have done that instead.
The sky turned a beautiful blue as the sun came up. After some time, the familiar rocking and loud metal-churning of the train calmed Carter’s heart and brought a yawn to his jaw. So he climbed down and into the train carriage. Inside, hundreds of boxes were stacked on wooden pallets. Plopping himself on the floor beside one such stack, Carter placed his satchel underneath his head like a pillow, then drifted off to sleep, dreaming about hope and fate and destiny and adventure, as well as a fleeting thought or two about the possibility of magic.
Surprise! It’s time for a little flashback!
I understand how frustrating it is to pause a story right in the middle of the action, but there are a few things you should know about Carter before I tell you what happens next. Things like: Who is this kid? And why was he running? And who is the man he was running from? I promise we’ll get back to Carter’s escape soon enough. And if we don’t, I’ll let you lock me up in a tight straitjacket with no key. Oh, the horror!
But anyway… onward!
Carter learned how to do magic tricks from his uncle. And they were just that: tricks. There was no magic involved. How could there be? Everyone knows there is no such thing as magic – or so Carter believed.
At a very early age, Carter stopped trusting in wonderful, happy, fantastic things. It wasn’t his fault. Sometimes bad things happen to good people.
You see, Carter was born to two lovely people. His mom had a smile that shone like the sun on a perfect day at the beach. And his dad could pull coins out of ears and make a deck of playing cards vanish into thin air. They all lived in a tiny red cottage with white trim on a wooded and winding road outside a small northern city. One afternoon when Carter was only a few years old, both of his parents failed to come home.
They also failed to come home the next day. Or the day after that. When the babysitter called the police, Carter hoped it was only one of his father’s tricks. But after another day passed with no word, Carter had to face the cold hard truth: his parents were not coming back. It was their final vanishing act.
Young Carter was taken in by a distant relative named Sylvester “Sly” Beaton. For the sake of convenience, we will call him Carter’s uncle.
Uncle Sly was a wiry little man who always dressed in a brown tweed suit with frayed seams and patches that covered moth-eaten holes. He wore his long, greasy hair tied back in a messy ponytail, and the whiskers of his patchy beard barely covered his pointy chin. Uncle Sly told people he got his nickname because he was like a fox, but Carter always thought that his uncle looked more like a weasel, which made sense because Uncle Sly often acted like a weasel too.
The man was not thrilled to have to look after Carter. And Carter was not thrilled to live with this weasel. But that’s what the circumstances were, and so Carter made the best of them.
Like Carter’s father, Uncle Sly knew magic tricks. He could hold a tissue up to Carter’s nose and make him sneeze a waterfall of coins into a glass. Then, one by one, Uncle Sly would make the coins disappear again. This blew Carter’s mind – well, his mind and his nose.
Carter begged his uncle to show him how to do magic. Eventually, Uncle Sly saw that there might be a benefit in having an assistant, and so he taught Carter everything he knew. It turned out Carter was a natural-born magician.
Soon enough, Carter was doing all of Uncle Sly’s tricks – only better. Carter had a special talent. His fingers were long and his tendons were taut, which gave him fast hands and expert card-shuffling skills. He could make coins vanish and reappear across the room. He could materialise playing cards out of thin air. He even revised Uncle Sly’s sneeze trick, using ice cubes instead of coins (which was rather impressive, given the size of the average human nostril).
Now, Uncle Sly wasn’t the type of man to celebrate his young nephew’s ability to change up his oldest and best illusion, but he was smart enough to notice an opportunity when it was sneezing ice cubes right in front of him. So on Carter’s birthday, instead of throwing him a party, Uncle Sly decided to test him. He sent the boy up to a random couple on the street to perform his very first show.
As Carter approached, he nervously slicked his blond mop of hair to the side, pinched his pale cheeks, and opened his blue eyes wide. The couple seemed happy to stop for him. First, Carter presented a deck of cards and asked the woman to choose one and keep it hidden between her two hands, making sure not to show him.
“Now, hold on to it tight,” he said, “while I guess which card you picked… Is it the queen of diamonds?”
“It is! It is!” the woman gasped. But when she opened her hands to look, she yelped, “The card is gone!”
“Is it?” Carter asked, holding it up in his own hand.
“How did you do that?” the man asked.
“With magic, of course,” Carter said, though the words were just words. Carter didn’t believe in real magic, but he knew a thing or two about making people pay attention to one thing while he distracted them from something else. Growing bolder, he added, “Now, would you mind giving me back the card you’ve taken, sir?”
“I didn’t take a card,” the man said.
“Then what is that in your pocket?”
The man reached into his breast pocket, and sure enough, the king of diamonds was inside.
The couple laughed. With a flick of his wrist, Carter produced a bouquet of colourful paper flowers. He presented it to the woman, then took a bow, just like Uncle Sly had taught him. The couple clapped and clapped and clapped.
The lady kissed Carter on his cheek. The man gave him a nickel. Carter’s proud uncle shook both their hands before hustling Carter away.
Carter beamed like the sun. He had brought joy to the young couple. In earning their smiles, he recalled his own two parents and their laughter. He didn’t care that there was no party. It was still a very good birthday…
At least until later, when Carter realised his uncle had stolen the man’s wristwatch and the woman’s wedding ring. Uncle Sly had used him. Carter knew too many stories in which villains stole from innocent people. These stories always made him feel as if someone had stolen his parents from him.
What was left of that earlier, good feeling squeezed out of him like a balloon with a leak in it.
Uncle Sly was not an ideal guardian by any stretch of the imagination. Quite the opposite. You already know that he was a thief, but you should also understand that he was a con artist – someone who cheats others by getting them to believe something that isn’t true.
Carter’s uncle enjoyed “short cons.” This means he didn’t go in for long-term scams that took days or weeks to pull off. He did it as quickly as possible, robbing money or valuables off people in the blink of an eye. By the time they realised they’d been robbed, Uncle Sly was gone.
This was the reason why Carter never had a home. He’d never had friends or his own bedroom. He’d never gone to school or had a place that made him feel safe. He and his uncle slept in shelters on good days and in dark alleys on bad ones, constantly moving from town to town to town. After all, when you’re in the habit of making other people’s things vanish, it’s best that you know how to vanish too.
Sometimes Uncle Sly even disappeared for days at a time, leaving Carter behind. Carter