[Roughly once a week, I choose a striking photograph or illustration, set a timer for one hour, and write a story.]
1915 Thurston the Great Magician, via Shorpy
After each tour, the Thurston Money Men would arrive at the National Savings and Trust with their leather-covered ledger and a wheelbarrow of bagged cash. A wheelbarrow, yes.
Maybe they took turns pushing the thing, but they looked so similar there was no way to tell. All three of them were short, portly, and pale with tiny wire-rimmed glasses. They had the peach-pink skin of pigs stretched over egg-shaped bodies. Their most distinguishing feature, though, was their ears: long and pointy, poking just above their balding scalps.
Now, we like to say that a customer is a customer here at National Savings and Trust, and we’ll treat a man in coveralls the same way we’d treat one in a suit. All men work in their way and their costume, and we’re here first and foremost for the working man.
There was no question that Thurston’s Money Men worked hard at something, but damned if we could quite figure out what it was. Following a third-rate magician around the country didn’t seem that good a game, but they sure made it pay somehow. I guess there are rubes all over, people eager to talk to their loved ones beyond the grave or see some proof that the universe isn’t just a big ol’ clock ticking time away forever.
You see Thurston’s posters all over, pasted up on wooden fences and store windows, and it all looks like a recipe for disappointment. You know the skulls on stage will be made of plaster and the bats will hang from strings, and you know that Thurston is going to guess all his bland predictions about your dead Aunt Sally.
“I’m getting a name…something with a vowel in it,” he’ll say, theatrically rubbing his temples while the old ladies gasp.
But the Money Men? They’re real. Money men always are, grounded to the marble floors of banks and the steel walls of vaults. Real, like me.
Maybe they’re deformed or something. Or maybe the pointed ears are some kind of stage make-up. All I know is that they come in with their wheelbarrow of cash and smell like they’re real enough, tangy and acidic with sweat. Their money makes real interest, and I give them a real National Savings and Trust calendar each year when they come in with the December take.
Except the year that Thurston himself came instead…to withdraw the money.
It must have been about two weeks before Christmas when Thurston came bolting into the lobby, shoving through the revolving door so quickly that Mrs. Jernigan swung around twice before she could escape. She howled behind the glass but Thurston didn’t notice.
Thurston was wearing his stage duds, a black tuxedo. He looked like he’d just fought his way from one of the trenches of Verdun in it, though: the sleeves had separated at the seams, the bow tie had been torn from his neck, and one of his spats was missing. His hair stood all on end, too.
I watched him run across our polished floor, pushing aside our usual customers to get toward the front of the line.
“Emergency!” he cried when they snapped their mink-coated arms from him.
That may stand in a city bank, somewhere down in Manhattan where people are all but waiting to tear each other apart like tigers. But this is upstate, and we do things here with a little quiet civility.
So I rose from my office chair, flattened my tie to my chest, and calmly strode across the lobby of my bank to help Mr. Thurston back to my desk. He followed reluctantly, staring wide-eyed all around, stumbling on his own feet.
“How can I help you today, Mr. Thurston?” I asked, motioning him to take a seat.
“I’m here to withdraw all my money!” Thurston glanced over his shoulder at the door.
“We can certainly do that,” I said, tenting my fingers. “But I beg you to consider the value and security you get from keeping your money in a financial institution. There have been panics lately, I know, but our National Savings and Trust is backed by the strongest investments and securities—“
“I need my money!” cried Thurston. “I need it in gold coins.”
“Now, let’s not be hasty, Mr. Thurston—“
“You think I’m being hasty? I’ve been planning this for thirty years, ever since they came for me at the orphanage.” At the sound of the sleigh bells by the door, he snapped around. It was only Mr. McWarret, in with the bakery proceeds.
“I’m on the account, right? I signed it, too. They needed me for that. They needed a human, right?”
I answered the one question I understood. “Yes, the account is in your name.”
“Good. Thank God for that. Now, quickly: a bag of gold.”
“I’m sure you understand that we don’t keep all of our money physically on the premises. We’ll be happy to cut you a certified check—“
“Where the hell am I going to cash a goddamned check in Thuria? You think they’ve got a branch of Chase Manhattan at the bottom of the Tree of Holy Sorrow? You think the Happy Cephalopod Tavern takes out-of-universe checks?”
“I can’t rightly say,” I replied. “I’m not familiar with Thuria. Is that down in Connecticut somewhere?”
Thurston grabbed the front of my suit most rudely. “I want my fucking money and I want it now, before those gnomes come and skin me alive for it. Or worse.”
Hanging limp in his grasp, I realized that it was not good for business to fail to meet our obligations. It said on the door that we backed our notes with gold, and here was someone asking us to fulfill that promise. If word got out that we hadn’t…
“We might not have it all,” I said.
“Well, give me what you’ve got, for Christ’s sake!”
It took a few minutes for Templeton and Burke to count out the gold coins on the velvet tray for Thurston. He stared as they did it, counting along by gently moving his lips.
“We’ll, uh, miss having your business,” I said. “Going…abroad?”
He laughed at that. “That’s one way of putting it. I’m retiring, that’s what I’m doing. I’m giving up the magic game. Maybe I was born with the talent like they said, maybe they just trickled it out to me over the years to keep the money coming in, but I’m done.”
“That’s a shame,” I said.
