Filler
(Talisman part VIII)
 
By D. Monster
 
“This sucks!”
 
“Hngghuh?”  Lloyd lurched awake and sat up, sending the cat that had been lying in his lap screaming for the door. 
 
“Sorry Hart!” he called to the retreating feline.  Shaking his head to clear the cobwebs from his brain, he turned to his wife, who sat next to him looking peeved.
 
“You picked the movie out.  Why do you get to skip the pain of watching the infernal thing?”
 
“We’re watching a movie?”
 
“Yes!”  Kate gestured toward the flickering screen.  “And it’s AWFUL!”
 
“What is it?”
 
“You picked it…oh, for goodness sake!”  She grabbed the box the tape had come in and shoved it under his nose.
 
He studied it for a moment and was about to explain to her that it was a classic, but decided that it might be politic not to belabor that point.  “Should I turn it off?”
 
A raised eyebrow told him all he needed to know.
 
“And you?”  He looked over to Prita, who lounged in a recliner with a look of wry amusement on her face.  She was absently stroking her swollen belly and Lloyd could tell that she’d probably been paying less attention to the movie than he had.
 
He snapped his fingers and the television clicked off.  Prita started and looked up in surprise. 
 
“Everything okay?”  Kate’s tone had switched instantly from irritation to gentle concern.
 
“She kicked,” said Prita, who paused and then smiled.  “I think that Callie liked that movie.”
 
Good girl, thought Lloyd.  “How would she know…”
 

“She knows.”
 
Lloyd looked puzzled.  Or sleepy.  Or both.  But Prita continued.
 
“I suppose that she can hear most of what we say, even if she isn’t necessarily fully conscious of it.  She’s a definite presence, and I can feel her lurking at the edges of my thoughts sometimes.  I wouldn’t be surprised if she sees through my eyes and rummages through my memories occasionally.”
 
“Does that bother you at all?”
 
“No.  I want her to do whatever she needs in order to feel whole again.”
 
The cat strode back into the room and hopped up onto Prita’s recliner.  It snuggled up next to Prita and began to change, soon looking less like a cat and more like a small, nude human female with bright eyes and a vivid mane of red hair.  “Hey Hart,” Prita murmured as she ran her fingers through the creature’s hair.  It began to purr.
 
There were footfalls on the stairs and a head popped in through the door.  “Hi guys!” called Clea excitedly.  “Going dancing!”
 
Kate peered through the door, spying Clea’s outfit, which was a set of loose-fitting sweats.  “Not really dressed for it, are we?”
 
Clea shrugged her backpack a little higher up on her shoulder.  “I’m in a bit of a hurry.  I’ll change at the club!”
 
“Which club?” asked Kate, but Clea was already gone.
 
“Could be anywhere,” said Lloyd.
 
“What?”
 
“The club.”
 
“What do you mean?”
 
“She has one of my teleportation amulets in her backpack.  She could be off to New York or Los Angeles for all we know.”
 
“Doesn’t this bother you?”
 
“Not really.  Each of the amulets has a panic button that brings the wearer right back here in case of emergency.  And it’s a personal amulet – it will only transport one person and the items that person is wearing or carrying.  As far as I’m concerned, she’s safer with it than without it.”
 
“And you trust her with it?  She did take it without your permission, you know.”
 
“Well, she’s certainly not the only one.  You pilfer my stuff all the time.  And you…”  He looked over to Prita, who tried to wipe a look of merriment off her face.  “Don’t think I don’t know where the magic dildo is hiding these days.”  Prita gave him a look of feigned innocence and returned to stroking Hart.  Lloyd turned back to Kate.
 
“I trust all of you.  No one in this house has ever given me any reason to distrust them.  So I let you play with my toys.”  He paused.  “Las Vegas.”
 
“Huh?”
 
“She went to Las Vegas.”
 
“Fun town.  So why do you make them that way?”
 
“Hmmm?”
 
“If you trust us, then why are all the magical devices you build enchanted so that you know where they are at all times?”
 
“Ah.  I’ve never told you that story, have I?”
 
Prita spoke up.  “You’ve never told me, either.”
 
“It’s not a story that I’m terribly proud of, I have to say.”  They could hear the embarrassment and guilt in his voice.  “About twelve years ago, after I’d discovered what I could do…”  He stopped.
 
Kate put her arm around his shoulders.  When he’d found his magic, he’d lost everything else:  his job, his house, his first wife.  They’d been hard times, until…
 
He straightened up.  “After I discovered what I could do, I assembled my first set of illusions and set about trying to become a stage magician.  Seemed a logical step for someone of my abilities.  These illusions were, of course, real magic…but set up to be indistinguishable from standard stage illusions.  They were fast and they always worked. That was my hook – I could do the tricks that the other magicians did, but with a speed and efficiency that left even them wondering how I did it.  And I was naïve.
 
“I had a business partner – a fellow named Samuel Fleming.  He was a blustering fool, but an able businessman.  I suspect that he was a magic fetishist – there’s nothing strictly wrong with that, as we know – but I didn’t know that at the time.  I also didn’t know that he was a crook.  I never told him my secret, but I suspect that he had broken into my storage trailer several times to play with the illusions and discovered their true nature.”
 
He paused.  “Then he stole them.  Every last one of them.”
 
“How?” asked Kate.
 
“Simply drove away with them in the middle of the night.  I had no idea where he went.  I could have simply constructed more illusions and continued my career right then as I did eventually did…”
 
Kate smiled.  That was when they had met.
 
“…but I knew that those loose bits of magic were my responsibility, and that it was my duty to find them and either reclaim or destroy them before somebody got hurt.  It took me three years.”
 
Kate did the math in her head and nodded.
 
