Christopher Priest - The Prestige

Nor can I remember when my father walked out on us. I know the date it happened, because I found it in the diary my mother kept in the last years of her life, but my own memory of that time is lost. Because of her diary I also know most of her feelings about the split-up, and a few of the circumstances. For my part I remember a general sense of his being there when I was small, an unnerving and unpredictable figure, thankfully at a remove from the lives of his two young daughters. I also remember life afterwards without him, a strong sense of his absence, a peace that Rosalie and I made the most of and which has continued ever since.

I was glad at first that he went. It was only when I was older that I began to miss him, as I do now. I believe he must be alive still, because otherwise we would have heard. Our estate is complicated to run, and my father is still responsible for that. There is a family trust, administered by solicitors in Derby, and they are apparently in touch with him. The house and land and title are still in his name. Many of the direct charges, such as taxation, are dealt with and paid by the trust, and money is still made available to Rosalie and me.

Our last direct contact with him was about five years ago, when he wrote a letter from South Africa. Passing through, he said, although he didn't say where from or where to. He is in his seventies now, probably hanging out somewhere with other British exiles, not letting on about his background. Harmless, a bit dotty, vague on details, an old Foreign Office hand. I can't forget him. No matter how much time passes, I always remember him as the cruel-faced man who threw a small boy into a machine he must have known would certainly kill him.

Clive Borden left the house the same night. I've no idea what happened to Nicky's body, although I have always assumed that Borden took it with him.

Because I was so young I accepted my parents’ authority as final and when they told me the police would not be interested in the boy's death, I believed them. In the event, they seemed to be right.

Years later, when I was old enough to realize how wrong it was, I tried to ask my mother what had happened. This was after my father had left home, and about two years before she died.

It felt to me as if the time had come to clear up the mysteries of the past, to put some of the darkness behind us. I also saw it as a sign of my own growing up. I wanted her to be frank with me and treat me like an adult. I knew she had received a letter from my father earlier that week, and it gave me an excuse to bring up the subject.

"Why did the police never come round to ask questions?" I said, when I had made it plain that I wanted to talk about that night.

She said, "We do never talk about that, Katherine."

"You mean that you never do," I said. "But why did Daddy leave home?"

"You would have to ask him that."

"You know I can't," I said. "You're the only one who knows. He did something wrong that night, but I'm not sure why, and I'm not even sure how. Are the police looking for him?"

"The police aren't involved in our lives."

"Why not?" I said. "Didn't Daddy kill that boy? Wasn't that murder?"

"It was all dealt with at the time. There is nothing to hide, nothing to feel guilty about. We paid the price for what happened that night. Mr Borden suffered most, of course, but look what it has done to all our lives. I can tell you nothing you want to know. You saw for yourself what happened."

"I can't believe that's the end of it," I said.

"Katherine, you should know better than to ask these questions. You were there too. You're as guilty as the rest of us."

"I was only five years old!" I said. "How could that possibly make me guilty of something?"

"If you're in any doubt you could establish that by going to the police yourself."

My courage failed me in the face of her cold and unyielding demeanour. Mr and Mrs Stimpson still worked for us then, and later I asked Stimpson the same questions. Politely, stiffly, tersely, he denied all knowledge of anything that might have taken place.

My mother died when I was eighteen. Rosalie and I half-expected news of it to make our father return eventually from exile, but it did not. We stayed on in the house, and slowly it dawned on us that the place was ours. We reacted differently. Rosalie gradually freed herself of the place, and in the end she moved away. I began to be trapped by it, and I'm still here. A large part of what held me was the feeling of guilt I could not throw off, about what had happened down there in the cellar. Everything centred on those events, and in the end I realized I would have to do something about purging myself of what happened.

I finally plucked up my courage and went down to the cellar to discover if anything of what I had seen was still there.

I chose to do it on a day in summer, when friends were visiting from Sheffield and the house was full of the sounds of rock music and the talk and laughter of young people. I told no one what I was planning, and simply slipped away from a conversation in the garden and walked into the house. I was braced with three glasses of wine.

The lock on the door had been changed soon after the Borden visit, and when my mother died I had it changed again, although I had never actually ventured inside. Mr Stimpson and his wife were long gone, but they and the housekeepers who came after them used the cellar for storage. I had always been too nervous even to go to the top of the steps.

On that day, though, I wasn't going to let anything stop me. I had been preparing mentally for some time. Once through the door I locked it from the inside (one of the changes I had brought about), switched on the electric lights, and walked down to the cellar.

I looked immediately for the apparatus that had killed Nicky Borden, but, unsurprisingly, it was no longer there. However, the circular pit was still in the centre of the cellar floor, and I went over and inspected that. It appeared to have been constructed more recently than the rest of the screed floor; it had clearly been excavated with a plan in mind, because several steel ties were drilled into the concrete sides at regular intervals, presumably to act as stays for the wooden bars of the apparatus. In the ceiling overhead, directly above the centre of the pit, there was a large electrical junction box. A thick cable led away to a voltage converter at the side of the cellar, but the box itself had become dirty and rusty.

I noticed that there were numerous scorch marks on the ceiling radiating out from the box, and although someone had put a coat of white emulsion paint over these they still showed through clearly.

Apart from all this there was no sign that the apparatus had ever been in place.

I found the thing itself a few moments later, when I went to investigate the collection of crates, cases and large mysterious objects stored neatly along most of the length of one wall. I soon realized that this was where my great-grandfather's magic paraphernalia had been stored, presumably after his death. Near the front, but otherwise stacked unobtrusively, were two stoutly made wooden crates, each of them so heavy I was unable to budge them, let alone get them out of the cellar on my own. Stencilled in black on one of them, but greatly faded with age were routing names: "Denver, Chicago, Boston, Liverpool (England)". A Customs manifest was still stapled to the side, although it was so frayed that it came off in my hand when I touched it. Holding it under the nearest light I saw that someone had written in copperplate, "Contents — Scientific Instruments’. Metal hoops had been attached on all four sides of both crates, to facilitate hoisting, and there were obvious handholds all over the crates.

I tried to open the nearer of the two, fumbling along the edge of the lid to find some way to force it open, when to my surprise the top swivelled upwards lightly, balanced within in some way. I knew at once I had found the workings of the electrical apparatus I had seen that night, but because it had been disassembled all menace was gone.