27. The Marvelous Manfredini
Chapter 27
The Marvelous Manfredini
“Quarter past eight,” the man occupying the seat to the left of my own pronounced at last, having taken a moment to navigate the spiderweb of cracks on the glass face of his pocket-watch as they caught the dim gas-glow of the theater lights.
“Thank you.”
He snapped the bronze case closed with a tight grin, returning the battered watch to the pocket of a well-fitted waistcoat a bit too old in style for a man who appeared to be of approximately my own age. Though the lighting was poor, and I did not wish to allow my eyes to linger too long upon him, he looked to be tolerably handsome if a bit unkempt, with outgrown dark hair and a face shadowed by the irregular beginnings of a beard. “Let’s see how long it takes the Marvelously Late Manfredini to start this time.”
“Is he usually so late?”
“Usually later,” he replied with a light shrug, and we both pulled in our knees as a couple walked past us to find a pair of seats some distance down the row. I pulled in Victor’s cane as well, lodging it between my seat and the empty one to my right to move it safely away from the narrow aisle; I kept it within the circle of my arm and let the cool weight of the silver scorpion pommel rest against my chest, just above the swell of my bosom.
I felt myself exhale in a silent sigh: though I was never now without the feeling of him, the strange comfort of its touch made me feel closer yet to Victor again. As I allowed the subtle sensation sift through me I settled my gaze on the pair of immense, Ozymandian figures that flanked the red-curtained stage: twin, colossal sculptures of that god of the Egyptian underworld from which the New Osiris Hall took its name, their peaked crowns stretching nearly to the ceiling, their mummified fists crossing the royal crook and flail before their chests. From my secret studies of my husband’s work, that resurrected lord of the world below, the embalmed and eternal regent of the reborn dead, was to me no stranger. I tried to wonder at the portentous choice of namesake for a theater—to assign the towering idols a greater interest—to stave off the hollow in my heart that I knew would follow the filling warmth, Victor’s presence and his absence striving for mastery within my breast.
“Tries to sell every last ticket he can,” the man to my left continued. “Can’t blame him for that, but I think the delay is part of the performance as well. Keeps everyone guessing—a little expectant, a little on edge. Ready for wonder and mystery ,” he said, raising his dark brows. “Your first time?”
Broken from my reverie, I nodded, remaining polite while I began to regret that I might now spend the whole show beside a man who mistook a sincere question about the time for personal interest.
“My fourth,” he conceded with some mixture of pride and chagrin, though I had not asked. “Do you…” Pausing, he considered me with some mixture of curiosity and mild concern. “Know what to expect?”
“The advertisement made it look rather exciting,” I replied, and as he nodded in encouragement I sensed his interest growing. “I am not easily perturbed by such things, but it looked something fiendish to be sure, if that’s what you mean.”
“To be sure,” he repeated with a tilt of his head and a slight curl of the lip. “But not only that. I couldn’t tell you whether it’s real or another of his illusions, but in every show there seem to be a few spectators who become—affected, somehow, by what happens on the stage. They faint, or cry out, or appear to be in some odd state, and once or twice I’m certain I heard a man retch. Manfredini’s shows have become rather infamous for that. I think they’re plants, myself—part of the performance—but worth a warning to you. At least you know I’ve sat through it unscathed, and so long as that seat on your right remains empty, you won’t have to worry too much about unpleasantries of that sort.”
I think I must have laughed a little: a genuine response, for though I could not bear for him to mistake my light conversation for flirtation, it did amuse me that a young man with a cracked pocket-watch should regale a mourning widow he had just met with tales of nausea at a magic show.
And yet I knew to what he alluded (though I could not allow him to learn that such knowledge was mine), and I remembered at once what Victor had said of such things: that half of the supposed sleight of hand the Marvelous Manfredini trafficked on his stage was no street performer’s jugglery, but the sorcerer Luther Reinhardt’s own eldritch art. A sorcery of illusion, yes—a mortal man’s faerie glamor , a change in the seeming or semblance of a thing, with no enduring shift of the elements of the earth—but sorcery nonetheless.
