacks of diamonds, the twos of spades will spread through the deck.” He waved a hand over the cards and spread them wide. Now all seven of the cards were jacks of diamonds and eighty-four of their garish faces smiled back from the mirror. It was a shaky conclusion, but it worked. He escorted his assistant back to the edge of the stage where she received her applause and returned to her seat. The audience roared with appreciation. He would have to rehearse this variation for future reference. At least it saved the trick.
Paris began to hum as he returned to his position behind the table. He didn’t know why, but it was comforting to him as something important seemed to niggle at the edges of his aching brain. The card trick had nearly panicked him. Perhaps it would not have been so bad if he had not seen the instantaneous reflection of his own reaction in the mirrors. They mocked him at the time he needed his concentration the most.
He could feel the headache growing as he began cleaning up his workspace. He rolled a piece of paper into a tube and looked at the audience through it. Then he began picking up the scarves from the floor and stuffing them into the tube one after another. They did not emerge from the other end. He started picking up other things from the table—his silver egg, a marble, a golf ball, a tennis ball. Each item was stuffed into the end of the paper tube as Paris sang a wordless melody and danced around the table. Nothing emerged from the tube. Paris pulled a bowl of fruit near him and pushed objects of ever-increasing size into the impossibly small opening of the paper tube where they disappeared. Plum, apple, orange, grapefruit. He reached into the bowl and his rabbit came into his hand. The audience watched breathlessly as he gently fed the bunny into the tube where it disappeared.
Paris continued his chanting sing-song dance around the stage. Wayne had come through to help him. The followspot was directly in his eyes so he could no longer see the mirrors that had distracted him. Still, the room spun as he teetered on the brink of memory. Something important was being whispered in his ear. Paris raised a hand and circled it above his head. From the circle flew Sandra, his dove. He held out the hand and she landed on it. Then, like the rabbit before her, the dove disappeared into the tiny tube as if sucked into a vacuum cleaner. Paris held the tube to his eye and looked through it as the audience erupted in applause.
The isolation of looking through the tube focused Paris on one of the mirrored panes. A new light rose from it. His knees felt weak and his heart beat too fast. He wanted to end the act and sit down, but the monster magicians in the mirrors mocked him with their spells. As Paris crumpled the tube of paper in his hands and made it disappear, he was caught again by the multiple images behind the bar. Each was different. A boy, a child, a man, mocking his performance. A tear squeezed out of his left eye and hung tenuously just at the corner. As he waved his hands and continued to sing to himself, the reflections in the mirrors moved in a pattern, circling around each other and around the light that held the center of the reflection. The images were familiar but unsettling to Paris. It was kaleidoscopic. The mirror images rotating independently of Paris, moving in and out toward a vortex at the center of which was the light that never wavered. He was losing control again. The mirror was taking over.
His head was throbbing now. The tear at the corner of his eye grew and broke loose from the tenuous bond that held it, dripping down his cheek to mingle with the sweat gathered there. Paris needed a finale for the act and reached for the cloth covering his table. An instant stab of pain crushed his thoughts as he saw a pattern emerging on the cloth. It was a flat off-white, a color that many people call ivory. Paris snatched the veil from the table.
Serepte! It suddenly dawned on him that he must not come in contact with Serepte. She would try to heal him and nothing could heal this pain of memory that was bursting on him. He flipped the cloth out in front of him until it was flat and then let go. It hung suspended in the air as he walked around it, looking for all the world like it draped an invisible table.
He fought to hold himself together long enough to finish the act, but his one path of escape was blocked. Serepte stood in the wings flanked by Judith and Lil. He could not move toward her. He could not inflict his pain on her. The first night he met her, she had lifted the headache when she touched his forehead. Taking his pain had hurt her. He would not give her his pain.
Paris snatched the corner of his cloth and began spinning it. The dozen images in the mirrors mocked his movements as the cloth straightened and stiffened. He sang to the cloth—something the images could not do. They were a silent reflection. Wielding the straight, stiff cloth like a baseball bat, Paris slammed it down on his table where it became a simple pile of salt.
The audience was applauding again. It sounded like thunder. He couldn’t believe he would ever regret hearing applause. It roared in his ears and echoed, amplified by every turn of his aching head. He didn’t even know what he had done to earn their applause. But he bowed. He always bowed for applause. For that moment, just as he began to rise from his slightly too deep bow, he found the tipping point of vertigo—could feel the sucking whirlpool from below him—could feel a thirteen-year-old boy being sucked into the vortex to emerge a mental infant in the arms of a strong man. He threw the memory off violently, bellowing out his song.
He rose and bowed again. The mirror images were bowing also, bobbing up and down like manikins on a shooting range. The man at the bar, who had never turned to face Paris, was bowing, too, nodding to each of the images as if they had entertained him alone. The act was over. He could go backstage to his dressing room and rest—take aspirin—fight the headache.
