9
It was around the same time as this that Thom began to feel that he was being watched or followed. For all its bland character, Prachous could be a place of suspicions, of doubts, of interference. Most people pretended to be absorbed in their own lives, but in reality all Prachoits were nervously curious about what their neighbours might or might not be doing. It always paid to be careful if you had something, no matter how harmless, you wanted to keep to yourself. In Thom’s case, because he was a magician, a feeling of secrecy about what might be involved in his preparations was habitual.
Every morning when he walked across the town centre to his rehearsal room, Thom normally stopped at a particular pavement café in the central square of Beathurn. He would buy a pastry or a small piece of cake, drink two cups of coffee, and while he sat alone at a table he would read the day’s newspaper. Around him, many other people were doing much the same. It was pleasant to sit there under the shade of the big trees in the square, listening to the sound of other people’s chatter and the traffic going past, and harmlessly watching the passers-by as they headed for work, or home, or to the university on the opposite side of the square.
He rarely took much interest in the other customers, but one morning he realized that a certain young woman was once again sitting at a table not far from his own. He had noticed her before – although she was young, looked interesting and always dressed well, there was some kind of deep stress apparent in her expression and bearing. She seemed never able to relax, but always sat forward, slightly hunched, staring out across the street. She was often frowning. In a town of contented people, she looked like an outsider. She always arrived at the café after Thom had ordered from the waiter, and she was still there when he left. Whenever the right table was available she sat at the same distance from him: not too close, not too far away. She always sat at an angle towards him – neither facing him nor with her back turned.
She never looked directly at him, but on the morning when Thom took a special interest in her he glanced up suddenly from his newspaper and his eye happened to fall on her. She was staring at him then, but the instant she noticed him looking she turned her gaze away. Until then, Thom had given her no more thought than anyone else he saw in the café, but after that he was more aware of her.
It became, for Thom, a sort of mild game without rules. He started choosing a different table every day, but each time he did the young woman would contrive to sit at the same general distance away from him as always. One morning he deliberately chose the only free table in an area that was crowded – the young woman had to sit on the far side of the café area. Another time he chose a table inside the café – she took a table outside, but one close to the window with a view towards him. She never seemed to look directly at him, though.
A few days later he realized that she often followed him when he walked the rest of the way to his rehearsal room. She was adept at it: she shadowed him at a great distance, and it took some time for him to be certain that following him was what she was doing.
Not knowing who she was, and feeling sure that her behaviour was not some odd way of showing she was attracted to him, and not himself being interested, at that time, in forming any new relationship, Thom began to wonder what might lie behind it all. Just about the only motive he could ascribe to her was that she trying to find out what his plans were, what he was preparing in his rehearsal room.
His work a year or two earlier as a pavement performer had given him a valuable lesson in the ways this town had of dealing with unconventional activity. The first few times he stood on a street corner and busked his guitar, policier officers had courteously but firmly moved him on. He had soon acceded to the inevitable and applied for, and was quickly granted, a street performer’s licence. After that, he was left alone.
One afternoon, when the woman’s behaviour had for some reason bothered him more than before, Thom went to the local policier office, applied for and was quickly granted another licence. This was for Live Performance and Rehearsal. In the part of the form where he had to enter a Performance Description he wrote the word Magician. Then, thinking that he should cover all possibilities, he added Illusionist, Conjuror, Prestidigitator, Thaumaturge, Wizard, and many more synonyms. He looked forward to being left alone by whoever was instructing this woman to watch him.
But a week later she was still shadowing him. By then Thom had another problem he had to solve.
10
He could not perform the new illusion without an assistant. Indeed, the assistant was the essence of the illusion. What he required was a boy or a girl, or a very young man or woman, who was not only willing to work under the unusual directions of a stage magician but who above all was strong, lithe and athletic. Most of the magical effect of the trick would be gained by the acrobatic performance of the assistant.
He advertised. He tried asking among the people he knew in Beathurn. He approached model agencies and actors’ agents.
Applicants were few, and none of them turned out to be suitable. He waited, advertised again, asked around again. He had taken his own rehearsals of the illusion as far as possible – nothing more could be done until he had an assistant to work with. Once again he began to wonder about the wisdom of trying to pursue a magical career in this place.
One morning, when he happened to be sleeping late, he was awakened by someone coming to his door. Dishevelled and barely dressed, Thom was greeted by a man who introduced himself as Gerres Huun. The Huuns were one of the better-known families in Beathurn, managers of several seigniorial tithe agencies in the town.
Huun had arrived with his daughter, an eighteen year-old scholarship girl who was about to attend the Beathurn Multitechnic University, where she was to take a degree course in Body Tension Applications. Her name was Rullebet. She stood quietly beside her father while the two men discussed what she would be required to do if she was given the job. The father said, and Rullebet quickly confirmed, that she lived for athletics and other kinds of physical activity. She had seen Thom’s job when he first advertised it, but it was only now that she had managed to persuade her protective father to allow her to apply for it.
