I was hired to steal something from a magician

My client said it was a cardboard box. She was right about that much. She also said it would be easy.  “It’s a magician’s prop,” she’d said, her fingers fidgeting in and out of a hole in the right-arm sleeve of her oversized sweater. We were meeting in a crummy little diner, yet I feel I knew her from somewhere before that. I’m still not sure, but that’s beside the point by now, I think.

“A cheap one. Looks like someone glued some kindergarten art project to it. Stars and moons, you get the idea.”

I took a sip from my coffee and nodded, making sure my words were blending in satisfactorily with the general hubbub of the diner. “And you’re offering four figures for this, uh, art project?”

“It’s important. He’s… he’s not right. Just get in, get the box, and get out. Don’t talk to him. Don’t even look at him. Don’t think about him.”

I nodded. Right. Don’t talk to the “magician”. I’d filed it under superstitious nonsense for the most part. From what she’d told me previously about this guy, “Marvello the Terrific”, he was just some con-man that scammed old people at county fairs by reading them bullshit tarot cards and so on. I didn’t know what could’ve possibly been so worrisome about this guy other than the usual concerns that he’d have a gun or some other weapon. But whatever. My job was to acquire things, not to debunk my client’s superstitions or mental illnesses.

That’s how I found myself crouched in the rhododendrons outside a house that looked like it was being slowly digested by the woods behind it. It was an old, small house with peeling aged paint that’d probably been sort of pretty once. Now it just looked exhausted. There were no vehicles parked anywhere outside.

Staring at the house for hours from this vantage point, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d been here before somehow, done this before, concealed myself in the tall grass and flowers near this house. It felt like something long gone, like a relative’s house I’d seen years and years ago and all but forgotten about. I remember this strong sense of déjà vu washing over me for a moment before I decided it was time to get cracking.

The lock on the back door was a joke. It surrendered to my first lockpick with a soft, pleasant little clunk. So far, she was right. Easy. I slipped inside, into a silence so thick and oppressive it felt like walking through porridge. The air was stale, carrying the scent of dust and something faintly metallic and sweet that I couldn’t place. Whatever. It was an old house.

The inside was like a time capsule of bad 70s decor, at least if what I guessed was the living room was anything to go off. Ugly mud-brown couches, burnt-orange wallpaper and awful shag carpeting everywhere. There was this one Billy Idol poster on one of the walls. It set me on edge, because I recognised this exact poster. It was in my sister’s bedroom that I moved into after she left for college. It used to scare me when I was a kid because it felt like he was watching me. I used to think he knew I was there.

The place was clean, almost eerily so. No clutter, no mail left on the tables, no family photos on the walls either. It’s like it was a stage set for some old sitcom. And on a table in the centre of the room, as if on display, was the box.

It was exactly as described. A flimsy-looking thing made of what seemed like reinforced cardboard, about the size of a small coffin, covered in the most gloriously tacky, hand-painted design I’ve ever seen. A swirling, purple and blue cosmos, dotted with lumpy, glitter-covered stars and a glowing crescent moon with a comically surprised face. The kind of thing a B-tier circus magician would use to pretend to saw their assistant in half. I almost laughed. She was paying me four figures for this?

My caution was already buzzing. This had been
almost too easy. Too obvious. A trap? I pushed the feeling down. Get the asset, get out. No second-guessing. I took a step forward, my foot sinking into the thick carpet and my cynicism returning firmly in place. Four figures for this waste of space. Sometimes the universe just hands you a win, I guess. That’s when I heard a strange, deliberately slow click-click-click coming from the hallway.

Shit.

I froze, my hand hovering near the inside pocket of my jacket where my pepper gel was concealed. I quickly catalogued exits, hiding spots, weapons. Then a man stepped into the doorway. He was wearing a tattered suit. He looked middle-aged and ordinary, until I first saw him blink. On his eyelids, he had what looked like crude tattoos of both an iris and pupil. It would’ve looked almost like he never really blinked at all, if it weren’t for how rudimentary his “second set” was.

“Look, I don’t want any trouble, sir,” I said, the standard lie falling easily from my lips. “I’m a handyman, I think my customer gave me the wrong address. Maybe, you could, I don’t know, take a look and gimme a hand?” I added while discreetly grabbing hold of the gel.

“You’re a liar,” the man, Marvello, I could only assume, said. “She sent you,” he continued. Marvello’s voice was like a calm, flat lake. But there was something underlying in there, something viscerally disgusting to my brain that I couldn’t put a finger on. Thoughts of algae flashed through my mind.

The ’don’t talk to him’ rule was already out the window, but he hadn’t done anything yet. So I decided to play along while I figured out plan B.

