Christopher Priest - The Prestige

I realized Borden was provoking him into this kind of rage, perhaps deliberately. I stepped forward, not to any of the adults, but towards Nicky. This small boy was caught up in something he could not possibly understand, and my instinct was to rush across to him, take hold of his hand and perhaps lead him away from the dangerous adult game.

I had walked half the distance to the group, entirely unnoticed by any of them, when my father shouted, "Stand back, everyone!"

My mother and Stimpson, who presumably knew what was going to happen, immediately moved back a few paces. My mother said something in what was for her a loud voice, but her words were drowned by a rising din from the device. It hummed and fizzed, restlessly, dangerously. Clive Borden had not moved, and stood only a foot or two away from the edge of the pit. Still no one looked at me.

A series of loud bangs suddenly burst forth from the top of the device, and with each one appeared a long, snaking tendril of white electrical discharge. As each shot out it prowled like the reaching tentacle of some terrible deep-sea creature, groping for its prey. The noise was tremendous; every flash, every waving feeler of naked energy, was accompanied by a screeching, hissing sound, loud enough to hurt my ears. My father looked up towards Borden, and I could see a familiar expression of triumph on his face.

"Now you know!" he yelled at him.

"Turn it off, Victor!" my mother cried.

"But Mr Borden has insisted! Well, here it is, Mr Borden! Does this satisfy your insistence?"

Borden was still standing as if transfixed, just a short distance from the snaking electrical discharge. He was holding his little boy in his arms. I could see the expression on Nicky's face, and I knew he was as scared as I was.

"This proves nothing!" Borden shouted.

My father's response was to close a large metal handle attached to one of the pillars inside the contraption. The zigzagging beams of energy immediately doubled in size, and snaked with more agility than ever around the wooden bars of the cage. The noise was deafening.

"Get in, Borden," my father shouted. "Get in and see for yourself!"

To my amazement my father then climbed out of the pit, stepping up to the main floor of the cellar between two of the wooden bars. Instantly, a number of the electrical rays flashed across to him, hissing horribly about his body. For a moment he was surrounded by them, consumed by fire. He seemed to fuse with the electricity, illuminated from within, a figure of gruesome menace. Then he took another step, and he was out of it.

"Not scared , are you, Borden?" he shouted harshly.

I was close enough to see that the hair on my father's head was standing up from his scalp, and the hairs that stuck out from his sleeves were on end. His clothes hung oddly on his body, as if ballooning away from him, and his skin seemed to my mortified eyes to be glowing permanently blue as a result of his few seconds bathed in the electricity.

"Damn you, damn you!" cried Borden.

He turned on my father, and thrust the horror-struck child at him. Nicky tried to hang on to his father, but, Borden forced him away. My father accepted the boy reluctantly, taking him in an awkward hold. Nicky was yelling with terror, and struggling to be released.

"Jump in now!" my father yelled at Borden. "It will go in the next few seconds!"

Borden took a step forward until he was at the edge of the zone of electricity. My father was beside him, while Nicky was reaching out with his arms, screaming and screaming for his daddy. Waving blue snakes of discharge moved crazily a fraction of an inch in front of Borden. His hair rose from his scalp, and I could see him clenching and unclenching his fists. His head drooped briefly forward, and as it did so one of the tendrils instantly found him, snaking down his neck, around his shoulders and back, splattering noisily on the floor between his shoes.

He leapt back in terror, and I felt sorry for him.

"I can't do it!" he gasped. "Turn the bloody thing off”

"This is what you wanted, isn't it?"

My father was filled with madness. He stepped forward, away from Clive Borden, and into the deadly barrage of electricity. Half a dozen tentacles instantly wound themselves around him and the boy, imbuing them both with the lethal cyanic glow. All the hairs on his head were standing on end, making him more terrible than ever I had seen him.

He threw Nicky into the pit.

My father stepped back, away from the deadly barrage.

As Nicky fell, his arms and legs scrabbling wildly at the air, he screamed again, one despairing yell. It was a single sustained outbursting of sheer terror, loneliness and fear of abandonment.

Before he hit the ground the device exploded with light. Flames leapt from the overhead wires, and a crash rang out violently. The wooden struts seemed to swell outwards with the pressure from within, and as the tentacles of light withdrew into themselves they did so with a screech as of sharp steel sliding against steel.

Horribly, it had ended. Thick blue smoke hung heavily in the air, spreading torpidly outwards across the ceiling of the cellar. The device was at last silent, and doing nothing. Nicky lay motionless on the hard floor beneath the structure.

Somewhere in the distance, it seemed, I could hear his terrible scream echoing still.

My eyes were half blind from the brilliant dazzle of the electric flares; my ears were singing from the assault of the noise; my mind ran deliriously with the shock of what I had witnessed.

I walked forward, drawn by the sight of that smoking pit. Now still and apparently in repose it was full of threat, yet even so I felt myself drawn inexorably to it. Soon I was standing at the edge, beside my mother. .My hand went up, as so often before, and folded itself into her fingers. She too was staring down in revulsion and disbelief.

Nicky was dead. His face had frozen in death as he screamed, and his arms and legs were twisted, a snapshot of his flailing as he was thrown into the pit by my father. He lay on his back. His hair had horripilated as he went through the electric field, and it stood up around his petrified face.

Clive Borden emitted a dreadful howl of misery, anger and despair, and leapt down into the pit. He threw himself on the ground, wrapped his arms around the body of his son, tried tenderly to pull the boy's limbs back to their normal position, cradled the boy's head with a hand, pressed his face against the boy's cheek, all the while shaking with terrible sobs coming from deep within him.

And my mother, as if realizing for the first time that I was there beside her, suddenly swept her arms around me, pressed my face into her skirt, then lifted me up. She walked quickly across the cellar, bearing me away from the scene of the disaster.

I was facing back over her shoulder, and as we went quickly out to the staircase my last sight was of my father. He was staring down into the pit, and his face bore such an expression of harsh satisfaction that more than two decades later I can still remember it only with a shudder of repulsion.

My father had known what would happen, he had allowed it to happen, he had made it happen. Everything about his stance and his expression said: I've proved my point .

I noticed also that Stimpson, the servant, was crouching on the floor, balancing himself with his hands. His head was bowed.

I've lost, or suppressed, all memories of what happened in the immediate aftermath. I only recall being at school during the following year, and then changing schools, making new friends, gradually growing up through childhood. There was a rush of normality around me, almost like a flood of embarrassed compensation for the appalling scene I had witnessed.