The Magic Touch Read online

  “We’ll make it work,” said the Riverside Jackal confidently.

  “I don’t want just anyone rubbing on my lamp,” the young black man said. “How come we still using lamps nowadays? That’s old. Why not something modern?”

  “What about bottles?” another one asked. “They’re more portable.”

  “Or rings?” chimed in a third.

  “Tradition, my friends,” Froister said, holding out his hands to them. “You’d be surprised how safe a lamp is. There’s hardly any fear of discovery. If you were inside a VCR, you’d change hands six times a week in your neighborhood, wouldn’t you? Yes, of course you would. A bottle? What if someone turns it in to a grocer for the deposit or, horror of horrors, sends it to the recycler to be melted down! Rings? How many people your own age do you know who have been gunned down for a piece of cheap jewelry? And don’t you dare let me hear you suggest that you conceal the essence of your souls in something edible! Ah, but with lamps—lamps are furniture. People ignore them, knock them over, change the bulbs, push the switch, plug in, click, turn on, turn off, and even occasionally dust their lamps, but they hardly ever rub them. Our membership seems to appear accidentally these days only to Polish or Puerto Rican cleaning ladies, and though it takes a lot of … persuasion to run them through their three wishes and get our members out of their thrall,” Froister sighed, “that’s a minimal annoyance. Lamps are safe.”

  “Hey, do you hear something?” Guthrie asked. They all quieted down to listen. A rattle of keys against glass became audible, followed by the creak of door hinges and the slow pace of footsteps.

  “Sst!” Froister said. “My night watchman! I didn’t realize it was so late. Everybody into their lamps!”

  In a moment, the room was empty. A man in an army green uniform shuffled through, looking around suspiciously. He shook his head and kept going out of the showroom toward the door that led into the warehouse. The footsteps diminished in volume.

  Froister manifested himself immediately. “Let’s wrap this up, gentlemen. He’ll be back again.”

  “How come you don’t want him to see us?” the Backyard Wolf asked suspiciously. Froister shook his head patiently.

  “Do you want him telling anyone that the Backyard Wolves and the Riverside Jackals were having a secret meeting in a warehouse? What do you think would be the reaction if word got downtown to the Scarlet Dragons?” he asked reasonably, watching understanding dawn on their gape-mouthed faces. “They’d think you were forming a secret alliance, probably in preparation for a total turf war. They wouldn’t believe the idea that you had been buying a lamp for your girlfriend.”

  “Hey, women! Yeah, women!” another youth asked. “How come there’s no women in this club? Ain’t they allowed?”

  “Oh, certainly. They come and go,” Froister said offhandedly. “It’s rare that a woman of sufficient character appears and wants to join. It takes strength to handle power like ours. You’re welcome to bring in anyone you think is … worthy.” He accompanied this assurance with a feral grin. A few of the young men who thought they understood what he meant, grinned back.

  “Naw, I don’t want to share it with anybody,” Speed, the nose-wiper, said. He clashed bracelets with the man next to him the way they’d seen Froister and Gurgin do. “You give everybody power, where’s your edge? Come on, dudes, let’s go out and score some booze.”

  “Hey, we can score anything!” the Backyard Wolf said. “We can slip under doors when we’re made of smoke.”

  “Yeah,” the Riverside Jackal said, the light of avarice dawning in his eyes.

  The young black man paused. “We gotta be back in the lamps by sunrise, or something? I mean, do we melt or burn up if sunlight hits us?”

  “Why, are you that sensitive to UVA?” Froister asked blandly, and the others laughed. “No. Live your lives as you always do. You’ll come when called—I mean, needed.”

  “Cool, man,” he said. He bent to unplug the cord of the lamp beside him. Bannion grabbed his arm.

  “Hold it. You can’t take that with you.”

  The young man shook loose and bent an uneasy eye toward Froister. “I thought you said these were our lamps.”

  “They are. But they stay here,” Froister said in a tone that brooked no argument, then he softened his voice. “This is a lamp warehouse. Where could they be safer than among thousands?”

