Alan Bradley - The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

"No, of course not," I said, pulling my chair closer. "Please go on."

"Horace was an extraordinarily tall boy even then, with a shock of flaming red hair. His arms were so long in the school jacket that his wrists stuck out like bare twigs beyond the cuffs. 'Bony,' the boys called him, and they ragged him without mercy about his appearance.

"To make matters worse, his fingers were impossibly long and thin and white, like the tentacles of an albino octopus, and he had that pale bleached skin one sometimes sees in redheads. It was whispered that his touch was poison. He played this up a bit, of course, snatching with pretended clumsiness at the jeering boys who danced round him, always just out of reach.

"One evening after a game of hare and hounds he was resting at a stile, panting like a fox, when a small boy named Potts danced in on tiptoe and delivered him a stinging blow across the face. It was meant to be no more than a touch, like tagging the runner, but it soon turned into something else.

"When they saw that the fearful monster, Bonepenny, was stunned, and his nose bleeding, the other boys began to pile on, and Bony was soon down, being pummeled, kicked, and savagely beaten. It was just then that I happened along.

"'Hold up!' I shouted, as loudly as I could, and to my amazement, the scuffle stopped at once. The boys began extricating themselves, one by one, from the tangle of arms and legs. There must have been something in my voice that made them obey instantly. Perhaps the fact that they had seen me perform mystifying tricks lent me some invisible air of authority, I don't know, but I do know that when I ordered them to get themselves back to Greyminster, they faded like a pack of wolves into the dusk.

"'Are you all right?' I asked Bony, helping him to his feet.

"'Faintly tender, but only in one or two widely separated spots—like Carnforth's beef,' he said, and we both laughed. Carnforth was the notorious Hinley butcher whose family had been supplying Greyminster with its boot-leather Sunday roasts of beef since the Napoleonic Wars.

"I could see that Bony was more badly beaten than he was willing to let on, but he put a brave face on it. I gave him my shoulder to lean upon, and helped him hobble back to Greyminster.

"From that day on, Bony was my shadow. He adopted my enthusiasms, and in doing so seemed almost to become a different person. There were times, in fact, when I fancied he was becoming me; that here before me was the part of myself for which I had been searching in the midnight mirror.

"What I do know is that we were never in better form than when we were together; what one of us couldn't do, the other could accomplish with ease. Bony seemed to have been born with a fully formed mathematical ability, and he was soon unveiling for me the mysteries of geometry and trigonometry. He made a game of it, and we spent many a happy hour calculating upon whose study the clock tower of Anson House would fall when we toppled it with a gigantic steam lever of our own invention. Another time, we worked out by triangulation an ingenious series of tunnels which, at a given signal, would collapse simultaneously, causing Greyminster and all its inhabitants to plunge into a Dantean abyss, where they would be attacked by the wasps, hornets, bees, and maggots with which we planned to stock the place.”

Wasps, hornets, bees, and maggots? Could this be Father speaking? I suddenly found myself listening to him with new respect.

"How this was to be achieved," he went on, "we never really thought through, but the upshot of it all was that while I was getting chummy with old Euclid and his books of propositions, Bony, with a bit of coaching, was turning out to be a natural conjurer.

"It was the fingers, of course. Those long white appendages seemed to have a life of their own, and it wasn't long before Bony had mastered completely the arts of prestidigitation. Various objects appeared and vanished at his fingertips with such fluid grace that even I, who knew perfectly well how each illusion was done, could scarcely believe my eyes.

"And as his conjuring skill grew, so did his sense of self-worth. With a bit of magic in hand, he became a new Bony, confident, smooth, and perhaps even brash. His voice changed too. Where yesterday he had sounded like a raucous schoolboy, he seemed now, suddenly—at least, when he was performing—to possess a voice box of polished mahogany: a hypnotic professional voice which never failed to convince its hearers.

"'The Resurrection of Tchang Fu' worked like this: I decked myself out in an oversized silk kimono I had found at a church jumble sale, a beautiful bloodred thing covered with Chinese dragons and mystical markings. I plastered my face with yellow chalk and stretched a thin elastic round my head to pull my eyes up at the corners. A couple of sausage casings from Carnforth's, varnished and cut into long, curving fingernails, added a disgusting detail. All that was needed to complete my getup was a bit of burnt cork, a few wisps of frayed string for a beard, and a frightful theatrical wig.

"I would call for a volunteer from the audience—a confederate, of course, who had been rehearsed beforehand. I would bring him onstage and explain, in a comic singsong Mandarin voice, that I was about to kill him, to send him off to the Land of the Happy Ancestors. This matter-of-fact announcement never failed to fetch a gasp from the audience, and before they could recover themselves, I would pull a pistol from the folds of my robe, point it at my confederate's heart, and pull the trigger.

"A starter's pistol can make a frightful din when it's fired indoors, and the thing would go off with the most dreadful bang. My assistant would clasp his chest, squeezing in his hand a concealed paper twist of ketchup, which would ooze out horribly between his fingers. Then he would look down at the mess on his chest and gape in disbelief.

"'Help me, Jacko!' he would shriek. 'The trick's gone wrong! I'm shot!' and fall dead flat on his back.

"The audience would, by now, be sitting bolt upright in shock; several would be on their feet, and a few in tears. I would hold up a hand to quiet them.

"'Sirence!' I would hiss, fixing them with an awful stare. 'Ancestahs lequire sirence.'

"There might be a few titters of nervous laughter, but generally there was a shocked hush. I would fetch a rolled-up sheet from the shadows and drape it over my apparently dead assistant, leaving only his upturned face visible.

"Now this sheet was quite a remarkable object; one which I had manufactured in great secrecy. It was divided lengthwise into thirds by a pair of slender wooden dowels sewn into two narrow pockets that ran the length of the sheet and were, of course, invisible when the thing was rolled up.

"Squatting down and using my robe as cover, I would slip my assistant's shoes from his feet (this was easily done, since he had secretly loosened his laces just before I chose him from the audience) and stick them, toes up, on the end of the dowels.

"The shoes, you see, had been specially prepared by having a hole drilled up through each heel into which a penny nail could be inserted and pushed through to pierce the end of the dowel. The result was most convincing: a gaping corpse lying dead on the floor, its head sticking out at one end of the draped sheet and its upturned shoes at the other.

"If everything went according to plan, great red stains would by now have begun to seep through the sheet above the 'corpse's' chest, and if not, I could always add a bit from a second twist of paper sewn into my sleeve.

"Now came the important part. I would call for the lights to be lowered ('Honabuh ancestahs lequire comprete dahkness!') and in the gloom I would set off a couple of flashes of magnesium paper. This had the effect of blinding the audience for a moment: just enough time for my assistant to arch his back and, as I adjusted the sheet, get his feet firmly on the floor in a squatting position. His shoes, of course, protruding from the bottom of the sheet, made it seem as if he were still lying perfectly horizontal.