Amazon Arrow: Madame Emerald (Patreon)

The marquee outside the Starlight Pavilion buzzed in pink neon: MADAME EMERALD’S SPELLBOUND HOUR — LIVE TAPING NIGHTLY — SEE THE MIND SURRENDER!

Amazon Arrow read it twice from across the street, arms folded, the collar of her trench coat turned up against the October wind. Beneath the coat she wore her crimefighting costume: crimson and black, the silver star at her throat, black leather gauntlets and boots. She had a ticket in her pocket for row C, seat 4.

Eleven reports in five nights. Every one of them had sat in the audience of the Spellbound Hour. None of them remembered a thing past the opening number, and every one of them described the show, unprompted, as wonderful.

Mrs. Harriet Kemble, 61: diamond brooch, missing after attending the Tuesday show. No memory of removing it.

Mr. Donald Pruitt, 44: wallet, wristwatch, gold cufflinks. Says he “had a lovely time.”

Miss Loretta Vance, 29: pearl necklace, her grandmother’s. Wept in the precinct office. Couldn’t say when it went.

The police had shrugged. Pickpockets worked crowds; crowds went to shows. It proved nothing. But Amazon Arrow had built a career on noticing patterns that others missed. A theater full of people losing their valuables and their memories in the same hour wasn’t a pickpocket. It was a method.

She crossed the street, determined to put a stop to it.

The lobby smelled of popcorn and hairspray. Ushers in green bellhop jackets tore tickets beneath a portrait of Madame Emerald herself, painted in oils: auburn curls, that towering sequined top hat, eyes rendered in a green so vivid it seemed to follow you across the carpet. Amazon Arrow looked at it longer than she meant to, then looked away sharply.

Already setting the stage, she thought. Clever.

Chryseis checked her coat but kept her eyes moving: exits at the rear and stage left, a fire door behind the concession stand, two burly men in shirtsleeves who didn’t look like they worked concessions. She noted it all. She’d come prepared. She’d read up on stage hypnosis at the library that afternoon: suggestibility, fixation, the role of expectation. The trick only worked, the books agreed, on people who wanted it to. People who relaxed. People who played along.

She had no intention of playing along.

Row C put her close enough to see the scuffs on the stage. The set rose up before her in great painted spirals, rings of magenta and gold and black that wound inward toward points she found she didn’t want to look at directly. Two enormous silver pocket watches hung on chains from the fly gallery, perfectly still. Television cameras on dollies waited at the edges.

The seats filled. A man in a gray suit settled beside her with his wife, who wore a gold cocktail dress and a necklace of garnets that caught the house lights. “First time?” the woman asked brightly.

“First time,” said Amazon Arrow, smiling politely.

“Oh, you’ll love it. My sister came on Wednesday. She said it was the most relaxing evening of her life. She couldn’t remember half of it!” The woman laughed. “Isn’t that funny?”

“Hilarious,” said Amazon Arrow, wondering what might have been stolen from the sister.

The house lights dimmed. A drumroll rose from the orchestra pit and the spotlights, pink and cyan and violet, swung across the curtain in lazy figure-eights before converging at center stage.

And there she was.

Madame Emerald didn’t walk onstage so much as arrive, as if she’d been there all along. The green sequins of her costume threw a thousand points of light into the house. Her ruffled collar framed a face that was pretty, though her eyes were the true event. They really were that green. Captivating.

“Good evening,” she said, and her voice was warm and low and close, as though she’d leaned in to speak only to you. “Welcome to the Spellbound Hour. Tonight, I’m going to ask you to do something very difficult.” She smiled. “I’m going to ask you to do nothing at all.”

Polite laughter. Amazon Arrow didn’t laugh. She sat straight, her gloved hands on her knees, and began counting the stage lights. Thirty-two. A small mental task, the books said, kept the mind from drifting.

“So many of you work so hard,” Madame Emerald went on, strolling the lip of the stage, her wand tapping softly against her palm. Tap. Tap. “You carry so much. Every day you hold everything together. Aren’t you tired? Wouldn’t it feel good, just for an hour, to set it all down? To let it all go?”

Thirty-two lights, Amazon Arrow thought. Four cameras. Two exits stage left.

Above the stage, the great silver watches began to move.

They swung slowly, out of phase, one sweeping left as the other swept right, their chains creaking faintly. The spotlights tracked them. Light slid across their polished faces and spilled down the painted spirals, and the spirals, which were only paint, seemed to turn.

Amazon Arrow knew it was a trick of the lights. She looked anyway. It was impossible not to be impressed by the elaborate stage production. Madame Emerald spared no expense.

