The green man took a deep bow, then unlatched the lid and threw it open. He stretched to his full height and stepped off the platform. Weighted down by the heavy boots, the Martian Magician sunk to the bottom of the tank. For one long moment, he stood absolutely still, staring out through the glass at the audience.
Gus knew this was a trick. He understood that everything Shawn had said was right. But as he watched the green man standing patiently at the bottom of a tank of water, he could feel the pounding of his heart, the thin trickle of sweat on his palms. His lungs began to ache for air, and he realized he’d been holding his breath since P’tol P’kah slipped under the water.
“This can’t be part of the trick,” Gus whispered to Shawn. “There’s got to be something wrong.”
“That’s what you’re supposed to think,” Shawn said.
“Well, I’m not the only one here who’s good at taking instruction.” Gus gestured at the crowd of bachelor partyers. They were staring, transfixed, worry on their faces. Even some of the magicians in the room were beginning to look concerned.
“We should do something,” Gus said.
“You’re right,” Shawn said. “If we left now, we could beat the rush to the parking lot.”
Before Gus could respond, there was a gasp from the audience. He turned back to the stage to see that the water in the tank had changed. Before it had been perfectly still. Now it bubbled and frothed like a glass of cheap champagne. As Gus stared, he realized that the bubbles were coming from the green man’s body.
P’tol P’kah raised his hands over his head, sending a storm of froth rising to the surface. As the bubbles flew from the green fingertips, Gus saw with a shock that the fingers were shrinking. No, dissolving. Within seconds, they were gone down to the first two knuckles, and quickly the hands were reduced to clublike stumps.
The green man lowered one deformed hand to touch his stomach, and immediately the bubbles began fizzing out of his abdomen. But they didn’t rise to the top of the tank. They spun around, as if caught in a whirlpool. And when they cleared, Gus could see they had eaten a hole clear through P’tol P’kah’s midsection.
This has to be a trick, Gus told himself. Shawn must be right. But he didn’t see a trick. What he saw was a giant man dissolving like an Alka-Seltzer tablet. Where moments before there had been rock-hard green abs, now there was a void. And it was growing in all directions, devouring his chest, his hips, his shoulders. His arms, eaten from both sides, fell off his body and dissolved into bubbles before they hit the tank floor. All that was left was the grinning green head floating seven feet over the enormous black boots.
The bubbles were working on P’tol P’kah’s chin now. Before they could reach any higher, the green man opened his mouth as if to speak-or to scream. But what came out wasn’t just a blisteringly loud roaring sound. It was light, a blast of pure white light that lit up every corner of the showroom, blinding Gus temporarily-but not before he could see the stunned faces of everyone in the audience.
Then the light went out, and the room was plunged into darkness.
For a moment the room was so silent, Gus thought he might have been struck deaf as well as blind. And then he heard a sound from across the room. He was so stunned by what he had just seen, it took his brain a few seconds to understand that what he was hearing was the clapping of hands. At first, it was just one person, but soon the entire auditorium had erupted into wild applause and cheers.
Gus knew exactly what he should be doing at this very moment. He should be constructing the perfect pithy phrase to shoot at Shawn, something that would take all his friend’s premiracle jibes and throw them back in his face
But Gus didn’t feel like lording it over Shawn. He didn’t want to win an argument or grab a few well- deserved points. All he wanted was to luxuriate in the moment. Before he even started the inevitable-and inevitably futile-process of trying to figure out how P’tol P’kah had achieved this impossibility, Gus wanted to replay the moments in his mind and marvel over the vision.
As the cheering started to subside, the houselights flickered on. Gus turned instinctively to the spot in the crowd where P’tol P’kah had promised to materialize. He wanted to see the giant take his much-deserved bows.
But P’tol P’kah wasn’t where he said he would be. No one was. The magicians surrounding the spot had kept it clear, just in case, and the entire audience was staring at the empty hole in the crowd, but the giant hadn’t materialized. The applause faded away to a confused muttering.
Gus tried to ignore the minor disappointment. After all, the Martian Magician had dissolved in a tank of water. If he didn’t stick the landing, that didn’t take anything much away from the rest of the performance. But he knew that Shawn was going to start mocking the show any minute now.
“If you’ve figured it out, you can say anything you want,” Gus said, not even casting a glance at Shawn. “Until then, I don’t want to hear that it was cheap or cheesy or fake. Because I’ll know you’re not telling the truth.”
Shawn didn’t answer. Which was odd, because in all the years they’d been best friends, Gus couldn’t remember a single time when Shawn didn’t answer a taunt. Even when he’d had strep throat and couldn’t talk for days, he’d scrawl a response on a piece of paper, or at least hit Gus with a rolled-up magazine.
Gus turned to Shawn and saw that his friend was staring straight at the stage, a look of pure fascination on his face.
“A-ha!” Gus said. “You can’t even pretend you’re not amazed. That was much better than you thought it would be, and you can’t figure out how he did it.”
“I am amazed,” Shawn said. “But I don’t think I’m amazed by the same thing you’re amazed by.”
“You mean the fact we just saw a giant green man dissolve into bubbles?” Gus said. “That’s not what you’re amazed by?”
“No.”
Even for Shawn this was a ludicrous level of stubbornness. Gus wanted to shake him until the truth dropped out onto the floor. “If you’re not amazed by the sight of a giant green man dissolving into bubbles, then would you please be so kind as to explain exactly what does amaze you?”
Somewhere in the auditorium, a woman screamed. “Oh my God, he’s. ..”
Gus whirled around and saw that the woman was pointing at the stage. The rest of the crowd was turning to see what she was pointing at. Gus followed them.
The tank was simple, a glass rectangle ten feet tall and four feet across with steel brackets reinforcing the corners and a metal lid on the top. It towered over the audience in the middle of an empty stage that was raised three feet above the showroom’s threadbare rug.
On the tank’s floor stood a pair of enormous, empty black boots. And at the top of the tank floated a bowler hat. This might have been only of passing interest, except that the hat sat on a head, and that head was attached to a portly body clad in a three-piece suit. And the head and body were both obviously dead.
“That’s what amazes me,” Shawn said.
Chapter Seven
Detective Carlton Lassiter hated the full moon.
Not the moon itself, of course. The head detective of the Santa Barbara Police Department knew that it was nothing more than a hunk of rock spinning in orbit around Earth, and aside from a moment of weakness during Apollo XIII when he shed a tear for the astronauts who were never going to reach it alive, he’d never been able to work up any kind of emotional reaction to it.
It wasn’t the psychological effect the full moon had on people that he hated, either. He knew that there was no way that human psyches could be affected by the percentage of shadow Earth cast on its lone satellite in a given time of the month.
What Lassiter hated was the belief shared by so many losers and lowlifes that the full moon had some bizarre power over their behavior. He hated the way they used the monthly lunar phase to justify abandoning the inhibitions they barely managed to hold in check the other twenty-nine or thirty days. And while there was only a relative handful of miscreants who felt compelled to submit to the lunacy, there were far more people who believed that crazy things happened when there was a large orb shining down instead of a thin sliver, so they started seeing them-and worse, reporting them to the police.
