The Gift of Illusion: A Thriller (16 page)

“So, what’s the connection?”

“Where did you find the first body?”
Virginia asked.

Simmons groaned, cleared his throat. “Maria
Avenue.”

Isaac nodded. “Yeah, the little girl.”

“Do you think she could have come across the
statue?”

“Certainly,” said Isaac. “Hold on for a
second.” He hurried out into the garage, opened the door to the
Charger, and grabbed the manila folder from the back seat. He
returned to the living room, removed the photos from the folder,
and handed them to Virginia. “See, up in the left corner on top of
the dresser.”

“When were these photos taken?”

“Shortly after the police and fire
department arrived at the house. Early Tuesday morning, though I
didn’t see the photos until after sunrise, and by the time we got
to the house, the statue was gone. The next morning we found it
with Mr. Ackerman.”

“Okay, then I was right,” said Virginia.
“Did you notice the small park on the corner of Maria and
Fairway?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I’d be willing to bet that is where
the little girl found the statue.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I thought you said the statue came from a
tombstone,” said Simmons.

“The park on the corner of Maria was once a
graveyard.”

“They built a park on top of a graveyard?”
asked Simmons.

Virginia nodded.

Isaac grabbed the book again and looked
closer at the statue and the barren street in the background.
“That’s Fairway?”

“Yeah, it’s changed a lot in sixty
years.”

“I guess it has,” said Isaac. “When was the
park built?”

“I’m not exactly sure. Sometime in the early
sixties, I think.”

“Do you know why?” asked Simmons.

“Supposedly the graveyard was in shambles.
There were weeds as high as the tombstones, those that still stood
that is, and I guess nobody wanted to keep up the maintenance.
Plus, by the sixties the area began to fill with homes and
businesses, and the old graveyard seemed like a bad marketing tool
to grab the interest of investors.”

“What about the descendants?”

“There were none,” Virginia said. “At least
none that made themselves known. You see, there were only four
graves, and all four of them belonged to the same family, with the
oldest grave belonging to Lucius. Oddly enough, the other family
members all died at the hands of a fire, much like these recently.
At the time, many people believed it had something to do with
spontaneous human combustion, but I think we know better now.”

“So you're saying this Lucius character is
responsible somehow?”

“Are you a spiritual man?”

“I could be,” Isaac answered. “I guess it
depends on what you say.”

Virginia took a deep breath. “When he was
alive, Lucius practiced the art of illusion.”

“He was a magician?” asked Simmons.

“No, an illusionist,” Virginia corrected.
“Lucius went beyond simple tricks of the hand. He used to draw
large crowds to his mansion where he would perform on stage, just
like many popular performers of today. But what few people knew was
that Lucius had many dark cells in a chamber below his mansion full
of prisoners. These people were innocent, with no reason to be
locked up other than to become a part of the performance.”

“This is the Mansion at the end of Maria?”
asked Isaac.

“Yes. You've heard of it."

“I've actually seen it from a helicopter
once, but that's the closest I've been. It's buried out there in
the woods. Have you been inside?”

“No. At one time I thought I had enough
courage, this was around the time I started gathering information
for the book, but I quickly found my fear at the doorstep and ran
off. Today I know too much about the place to even consider going
inside. I probably wouldn’t even reach the doorstep.”

“What century was this place built?”

“The latter part of the nineteenth century.
Lucius was born in 1846 and died in 1898.”

“How did he die?” asked Simmons.

“I was just about to get to that. Apparently
his reason for torturing these innocent people was to test the
mortality of man. He wanted to discover the depth of each
individual’s breaking point, the point in which they would gladly
give up life and invite death. So by the time he killed these
people they were more than ready to die, and he thought he was
doing them a favor.”

“Sounds like he carried each one of his
marbles in a separate sack,” Isaac remarked.

“Lucius believed he was immortal, hence the
name of the book, though by his own making he found that not to be
true. During one of his shows, actually his last show, he put his
immortality to the test. That night he used one of his favorite
elements. Fire. And it turned against him."

2

At a quarter past seven, a red Ford pickup
rattled down Hampton Lane. Randy sat behind the wheel eager to get
home and see his fiancé. It had been a long and tiring day, and
Lizzy’s sweet smile was just the medicine he needed. His first week
as a used car salesman was almost over, with only one day left, and
other than yesterday’s unfortunate setback, the sale went over
without a hitch. More than two dozen cars left the small lot with
his signature on the release form, not too bad for a guy used to
working with his hands and not with his mouth, though it would
definitely take some time to get accustomed to the new dress
code.

Randy was a new man now, a man he could
hardly recognize, a man with a steady job and a future to look
forward to, a man with hopes, dreams, and a soon to be wife that
would do anything for him. That is what the new job was about,
something he had to remind himself throughout the week. This was a
chance for the first time in his life to do things right, and make
up for all of the past mistakes.

The brakes squealed as Randy slowed down to
pull into the driveway. He parked the red truck next to Lizzy’s
sedan and clicked off the ignition. As he got out of the truck, he
noticed that all of the lights were off in the house except for the
bedroom light. She must be reading, he thought. Almost every night
around seven, Lizzy would retire to the bedroom to read for a
couple of hours without the disturbance of Randy’s nightly sports
routine. Sometime between nine and ten (when the third quarter came
to an end), Randy would go in and check on her, most nights finding
her asleep with a book across her chest. But since there was no
game on TV tonight, perhaps they could spend the time together.

The minute Randy stepped through the front
door a very sweet but putrid aroma grabbed his attention. His face
puckered up like an infants. The scent was almost intoxicating.

“What in the fuck is that?” he said, walking
into the dark kitchen. He scanned the kitchen counter, along with
the refrigerator and oven, but found no reasonable source for the
stench. Then he left the kitchen and stood for a minute in the
corner between the living room and the hallway.