  “Yeah, but what if someone tries to rub on us? Or buy them?”

  “I will look after your lamps,” Froister said smoothly, “as I look after my own. Lamps are my business. There’s a top-grade security system here, and no one buys the floor displays without my specific permission. But any of you are welcome to arrange a rotation of standing guard on the lamps if you wish. That would be fine with me.” He looked around amiably from face to face. As he had made no mention of compensation for the service, the initial enthusiasm was not sustained.

  “We don’t have to do that,” the Riverside Jackal said, with a look at the Backyard Wolf to make sure there had better be no reason to have to stand guard. The Wolf nodded, arms folded.

  “I don’t like it, but I get it. The lamps are okay here.”

  “Fine, fine. Come back next week at this same time,” Froister said. “Then, we’ll begin to show you how to make use of your new power. In the meantime, enjoy.”

  The young members went out into the night air, talking in low voices, pushing each other, lighting cigarettes. One or another would occasionally turn into smoke, and re-solidify on the other side of his group of fellows, cackling at his newfound ability. Froister locked the door behind them and set the alarm.

  “Young hoodlums,” he said. “But they’ll be useful.”

  Gurgin smiled. “New blood,” he said avidly. “Get them to swear allegiance before they start asking questions. By then, it’s too late. We have them to do our bidding now.”

  “It’s about time,” DeNovo said. “The IRS is looking into my business again. I need a wish to get them off my back.”

  “You think small.” Gurgin shook his head. “We have bigger plans. We’re going to wish ourselves free. That’s something I’ve been wanting for two hundred years.”

  “We need more kids,” Bannion said. “Thirty is good, but it won’t be enough.”

  “Patience!” Froister said. “It’ll take some care to make use of their power. We have to go slowly so we don’t frighten off the others while they’re waiting their turns. I still think we should have gone for young schoolchildren, more easily controllable. Not these gangbangers.”

  Gurgin smiled again, showing the points of his teeth. “No one will come looking for these if they go missing.”

  Timbulo grinned. “That’s true, Allie,” he agreed, poking Froister in the ribs. “If they become inconvenient, you can ship them off to Taiwan in a container ship.”

  “Not right away,” Froister reminded them. “We need them, and more like them.”

  DeNovo crossed his arms. “The system’s worked just fine for hundreds of years. Why change things now?”

  Froister banged his hand down on the glass-topped table. “That one boy brought up the same point that’s always troubled me: security. I don’t like my fate being so casually affected by others. I’m tired of having to safeguard my lamp day in and day out. I want to be free of the lamp, or any object, free to use our vast magical power for ourselves. To do that, we need power from another source, and we’re moving in on it.”

  “How soon?” Timbulo asked.

  “Soon enough,” Froister said. “You and I just have to be patient, but vigilant. We have to control our new recruits, and be ready to move as soon as I give the word.”

  “That was a smooth move of yours,” Bannion said, “proposing an official merger with the upper-ups from both sides. It almost sounded legitimate.”

  “Well,” Froister said, showing his teeth. “I want access one way or the other. If fair means don’t work, we’ll be ready with foul.”

  “I’m b
etting on foul,” said Timbulo. He looked up. “Did you hear something?” The beam of the flashlight appeared near the open door to the warehouse.

  “He’s coming back,” Froister said hastily. “Meeting adjourned.” The seven men vanished in their disparate puffs of smoke.

  The night watchman hurried into the showroom, and looked around at the twinkling crystal and gold fixtures hanging or standing everywhere. He couldn’t see a single living being.

  He pulled the shortwave radio out of the loop on his hip, flicked it on, and spoke into it.

  “Yeah, Charlie, it’s Dave over at Enlightenment. I heard those voices again, men’s voices. No, nothing’s gone. No signs of a break-in. All the doors were locked. There’s nobody here at all.… I know, I know.… I swear the place must be haunted. I’m quitting this danged job.”