The man to my left was innocent of any knowledge of such art, or so I believed, and therefore I said nothing of it. But neither did I wish to leave the conversation hanging at such a point as to arouse his suspicions, and so I meant to carry on—yet he was quicker.
“Are you here by yourself?” He leaned forward, looking across me to my right. “That cane is?—”
“Mine,” I replied instantly. The inevitable question of my accompaniment, I supposed with an inward grimace of irritation which did not quite cross my lips, was no longer to be deferred. “And no,” I answered truthfully, allowing myself to feel more keenly that restless fire in the blood that I was never now without. “I am not.”
“Ah.”
“What interest do you find in this show, if I may ask, to revisit it three times?”
“I don’t know,” he looked distant for a moment, as if attempting to catch a suitable phrase, “quite how to say it, without sounding entirely mad. And so I shall take that as license to sound as mad as I please: there’s something true in it—not real , if to be real means to conform with some dismal and denuded notion of the world, but true . Look,” he turned to me in his seat, appearing to be bothered by the confines of the armrest, “when I paint, I paint the soul of the thing, not that damnably mannered inanity they mistake for art; and they say that what I paint does not look real , but I say it is more true than all the soot-stained photographs in this chimney-choked town.”
His tone grew emphatic and intense, his eyes flashed with life; I let his words hang in the air, considered them as they dispersed into the low din of anxious conversation among the waiting patrons of the small theater, and allowed a slow nod and a slight smile. Those vivid words made his company agreeable to me—indeed, I was moved by his madness , as he had called it—and though I wished still to remain apart enough from him, allowing him no false hope, I developed at once a genuine interest in his work.
“I should like to see your paintings, then. Are they hung anywhere nearby?”
“No exhibition will have me,” he said rather matter-of-factly, “unless to hang one or two in a dark corner of the farthest room—and then with the painted side toward the wall, I shouldn’t doubt?—”
He stopped: the gaslights began to dim; around us in the red upholstered seats the cacophony of conversation crested, ebbed to a susurration of final murmurs, and faded with the light.
With a hurried whisper he informed me of his pleasure at my acquaintance, and must have told me his name; I gave him my name in turn, and told him likewise, though in truth I had not caught his. A pity—I would have liked to see his art—but rather than ask him to repeat himself, and in doing so confirm (in his estimation) an interest in his identity, I thought it better to let the matter pass.
In the next moment, it was entirely out of mind: the bracing flourish of Bach’s fearful Toccata pealed from an unseen organ, its howling cry of the uncanny rolling in like fog to fill the small, darkened theater, and the mood of unease was set before the deep crimson curtain so much as shivered on its pulley-ropes. When at last the velvet veil rose, it rose with some speed, as if to astonish the eye and the mind with a sudden descent into a lurid realm. Painted wooden flames rose from the edges of the stage, framing a canvas backdrop across which fiery dragons uncoiled and devils danced, and in the center of this red riot of hellfire—all of it so artificially motionless, as if frozen in time—stood a single, silent figure, as if Dante had forsaken Virgil and claimed some circle of the Inferno for himself.
The Marvelous Manfredini stood utterly still. His arms were folded in authority, his head half-bowed and his top hat down low over his eyes, and from the thick fingers of his right hand dangled, almost carelessly, a magician’s black wand with bright white tips. His black tailcoat and gloves were impeccable—his bowtie sharp—and the burning red swirls of his waistcoat almost, but not entirely, distracted from the way that his moderate paunch strained at the buttons.
His head raised! The stage lights reddened, and from somewhere behind the canvas hellscape the hidden organ reprised with a fervor its monstrous strains.
“His best yet,” I heard the artist beside me murmur, shaking his head in a kind of awe. “He told me someone helped him with the new opening. I wonder who.”
I did not have to wonder who—I thought already that I recognized some echo of Victor’s sense of style—but I said nothing of that. “You know him?”
“He’d recognize me, I think. I met him at the backstage exit last time after the show.”
“At this theater?”
He nodded.