He could not go backstage. Serepte was backstage. She would try to heal him. She would be hurt. There was only one exit from his pain. He would have to wade through it—wade through the painful memory that waited for him. He stepped off the stage into the audience, continuing to sing the songs of his magical childhood. The mirror images seemed to follow him even here. He did coin and card tricks at tables as waiters scurried to serve drinks during the intermission. At one table, the cards came flying out of his hand, scattering all around the room, but the one card remaining was the card the guest had chosen.
He looked at the people at this table and recognized them. Lissa, Meaghan, Elizabeth, and Mark. Paul saw Wayne headed in his direction. Paul paused his singing only long enough to whisper, “Help me,” as he moved away from the table and continued to entertain the audience. He moved through the theater, pulling things from the air that he did not remember having planted in the pockets of his tuxedo. He did not speak, but continued the chanting song, his feet continuing to dance among the stars… the tables. He was working the tables.
He didn’t know what he was going to make appear or vanish as he approached a table. The song seemed to control that. He could see the object a second before it was hard and firm in his hand. A coin, an apple, a flower. He handed out the props as if they were novelties at a carnival. And he sang to himself in that strange gibberish that he had used when he had no other language.
A strange tingling sensation ran from his hand up his arm as a new object materialized in his fingers. It rushed from his pounding heart down his arms as if it were generating an enormous flow of power. It hurt. The pain in his head either manufactured the power or was the result of it, or both. It flowed through him like electricity.
The audience applauded and shouted out as he moved among them. He was working up close and no one was catching the tricks. They believed in him. Someone exclaimed that a glass was floating above their table. Paris found it in his hand. Someone must have handed it to him. Everything was only an illusion. Behind the bar, he could see twelve glasses rise from a table in the mirrors and float to the hands of the phantom magicians before him. Twenty-four eyes that were not in the audience watched him from the mirrors. They held his gaze and drew him across the room, closer and closer to the images that he could not out-act nor out-perform.
He stopped at a table to do some simple sleight-of-hand with a new deck of cards he found in his coat pocket. Pick-a-card-any-card, his mind rolled on. But his voice could no longer form normal English sounds. The language he sang held him captive. Turning, he found his taxi driver, Mark, in front of him. He was crying. Paris was taken aback. Had his own pain affected this man, too? He pled inside himself for the driver to reach out and touch him and bring him back to something tangible. But he could not put the longing into words. Instead all he could do was stare and sing in this gibberish that he hated with a passion. Why was the driver crying?
Mark answered. He didn’t answer the plea from deep inside Paris, but rather he answered the song that he sang. He sang back in a counterpoint with words equally incomprehensible. They were as strange, garbled, and unintelligible as his own. But the images the song brought to Paul’s mind were not vague. The images were cut like crystal—clear, reflecting each ray of light back to him, adding yet another dimension to the reflections in the mirror. They were too big for Paris’s mind. They spoke of a belief and past that were too much to take in at once. They threatened to push him over the threshold of his delicate balance between ultimate forgetfulness and the clear memories of a lifetime. And the song spoke his name, as clearly as it had been in English. Apollo. Son.
Paul saw movement beside him as the members of Serepte’s circle closed in on him. Each carried an object in her hand that glowed with intense power. Wayne chanted counterpoint to Paul’s song and soon a glowing globe of light surrounded them. The four witches. Wayne. Mark. Paul. And the man at the bar, drawing circles on a paper in front of him.
The sounds of the crowded show floor faded as people continued to exclaim over tables, glasses, and other things in the room that seemed to levitate of their own accord. But the voices were muted in the circle of power.
Every nerve, every muscle, now tingled with a frisson of energy. The audience was feeding the energy, watching the display at the bar where glasses on the shelves looked alive as they sprang floating in the air and smashing to the floor. Paris was losing perspective, the whirlpool sucking at him from under the floor, pulling him down under his own weight. Inanimate objects were flying, dancing, singing back to him in the voice and the language that he still called gibberish—just nonsense.
A cold wind came from the door, whipping the hair from his forehead and plastering it back. A storm was raging and he fought against it to reach the demon-man at the bar. The man still stared at him in the mirrors, never turning, not seeming even to notice the gale that was blowing across him toward Paris. And with every look, the pain burst like lightning through Paul’s brain. He felt Mark support him as he worked his way to the confrontation.
They were locked together. The Great Paris and the demon who had hounded Serepte. Paul was battered back and struggled forward. His fear and pain were gradually replaced by anger as he faced his tormentor. It was irrational. And through it all, the man sat calmly at the at the bar—as if there were no wind, no dishes dancing off the shelves, no objects floating in the room. The demon-man wrapped his power around Paul’s head and squeezed like a vise, packing his brain with too many sensations to process.