  Chapter 3

  “I mean, we’re not really fairy godmothers,” Ray said as he loped along beside Rose. They were walking down the busy street, and Rose seemed to be looking for something. “You know, not with magic or anything.”

  “What?” Rose asked, stopping short on a corner in the beam of a streetlamp. He all but ran up her heels, and cursed under his breath. She looked distracted, her gaze flicking over the buildings and bushes and lampposts, but not really seeming to see any of them.

  Ray raised his voice over the sound of the traffic. “I mean, this is a benevolent organization or something, what you said. We raise money for needy kids, right?”

  “No, we don’t,” Rose said, as if hearing him for the first time. She turned to meet his gaze, and the sharp, dark eyes looked straight into his. “Remember Cinderella? Remember her fairy godmother, the one who gave her clothes and transportation for the big night of her life? We get a child whatever he or she needs. By magic.”

  “But Cinderella was a kid’s story,” Ray protested.

  “Not at all! Her fairy godmother was one of us, a member of Hochunit 23, in Bavaria, as a matter of fact. It’s still in operation. A lot of the local federations have disbanded for lack of membership, but in many places we’re still going strong. Like here.”

  “We buy clothes for kids?” Ray asked, struggling to hold on to the part of her discourse that he thought he could understand. “Where do we get the money?”

  “We help children more directly than that. Money doesn’t solve every problem, Raymond, not the really important ones. The most important things in life can’t be bought with money. You ought to know that by now.”

  Raymond thought about the car he’d been wanting ever since he got his first bike. That was mondo importante, but Rose’s words brought back other memories, like his father’s face beaming when Ray brought home a high school report card of straight A’s. Never happened again, which made the memory all that more precious. He couldn’t buy that moment back for a million dollars, and he could get fifty great cars for that kind of big bucks. Suddenly, he was back on the street on a hot, noisy night, and Rose was watching him.

  “Yeah, I guess I know,” he admitted, with an uncomfortable shrug. He was trying to keep his vulnerable side hidden from Rose, but it didn’t seem to do any good. She read minds.

  “You’re thinking,” Rose said, patting his arm and smiling up at him. “You’re definitely Mrs. Green’s grandson. That’s where these children need our help, in the self-esteem department a lot of the time, but in other ways, too. Of course we really use magic. Otherwise we’d just be godparents, right? Not fairy godparents.”

  “Right.” Ray still felt lost, but he was sure now it was Rose who was missing on half her cylinders, not him.

  “Right,” Rose said emphatically. A thought struck her, and she turned and pointed to the right, up a side street. “Yes! This way, Ray.”

  He hurried along beside her, the flap-flap of his sneakers hitting the pavement in andante accompaniment to the tick-tick-tick rhythm of her low-heeled shoes. Her legs were about half as long as his, but he had to scurry to keep up with her. “Ma’am, uh, Mrs. Feinstein …”

  She reached out and grabbed his hand again. That seemed to be something she did. He’d just have to live with it, or quit and go tell his grandma he couldn’t stand working with an old white lady. “Call me Rose, honey.”

  “Rose. Thank you, ma’am. Uh, where are we going?”

  “First stop of the night.”

  “But where is it?” He looked up the street. Like miles and miles of other residential streets in Chicago, including the one he lived on, this one was full of brick or stucco houses, apartment blocks, and six-flats. Old-fashioned light poles topped by new, hot yellow sodium vapor lights shone at the corner and in the middle of every block, illuminating mail boxes, trees, little squares of grass surrounded by swinging chains, and bumper-to-bumper lines of parked cars on both sides of the street. The overhead El tracks cut through the neighborhood about three blocks away. “What’s the address?”

  “I don’t know,” Rose said, with a sharp look. She raised her hands to stave off another question. “All right. Lesson one. We go where we’re needed, where a child needs us. How do we find the child?”

  Raymond shrugged. More mysticism. She sounded like she was putting him on, but she was all business.

  “I dunno.”

  “This is how you find out. Take out your wand.”

  “No!”

  Rose looked impatient. “This is lesson one. You’re my apprentice. Take out your wand.”