“Do you think,” I chose my whispered words with caution, careful to conceal all hint of my keenness for the success of my plan, “that after the performance, you might show me where to meet him? I think he would recognize me too.”
“You mean that you?—”
A sharp shh! from behind us silenced him, reducing the rest of his answer to a nod and a wink.
I would have preferred to have gone without the wink, and did not look to him again.
Bathed in the crimson stage lights, Reinhardt uncrossed his arms suddenly—his appearance was too familiar to me to keep the name of the Marvelous Manfredini continuously in mind—and as he threw them cruciform out to either side, a pair of small, fiery explosions erupted to his left and his right from behind the wooden flames. Then a collective gasp arose from the audience: the copious smoke from the brief fires formed into spectral figures of dancing devils, Reinhardt approaching each and passing his wand through them both, and then the smoky ghosts shifted into flesh-and-blood women with red capes and tridents.
“Double transmutation. Accomplished with mirrors,” the artist beside me whispered beneath the sound of general applause. “He’s not the first to do it, but he might be the best. It’s the next one I can’t figure out.”
Flanked by the two devil-women, Reinhardt doffed his top hat and held it under his chest to bow, but as he replaced it on his head it seemed to sit almost comically high. The woman beside him pushed down on the flat crown, to no avail—Reinhardt allowed a look of suspicious concern to cross his face, to the amusement of the audience—and then both ladies attempted to pull it down onto his rather sizable head. Uproarious laughter followed from the crowd, and then an intake of breath as the feminine fiends together removed Reinhardt’s hat and overturned it before him, allowing both magician and audience to behold the human skull that rose slowly from its circle, the hollow sockets of its absent eyes peering over the underside of the brim.
Reinhardt grinned in ghoulish delight as he snatched his hat from his assistants, skull and all, and set the newly sinister chapeau upside-down at the center of the stage. Pointing his wand, he traced a broad ring on the floor around it—I smiled a little to myself: some manner of artificial lighting from below the stage must have been the source of the illumination of his glowing sorcerer’s circle—and as a sinuous ripple of notes cascaded from the invisible pipe-organ, swelling the anticipation in the hall, Reinhardt’s pair of devil-women drew near to him and clung to his shoulders, tridents leveled at the circle, as if even they felt trepidation for what terrible new marvel Manfredini might reveal.
With a single, decisive motion Reinhardt swept his wand left to right, as if to encompass the whole of the audience, and then cut back to aim it squarely at the hat and the skull.
Ich bin der Spiegel des Spiegels! he shouted with such force of will as I had never heard from him and scarcely imagined him to possess; with what small knowledge I had of his native German I understood something akin to the meaning of his words— I am the mirror of the mirror! —but I had little time to consider their portent.
No sooner had he spoken than I felt myself draw a sharp breath: not for the sight of the human skeleton that arose in smoke and flames from Reinhardt’s hat, unfathomable vision though it was; nor for the organ’s thundering reprise of the first stanzas of the sepulchral Toccata, though the bass of its undertones shook me to the core. Somewhere between my seat and the reddened stage a woman shrieked—a man groaned—and I understood.
I knew this sensation in my marrow: the falling darkness, the brush of vertigo, the unease of the uncanny world. The feeling was faint for the distance, and I doubted that even at close range it would have come near to rivaling the deep, penetrating perturbation of the first touch of Victor’s sorcery—and yet, dim shadow though it was, it was nearer in nature to Victor’s art than to Absolon’s, muscular and fleshly and human.
Reinhardt was the mirror of the mirror because the trick of his grim apparition made use of no device but his imagination and will—the illusion of illusion was once more the thing in itself—the vision was a child of his magia intrinseca , born not of stratagem and reflecting glass but of true sorcery, its verity proclaimed to a crowd of unwitting voyeurs who would live their lives never knowing they once had witnessed a genuine sorcerer’s art. In their minds and memories the outbursts of their fellow spectators were merely out of fear and surprise at the ghastliness of the image, the vague sense of disquiet in the chest and bone and viscera no more than the effect of the organ’s booming throb.
Here on his illusionist’s stage, Reinhardt unleashed his sorcery in plain sight.
