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The streets he walked had borne the brunt of the bombing. The fallout was devastating. These were the same streets the world's most notorious murderer had prowled in the days just before Seth had been born. The famous church bells rang out. At least the old church survived, he thought, not in the least bit sentimental for the place. He hadn't realized where he was walking until he stood outside the old gates and looked up at the nunnery. He rang the bell and waited for the lined face of a world-weary sister to peer through the small hatch. "Got a little 'un here," Seth said. "His mum didn't make it last night." He looked up at the sky as if to blame her passing on the invisible enemy. The old woman leaped to the conclusion he wanted her to leap to and ushered him inside without a word. She led him across the courtyard to the main building. "I figured you'd be best placed to find someone who might be able to nurse 'im, poor scrap. I can't look after 'im." He exaggerated his accent, laying it on thick, then caught his reflection in the mirror and stopped cold. He could have sworn he'd aged a decade since he'd walked between worlds. Gray had crept in at his temple, his crow's-feet deepened around his eyes, and his complexion had gone from ruddy to waxen. The transformation just highlighted how unnatural Damiola's magic had been. Now, looking at his grim reflection, he knew his hours here were marked if he didn't want time to catch up with itself and leave him old before his time. Seth gathered his wits and pushed on. "Maybe some unfortunate mum who lost her little 'un? It'd be good if some good could come out of this." Again he lifted his gaze heavenward.
The old woman nodded. "Of course. We'll do everything we can. We're here to help you and the child." She offered him a practiced smile of sympathy. "Please, sit yourself down. You must be desperate. Let me take the little one." She held out her hands for the swaddled babe.
"I'm not staying," Seth said, handing the boy over. "Take him, find him a good home. I need to go. I can't bear to drag this out, you understand? Just find the boy a good home. I don't want to think of
him suffering."
"What's his name?"
"Gideon," Seth told her. "Gideon Lockwood."
"Pleased to meet you, little Gideon," she said. "I'm Sister Anne. I'm going to take good care of you, I promise." She fussed over the little bundle of joy. Seth left the old woman and the boy, knowing he needed to go home.
He was already halfway down the street before he realized he'd started running.
It struck him then that he didn't even know if he'd be able to step back through the fissure into Damiola's great illusion or if he'd locked himself out of it forever. For just a moment, the silence between heartbeats, when the blood wasn't pounding through his skull, allowed him to think that maybe that wouldn't be such a bad thing. He could make a new life for himself here.
Finding the fissure was easy enough when you knew what you were looking for--and from this side it was obvious how it had come to be. It wasn't some flaw in Damiola's design; it came down to the damage of the German bombs. The building the illusion was anchored to had taken a battering in the most recent wave of blanket bombs, weakening it so much that time had begun to flow back toward the crack, trying to fill it in. Without knowing what you were looking at you'd have been forgiven for thinking it was a smudge on your glasses or a bit of grit in the corner of your eye, making your vision blur ever so slightly. Watching the flight of a bumblebee gave it away, the way the insect's flight stalled then juddered backward as it struggled to escape the gravitational pull of the fissure. The image of the bumblebee repeated itself over and over and then it was gone. Seth wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, looking at the damage the German bombs had done. He felt dread form in the back of his throat, thick with the taste of iron, and sink to the bottom of his gut as he walked on into the rubble. Balancing on the broken bricks was difficult because the ground kept shifting beneath his feet, but he made it across the gap, reaching out a hand to touch the shimmering movie light spilling out of the fissure. He couldn't leave it like this. Someone would see it, even if they didn't understand what they were seeing, and once seen it wouldn't be forgotten. Seth needed people to forget if he was going to truly disappear and ever stand a chance of reemerging from Glass Town into anything approximating his old life.
What could he do, though? It wasn't as if he could rebuild the wall and hide the fissure away, could he?
Even as the thought occurred to him, Seth was on his hands and knees scrabbling around in the debris for pieces of brickwork that might fit together, but like all of the king's horses and all of the king's men, he couldn't put the building together again.
He hurled a huge chunk of plaster at the sliver of glittering blue light and watched it disappear. That answered one of his questions. He could step through, but then what? Find some building tools left over from when Glass Town had been a failed movie set and look to build a fake facade here? That was beyond his ability. But he had money. Money could solve a lot of the world's ills; surely it could hide away a fissure in the fabric of the city from prying eyes.
Seth went to the nearest pub, a seedy little place a couple of streets away, and found a couple of desperate men willing to re-create the front of the Georgian terrace for the promise of good money. Opportunities for men not on the Front were few, so there were plenty of willing souls to bite his hand off when the color of his money proved to be green.
Seth didn't stay in the city to supervise the work. He had to trust them to do what they were paid to do, and gamble that they wouldn't grasp the true nature of that slight smudge that caught every so often in their line of sight. If they did, then he would be waiting for them on the other side, and that would be bad for them.
He didn't return to London proper again for more than twenty years.
They'd kept his secret intact.
