Helpline II: The Lab
By Czolgolz: [email protected]
copyright 2000


I stood before the plain metal door with its simple handwritten sign: Magic Co—lab.  I took a deep breath to steel myself.  I wasn’t sure what I was about to get into, I had never done anything like this in my life.  Bracing myself, I knocked on the door.
A  young, semi-handsome guy answered.  “Chet?” I asked.  “I’m Jo.”
“Ah, Jo, from the helpline, right?  I was wondering if I’d ever meet you in person.”  We shook hands.  “So what brings you by?”
“There was a Wringer screw-up in California.  She’ll be arriving in tomorrow’s mail.”
“Another one?  I’m going to have to think up a way to fax those girls over here.  She’ll be the fifth this month.”
“At any rate, the magician needs an assistant.  And H.P. asked if I could fill in for her.”  There, I said it.  Being a magician’s assistant meant more than wearing a skimpy costume and picking cards.  Since the magician had assured us he only used authentic Magic Co. products in his act, it meant that I’d probably wind up in two or more pieces, vanished and restored, and possibly transformed into an animal.  Plus, there was the matter of transportation…
Chet smiled.  “Come on in.  I’ll get you squared away.”
I followed him into the lab.  I was rather impressed at the high-tech, sterile environment inside.  It looked like some Pentagon weapons research lab; not the R&D of a magic supply company.
Chet read my thoughts.  “Impressive, eh?”
“I’ll say.  I guess I was expecting ‘eye of newt and tongue of frog.’
“Well, let me give you the grand tour.”
The first place he led me to was a wide, spotlessly clean, workbench.  The lone object on the surface appeared to be a life-sized photo of a young woman.  She looked to be about twenty; blonde, lightly freckled, and pretty.  She was wearing tight pants and a sequined bikini top.  She was smiling, with one hand extended in the air, like she was motioning to something.
“Jo, I’d like you to meet Suzanne.  Suzanne, Jo.”  Suzanne obviously said nothing.  While the layman might mistake her for a cardboard figure or a big photo, those of us in the know knew that we were looking at a real woman.  She’d just been flattened until she was no thicker than a towel.
Chet picked up her limp, floppy wrist.  “Suzanne works a show in Vegas.  Three days ago she was fed through the Wringer.  Then some idiot stage hand crashed a hand truck into it backstage.  Her partner didn’t want to risk sending her through a damaged machine, so he mailed her here.  We should have her back to normal by tomorrow.”
I gently touched Suzanne’s cheek.  It always gave me the creeps how lifelike the seemingly inanimate Wringer victims felt: warm, soft, and skin-like.  It was more than a little frightening to know that I’d look like that in less than an hour.
“So,” I asked, “why do so many people have trouble with the Wringer?”
“Beats me.  It’s like it’s jinxed or something.  If these ladies weren’t so easy to restore, I’d recommend a complete recall…jeez Louise, look at this!”  He walked over to a nearby desk and picked up something from an ‘in’ basket.
I watched as he ripped the Manila envelope open.  I wasn’t too terribly shocked when a woman no thicker than a piece of cardboard slid out.
I straightened her out as Chet read the enclosed letter.  She was an undeniably pretty brunette, but at the same time she seemed too old to be an assistant.  She looked well over forty.  She was dressed in work clothes and had an utterly dumbfounded expression on her frozen face.
“Cleaning woman,” mutter Chet.  “Must have been dusting or something, the magician found her like this on the floor of the storeroom.  So what does he do?  Just sticks her in an envelope and expects us to make everything OK!  Crap, I’m going to be here all night.”
I tried to make the woman as comfortable as I could.  “Don’t worry,” I whispered in her paper-thin ear.  “Chet will put you back to normal.  You’re in good hands.”
Chet grinned and motioned me over to another part of the lab.  This area seemed full of cages, ranging from shoebox-sized to an enclosure that could comfortably hold a tiger.  There were several fish tanks as well.  Only one of the kennels was occupied.
I looked closely at the small box.  Inside was a beautiful, dark-green parrot.  Taped to the box was a Polaroid of a petite Asian woman smiling sweetly for the camera.  I looked closely at the bird.
“Yes,” said Chet, “that’s her.  Her partner brought her in yesterday.  The animal transformation trick is usually reliable, but sometimes the unforeseen happens.”
The parrot seemed to be looking at me intently.  “What’s her name?”  I asked.  Chet seemed embarrassed.  
       “Polly.”  I suppressed a giggle.
       Chet knocked on a side door of the lab.  It opened a crack and the head of another techie emerged.
       “Hey Chet.”