Looking at the man’s hands, Paul saw the missing drawing from his notebook. The sketch for the new cloth for his future act lay in front of the man and he scratched on its surface with his fingernails, each scrape digging deeper into Paul’s brain. Wayne had warned him that the missing item would be used against him. The figures he had drawn on the scrap of paper called out to him as if they too were being tortured. The man chose to challenge him, now the challenge must be met.
“Get out of my head!” The words came out of Paul’s mouth in a scream that split the air. They were the first intelligible words he spoke since leaving the stage. But the demon pressed on. Wayne and the witches were all pouring power into Paul, but it was being absorbed by the demon as fast as they could create it.
Then Paul felt the disk in his hand—the talisman Wayne had given him. As he brought it before his eyes, he could see the missing pieces of the sketch, filled in by the design engraved by Wayne.
Paul began to laugh as he saw the clear pattern. It was not the demon’s to command. It was his. His to remember. Paul snapped his fingers and the paper drawing began to darken and curl, smoke rose from its edges, and it burst into flame. Without his weapon, the demon-man turned to look into Paul’s eyes directly for the first time.
Paul could still feel the threatening whirlpool tugging at him and remembered the three goddesses in the museum pulling him three times into the pool at their base. The door opened in front of him and the demon stood frozen in place. The seasons turned ever in upon themselves, as old as eternity, but each one new and young. The three sisters dancing out the pattern of the mandala now held in his hands and his mind.
Winter give me peaceful rest
Quiet heart within my breast.
Not giving up the fight, the demon-man sent new lances of pain through Paul’s head and chest. He felt Mark holding him up.
Yours the gift of solitude,
Grant a silent interlude.
It was silent. In his deep-sea adventure, he, Pol, was drowning and all was completely silent. No word could reach him. The pain washing away his memories as quickly as he recovered them. “Don’t!” he screamed inside himself. “Don’t let winter silence erase the hope of spring.”
Spring, like dawn replace my sleeping
Constant ever in your keeping.
Grant that I might turn my face
To worship in your holy place.
The words to the song came faster than he could sing them, then escaped from him as he gave them breath. The images. The dances. The Bacchae were the heralds of spring. The grape, the wine, the violent, passionate dancing of fullness. Passion. Summer.
Summer baking, heat my soul
And let my mind in pastures roll
Where bitter herbs cannot be found
But passions sweet lie all around.
He was there! There was nothing wrong with the passion. There was nothing wrong with the anger. It would burst out of him if he kept it hidden any longer. It was a sweet release of the energy that had been building. The talisman in his hand glowed as the demon-man clutched at his heart.
Wayne and the witches seemed to suddenly spring into action. The tools of their circle were raised as one to contain the demon in a seething cauldron of power while Paul held him frozen.
“Exorcizo te, omnis spiritus immunde,” Wayne finally called out, placing his hands on the man’s head. The physical body convulsed and collapsed at the bar as the demon spirit separated from it and bellowed.
“I will have the Goddess!”
More quickly than the demon could move, Judith struck out with the deadly Athamé of Coven Carles and sliced through its incorporeal body. A hiss and foul stench filled the air.
A scream split the crackling atmosphere, piercing through the silence to his ears. Paul looked up into the mirror and saw Serepte, her arms extended to him, crumple against Lil on the stage. She crumpled under the weight of pain that he had endured and crushed Lil to the floor beneath her. Through their defeat of The Blade, the demon might yet have fulfilled his purpose.
They rushed to the stage, the circle forming around Serepte as Paul knelt next to her. Lil and Mark were held outside its bounds. The words and music that he had sung earlier were coming to him again, only now they were perfectly clear. They were not English, but they were definitely language. The language went beyond individual words and became the music of the gods, speaking clearly in complete images. Each sound wove together the memories that now began to fill his head. This time his head filled with the sweet images of a past remembered—of a country and a family. Outside the circle, a taxi driver, his father sang out the song at the top of his voice.
Paul lifted Serepte in his arms as he sang. There was a scarce breath humming between her lips as she attempted to cross the world boundaries with his pain. He cradled her in his arms, listening to the melody that burst in upon his memory, words he had never before sung but that completed the song for her. A golden dome of light encased them as the circle unified themselves around him and he began the final verse, concealed for millennia.
Autumn’s nature chills the soul,
As death encompasses the whole.
But Harvest’s hope is ever true:
The seed it holds for life anew.
His voice echoed within the warded dome and was joined by a chorus that could be felt adding a descant above his own voice. He could feel the world shaking. The song altered the shapes around them, shielding them gradually in a fog that rose from the floor of the little theater. The song called forth the fog, the change, out of a past more ancient by far than his small lifespan. It reunited the worlds and put them in harmony with each other and with the universal consciousness of all the cosmos.
The circle of five coalesced around him, holding the fog at bay as they followed the guides that would see him safely through with his charge.
The room finally faded away entirely, his last perception of it showed the audience standing, applauding the fine performance.
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