The Manual of Darkness

by Enrique de Heriz

  Starting Over

  Given his difficulty with long sentences, it is hard to believe that Peter Grouse developed a taste for reading. On the other hand, it is possible that the simple fact of getting through Hoffmann’s indigestible prose convinced him that he was capable of swallowing anything. Or perhaps books were simply the answer to the question of how he intended to spend Maskelyne’s money. Whatever the case, the only traces of him in the decade following his triumph at the Egyptian Hall derive from the four fundamental books on the history of magic published in England at the time. Two of these were memoirs by famous magicians: those of Jean Robert-Houdin, a Frenchman who is universally considered to be the father of modern magic, and those of Colonel Stodare, inventor of many of the popular illusions of the period, among them the Decapitated Head trick that made Maskelyne such a handsome profit. The other two were academic studies of the theatre and prestidigitation, both published in 1881. In all four cases, the authors agreed to reveal the workings of a number of important illusions that had become obsolete – either because they had been overperformed, or because they had been superseded by some new method. There is, of course, no proof that Grouse read any of these writers, but one would have to be a firm believer in coincidence to come up with another way to explain the fact that, between 1880 and 1890, he made his living from the phenomena they described. For the only trace of him during the decade is the series of improvements he devised for classic illusions, registered by him at the Patent Office in London. Though, in general, these consisted of seemingly minor technical enhancements, they breathed new life into the illusions: a velvet sheath on a wire muffled the sound which might attract the audience’s attention, pulleys attached to a trapdoor made it easier for ghosts, as they appeared from vaults, not to be so pitifully motionless. It would not be accurate to say that Grouse changed the profession, since, in the end, he was still a thief. The difference was that now, he stole ideas rather than objects and gave them back much improved. He paid in advance, naturally. It appears that learning to read, however difficult it may have been, proved to be a good investment. Now he did not have to go out to steal. It is easy to imagine him spending his nights shut up in his room reading by candlelight, and his days perfecting technical improvements and patenting them.

  Galván had bought first editions of all four books for exorbitant sums at antiquarian book fairs. He kept them under lock and key in a display case in the workshop, together with a first edition of Modern Magic, and unlike with the rest of his vast collection, he never loaned these books to Víctor. At best, he allowed him to look through the glass, as though contemplating a sacred relic. ‘Even I don’t touch them,’ he would say. He did, however, persuade Víctor to read Harry Kellar’s A Magician’s Tour, which, according to the available evidence, was responsible for Grouse’s next appearance in public.

  ‘It’s a recent edition,’ Galván said. ‘It’s not likely to fall apart in your hands like the others. Besides, this one is much more important; this is the book that brought Grouse out of his decade of darkness.’

  Víctor read the title page, where, next to the information that it had first been published in Chicago in 1890, it gave the author as ‘HARRY KELLAR, EDITED BY HIS FAITHFUL “FAMILIAR,” “SATAN, JUNIOR”’, a device that allowed him to refer to himself in the third person, so that he would not have to deny himself praise.

  Kellar had been a real character. Born to a poor family in Erie, Pennsylvania, he had been a seminarian and as a boy had earned his living as assistant to the Fakir of Ava. He toured with the Davenport Brothers when they began their career as spiritualists and must have learned something from them to judge by the facility with which he appropriated other people’s illusions later in his career. Although his fictitious, satanic familiar is careful not to mention the fact, accounts by his contemporaries confirm that he was a terrible magician; or rather, he was all thumbs, incapable of performing the most basic sleight of hand using coins or cards or cubes, which any aficionado is required to master. Even with something as simple as palming a card, he was obliged to resort to clumsy mechanical solutions. And yet, perhaps through the audacity of ignorance, he managed to hold his audience spellbound.