       “Hey Mark.  This is Jo.  What’cha doing in there?”
       Mark sighed.  “Twister malfunction.  I’ve about got it fixed.”
       “Mind if we watch?”
       Mark ducked his head back into the room.  “There’s a couple of other technicians out here,” I heard him say.  “Do you mind if they come in?”
      “Yeah, sure,” came a female voice from within.
I walked into the back room and found myself face to face with an odd looking device.  It was a box the size of a refrigerator, with a door in the front.  Inside, I could see that the box was divided into three sections.  The topmost was small, and contained the head of a very bored looking woman.  The bottom section contained her bare feet.  The middlemost section was about four feet high and contained what appeared to be a length of hose.  Upon  closer inspection, I realized I was looking at what was left of the woman’s body.  I knew the trick.  The woman steps into the cabinet.  The door is shut and the middle section is twisted round and round.  When it is opened again, the woman’s body has been wound so tight that is no bigger around than a tree branch.
Mark was working furiously on the back of the machine.  “The mainspring’s busted.  Poor Marcela has been like this for…how long?”
“About sixteen hours,” the woman replied.  She looked as if she were at the end of her patience.
I examined Marcela’s body.  I could make out the area where her legs had twisted together, the blue area where what appeared to be a one-piece swimsuit began, and the stumps of her protruding fingers.  
“How do you feel?”  I asked her.
“Constricted.  But not too bad, I guess.  I’ve been an assistant for quite some time, this isn’t the worst situation I’ve been in.”
“Ready!” shouted Mark, as he slammed the front of the cabinet.  We stepped back.  Mark grabbed the upper part of the box and began turning.  Marcela’s head rotated 360 degrees about ten times before stopping.  When Mark opened the door, she stepped out, dizzily, but fully reformed.
“Step into reception,” said Chet.  “They’ll get you some clothes and set you up with a hotel room for the night.”  Woozily, Marcela left the room.
Mark rubbed his eyes.  “What time is it?”  he asked, groggily.  
Chet looked at his watch “Two AM.  How long has it been since you’ve slept?”
Mark counted on his fingers.  “Two days, three hours.”  Without preamble, he laid down on the floor, pulled his toolbox under his head, and was snoring within five seconds.  Chet turned off the lights and we returned to the main lab.
“How come he’s working such a nasty schedule?”
“We all do,” said Chet with a sigh.  “That’s why the money’s so good.”
“But H.P. could afford to hire more help.”
“Afford, sure,” replied Chet, pouring some birdseed into Polly’s dish.  “But there’s only about half a dozen of us who can fix the equipment correctly.  Then there’s the matter of hiring people he can trust not to reveal company secrets.  Not to mention people who wouldn’t take advantage of women in such helpless states.”
I persisted.  “But that doesn’t mean you have to go without sleep for two days!”
“Yes it does.  Take Marcela for instance.  Could Mark really have told her to wait while he took a nap?  Some women, like Polly or Suzanne can spend a few days in their new forms.  Others we have to get to immediately.”
“I see your point.  God, I had no idea how hard this job was.”
“You don’t know the half of it.  Look here.”  He motioned to a large object covered in a sheet.  He uncovered it with a flourish, revealing a lifelike marble stature of a woman.  She was slender, well proportioned, and wearing a lab coat.
“I take it this is no ordinary statue?”
“Nope.  I’d like you to meet Dr. Sanders, my supervisor.”
“What happened to her?”
“A month ago she was working on a derivative of the petrification illusion.  She apparently succeeded, but since she neglected to leave any lab notes, we don’t know how to bring her back.  We’ve been spending all our spare time dismantling her machine to figure out how it works.”
“I bet she’ll be thankful when you’re through.”
Chet replaced the sheet over the stone woman.  “Well, maybe then we can talk about the Christmas bonus.”
“Does this sort of thing happen often?”  I asked, wondering if Dr. Sanders was aware of her condition.
“You’d be surprised.  I don’t think there’s a single employee here who hasn’t ended the work day looking quite different from when they came in.”
“Including you?”
Chet looked very embarrassed.  “C’mon, out with it,” I prodded.
“You have to swear not to tell anyone what I’m about to show you.”  Intrigued, I agreed.
Chet dug into a file cabinet until he found an innocuous folder.  “Promise not to laugh?”  I consented, wondering what I was about to see.
“Last year, around Christmas, this magician comes in.  Real good guy.  Seems his assistant, Linda, had entered one of the transportation cabinets and never came out the other one.  I’m screwing around with the trick, trying to locate her, and poof! I get zapped to the other side.”
“And then what?”  