The conjured skeleton seemed to grow, looming over the stage with eyes aflame, until the devil-women tore the image asunder with their tridents and the rest dissipated into smoke. Reinhardt stepped cautiously into the circle as its light faded, picked up his hat, dusted it off on his knee and swung it back onto his head as he flashed a rakish smile.
Applause!—a pause, as red-skirted tables were hastily wheeled in behind the wooden flames—and then the show continued, alternating and augmenting what I understood by reputation to be stage magician’s tricks with the fantastical illusions of Reinhardt’s sorcery: I witnessed one demoness sawn in half and smilingly reassembled; the other reclined and was levitated, and after Reinhardt passed her form through a ring to ensure the apparent impossibility of ropes, she floated out toward the audience, burst into flames, and vanished—all but for a red skull, which rolled from the edge of the stage to drop nonchalantly into the first row. From the cries and commotion, it seemed to have fallen into the lap of a woman with a rather outsized hat, and she fainted promptly away (to the relief, I imagined, of those seated behind her headwear)—but the offending skull was never found.
The grand finale was an infernal game between Reinhardt and the second devil-woman; after the incident of the skull she was, by appearances, understandably reticent to assist in his further experiments, and tauntingly appeared and disappeared in various locations across the stage as Reinhardt leveled his wand at her each time, always a moment too late, the miss of each supposed burst of magic from his weapon indicated by a puff of smoke like a bullet strike in dust. At last he gave up, standing at center stage and folding his arms in frustration, and that is when the demoness took her revenge: she materialized behind him to pluck the wand from his unsuspecting fingers, and as she aimed it at its owner, Reinhardt himself vanished in a great eruption of smoke. The audience gasped, the devil-woman smiled and twirled the wand in her hand, and a moment later the magician and the first fiendess strode in from the wings to join hands and bow with her, revealed to be no worse for the wear.
The artist to my left shifted in his seat as he joined in the applause, shaking his head again as if having witnessed some work of inimitable genius, and I clapped as well. For my part, I found the performance amusing enough to have partly distracted me from my purpose of devising a means to meet with Reinhardt after the show—but the show now concluded, the distraction ceased.
“Shall we go to meet him?” I whispered to the man at my side as the final funereal tones of the organ died away: unduly forward perhaps, but I could not risk him forgetting what he seemed to have offered me. If he declined, I would have only moments to invent an alternative.
And then, as if on cue, an idea occurred to me—not a second plan, but an amendment to the first, and as I regathered Victor’s walking-stick into my hand I felt my fingers tighten around its smooth black shaft.
The mirror of the mirror : as the words repeated in my mind I remembered the wild darkness in my eyes in the mirror that morning—so fearfully, so fascinatingly alike to Victor’s eyes—my own gaze, haunted by Victor’s possessing shadow within me, so magnetic I nearly lost myself in the image of its depths. While I did not know my power, and could not anticipate its effect, it seemed to me that any minor misstep I made could be attributed easily to the uncanny atmosphere of Reinhardt’s show.
If I were to test my strength in relative safety, attempt to make use of my new state in the service of advantage, there was unlikely to be a time more suited than the present.
“I need to paint,” said the man beside me, some measure of genuine regret in his voice, “after what I saw here tonight. It gave me a feeling I can use. I’m sorry to go back on my word, but if you prefer, I could?—”
I respected him more for this turn, if he were sincere; and it may have been, I concede, that he was about to offer to me instructions to find my way to Reinhardt on my own—but I did not wish to wait upon the chance. I turned to him, fixing my eyes upon his, taking the opportunity of his momentary wide-eyed confusion to deepen my gaze, and I began to focus my will upon the notion of him leading me to Reinhardt?—
To begin was enough. His voice did not falter so much as simply stop, as if he had forgotten he was speaking at all, and I watched as his posture began to subtly slacken; his eyes grew distant and began to drift closed—it was too much, too fast; my power over him came almost effortlessly, and unnerved by my own success I turned away and drew a breath. “I should like to meet the Marvelous Manfredini backstage,” I said quietly, looking back to see him blink in recovery and draw an incredulous hand across his brow, “after so wonderful a performance.”
