The Murder Cage

By C. C. Blake

There's a magic show in the inner city tonight. It offers more than the typical cheap tricks. It offers a finale that is both mind-blowing and body-ravaging. Are you ready for the Murder Cage? Find your seat because the terrifying show is about to begin!

See the pretty girl enter the infamous cage.
Watch her lifted into the air and cut to ribbons while the magician cavorts below.
Witness the miracle of her return to stage, unmarked and unharmed.

In this magic show of the damned, appearances are deceiving. Two people are drawn into a world of occult danger:
Detective Dick Winthorpe has an impossible death for a case, one that ties to concealed crimes from the city's past. How many more victims will the Murder Cage claim before he learns its hellish secrets?
Muckraking reporter Clarissa "Clark" Reynolds has a passion for investigating weird cases as well as antagonizing the police department. Is her drive to unravel the Murder Cage's mysteries more than a professionally motivated?

In The Murder Cage, C. C. Blake performs the ultimate killer magic trick. This 15,000 word novella is an action-packed thrill ride, a suspenseful nightmare that will keep you up after bedtime.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Twice Told Tales II
• Release date: Jan 13, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301407217

C. C. Blake

C.C. Blake has lived across the United States, starting in the suburbs of Detroit, to Massachusetts’ second largest city (Worcester) to the country’s seventh largest city (San Antonio, Texas, that is). He’s has a variety of jobs, working as a substitute teacher, the graveyard shift dishwasher at a haunted Denny’s, lab research monkey and teaching assistant at a second tier college. Currently, he works as an automation consultant for a chemical company on the Northeast side of SAtown (which isn’t as Hellish as it sounds). Blake’s most popular character, irrepressible adventurer Chuck Cave, has appeared in over two dozen stories, including the 2005 Man’s Story 2 Story of the Year Award winner “Chuck Cave and the Vanishing Vixen.” The character’s supernatural thriller stories (which began with the seminal “Cave and the Vamp”) are all being released as a part of Vampires2.com’s initial foray into e-books. These new versions are presented in expanded and revised versions, all are the author’s preferred texts. Be sure to collect them all! In addition to his pulp stories for the 2-Empire (Man’s Story 2, Vampires 2, Androids 2 and Paranormal Romance 2), Blake’s fiction has appeared in several anthologies, including Unparalleled Journeys II (from Journey Books Publishing) and Fearology: Terrifying Tales of Phobias (from Library of Horror Press).

Book preview

The Murder Cage

By: C. C. Blake

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

Copyright 2012 by C. C. Blake

Cover Photograph © Lonely11 | Dreamstime.com

Smashwords Edition

This eBook is published by Twice Told Tales.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author's rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

Table of Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Epilogue

Further Reading

About the Author

This eBook is dedicated to

L. L. Soares

&

Jeff Strand

who live too damned far away.

Chapter One

Henrietta leaned back in the Deceptions Theatre's squeaky chair, eyed the magician capering about the stage, and whispered, This Prosperio cat has almost got it made. A nearby nobody shushed her, and she offered an absent-minded backhand as a reply.

Prosperio had a good sized audience for his opening night—only forty empty seats in a rundown theater designed to pack a hundred or so bodies—plenty of eager dolls to make magic with and navy sport suit duds that made him seem professional but not soulless. The wrong suit, she knew, could make a man into one of those bureaucratic leeches up on the Wall Street—those 1% suckers didn't own their suits so much as get owned by them. What he did not have was glaringly obvious: no permanent assistant. No starlet lovely in fishnet tights to entertain the masses and distract their attention from the goldfishes in his pockets and the rabbit in his hat. Could he use that sort of a pretty face?

Any showman, she reasoned, should be interested in stocking the stage with eye candy. He seemed pretty enough himself, a slender rake with dark hair and a flashy white tux. His pale skin gleamed under the house's lights. Still, any show could benefit from a little lovely ass-sistant appeal.

What I wouldn't give to have that job, she thought. Show me a place to sign away and I would. Totally and completely.

When he surveyed the audience for his next helpful person, she stuck her hand way up high and waggled it around just like everyone else, knowing there was no way on earth or otherwise that he would call her up. He had ringers in the audience. Had to have 'em.

Still, she played it with school girl enthusiasm.

Then, a surprising thing happened. His eyes fell on her, and his lips pulled up at the corners—this was a suggestive smirk, which promised savory sweets and unearthly delights and perhaps a few delicious perversions—and he bid her, Henrietta Cooney, to come up and take a part in the show.

No way. No! Way!

She almost squealed with delight as she made her way to the aisle and then up among the applauding people, wondering: Is this what it would be like to be a magician's assistant? She imagined herself strutting around in a cutesy-sexy costume and listening to the oohs and ahs of the audience as Master Magician Prosperio performed tricks like knocking down dominos.

I could get used to that, she thought again. It would beat the long hours suffering through gen-ed college courses on the path to a career she was as yet uncertain about. I wonder if he'd take me on.

She ascended the thirteen steps at a near sprint, and then she was up above the world, bathed in spotlights, and trying to keep an eye on where she was going, but alternately amazed and terrified of the great darkness that was the audience. Hard to make them out as more than inky blobs beyond the full in-her-face light beams.

Aren't you a pretty, pretty thing? Prosperio stage wondered, and the audience responded with scattered chuckles and applause. Henrietta did a little curtsy for the audience's appreciation, and then realized that her skirt was just short enough that she may very well have flashed her panties. Embarrassment struck her, then, not showing as anything more than a