Thom was of course eager to explain that the work she would be asked to do, although unusual, was perfectly safe, that the hours expected of her were not long, that he would fulfil any special conditions her parents requested, and of course that she would be remunerated regularly and promptly.
Pleased in every way by Rullebet’s appearance and personality, he offered to show them the rehearsal room immediately. After Thom had hastily dressed, the three of them walked through the sunlit streets towards the restaurant building. On the way they passed through the square by the university, where he would normally stop for his morning coffee. It was a little later than his normal time. Thom wondered if he would see the woman who was shadowing him, but he saw no sign of her as they passed.
The high-ceilinged rehearsal room was cool, the windows shrouded with wooden blinds.
‘Would you please climb this metal pole,’ Thom said, when they were inside with the door locked. The pole was firmly mounted, connected to the floor and one of the ceiling joists. Before Rullebet was allowed to start her father checked it thoroughly to make sure it had been properly secured.
She then shinned up the pole in a matter of seconds. Her body movements were smooth and elegant and when she reached the top she contrived to swirl around it, arm raised in a graceful salute.
‘Is that all she will have to do?’ said Gerres Huun.
‘I require her for rehearsal,’ Thom replied. ‘That will take several intensive days, with warm-up practice before every performance.’
‘Full reward for rehearsals?’ said Huun.
‘Naturally,’ said Thom. ‘I will make credit available either to Rullebet herself or to you – or, if she prefers, I could pass the credit to the Body Tension department at the Multitechnic. I’ll also credit her with a bonus for every performance in front of the publ
ic. The first one of those is yet to be arranged, but I am eager to mount my illusions. I’m certain that now Rullebet will be working with me I can obtain a firm booking in the theatre, here in Beathurn. After that – who knows?’
‘I shall be expecting Rullebet to concentrate on her studies.’
‘I understand. And I want you to appreciate, sir, that I shall take the greatest of care with her, so that everything she wants of life will be possible. I hope this will even contribute to her studies at the Multi. And of course she will be paid well.’
While they were speaking, Rullebet slid down the pole with a gracious circling movement, and landed lightly on the floor. She acknowledged an unseen audience with a wave of her hand, a radiant smile and an easy curtsey.
11
The management of the community-run theatre was reluctant to put on Thom’s new show. He underwent a discouraging interview with the woman in charge. She had avoided him for days but when he finally tracked her down she told him with evident bad grace that their audiences were tired of magic shows. She said that the last magician who performed at Il-Palazz had been released from his contract halfway through the week’s run.
Thom knew the magician she was meaning – a conjuror of the old school, whose repertoire consisted entirely of tricks with playing cards, handkerchiefs and lighted cigarettes – but Thom’s enthusiastic pitch that he had devised an exciting new illusion was to no avail.
Later, he went around to see the editor of the newspaper and invited him to visit his rehearsal room to see a performance for himself. The man’s memory of the brief correspondence in his letters column had faded, so Thom had to remind him several times of the intrigue that so many people had expressed.
The elderly editor, a true Prachoit who had made his career reinforcing the cautious views and outlook of his readership, missed his first appointment and sent a trainee reporter to the second, but did manage to turn up after Thom had gone to even more lengths to persuade him.
Rullebet, now exotically clad in the glittering costume she and Thom had chosen for their performances, clambered up the special rope he had imported from Glaund, and at the sound of Thom’s mystic incantations disappeared into thin air.
‘Do that again,’ said the ageing journalist, as the smoke of her disappearance drifted through the large room.
‘A good magician never repeats a trick,’ Thom replied.
‘Where the devil did she go? And where is she now?’
‘You have seen her disappear. For that reason alone I could not repeat the illusion.’
Grudgingly, the man said, ‘All right. It is astonishing.’
‘Thank you.’
Thom clapped his hands loudly. Rullebet ran lithely from the cloakroom at the far end, her arms spread wide, a beaming smile on her face. She bowed deeply to the editor, then without saying a word hurried back to the cloakroom.
Thom had to restrain the man from going after her. He wanted to interview her, wanted to know how she felt about being transported invisibly from one part of the room to another, but Thom led him firmly to the door.
‘Sir, do you agree that what you saw just now is amazing?’
‘I suppose.’
‘Then if you were to write a review of what you have seen, pleading perhaps with the management committee of Il-Palazz, maybe our townspeople might have a chance to share the experience? This is only one of many illusions I can perform.’
‘I’ll see what I can do,’ said the editor, but not encouragingly.
12
The write-up did not appear until two weeks later, just as Thom was beginning to despair of the whole matter, but once the article was in print it could not have been better worded. It spoke of mystery, skill, amazing impossibilities, a dazzling young lady, a fiendish sorcerer, one shock and stunning sight after another.