“Of course,” he replied naturally, as if it were the most inevitable thing in the world. “Follow me.”
I cannot say whether I successfully enforced upon his mind this new response, or whether my brief success at some manner of mesmerism simply frightened or impressed him into choosing to assist me, or whether (though I thought this least likely) it was all merely a matter of coincidence, but in that moment it little mattered to me. He led me through the narrow aisles of seats, and I carried Victor’s cane as I trailed him; we moved as swiftly as we might without drawing undue attention, dodging the other patrons as they rose and made their way toward the exits, while we walked obliquely toward the stage and then waited before one of the long crimson draperies that hung beside the mummified legs of a monumental Osiris. Satisfied, after a few moments, that we had attracted no inordinate interest, my companion pulled the drapery to one side behind his back, motioned surreptitiously for me to enter, and followed me into the corridor behind it as—albeit smokelessly—we vanished, hopefully without notice, from the sight and knowledge of the theater.
“This way,” he whispered, pointing to an open door ahead to the left. We were in a dim, carpeted hallway, illuminated by gaslights on the walls and decorated with framed playbills. “His true name is Luther Reinhardt.”
“I know,” I replied.
Despite the soft lighting I saw him cast me a strange and questioning glance, studying my face for a time and then looking quickly away, as if the memory of my gaze a moment before drew him to soon reconsider his choice.
“Mr. Reinhardt?” he called into the door, tapping on the frame with the backs of his knuckles. “It’s that painter you met last week. I pray I don’t impose too terribly by bringing a guest to meet you. A young woman, I venture to say a friend of mine, who shares in my admiration for your performance.”
“A guest?” I heard Reinhardt’s voice at some distance, his familiar accent echoing in what sounded to be a large room behind the door. “Well, since you have brought her this far?—”
“Reinhardt,” I interrupted, allowing him to hear my voice, “it’s Elizabeth Buckingham.”
The scent of fine cigar smoke preceded him. “Buckingham?” Reinhardt repeated with a mixed tone of intrigue and incredulity, and within moments he appeared in the open frame of the doorway in his shirt-sleeves, as if the novelty of my presence were more pressing to his mind than completing his change of clothes: he was ungloved and had but one cufflink, his black bowtie hung unbound from his collar, and without his hat the receding line of his slicked hair revealed him to have exceeded by a few years the Marvelous Manfredini of the advertisement.
I saw something in him tense before even he looked to me—a subtle catch in his step, a change in the way he held his jaw—and he glanced past me, right and left down the hall, before he removed the short, thick cigar from his mouth with a cloud of exhaled smoke. “For the moment, I thought you might have brought another guest yet,” he offered casually in explanation—but his mood shifted as he caught sight of Victor’s cane and then my eyes, and I saw his brows furrow in some secret thought. “No matter. An evening’s welcome to you both,” he continued with a gentlemanly nod. “You never told me, Buckingham, that you meant to attend my show. I keep discount tickets for colleagues and other friends, as your companion here knows well—I hope you didn’t pay full price?”
“I need to speak with you,” I said quietly to him, unable to fully conceal the urgency in my voice, “if you can spare a moment.”
Reinhardt nodded slowly, motioning me inside. “A moment,” I heard him advise the man who led me to him, “if you please.”
I called a thank you over Reinhardt’s shoulder to the other man, hasty but sincere—strained and strange though our interactions may have been, I would not have reached Reinhardt without the nameless artist’s assistance, and my gratitude was genuine—but if he replied in turn, I did not hear it.
“Buckingham,” Reinhardt spoke in hushed tones, taking me aside to a quiet corner near the great ropes that raised and lowered the stage curtain as he looked again at my eyes, “you’re… changed, and only Absolon answers at Doctor D’Arco’s door.” Behind him I saw a young stagehand roll away one of the red-draped tables, laden with boxes of stage properties. “And now you’re here . At my show. And with you comes some,” he paused as if waiting for me to relieve him of the mystery of the moment, though I did not, “…some unaccountable sense of him , so singularly strong I wondered if he was with you. What is going on?”
