He got back to his room, excited and out of breath, but before opening his copy of Modern Magic for the umpteenth time, he tried to calm himself a little. Eleven months had passed since his first visit to the Egyptian Hall but he still remembered the absurd joy he had felt that night when he got home and realised that the torn edge of the piece of paper he had stolen from Maskelyne matched the thin ragged strip where pages 537/538 had been ripped out of the book. He immediately sat down and began to read, convinced that in his hands he held the key to claiming Maskelyne’s £3,000. He was quickly, and brutally, disappointed. Having read the whole chapter, all he could do was agree with Maskelyne’s scrawled note: Hoffmann has no idea. Worse still: Hoffmann masked his ignorance by larding his text with technical terms. Though he now knew the entire chapter by heart, Grouse still resented the convoluted prose, full of deceptions, insinuations and deliberate evasions.
That first night he had not been able to get a wink of sleep so he profited from his insomnia by making one of the most important resolutions of his life: whatever it took, he would reconstruct Hoffmann’s diagram in three dimensions. He knew from the text that he could not possibly replicate the way the automaton functioned and consequently he was a long way from being able to claim the magician’s £3,000, but he needed to see it. To see, to touch, to have something concrete, something tangible, which might act as a springboard for his imagination. Provided he succeeded, it did not matter to him how much he spent. Or, rather, what crimes he might have to commit, since as a matter of professional pride he did not pay for anything he could get free. His most spectacular crime had been breaking into a tailor’s shop at night and stealing a wooden dummy, a head and torso which were conveniently hollow. In just two days he had managed to lay his hands on dozens of tools, many of which he would not even need. With these, he had handmade most of the pieces. Others he had seized from poorly guarded bicycles which he had abandoned after he had done with them. For the more complex parts, he had had no option but to entrust his request to a blacksmith and pay for them. As the expenses began to eat into his earnings, he was obliged to extend his working hours. The few free hours he had left, he spent at the table in his room, assembling pieces which he then fitted into the dummy by the light of two candles.
It had taken him five months to build something that vaguely resembled Psycho. It was a poor copy and the movement lacked the precision of the original, but at least he had managed to get the arm to move. To do this, he had only to turn a crank set into the hollow body of the mannequin. Grouse was particularly proud of the way the gears meshed silently and he would frequently take them out and oil them again.
But he still did not have the most crucial piece of information; the detail over which Hoffmann shamelessly equivocated: how to move the crank remotely. In the Egyptian Hall, no one had come within two metres of the automaton while it was working, a fact that Maskelyne had not only mentioned, but had rather pretentiously and theatrically demonstrated. Grouse spent night after night with the crank in one hand, spinning it in the air as the imaginary gears in his brain turned round and round.
He had his first success using a bicycle from which he had removed the wheels. He screwed the frame to the floor and attached the crank handle to the chain. This gave a distance of barely two feet. The arm of the automaton still moved, though the movements were more spasmodic and less precise than before. Next, he tried making the chain longer so as to increase the distance but, although he extended it by only a few inches, it didn’t work. Now that it was longer, the chain lost tension after the first turn of the pedals. It was logical, he thought; after all, bicycles otherwise would be fifteen feet long.
As the weeks passed, his room began to seem smaller and smaller. Every inch of space was covered with tools and spare parts which he went on collecting even if he had no specific use for them. By now, not even his bed, which was pushed back against the wall, was immune to the invasion. One night, stumbling into his room in the dark, he tripped over the bicycle chain and, in a rage, he lashed out, kicking and stamping. He didn’t quite manage to destroy the mannequin, but it was a close thing. When he finally calmed down, he was frightened. He was not accustomed to losing his head. Lying back on the bed, it took him only a few moments to work out what had caused this reaction: the closer he came to the solution, the more impossible it seemed. Even if he could find a way to extend the chain by several metres and keep it taut, he still had to deal with the most intractable problem of all: making it invisible. In the end, even allowing for a trapdoor and a space beneath the stage, which probably existed at the Egyptian Hall, the chain still had to connect with the body of the mannequin. Through a transparent cylinder. This phrase was carved in capital letters on his brain: A TRANSPARENT CYLINDER. He was as far from his goal as he had been the day he started. There was no way to make a chain invisible. He had to start over again.
Something invisible, something invisible. These two words had been plaguing him for weeks. Determined not to squander any more time or money, he forbade himself to pick up another tool until he had worked out the theory. He would draw. That’s what he would do. Draw as many diagrams as he needed, make lists of every substance he was aware of until he came up with one that was invisible but still capable of moving the mechanism of the automaton. He was not stupid, he knew that, in this case, ‘invisible’ meant ‘transparent’. He continued to throw himself into the task, but the thrill of the first days was gone because he was faced with an insurmountable obstacle. He never forgot that his initial desire had been to see. To see something similar to the original so that he might use this as a springboard to imagine a solution. Now that he could see it, he had to imagine something invisible. He had to see something that was invisible.
