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for the six stairs to the stage, he heard an audience member hissing, “Look at that kooky old guy, that big white hair! Televangelist showman. Las Vegas!”
    He held his cherished snowy pompadour high. It gave him an ecclesiastical air, he thought. He liked to consider himself as the high priest of magic in a town riddled with cheesy acolytes.
    Chardonnay went through the usual chitchat with him: name, where he was from, what his hobbies were. The audience quickly caught on that he was more than the nightly guinea pig, that he was a noted magician himself, and laughed at his coyly truthful answers.
    “Are you ready to face my mirror of truth and consequences?” she asked at last.
    He glanced over his sober, caped, black shoulder at the gaudy thing. “Of course. I am even more ready to meet myself coming
from
it than going
into
it.”
    That earned a few titters from the audience, and then the gilt-frame door was swinging toward him like a horizontal guillotine aiming at his sutured neck. He ducked when he stepped up to enter the dark space behind the silvered door, thinking the opening might be too small for his height.
    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 hair’s-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