Chapter Forty-Six
Jack stepped up onto the table and stood tall, proudly facing the audience, knowing that in exactly thirty seconds, she would disappear to most likely face a demon from her nightmares in the room below.
She pressed her lips together and raised her chin boldly towards the audience, a subtle sign she’d practiced with Sera, who knew that was the cue to throw the large, red silk cloth over Jack, which she did.
The fabric floated down over Jack’s head, covering her completely, while Sera rattled off an incantation before the assistant picked up a candle from the floor and walked towards the table.
Jack twisted her right boot so that her toes were hovering over the hidden catch that would release the trap door below her feet.
Then as Sera set the candle flame to the combustible cloth, Jack simultaneously pressed her boot down.
The trap door silently swung open, and she dropped down below, the trap door closing instantly above her.
To the audience, it seemed like she’d magically vanished.
But as she fell, straightaway, she knew something was wrong. Instead of falling onto the sandbag below, she fell past it and kept falling—before landing on a hard, stone floor.
She gasped as her whole body was jarred, and the breath rushed from her lungs from the impact. Desperately, she tried to suck in some air, but she struggled to inhale more than a shallow breath as she lay there on her back.
Blinking into the darkness, she couldn’t see anything, and she began to realize that this had not been part of the plan… As her heartbeat started to race, a candle flame flickered to life, revealing she was in a narrow, dark corridor.
“There, there, my dear lady,” a familiar voice crooned, but with the shadows surrounding her, she couldn’t see his face.
She tried to get to her feet, but she was pushed back to the ground and a cloth was forced against her mouth.
Valiantly, she held her breath, trying to wrestle against whoever was pressing her down, but her lungs were nearly bursting and she couldn’t help but suck in a lungful of air.
The sickly-sweet smell of whatever the cloth was soaked in filled her nose and mouth, befuddling her senses, and though she tried to fight against it, her eye lids got heavy. And then, everything went black.
*
“They should have come out that door by now,” Tobias muttered as both he and Iain stood in the shadows of the alley, waiting.
It had been exactly five minutes from when they had timed Jack’s last illusion would be executed.
More than enough time for Clorren to ambush Jack and lead her from the exit, but the doorway from the secret corridor remained closed.
“Do you think he didn’t show up?” Iain asked.
“I don’t know, but something’s not right.” He could feel it in his gut, and damn it, he wasn’t going to wait a moment longer. “Lock everything down. I’m going in.”
Without waiting for Iain to acknowledge his command, Tobias grabbed the oil lantern on the floor beside him, then sprinted for the door. He wrenched it open and listened for a second. Nothing. No footfalls or noise whatsoever.
Quickly, he rushed down the stairs and ran down the hallway towards the hidden door that doubled as the back of the wardrobe, leading into the room under the stage into which Jack should have fallen from the stage above.
He opened the door and stepped into the wardrobe, pausing for a moment as he listened through the wood.
Again, he didn’t hear anything coming from behind the door.
He turned the lantern off then placed it carefully down onto the floor of the wardrobe before he pulled out his pistol with his right hand and then twisted open the handle of the wardrobe door with his left.
He emerged into a completely empty room.
Immediately, his eyes fell to the spot where Jack should have fallen onto the sandbag from above.
But there was no Jack, and there was also no sandbag, either.
He holstered his pistol a moment before the door to the backstage corridor burst open and Miss Fennessy rushed into the room, stopping short upon seeing him, Miss Montague pulling up behind her.
“Why are you here?” Miss Fennessy asked. “Shouldn’t you be following Jack and the killer from the alley?”
“No one has left from the alley,” Tobias replied as Detective Rollings also followed the ladies into the room. “What happened on stage? Did Jack fall down into this room?”
“Yes. Everything went perfectly,” Miss Montague replied.
“I set the cloth alight over her, and she disappeared instantly down the trap door. I finished off the routine as she told me to, explaining to the audience that she had a Coffin Conjurer to catch instead of a coffin to return to, and then we waited the five minutes before rushing down here to see if she was still here or not.”
“Well, she’s not here, and she didn’t leave through the secret passage,” Tobias replied, trying his best to calm down and think.
“How is she not here, if she didn’t go through the passageway?” Miss Fennessy asked.
“Detective Rollings.” Tobias turned to face the young officer. “Did anyone leave this room through the main door you’ve all just come through?”
“Not a single person, sir,” Detective Rollings replied. “I didn’t leave my post, hidden as I was, not once. I would have seen if anyone had either entered or left.”
“Where the bloody hell is Miss Hart, then?” Iain asked, stepping through the wardrobe and startling the ladies.
“I don’t know, but I think the Conjurer must have her.” Miss Montague pulled out a Jack of Hearts playing card from her pocket. “He left this in my pocket.”
Tobias glanced over to her. “When was that left?”
“I don’t know,” she replied. “I didn’t feel a thing, but he must have gotten close to me backstage at some point and slipped this into my skirt pocket. He did so to Cordy too.”
Miss Fennessy pulled out another Jack of Hearts from her skirt pocket.
“And Jack definitely fell through the trap door above?” Tobias asked, tilting his head up to see the trap door in the ceiling, which had been expertly crafted to be barely visible, cut seamlessly into the wooden floorboards that made up the ceiling from the theater floor above.
Spinning around, his eyes were drawn to where the sandbag was meant to be. He strode over to the spot and glanced down at the wooden floor, fear clawing at his chest as he spotted the very slight gaps in some of the wood planks, barely visible to the naked eye. “God damn it!”
He pulled out a knife from the sheath on his belt, then crouched down and pried the blade between some of the floorboards.
A few moments later, the blade pressed against something.
Tobias pushed against it harder, and instantly, a hidden trap door in the ground swung open, revealing a dark space below the room they were in.
“A second trap door!” Miss Fennessy exclaimed.
“How did we not know about this?” Miss Montague growled, her face reflecting the fear Tobias was feeling.
His blood ran cold as he glanced down into the space, thinking that Jack must have fallen through here. A space they hadn’t known about, but one that Thomas Clorren obviously had. “Iain, fetch me the lantern in the wardrobe, then throw it down to me.”
As Iain rushed over to the wardrobe, Tobias swung his feet over the edge of the trap door and then jumped down into the dark space below.
He bent his knees to absorb the impact but found himself landing on a deflated sandbag.
His landing still jarred, but quickly, he righted himself before glancing up when Iain hollered and threw down the lantern.
Tobias caught it, then pulled out a match and lit the lantern’s wick.
The light illuminated the space of what appeared to be an underground corridor.
He held the lantern up and glanced around.
His heart clenched when he saw what was lying on the ground.
Staring up at him, almost tauntingly, was a gleaming, red Jack of Hearts playing card, with the words ‘My Burning Lady has been delivered’ scribbled across its surface.
In that moment, he knew with a certainty that the Conjurer had Jack, and his final performance was about to begin.