“Yeah. I’m just here for the box. You got me,” I said. My eyes darted as subtly as possible around the room’s layout. The rational part of me was screaming to abort, but the part of me that craved that juicy payroll was calculating the distance from where I stood to him, the box, the back door. He didn’t look super imposing and I didn’t see any weapons on him. I felt I still had a solid chance of pulling things off. Grab the box, incapacitate the guy, split.

“It’s a universe in there, you know. My little universe. It’s not meant for thieves,” he said, smiling. He closed his eyes as he spoke, showing me only their inked counterparts. “I can feel it in you Jordan. There’s so much stuff in you and I need it back.”

I realised then where the clicking noise must be coming from. On a mantlepiece in the hallway there was a little metronome resting and ticking away.

“I don’t know any Jordan,” I lied. He just kept “staring” with those awful tattoos. My instincts were screaming at me now. This is where a smart guy values his life over money and gets the fuck out. But the box was right there. And I’m not always a smart guy. I moved quickly, grabbing the box. It was lighter than I expected.

Even with his eyes shut he seemed to know. “No swiping!” he screeched at me suddenly. I froze more out of shock than fear. The alarm bells in my mind were foghorns now. The metronome kept ticking and I felt rooted in place somehow. So much so, I’d lost my grip on the pepper gel.

“Wanna see a trick?” he whispered to me.

“I’ve seen enough,” I said, my voice tighter than it wanted to be.

“Seeing’s one thing,” he murmured, his voice sounding now like it weaved and twisted through the metronome, somehow synchronizing with one another. “Feeling’s another. You feel the floor getting softer, right? Like the bank of a pond. Unsteady.” A cold jolt went through me. I did feel it. A strange, sinking sensation in the ugly carpet.

“Your hands,” he went on, his eyes opening up again and locking onto mine. “They feel strange. Heavy. Useless. Not like hands at all. Someone else’s. Not yours, Jordan, never were yours, never ever not at all. Only meat. Not yours to take.”

A wave of nausea washed over me. My hands did feel numb, clumsy, foreign at the ends of my arms. I tried hitting him, tried to even make a fist, but I couldn’t. The sensation was dull, distant. The world swam, the tacky stars on the box blurred into real constellations, the room warping at the edges in strange ways. He grasped my shoulders and I heard the metronome and the world spun and he said, \*“*You* \*are a duck and a duck you shall be.”

I tried to fly away, but my wings were insufficient slabs of meat. He seized me and locked me in an upstairs room with a purple door and a black door.

“I’ll be back to roast you,” he said.

I’d come through the purple door. I remember being deathly afraid of the black door. I was afraid in general. I couldn’t remember of what. I couldn’t remember anything, so to speak. I didn’t have thoughts. I had instincts and sensations.

As I tried to catch a roach with my flat, fleshy bill, I caught sight of a creature skulking in the corner. Her skin clung to her skeleton. Her hands reworked thread from an old sheet into a kind of net. She eyed me. My instincts told me it was hunger. If I could pray it would’ve been the first time in years. It would’ve been the best prayer a duck ever offered.

“Our Father quacks in Heaven
Hallowed by your cool pond
With bugs and tall grass and my feet
Need never be dry
And bread crumbs are good. Amen.”

Why was I even there? I have a hard time remembering. I’d been asked by someone to steal something. I think it was a box. A cabinet. It could do things. When I try to remember what, I hear the metronome ticking.

There were others in the house. I could hear them. Poor idiots. Did they come looking for the box too? I remembered something then. My father took me hunting ducks once. It made me cry. That’s not why I was in this house, though.

The woman in the corner was stalking toward me. Slowly, like she thought I couldn’t see her. She kept working the threads with her hands. I think I knew her once. She found out about the box. Its secrets. She was waiting for me to sleep. Or so I thought. In her slow movement she’d imperceptibly loomed over me and I felt the threads.

Then her talons were digging into my arms. I squawked and flapped with all my might, but went nowhere. She bit my face and I pulled away, laying a shaky kick into her ribs. I heard a crack instantly. She flew against the black door, her head hitting the handle. She lumped bleeding at the threshold as it slowly opened.

I didn’t want to go into the room but I heard footsteps coming from somewhere in the house. Loud noises that sounded like animals I didn’t know. Someone was talking on the other side of the purple door. “Oh to be Turducken, a symbol of the power of Oven…” I heard. The voice scared me more than the black door did. I waddled over the woman and through the black door as fast as I could.