He winced. “You don’t know what you’re talking about, buddy. Did you know that every show literally subtracts exactly one year from my life? Bet you didn’t. Did you know that those demons on the stage are real, that they’ve been promised my soul by those Money Men? Bet you didn’t know that, either. Magic costs, pal. That ought to make sense to someone like you.”
It did.
“And it turns out that only certain kinds of people can pay it. Humans, the magic batteries of the universe. I had the bad fortune to be born a better one than most.”
By then, the coins had been counted: $10,000 from his account of $72,000. He swept them into one of our National Savings and Trust burlap bags with his arm.
“But you pick things up. Little tricks. Little dodges. You tug a little to see how long the leash is. And mine is as far as it is going to go, I think.” He stood up, holding the heavy sack with both hands. “Jesus, this weighs a ton.”
“Can we help you out to your—“
The revolving door let out a squeal as it stopped, and something on each side tried to push in opposite directions. Sometimes kids did that to be funny, but I could see from the red glow that it wasn’t kids. A claw scratched at the glass once and then twice, and then there came a great shattering of glass as the winged arm thrust through.
Everyone in the lobby screamed, not least of all me. Our insurance was already absurdly high with all of the recent robberies, and an injury on the premises wouldn’t help.
The door cracked and then groaned and then tumbled into the lobby, slapping against the marble. Something stooped to get through the opening and then spread its red wings to their full extent. The velvet rope and the brass posts holding it tumbled to the ground and everyone recoiled toward the tellers.
In came the Money Men, their bodies seemingly covered with feathers and blood. Whatever Thurston had done to them hadn’t done much for their mood, and all three of them pointed toward the two of us and released a harmonic shriek.
The towering thing in our lobby swung toward us. It stood maybe fifteen feet high and easily twenty across the wingspan. It had a snout of ragged teeth, and this opened now in our direction.
“Quickly!” snapped Thurston. “The vault!”
The thing came closer, crashing through my wooden railing and knocking over two plush velvet chairs. Another step, a swing of the claw…we would be finished.
I grabbed Thurston’s arm and pulled him back toward the eastern side of the building. We ducked between the desks, letting screaming customers scatter as the thing pursued us. I lifted the counter top and we crawled back among the tellers, scrambling as best we could toward the safety deposit box room.
The thing, only marginally bright, was smart enough to follow us but not smart enough to cut us off. It tried to crash through the teller cages to get at us and I knew it would take three or four assaults before it would break through, enough to get back to the vault.
We hurried past the deposit boxes and ran for the huge round cap door. We kept it open during working hours, a direct violation of corporate policy but one that reassured our customers that we had nothing to hide. I was grateful for that now as we simply had to leap over the threshold and pull the door closed behind us.
It swung slowly, incredibly slowly, and the thing was tearing one teller’s cage after another out of its way to get at us. The tellers themselves, thank God, had fled or hidden.
The door thundered shut, partly from our pulling and partly from the thing’s last surge. It slammed against the door twice more for good measure and then started scratching at the seams.
“We’d better hurry. It’ll be in soon,” said Thurston.
“I think not,” I said. “That’s heavy security steel, poured by the Bethlehem Iron Works in—“
“It won’t hold,” said Thurston simply. He opened his bag of gold coins and counted out two dozen. These he spread upon the floor into a perfect circle.
“You’ve got to use gold,” he said. “It’s how things move over there.”
He prowled the edge of the circle now, sweeping his arms, extending his fingers, muttering an incantation. Maybe that farm league stuff worked with the old folks and the children out in the country, but this was a solid town with a solid bank and it wasn’t working on me.
Until, yes, the marble at the center of the circle swirled away and left us both staring into a pastoral landscape. A rock wall crested several hills in a meadow, but the trees atop the hills were of colors I’d never seen before – shimmering purples and greens like the sheen of oil you see in puddles at the service station.
“The rest of it will get me where I’m going after this,” he said.
I kept staring into the hole.
“Coming with?” asked Thurston. “I’m sure they could use banks over there, a place to store the wealth and save for a rainy day.”
It seemed to call to me, I’ll admit. There were no panics over there, no drought, no Depression – that much I could tell. God, I wasn’t even sure they had money if Thurston had been so worried about getting gold. Did they charge interest over there? Were there investors? I had a feeling that there weren’t, that people sold what they had and that was it.
The steel door creaked beneath the pressure of the thing on the other side.
I had tellers out there, though. Tellers in danger, certainly, but also tellers who needed jobs. I had customers, too, people who had tough times ahead. They’d need someone to negotiate their payments, certainly. Now that I’d seen the flexibility of the universe, I wondered if I’d negotiate those quite the same as I had.
Thurston seemed to understand. He shook my hand.
“Keep the calendar this year,” he said. Then he stepped through and the hole closed behind him.
Almost immediately, the scratching on the other side of the vault door stopped. I’ll admit I was too scared to open it still for a good fifteen minutes, but when I did, the thing was gone.
The lobby was in a shambles, though. The teller windows had been torn to splinters and the walls scorched with fire. My tellers scrambled behind the counter, gathering the fallen money. I’m proud to say that we didn’t lose a single dime.
The Money Men knew the instant Thurston had made his escape. All three of them had dropped to their knees and clutched their heads. Whatever had kept the thing under control had weakened then, and it had flown out through the skylight.
It was the second leash they’d lost that day.
The holidays at the National Savings and Trust were better than they were anywhere else in the country. It helped to have a new idea of the edges of reality, I guess, but Thurston’s leftover account helped tide over a lot of families who missed their home and farm payments.
Not a bad trick after all, I supposed.