  Though he knew many triumphs and was, for decades, considered the finest magician in the world, he bankrupted himself several times over but always found the strength to start again. In 1867 he claimed to have left Chicago by train, but he had barely made it as far as Rose Hill cemetery when the conductor forced him to get off since he did not have the money for the ticket. He walked for hours along snowy roads, keeping his spirits up by noting the fact that there were twenty-seven lamp-posts for every mile. He finally arrived in Waukegan, where he persuaded various people to extend him credit for the rental of the Phoenix theatre, the printing of the posters, the four dollars he needed for a performer’s licence, even the two packs of cards he required for the show. Three weeks after he opened, the theatre was still sold out every night.

  In August 1875 he survived the shipwreck of the boat that was taking him from Rio to London via Cape Verde. Kellar had embarked after a long tour of Latin America, and when the ship went down, he lost not only all the props for his stage show, but two huge trunks containing a myriad objects collected during his tour: stuffed birds, a Mexican suit valued at $500 together with gold and silver coins from the countries he had visited. The last straw, however, was that, having been rescued by a French ship, he arrived back in London to discover he was utterly penniless: his bankers, Duncan, Sherman and Co., to whom he had sent the substantial receipts from his American tour, had been declared bankrupt. And yet a few short months later, he was once again performing in Lima to great acclaim. He survived an epidemic of Java fever, which forced him to take to his bed, where he spent two months in delirium, and, no sooner was he well, than he immediately set off on a tour of Australia. Starting again was his speciality.

  If there is one thing Kellar cannot be accused of it is a lack of ambition. In 1871, he toured Mexico with a show so spectacular he was forced to reserve an entire train to carry his equipment. Aside from Mexico City, he visited Pueblo and Veracruz. The press accused him of being ‘the devil himself’ and his fame spread so quickly that even the bandidos did not dare attack his train. In Cape Town, people wrote letters to the newspapers complaining that this man, who was manifestly capable of bending supernatural forces to his will, should dare to present himself as a mere performer of mechanical tricks.

  He was a much better self-publicist than he was a magician. Shortly after arriving in Calcutta, at the invitation of a British colonel’s wife, he met with Englinton, a well-known spiritualist at the time. The object of this meeting was to convince Kellar that spiritualists were indeed capable of controlling the forces of nature and to discourage his mission to expose them as charlatans. On 25 January 1882, the magician wrote two letters to the editor of the Indian Daily News. In one of these he wrote that Englinton had apparently caused a series of slate writings to appear from former acquaintances of Kellar who were now dead. In the other, he recounted a seance in which the spiritualist caused the entire group to levitate. In neither case did he directly attribute the phenomena to spiritual intervention; he admitted that he had thoroughly examined the room in which the seances were conducted and confessed himself unable to find a logical explanation for the events. A week later, however, in another letter, he announced that he himself would perform these illusions, which he had since decided were mere trickery, in a theatre in the city. Which theatre was, of course, immediately sold out without the need to pay for a single advertisement.

  Some of the feats that were to make him a legend were the result of a basic understanding of chemistry. In 1874, for example, in deepest Patagonia, the commandant of the penal colony in Punta Arenas asked him to perform something that might impress the natives, whom he refers to in his account as ‘half-naked savages’. Kellar ‘began to harangue them by means of an interpreter, and when a large number had gathered, su
rprised and startled them by a variety of sleight of hand tricks; then assuming a fierce look he told them he could burn the earth if he so desired and to prove it, he would set the ground on fire. Now the land of Punta Arenas is covered to a considerable depth with white sand. While Kellar had been mystifying the natives, his assistant had mixed some chlorate of potash and white sugar in equal parts and filled a deep hole in the sand with it, without attracting attention.’ Kellar had only to thrust his wand into the ground – having carefully dipped it in sulphuric acid beforehand – and a huge column of flame appeared as he roared the words: ‘Burn, O Earth!’

  Víctor devoured all 212 pages that very night, arriving breathless, and a devoted admirer, at the final paragraph in which Kellar’s satanic alter ego took his leave: ‘Having thus briefly sketched the more or less supernatural and decidedly checkered career of my great master, I, his “familiar”, and in this instance his scribe, take leave of him and my polite readers for the time being. We shall meet again, however, if my readers are by any means interested in what I have set down. Wizards and sorcerers are immortal, and their fame, at any rate, lives after them. The Magician, like the King, lives for ever.’