  Raymond looked around. There were people everywhere, some of them walking up the street between them right now. The wand was a puking, wimp thing, about eight inches long, painted baby blue. The little star on top had rounded points. He wanted to keep it right where it was, deep in his jacket pocket.

  “No, ma’am.”

  Rose sighed. “All right, I’ll do it.” She reached into her handbag and drew forth a slender rod. Ray goggled, watching the thing getting longer and longer and longer. The bag was no more than seven inches deep, but the wand had to be a good foot and a half. In keeping with her name, it was rose-colored, and the star at the top gleamed and glistened silver, gold, and pink. Ray tried to study it, to find out how it made those moving rainbows even though the nearest light was a stationary streetlamp.

  A man pushed by them, briefcase held out ahead of him to clear the way, too busy to say “Excuse me.” Ray stepped in front of Rose to hide the wand.

  “Hey, put that thing away,” he murmured out of the side of his mouth. “People are going to think we’re crazy.”

  “They can’t see it, Ray,” Rose said with a motherly smile, stepping out from behind him. “All they can see is our hands. Wands are invisible while we’re on duty. They probably think I’m asking you for directions. Watch me.” She took the end between her fingertips and extended the star in a broad arc. “When I hold the wand out like this, I can feel need strings. Each string is attached to a child who has a longing.”

  Ray put his hands in his pockets and bent down to see. He peered closer, expecting to see the same veil of light the Blue Fairy spread on them at the union meeting. “I don’t see any strings.”

  “You can’t see them unless you have your own wand out.” Ray dug his hands deeper into his pockets. “Don’t worry,” Rose promised him. “Nothing bad will happen. That’s just a training wand. It doesn’t have enough pfft”—she blew through her lips—“to break a soap bubble, but it’ll teach you everything you need to move on to the real thing.”

  “Yeah, right.” Ray put all the skepticism he felt into two words. Rose smiled at him encouragingly. She must think the craziness was catching. At last, he reached into his pocket.

  The baby wand had looked like a painted pencil when he got it in the guildhall, but when he took it out this time he felt a kind of electric shock. “Wow!”

  Rose nodded, studying him critically. “You’ve got the aptitude. No question about it.”

  Ray whisked the small stick through the air and felt texture there, as if he was running it over a ridged surface. Impossible.
He tried it some more to make sure he wasn’t simply imagining the sensation. It was real. Magic really existed? He goggled at Rose, but she just nodded encouragingly at him to try it again, so he continued to wave the stick around. After a few moments, he began to get a feel for the shape of the air. Some of the bumps were higher than others. The high ones were more intense-feeling than the low ones. He deliberately stopped with the wand resting on a high, and felt the thrill of tension.

  “This is weird! How come I didn’t feel this before, when I got it?”

  “We suppress a lot in the hall,” Rose said. “Otherwise the roof would blow off.” Raymond let scorn and disbelief show on his face. She shrugged. “It happened once. Ask your grandmother. She was there.”

  He’d rather have dropped dead right there on the sidewalk than ask Grandma the kind of question she might answer with that look, so Raymond just returned his attention to the feeling he got holding the wand. A nice sensation. He should have been terrified of it, but the wand wouldn’t let him. He couldn’t fear it if he tried. He liked it. Rose was right, there was nothing bad in the wand. He didn’t know how he knew that, but he just did. The feeling reached way down inside him and lit him up like springtime. He smiled and let out a deep breath.

  “That’s good,” he said.

  “That’s exactly what it is.” Rose nodded firmly. “It’s good. You have a lot inside you, and it resonates.”

  “Aw, come on,” Ray said, embarrassed. The sensation faded just a little, and he felt bereft at the loss. He clutched the little pencil-wand more tightly. Rose stared off into space, her eyes half-closed.

  “There’s that verse, by Tennyson I think, about Sir Galahad. Ever hear it? ‘My strength is as the strength of ten, because my heart is pure.’”

  Ray gawked at her. “Bullshit,” he said.