8. Weird Brothers #2
“Well . . . yeah, some magicians have real power. But it’s still different from what we do.”
“How? How is it different?”
“Because . . .” He could see she was struggling now, grasping for words to explain something she’d apparently never thought about in quite this way before. “Because that’s just how it is. Witches and magicians have been enemies forever. Since the beginning of time.”
“Since the beginning of time?” Elias laughed, but not unkindly. “Come, now. This feud started somewhere, at some point, for some reason. But what?”
“I honestly don’t know,” she admitted.
“Doesn’t that strike you as odd? That you don’t know?”
She didn’t have an answer.
Soon they came upon a peculiar sight: a line of people waiting patiently on the sidewalk, illuminated by the amber glow of battery-powered lanterns and the occasional flicker of a lighter.
The humid air hung heavy around them, thick with the smell of hot asphalt and the distant scent of something burning, probably trash cans set ablaze for light somewhere in the city.
“What are they all waiting for?” Luna asked, craning her neck to see what was at the front of the line.
Elias followed her gaze to the glass booth standing on the corner like a beacon. Inside, a woman was speaking animatedly into a black handset, one hand pressed against the glass as she ranted about who knows what.
“The telephone.”
She stared at him blankly. “The what?”
“The pay telephone. The phone booth.” He gestured toward the contraption. “Surely you’ve seen one before?”
“Ohhh, sure. Yeah, in movies. That’s where Superman gets changed.”
“Super who? What on earth are you talking about?”
“Never mind.” Luna studied the increasingly impatient line. “But I still don’t get it. Why are they standing in line to go into a box?”
Aha, he thought. At last, I am the expert. “Presumably to make telephone calls, doll. Pay phones don’t run on electricity; they’ll work as long as the lines are intact.”
“No, but why do they have to go inside there? Why can’t they just call from wherever they are?”
“What kind of question is that? The telephone is attached to the booth, sweetheart. You put in your two cents, dial your number, and talk.” He watched her face, enjoying her genuine confusion. “What did you think a telephone was?”
She was looking at him like he’d asked her to explain the color blue. “A telephone is . . . it’s just . . . you pick it up. You don’t need a special box or coins or anything.”
The woman in the booth slammed down the handset, stormed out of the booth, and the line shuffled forward. The smell of cigarette smoke drifted over from a nearby stoop where a group of teenagers had gathered around a radio, the thrum of unpleasant dance music barely audible over the static.
“This is completely backwards,” Luna muttered. “What if you have an emergency? What if you don’t have exact change? In my time, phones are . . .” She paused, clearly trying to figure out how to explain something that would sound impossible. “They’re portable. Small. Everyone has one.”
“How small?”
She held up her hand as example. “About like this.”
“No!” Elias laughed. “That’s not big enough! Where would you fit the dial?”
“There is no dial. You just touch the numbers.”
“Touch the what?”
“The numbers.”
“What numbers?”
“The numbers on the screen.”
“What screen?”
“The phone screen.”
He made a face. “How do you screen a phone?”
“Third base!” Luna threw up her hands in exasperation. “Never mind.”
As they meandered toward 6th Avenue, the blackout continued its strange transformation of the city.
Without the usual streetlights, the moon was brighter, and the stars actually visible.
People moved more slowly, spoke more quietly.
Except for the near-constant wail of distant sirens, the street was almost peaceful.
“You know what’s funny?” Luna said eventually. “I’ve traveled all over the world. I’ve studied dozens of different magical systems, worked beside witches and wizards and shamans and sorcerers from every continent. But I’ve never actually talked to a magician before. Not really talked.”
“And?”
“And you’re not what I expected.”
“What did you expect?”
Luna considered this. “Someone more . . . flashy and superficial, I guess. Someone who’d try to saw me in half.”
He shrugged. “The night’s young.”
“Ha, good luck with that.”
As they approached the intersection of West 3rd Street and 6th Avenue, the sounds of revelry grew louder. And when they turned the corner, Elias stopped dead in his tracks.
“What in the Sam Hill . . . ?”
Across the street, in front of what appeared to be a small theater, the most extraordinary gathering he’d ever witnessed was taking place.
About fifty people had assembled on the sidewalk, and every single one of them looked like they’d raided the costume department of a particularly deranged vaudeville house.
A tall figure in the center wore an elaborate corset, fashioned from black leather and studded with metal spikes.
Fishnet stockings climbed impossibly long legs, and a cape that would have made Dracula himself envious billowed dramatically in the humid night air.
The whole ensemble was topped off with wild, teased hair and makeup that belonged either on a stage or in a fever dream.
Around this central figure, the crowd had arranged itself in a wide circle.
The men—well, maybe they were men? Elias wasn’t certain—wore tuxedos and the women—again, maybe—shimmied in elaborate gowns that sparkled under the streetlights, their hair piled high in impossible configurations.
One particularly striking individual, who was seemingly neither female nor male (or both at once?), was dressed in glittering gold from head to toe, happily tap dancing in the middle of the street.
The crowd began to move—not chaotically, but in unison. Choreography. Their voices rose together in some kind of chant or song, though the words were lost in the distance and the ambient noise of the darkened city.
One thing was certain: whatever was happening over there, it was drawing quite an audience. People had begun to gather on their side of the street as well, laughing and calling out encouragement to the performers . . . or worshipers . . . or whatever they were.
“Well,” he straightened his tie, “if we’re going to figure out what’s going on in this godforsaken decade, we may as well start with whatever that is.”