I was in a long dark space. Far ahead of me, a light. I heard footsteps coming my way from somewhere. I took off toward the light. Light is safe. I had to remember. The box. Why the box? My head hurt. Think, Jordan, think. Don't just listen for bugs.

When I got to the light, there was a frame propped up against the wall at my duck-height. It was a picture of a man and a little boy. They were in the woods and the boy was crying. In the treeline, a figure stood watching, too blurry to see. Who were these people? I stared at it in silence. The noises in the house had stopped.

I started to remember something then. The sound was so much louder than I'd expected. The bird fell in a spiral of brown and green and now red and hit the water with a sound like, like a sack of wet gravel.

I was crying. Why was I crying? Because it was so beautiful and then it was gone. Because Dad’s hand on my shoulder felt like a weight, holding me down. Because the other duck, its mate, was calling out for it over and over, stretched and distorted, like *"Jor-dan... Jor-dan..."*
No. That wasn't right. That was now. That was a voice in the house. I couldn’t tell where from. I had to move. I continued into the dark ahead of me.

There was no light anywhere here. It was wider here and dark all around. I sensed movement in the dark around me and heard someone snickering. They kept giggling louder and louder until they were laughing at the top of their lungs. I had to keep going. The laughter never stopped. It felt like it was all around me.

I remembered something else then. This time when I was in the woods exploring. I remember a trail deep in the woods that led even deeper into the woods. I wasn’t supposed to go that far but I did one day. There was a big red circus tent in a clearing at the end. I peered inside and saw a big wooden crate in the centre of the tent and a man. The same man in the house with me. One side of the crate was hanging open and I could see inside. There was a dead duck in there. The man stared at me and I knew he wanted to get me in that crate too. He let out a terrible hiss and came marching at me faster than I expected and I heard the metronome tick and I was back in the house. The laughter all around me in the dark.

I kept moving. I ran right into the first step of some kind of stone staircase. I waddled up one step at a time. They were wet and slimy feeling. I reached a doorway at the top that hung open a crack. I pushed my way through.

I was in the room I remembered from before. The room where he turned me into a duck. But the lights were on now and I saw the box on the table and I felt instinctively repulsed by it. I heard footsteps coming up the stairs behind me but I felt that I couldn’t walk towards the box. I had a complete abhorrence of it.  And the metronome, still ticking in the hallway. 

“I’m gonna get you, little shucky ducky,” I heard behind me.

I forgot about the box then and ran. I looked for hiding spots but it was too late. I looked back and I saw him coming at me. He seized me and started giggling. He held me ahead of him and started dancing a weird waltz in circles. “You’re going back in your box,” he said. He was carrying me toward the box. He was putting me in it. The closer I got to it the more I felt sick. I managed to squirm out of his grip just in time and landed on the table. I heard him screaming behind me like a dying animal as I stumbled and fell down to the ground. I ran to the door, opened it and stumbled out.

Wait. I opened the door. I looked down at my hands. I was a man. When was I a man before, I remember thinking. But I still had to run. I was in the back yard. He wasn’t chasing me. I looked back through the window and saw him lowering his head into the box. I watched as his neck and shoulders and entire body somehow disappeared into it. He was gone.

I couldn’t remember why I’d been in the house at all at the time. I ran to my car and for a second I couldn’t remember how to drive it. Eventually I managed to start it and I drove away. I knew I couldn’t call the police. So I just shakily drove home.

That was a while ago. I’ve thought a lot about it all. I’ve tried researching and I can’t find anything about Marvello the Terrific anywhere online. I checked my call logs, and the initial call from the client was missing. I had no way of getting in contact with that woman again. Against my best judgment, I went back to where the house was, and found that it was gone. I knew I didn’t get the location wrong. But all I saw was a field of rhododendrons and tall grass. It’s like every trace of what happened is just gone. Maybe Marvello came from the box just like he disappeared into it.

I think the box did something to my memories. Because, I’m not sure I’m right about when I stopped being a duck and started being a man. I’m not sure I really became a duck. Maybe he somehow just gave me the mind of one. Maybe I really did just get hypnotised and imagined the whole thing.

And that memory of that day in the woods. I remember it so vividly. I remember seeing that dead duck in the box. But I don’t remember ever remembering it before that moment in the dark. Before being a duck. So is it even real? It’s like the box put the memory there. And if that was the case, what other memories could have been implanted? How could I be able to tell?

Sometimes, I wonder if maybe I always was a duck and I was really turned into a man. I remember being a little boy. But how can I be sure that those memories are real? Because there’s one thing that doesn’t make sense. I never knew my Dad. He died before I was born. But I remember hunting ducks with him somehow. So, who was I really hunting ducks with?