“I was injured,” I began, and then paused: for all my will to find Reinhardt, I had little considered what to say to him once I did. But the cloth wrapped around my legs was visible, I thought, when I walked, and between this and the presence of the walking-stick I saw little use in concealing the fact of my convalescence.
“Magical injury? Some manner of elf-shot?”
“I think so. Doctor D’Arco has gone to secure the proper herbs.”
“Either the wound is severe, or he thinks very highly of you. Perhaps both. But he is a law unto himself, and it is not my place to speculate. I advise you that I am no healer, and that my art runs in unusual ways, but…” He took a draw on his cigar, savored the smoke thoughtfully, then let it go as he held the cigar aside. “You need my help?”
“Yes, sir. It sounds strange, but—I need to procure a copy of my late husband’s book, and I have seen one at the spiritualist shop at Witch’s Corner not long ago—held the very volume in my hand—but though I once was led down the tunnels from there to Hargrave’s library, I do not know the way back. And I have only until midnight,” I added. “As part of my recovery, I have been ordered to return to my chamber before the strike of that uncanny hour.”
“You must have already tried Hargrave’s library itself, then? And Doctor D’Arco’s, should Absolon deign to let you in?”
“Both.”
Reinhardt nodded, rolling the girth of the cigar slowly between his fingers in something like contemplation.
“I am afraid I cannot tell you much more,” I continued, “but nor do I ask for much: directions alone will suffice. A quick drawing of a map would be more than I could hope.”
“And I am afraid I can grant you neither,” he replied with a terribly cavalier smile before replacing what was left of the cigar between his lips.
As I entertained the possibility of another attempt at mesmerism—rash, desperate thought, to so much as consider risking that feral new art upon a fellow sorcerer!— I felt the rise of Victor’s dark heat though my chest, ready and quickening, and the strength of it nearly made my hands tremble. I watched Reinhardt as he grabbed his hellfire-red waistcoat and black tailcoat from the back of a nearby chair and threw them both on nearly at once, forcing his disheveled cuffs through the sleeves and hastily fastening the buttons over his stomach; he ran a swift hand over his hair to smooth it down, took a last puff of smoke from his cigar, and put it out in the glass of water beside the ash-tray on the chair’s seat.
And then, from beside the ash-tray on the same chair, he picked up his wand.
“Are you well enough, Buckingham, to climb down a ladder?”
“I should think so.”
“Henry,” Reinhardt called aloud to the young stagehand, who was presently encumbered with the task of carrying away the awkwardly large wooden flames, “tell my guest at the door that I have become immersed in my work, will you? Give him a free ticket for next week if he shows enough disappointment. If I’m gone when you get back, close up when you finish.”
“Right, sir, got it.”
“ Danke .”
The young man set down his ungainly burden and departed; after a quick dart of his eyes across the expanse of the artificial world behind the back of the gaudily painted hellscape, Reinhardt bent down and cast aside the old rug that graced the backstage corner behind him, worked his fingers into a gap in the weathered floorboards, and with a short heave slid aside the cover from the gaping darkness of a narrow trapdoor.
“I can’t give you directions, Buckingham, nor a map, firstly because I am poor with them myself without the sense of the place about me, and secondly,” he straightened his cuffs, rather futilely I thought given his eccentric state of dress—perhaps the same thought occurred to him, as he pulled off his untied bowtie and tossed it over the chair, “because it is enough that you came here alone on my account—you didn’t arrive at the hall with that painter, did you?”
I shook my head.
“I thought as much. You have a driven look; if I declined to aid you,” he continued, and so soon after his staged flirtation with the forces of the infernal world, something in the accents of the Marvelous Manfredini sounded nearly like fear, “it would not stop you. Enough that you came here alone on my account—injured as you are, no less—and I don’t mean to send you alone on your way. The ladder to the underground is about fifteen feet, narrow but sturdy, rungs too far apart. Go slowly; tell me when you reach bottom. I’m coming with you.”