“When I did eventually find Fleming, he was dying.”
 
Prita stopped stroking Hart and looked up in surprise.  So did Hart.
 
            I’d gotten a lead about a magician calling himself Flambino.  His description fit Fleming and details about his act were alarmingly familiar.  Why it took me three years find him, I’ll never know.  Turns out the man was incredibly sloppy in both his life and his performances.  But no one seemed to have tumbled to the true nature of his act.  Well, almost no one….”
 
Prita had turned pale.  “A Grim.”
 
Lloyd nodded gravely.  “I don’t know if it was the same one that we just faced, but I got to Fleming less than an hour after it did.  As I said, Fleming had been sloppy and the Grim had homed in on him like a hunting dog.  When it found that the only power present was the meager amount with which the illusions were imbued and that there was no power source worthy of its attention, it destroyed all of the illusions in a rage.   Then it opened up Fleming’s guts and left him to die.”
 
Kate winced.
 
“You know,” said Lloyd.  “That man actually saved my life.  When I started alone into the world of real magic, I had no clue that predators like the Grim existed.  If I’d continued along the path I was on when Fleming interrupted me, the Grim would have taken me instead.  It might have taken longer for it to find me, but it would have done so eventually…and then it would have found the power source it was seeking.  It would have fed off of me for a long time, just as it or one of its brethren planned to do with our guest and her talisman.”
 
Prita looked uncomfortable, as though Callie had reacted poorly to mention of her encounter with the Grim.
 
“But Fleming wasn’t dead yet.   And neither, as it turned out, was my search.   Fleming told me that all of the illusions were destroyed by the Grim except for one.  A year before, part of the Metamorphosis illusion had been stolen from him as he had stolen it from me.  He told me that he was sorry.  And then he died.
 
“It took me an additional six months to find the last illusion.  It was made of rare and expensive cloth and I actually found it by contacting antiques dealers.  It had been a bag in its original incarnation.  When I found it, it had become a set of curtains.  The woman who owned them had purchased the bag at a police auction.  She said that there had been a hole in the bag, which it was supposed to have, and a large tear, which it was not.  I suspect that the magic that the bag had possessed ceased to work when the bag was damaged.”
 
“Police auction, you say?  Did you talk to the police?”
 
“Yes.  When they found the bag, they’d also found the thief.  Her name was Claudia Strickland.  She was the daughter of the owner of one of the theaters Fleming had played.  When I told them when and where the bag had been stolen, they consulted their records and found that a stagehand named Maya Howard had died in that theatre during the same period of time Fleming had been there.  She’d fallen into the orchestra pit and broken her neck.  Apparently it had taken her several hours to die.”
 
Kate gasped.  “Oh that’s horrible!  Was she pushed?”
 
Lloyd nodded.  “That’s my suspicion.  Maya likely caught Claudia in the act and got pushed into the pit for her trouble.”
 
“Wait a moment,” said Prita, looking puzzled.  “You said that you told the police when and where the theft occurred, which suggests that they never knew about the theft in the first place.  If so, why did they apprehend Claudia at all?”
 
“They didn’t.  She was in a coma when they found her.  They’d found the ripped bag and signs of a struggle in her hotel room.  They’d assumed she was the victim of a crime.”
 
“And you?”
 
Lloyd shrugged.  “I don’t know.  It’s possible that the coma was the result of the presumed struggle.  Maybe it was some sort of magical discharge when the bag was ripped.  I just don’t know.”
 
“And Claudia?”
 
“Her parents withdrew life support two years ago.  She was never able to answer any of my questions.”
 
He bowed his head.
 
Kate put her arms around him.  “Oh honey…”
 
“Three people.”
 
“It’s not your fault.”
 
He looked up.  “I know, and I’ve made peace with my guilt.  These people were killed by others.  But I’ve changed the way I do things.  I learned about the Grim.  I learned how to evade them.  I learned how to destroy them.”
 
Lloyd smiled.  It was a grim smile.  Anyone who saw that smile would know that this was truly dangerous man.
 
“I’ve taken precautions.  Now I know where every item I create is.  Nothing can be stolen.  I create wards like the ones that protect this house to protect users of magic from their less scrupulous brethren.   And we try to find those that are like I was twelve years ago so that we can teach them the things that I – and folks like Callie – had to learn the hard way.”
 
Kate hugged him even harder.  “That’s why I love you so much,” she said.
 
“So,” she continued.  “Since the movie’s a bust, why don’t we try something else to lighten the mood?”
 
“Like what?”
 
“How about and Hide and Seek?”
 
Kate rolled up the sleeve of her shirt, revealing a small elastic band covered with runes encircling her wrist. 
 
Lloyd’s eyes widened as he smiled and made a playful grab for her.  “I wondered why you were wearing that!” he said.
 
She hopped up off the couch and onto the coffee table. 
 
“Seeya later alligator!”  she shouted, holding her hand to her chest.  She grabbed the runed band with her other hand and gave a quick twist.
 
There was a quiet pop and Kate’s empty clothes fell onto the table.  Of Kate there was no sign. 
 
The pile of  clothes twitched slightly and a disembodied hand emerged, walking on its fingers, the elastic band still on its truncated wrists.   It, or rather she, for this was what was left of Kate, paused briefly to untangle one of her fingers from the thong underwear she had no use for.  Then the whole hand shook itself until the elastic band was dislodged, leaving a stump of her wrist bare and trapping Kate in her current state until the band could be put back on. 
 
Lloyd, realizing this, lunged for her, but she was too quick, hopping off the table and skittering out the door.
 
Lloyd, extracting himself from the empty pile of her clothes, smiled and followed her out.
 
The chase was on.
 
To be continued…