Two months later, he was still turning the problem over in his mind, but now he no longer drew diagrams and, though it pained him to admit it, he was thinking about giving up. The coup de grâce, when it came, was not the result of long nights of mental gymnastics, but a complete accident, a piece of information he stumbled on while going about his ordinary business.
Grouse always kept in touch with various officers in the London courts. It was useful to know who had been locked up, what sort of sentences were being handed down for which crimes, which judges were harsh and which were lenient with those who worked the streets. All in all, information that was of secondary importance, but useful in making decisions with regard to his profession and which only entailed buying a pint of beer from time to time for clerks and junior officers of the court. It was during one such meeting that he discovered Maskelyne had been to court a few weeks earlier. And not as a plaintiff – something he frequently did if he felt someone was making use of one of his patents – but as the defendant. It seemed that someone had come up with, or thought they had come up with, the solution to how Psycho worked and had claimed the £3,000 reward. Maskelyne had refused to pay. The case had caused something of a stir among the court officers because the plaintiff had brought his automaton into court. Maskelyne had not. He had nothing to prove and the judge accepted that forcing him to demonstrate how Psycho worked was tantamount to making his invention obsolete.
Since the hearing had been held in camera, Grouse’s informant did not know how the plaintiff’s automaton worked. What he did know was that the verdict had been decided on a linguistic nuance. During opening remarks, witnesses for both sides had agreed on Maskelyne’s exact words when he made the challenge: ‘A similar apparatus capable of playing cards that is genuinely automatic’. In other words, what was important was not that the competing automaton should look exactly like Psycho, nor even that it should function in the same way, but that it do so without any human intervention whatsoever. This, according to Maskelyne, and apparently to the judge, was the meaning of the word ‘genuinely’. It was not enough that someone should be able to operate the automaton secretly or remotely. In simple terms, the machine had to function by itself. The plaintiff therefore demanded that Maskelyne reve
al how Psycho worked in order to prove that the challenge was possible. Or, if not, that he should publicly admit that he had been fooling his audience. The judge, however, poured scorn on this request, in words that quickly spread throughout the courts: ‘If I claimed that I had visited the moon and offered a reward for anyone capable of doing likewise, I would be insane. But nobody could insist that I prove it, still less that I pay up. And being insane, as far as I know, is not a crime.’
Even Grouse had to accept that the decision was legitimate, and, with a heavy heart, he felt he had to abandon his attempt. A substance that, besides being invisible, was capable of moving by itself? It seemed easier to accept the judge’s challenge and try to come up with some means of propelling himself to the moon. Until his conversation with the two workmen in the street. At that moment it was as though a light had switched itself on in his mind and, for the first time, he saw the solution he had been seeking for so long. The rubber tubes from the tank could run under the stage to a simple trapdoor, which would allow air up through the cylinder when required. Nothing was more invisible than air.
The Future
‘Let’s leave it at that,’ Galván announced.
He had been telling the story of Psycho and had just come to the point where Grouse discovered the existence of compressed air and its possible uses for automata. Halfway through the story he had got to his feet and his voice continued its narration from the darkness. These sudden, increasingly lengthy disappearances had ceased to worry Víctor, but it did bother him if Galván moved around as he was talking because it forced Víctor to swivel round in his chair in order to be able to hear. Most of all, he was irritated by Galván’s tendency to break off in the middle of his stories.
‘Why?’ he protested. ‘Go on, just a little more … It’s not late. I still don’t understand what this has to do with Grouse’s thumb …’
‘There’s too much left to tell,’ the maestro said. ‘Right now, we need to talk about the future.’
At that moment, there was a noise and the lights came on.
Víctor rubbed his eyes and blinked before looking around the room. The island, these two square metres within whose borders he had been confined every Tuesday afternoon for almost two years suddenly became a vast, diaphanous space. Galván, dressed in black, as always, was standing with his back to Víctor near the door in front of a large bank of switches. Every time he pressed one, another section of the hall lit up, finally revealing a small stage right at the back of the room. In this new context the table and the two folding chairs looked like toys. The walls were plastered with old magic posters. Without moving from his seat, Víctor recognised several names: Maskelyne, Kellar, Stodare. Near the stage, the walls and the floor were completely black. At the other end of the room, on the wall with the small window, were half a dozen objects which Víctor at first assumed were pieces of furniture until, taking a second look, he recognised the famous Sword Cabinet and an escape-artist’s trunk circled with stout chains and heavy padlocks.
‘Shit … this place is a museum.’
‘Not yet,’ Galván said. ‘But that’s what I want to talk about.’
He came over to the table, moved his chair next to Víctor’s and sat down. He smoothed the green baize tablecloth before carrying on.
‘I have emphysema,’ he announced matter-of-factly, as though he were telling someone it was raining outside. As Víctor opened his mouth, the maestro raised a hand to stop him. ‘It’s not going to kill me just yet, but I need to make a few changes. At my age …’
‘I don’t even know how old you are,’ Víctor objected.
