Rosie Thomas - The Illusionists

Tonight was an opportunity, even though the audience was wrong and Grady was a fool.

The opportunity must not be missed.

One act followed another. The acrobats were popular, the musicians and singers less so. The curtain came down as the hem of another costume swept across Devil’s line of vision. He glanced up, and then looked higher. Carlo towered over him, Carlo on stilts that were concealed by a long robe and an academic gown stitched with occult symbols. He wore the grey wig Devil had bought for him, the horsehair combed smoothly back from his brow. Under the stage paint his long-chinned face looked authoritative, even noble. The dwarf was pleased with his appearance.

‘Ready?’ Devil asked automatically.

Carlo’s lips twisted to indicate that he was always ready, that Devil would never find him in any other condition. In a moment of fellow feeling Devil even patted the dwarf’s shoulder but all that met his touch was the wicker frame that Carlo wore over his shoulders to increase their breadth beneath the philosopher’s gown.

A pair of stagehands lifted the cabinet between them and positioned it on the marks. Devil himself carried the precious mirrors and placed them on the angled lines he had so carefully calculated and measured. When they were aligned the cabinet appeared to stand clear of the stage on its four legs, with no other support or place of concealment visible from the body of the theatre.

The curtain rose once more.

The stage was empty apart from a soot-black basket and the cabinet itself. Paste jewels glittered under the lights. To begin with there had been some tittering and a couple of louder guffaws, but the effect was sufficiently striking to capture attention. Devil swept onstage into an expectant silence, the first real silence of the evening. As the evil philosopher he was costumed in stark black. The lights dimmed, there was a slow roll of the drum and he threw open the double doors of the cabinet. There was nothing in the velvet-lined interior, so much nothing that the emptiness seemed infinite. Devil slid his hands inside and spread his arms to prove that the audience’s eyes did not deceive them. As he withdrew there was a flash of light, and a puff smoke rose from the cabinet. Devil came forward to the footlights and bowed low.

‘Are you finished?’ some wag called down.

Towards the back of the stalls Devil spotted Jasper Button, seated with a young woman on either side of him. He was glad that after all Jasper had come to see him perform.

Devil held up one hand. ‘I have not yet begun,’ he said.

His air of authority was enough to quell the unrest. The audience shifted in their seats. There was another flash of light and smoke drifted across the stage.

He led Carlo out from the wings at the end of a short length of rope. The captive’s hands were bound at the wrists. He moved at a slow shuffle, his head hanging like a prisoner’s. Devil brought him to centre stage.

Between them, in the past days, they had worked up some lines of dialogue.

Devil was pleased with his own literary abilities and he had composed a declamatory paragraph or two to establish the proper degree of evil exhibited by himself. Carlo’s response to the first recitation of this had been to scowl, pinch his own lips between finger and thumb and then jab a forefinger at Devil.

‘Keep the jawing short. Tell ’em a bit of a story as fast as you can do it and move on to the action.’

There had been a day or two of violent disagreement followed by a period of coolness, but Carlo had won. The exchange now established simply that Good and Evil were locked in a struggle for possession of the formula for transforming base metal into gold. This was established mostly by sign language accompanied by plenty of smoke, drum and cymbal.

‘I shall never yield my secret,’ said the good philosopher. ‘Never, while breath remains in this body.’

He raised his grey-wigged head and held it high.

Behind him, with relish, Devil drew a long blade from beneath his academic gown.

The audience fell silent.

‘Then the breath shall be extinguished,’ Devil cried.

He swung the blade in a glimmering arc. There was a collective gasp. Following a loud bang, a second’s total darkness and a savage chord from the musicians, the lights flared again. Devil stood alone in a swirl of smoke. The knife dripped with gore and at his feet a huddled outline lay beneath the good philosopher’s robe.

Devil reached down to the soot-black basket and slid one gloved hand into the interior. With a flourish he pulled out the severed head and brandished it by a hank of the grey hair.

Jasper had done his work well. The noble philosopher’s features were Carlo’s smeared with blood, the eyes glazed in death. When the executioner tilted it to show the mutilated neck a woman screamed aloud in horror. Devil bared his teeth in a snarl and tossed the head back into the basket. Once the grisly thing was hidden from view and the shock of its appearance subsided, there was a tide of applause followed by a substantial rising cheer from the gallery. In the wings Jacko Grady stood watching, thumbs in the pockets of his waistcoat and feet planted apart, a cloud of cigar smoke about his head.

Devil passed in front of the ornate cabinet. He caressed the gilded pinnacles and touched the paste gems with the tip of his finger. He uttered some words in an unintelligible language and flung open the doors.

Another gasp rose from the auditorium. The good philosopher’s head floated in black space within. It turned from side to side and its ashen lips parted.

Devil demanded, ‘Tell me the formula now. You are my prisoner for eternity.’

‘I curse you to eternity and beyond,’ Carlo’s voice answered.

Devil threw back his head and laughed. He stretched out one foot and kicked over the basket. It rolled, empty, towards the footlights. He picked up the sword once more and drove the point into the lower part of the cabinet where the living body attached to the head must surely be concealed. He stabbed the emptiness over and over again.

‘My secret is mine,’ the head mocked him.

‘Die, then.’

‘You cannot kill me. I will always be here. In sleep, in waking, in daylight and darkness. Wherever you travel, I will be at your shoulder. I shall be always watching you’.

His words echoed in the air. Across Devil’s face in rapid succession passed realisation, understanding of what he had done, and then the dawning of a terrible fear. It was a moment to behold, and the audience edged further forwards in their seats.

Carlo Morris had agreed to throw in his lot with Devil just as deliberately as his partner had chosen him. He had done so because he recognised from the outset that Devil Wix was a useful melodramatic actor. All he needed was proper restraint.

Jacko Grady pulled on his cigar.

Out on the stage Devil had closed the doors and taken a step backwards from his magic cabinet. He snapped the blade of the sword. He fell on his knees beside the black basket and dropped into it the fragments of metal and the twisted hilt.

‘Forgive me!’ he cried.

There was a deafening drum roll and every pair of eyes in the house fastened on Devil as he prostrated himself. The lights flashed off and then burned cold blue and silver.

With his forehead pressed to the boards and dust in his nostrils making him want to sneeze, Devil wordlessly prayed that the sequence would go smoothly. This was the trickiest part of the entire illusion.

Across the stage to his right the tumbled heap of clothes belonging to the good philosopher stirred and grew as it took on human shape. The gown’s hood fell back, and the audience saw that the noble grey head rested on broad shoulders again. Standing tall, Carlo held up his arms. The sleeves dropped to expose his bare wrists, freed from the rope.