       Chet handed me a photo of a brown-skinned young woman.  She had big, dark eyes, short black hair, and looked very angry.  She was wearing what seemed to be extra-large men’s clothes.”
“Is that Linda?”  I asked, confused.
“Well…it’s Linda’s body.”  
Suddenly it hit me.  “That’s you!  Oh my God!”
“Go on, laugh it up.”
“No, I’m sorry.  It’s just that I just had a phone call from the wife of a guy who’s going through the same thing.”  I was trying very hard not to break into gales of laughter.
“Poor bastard.  I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.”
“Well, you look cute here.”  I handed him back the picture.  “So how long were you like that?”
“We couldn’t get the real Linda back for two weeks.  But that’s not the worst of it.”  He handed me another picture.  This one was of the same woman, now on stage.  She was dressed in a skimpy showgirl outfit, complete with feathered headdress.  
“The magician needed an assistant that week.  And since I looked exactly like his partner…”  This time I couldn’t keep the laughter inside.
Chet snatched the photo back.  “Can we talk about something else?”  he pleaded.
I pecked him on the cheek and allowed him to lead me to another section of the lab.  On what appeared to be an operating table, the torso of a woman rested.  It was clothed in a halter-top.  She had been skinny, and rather dark complected.  Her stomach heaved in and out with her breathing.  Her severed ends were covered with surgical gauze.
“This is Dulce.  Or should I say ‘was.’  This was supposed to have been the ‘Disembodied Girl’ trick, but instead of her torso vanishing, it stayed.  Everything else disappeared.”
“How hard will it be to bring her back?”
“It won’t be easy.  To tell you the truth, I’ve never seen anything like this before.”
I glanced around the lab, but didn’t see any evidence of women, or partial women.    
       “Is that all?” I asked.
“Almost.  Come here.”  He led me over to a computer and pulled up an image on the screen.  It was a sketch of a laughing, smiling woman.  “Who is she?”  I asked.
“I have no clue.  All we know is she was an audience volunteer.  An amateur magician made her vanish and couldn’t bring her back.  All we have to go on is this sketch another audience member made from memory.  We were hoping someone would report her missing, but so far, no one has.”
I looked at the pencil drawing of the twenty-something girl.  I wondered where she was right now, and if anyone noticed she was gone.  I felt strangely hollow inside, knowing this poor person had vanished without a trace and no one had noticed.
Chet laid a hand on my shoulder.  “Don’t worry.  We’ll get her back.  We always do.”
I didn’t want to think about it any more.  “So does anyone ever home in here on their own two feet?”
Chet grinned, and motioned me over to a glass panel.  It was obvious we were looking into a one-way mirror.  On the other side, we could see a waiting room with four people in it.
The first person to catch my eye was a comely black woman in an evening gown.  She had her arms folded and was tapping her foot irritably.  Next to her sat a man in a tux, despondently trying not to look in her direction.  The obvious source of contention was the fact that the woman had absolutely no sign of a head.  Nothing above the neck.
Chet chuckled.  “The Headless Princess.  We’ll be able to fix her up in no time, but when she lays into the magician, he’ll probably wish she was still headless.”  I looked back at the woman.  Even with no face, it was obvious she was quite angry.
The other two people in the lounge were a pair of college-age women.  One was wearing a white blouse with a black skirt and shoes, the other was wearing a black top with white pants and shoes.  They kept looking at each other out of the corners of their eyes.
“The double sawing,” Chet explained.  “They now have each other’s lower halves.”
“So I guess, technically, they didn’t walk in her on their own two feet.”
Chet smiled.  “Well, looks like another all-nighter for me.  So if you don’t mind…”  he motioned to the machine known as the Wringer, which was parked in a corner.
“I’ve never done this before.”
“You’ll be all right.”  Dubiously, I opened the top and climbed inside.

A few minutes later, Chet was holding me up in front of a mirror.  “Nice work, eh?”  he said.  ‘Nice’ might not have been the word I would have used to describe it, but it was amazing.  I was now a bed sheet.  Chet was holding me by the top of the head, as I swung gently in the breeze.  I no longer had any sense of body; I knew I weighed about two pounds, max.  I was now a prop, no one but Chet would think I was a real woman.
“Jo, it’s been a pleasure.  I hope you’ll come back to visit us some time.”  He spread me out between Suzanne and the cleaning woman, and addressed an envelope.  “I’m going to overnight you,” he said as he folded me up.  You’ll get there by tomorrow afternoon.”
I felt Chet seal the envelope.  Then I had the sensation of being carried.  A rusty creak indicated a public mailbox was being opened.  I felt myself be dropped inside.  Then all was silent.