The culture shock of returning this next time was extreme. He'd barely changed. For Seth, only a couple of months had passed since he'd last ventured out, but as he slipped between the oblique--that was what he'd taken to calling the fissure, an oblique, as it was like some angle where one world brushed up against the other, allowing him to slip through--he was confronted by an almost alien landscape. All manner of cars lined the road. Streetlights shone down amber on the rooftops. There was a phone booth across the road, a girl in a brightly colored swirl of a miniskirt making a call. Her blond hair was cut savagely straight in a short bob that swished about her shoulders as she laughed at some unheard joke. Seth watched her through the glass wall, but she gave no indication that she'd seen him slip through the oblique from Glass Town, so he put her from his mind. In all the time he'd been gone, the building he'd paid to rebuild hadn't changed very much at all, but then when he looked past the superficial modernization all around him, so much of the other buildings were essentially the same. The more the things changed, the more they stayed the same.
He had limited time here if he didn't want to return to his prison an old man.
He needed to find Cadmus Damiola, if he was still alive, and get him to undo his damnable illusion without costing him his unlived life. There was only one place he could think of that might offer a thread back to the old man and his tricks: the Magic Circle.
Magicians weren't the only ones with tricks; ordinary decent criminals like Seth Lockwood had their own, and when it came to getting into locked buildings, theirs were far more effective than a few mirrors and a bit of smoke for distraction. He'd scavenged a decent set of tools from the back of the movie lot he called home, including the glass cutter he'd used to enter with as little breaking as possible. Now, creeping through the dark corridors, it was about finding whatever clues he could to the whereabouts of that damned magician, and getting out again without seeing another ten years of his life slip away unlived. The building didn't live up to his expectations; it was more like a museum than a home of magic. But then, 99 percent of the illusions housed in it were nothing more than cheap chicanery. Wooden crates lined one of the walls, stamped FRAGILE and THIS WAY UP with arrows pointing at the ceiling, exhibitions yet to be laid out. He made his way through the various displays, reading names he didn't recognize and looking at the tricks that had made them famous, things like the Mismade Girl and Asrah Levitation, the Devil's Torture Chamber and Sands of the Nile, as well as Chen Lee's Water Suspension and the Dagger Head Box. The props offered a candid look up the magician's metaphorical sleeve, but Seth had no interest in the workings of a few old tricks. He moved through the displays, looking for Cadmus Damiola's name on one of the small plaques. Display after display offered up the equipment of the deceased, Thurston and Robert-Houdin, Harry Blackstone, junior and senior, Chung Ling Soo, Sorcar and Kellar, Maskelyne and the great Houdini himself.
He was at the point of giving up and getting out of there when he saw a table with an ancient praxinoscope on it. There was a screen set up beside it and a number of cards cut out in the shapes of various scenes the device would animate on the screen. On the wall beside the display he saw Damiola's face. He had forgotten just how much he loathed the miserable little man; seeing him brought it all flooding back. The short biography ended with the lines: Damiola failed to perform what would have been the last show of his tour, disappearing on the night of January 13, 1924, never to be seen or heard from again. It is believed he fell afoul of notorious figures from London's criminal underworld. His disappearance was linked with that of a young actress, Eleanor Raines, who went missing on the same night. The commonly held belief is that the pair ended their days in unmarked graves somewhere outside the city limits.
If only they knew the half of it, he thought.
It answered the most obvious question, though: forty years on, it wasn't going to be as simple as walking up to Cadmus Damiola's door and demanding he reverse what he'd done. If he wasn't dead, Damiola had done a bloody good job of making it look that way to the rest of the world.
Seth lashed out in anger, toppling part of the display. The praxinoscope lurched, starting to fall. He caught it as the rest of the setup fell and set it down gently. He spun the carousel, watching the figures flicker to life on the screen. They took a couple of faltering steps in a chiaroscuro ballet before the light burned out and left the wall in darkness. He spun it a second time, watching the couple dance on. It was a neat little trick, but nothing close to the kind of thing Hitchcock had been doing in Number 13. The description of the trick was dry, detailing how it had been first invented by Charles-Emile Reynaud in France and how it worked by inserting a strip of pictures around the inner cylinder, the motion of the praxinoscope bringing them to life. He couldn't understand why a piece of junk like this was on display until he saw the twist Damiola had brought to the trick, bringing the animations to three-dimensional life detached from the screen. He had called them the Reels, which sounded positively monstrous to Seth.
Aside from a single inconsequential journal, it was the only thing of Damiola's in the place. The brief biographical sketch described some of his other great illusions, including the Opticron, but suggested they had all been lost or destroyed and that aside from the Reels none of Damiola's other illusions survived.
He didn't realize what he was hearing at first, as the sirens wailed out in the street, but even out of his own time, it didn't take a criminal mastermind to know he needed to get out of there. Fast. He hadn't intended to steal the carousel and its cards, but that was exactly what he did. The cutouts were brittle with age. He slipped them into a manila envelope and took the praxinoscope by the base, making his way back toward the open window up in the gods.
The police could run around like rats down below, Seth thought with a wry smile as he made his escape across the rooftops. Today wasn't the day they'd finally catch up with him. He moved from rooftop to rooftop, following an elaborate pathway of planks he'd put in place to take him out of harm's way. By the time the police emerged, scratching their heads at the bizarre theft of an old trick, Seth Lockwood was long gone.
He needed to think, make an alternative plan.
He couldn't simply wait it out in the '60s--that meant aging forty years if he couldn't find a way to reverse what Damiola had done. Without the magician that wasn't a viable option, not with time catching up with him faster than he could run. No, like it or not, he w