Thom was about to hurry around to Il-Palazz with a cutting of the article, and plead with the woman manager to change her mind, when she appeared in person at his door.
Not long afterwards, luridly coloured posters appeared all over the town: An Evening with Thom the Thaumaturge! A month later Thom enjoyed his triumphant opening night.
He was given the two prime spots in a programme of general varieties. He closed the first half before the interval with a series of relatively straightforward illusions, and he came back at the end of the second act for the finale, saving his vanishing trick with Rullebet for the climax. The shows went well all through the week.
Once he was inside the building and using it regularly, Thom felt less happy with the physical state of the theatre. The auditorium itself would have benefited from a general updating and redecoration, but much more concerning to him was the condition of the theatrical machinery. In particular he discovered the electrical wiring was antiquated. Most of the stage lights appeared to work, but there were worrying intermittent flickers whenever the main spots came on. Touching the microphone stand during a technical rehearsal, Thom received an electric shock – afterwards, one of the tech crew wrapped some insulating tape around the stand and declared it to have been made safe, but Thom could still feel a tingle of static whenever he touched it. He did so as infrequently as possible after that.
One of his illusions in the first half of the show required the use of the stage trapdoor, but during technical rehearsals it jammed several times. Again, the tech crew came to his rescue and quickly claimed to have solved the problem. Watching them work, Thom came to the conclusion that these apparently keen technicians were the cause of many of the small problems. Most of them were unpaid volunteers, enthusiastic enough, but that was the best that could be said of them. There were two men in charge of the gang who said they had worked in theatres all their lives, but they were both elderly and every day the marginally younger of the two was drunk by mid-afternoon. After the trapdoor was allegedly repaired Thom could still not make it work reliably, so he dropped that particular trick from his repertoire.
As unobtrusively as possible he went through the rigging loft and checked the hemps and lifts. No magician should ever leave anything to chance. His first technical rehearsal cast him into gloom because so many things went wrong, but the second one was better.
Then the week of performances began and all was well. There was a good audience on the first night, a smaller one after that, but as the week went by the numbers steadily increased.
After the first few variety acts – a television comedian who had been famous some years earlier, a chanteuse, a troupe of dancers, some piano duettists – his simple but puzzling tricks went down well. He began with card tricks, then performed a trick known as the Pejman Illusion. This involved a curtained litter, pushed on to the stage on wheels with its compartment concealed by drapes. When the curtains were opened it was shown to be empty, but as soon as Thom closed them again, they would be thrown open from inside and Rullebet sensationally appeared. He then carried out a series of acrobatics-cum-legerdemain stunts on his unicycle, and finished with a more complex illusion which involved an escape from a metal cage under the threat of an array of deadly-looking knives poised to fall across him.
The main attraction was of course the illusion with which he ended the show.
For this, Thom assumed the identity of a sorcerer and appeared on stage in a flowing gown, his face painted to make it seem sinister or inscrutable. When he moved about the stage he did so with a sinuous gliding motion, keeping his arms folded and his head tilted back.
After some exaggerated descriptions of the wonders of ancient magic he would reveal his main prop: a large basket placed in the centre of the stage. From this Thom pulled out a length of thick rope. Two members of the audience would be invited on to the stage to examine the rope, and they would, inevitably, confirm that it was in every way normal. It was not, of course: it was the technologically sophisticated hawser he had imported from a specialist marine industrial supplier. The rope, reinforced with metal and carbon fibres, undetectable by the untrained eye, had a self-rigidify
ing property – when it was used in a certain way it would become as strong and solid as a steel rod.
With the volunteers departed from the stage, Thom embarked on what was for him the most difficult and physically demanding part of the illusion. He threw the rope upwards towards the rigging loft in such a way that it would self-rigidify. He had rehearsed this for weeks and could count on a successful throw at least two times out of three. Even so, for effect he always contrived to get it wrong a few times. This would underline the ‘normal’ properties of the rope, as well as providing the theatrical spectacle of a heavy rope collapsing down on top of him, apparently with great hazard to himself. Finally, though, he would succeed and the rope would magically stand upright. What the audience could not see was that the base of the rope was mounted securely inside the solidly constructed basket, so that once the rope was erect it would not again collapse until he wanted it to.
Rullebet was of course concealed inside the basket throughout all this. He would magically cause her to appear, and she would rise like a beautifully plumed bird from the basket. Thom would place her in what seemed to be an intense trance, and she climbed the rope towards the top. Not to the very top, but as high as possible so that she could be seen by everyone in the audience.
Once she was there, Thom would cause her to vanish, with many flashes and loud bangs, and the rope, now secretly controlled by Thom from below, collapsed down on to the stage again, most of it falling into or around the basket.
After the audience had been given the time to marvel at what they had seen, Rullebet would mysteriously appear in some other part of the auditorium, and she and Thom would take their final bow.
They performed this six times during the course of the week, and all went well. Then came the final performance.