He called his fiancé’s name but she didn’t
answer. He looked up at the air vents above his head. It could just
be the heater, he thought. If the dust in the ventilation ducts
reached a certain temperature, it could cause a strange smell to
circulate through the house. It has happened before, although never
to such a severe extent.

He called for his fiancé again, louder this
time, but still heard no response. He looked down the hall and saw
a dim light glimmering from underneath the bedroom door. Could she
have fallen asleep already? He headed down the hallway and stopped
in front of the door, listening for any sound (presumably the
television or radio) that could have blocked his voice. At first,
he didn’t hear anything, just the panting of his breath, and then
his fiancé spoke.

“Come in,” she said, her voice soft but
demanding.

Randy slowly turned the handle and opened
the bedroom door. To his surprise, Lizzy lay on her back in the
middle of the bed wearing nothing but a pair of black silk panties.
The light that Randy had thought was from the touch lamp was
actually from a dozen candles uniformly placed around the room. As
he looked his fiancé over, from the sleek heels of her feet, down
her long sloping legs, up the smooth crotch of her black panties,
and further up to the light pink of her nipples, a big smile came
across her face.

A stunned Randy asked: “What are you
doing?”

“What do you want me to do?”

“How come you didn’t answer me?”

“I wanted to surprise you.”

Randy sighed. “Well, I’m definitely
surprised. What is that smell?”

“What smell?”

“That awful smell,” Randy said. “Are you
telling me you can’t smell that? What did ya burn something?”

“Yeah, actually, I did.”

“What the hell did you burn?”

“You’ll see,” Lizzy said. “Now why don’t you
come here? I’ve got something for you.”

Randy walked around the bed and watched his
fiancé pull two of his bandannas, one black and one white, from the
drawer of the nightstand. “What do you want me to do with
those?”

It took him a second to realize her
implications, afterward, he felt like an idiot for asking the
question. He also wanted to slap junior and get him moving, but
maybe she could take care of that, take care of him. Shape up and
let's get a move on soldier, we haven’t got all night. But, oh,
that smell. It’s everywhere.

“You want me to tie you up?”

Lizzy sat up in bed, held her arms out, and
gripped the corners of the headboard. Randy grabbed the bandannas
and proceeded to secure his fiancé’s hands to the headboard. When
they were nice and tight, he began to unbuckle his belt.

“Now why don’t you kiss me?”

Randy stopped dropping his drawers and
leaned over Lizzy’s sleek white body. “What has gotten into you?
I’ve never seen you like this before.”

“It’s the new me,” she said. “Do you like
it?”

Randy nodded.

“Then kiss me.”

Randy leaned in closer to kiss his fiancé,
his body brushing against hers. He could finally feel the little
man coming out of hibernation; he had a head full of steam, like an
old locomotive ready to ride the rails into the station, over and
over again.

After the kiss, Randy quickly backed away as
Lizzy began yanking at the bandannas, cursing at him to try and
help her free her hands from the headboard.

“Why am I tied up? What did you do to me?
Help!”

Randy Wilson (a new man in new skin, a man
hardly recognizable anymore, a man with a new job, a future, a man
with hopes and dreams and a soon to be wife that would do anything
for him) just leaned against the rear wall and enjoyed the show.
This was always his favorite part—watching them beg for life then
surrender to death.

3

The woman, now properly identified as
Virginia Maples, proved to be more helpful than Isaac could have
imagined. She painted a clear picture of what they were up against,
without excluding any of the horrific details. Due to Ms. Maples
unique insight, the case had taken a frightening, though not an
entirely unexpected turn, and for the first time in two days, Isaac
felt confident that they were moving in the right direction. Now
with the origin identified and the target pinpointed, there was
only one question left.
What do we do about this?

It was clear that this would not be your
ordinary trial and convict, after all, this was not your ordinary
serial killer. There was no need for a hearing, a judge, or a jury;
the verdict was already in, and the sentence irreversible. Isaac
had worked dozens upon dozens of investigations, and seen many
strange things, but this one by far was the strangest, and the
scariest. This villain, this
evil,
posed the biggest threat
imaginable, with little or nothing to lose and everything to
gain.

It was almost ten o’clock before Isaac
remembered to call Randy, although with the information he now had,
it seemed pointless. He was already twenty-eight pages into
The
Immortal
and did not want to put it down.

The phone rang five times before the
answering machine clicked on. “Hey man, it’s Isaac. Are you there?”
He waited for a second but no one picked up. “Okay, I guess you’re
not there. I’ll try and get a hold of you tomorrow. Bye.”

He sat back down at his reading post and
removed the folded dollar bill from the black book. Then he began
reading from where he had left off.

From
The Immortal
(pg. 28)

Between 1870 and 1885, Lucius was on the
road routinely performing shows all across the southeast, and
although many of these shows would draw uncommonly large crowds, he
hadn’t enough money to eat, not to mention that most of the money
generated per show went to making the next show that much better.
Being on the road all the time also provided Lucius no steady place
of residence, forcing him to occasionally spend nights with many of
his faithful followers.

Many critics (and he had many) labeled
Lucius as nothing more than a ruthless beggar, seeking only to use
his growing popularity as a stepping-stone to self-charity. Yet,
Lucius took great advantage of these stays to get to know his
audience on a more personal level and dissect each of their fears
one by one. Critics also quickly dismissed him as being an
untalented hack, believing his performance was nothing more than a
well-orchestrated scheme, however, most did give him some credit
for being a superb showman. Indeed, a superb showman he was, though
far from untalented.

It was very common in that time (even in
today’s world) for many so called
ordinary people
to hate
something they could not understand, or find the words to explain,
and Lucius was to even the most astute critic and fan,
unexplainable.