“Watch them if you like,” Madame Emerald said. “Or don’t. It doesn’t matter. Your eyes will go where they want to go. That’s all right. Everything is all right here.”

Thirty-one lights? No, thirty-two. Best to count again.

The orchestra had shifted into something soft, a slow waltz on muted strings that matched the swing of the watches exactly. Left, and right. Left, and right. Amazon Arrow realized her head had begun to tilt, ever so slightly, with each pass. She straightened herself up, blinked her eyes and set her jaw.

Pay attention, she reminded herself. These people are counting on you.

She watched the wand. It was black with a silver tip, and Madame Emerald moved it as she spoke, in small slow circles that echoed the spirals behind her. Circle. Circle. The silver tip caught the light on every turn, a tiny star going round and round.

“Some of you are fighting me,” Madame Emerald said fondly, and Amazon Arrow felt a jolt, because the green eyes had swept the house and paused, just for a moment, on row C. She didn’t want to stand out. Didn’t want to raise Madame Emerald’s suspicion. “That’s all right too. Fighting is tiring. Every time you resist, you get a little more tired. The more tired you get, the more you might try to resist.”

Chryseis’s limbs felt heavy. Her arms lay heavy on the armrests. When had she moved them to the armrests? She’d had her hands on her knees. She was certain she’d had her hands on her knees.

Don’t fall for her tricks, she thought. Count the lights. Stay focused.

She looked up to count them, but the watches swung across her vision, silver and slow, and she lost her place, and started again, and lost it again.

Beside her, the woman in the gold dress let out a long, contented sigh.

“Let’s try something,” Madame Emerald said. “Everyone, just for fun. Take a deep breath in.”

Six hundred people breathed in. Amazon Arrow did not, out of sheer stubbornness, and then she realized that she couldn’t just stop breathing. She took a deep breath in.

“And let it out... slowly... and as you let it out, let your shoulders drop. Just a little.”

Her shoulders dropped. That was probably not a good sign. Count the lights. Stay focused. One, two, three, four…

“Good,” Madame Emerald murmured. “So good. Again. In...”

In.

“...and out. And now your eyelids. Feel how heavy they are. You don’t have to close them. You can keep them open as long as you like. But they’re so heavy, aren’t they? Heavier every time the watches swing.”

Left, and right.

Amazon Arrow’s eyelids were heavy. She widened her eyes deliberately, glaring up at the stage. The spirals pulsed: magenta, gold, black, magenta, gold, black. Drawing her inward toward the center, where there was nothing at all, only a soft dark point like the bottom of a well.

She pinched her left forearm with her right hand, hard enough to bruise. Pain was clarity. Pain was an anchor.

It worked for a moment. The room snapped back into focus: the cameras, the exits, the man in the gray suit beside her with his chin drooping toward his chest.

He’s hypnotized, she thought.

“And whoever is pinching herself in the third row,” said Madame Emerald, without looking, in that same warm close voice, “you can let go now. You’ve been so strong. You don’t need to be strong anymore.”

Her fingers loosened. She didn’t decide to loosen them. They simply did. And without the pain the room went soft again, the edges blurring, the music swelling up around her like warm water filling a bath.

How did she know? The thought came slowly, from far away. How did she know that I was pinching myself?

And beneath it, a smaller, stranger thought: She always knows.

The watches swung, and the music played, and Madame Emerald talked, and Amazon Arrow understood the words individually without being able to hold them in a row. Deeper. Softer. Let go. Deeply hypnotized. Each word arrived and settled into her like a stone into a pond, and the ripples spread, and her thoughts spread with them, wider and thinner, until there was very little of them left.

“You’ve been holding on so tightly,” Madame Emerald said, and she was closer now, or her voice was. “Holding on to who you are. Holding on to what you came here to do. And it’s all right to let it go. It’ll still be there. I’ll keep it safe for you. Just let it go... and sink.”

No, I can’t, she thought.

The spirals turned.

“...and sink.”

I’m sinking...

The watches swung.

“...and sleep.”

Amazon Arrow’s eyes closed.

The man in the gray suit had gone first, then his wife in gold, her garnet necklace rising and falling with her slow breath. The row behind them followed, and the row behind that. A man in the balcony sagged against his date. A pair of college boys who’d been heckling in the opening minutes now sat with their mouths open, staring up at the spirals with the round empty wonder of very small children.

Six hundred people, and not a cough among them.

Madame Emerald stood at center stage and let the silence ring for a long, satisfied moment. Then she lowered her wand, and the orchestra stopped, and the only sound in the house was the creak of the watch chains overhead.