  Patagonia, Australia, Mexico, the South Seas, Calcutta, boats and trains, natives, aristocrats, castaways and soldiers. Of course Kellar’s life was fascinating. As was his tale, even if it was clearly embroidered by an overheated imagination and an undeniable passion for self-promotion. Kellar had journeyed to places untouched by man, had frequented legendary sailors, and distant tribes, and he had embellished his story with passionate descriptions of flora and fauna, anthropological commentary, weather reports about the cold in the Suez Canal. He even claimed that, all the way from Singapore in late August 1883, he had heard the explosion of the volcano Krakatoa, which sundered the island in two, covering the Java Sea and the southern part of the China Sea in a thick layer of ash.

  However, none of these adventures explained why the book should have fired Peter Grouse – an eminently pragmatic man, from Galván’s description of him – with such passion that he left his room, by now a thriving workshop, and boarded a ship for America. On the contrary, it seems clear that he was persuaded to do so by three short passages in the book, three passing comments to which no other reader would have attached the least importance. The first appears on page 131: ‘On the 9th of December 1878, under the management of the Redpath Lyceum Bureau, my master opened at Horticultural Hall, in Boston. One of his attractions at this time was the famous automaton, Psycho, and the entertainment he gave was one of great excellence.’ Full stop. The passage goes on to talk about Kellar’s financial difficulties at the time: there is no other reference to Psycho in the book. It is easy to imagine Grouse suspiciously reading on until he came to an extract from a review which appeared in the Natal Mercury in Durban dated 21 June 1881: ‘We have at Mr Kellar’s in perfection all the outstanding automata, which Maskelyne has made himself famous with.’ And if that were not enough to pique Grouse’s interest, on page 200, there is a mention of ‘an unprecedented run of 323 consecutive performances’ at the Egyptian Hall, with the singular difference that it referred not to the London theatre, but to one in Philadelphia.

  Grouse would doubtless have found the rest of the book boring, irritating and, most of all, useless. A consummate braggart, Kellar missed no opportunity to mention the astonishment provoked by his devices – at no point does he refer to them as ‘tricks’ – but he never bothered to give any details about their workings. There was nothing here to steal, to improve on. In fact, there was little point in trying since, of all the illusions mentioned in the book, there was not one that could reasonably be considered original. They were all facsimiles of classics performed by the magicians of the Golden Age. And of course Grouse would have cared little for the rapturous descriptions of Kellar’s travels, and his sententious opinions on matters as diverse as the reform of the penal system, the beauty of the women of Ceylon or the subhuman nature of the indigenous peoples of New Zealand. He would undoubtedly have found Kellar exasperating, though he may have held a certain admiration for the man’s capacity to reinvent himself whenever he encountered a difficulty. The references to Maskelyne, however, made him suspicious. Doubtless when he finished the book, Grouse did not close his eyes, as Víctor did, revelling in the glorious exoticism; instead he immediately turned to the contents page to find and reread the one brief chapter which described Kellar’s performances in Europe, entitled ‘Before Her Majesty’. At first reading, he had paid the chapter little heed since it seemed to have been included in the book purely because of the immense pride the magician felt at having performed for the Queen of England at Balmoral Castle. Rereading the chapter carefully, Grouse found other grounds for suspicion: Kellar gave an account of a glorious arrival at Portsmouth, bragged of a successful run in Edinburgh, mentioned a tour of ‘most of the cities and large towns of the United Kingdom’, mentioned Brighton and Cambridge, but London was remarkable only for its absence.