‘Too young to die,’ replied Galván. ‘And too old not to face the fact that I’m dying.’ He put his hand in his pocket and took out his pack of cigarettes. Víctor could see the determination in his eyes and did not even try to comment. ‘I’m not going to bother you with all the gory details. Let’s just say it’s like having a hole in my lungs. Or rather, a tunnel. I can’t breathe properly. I tire easily.’
‘But, Mario …’
‘Let me finish. I’ve wanted to change some things in my life for some time, and this is exactly the opportunity I’ve been waiting for. I’m tired of giving lessons.’ Seeing the fear in Víctor’s face, he quickly clarified his meaning. ‘Not to you. It’s the others I want to give up. In fact, I’ve told them I’m not teaching any more.’
Víctor, who had not even realised that Galván had other students, breathed a sigh of relief.
‘I don’t really care about the shop either. I don’t want to get rid of it, because I’ve spent my whole life there, but from now on, my daughter will manage it. Right now, there are only two projects that interest me. One is the museum. I have a lot more old things in the workshop. I’d like to restore them and exhibit them. If I put in seats from here up to the stage, I think the place could hold just short of a hundred people.’ It was clear he had everything planned. ‘It could be used as a lecture hall for conferences, exhibitions, masterclasses. All of this will take time that I haven’t had until now.’
‘And the other project?’
‘The other project is you.’
Víctor could not suppress a smile.
‘When do we start?’
‘We started two years ago. You’ve learned a lot. So much, in fact, that if you never set foot in this place again, I guarantee you could make a good living.’
‘Like Lápidus.’
‘More or less. All I need to know is whether you have the talent and the determination that he lacked. Whether you’re prepared to take the next step, prepared to think big, whether you’re interested in doing something that will make a difference.’
‘What do you think?’
‘I think you are. But that’s not enough. What I need from you is a commitment. If we’re to carry on, I’m going to put a lot of pressure on you. We’ll have to work, Víctor, really work. And if you fail me, I’ll never forgive you.’
‘Shit, Mario, you make it sound like we’re getting married.’
‘I’d never do that. You never stay with anyone for more than a couple of days.’
‘Anyway, the answer’s yes. Yes, I want to.’
For the rest of the conversation, Víctor had a smile on his face. He had spent two years waiting for this moment. He got up and hugged Galván, hopping from one foot to another like a little boy.
‘If everything goes well, you’ll make a lot of money. A lot. Even after I take my fifteen per cent. If not, it’s still worth having tried.’
‘Real magic.’ Víctor sat down again. Though he had returned the hug, Galván’s face was solemn, as though he was determined to ignore the magnitude of the moment. ‘At last.’
‘Yes,’ the maestro said. ‘Imagine. You wanted to talk about real magic. I wanted to talk about the future. As it turns out, they’re the same thing. But we can only make it happen if we go back to the past.’
‘Don’t start with the word games, Mario. Please.’
‘You’re right.’ Galván paused for a second and thought. ‘It’s time to act. Stay there, don’t move and keep your eyes closed until I tell you.’
Víctor did as he was told, but he listened as Galván’s footsteps moved away towards the stage at the back of the hall. After a few moments, he gave Víctor permission to look. When Víctor opened his eyes, he could not see hide nor hair of the maestro.
‘We are in the Berlin Panoptikon. The year is 1886, ten years post-Hoffmann.’
Víctor searched the room but still could not see Galván anywhere, although he could not possibly be hiding unless there was an invisible trapdoor in the back wall. After a few seconds, a small table suddenly materialised in the middle of the stage. Víctor started as though someone had pricked him. It was not possible. Ignoring Galván’s orders, he got up and moved closer, only to stop, frozen in mid-stride, when he saw a red cup appear on the table. It did not simply appear, it seemed to have sprouted there. In a fraction of a second. As if this were not enoug
h, at that moment a trickle of white liquid was spirited out of the air, filling the cup. Víctor crept closer, almost on tiptoe, as though the least sound would cause the illusion to vanish. He arrived at the stage, reached out and touched the table, the cup. Despite their solidity, he still believed they might be holograms. At that moment a strong hand grabbed his calf and Galván’s voice thundered:
‘I thought I told you not to move!’
Víctor let out a scream and stumbled, knocking over the cup and spilling the milk. Galván’s booming laugh echoed round the room. Still Víctor did not understand until he saw Galván’s hands in black gloves holding up what looked like a hood. As his student’s eyes lit up with the sheer simplicity of the illusion, the maestro said:
‘Welcome, Víctor Losa, to the Black Art.’
It was so simple it was insulting. Galván removed the gloves and explained the few details he had not grasped.
‘Apparently the illusion was discovered by a German actor, Max Auzinger, in 1885. According to him, the idea came to him by chance while he was watching a play his rep company were performing. At the climax of the play, a black man was supposed to appear suddenly at the back of the stage to rescue the kidnapped heroine. On opening night, when the black man appeared – though of course it was actually a white actor blacked up – the audience didn’t react. Auzinger, who was sitting in one of the boxes since he wasn’t in the scene, immediately realised the problem. Since the backcloth was black, all the audience could see were the whites of the actor’s eyes.’
The Manual of Darkness Page 15