“Amazon Arrow,” she said.

In row C, seat 4, the heroine’s head lifted. Her eyes opened. They were clear and calm and completely empty, like windows in a house where no one was home.

“Come up, darling.”

Amazon Arrow rose and shrugged off her coat. She moved without hurry, sidestepping knees that didn’t move to let her pass, and walked down the aisle and up the short stairs at stage left. The spotlights found her and she didn’t squint. She stood beside Madame Emerald on the lip of the stage, tall and straight in her crimson and black costume. Her crystal blue eyes drifted half-closed again, her lips parted, her arms loose at her sides. Waiting.

The audience gazed up at her with slack, astonished faces, and saw nothing at all.

“There’s my girl,” said Madame Emerald softly. “Do you know what to do?”

“Yes, Madame.” Her voice was flat and dreamy.

“Tell me.”

“Collect their valuables. Jewelry. Wallets. Watches. Bring them to the stage.”

“And if anyone wakes?”

“No one wakes.”

“Good girl. Go on.”

An usher appeared from the wings with a velvet-lined steamer trunk on casters. Amazon Arrow stepped down from the stage, unhurried, and began at row A.

She worked with tidy efficiency. The heroine unclasped a pearl bracelet. She slid wedding rings from limp fingers, eased wallets out of breast pockets, unbuckled wristwatches and laid them in the trunk in neat rows. Nobody resisted. Nobody stirred. When she reached row C she paused before the woman in the gold dress, lifted the garnet necklace over her sleeping head, and placed it in the trunk without a flicker of recognition. The woman sighed and smiled in her sleep.

Row by row, she emptied the house. The trunk filled with a glittering tide of gold and silver and leather. It took forty minutes. When she was finished, Amazon Arrow climbed back onto the stage and stood beside the trunk, her hands at her sides, her eyes half-lidded, waiting for the next instruction with perfect contentment.

Madame Emerald walked a slow circle around her, wand tucked under one arm, and looked her over the way an artist looks over a finished canvas.

“Beautiful work,” she said. “As always.”

“Thank you, Madame.”

“You know, darling, I want you to understand something. I want you to really understand it, deep down where it’ll stay.” She stopped in front of the heroine and tipped her chin up with the silver tip of the wand. Blue empty eyes met the hypnotist’s green ones. “You came here tonight to catch me. You read your little library books and you counted my lights and you pinched your own arm black and blue. You were so strong.”

“I was so strong,” Amazon Arrow repeated softly.

“You were. And do you know what’s funny?” Madame Emerald smiled, and it was a genuinely affectionate smile. “You were strong on Monday too. And Tuesday. And Wednesday, and Thursday. Every night this week you’ve come in that door with your coat and your ticket and your terribly determined face. Every night you’ve sat in row C, seat 4. And every night you’ve come up here and helped me.”

“Mrs. Kemble’s brooch,” Madame Emerald went on gently. “You took that. Mr. Pruitt’s cufflinks. Miss Vance’s pearls, the poor dear. You unclasped them yourself. Then you went home and wondered who on earth could be doing such a thing.” She laughed, low and warm. “You’ve been my very best assistant all week. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

“Now. I want to thank you properly.” She leaned close, her voice dropping to a velvet murmur. “Thank you, Amazon Arrow. And I’d like to invite you back. Tomorrow night, eight o’clock sharp. You’ll be so curious, darling. You’ll be sure you’re finally about to crack the case. Row C, seat 4. I’ll save it for you. Will you come?”

“I’ll come,” said Amazon Arrow.

“Of course you will.” Madame Emerald stepped back and raised her wand, and above the stage the great silver watches began, once more, to swing. “And now you’re going to forget. Everything you did tonight, everything I’ve told you, all of it, sinking down and away like a stone into deep, deep water. You’ll wake in your seat when the lights come up. You’ll have had a lovely evening. You’ll feel rested, and puzzled, and very, very determined.” She smiled. “And you’ll never, ever remember.”

Left, and right.

“Forget.”

“Forget.”

The empty blue eyes fluttered.

“...and sleep.”

Amazon Arrow’s eyes closed. Her head bowed gently forward, dark curls falling across her face, and she stood swaying in the spotlight like a reed in still water, deep asleep. Deeply hypnotized.

At 10:42 that night, Amazon Arrow walked out of the Starlight Pavilion into the October wind, frowning. She felt wonderfully rested and couldn’t account for it. She felt certain she’d missed some important detail. She bought a ticket for the following night, row C, seat 4, and walked home planning exactly how she’d catch Madame Emerald in the act.

She had a very good feeling about tomorrow.