  This was impossible. Grouse had reason to know better than anyone how jealously Maskelyne guarded his secrets. There were only two possible explanations as to how another magician, one famous enough to have spent years touring the world, could have used exact replicas of Maskelyne’s automata. Either he was a remarkable thief, or he had struck a deal with Maskelyne for the use of his patents. The fact that Kellar had never performed in London tended to suggest the latter: I will grant you the right to use my machines, but on no account should you set foot in my territory. Both possibilities aroused Grouse’s curiosity, and justified a visit to Kellar. If the man were a thief, measuring up to him would provide a challenge that made it worth leaving his self-imposed seclusion. And if Kellar had bought the right to use the patents, he might be persuaded to make another investment since, having checked the dates, it was clear that the American version of Psycho did not include Grouse’s enhancements. Could he manage to be paid twice for the same illusion? Now that would be magic. Like stealing the same wallet twice and finding it full again.

  Even Though You Cannot See Me

  Viktor. Or is it Vikter? Vikter Lousa. Maybe Loussa. He pronounced his name with an English accent, stressing each syllable, speaking slowly and in a low voice – not in case someone might hear him and think he was mad but so that he could draw out this blissful feeling, something that existed only in his mind and yet filled him with wonder. He was alone in the dressing room, but he could still hear the echo of the applause, the joy with which the technical team had congratulated him after the performance, the respectful tone of the four journalists who had asked to attend, the flashes of the photographers’ cameras. Galván had been the last to take his leave, pleading that his health would not permit him to stay up all night. Though Víctor enjoyed the solitude and the silence of the dressing room, he was sorry that Galván was not there now so he could talk to him, so he could finally find a way to express his gratitude for everything he owed him. Mario Galván and Vikter Loussa.

  As his lips formed his name for the last time, he stared at his reflection in the mirror, like a goldfish mouthing the water in a fishbowl. He took a deep breath. The success of his London debut meant a lot to him. It was not his ultimate goal, but it was the frontier to a country where he had long dreamed of planting his flag so he could say: ‘I have come this far. My name is Víctor Losa. Or Vikter Loussa, you decide.’

  And all this for a shadow, for a dream, something he could not put a name to. All this so that, for an instant, he might recapture the moment when Galván, drawing on the past in order to speak of the future, had first shown him the techniques of Professor Pepper, warning Víctor that there was, of course, no proof that the man was a genuine professor, although in this case the surname seemed to be genuine.

  Víctor’s reaction the first time Galván mentioned Pepper could hardly have been less enthusiastic. The maestro had presented him with a metal box and told him to look through the two holes cut into the lid. Inside, Víctor coul
d vaguely make out a theatrical scene with a crude backdrop of painted trees. When Galván manipulated the side opening to let in more light, a number of blurred shadows were projected against the backcloth. Víctor could see the expectant look in Galván’s eyes, but all he could think to say was:

  ‘It’s a cute toy.’

  ‘Toy?’ Galván blustered indignantly. ‘A toy? Pepper had only to look into this box for a few seconds to invent one of the most brilliant illusions in the history of magic.’

  The maestro grabbed the box from the table and turned on his heels to go. Víctor quickly asked how it worked, feigning a curiosity he did not feel. Galván, without even turning back to look at him, brusquely interrupted.

  ‘You can go now. I’ll see you at four o’clock tomorrow at the Liceo.’

  They knew each other so well by this stage in their relationship that a snub from the maestro upset Víctor more than any rebuke. Víctor made sure that he arrived at the theatre promptly the following day, and he feared the worst when he was met in the entrance by an usherette who showed him to the stalls, explaining that Galván had phoned to say he was running a little late. He made his way to the front row and sat down. While he waited, he contemplated the dimly lit set and the orchestra pit, which was covered by a black tarpaulin. There followed three or four minutes of utter silence. Suddenly, there came the rasp of a lighter and Víctor, accustomed to this calling card, glanced around the theatre.

  ‘Mario! Where are you? I can’t see you.’

  ‘I’m here.’ Galván’s voice seemed to be coming from the stage, but there was no one there. ‘I am here, but you cannot see me.’