"Edghill,.Rosemary.-.SS.Collection.-.Murder.By.Magic.v1.0.txt" - читать интересную книгу автора (Edghill Rosemary)

But nothing impeded him, and in a moment the door swung its matte-black-painted interior shut on him with a finalizing snap.
He turned at once, feeling up ... down . . . around for any panel that might give.
Nothing did. In fact, he felt no edges of anything, no limits.
Surprised, he took a step or two forward. Or four or five. Six, seven, eight! Backward. Sideways. Nothing. And he could hear nothing, no muffled covering lines from Majika while the transfers were accomplished inside the mirrored cabinet. No transfers were accomplished. He couldn't even feel the cabinet jolted and manipulated by her accomplices as they spun the unit on the stage.
Nothing spun but his own baffled speculations. No way could such a paltry cabinet be so vast inside. No way, no illusion . . .
He was in a void. A soundless, motionless void. Not a hairs-width of light entered or escaped that void. It was as pitch-black as a childhood confessional booth.
Used to mentally tracking time, Marlon tried to tote up the seconds, minutes, he had been thus isolated. He couldn't compute it. Had no idea. His every expertise failed him here.
He would have pounded on the cabinet walls, broken the illusion, if he could have. But there was nothing to pound upon except the solid floor upon which he stood. Upon which he stood. He stamped an angry foot, a child having a tantrum. No sound, not even the pressure of an impact.
He searched his throat for a cry of protest or fear, but found it too tight and dry to respond to his panic.
And then, just like in that long-ago confessional, a small square of gray appeared in the darkness.
"At last! Where have you been?" he demanded. "There can't be much time to make our reappearance together."
"Time?" asked an odd, wheezing voice. "What's that? Be still. I need to absorb you."
Absorb him? "It's a little late for Method acting," he fussed. "If you can't do a reasonable impression of me right now, this entire illusion is ruined."
Hmmm. A botched illusion wouldn't do much for Majika's hot new career. Perhaps this mess-up was for the best. One less rival was one less rival. "Where do we exit this crazy thing? I'm first."
"And the first shall be last," the wheezing voice noted, laughing soundlessly, or rather, with something like a death rattle.
"I don't understand," he said.
"This is where she fulfills her bargain. I have provided the faces and bodies of hundreds of mortal souls for her nightly exhibitions. It was always understood that I, the eternally shifting one, should eventually acquire a mortal body and soul of my own and escape this endless lonely dark."
Perhaps his eyes had finally adjusted to the sliver of gray light that shared the darkness with him. He imagined a wizened, warty figure not at all human, as perhaps the cat-suited and masked ninja men might look if stripped of their shiny black skins.
The glimpse was enough to convince him that this was no derelict hired double, but something far less ordinary.
"You're a genie," he guessed, "like in a lamp, only in a mirror. And she found you somehow and you gave her a wish, her resurrection as a youthful woman and a magician, only she had to promise you . . . something."
"Not very much." The tone implied the creature had been studying him and found him wanting. "I did require a soul that had squeezed itself bare of attachments to this world, that had shriveled enough that there would be room for me to expand."
"You can't just . . . take me over!"
"Ah, but I can. That is my sole talent. I can replicate any being, any body. I got into trouble about that millennia ago, and some wicked magicianЧa real oneЧsentenced me to my lonely mirror."
"What kind of demon are you?"
"Explaining that would take too long. Although time is endless for me, I see by the spinning of my senses that we are expected to make our appearances upon the stage. I will warn you about one thing: my gift of replication responds only to the genuine. I can't control that. So it is and so shall you be and so shall I be when I become you. But freedom is worth the price."
"Freedom! And you would imprison me in your place? For eternity? No mortal soul deserves that."
"You are right." The creatures gray aura faded as it appeared to think.
Marlon knew a moments relief and a sudden surge of hope for a new life, a better life, a kinder, gentler life. It was not too late . . .
"I will not abandon you to the dark," the croaking voice whispered, very near now, but no more visible. "I will not deprive you of your beloved limelight. I am a master of transformations, and I can manage that. Watch and believe."
Marlon . . . Merlin the Magnificent. . . found himself blinking like a tourist under a bank of gel-covered spotlights. Red, blue, green they blazed, Technicolor stars in an artificial sky.
He was . . . himself. Standing on a stage as he did almost every night, and Majika was lifting one graceful arm to indicate his presence. His reappearance from the box. His deliverance. His rebirth. I will be good, 1 will, I will. Well, better.
He took the stage, spread his arms and cape, rejoiced in the magic of his vanishing and recovery.
Applause.
And then more applause, accompanied by fevered whispers and then shouts of wonder.
Majika had thrust her left arm out to introduce the second half of the illusion, the other Merlin the Magnificent standing on her other side.
Marlon turned his eyes uneasily, expecting to see the gray, shriveled, scrofulous thing from the dark.
Instead, he saw a tall, white-haired man in fanciful evening dress ... a man whose snowy mane had dwindled to a few threadbare strands . . . whose lumpy frame slumped like an overstuffed sack of extra-large baking potatoes . . . whose neck had become a jowly wattle, whose eyes were sunk in ridges of suet flesh.
For the first time he truly felt the horror in the story of Dorian Gray. Gray!
And before he could do or say anything, or even make a few more frantic mental promises to what or whom he couldn't say, before he could even take in the enormity of it all and the loss that loomed before him, the foul thing moved toward himЧthe man he was before he had changed his own mirror imageЧand sank into him like fog, or like an exiled part of himself.
Marlon drowned in the engulfing presence of Merlin, a Merlin cursed to live and die looking exactly as Marlon had not allowed himself to look, and happy for that.
Where Marlon went he couldn't say. It was dark. And narrow. And he heard and felt nothing and knew he'd go mad if he was kept here.
And then . . . slap! Snap! A sharp small sound and the world exploded again with light and applause. He gulped a deep, anxious breath of light-heated stage air, lifted his head, and almost sniffed the sound of the applause. It was thunderous. Better than ever. He'd survived whatever nightmare the mirrored box had put him through.
Then it became too much. The continuing racket crashed on his sensitive ears. He shrank again, cowered, even as Majika lifted her arm the better to display him to the admiring audience.
His heart pounded against the palm of her hand.
His long white hair was full and thick again, luxurious, and she stroked it with her other hand.
Majika's giant face stared down with piercing eyes. His sensitive ears flattened at the horrid screeching of her voice in the microphone as she displayed her triumph of illusion: him.
Her face came close, smiling.
"You've been such a good boy tonight, Marlon," she whispered giddily as if to a confrere, "you'll have extra veggies in your after-show supper, and maybe even a big carrot from Mr. MacGregor's garden."
While his ears and tail drooped with self-recognition, he spied his former form, now bent and shuffling, hastening out of the theater before the crowd began its rush for the exits.
Doppelgangster